“This and that. Analysis. Talk shows. I have a consultancy in Washington. Risk assessment, I guess you would call it.” There is no point telling him that the consultancy consists of one person and is run from a top-floor eyrie in an otherwise empty house.
“Corporate clients?”
“Some. Banks. That kind of thing. Corporate, I guess.” He is probably thinking: Goldmans, Carlyle. I can only wish for such patrons.
“And you were a diplomat?”
“Ambassador.”
I feel as if I am being fitted into an identikit picture of the military-industrial complex, the sinister American to complement the naïveté Celiwe Nyati had discerned in me. I surmise, too, that his motive in seeking me out is to gauge the nature of my relationship with Zoë Joubert: men always intuit – or invent – their rivals.
“And you, Riaan?”
“NGO. Promoting investment in the former so-called homelands, the bantustans. Small loans for tools, seeds. Grassroots. Micro-credit. The best kind.” Then, switching tack: “So what do you think of our rainbow nation?”
He seems to be sneering, but whether it is at me, or his country, or his country’s failure to deliver greater rewards for him, I cannot immediately guess.
“I’m impressed. I was here before, you know. In the apartheid era.”
“A visitor, were you? A temporary sojourner? Come to punch the liberal card in the evil empire?”
“Not really. A functionary. American Embassy.”
His eyes light with malevolent recognition.
“Constructive engagement. Isn’t that what you called it? Set The Struggle back years. Typical American. Thinking you’re the cavalry. Hey, over here with that thing, man.”
He turned to draw on a large, well-constructed joint doing the rounds.
And then across the crowd on the warm deck above the bay at the start of that hot summer, I glimpsed another face, a woman’s face. Zoë Joubert was shepherding her towards me, an uncertain smile playing across her lips like a shadow cast by clouds, saying: have you met Jessica de Vere?
Twelve
I WAS STANDING AWKWARDLY WITH my back pressed to the wooden corner of the deck. The balustrade flexed and was flimsy where it should have been solid. Jessica de Vere – once plain Jess Chase – was not helping me feel comfortable, glancing over her shoulder towards the door, as if planning to bolt, or welcome a third party she had not yet introduced into the conversation. Around us, people danced with the pantomime awkwardness of age mimicking youth. The music – Mango Groove, Bob Seger, Johnny Clegg, old days stuff – was loud enough for intimacies to seem discreet.
“Does she know? Zoë?”
“Know?”
“About us, dammit, Tom. Us. The past. Ancient, dangerous history.”
She did not quite fit the memories. There were diamonds embedded in white gold jewellery decorating her ring finger, earlobes, neck; skin glowed with preparation and care; seal-sleek hair without a blemish of silver seemed to bounce on inner suspension; fine edges suggested scrupulous self-maintenance. She had always used conversation to protect privacy, vulnerability. But, on the rickety deck that night, her talk seemed more like Kevlar.
The Jess Chase I remembered wore shabby clothes, asked impertinent questions of ministers and diplomats, dodged police roadblocks on her motorcycle. Her newspaper articles stripped away pretence and untruth. She witnessed, first hand, the brutality and meanness of the townships. She lived among her subjects, breaking the Race Ogres’ laws to spend weeks under cover in Soweto and Khayelitsha and Cooktown.
And then, in hotel rooms in Port Elizabeth and Durban and Bloemfontein, I would wait restlessly as she composed her article on what passed in those days for a laptop – the pre-harddrive Tandy 200, the “AK-47 of laptop computers,” she called it – flicking back and forth through the pages of her notebook, muttering phrases to herself as she sought the precise language she required to frame the day’s anguish in columns of print, making calls to sources who recognised her voice and did not give their names over the unreliable hotel phone networks.
She would write with rapt intensity, hungry for the glory of the page one byline, fired by righteous rage. When she hooked her computer to the phone line with alligator clips or curious headphone-like cuffs, she seemed oblivious to my existence, cursing profanely when the line went down or when her editors said her story had disappeared into the ether in those early days of technological experimentation before the internet changed everything.
