'And after that the struggle will go on and become a great battle.' She was silent beside him, studying his face.
'I believe there comes a time when a man confronted by great evil must take up the spear and become a warrior. He must rise up and strike it down.' He was watching her, waiting for a reply. 'Yes,' she nodded. 'You are right.' 'These are words, ideas, Tara,' he told her. 'But what of action? Are you ready for action?' She nodded. 'I am ready.' 'Blood, Tara, not words. Killing and maiming and burning.
Tearing down and destroying. Can you face that, Tara?' She was appalled, facing the reality at last, not merely the dizzy rhetoric. In her imagination she saw the flames roaring up through the great roof of Weltevreden and blood splashed on the walls shining wetly in the sunlight, while in the courtyard lay the broken bodies of children, of her own children, and she was on the very point of rejecting the images when he spoke again.
'Destroying what is evil, Tara, so that we may rebuild a good and just society.' His voice was low and compelling, it thrilled like a drug through her veins and the cruel images faded, she looked beyond them to the paradise, the earthly paradise they would build together.
'I am ready,' she said, and there was not a trace of a quaver in her voice.
There was an hour before Marcus would take her to the airport to catch the Viscount flight back to Cape Town. They sat at his table on the verandah, just the two of them, and Moses explained to her in detail what must be done.
'Umkhonto we Sizwe,' he told her. 'The Spear of the Nation.' The name shimmered and rang like polished steel in her brain.
'Firstly, you must withdraw from all overt liberal activities. You must abandon your clinic --' 'My clinic!' she exclaimed. 'Oh Moses, my poor little ones, what will they do --' she broke off as she saw his expression.
'You care for the physical needs of a hundred,' he said. 'I'm concerned for the welfare of twenty million. Tell me which is more important.' 'You are right,' she whispered. 'Forgive me.' 'You will use the excuse of the defiance campaign to make a statement of your disillusion with the freedom movement and to announce your resignation from the Black Sash.' 'Oh dear, what will Molly say?' 'Molly knows,' he assured her. 'Molly knows why you are doing it. She will help you in every way. Of course, the police special branch will continue to keep you under observation for a while, but when you give them nothing more for their files, they will lose interest and drop you.' She nodded. 'I understand.' 'You must take more interest in your husband's political activities, cultivate his parliamentary associates. Your own father is the deputy leader of the opposition, with access to the government ministers.
You must become our eyes and our ears.' 'Yes, I can do all that.' 'Later, there will be other tasks for you. Many difficult and some even dangerous. Would you risk your life for the struggle, Tara?' 'For you, Moses Gama, I would do more. I would willingly lay down that life for you,' she replied, and when he saw that she meant it, he nodded with deep satisfaction.
'We will meet whenever we can,' he promised her. 'Whenever it is safe to do so.' And then he gave her the salute which would become the rallying cry of the defiance campaign, 'Mayibuye! Afrika!' And she replied, 'Mayibuye! Afrika! Africa, let it persist!' 'I am an adulteress,' Tara thought, as she had each morning as she sat at the breakfast table during all the weeks that had passed since she had arrived back from Johannesburg. 'I am an adulteress.' And she thought it must show, like a brand upon her forehead for all the world to see. Yet Shasa had greeted her cheerfully on her return, apologizing for sending a driver to meet her at the airport and not coming in person, asking her if she had enjoyed her illicit interlude with Australopithecus. 'Thought you might have gone for someone a little younger. I mean a million years old is just a little long in the tooth, isn't it?' And since then their relationship had continued unaltered.
The children, with the exception of Michael, seemed not to have missed her at all. Centaine had run the household in her absence with her usual iron fist in a candy-flavoured glove and after they had greeted Tara with dutiful but offhand kisses, the children were full of what Nana had done and said, and Tara was painfully aware that she had neglected to bring any presents for them.
Only Michael was different. For the first few days he would not let her out of his sight, but traipsed around behind her, even insisting on spending his precious Saturday afternoon with her at the clinic while his two brothers went off to Newlands Rugby Ground with Shasa to watch Western Province playing the visiting All Blacks team from New Zealand.
Michael's company helped alleviate a little of the pain of making the first arrangements to close down the clinic. She had to ask her three black nursing sisters to start looking for other jobs. 'Of course, you'll be paid your salaries until you find other positions, and I will help you all I can --' But still she had to suffer the reproach in their eyes.
Now, almost a month later, she sat at Weltevreden's laden breakfast table on a Sunday morning in the dappled shade beneath the trellised vines of the terrace, while the servants in crisp white uniform fussed about them. Shasa read aloud extracts from the Sunday Times to which none of them listened, Sean and Garrick wrangled acrimoniously over who was the best full-back in the world, and Isabella clamoured for her daddy's attention. Michael was giving her a detailed account of the plot of the book he was reading, and she felt like an impostor, an actress playing a role for which she had not rehearsed her lines.
Shasa finally crumpled his newspaper and dropped it beside his chair, acceding to Isabella's request to 'Take me on your lap, Daddy!', ignoring Tara's ritual protest and demanded: 'All right, everybody, this meeting will come to order and address the serious question of what we are all going to do with this Sunday.' This precipitated a near riot which Isabella punctuated with shrill cries of 'Picnic! Picnic!' and finally picnic it was, after Shasa had used his casting vote in his daughter's favour.
Tara tried to excuse herself, but Michael was so close to tears that she relented and they all rode out together, with the servants and the picnic baskets following them in the little two-wheeled dog cart. Of course they could have gone by car, but the ride was half the fun.
Shasa had had the pool below the waterfall bricked out to make a natural swimming-pool and had built a thatched summer house on the bank. The great attraction was the long slide down the glassy smooth rock of the waterfall on a red rubber inner tube, and the plunge over the final sheer drop into the green pool below, the entire journey accompanied by howls and shrieks of glee. It was sport that never palled and it kept the children busy all morning.
Shasa and Tara, in their bathing-suits, lolled on the grassy bank, basking in the hot bright sunlight. They used to come here often in the first days of their marriage, even before the pool was bricked and the summer house built. In fact Tara was certain that more than one of the children had been conceived on this grassy bank. Some of the warm feelings from those days persisted. Shasa opened a bottle of Riesling, and they were both more relaxed and friendly towards each other than they had been for years.
Shasa sensed his opportunity, fished the wine bottle out of the ice bucket and refilled Tara's glass before he said, 'My dear, have something to tell you that is of great importance to both of us and may quite substantially
