Life Times Stories

Open House


Frances Taver was on the secret circuit for people who wanted to find out the truth about South Africa. These visiting journalists, politicians and churchmen all had an itinerary arranged for them by their consular representatives and overseas information services, or were steered around by a ‘foundation’ of South African business interests eager to improve the country’s image, or even carted about to the model black townships, universities and beerhalls by the South African State Information service itself. But all had, carefully hidden among the most private of private papers (the nervous ones went so far as to keep it in code), the short list that would really take the lid off the place: the people one must see. A few were names that had got into the newspapers of the world as particularly vigorous opponents or victims of apartheid; a writer or two, a newspaper editor or an outspoken bishop. Others were known only within the country itself, and were known about by foreign visitors only through people like themselves who had carried the short list before. Most of the names on it were white names – which was rather frustrating, when one was after the real thing; but it was said in London and New York that there were still ways of getting to meet Africans, provided you could get hold of the right white people.

Frances Taver was one of them. Had been for years. From the forties when she had been a trade union organiser and run a mixed union of garment workers while this was legally possible, in the fifties, after her marriage, when she was manager of a black-and-white theatre group before that was disbanded by new legislation, to the early sixties, when she hid friends on the run from the police – Africans who were members of the newly banned political organisations – before the claims of that sort of friendship had to be weighed against the risk of the long spells of detention without trial introduced to betray it.

Frances Taver had few friends left now, and she was always slightly embarrassed when she heard an eager American or English voice over the telephone, announcing an arrival, a too-brief stay (of course), and the inevitable fond message of greetings to be conveyed from so-and-so – whoever it was who happened to have supplied the short list. A few years ago it had been fun and easy to make these visitors an excuse for a gathering that quite likely would turn into a party. The visitor would have a high old time learning to dance the kwela with black girls; he would sit fascinated, trying to keep sober enough to take it all in, listening to the fluent and fervent harangue of African, white and Indian politicals, drinking and arguing together in a paradox of personal freedom that, curiously, he couldn’t remember finding where there were no laws against the mixing of races. And no one enjoyed his fascination more than the objects of it themselves; Frances Taver and her friends were amused, in those days, in a friendly way, to knock the ‘right’ ideas slightly askew. In those days: that was how she thought of it; it seemed very long ago. She saw the faces, sometimes, a flash in an absence filled with newspaper accounts of trials, hearsay about activities in exile, chance remarks from someone who knew someone else who had talked over the fence with one who was under house arrest. Another, an African friend banned for his activities with the African National Congress, who had gone ‘underground’, came to see her at long intervals, in the afternoons when he could be sure the house would be empty. Although she was still youngish, she had come to think of ‘those days’ as her youth; and he was a vision strayed from it.





The voice on the telephone, this time, was American – soft, cautious – no doubt the man thought the line was tapped. Robert Greenman Ceretti, from Washington; while they were talking, she remembered that this was the political columnist who had somehow been connected with the Kennedy administration. Hadn’t he written a book about the Bay of Pigs? Anyway, she had certainly seen him quoted.

‘And how are the Brauns – I haven’t heard for ages—’ She made the usual enquiries about the well-being of the mutual acquaintance whose greetings he brought, and he made the usual speech about how much he was hoping he’d be able to meet her? She was about to say, as always, come to dinner, but an absurd recoil within her, a moment of dull panic, almost, made her settle for an invitation to drop in for a drink two days later. ‘If I can be of any help to you, in the meantime?’ she had to add; he sounded modest and intelligent.

‘Well, I do appreciate it. I’ll look forward to Wednesday.’

At the last minute she invited a few white friends to meet him, a doctor and his wife who ran a tuberculosis hospital in an African reserve, and a young journalist who had been to America on a leadership exchange programme. But she knew what the foreign visitor wanted of her and she had an absurd – again, that was the word – compulsion to put him in the position where, alas, he could ask it. He was a small, cosy, red-headed man with a chipmunk smile, and she liked him. She drove him back to his hotel after the other guests had left, and they chatted about the articles he was going to write and the people he was seeing – had he been able to interview any important Nationalists, for example? Well, not yet, but he hoped to have something lined up for the following week, in Pretoria. Another thing he was worried about (here it came), he’d hardly been able to exchange a word with any black man except the one who cleaned his room at the hotel.