Only when she had transmitted her dispatches – “filed,” as she put it – to the newsrooms she served in London and New York, did she permit any contact between us. Only then would she reach into the ice bucket I kept ready to charge a glass with chilled wine. Only then would she awaken to other needs. Her skin dark and her topaz eyes bright, as if the adrenaline could not be sated by word alone. Her hair short, black and spiky.
In her formless work gear she seemed to be without proportion. Beyond its disguise, she nurtured a physique moulded by whatever it was that drove her to excel in everything she did. If you were looking for adjectives to describe her, you would light on words like elfin and inquisitive, enigmatic, edgy, elusive. Nothing about her smacked of sentimentality or soft focus. Nothing about her, to use a diplomat’s weasel word, was “appropriate” to my status, my ambitions to achieve high rank.
Each time I headed out with her and her colleagues, trading my suit and tie for a photographer’s fishing vest, I took one more step away from the circumspection expected of me as a diplomat. Each bout of love-making, each ingestion from her stash of powerful local cannabis exposed me to the possibility that my ambassador would discover this secret life I led outside the embassy, and punish me for it. The risks were legion and I was besotted enough to ignore them all. It was the kind of love that brushes aside thoughts of self-destruction, maybe even feeds on them.
Each clandestine visit to the rough township drinking houses called shebeens, each meeting with people known to be “banned” as subversives took me a little further away from the bland, half-smile of the diplomat and towards the passions of those who were “involved” – that worst of professional indictments.
In her company, I skirted the world of The Struggle and its enforced choices. A chance mis-statement, an ambiguous look, the ‘wrong’ response at a police roadblock or a comrades’ indaba would change the course of your life forever. I remembered a woman in a township near Johannesburg whose daughter was a revolutionary and whose husband was a cop. “You just live like birds,” she said. “You cannot sleep.”
My secret half-hour with her embassy file had barely ruffled the surface of the cross currents that formed her.
Her childhood had unfolded in a former railwayman’s cottage in the Backlands – the name we gave to the black-ruled states to the north. A delusional British mother misfunctioned in loose tandem with a buccaneering American father, a Walter Mitty whose gold mines never produced gold, whose private yachts never sailed, whose stories never quite extended beyond the prologue.
He came to the attention of a Backlands Station Chief after he enlisted in one of the white-led armies – not the kind of thing Uncle Sam wanted its citizens doing, but there was nothing anyone could do to stop them – misfits, ne’er do wells, Vietnam vets washed up on the Africa mercenary circuit. In one particular fire-fight, according to a military prosecutor’s notes prepared for a court martial, he refused to advance when ordered to do so and, instead, took cover in thick bush, emerging with an empty magazine to prove he had indeed behaved as a warrior.
When the investigators went back the following day, they discovered 20 pristine, unfired rounds, emptied into the dense scrub. His discharge – not exactly honourable – followed pretty soon afterwards, as did his disappearance from the Backlands. That left a young daughter with a mother who insisted on being addressed as Ma’am, reinforcing her claim to descent from some aristocratic house. (The title had not checked out when she made a citizenship applicatio
n – rejected – at the local US embassy, citing her marriage to an American national.)
It was never quite clear to me how this odd couple had washed up in Africa and Jess Chase showed no inclination to enlighten me. Even her most intimate offerings of autobiography drew a veil over her childhood, just as I maintained my reticence about the file on her in the embassy registry.
Her break with me was equally unexplained.
Returning from the embassy to my villa sometime after Nyati’s death, I found she had left the set of house keys I had given her along with a handwritten note on a half-moon table of burnished cherry wood in the entrance hall, caught in a shaft of bright light from the open door.
“I cannot see you again. Do not come after me. Jess.”
“I heard that you quit early because they wanted to give your job to a political appointee. So you stamped your foot and threw out the toys.”
“And your byline seemed to disappear as well.”
“I married.”
“And stopped writing?”
“It was the deal.”
“Must have been a hell of a deal.”
