Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [30]
On his birthday, instead of a party, he is given ten shillings to take his friends for a treat. He invites his three best friends to the Globe Café; they sit at a marble-topped table and order banana splits or chocolate fudge sundaes. He feels princely, dispensing pleasure like this; the occasion would be a marvellous success, were it not spoiled by the ragged Coloured children standing at the window looking in at them.
On the faces of these children he sees none of the hatred which, he is prepared to acknowledge, he and his friends deserve for having so much money while they are penniless. On the contrary, they are like children at a circus, drinking in the sight, utterly absorbed, missing nothing.
If he were someone else, he would ask the Portuguese with the brilliantined hair who owns the Globe to chase them away. It is quite normal to chase beggar children away. You have only to contort your face into a scowl and wave your arms and shout, ‘Voetsek, hotnot! Loop! Loop!’ and then turn to whoever is watching, friend or stranger, and explain: ‘Hulle soek net iets om te steel. Hull is almal skelms.’ – They are just looking for something to steal. They are all thieves. But if he were to get up and go to the Portuguese, what would he say? ‘They are spoiling my birthday, it is not fair, it hurts my heart to see them’? Whatever happens, whether they are chased away or not, it is too late, his heart is already hurt.
He thinks of Afrikaners as people in a rage all the time because their hearts are hurt. He thinks of the English as people who have not fallen into a rage because they live behind walls and guard their hearts well.
This is only one of his theories about the English and the Afrikaners. The fly in the ointment, unfortunately, is Trevelyan.
Trevelyan was one of the lodgers who boarded with them in the house in Liesbeeck Road, Rosebank, the house with the great oak tree in the front garden where he was happy. Trevelyan had the best room, the one with French windows opening on to the stoep. He was young, he was tall, he was friendly, he could not speak a word of Afrikaans, he was English through and through. In the mornings Trevelyan had breakfast in the kitchen before going off to work; in the evenings he came back and had supper with them. He kept his room, which was anyhow out of bounds, locked; but there was nothing interesting in it except an electric shaver made in America.
His father, though older than Trevelyan, became Trevelyan’s friend. On Saturdays they listened to the radio together, to C K Friedlander broadcasting rugby matches from Newlands.
Then Eddie arrived. Eddie was a seven-year-old Coloured boy from Ida’s Valley near Stellenbosch. He came to work for them: the arrangement was made between Eddie’s mother and Aunt Winnie, who lived in Stellenbosch. In return for washing dishes and sweeping and polishing, Eddie would live with them in Rosebank and be given his meals, while on the first of every month his mother would be sent a postal order for two pounds ten shillings.
After two months of living and working in Rosebank, Eddie ran away. He disappeared during the night; his absence was discovered in the morning. The police were called in; Eddie was found not far away, hiding in the bushes along the Liesbeeck River. He was found not by the police but by Trevelyan, who dragged him back, crying and kicking shamelessly, and locked him up in the old observatory in the back garden.
Obviously Eddie would have to be sent back to Ida’s Valley. Now that he had dropped the pretence of being content, he would run away at every opportunity. Apprenticeship had not worked.
But before Aunt Winnie in Stellenbosch could be telephoned there was the question of punishment for the trouble Eddie had caused: for the calling in of the police, for the ruined Saturday morning. It was Trevelyan who offered to carry out the