She heard her voice saying casually, ‘Well, perhaps I might be able to help you, there,’ and he took it up at once, gravely, gratefully, sincerely, smiling at her – ‘I hoped you just might. If I could only get to talk with a few ordinary, articulate people. I mean, I think I’ve been put pretty much in the picture by the courageous white people I’ve been lucky enough to meet – people like you and your husband – but I’d like to know a little at first hand about what Africans themselves are thinking. If you could fix it, it’d be wonderful.’

Now it was done, at once she withdrew, from herself rather than him. ‘I don’t know. People don’t want to talk any more. If they’re doing anything, it’s not something that can be talked about. Those that are left. Black and white. The ones you ought to see are shut away.’

They were sitting in the car, outside the hotel. She could see in his encouraging, admiring, intent face how he had been told that she, if anyone, could introduce him to black people, hers, if anyone’s, was the house to meet them.

There was a twinge of vanity: ‘I’ll let you know. I’ll ring you, then, Bob.’ Of course they were already on first-name terms; lonely affinity overleapt acquaintance in South Africa when like-minded whites met.

‘You don’t have to say more than when and where. I didn’t like to talk, that first day, over the phone,’ he said.

They always had fantasies of danger. ‘What can happen to you?’ she said. Her smile was not altogether pleasant. They always protested, too, that their fear was not for themselves, it was on your behalf, etc. ‘You’ve got your passport. You don’t live here.’





She did not see Jason Madela from one month’s end to the next but when she telephoned him at the building where she remembered him once having had an office on the fringe of the white town, he accepted the invitation to lunch just as if he had been one of the intimates who used to drop in any time. And then there was Edgar, Edgar Xixo the attorney, successor to her old friend Samson Dumile’s practice; one could always get him. And after that? She could have asked Jason to bring someone along, perhaps one of the boxing promoters or gamblers it amused him to produce where the drinks were free – but that would have been too obvious, even for the blind eye that she and Jason Madela were able to turn to the nature of the invitation. In the end she invited little Spuds Buthelezi, the reporter. What did it matter? He was black, anyway. There was no getting out of the whole business, now.

She set herself to cook a good lunch, just as good as she had ever cooked, and she put out the drinks and the ice in the shelter of the glassed-in end of the big veranda, so that the small company should not feel lost. Her fading hair had been dyed to something approximating its original blonde and then streaked with grey, the day before, and she felt the appearance to be pleasingly artificial; she wore a bright, thick linen dress that showed off sunburned shoulders like the knobs of well-polished furniture, and she was aware that her blue eyes were striking in contrast with her tough brown face. She felt Robert Greenman Ceretti’s eyes on her, a moment, as he stood in the sunny doorway; yes, she was also a woman, queening it alone among men at lunch.

‘You mix the martinis, there’s a dear,’ she said. ‘It’s such a treat to have a real American one.’ And while he bent about over bottles with the neatness of a small man, she was in and out of the veranda, shepherding the arrival of the other guests.

‘This is Bob – Bob Ceretti, here on a visit from the States – Edgar Xixo.’

‘Jason, this is Bob Ceretti, the man who has the ear of presidents—’

Laughter and protests mingled with the handing round of the drinks. Jason Madela, going to fat around the nape but still handsome in a frowning, Clark Gable way, stood about, glass in hand, as if in the habit acquired at cocktail parties. With his air of being distracted from more important things by irresistibly amusing asides, he was correcting a matter of terminology for Robert Ceretti – ‘No, no, but you must understand that in the townships, a “situation” is a different thing entirely – well, I’m a situation, f’rinstance—’

He cocked his smile, for confirmation, to Xixo, whose eyes turned from one face to another in obedient glee – ‘Oh, you’re the muti man!’

‘No, wait, but I’m trying to give Bob an obvious example’ – more laughter, all round – ‘ – a man who wears a suit every day, like a white man. Who goes to the office and prefers to talk English.’

‘You think it derives from the use of the word as a genteelism for “job”? Would you say? You know – the Situations Vacant column in the newspapers?’ The visitor sat forward on the edge of his chair, smiling up closely. ‘But what’s this “muti” you mentioned, now – maybe I ought to have been taking notes instead of shaking Frances’s martini pitcher.’

