‘Tonight?’
‘Yes.’ She looked at me carefully. ‘Please be here, Johnny. Don’t run away from it.’
‘I’m not running away from anything. I’m reviewing my social calendar. What’s for dinner?’
She smiled, having won. ‘Bread and water.’
‘Cut another slice.’
I had, I hoped, shown the necessary co-operation, but in fact it was not at all the sort of interruption I wanted, at this stage of the
Safari
production, in the last two weeks of rehearsal; and, skimming the solid print in
The Times
on my way down town, and later on at the theatre, I felt even less inclined to give it room for manoeuvre.
Father Shillingford was indeed in town. He had left South Africa a few days earlier, minus his passport, with a vague ‘travel document’ which was no guarantee of his return-entry; he had arrived at the UN, and there begged leave to appear before a committee, chiefly African and Asian, which seemed at the moment solely concentrated upon the expulsion of South Africa on the grounds of her racial discrimination.
Once accredited, he had promptly, and to everyone’s astonishment, brought all his skill and persuasion to pleading the cause of his country – the country which despised and rejected him. Don’t throw South Africa out of UN, had been his theme, in a passionate speech which had ‘visibly moved’ the delegates. Keep her inside, treat her like a misguided but not incorrigible friend, and try to persuade her to mend her ways.
As an example of ‘other cheek’ Christianity, it was memorably effective. The picture kept nagging me all day; I returned to thinking about it again and again, with foreboding, and with doubt about meeting him once more, and about dining in this elevated atmosphere. It got in the way throughout that day’s rehearsal, which was enough to try the patience of another kind of saint; and was an appropriate prelude to one of the most absurd and uneasy meals I had ever eaten.
If Lord Muddley had been a fat ghost from the past, Father Shillingford proved a veritable skeleton from a cupboard I had thought long walled up.
He was there when I got home, talking to Kate, and it was strange to see the two of them together – the extremely elegant woman and the pale shabby priest, sitting side by side in our gilded cage. He got up when I came in, and greeted me very warmly.
‘Jonathan! How very nice, after all these years! How are you?’
‘All the better for seeing you.’
It could hardly have been less true. Close to, he looked pathetic; shrunken, cruelly tested, pitifully spent; the energetic and rather tubby little man I remembered from six years earlier had been worn down, by God knew what pressures and pains, to a water-thin figure of exhaustion. His face had that look of bony dejection which one sometimes saw in pietistic carvings of Christ on the cross. Of course, he had fashioned his own cross, and chosen to suffer on it, and perhaps was glorified by his ordeal. But one look at him, one brief clasp of his meagre hand, was enough to send me to the bar, almost at a run.
Dinner was very awkward. He caught me unawares by bowing his head to say grace, just as I was taking my first swig of wine; I said ‘Cheers’, and he said ‘
Benedictus benedicat
’, at the same moment; as a chorus, it was ill-matched, and Kate’s face showed it vividly. We talked, of course, about South Africa; or rather, they talked, and I mostly drank. I was not really in on this party, and it needed no stage-direction to make the fact clear.
His old shanty-town of Teroka, he told us, had now vanished; the people had been dispossessed, the houses razed, the area given over to a neat white suburb called, it seemed sarcastically, Pleasantville. The former population had been pushed still farther out, and rehoused nearly twenty-five miles from the centre of Johannesburg, where they had to work.
‘Of course, the houses are a little better,’ he said quietly, ‘and there is running water. But it has become terribly overcrowded already, and lawless, and dirty. And now it means travelling almost fifty miles to and from work each day, in those wretched buses. Some of the men have to queue up at four in the morning, to be sure of getting to town by eight. And the same thing at night.’
‘That must mean a long journey for you, each day,’ said Kate.
‘About the same,’ he agreed. ‘I tried to move nearer to the mission, but I couldn’t find anywhere suitable. But–’ he smiled, ‘I have a motor scooter now! Very dashing. So I am not really badly off at all.’
The picture of Father Shillingford, his cassock swirling in the breeze, hitting forty miles an hour on a Vespa along the dusty Transvaal roads, amused me, and I made an effort to become one of the party. I said: ‘I’d like to see you riding that chariot … Of course, they’ve always had those queues for the buses, haven’t they? They must be pretty well resigned to it by now.’
