Despite the Darkness, page 37
‘Lots of people might disagree,’ he remarked to Lynn at breakfast on the Thursday morning, ‘but I think this week might have marked a turning point of some kind, however minute. On Monday, Gavin Relly announces he is going to lead a team of businessmen to Lusaka for talks with the ANC. Businessmen talking to the ANC – whatever happened to their fatuous mantra about never talking to “terrorists”? P.W. Botha says he thinks that is a seriously bad idea and Relly just says “stuff what the President thinks”, in not quite so many words. On Tuesday, Reagan changes his tune completely and signs an order approving limited sanctions. On Wednesday, P.W. Botha himself decides to restore South African citizenship to all black South Africans, and now they have just announced that the President’s Council has recommended scrapping the pass laws. How can all that, coming in a single week, so soon after Botha’s Rubicon speech, not be significant?’
‘But the die-hard Afrikaners whose support he relies on will never agree to a handover of power,’ Lynn said. ‘You don’t erase three centuries of racism overnight. You’ve still got an out-of-control army and police force to contend with, not to mention the legacy of hatred and violence the Nationalists have been deliberately stirring up between the IFP and ANC and between the Zulus and the Xhosas. I can’t see Botha having a change of heart.’
‘I don’t suppose there will be a real change of heart on the part of any of them,’ Cameron said. ‘But if enough of them can have their noses rubbed in the writing on the wall – which is bound to take several more years – they will probably be arrogant enough to think that, being white, they are so intellectually superior and politically experienced that they will run rings around anyone the ANC could put up to negotiate with them.’
‘I don’t know,’ Cameron continued with a sigh, ‘one gets so tired of speculating on different, invariably pretty bleak, possibilities. Tutu said five years ago “there is still a chance, but if we let it slip then it will be gone forever” and if Tutu, who should know better than anyone, thought that there was still a chance then, perhaps it isn’t being too naïve to think that there may still be a chance now – even if virtually everything they have done since he said that looks like a determined attempt to let that chance slip. One can but hope.’
Michelle was knocking on his office door as he got back from dragging himself through yet another under-populated tutorial later that morning. She had come to tell him that there had been an urgent phone-call for him from Fiji while he had been in the tutorial. Somebody with an unpronounceable name from the University of Suva had phoned to say they wanted to speak to him. Did he want to phone them back himself and leave a message – it was getting close to midnight there – or should she?
If the Head of Department had been at the Brighton conference and still wanted to employ a police agent who had betrayed one of his students to the security police, he was not a person Cameron wanted to work for. There was no way they could have found out that the rumour wasn’t true. Even if, by some remote chance, the Head of Department hadn’t made it to Brighton for the conference, the University was bound to subscribe to the THES – so they would have read the story. Besides which, how could he possibly continue to play any kind of useful role in the struggle from the other end of the earth? It was entirely unclear what role he might be able to play, even as a free agent, but, whatever role it was, it couldn’t be played from Fiji. She should please just phone them back and let them know that he was no longer interested.
As she turned to go, Michelle handed him a post-card.
‘Here’s a bit of History Department ancient history for you,’ she said. ‘I’ve no idea why it has been sent, but it is supposed to be passed on to you.’
The postcard featured a photograph of the good ship S.S.Enlightenment steaming across an improbably turquoise millpond sea towards omniscience beyond the far horizon. It was addressed to Mrs Petunia Redgrave who had been the History Department Secretary when Mark Fern had been a student. Mark was obviously taking to the cloak and dagger bit like the proverbial duck to water. Quite cleverly too – he would assume that Mrs Redgrave, she of the improbable but memorable name, had moved on, but it was a safe bet that nobody would be taking a particular interest in a postcard addressed to her, which would accordingly have a very good chance of reaching Cameron.
Mark had clearly enjoyed the creative writing exercise involved in penning a ‘wish you were here’ message applauding stony beaches and misty weather. But the point of the postcard was that it listed, in three lines of small print along the bottom on the message side, the dates on which Enlightenment was scheduled to arrive at its various points of call. It would be in Cape Town from Thursday to Tuesday the following week, and in Durban from Friday to Sunday the week after. The message had been signed by Luke rather than Mark, and was followed by ‘PS. Please pass on to Cameron if he is still in the Department.’ He was still in the Department, but wouldn’t be for long. Cameron made a mental note of the dates without any thought of making use of them.
The phone in his office rang in the interval between his two Friday morning tutorials. It was Jules. She responded to his surprise at being phoned in his office rather than at home by pointing out rather tartly that he didn’t seem to spend much of his time at home these days. She wanted him to phone her back using a public phone.
The public phone in the Arts Block was out of order, so Cameron had to traipse across to the Science Block wondering what Jules could possibly have to say that she needed to be so sure wasn’t going to be overheard. What Jules had to say certainly needed not to be overheard. She had booked a flight to come up from Cape Town for the day the following Sunday. Her mother would be coming home in the next day or two and could look after Nicky and Hilton for the day with the help of her friend next door. There was a relatively early morning flight, she would hire a car and could get to ‘what used to be their home’ by eleven. That would give her enough time to pack a couple of suitcases with the special clothes, her jewellery, and the other precious things she had left behind. She would have to drive back to the airport in time to catch the six o’clock flight. If he wasn’t even sleeping in the house, the sooner she collected her precious things before the house was burgled the better.