‘He’s a medicine man,’ Xixo was explaining, while Jason laughed – ‘Oh for God’s sake!’ and tossed off the rest of his gin, and Frances went forward to bring the late arrival, Spuds Buthelezi, in his lattice-knit gold shirt and pale blue jeans, into the circle. When the American had exchanged names and had Spuds by the hand, he said, ‘And what’s Spuds, then?’

The young man had a dough-shaped, light-coloured face with tiny features stuck in it in a perpetual expression of suspicious surprise. The martinis had turned up the volume of voices that met him. ‘I’ll have a beer,’ he said to Frances; and they laughed again.

Jason Madela rescued him, a giant flicking a fly from a glass of water. ‘He’s one of the eggheads,’ he said. ‘That’s another category altogether.’

‘Didn’t you used to be one yourself, Jason?’ Frances pretended a reproof: Jason Madela would want a way of letting Ceretti know that although he was a successful businessman in the townships, he was also a man with a university degree.

‘Don’t let’s talk about my youthful misdemeanours, my dear Frances,’ he said, with the accepted light touch of a man hiding a wound. ‘I thought the men were supposed to be doing the work around here – I can cope with that,’ and he helped her chip apart the ice cubes that had welded together as they melted. ‘Get your servant to bring us a little hot water, that’ll do it easily—’

‘Oh I’m really falling down on the job!’ Ceretti was listening carefully, putting in a low ‘Go on’ or ‘You mean?’ to keep the flow of Xixo’s long explanation of problems over a travel document, and he looked up at Frances and Jason Madela offering a fresh round of drinks.

‘You go ahead and talk, that’s the idea,’ Frances said.

He gave her the trusting grin of some intelligent small pet. ‘Well, you two are a great combination behind the bar. Real teamwork of long association, I guess.’

‘How long is it?’ Frances asked, drily but gaily, meaning how many years had she and Jason Madela been acquaintances, and, playfully making as if to anticipate a blow, he said, ‘Must be ten years and you were a grown-up girl even then’ – although both knew that they had seen each other only across various rooms perhaps a dozen times in five years, and got into conversation perhaps half as often.

At lunch Edgar Xixo was still fully launched on the story of his difficulties in travelling back and forth to one of the former British Protectorates, now small, newly independent states surrounded by South African territory. It wasn’t, he explained, as if he were asking for a passport: it was just a travel document he wanted, that’s all, just a piece of paper from the Bantu Affairs Department that would allow him to go to Lesotho on business and come back.

‘Now have I got this straight – you’d been there sometime?’ Ceretti hung over the wisp of steam rising from his soup like a seer over a crystal ball.

‘Yes, yes, you see, I had a travel document—’

‘But these things are good for one exit and re-entry only.’ Jason dispatched it with the good-humoured impatience of the quick-witted. ‘We blacks aren’t supposed to want to go wandering about the place. Tell them you want to take a holiday in Lourenço Marques – they’ll laugh in your face. If they don’t kick you downstairs. Oppenheimer and Charlie Engelhard can go off in their yachts to the South of France, but Jason Madela?’

He got the laugh he wanted, and, on the side, the style of his reference to rich and important white industrialists as decent enough fellows, if one happened to know them, suggested that he might. Perhaps he did, for all Frances Taver knew; Jason would be just the kind of man the white establishment would find if they should happen to decide they ought to make a token gesture of being in touch with the African masses. He was curiously reassuring to white people; his dark suits, white shirts, urbane conversation and sense of humour, all indistinguishable from their own and apparently snatched out of thin air, made it possible for them to forget the unpleasant facts of the life imposed on him and his kind. How tactful, how clever he was, too. She, just as well as any millionaire, would have done to illustrate his point; she was culpable: white, and free to go where she pleased. The flattery of being spared passed invisibly from her to him, like a promissory note beneath the table.

Edgar Xixo had even been summoned to The Greys, Special Branch headquarters, for questioning, he said – ‘And I’ve never belonged to any political organisation, they know there’ve never been any charges against me. I don’t know any political refugees in Lesotho, I don’t want to see anybody – I have to go up and down simply because of business, I’ve got this agency selling equipment to the people at the diamond diggings, it could be a good thing if...’

