Murderers and Other Friends (31 page)

I arrived, a little ahead of Jeremy, on Peace Day in Johannesburg. There were two minutes' silence and all the traffic stopped. In the dining-room of the hotel black and white waiters and waitresses, black and white cooks in tall hats, were standing with their heads bowed, praying for peace. As I got to know these people better, I learnt their names. One waitress was called Sweetness, another Birthwell, because, it seemed, she gave her mother an easy delivery. A waiter told me his mother called him Adolphus ‘because she was always a great admirer of Hitler'.

Half a dozen close relatives whom I'd never met arrived for dinner. I was pleased, in a way, to see they were wearing blue ribbons in their buttonholes, the symbol chosen for the day of peace, but disappointed also. Could the Mortimer family not produce one outrageous apartheid apparatchik for me to describe and mock? It seemed not. The ghost of my grandfather, being carried across a stream on a ‘Kaffir's' back, the raucous tones of Aunt Gertie – The Great Tree and adulteress, screaming from the shadows of her verandah – had, it seemed, been stilled for ever. It was the sort of amiable dinner party you might go to in Hampstead with a family who supported the Liberal Party. Pam Edkins, grey-haired and pretty, handed out photographs of my bearded grandfather, my father as a schoolboy at the famous drag party, my beautiful Aunt Rene, my father's favourite, and Gertie in her prime, her jutting sleeves and billowing skirts making her look like a tall ship sailing out to war. But these people were long dead. The later generations scorned cocoa, did complete justice to the Coastal Region Cabernet Sauvignon and accepted the fact that Nelson Mandela would be the next State President and that they had no alternative but to be nervously optimistic. It was a perfectly enjoyable evening. The Peace Day was held to be a great success as there were only three murders. A few days later twenty-five people were slaughtered as they waited for taxis to take them to work. It was, once again, as the whites comfort themselves by saying, ‘black on black'.

Death is so near and yet seems, for most of the time, so safely far away. The road from the airport into Cape Town is said to be dangerous. Soldiers line it and helicopters guard the sky over a city of fragile shacks where almost half the adults are unemployed and one in five of the young men is going to die by a shot from a hand-gun. And yet so near, it seems almost next door, are the watered greens and manicured tees where white people are playing golf in the sunshine, apparently without a care in the world.

On the aeroplane we had been looked after by cheerful Afrikaner stewards and stewardesses, and wondered how it was that the Dutch, who have produced such a liberal and tolerant society at home, became violent racists south of the equator. Every brand of human being in this strangely isolated part of the world seems characterized by personal generosity and hospitality. No doubt many Boers cared well for their own servants, and their servants' children, and their servants' children's friends. An open house is easy to keep when you don't have to do the cooking and white South Africans who'd been to London were amazed that you had to give a fortnight's notice, and wait for a formal invitation, if you wanted to take your child to tea in the house of a schoolfriend. The situation, of course, changed when the servants became insolent and asked for things like votes. The Afrikaners are a South African tribe, like the Zulus and the Xhosas, and tribal warfare and private generosity seem compatible. The English, however long they stayed, never really became a tribe raised in the dark heart of Africa. The Boers called them ‘salt pricks', men with one foot in Natal and the other still in England, with their genitals trailing in the salt water of the Atlantic Ocean.

The Cape is undeniably beautiful. From my bedroom window it seemed I could almost reach out and touch the side of Table Mountain, which changes perpetually, appearing and disappearing, standing out with daunting clarity or withdrawing into the clouds. When we drove up to Signal Hill, we were lost in a grey mist, barely able to see the bright blue flowers on the side of the road and the wild guinea fowl that scuttled across it. We drove down to the beaches, brown strips between the mountains and the white-crested breakers, and to the fish market where oysters, mussels, crabs, lobster and huge kingklip were arranged in patterns on ice, like gigantic flowers.

At dinner we met a couple who ran a small independent publishing house. They had been arrested, and their daughter put in detention, during a long political struggle. From across the street police, with strong binoculars, had looked into their windows, seen the titles and immediately got a banning order. Against enormous odds these publishers managed to keep going and made a living. With the death of apartheid, books about the fight for human rights have gone out of style; now that change is inevitable everyone longs for entertainment. The couple in publishing are suffering badly and, in the theatres, Athol Fugard may have to give way to Noël Coward.