Under no circumstances must Venter find out that she was coming. She had booked the flight and the hire car in her maiden name, which was the name she would be using from now on anyway. She had chosen Sunday because Venter was less likely to be on duty and watching the house. If they juggled the cars as soon as she arrived she could park the hire car in the garage leaving no visible sign that there was anyone apart from Cameron in the house. If Cameron needed to phone her about the visit it must be from a public phone-box.
No, he couldn’t bring what she wanted down to Cape Town. She didn’t want the children being unsettled again and she had told her mother he was having an affair so he would most certainly not be welcome under her mother’s roof – besides which he wouldn’t know exactly what to bring down to her. Three or four hours would be all she would need to pack what she could take back with her and sort out what needed to be railed down to Cape Town – she wouldn’t be able to take more than a couple of the soft toys Nicky was missing so badly. She didn’t want to risk spending even one night in the same city as Venter, and would hate to inhibit Cameron from screwing Lynn. Cameron told Jules that he could do without her sarcasm, to which she replied that in that case all he needed to do was just sign the divorce papers which had been delivered to his office earlier in the week and send them back to her.
Although most of the weekend was spent at Lynn’s house and Venter obviously knew where he was, the neighbourhood watch hadn’t been relocated to the pavement outside Lynn’s house. On Sunday morning Cameron took Kali for a walk, coming back past their house where the white car with the shaded windows was in its usual spot. But it had already gone by the time he had finished checking that, with the windowpanes replaced, everything in the house was as it should be. The fact that Venter had been there on the Sunday before Jules’s visit was worrying, but, provided she could get there and get the car into the garage early, there was no way Venter could find out she was there until she left to drive back to the airport, by which time it would be too late.
Cameron slept at home on the Saturday night. It was possible that a 3am death threat might give the game away, letting him know that they knew Jules was coming, in which case he would have insisted that she stayed in Cape Town. The phone didn’t ring, but he hardly slept at all. He couldn’t work out quite why he felt so keyed-up – it wasn’t as if he was still constantly waiting for the tramp of boots on the verandah and the banging on the door as they came to arrest him, as he had been during the long nights after Mirambo had disappeared into the darkness.
It might have had something to do with Lynn not being in bed beside him, but he had only been sleeping at her house for a couple of weeks, and earlier in the day they had made languid love through the warmth of the afternoon. He hadn’t told Lynn that Jules was coming up, he had just said he needed to sleep at home and she had asked no questions. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust Lynn – it was just safer for everyone if people were only told what they needed to know.
Jules arrived just before eleven, as expected. Cameron had lost count of the number of times he had looked out of the spare room window to check that Venter’s car wasn’t there. Not that there was anything he could have done to warn Jules if it had been. The car wasn’t there, but Jules looked just as nervous as if it had been. Cameron quickly reversed the Renault out of the drive to allow Jules to drive the car she had hired – which turned out by one of the little ironies of life to be a white Corolla – into the garage. Once they were in the house she turned her cheek, inviting a quick welcoming kiss.
Cameron had taken care to make sure that the curtains of their bedroom, the children’s room and the kitchen, the rooms in which Jules would be doing most of the sorting and packing, had been closed all week. The curtains of the lounge, which she wouldn’t need to go into, remained open. There could be no reason for anyone outside the house to suspect that Jules might be there.
Jules was nothing if not efficient. She had found and packed everything she wanted to take back with her by the time they sat down to eat the smoked salmon and granary bread Cameron had bought for a light lunch. After lunch they set about separating what would stay and what would be packed by Stuttafords to be sent down to Cape Town. The granny flat was already furnished, so only a couple of small pieces of furniture were set aside to go.
Not a lot was said in the process of what amounted to the symbolic dissolution of their life together. Cameron felt a jumble of emotions, most of them painful, as he watched Jules. Her familiar precise movements, the quick jerk of her head as she flicked her dark hair away to stop it getting in her eyes when she bent to put a vase in a box, her purposeful walk, however short the distance – all the little details that came together as the person he had lived with and loved for the past fifteen years.
The person he still loved – loving Lynn didn’t make him love Jules any less. He would be sorry to say goodbye to Lynn but, even leaving the children aside, he would still choose to live with Jules – if that were possible and they could make up the ground they had lost over the past few weeks and months. He was sure Jules still loved him somewhere under her steely determination to protect her children from the trauma of living with him. The wave of anguish he had felt when she said she would be reverting to her maiden name on a permanent basis swept over him again. If he were given the choice, he would very much prefer not to be a free agent. But the choice wasn’t his to make.
