Two, he did not see why he should give free lifts to people who had just unfairly beaten his side in the War.
My smug disapproval about the whites not giving lifts was to take a knock, for six years later I found that no one, not ‘liberals’ or the religious; not ‘progressives’ or ‘reactionaries’, no one at all, gave lifts to any person, black or white, whose face was not familiar. It was too dangerous: there had been too many muggings, hold-ups, ‘incidents’ of all kinds.
We went to take morning tea on another verandah full of wonderful dogs, and luxurious cats, who had to be spilled off the chairs so we might sit down, and I heard The Monologue spoken, first by the wife, and then at lunch, which was served by a black girl wearing a uniform not unlike an Edwardian maid’s, black, with white cuffs and lace. This time the husband said The Monologue. Then everyone sneered at President Banana’s funny name.
We walked around the garden. Again a garden ‘boy’–the old word still used, quite unself-consciously, watered a variety of lawns and shrubs, and when his employers were not listening, asked if he could come and work for me, he needed to better himself. He had an O-level, and was only a gardener because he had not yet found a good job. I live in London, I said. He asked if it was in America, because if so, he would come and work for me. I said in America black people did not necessarily have an easy time. He said he had seen rich black people on television and in films, and he wanted to be like them. This took me back thirty odd years, to when I used to sell communist papers around a certain ‘Coloured’ (that was the correct word politically then for people of mixed race) suburb in old Salisbury. While I preached informed opposition to white domination, I was being stopped on every street corner by aspiring young men who wanted to go to America where everyone was rich. I used to give them gentle lectures on the need to think of the welfare of All before self-advancement. What a prig. What an idiot. I can see myself, an attractive but above-all self-assured young woman, in a clean and perfectly ironed cotton dress–which in itself was a luxury for people living crammed in shabby rooms; wheeling a nice clean bicycle too expensive for almost everyone I met, and on the carrier piles of newspapers and pamphlets advocating varying degrees of social discontent, with revolution as a cure for everything.
Next day Harry said he would take me to the Club some miles away. I knew he did not want to go, but he said it would do him good. Since his wife died he had got out of the habit of socializing. But I wasn’t to expect a good time. Because so many people had Taken the Gap, the Club was nearly empty these days. Once there were two hundred, three hundred people on Saturdays and Sundays, and people had to queue to use the tennis courts or to get drinks at the bar. Yes, yes, he would go, he felt he should: people kept insisting that he must go out to lunch, or to supper, or to the Club. They meant to be kind, he knew that.
When we got there, the Club was a low brick building in the bush, with tennis courts, a squash court, a bowling green. It seemed the weekend before several cars full of youngsters had come down from Harare for a party, and some were still here, lolling on the verandah. A couple slept flat on their backs under a tree, their arms flung out, faces scarlet. On one sun-inflamed forearm sat a contemplative green grasshopper. The cold-thinned musasa trees of winter laid shifting mottled shadow over them. There was a bleak and dusty wind.
‘Stupid to drink yourself into this state,’ said Harry authoritatively, and shouted: ‘Thomas. Thomas!’
A black man in a servant’s white uniform appeared on the verandah, said calmly to him, ‘Good afternoon, sir,’ and walked slowly over.
‘They shouldn’t be lying here like this, they’ll get pneumonia.’
Thomas looked down at the unconscious