Free Rage by Wilbur Smith Page A

Pinelands, a modern ranch-type home with a flat roof and large picture windows, with ordinary functional mass-produced furniture and nylon wall-to-wall carpets. There were dog hairs on the chairs, well-thumbed intellectual books piled in odd corners or left open on the dining-room table, children’s toys abandoned in the passageways, and cheap reproductions of Picasso and Modigliani hanging askew on the walls marked with grubby little fingerprints. Tara felt comfortable and welcome here, mercifully released from the fastidious splendour of Weltevreden.
    Molly Broadhurst rushed out to meet her as she parked the Packard. She was dressed in a marvellously flamboyant caftan.
    â€˜You’re late!’ She kissed Tara heartily and dragged her through the disorder of the lounge to the music room at the rear.
    The music room was an afterthought stuck on to the end of the house without any aesthetic considerations and was filled now with Molly’s guests who had been invited to hear Moses Gama. Tara’s spirits soared as she looked around her; they were all vibrant creative people, all of them spirited and articulate, filled with the excitment of living and a fine sense of justice and outrage and rebellion.
    This was the type of gathering that Weltevreden would never see. Firstly, black people were included, students from the black University of Fort Hare and the fledgling University of the Western Cape, teachers and lawyers and even a black doctor, all of them political activists who, although denied a voice or a vote in the white parliament, were beginning to cry out with a passion that must be heard. There was the editor of the black magazine Drum and the local correspondent of the Sowetan , named after that sprawling black township.
    Just to mingle socially with blacks made her feel breathlessly daring.
    The whites in the room were no less extraordinary.
Some of them had been members of the Communist Party of South Africa before that organization had been disbanded a few years previously. There was a man called Harris whom she had met before at Molly’s house. He had fought with the Irgun in Israel against the British and the Arabs, a tall fierce man who inspired a delicious fear in Tara. Molly hinted that he was an expert in guerrilla warfare and sabotage, and certainly he was always travelling secretly around the country or slipping across the border into neighbouring states on mysterious business.
    Talking earnestly to Molly’s husband was another lawyer from Johannesburg, Bram Fischer, who specialized in defending black clients charged under the myriad laws that were designed to muzzle and disarm them and restrict their movements. Molly said that Bram was reorganizing the old Communist Party into underground cells, and Tara fantasized that she might one day be invited to join one of these cells.
    In the same group was Marcus Archer, another ex-Communist and an industrial psychologist from the Witwatersrand. He was responsible for the training of thousands of black workers for the gold-mining industry, and Molly said that he had helped to organize the black mineworkers’ union. Molly had also whispered that he was a homosexual, and she had used an odd term for it that Tara had never heard before. ‘He’s gay, gay as a lark.’ And because it was totally unacceptable to polite society, Tara found it fascinating.
    â€˜Oh, God, Molly,’ Tara whispered. ‘This is so exciting. These are all real people, they make me feel as though I am truly living at last.’
    â€˜There he is.’ Molly smiled at this outburst and dragged Tara with her through the press of bodies.
    Moses Gama leaned against the far wall faced by a half-circle of admirers, yet standing head and shoulders above them, and Molly pushed her way into the front row.

    Tara found herself staring up at Moses Gama, and she thought that even in this brilliant company he stood out like a black panther in a pack of mangy