‘A little palm-grease, maybe,’ said Jason Madela, taking some salad.

Xixo appealed to them all, dismayed. ‘But if you offer it to the wrong one, that’s the . . . ? In my position, an attorney!’

‘Instinct,’ said Madela. ‘One can’t learn it.’

‘Tell me,’ Ceretti signalled an appreciative refusal of a second helping of duck, while turning from his hostess to Madela. ‘Would you say that bribery plays a big part in daily relations between Africans and officials? I don’t mean the political police, of course – the white administration? Is that your experience?’

Madela sipped his wine and then turned the bottle so that he could read the label, saying meanwhile, ‘Oh not what you’d call graft, not by your standards. Small stuff. When I ran a transport business I used to make use of it. Licences for the drivers and so on. You get some of these young Afrikaner clerks, they don’t earn much and they don’t mind who they pick up a few bob from. They can be quite reasonable. I was thinking there might be someone up at the Bantu Affairs offices. But you have to have a feeling for the right man’ – he put down the bottle and smiled at Frances Taver – ‘Thank heaven I’m out of it, now. Unless I should decide to submit some of my concoctions to the Bureau of Standards, eh?’ and she laughed.

‘Jason has broken the white monopoly of the hair-straightener and blood-purifier business,’ Frances said gracefully, ‘and the nice thing about him is that he has no illusions about his products.’

‘But plenty of confidence,’ he said. ‘I’m looking into the possibilities of exporting my pills for men, to the States. I think the time’s just ripe for American Negroes to feel they can buy back a bit of old Africa in a bottle, eh?’

Xixo picked about his leg of duck as if his problem itself were laid cold before them on the table. ‘I mean, I’ve said again and again, show me anything on my record—’

The young journalist, Spuds Buthelezi, said in his heavy way, ‘It might be because you took over Samson Dumile’s show.’

Every time a new name was mentioned the corners of Ceretti’s eyes flickered narrow in attention.

‘Well, that’s the whole thing!’ Xixo complained to Ceretti. ‘The fellow I was working for, Dumile, was mixed up in a political trial and he got six years – I took over the bona fide clients, that’s all, my office isn’t in the same building, nothing to do with it – but that’s the whole thing!’

Frances suddenly thought of Sam Dumile, in this room of hers, three – two? – years ago, describing a police raid on his house the night before and roaring with laughter as he told how his little daughter said to the policeman, ‘My father gets very cross if you play with his papers.’

Jason picked up the wine bottle, making to pass it round – ‘Yes, please do, please do – what happened to the children?’ she said.

Jason knew whose she meant; made a polite attempt. ‘Where are Sam’s kids?’

But Edgar Xixo was nodding in satisfied confirmation as Ceretti said, ‘It’s a pretty awful story. My God. Seems you can never hope to be in the clear, no matter how careful you are. My God.’

Jason remarked, aside, ‘They must be around somewhere with relatives. He’s got a sister in Bloemfontein.’

The dessert was a compound of fresh mangoes and cream, an invention of the house: ‘Mangoes Frances’ said the American. ‘This is one of the African experiences I’d recommend.’ But Jason Madela told them he was allergic to mangoes and began on the cheese which was standing by. Another bottle of wine was opened to go with the cheese and there was laughter – which Robert Ceretti immediately turned on himself – when it emerged out of the cross-talk that Spuds Buthelezi thought Ceretti had something to do with an American foundation. In the sympathetic atmosphere of food, drink and sunshine marbled with cigarette smoke, the others listened as if they had not heard it all before while Buthelezi, reluctant to waste the speech he had primed himself with, pressed Ceretti with his claim to a study grant that would enable him to finish his play. They heard him again outlining the plot and inspiration of the play – ‘right out of township life’ as he always said, blinking with finality, convinced that this was the only necessary qualification for successful authorship. He had patiently put together and taken apart, many times, in his play, ingredients faithfully lifted from the work of African writers who got published, and he was himself African: what else could be needed but someone to take it up?

Foundation or no foundation, Robert Ceretti showed great interest. ‘Do you know the play at all, Frances? I mean,’ (he turned back to the round, wine-open face of the young man) ‘is it far enough along to show to anybody?’