‘They are certainly resigned,’ said Father Shillingford. His eyes, meeting mine across the candlelight, were unexpectedly searching, as if he were trying to discover my whole character at a single glance. I wished him luck, and sealed the wish with a libation. ‘But that doesn’t make these hardships any easier to bear.’
‘It’s wonderful what you can get used to.’
‘I think it is more sad than wonderful.’
Kate, with a frown for me which made me suspect that I might well finish the evening standing in a corner, guided us somewhere else.
‘I don’t think I saw any of the Black Sash people while I was there,’ she remarked, in a bright tone which seemed to invite, irresistibly, the label of Social Notes from All Over. ‘Are they still operating?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Father Shillingford. ‘But less than before, I suppose. Don’t forget that the movement had been going on for nearly fifteen years, and some of the women – well, I don’t wish to be ungallant, but they must now be well into their seventies. It takes a good deal of courage, and stamina as well, to engage in silent-protest picketing at that age. I don’t think they have had much success in gaining new recruits.’ He sighed, and his pale face seemed to go even further into mourning. ‘There is curiously little feeling for that kind of politics among the young people. They simply don’t want to be bothered. South Africa is very prosperous, the police are extremely efficient and energetic, so–’ he spread his hands, ‘–so life goes on quite agreeably, and very few white people want to change it. Particularly as it might cost them their liberty in the process.’
‘I think that’s one of the worst things,’ said Kate. ‘The way the police lay down the rules, and everyone just says “Yes” and does what they’re told.’
Julia came in with a fresh course, of chicken Kiev – dinner was really very good tonight, and it was a pity that one could not enjoy it in peace, instead of being driven inexorably to the bottle – and there was silence as we set to work. Presently Father Shillingford, who was eating with a sad kind of reluctance, as if food, though pleasurable, were an insult to the hungry, took up his tale again.
‘The police certainly lay down the rules,’ he said. ‘I don’t think there’s a single thing which a man could say or do in South Africa, which could not somehow be brought within today’s sedition laws. And once you become suspect, you have a police dossier and you can be hounded quite unmercifully.’ He smiled at Kate. ‘You found that out yourself, didn’t you? I remember reading about it, and wondering how a person of spirit would react to it.’
‘I reacted, right enough,’ said Kate. ‘I hadn’t been so angry for a long time. But that’s another thing. I didn’t
worry
, because I was safe, really. I was absolutely innocent, and so was Julia, and I had some influential friends to fall back on, and, I suppose, enough money to get the best kind of legal advice and protection. But what do other people do? What
can
they do?’
‘Nothing,’ said Father Shillingford flatly. ‘They are powerless. They are also permanently afraid, whether they are black or white.’ He brushed his hand across his forehead, wearily. ‘I have lived with this for so long, it is sometimes difficult to realise how strange it is. How wrong. How
iniquitous!
’ It was, for him, a very strong word, and he spoke it with extraordinary feeling. ‘It reaches its worst point in what they now call “house arrest”, which must be one of the most wicked forms of punishment ever devised by a so-called Minister of Justice. Imagine being told to stay at home, seeing no one, during all your free time. Imagine being ordered to travel straight to work, and straight back, and not to visit anyone on the way, except to report at the police station, and not to have friends in your own home, at any time. Imagine a whole weekend like that, when you may not move beyond your garden gate, nor talk to anyone except a policeman.
Imagine that for the rest of your life!
’
He was obviously distressed, and his voice as he recalled these details was trembling. I took a sip of my wine, not knowing quite how the ideal host should react to this sort of thing. A kindly word? A change of subject? Finally I said, in as reasonable a tone as I could muster: ‘I don’t think I should like house arrest.’
For some reason this innocuous statement did not seem to sit well with Kate. She gave me another of her formidable frowns, and then, as if to draw attention away from her unworthy spouse, said to Father Shillingford: ‘What I don’t understand is, what you’re really trying to do at UN. Why go to all that trouble, if you feel as you do? Surely South Africa doesn’t deserve to keep her membership.’
