yourselL what I am about to tell you.9' 'Darling, if there is a good story in it, they wouldn't get it out of me with thumbscrew and hot irons - that is, not until I splash it across the screen myself.' Tara told her in a rush of words, getting it out quickly before she could change her mind. 'It will be a chance to film him at work, to see him with his people, to watch him defying the forces of oppression and bigotry.' She saw Kitty hesitating and knew that she had to think quickly.
'However, I should warn you, there may be danger. The confrontation could turn to violence and even bloodshed,' she said, and she had got it exactly right.
'Hank!' Kitty Godolphin shouted through to the lounge of her suite where the camera crew were strewn over the furniture like the survivors of a bomb blast, listening at full volume of the radio to the new rock 'n' roll sensation warning them to keep off his blue suede shoes.
'Hank!' Kitty raised her voice above Presley's. 'Get the cameras packed. We are going to a place called Port Elizabeth. If we can find where the hell it is.' They drove through the night in Tara's Packard, and the suspension sagged under the weight of bodies and camera equipment.
In his travels around the country Hank had discovered that cannabis grew as a weed around most of the villages in the reserves of Zululand and the Transkei. In an environment that the plant found agreeable, it reached the size of a small tree. Only a few of the older generation of black tribesmen smoked the dried leaves, and although it was proscribed as a noxious plant and listed as a dangerous drug, its use was so localized and restricted to the more primitive blacks in the remote areas - for no white person or educated African would lower himself to smoke it - that the authorities made little effort to prevent its cultivation and sale. Hank had found an endless supply of what he declared to be 'pure gold' for the payment of pennies.
'Man, a sack of this stuff on the streets of Los Angeles would fetch a hundred thousand dollars,' he murmured contentedly as he lit a hand-rolled cigarette and settled down on the back seat of the Packard.
The heavy incense of the leaves filled the interior, and after a few draws Hank passed the cigarette to Kitty in the front seat. Kitty drew on the butt deeply and held the smoke in her lungs, as long as she was able, before blowing it out in a pale streamer against the windscreen. Then she offered the butt to Tara.
'I don't smoke tobacco,' Tara told her politely, and they all laughed.
'That ain't baccy, sweetheart,' Hank told her.
'What is it?' 'You call it dagga here.' 'Dagga.' Tara was shocked.
She remembered that Centaine had fired one of her houseboys who smoked it.
'He dropped my Rosenthal tureen, the one that belonged to Czar Nicholas,' Centaine had complained. 'Once they start on that stuff they become totally useless.' 'No thanks,' Tara said quickly, and thought how angry Shasa would be if he knew that she had been offered it. That thought gave her pause and she changed her mind. 'Oh, all right.' She took the butt, steering the Packard with one hand. 'What do I do?' 'Just suck it in and hold it down,' Kitty advised, 'and ride the glow.' The smoke scratched her throat and burned her lungs, but the thought of Shasa's outrage gave her determination. She fought the urge to cough and held it down.
Slowly she felt herself relaxing, and a mild glow of euphoria made her body seem air-light and cleansed her mind. All the agonies of her soul became trivial and fell behind her.
'I feel good,' she murmured, and when they laughed, she laughed with them and drove on into the night.
In the early morning before it was fully light, they reached the coast, skirting the bay of Algoa where the Indian Ocean took a deep bite out of the continent, and the green waters were chopped to a white froth by the wind.
'Where do we go from here?' Kitty asked.
'The black township of New Brighton,' Tara told her. 'There is a mission run by German nuns, a teaching and nursing order, the Sisters of St Magdalene. They are expecting us. We aren't really allowed to stay in the township, but they have arranged it.' Sister Nunziata was a handsome blond woman, not much older than forty years. She had a clear scrubbed-looking skin and her manner was brisk and efficient. She wore the light grey cotton habit of the order, and a white shoulder-length veil.
'Mrs Courtney, I have been expecting you. Our mutual friend will be here later this morning. You will want to bathe and rest.' She led them to the cells that had been set aside for them and apologized for the simple comforts they contained. Kitty and Tara shared a cell.
The floor was bare cement, the only decoration was a crucifix on the whitewashed wall, and the springs of the iron bedsteads were covered with thin hard coir mattresses.
'She's just great,' Kitty enthused. 'I must get her on film. Nuns always make good footage.' As soon as they had bathed and unpacked their equipment, Kitty had her crew out filming. She recorded a good interview with Sister Nunziata, her German accent lent interest to her statements, and then they filmed the black children in the schoolyard and the out patients waiting outside the clinic.
Tara was awed by the girl's energy, her quick mind and glib tongue, and her eye for angle and subject as she directed the shooting.
It made Tara feel superfluous, and her own lack of talent and creative skill irked her. She found herself resenting the other girl for having pointed up her inadequacies so graphically.
Then everything else was irrelevant. A nondescript old Buick sedan pulled into the mission yard and a tall figure climbed out and came towards them. Moses Gama wore a light blue open-neck shirt, the short sleeves exposed the sleek muscle in his upper arms and neck, and his tailored blue slacks were belted around his narrow waist.
Tara didn't have to say anything, they all knew immediately who he was as Kitty Godolphin breathed softly beside her, 'My God, he is beautiful as a black panther.' Tara's resentment of her flared into seething hatred. She wanted to rush to Moses and embrace him so that Kitty might know he was hers, but instead she stood dumbly while he stopped in front of Kitty and held out his right hand.
'Miss Godolphin? At last,' he said, and his voice brought out a rush of goose-bumps down Tara's arms.
The rest of the day was spent in reconnaisance and the filming of more background material, this time with Moses as the central figure in each shot. The New Brighton township was typical of the South African urban locations, rows of identical low-cost housing laid out in geometric squares of narrow roads, some of them paved and others rutted and filled with muddy puddles in which the pre-school children and toddlers, many of them naked or dressed only in ragged shorts, played raucously.
Kitty filmed Moses picking his way around the puddles, squatting to talk to the children, lifting a marvellously