“It was. Is. It’s called love. He’s here. You might know of him. Chris de Vere.”
“Finance. Venture capital. Diamond money magnified. He was written up in The Journal.”
“He didn’t like that.”
“I always thought you’d go back home. To the Backlands.”
She looked at me sharply.
“This is my home now.”
“So you finally joined the aristocracy.”
“That’s what people seem to think. What are you really doing here?”
“I met Zoë in Cape Town. That’s it. Isn’t that enough? Boy meets girl.”
“Hardly a boy. Or girl.”
“Ouch. And how do you know these guys, Zoë and company?”
“Oh. Back then.” She waved a hand backwards over her own tanned shoulder, as if dismissing a life she had outgrown. “In the reporting days. They were a good story. Old Deep. ODAC. White liberals. Angst. Sex. Police raids on the servant’s quarters. Detentions. A prison suicide. I stayed with Zoë and Rod for a couple of days to get the feel for it – you know, sex under hot tin roofs, barefoot servants. And we became buddies. In fact, she introduced me to my husband-to-be. “
“You never told me.”
“It was later.”
“When?”
“Whenever. Around the time I introduced the Old Deep set to Solomon Nyati. Making my contribution to history, racial harmony. Although it didn’t quite work out that way. You feeling alright?”
“You introduced them to Nyati?”
Behind her, an outer door opened into the living room that led onto the deck. She turned and slipped rapidly through the crowd, linking arms with a tall, slender, silver-haired man who scanned the room from patrician heights, finding it all too predictably inadequate.
“I didn’t know you knew her.” Zoë Joubert had emerged from the throng, as if stepping from a dense jungle.
“From the embassy days. I was doing press work. That’s how I met her. Journalists. You know the kind, some of them at least. Couple of gin and tonics, a long lunch and get Uncle Sam into the paper in a good light. Find out what they’re up to. Pick their brains. I guess it was cynical. But she was in a different league.”
“Well, ‘twas in another country,” she said with a laugh that did not quite reach her eyes. “But this wench is very much alive.”
“So you keep in touch?”
“I can see you need a lesson in the caste system in dear old Plett. Plett 101? There are two kinds of people that you will meet here, white people that is, people who get by quite comfortably, like me and this lot” – she gestured fondly to the crowd on the deck – “and seriously rich people like Chris de Vere. We rent houses. They own them. We throw parties like this where everyone brings food and drinks and their kids snog in the bushes. They have staff to fix lunches and cocktails. Snogging is conducted more decorously. And once a year when we all come to the seaside, we cross the lines. Chris and Jess come to my parties, I go to theirs. In fact, I expect you’ll be getting an invitation for lunch from Chris fairly soon. He likes to keep track of newcomers. Likes to know who’s sniffing round the harem.”
“Harem?”
“Figuratively speaking, of course.”
She stepped back into the throng, disappearing into the crowd, the babble. I felt like a fly fisher who sees only the perfect ring of water where the quarry surfaced before sliding away.
I struggled to reconcile the timelines. I knew for a certain fact that Jess Chase had been at my villa – in my bed – when word broke of Nyati’s death. But she had never mentioned her contact with Zoë Joubert and her comrades-in-arms. So, if Jess Chase had been talking clandestinely to Solomon Nyati about the Old Deep set, how much more of her life had she kept secret? And if Zoë Joubert had introduced Jess Chase to Chris de Vere, had that been during, before or after my own relationship with Jess?
“You look like you’re trying to remember the theory of relativity,” Riaan van Rensburg said. He had that skill acquired by very serious drinkers of reaching a plateau of advanced inebriation which, to the casual eye, resembles extreme sobriety.
“Have you seen my wife?”
The painter and sculptor I had been introduced to as Vanessa van Rensburg with her flame-red tresses and emerald eyes had disappeared some time earlier into the thickest cover in the walled garden. Minutes later, another woman – short, cropped-headed with ear and eyebrow piercing – had followed.