Father Shillingford, now more composed, shook his head. ‘If she were expelled – which is what they are trying to do – I believe it would be nothing short of disaster. There would then be no form of pressure or persuasion left, except the threat of war, which is unthinkable. The very people who most need our help would be the first to suffer. They would be left to the wolves.’ He looked from one to the other of us, seeking allies, seeking confirmation of his urgent hope. ‘I have thought about this for a long time, and I am sure I am right. South Africa in isolation would go her own way, and a sordid and terrible way it would be. But South Africa as a member of a world body might still listen to reason, and be brought to reform. The United Nations is now a very sophisticated and powerful body. All the members are subject, whether they know it or not, to a sort of group civilising influence. It’s far better for such a country to be a member, however unpopular, rather than an outcast. You cannot hope to reach a country, or a man, who has locked himself in.’
It was at that moment, faced with this barrage of marginal though lofty logic, that I was trapped by an uncontrollable fit of the gapes. At one moment I was sitting back in comparative ease, doing nothing except perhaps compare the flavour of our present company with the sharper tang of Rhein wine; at the next, a cavernous yawn split my face, just as Father Shillingford glanced in my direction. Kate also caught the tail end of it, and gave me a furious look. There could be no doubt that this was a social
gaffe
, and would be classed as such for a very long time to come.
I smiled at them, brave to the last. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said. ‘I’ve really been working very hard. I must have been saving that one up all day.’
‘I’m afraid I’ve been neglecting you,’ said Father Shillingford, with a contrite air which was really very irritating indeed. ‘My trials and troubles must seem excessively dull … Tell me about your play.’
‘Well, it’s a musical,’ I began, readily enough, ‘and it’s funny, and it’s about–’ Suddenly, the words simply would no longer flow. It was not that I wanted to hide anything; it was just that I did not feel like another argument – and an argument it would become, as soon as the pair of them got busy on the suitability of certain themes for merriment. Why should I strip in this frosty climate? ‘Oh, you don’t want to hear all this,’ I said after a moment. ‘It’s only a play. Mass entertainment.’
‘About South Africa, I think I read. Based on that wonderful book of yours.’
‘About South Africa.’
‘I would not have thought,’ said Father Shillingford, ‘that there was a great deal of humour to be found in that particular subject.’
There it was, damn it, flat on the table in front of me, before I had a chance to dodge. I bunched my shoulders, not listening to his voice any longer. I did not want to talk about it. I did not want to talk to Father Shillingford. This inability to meet his mind, to face this strange little spectre of the past, might have shamed me; instead, it only goaded and irritated. It was a hateful reminder of Kate’s own crusade, and the role of low-class, scarcely mentionable target which had been assigned to me, throughout the last few months, the last few years.
I was fed up with playing that part; and when Father Shillingford ended his small homily with the words: ‘You should really be back there, you know, Jonathan,’ I suddenly found that I had had enough, and was going to tell him so.
‘I don’t agree,’ I said roughly. ‘I’m not interested in South Africa. I don’t want to go back there. In fact, I don’t even want to talk about it any more.’
‘Jonathan!’ said Kate, with a look which might have snuffed the candles. ‘That will do.’
‘You’re damned right it will do,’ I told her. I surveyed them both, first over the top of my wineglass, then through its stem, then through its empty shell. What was there to be afraid of? I had long forfeited my chances of a good conduct medal. Surely, in the company of my dear wife and my old and sanctified friends, I could speak my little piece … ‘OK, I’m selfish, I’m making a balls out of my entire life, and this is all part of Hate Steele Month. Sorry, Father,’ I threw across to him, ‘we’re raking over a few very old ashes tonight.’ Yet I was going to rake them, nonetheless, and not all the cassocks in holy church were going to stand in my way. ‘But the fact is, I’m fed up with being made to feel like a criminal, just because I want to work at one sort of book rather than another.’
Father Shillingford was looking at me with infuriating mildness. ‘Why should anyone hate you, Jonathan?’ he asked gently.
‘Because I’m trying to talk sense, and
live
sense!’ I turned from one pair of eyes to the other; his were inquiring, hers were steely and unforgiving, and I did not give a damn about either. ‘Come on, let’s cut out all the nonsense! What are you trying to do? What do you actually want for South Africa? How do you want her to change? You think the natives can take over and run the country? That’s complete rubbish, and you both know it.’