When they reached the road, Ruthie’s mother turned right and set off down the hill in the direction of town. Auntie Pearl came straight across the road to the bus stop where we were waiting. I supposed that parking was a problem where she worked and, despite owning the little yellow car, she would still be using the bus. She stopped on the edge of the crowd, her head held high in the characteristic way she had, making eye contact with no one, especially avoiding me.
Ruthie’s mother, in the meantime, had crossed the road lower down. I watched until she came to a halt at the bus stop where the bus for coloureds and Indians was expected. She too looked neither right nor left.
thirty-nine
On the Thursday of the week after Auntie Pearl offered us the ef-el, I was surprised to receive a letter in an envelope of the Umhlanga Surf Hotel. Annie had emptied out the letter box and was eaten up by curiosity as to both its contents and the identity of the sender. I angered her by taking it to my room and sliding the cupboard in front of the door to keep her out.
The note inside was on the hotel’s letterhead and written in a strong, self-confident hand. It read:
Dear Chris,
Our recent meeting was far too brief, but I have been hearing a lot about you. Because of our common interest, I feel that we should get to know each other better. Could you call on me on Saturday afternoon at the above address? Shall we say three pm?
Yours faithfully,
William Peterson
Uncle William? And he wanted to meet me on Saturday afternoon. He was very important to Ruthie and I would have gone to visit him any time, if he wanted me to, but Saturday afternoon? My Saturday afternoons were not open for other social engagements.
Thinking about it, I realised that it was likely that Ruthie also knew about it. As so often in recent months, I was tempted to phone her to make sure that she knew I would not be coming. Since I had been coming to her home, I had missed very few Saturdays and I did not want to add to that total, now or ever.
Eventually, I decided that phoning from home was risky. I would go to Uncle William in the hope that Ruthie knew. The most important aspect of the matter was that I did not want to disappoint her by not keeping our weekly date.
From our house, it was downhill most of the way to Umhlanga Rocks. It took me about twenty minutes to cycle there. I had passed the hotel many times before, but this was the first time I really looked at it. From the top of Umhlanga Ridge, it appeared to be the biggest hotel on the strip along the beachfront, big enough to accommodate five-hundred suites, maybe even a thousand. I freewheeled from the ridge into the Umhlanga Rocks shopping centre, down the drive of the hotel and stopped at the main entrance, only to find that the hotel was not geared for travellers arriving by bicycle. A man in the hotel uniform directed me round to the back. A cleaner woman showed me a place in a storeroom where I could leave my bike. From there I found my way through a kitchen bigger than our Saturday afternoon football pitch in the street outside the Peterson’s home. From the kitchen, a staff lift took me to a narrow passage that led into the lobby.
In the doorway to the lobby, I stopped to absorb the scene. Gleaming metallic surfaces were everywhere. Even some of the walls seemed to be of burnished bronze. The material was probably just some sort of plastic-covered foil, but to me it was a sign of immeasurable wealth. Other signs of affluence in the form of metal statues of teenage girls leaping about in bathing suits, huge paintings of the surf, luxurious couches with deep pillows, ceramic floor tiles that competed with the bronze walls for radiance, and seemingly wealthy patrons in beach gear were everywhere in a lobby that was even bigger than the kitchen. It was not the sort of place where, in the 1970s, the families of South African civil servants went on holiday.
At the long, equally gleaming, glass-topped reception counter, a young woman in uniform found the time to attend to me. I recognised her as head-girl in the girls’ school two years before. She had been smiling and nodding to an old man in a Panama hat, a Hawaiian shirt, cream-coloured slacks and highly shone orange shoes. She frowned at me in my khaki shirt and shorts and dusty sandals, sweating from the ride, my hair windblown. ‘Can I see William Peterson?’ I asked.
‘Do you have an appointment with Mister Peterson?’ It was said in a way that indicated her certainty that obviously I would not have an appointment with Mister Peterson. The very idea was absurd.
‘Yes,’ I told her. You must be a disappointment to everyone, I thought, having been headgirl and now all you are is a receptionist instead of being at university.
‘I’ll check,’ she said doubtfully. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Chris Vorster.’
She picked up the handset of a phone and pressed a series of buttons. After a few moments she spoke into the microphone, her eyes fixed on me. Clearly, you needed to keep an eye on people like me. ‘Julia, I’ve got a boy here who wants to see Mister Peterson. He says his name is Chris somebody.’ Her eyes widened at whatever Julia told her. ‘You can go up,’ she said to me. ‘Do you know where to go?’
‘No,’ I said, feeling justifiably triumphant.
‘Top floor, turn left, last suite on the right. His PA’s name is Julia.’
That was not all I needed from her though. ‘What’s his job here?’ I asked.
She looked at me, aghast. My ignorance was even worse than my appearance. ‘He’s the hotel manager, of course.’
‘The whole hotel?’
‘Of course.’
‘What’s a PA?’
‘Personal assistant. Don’t you know anything?’
In the lift I considered that Ruthie’s uncle was the manager of all this. There could be no connection between the grandeur of the place and Ruthie’s mother’s little house in Greenwood Park.