And she said, finding herself smiling encouragingly, ‘Oh yes – an early draft, he’s worked on it a lot since then, haven’t you – and there’s been a reading . . . ?’

‘I’ll certainly get it to you,’ Buthelezi said, writing down the name of Ceretti’s hotel.

They moved back to the veranda for the coffee and brandy. It was well after three o’clock by the time they stood about, making their goodbyes. Ceretti’s face was gleaming. ‘Jason Madela’s offered to drop me back in town, so don’t you worry, Frances. I was just saying, people in America’ll find it difficult to believe it was possible for me to have a lunch like this, here. It’s been so very pleasant – pleasant indeed. We all had a good time. He was telling me that a few years ago a gathering like this would be quite common, but now there aren’t many white people who would want to risk asking Africans and there aren’t many Africans who would risk coming. I certainly enjoyed myself . . . I hope we haven’t put you out, lingering so long . . . it’s been a wonderful opportunity . . .’ Frances saw them to the garden gate, talking and laughing; last remarks and goodbyes were called from under the trees of the suburban street.

When she came back alone the quiet veranda rang tense with vanished voices, like a bell tower after the hour has struck. She gave the cat the milk left over from coffee. Someone had left a half-empty packet of cigarettes; who was it who broke matches into little tents? As she carried the tray into the deserted kitchen, she saw a note written on the back of a bill taken from the spike. HOPE YOUR PARTY WENT WELL.

It was not signed, and was written with the kitchen ballpoint which hung on a string. But she knew who had written it; the vision from the past had come and gone again.

The servants Amos and Bettie had rooms behind a granadilla vine at the bottom of the yard. She called, and asked Bettie whether anyone had asked for her? No, no one at all.

He must have heard the voices in the quiet of the afternoon, or perhaps simply seen the cars outside, and gone away. She wondered if he knew who was there. Had he gone away out of consideration for her safety? They never spoke of it, of course, but he must know that the risks she took were carefully calculated, very carefully calculated. There was no way of disguising that from someone like him. Then she saw him smiling to himself at the sight of the collection of guests: Jason Madela, Edgar Xixo and Spuds Buthelezi – Spuds Buthelezi, as well. But probably she was wrong, and he would have come out among them without those feelings of reproach or contempt that she read into the idea of his gait, his face. HOPE YOUR PARTY WENT WELL. He may have meant just that.





Frances Taver knew Robert Ceretti was leaving soon, but she wasn’t quite sure when. Every day she thought, I’ll phone and say goodbye. Yet she had already taken leave of him, that afternoon of the lunch. Just telephone and say goodbye. On the Friday morning, when she was sure he would be gone, she rang up the hotel, and there it was, the soft, cautious American voice. The first few moments were awkward; he protested his pleasure at hearing from her, she kept repeating, ‘I thought you’d be gone . . .’ Then she said, ‘I just wanted to say – about that lunch. You mustn’t be taken in—’

He was saying, ‘I’ve been so indebted to you, Frances, really you’ve been great.’

‘—not phonies, no, that’s not what I mean, on the contrary, they’re very real, you understand?’

‘Oh, your big good-looking friend, he’s been marvellous. Saturday night we were out on the town, you know.’ He was proud of the adventure but didn’t want to use the word ‘shebeen’ over the telephone.

She said, ‘You must understand. Because the corruption’s real. Even they’ve become what they are because things are the way they are. Being phony is being corrupted by the situation . . . and that’s real enough. We’re made out of that.’

He thought maybe he was finding it difficult to follow her over the telephone, and seized upon the word: ‘Yes, the “situation” – he was able to slip me into what I gather is one of the livelier places.’

Frances Taver said, ‘I don’t want you to be taken in—’

The urgency of her voice stopped his mouth, was communicated to him even if what she said was not.

‘—by anyone,’ the woman was saying.

He understood, indeed, that something complicated was wrong, but he knew, too, that he wouldn’t be there long enough to find out, that perhaps you needed to live and die there, to find out. All she heard over the telephone was the voice assuring her, ‘Everyone’s been marvellous . . . really marvellous. I just hope I can get back here some day – that is, if they ever let me in again . . .’