What was to go to Cape Town was being stacked in the kitchen. The bigger items on the floor, the smaller ones on the kitchen table and the kitchen counter – the space under the kitchen table was kept clear as Kali’s refuge of last-resort. He had been overjoyed to see Jules and had followed her around, not letting her out of his sight, ever since she arrived.
They had almost finished sorting, and Cameron had switched the kettle on for them to have a cup of tea before Jules had to leave for the airport, when there was a loud banging on the front door. Kali shot under the kitchen table with a whine that told Cameron, if he hadn’t realized already, that it was Venter at the door.
With a vivid sense of déjà vu, Cameron ushered Jules into the pantry. She was pale enough to justify the whiteness claimed for her in her ID book. He left the door open just a slit, as he had for Mirambo, so that she could hear what was being said.
As he turned to leave the kitchen, his heart racing and his stomach churning as it hadn’t done for weeks, he heard a scrabbling of nails on the floor under the kitchen table and saw Kali scurrying across the kitchen, nosing the pantry door open and sliding in to join Jules. There was loyalty for you – though who was supposed to be protecting whom was a good question.
It came as no surprise to see Venter standing belligerently on the doorstep – but Cameron was taken aback by the picture he presented. His normally slicked-back dark hair, kept in place by generous helpings of Brylcreem, was dishevelled, and his eyes were blood-shot and red-rimmed. His pupils were widely dilated again – he was clearly as high as the proverbial kite. His service automatic in its shoulder-holster looked uncomfortably out of place against his brightly coloured shirt and Bermuda shorts. He was as obviously off duty as it was possible to be.
‘What do you want?’ Cameron was pleased his question had come out clearly, he had been afraid it might come out as a squeak. Bloody idiot! He’d been so busy being with Jules that he hadn’t kept a lookout for Venter’s car.
‘I want your cheeky bitch wife, Doctor Beaumont,’ Venter snarled. ‘That is what I want.’
‘What makes you think she is here?’ Cameron asked. ‘You know perfectly well she is with my children in Cape Town at the address to which you sent your sick video.’
‘Just how stupid do you think I am, Doctor Beaumont?’ Venter asked. ‘Just because you’ve got a degree doesn’t mean people who haven’t got one are stupid. I know your wife is here. I have been sitting in my car over there listening to you talking in your kitchen. What did you think I was doing in your kitchen when that mongrel of yours bit me? I swear to God I should have shot that bloody dog. Borrow that detector thing from your Coolie friend all you like, you won’t find my microphone. Your talk about what you are going to send down to Cape Town and what is going to be staying here came straight to the speakers in my car. One of the things you need to send down to Cape Town is a chair with very comfortable cushions.’
‘What do you mean?’ Cameron asked.
It was perfectly obvious what Venter meant, but Cameron needed to stall for time. What the hell was he going to do? Venter wasn’t keeping his automatic on such prominent display for nothing.
‘You know perfectly well what I mean, Doctor Beaumont,’ Venter said. ‘I told you I was going to take a sjambok to your cheeky bitch wife’s backside didn’t I? Colonel van Zyl told me you begged him to tell me to leave your wife alone. He told you to tell her to stay away from me because if she didn’t she could get hurt very badly. She should have listened, Doctor Beaumont. When I have finished giving her the whipping she deserves she is going to need very soft cushions for a very long time to come when she sits down.’
‘You … you can’t do that,’ Cameron heard himself stammering. ‘You can’t just assault people because they say things you don’t like. You have no reason to detain her and you certainly have no right to assault her.’
Venter smiled and very deliberately lifted his right hand and eased the automatic half out of its holster before letting it slide back into the worn, greasy-looking leather.
‘Who exactly do you think is going to stop me, Doctor Beaumont?’ he asked.
There was nothing to say. Cameron felt as if he was going to be sick. He hoped to God Jules couldn’t hear the conversation.
‘So that is agreed then, Doctor Beaumont,’ Venter said, after a pause. ‘Nobody is going to stop me. Now listen very carefully. You do not have a choice about whether or not I am going to make your cheeky bitch wife bend over for a whipping. But you do have another choice. I can do that here and now, in your house, and you can watch and make sure I don’t get carried away and do other things to her as well. She has taken your children away from you – I expect you would enjoy watching someone taking a sjambok to her.’
‘Or,’ Venter went on after pause, ‘I can radio Sergeant Poggenpoel, who is on duty, and we can formally detain her and take her somewhere else. Who knows what might happen then? My sjambok is in my car, and so is my radio. You have two minutes to decide and come and tell me. You can even ask your cheeky bitch wife which she would prefer. But you are not stupid, Doctor Beaumont. I know what you will choose.’
‘You are a sick bastard, Venter,’ was all Cameron could think of to say.
‘Perhaps I am,’ said Venter. ‘But the more you insult me the harder I will sjambok your wife. She is going to be sorry you said that. Two minutes.’
Venter pressed one of the buttons on the side of his heavy stainless steel watch and turned to go back down the front steps. He staggered slightly as he turned, looking as if he might lose his balance.
Cameron turned numbly back to the kitchen in time to see Jules push the pantry door wide open and move quickly across to the sink to vomit.