To get to the suite from which Uncle William conducted business, I had to wade through a carpet that had pile that was almost ankle deep. At least, that was the way it seemed to me. The door of the suite was open, inviting me in, and a beautiful blonde girl, no more than five or six years older than me, smiled at me from her desk. ‘You must be Chris,’ she said.
I immediately made up my mind that I liked PAs, but did not think much of receptionists. ‘Yes,’ I said. It sounded lame, so I added, ‘That’s me.’
She laughed as if that was a brilliant witticism. ‘I’ll tell Bill you’re here.’
Bill? I thought. Was that Uncle William? Did she call him Bill, the manager of all this?
She got up and opened a door behind her desk without knocking. A moment later she was waving me in. ‘He’s waiting for you, Chris.’ Again that warm smile was directed at me. It was only later that I realised that in her world, if I was acceptable to her boss, I had to be okay and that smile would be used on anyone who wanted to see Uncle William.
He was seated behind a desk that was about twice the size of my mother’s kitchen table and Mama had the biggest kitchen table I had ever seen, except perhaps Ouma’s. Uncle William was writing a note by hand on a sheet of the hotel’s stationery, just the way he had written to me. He waved me to a chair, but finished the note before he looked up. When he did, his expression was neither friendly nor unfriendly, more the look of one man appraising another. ‘So now I get a good look at Chrissie,’ he said.
Even at that age I was irritated by the sort of remark that had no meaning, but was intended to draw me into saying something. I looked back at him, expectantly. At least I hoped that my expression conveyed expectation.
‘Ruthie’s friend,’ he added.
Still I waited. To hell with you, I thought. I don’t need to explain myself to you.
‘Tell me about yourself, Chrissie, friend of Ruthie,’ he said.
‘What would you like to know?’
‘Where you go to school, who your parents are, what your father does for a living. I’d like to know about you.’
As I told him about school and the names of my parents and sisters, my mood began to thaw. When I got to the bit about my father workin
g for the Department of the Interior, he looked surprised, but said nothing.
Despite myself, I wanted him to think well of me. He was Ruthie’s uncle and she always spoke of him in awe. He came across as a strong, confident man. In some way, he reminded me of Uncle Stefan. Then I told him about my business interests, the way I had supplied the flea market stall owned by Ruthie’s mother, whom I had not been able to bring myself to call Auntie Sarah. I left out the part about raiding the graves in Red Hill cemetery. But I did tell him about the success of Dog Box Flowers. I told him about the way Ruthie and I had gone to the opera together, but ignored the part about our place in the sugar cane.
‘So you’re an entrepreneur.’ There was nothing patronising about the way he said it. I had the clear feeling that Uncle William was warming towards me.
‘I want to be one. And I want to make lots of money.’
‘And Dog Box Flowers, how did you come upon that?’
So I told him about Mister Harvey and the way I saw I could meet his need.
‘And the name, Dog Box Flowers?’
‘It just came to me.’
He thought about this for a while, then, to my surprise, he extended a hand across the desk to me. We had to lean from either side to reach each other. His grip was firm and we shook vigorously. ‘That’s real inspiration. You’ve got a future in business, boy.’ It seemed that I was doomed to be called boy by all the Petersons. ‘You’ve got a good head on your shoulders. I like you and I want to understand you, but I also want you to understand me.’ Again there seemed to be nothing to say. I just looked at him and waited for him to continue. ‘Ruthie is my niece and I love her. Because of circumstances, I can’t see as much of her as I would like to. But that doesn’t mean I love her less. Perhaps she’s told you something about me?’
‘Only that you are the most successful member of the family and that you are rich.’
‘Did she mention my home life?’
‘No.’
‘Nothing at all?’
‘Not to me. She said nothing.’
He looked at me thoughtfully. The fact that she had said nothing about his home life had clearly surprised him. ‘Well,’ he said at last, ‘that’s not important. What is important is that Ruthie is very special to me and she is only fifteen. I don’t want her hurt in some love affair that she is too young for. How old are you, boy?’
‘My name is Chris,’ I said. ‘I’m fifteen.’
‘You’re big for your age.’
‘I know.’
‘So why are you hanging around Ruthie?’
‘I love her.’
Again he looked in my direction, but now he seemed to be focusing on something behind me, as if he might be looking through me. ‘And you want to make love to her?’
‘I want to marry her.’
‘For God’s sake, kid, you’re both fifteen. And even if you were both adults, the laws of the country forbid it. Don’t you know that?’
‘We can go somewhere else.’ Ma Peterson had first raised the idea and, despite my extravagant patriotism, it was growing on me.
‘You’re serious, aren’t you?’
‘Yes.’ I knew that my responses to his questions were getting shorter, but it was the brevity of determination, not arrogance.
‘Your parents?’
I shook my head.
‘This is a fine mess, right?’
I nodded.
Nothing was resolved in my meeting with Uncle William, perhaps because no resolution was possible. Before I left, he made me promise that, if a crisis arose, I would contact him. Whatever it was, he would see what he could do to help. Afterwards he walked with me to the lift. He shook my hand again while we waited for it. ‘You be careful, Chris, and you treat my Ruthie with respect, you hear?’