“My third. Third wife. Vanessa. All-purpose genius. Mother of my sons, and of my step-daughter. Love of my life.”
A bitter cackle rumbled up from his chest like bubbles in swamp water and ended as a protracted bout of coughing. He pulled a packet of the local Gunston cigarettes from the pocket of his flowing shirt and lit one, inhaling deeply.
Below the deck, his wife emerged from the bougainvillea, smoothing down her dress and drawing the back of her hand across her mouth. Riaan van Rensburg fixed his gaze on the bejewelled night sky.
When people are new to one another, thrown together without time for inquiries or due diligence, they have a golden moment to define themselves in their best light, to turn the kaleidoscope so that their flaws are presented in acceptable symmetry, the constructs free of inconvenient questions or contradictions.
They are creatures without history, granted brief licence to compose their narratives to their advantage. So I wanted it to be with Zoë Joubert.
For my stay in Plettenberg Bay, I had splurged my moderator’s fee – and then some – on a suite at the resort’s premier hotel with its vista across Lookout Beach and Keurbooms Lagoon to the serrated ridgeline of the Tsitsikamma Mountains. Now, at her party, I was thinking how I might detach her from her guests – from the web of shared history that bound as surely as chains and manacles – and persuade her to step into my stranger’s world.
The party was winding down. Jessica and Chris de Vere had left quietly, folding themselves into a smart, silver two-seat sports car, a Mercedes or BMW, for the return journey to their part of the resort. As Zoë Joubert had forecast, Chris de Vere had sought me out and invited me – or, rather, ordered me – to join them later in the week for lunch at his villa (he called it their beach cottage.) 1:00 for 1:30. Casual, of course.
I guessed he was 10 or 15 years older than I, immaculate in a yellow sports shirt with an expensive logo of the kind favoured by serial golfers, fashionably creased blue linen trousers and Gucci loafers worn without socks. His hair had begun to thin, running in silver waves that softened the uncompromising lines of his tanned, hawkish features. He had the look of a man used to winning contests whose real prize was not so much victory as the loser’s humiliation.
The sky began to lighten on the stragglers tackling the worst of the damage – congealed steaks, half-eaten skeletons of fish, ashtrays piled with cigarette butts and exhausted reefers. I joined in
the ritual gathering of glasses to be deposited in the kitchen where a dishwasher whirred with a first batch of stained offerings. A maid hired for the season would doubtless arrive in due course to complete what we had begun.
Other late-stayers were sweeping shards of broken glass and filling black garbage bags with the detritus of our libations: the paper plates and burned-down candles that had become mounds of wrinkled white wax streaked with black; the bottles drained to the lees.
In deck chairs, in quiet corners, the overwhelmed, the drunk, the defeated and the abandoned dozed in heavy, fitful slumber – Riaan van Rensburg among them, his wife long departed. I had seen her leave, darting quickly out of the door, followed by her brush-cut companion. If Van Rensburg had noticed, he made no attempt to pursue, challenge or restrain her. Beneath the floral shirt, his stomach rose and fell in time to his snores. From the kitchen I smelled fresh coffee.
“You guys always party like this?”
“Partying is one thing these guys do best. And they never seem to slow down.”
We were alone in the kitchen. The scar tissue on her shoulder produced an irresistible desire to touch it.
“War wound,” she said, mimicking gruffness, like a Purple Heart Marine deprecating personal valour.
She put her arms around my neck and I slid mine around her waist. She drew her body close to mine and I pulled her closer. Then, inexplicably, her embrace slackened.
She took my hand, leading me to the rickety balustrade of the deck. I noticed that Riaan van Rensburg had vacated the deck chair where I had presumed him to be sleeping. We looked east across the bay, towards the mountainous ridgeline beginning to detach itself from the bruised vermilion of the dawn. Soon the sky would flare into striations of orange, lime, scarlet and indigo.
“Don’t ever say we never saw the sunrise together,” she said with a smile.
“How about sunset, too – morning, noon and …”
“Slow down, Tom. Friends, we said. Remember?”
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