Burger's Daughter Read Free Page A

even in the water, she felt by seeing Baasie clinging there.
    In the coffee bar she was still smiling. She seemed to savour the domino of sugar she held, soaking up dark hot coffee before she dropped it in.—Oh leave the poor waiter alone.
    â€”No but—I’m curious.—
    She nodded in jerky, polite, off-hand dismissal, as if that were the answer to the idle question she didn’t ask: What brings you to the trial ? A girl in her situation, she had nothing much to say to a stranger, and it was difficult for anyone outside what one must suppose—respect, awkwardly—were her intense preoccupations, to begin to talk to her. An important State witness was due to be called for cross-examination before the court rose for the day; she knew she must drink up and go, he knew she would go, but they sat on for a minute in a purely physical awareness of one another. His blond-brown hand lying across the vice of his crossed thighs, with the ridiculous thick silver manacle following the contour of the wrist-bump, the nave of her armpit in a sleeveless dress, shiny with moisture as she pushed away the tiny cup—the form of communication that is going on when two young people appear to have no reason or wish to linger.
    Most of their meetings were as inconsequential. He came to the trial but did not always seek her out—supposing she was right that he ever had. Sometimes he was one of the loose group centred round the lawyers and her who ate sandwiches or grey pies in the Greek café during the lunch adjournment; it was assumed she brought him along, she thought someone else had. He did not telephone her at work but she met him once in the public library and they ate together in a pizzeria. She had thought he was a university lecturer or something of that kind but he told her, now that (without curiosity) she asked, that he was doing a post-graduate thesis on Italian literature, and working on Wednesdays and weekends as a bookie’s clerk at the race-course. He had begun the thesis while studying in Perugia, but given it up when he spent a year or so in France and Denmark and England. He was vague about what he had done and how he lived. In the South of France, on a yacht—Something between a servant and a pet, it sounds—
    He was not offended by her joking distaste.—Great life, for a few months. Until you get sick of the people you work for. There was no place to read in peace.—
    It was a job for which you did not need a foreigner’s work permit —he knew all the ways of life that fitted into that category. In London he squatted in a Knightsbridge mansion. He’d fixed up a condemned cottage, in Johannesburg, with the money he’d got for bringing in a British car duty-free, after having had the use of it for a year abroad, an arrangement made with a man who had bought it in his name.—Any time you need somewhere to stay... I’m often away for weeks. I’ve got friends with a farm in Swaziland. What a wonderful place, forest from the house all the way to the river, you just live in a kind of twilight of green—pecan-nut trees, you know.—A casual inspiration.—Why don’t you come there this weekend ?—
    It didn’t occur to him:—I don’t have a passport.—
    He didn’t make sympathetic, indignant noises. He pondered as if on a practical matter.—Not even to hop just over there ?—
    â€”No.—
    He looked at her in silence, confronted with her, considering her as a third person, a problem set up for both of them.
    â€”Come to my house.—
    â€”Yes I will, I’d like to see it. Your big jacaranda.—
    â€”Bauhinia.—
    â€”Bauhinia, then.—
    â€”I mean now.—
    â€”I have to go to Pretoria after work this afternoon.—But at least it was a serious answer, a practical matter that could be dealt with.
    â€”There’s an adjournment till Monday, isn’t there