‘The third thing?’ Ralph said.
‘Oh yes. When you write home to England, ask your people not to make hasty judgements. It is a complicated country, this. I comfort myself that there is little real wickedness in it. But there is so much fear, fear on all sides. Fear paralyses the sympathies, and the power of reasoning. So it becomes a kind of wickedness, in the end.’ The archbishop looked up, nodded. The interview was over. They rose. Unexpectedly he smiled, and patted at his leg, lying before him painful and inert. ‘Do you know what I did last year? I went to Tristan da Cunha. I expect you did not know my diocese ran so far. They had to tie me into a chair and run me down the side of the frigate on ropes. Then I had to lie in a little boat with a canvas bottom, and they paddled me ashore. Your Uncle James wouldn’t have believed his eyes. But you know, I don’t think I’ll go again. I hardly think I’d weather it, do you?’
He didn’t expect an answer. A secretary ushered them out. He was picking up papers to read as they left the room.
Outside Anna said, ‘The Winston Churchill imitation, do you think it’s deliberate? Do you think he’s studied from recordings?’
‘I’m sure.’
‘He practically accused us of not being Christians.’
‘We are, though,’ Ralph said. ‘Despite provocation.’
‘His heart’s in the right place,’ Anna said.
‘His heart’s irrelevant, I’m afraid.’
At Cape Town Station, the signs said Slegs vir Blankes. The non-European carriages were tacked like an afterthought on to the end of the train.
At stations up the line, children gathered around the carriage doors, their hands cupped for small coins.
At Johannesburg, the station was bustling with black men in slick suits with cardboard briefcases, and with florid white farmers come to town. Their hair seemed insufficient to cover their great heads. Their bellies threatened to burst the buttons of their shirts. Great rufous knees, exposed beneath khaki shorts, butted at the future. Beneath the pavements, Ralph said, were diamonds and gold.
It was cooler than Anna had expected, and the air seemed thin. She shrank away from the hooting and snarling of the traffic and the mosaic of faces in the street. At midnight a noise brought her to the window of their modest hotel. Hailstones – frozen chips of ice, an inch and a half across – rattled at the glass. The bombardment lasted for five minutes. It stopped as suddenly as it began. For an hour, deep in the watches of the night, the city was quiet, as if holding its breath.
The Mission House stood on Flower Street. It was set back from the road, in a kitchen garden in which grew mealies, potatoes, cabbage, pumpkins and carrots. There were three steps up to the veranda, which was netted in against flies. There had been shade at one time, but the big trees had been cut down. Inside the rooms were small and hot.
Everything had been refurbished, Lucy Moyo said, refurbished in anticipation of their arrival. The linoleum on the floor, polished till it gleamed, was offensively vivid: irrepressibly jazzy, zigzagged, sick-making. No expense had been spared – or so Lucy claimed – on providing for the sitting room nylon-fur cushions with buttoned centres, and a coffee-table which splayed its legs, like a bitch passing water. With all the vicarious pride of careful stewardship, Lucy showed off a magazine rack of bent gold wire, tapping with the cushion of her finger at its little rubber feet. In the kitchen was an acid-yellow table with a chromium trim and white tubular legs. There were chairs to match.
The town was set on a height; every day there was a breeze. On clear days you could see the prosperous suburbs of Pretoria – white houses sprawling across green lawns, avenues lined with jacaranda trees. Down there, public monuments, Boer pride: up here, swart gevaar, the black peril. Yet what unfolded to the view, at Elim’s centre, but a vision of clipped, cold-water respectability: wide roads on a grid plan, well-fenced playing fields, neat brick houses? The houses, true, differed as to the state of their repair. The best were freshly painted; and outside them, in regular rows, grew pot-plants in old paint tins. They were not exactly pot-plants, not strictly. They were things that would have grown just as well, and more naturally, in the soil. But these sprigs had been singled out for special treatment. They bespoke ownership. They were nature tamed. They were a form of civic pride. Everyone seemed proud in Elim. ‘We live here as neighbours,’ Lucy explained. ‘Not as tribespeople. We all agree together.’ This was not quite true, of course. But it was a pleasant idea, and could be entertained for some of the time.
In their first few days they were shepherded from house to house, welcomed in the homes of churchgoers and parish workers. Cups of tea were provided; there were needlepoint footstools, framed photos, lace curtains. There was no artefact that did not rest upon its little crocheted mat.
The price of this fussiness, in labour, was clear at once. Water was fetched in buckets, cement floors scrubbed every day on hands and knees. By a servant, perhaps; even the poverty-stricken can afford to employ the destitute. Every morning, in the backyards, clothes were slapped and wrung in tin tubs.
But on the fringes of Elim the houses were overflowing. There were families living in sheds, in less space than a farmer would give an animal. Lucy explained all this; rents were high in the neighbouring locations and when families could not pay them and were turned out they came to Elim. And then, relatives came from the bundu all the time, and you couldn’t turn them away, people had to live somehow; perhaps you might build a lean-to at the back, with whatever came to hand, and hope it would withstand the wind and rain; if not, build it again. She indicated dwellings constructed of sheets of tin leaning against a wall. Naked children – naked except for a string of beads around the waist – played in the dust. Lucy stood before them, cajoling till they answered her, her bag matching her shoes, and her Sunday petal hat planted on her close-curled head. Sanitary arrangements? Better not to think about them. Even the Mission House, after all, had only its huts and buckets, emptied every day by Jakob Malajane, also employed as the gardener.
The Indian and Chinese shops were well-stocked and orderly, Lucy pointed out. There were several where she knew the proprietors, they were not bad types all of them, they would sometimes put things under the counter for you till you could pay. Every so often, though, the bad boys with knives and coshes came in, left the proprietor bleeding and took what they wanted. ‘Not all these tsotsis are boys whom you can discipline,’ Lucy said. ‘Some of them are grown men.’ She shrugged; she wanted to warn the Eldreds, whom she thought pitiful children, but she did not want to dwell upon this side of life. There was no need either to mention brothels and shebeens. After all, Mr and Mrs Standish had got by without talking about them.
So she marched them off to meet church-choir contraltos, a saxophonist in Elim’s jazz band, a neat-waisted coloured woman who ran a Girl Guide troop: all good people, she said, all family people. Down the road walked a stately, very black man, robed and bearing a crozier. His wife walked arm in arm with him, her purple frock sweeping the dust; she wore a necklace of bones. ‘Oh, Mr and Mrs Bishop Kwakwa,’ Lucy said. ‘Zionist Mount Carmel Gospel of Africa. Not at all a real church.’
The day in Flower Street began at six o’clock; but they woke earlier. The bedroom curtains were thin. Their background colour was tan, with a design of purple sunbursts. They did not quite meet across the glass. Each morning a shaft of sunlight, thin as an axe-blade, struck across their pillows and their eyes.
Already the kitchen was busy, the mealie-porridge bubbling on the range. Jakob chopped the wood, then ambled to his garden duties. He was a country boy: his face was battered like a boxer’s. He had, Lucy told them, the falling sickness. The people of his village used to throw stones at him when he fell down in a fit, to drive the devil out. They were illiterate people, Lucy explained, in her lofty way.
They would walk to Matins: the church was five minutes away. Father