‘I promise,’ I said. ‘There is no one in the world I respect more than Ruthie.’
‘I believe this is true,’ he said. ‘You remember to contact me when you need me.’
I went back through the kitchen and found my bike where I had left it. Outside the sun was still high in the sky and the afternoon bright. I freewheeled down the alley behind the hotel, then cycled hard up a steep slope when I reached the road. Suddenly there was a whirring of bicycle wheels next to me. I looked round into the grinning face of Ruthie.
She pushed hard to get ahead of me, then waved to me to follow her as she turned into the road that led into La Lucia, the wealthy suburb between Umhlanga Rocks and Durban North. A side road led us onto a back way. I caught up to her and we slowed down so that we could talk.
‘I told my ma I was going to Uncle William,’ she said. ‘It was true in a kind of way.’ She followed this anxiously with ‘You haven’t said anything yet. Say something. Are you glad to see me? Say you’re glad to see me.’
‘You know I’m glad to see you,’ I said.
‘I don’t know. You must tell me. You must always tell me.’
‘I’ll remember. I’m glad to see you.’
‘You have to be.’ Her eyes sparkled with barely suppressed merriment. ‘If you aren’t, I’ll stop loving you.’
There were more pressing matters on my mind. ‘How long can you stay?’
‘Not long. There’s a place I know at the beach. Come.’ She pedalled hard to move ahead. ‘I’ll show you.’
I followed her to a place where the dune along the edge of the beach was covered with scrub. We wheeled our bikes across the sand and dropped them in the shelter of some brush. With a spontaneity so complete that neither was taken by surprise, we fell into each other’s arms. Except for a few brief moments, it was the first time we had been altogether alone since we had stopped going to our place in the sugar cane. I had been missing the simple act of holding her so much that now our contact was almost painful. Pressing our bodies against each other was not on the Saturday afternoon programme under the eyes of Ma Peterson’s chaperones, more especially since Solly and Delicia had lost the job.
I do not remember how we got to be lying on the sand or how my hands got inside her clothing, but I do remember the little gasping sounds she made and how, eventually, she rolled away from me and rose as far as her knees. ‘No, boy, we have to stop.’ Her face was so flushed and she was panting so hard that she was again irresistible. I grabbed at her, got hold of an arm and she was again on the sand with me.
The second time she broke away she got all the way to her feet and stumbled a few paces away from me on the loose sand. ‘And your thingy is so hard again. I could feel it. It didn’t mess this time, did it?’
‘No.’
‘Will it mess again do you think?’
‘Not this way.’
‘Only when it goes into me?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m frightened, boy. I’m so frightened.’
‘What frightens you?’
‘I don’t know how long we can last like this.’
‘I don’t either.’
She righted her bike. ‘I’ve got to go.’
‘Stay a little longer, just a little.’
‘No, Chrissie. Look at the way we carry on. We’re terrible.’
‘We’ll sit and talk.’
‘We won’t. I know us.’
I lifted my bike from the sand and we went back to the road. I dusted the sand from my clothes. She was already doing the same. ‘Can we ride back next to each other?’
‘Just till we get to Durban North. Then we’d better split.’
‘Okay. And we’ll take quiet roads on the way there.’
That is how we travelled back towards Red Hill and Greenwood Park, side by side along the back roads, talking as we never did in her mother’s house. From time to time she laughed, not because either of us had said anything particularly funny, but simply out of the joy of our being together. Her laugh still reminded me of a little silver bell, just the way it had when I first heard it.
With the desperate rush of passion on the dune over, at least for the moment, we had things to tell
each other that we could not tell anyone else. The stories we told each other were not sacred, but we believed no one else would have been interested. Johnny would not have wanted to listen to the new music I had discovered, or the wonderful book Ruthie had found in the local library or even that Mrs Wharton from the library had broken the rules by letting her take out books. She would also not be inclined to share with him what one of the Standard Ten girls who had been having intercourse with her boyfriend since Standard Seven had told her about having an orgasm, and what exactly an orgasm was, and how it happened, what she had to do for it to happen and what I had to do. And I would not have discussed the important things in my life, mostly Ruthie, with anyone. The only time I discussed anything at home was when Annie and I talked about Dog Box Flowers or my father and I discussed the purchase of a new operatic release.
Whether we were at our place in the sugar cane, riding our bikes through the well-heeled suburbs north of Red Hill or even playing soccer in the street with Johnny and his friends, being together brought with it a contentment that I had never experienced before or since that day. Afterwards, I often thought about that time and tried to explain to myself what it was that I had felt. I eventually realised that my state of mind was too uncomplicated for any form of analysis. Simply put, I was happy.
forty
That was the year the dam wall finally burst. The school riots that started in the townships were not to be entirely extinguished for another eighteen years.
Nothing was more horrifying than that it had all begun because they did not want to be taught in Afrikaans. It was the language of the oppressor, they said. We were all angry at the thought of that. I do not remember a single member of our family, or anyone at church, who was not filled with indignation that the black children had rebelled against having to speak Afrikaans at school. After all, many of the people from Greenwood Park also spoke Afrikaans at home. And those in the townships should have been grateful for the education they were receiving.
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