At Durban airport we were met by my second cousin Peggy, the beautiful Rene's daughter, and her husband Dennis, who wore long khaki shorts, long woollen socks and said very little, being an ex-army man, while his wife spoke quickly, full of memories and family news. ‘We came to see you once in a house in Swiss Cottage,' she accused me, ‘and you stood in the corner of your room and asked how many black people we'd had to dinner lately!' I thought how intolerable I must have been, a smug North London pinko far removed from the land of Umbopa and Gagool. We were taken to lunch in a grand house on the Berea, a pillared mansion, once used as an officers' mess, surrounded by jacaranda trees on the hills above the centre of the city. Peggy's son Michael is immensely tall, a huge Ian Botham look-alike, with gentle good manners and a crushing handshake; his wife Cass and two daughters are blonde and pretty. Michael is preparing a journey to Europe in an exhausting attempt to market an all-plastic supermarket trolley. All young South African Englishmen seem giants, their women change often and own a multiplicity of outfits. That evening we drove down the short Durban street given over to shacks and shanties, between two pieces of waste ground on which the black families don't dare to trespass. Their homes are made of plastic sheeting and cardboard boxes. One dark room, which might blow away on a stormy night, houses a family of ten. There's no water or electricity, no loos, no place to wash. Tsotsis, sometimes children from this and similar streets, have nothing to do except steal cars and rob people. If they mug you, the whites complain, you can't just give them the money and hope to be allowed home in peace. It's probable that they will take the money and shoot you.

There was an orange sunset behind the palm trees; we were on the hot, Riviera-like Durban seafront. We walked down a long slender pier out over the ocean. We had been drinking Margaritas and were a little unsteady on the planks. The gently undulating waves were covered with small black dots, which I took for sea birds. Closer examination proved them to be the heads of people, business men and hairdressers, Michael told us, relaxing after a heavy day, bobbing about and waiting for a wave to wash them into shore. For some people, life in South Africa is still idyllic in spite of a soaring divorce rate and a plummeting currency.

Pietermaritzburg has been called the last outpost of the Empire; the Union Jack still dangles in the heat above the entrance to the Victoria Club, which has relics of the days before the Union, when Natal was governed by the British as though it were a large Home County. In the shadowy recesses of the club, with its own small house, a patch of lawn and a large quantity of salad, there lives an elderly tortoise called Doranda. A brass plate secured to his shell announces that he was presented to the club in September 1914 by a captain in the South Staffordshires. That regiment was quartered in the barracks on a Maritzburg hill and, when they paraded during a famous thunderstorm, lightning struck their fixed bayonets causing some deaths and a good deal of madness. Whether this captain was affected I don't know, but he certainly gave the club a tortoise which has outlived two wars and most of the old outpost's inhabitants. We were in the Victoria Club with a local schoolmaster who told us that Doranda was the Latin name for tortoise. It's a weakness of the English public school system that many hours spent learning Latin leaves you with such a tenuous grasp on the subject, but Jeremy and I looked at each other in surprise, remembering the Roman military formation, with shields held over bent backs, which was called a ‘testudo'. Careful research revealed the late Latin form ‘tortuca', a derivative of ‘tortus', meaning ‘twisted'. The ancient reptile of the order Chelonia, with its trunk enclosed between a carapace and a plastron, chomped its salad and the schoolmaster, with a slight loss of nerve, suggested that Doranda might mean tortoise in Greek. The privileged and poshly educated citizens of Maritzburg go round with hazy memories of the Empire, and even hazier memories of the classics.

Another relative, a pale Scot in pallid clothes, took us on a lengthy tour of the Maritzburg cemeteries, introducing us to the gravestones of numerous Mortimers. I discovered that my grandmother Selina, who had been brought from Bristol with her three children to this strange country, died when she was forty-eight; and my asthmatic cocoa-drinking grandfather lived to be sixty-five. They are all there: Will and Mabel, and Aunt Gertie, quiet at last, and the twelve-year-old daughter of Jack the embezzler, who died of hydrocephaly and could hardly move her gigantic head. The spirit of Maritzburg lingers on the tombstone of a certain Frederick George Mapstone (Sergt Natal Carabineers) who died fighting for his country at Ladysmith on the 4th of November 1899 aged 33 years: ‘He has fought the good fight', the tombstone told us, ‘and his Captain has called him to a high promotion.'

