None to Accompany Me Read Free Page B

her desk with a gloomy tilt of the head and the answering tilt of her head said it was not necessary to ask. He was wiping chicken-wing-greasy fingers. She passed him the waste-paper bin, dropping her apple core into it on the way.
    Oupa doubled as driver of the Foundation’s station-wagon battered by the lawyers’ trips into the backveld to consult with communities under threat of removal. One day when Mrs Stark’s car had been stolen he gave her a lift home, and the theft revived something else. Before he went to the Island, he was awaiting trial on the mainland in a cell with criminals. —Murderers, man! Gangsters. I can tell you, they were brilliant. Nothing to touch them for brains. The things they’d brought off—robberies, bank hold-ups. And they’d play the whole show through for us. Exactly how they did it. Prison means nothing to them, they had the warders bribed and scared of them. Even whites. They had all their stuff waiting for them outside, for when they’d done their time. I tell you, those guys would make top-class lawyers and big businessmen.— He grinned, chin lifted as he drove.
    Again Mrs Stark was comfortably silent, if she noted, she made no remark on what he had just innocently confirmed: something of the unacknowledged self that came into being in prison still existed within him, a pride in and defiant community with anyone, everyone, who had the daring to defy the power of white men, to take from them what was not theirs, whether by political rebellion or by the gangster’s gun; silent because this was a self that, by nature of what she was, could not exist among her selves.
    â€”You ever come across any of them again, outside?—
    Oupa pressed his elbows to his ribs and brought his shoulders up to his ears. —Those people! Man! Je-ss-uss! I’d be terrified.—
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Chapter 2
    Vera left her promising position in a prosperous legal firm after, when she had failed to conceive for twelve years, her second child was born, Annick.
    She has never known whether her first child, Ivan, is the son of her divorced husband or of Bennet Stark, her love of whom was ringed indelibly on a photograph. No one else will ever know that she herself does not. He of the sun-grained, fair-skinned nape is now living in Australia, retired from something to do with shipping, and has nothing around him to bring to the surface that last visit he made to the house they had once shared; and if, in the mood of male camaraderie on a drinking evening there is an exchange of confidences about the unpredictable sexual behaviour of women, he contributes the example of an ex-wife who gave him a better hour than she’d ever done during the brief marriage, he is unlikely to think there could have been any consequences—she was accustomed to see to that. Perhaps he might feel a momentary stab of betrayal, despite her complete betrayal of him, at mentioning her more or less in the context of the one-night stand, but it was all so long ago … As for her present husband, it’s unthinkable that ever there could be betweenthem one of those terrible, embattled stages of marriage when she might thrust her hand down into their life to seize a weapon to wound him mortally.
    Ben was almost embarrassedly dismissive of the fact that his daughter had inherited his beauty; part of the quality of that beauty was that he was not aware of it, he was brought to see it only by remarks upon the beauty of the baby girl as the image of her father. Ivan—because he reproduced the face of his mother?—remained Ben’s favoured child.
    When the girl was born, with the marvellous markings of her father’s black hair and double fringe of lashes, even the bevel-edged lips, Vera could have been looking in a mirror where her lover from the mountains was preserved as he was as a child. A tremendous gratitude gushed from her along with the expulsion of the afterbirth. For a year she