Bill Bizley, who lectures in English at the University of Natal in Maritzburg, had helped us to find relatives and plan our trip. There have been strikes and demonstrations at universities, particularly in Johannesburg, by students wishing to extend the principle of one man, one vote to one student, one degree. Some find it a racist outrage that any black student should ever fail. This is unfair treatment as the English universities never surrendered completely to apartheid, and they have to struggle with the hideous legacy of a system which provided no proper black education. Now Bill Bizley was lecturing his students on
Kim.
Kipling, the awkward, often bloody-minded imperialist genius, is being dragged towards the South Africa of President Mandela.

Maritzburg seemed too hot and its hotels too noisy, so we chose a place in the Natal midlands called, dauntingly, Granny Mouse's Country House. The drought had burnt the hills to the colour of coconut-matting and the streams and the waterfalls were dry. The feeling that you were driving through a scorched version of the Home Counties was strengthened by the place names: Caversham, Richmond and South Downs.

Our destination was a cluster of thatched cottages where a short lady, standing in the shadows beside the reception desk, introduced herself proudly as Granny Mouse. To call the hotel twee would be an understatement. Laura Ashley patterns, flounced pelmets, tartan scatter cushions and flower prints abounded. My room had a frenzied American feeling to it. There were any number of small cushions dressed up in the stars and stripes, the flounced curtains were red, white and blue, as was the patchwork quilt. There were a number of framed photographs of President Kennedy, and others of his assassination and his funeral. Seated on the lavatory in my bathroom there was a bewildered teddy bear. In the dining room the black waitresses were huddled together and giggling, perhaps at the decor or more probably at the Mrs Tiggywinkle costumes they had on: big mob-caps, ribbons and aprons. These Beatrix Potter illustrations laughingly brought us liver and bacon. There was trouble near by; Zulus had attacked an area lived in by Indians and there were further massacres in the Natal heartland. It was the only moment in my South African journey that I felt fear. Who would wish to be hacked to death among a lot of Laura Ashley patterns?

Jeremy and I sat in Granny Mouse's English country garden, by a tiny swimming-pool filled with black and brackish water, with hadedahs, the glossy ibis, calling out above us as raucous as Aunt Gertie. The rainbird uttered its single tedious note. We talked as we hadn't found time to talk for years; not, perhaps, since Jeremy was at school and we made a list for our day out in London – lunch, a cinema, finally a theatre. Even further back he was a quiet boy among a crowd of older, bossier girls or, dressed as a Roman soldier, was standing beside my father's garden stool being asked, as I was asked at that puzzled age, ‘Is execution done on Cawdor?' We went to a game reserve where black rhinos slowly crossed the road and giraffes and wildebeest stood patiently, waiting to be photographed as though they too were tourists who'd come from another country.

Not too far away a dog was wandering in a township with a human arm in its mouth; an American girl, dropping her black student friends off at their homes near the airport, was butchered; white racists were stealing weapons in enormous quantities. Gagool was still scuttling about, full of malice, looking forward to the great dance when innocent men and women would be picked off at random for instant death: ‘“Good! Good! Good!” piped out that aged iniquity. “Are your senses awake? Can you smell blood? Can you purge the land of the wicked ones?”' Can the story ever have a happy ending? My numerous relatives, the salt pricks, are doing well to remain nervously optimistic.

For a long time the children have been preparing a play. We heard them whispering. They locked themselves away from the Italian sunshine. We found our clothes vanishing, hats and sunglasses went musing, make-up was depleted. After dinner, we go down to what is labelled on the bunch of keys
II Salone
. It's the coolest and most comfortable room in the house. Through the high French windows, now shuttered, you walk down stone steps to the patch of grass, the roses and lavender, to the olive trees and the wood where there is a stream and snakes perhaps an occasional wild boar snuffling. At one end of the room there is a platform, a grand piano, music-stands and piles of sheet music, a place where the true owners of the house play string quartets. We, the grown-ups, the old and the not so completely young, sit in darkness. After we have told each other how excited we are, we fall silent. And then the stage is bathed in light, performing as sunlight. Some people are having lunch, no doubt on the terrace, and then we see that the people are the children and the children are us.