Tales of the Metric System. Imraan Coovadia

a catheter in the neck. It was difficult to refuse her mother-in-law’s gifts. Sometimes the old woman seemed to have crockery in her face.

      Ann spied her neighbour on the porch. She got out of the car and tried to attract his attention. Mackenzie was her shot. He liked to help her. When the mains tripped Mackenzie had his man bring the step ladder and climbed up to the panel. He would reset the stiff green switches, one by one, until he found the broken fuse. In July the Security Branch had arrived while Neil was away. Mackenzie had sat in the lounge for moral support. He had read his own magazines on the couch—Scope, for men, and Creamer’s Illustrated News, an engineering gazette—while the policemen had examined Neil’s desk, checked the numbers circled in the directory, and searched the cupboards.

      Mackenzie brought his servant, a muscular old man who must have been in his sixties and who sat perfectly upright in the back of the Hillman Avenger when accompanying his employer.

      For a moment Ann thought Mackenzie was going to put his hand on her shoulder. Instead he placed it on the bonnet of the car.

      —It’s the salt in the air. The same engine that runs for five years in London may only survive eighteen months out here. But your husband must see to the maintenance.

      —I’ll tell him.

      —Get in and release the handbrake. This fellow will push you to the top and you can start the engine. Coming back you should be fine. The battery will charge on the motorway.

      Mackenzie’s man, as old as he was, started to push, the thick brown veins standing out on his dark arms. He began to perspire immediately, his body shining, and allowed the car to stop at the top of the road. The engine caught on the downhill. By the time she went past the Caltex garage the car was moving fast.

      To see Mackenzie’s servant in the mirror, standing exhausted in the road, reminded Ann that she had never learned the man’s name. She wasn’t sure of her own. From her first husband she was Ann Rabie. She had once been Ann Bowen, whose father, commodore in the Royal Navy, met her mother at a ball during shore leave in Durban. For some reason which lay between herself and Neil she had never completed the switch to Ann Hunter.

      In town, she parked near Greenacres. The shop assistants were dressing the plaster-of-Paris mannequins in the window, holding pins in their mouths as they went over the clothes. Something to do with the wirework and the gluey brush strokes on the dummies’ arms disturbed Ann. They would hex the car. After her conversation with Lavigne, she would have to wait in their papier-mâché company until the truck arrived from the Automobile Association.

      She hurried. Her son Paul had been caught with alcohol on the school grounds. Curzon College was strict. The penalty could be as severe as a suspension for the whole of Michaelmas term. Lavigne represented the school board. In his first letter home, Paul said Lavigne defined College as a place where punctuality came second to godliness. She couldn’t afford to be twenty minutes late.

      She went past the telephone booths occupied by white men and women. The newsagent was setting out the overseas newspapers, his blue shirt rolled up above the elbow. The shops sold signs and flags claiming the province of Natal as the last outpost of the British Empire. Curzon College was a school of the same empire, attracting the sons of factory owners and Midlands farmers, members of the United Party who proposed extending the franchise to educated Bantus, Durban lawyers and bank managers.

      Ann found Lavigne at the entrance of the Royal Hotel. He was compact in the shoulders, wearing a gold-buttoned blazer, grey trousers, and black shoes, which she imagined him brushing as fiercely as his teeth. Every Curzon College man, new boy or prefect, housemaster or headmaster, shone his own shoes.

      Lavigne stood in his perfectly buffed shoes between the doormen, looking straight onto the road as the tram came clattering along, and didn’t see her until she was at his side.

      —Mr Lavigne, Edward, I apologise for being late. My car refused to start. Every red light I was petrified it would stall.

      —It’s of no consequence, Mrs Rabie. I must remind you, however, that my next appointment is set for 1 p.m. across town. These few days I spend in town are booked end to end. I reserved a table in the tea room.

      Ann went past the doormen, noting their long white leather gloves and high red hats.

      —Are you staying here?

      —College has an arrangement for a reduced rate.

      —I wasn’t objecting.

      —The chairman of the hotel company is an Old Boy. It is the express wish of the board that the school maintain a certain standard. It should be this way to the tea room.

      Ann went past wallpapered rooms and a procession of fronded plants in big brass pots. There was a long brass-framed mirror beside the lift in which she caught sight of herself while a clerk in a waistcoat pushed a cart in the opposite direction. The staff were lying in wait, looking for any reason to approach a visitor. Since returning from Paris, she had started to resent the omnipresence of servants and clerks over here.

      The tea room was cordoned off by a rope looped through the eyes of four gleaming brass stands. She and Lavigne sat across from one another at a table beside the wall. The waiter, an Indian man with the pitted skin of a smallpox victim, wore a turban in addition to the stiff red tunic prescribed by the hotel. He spoke through his long moustache as he distributed the items for tea, placing them on the clean linen as if setting up his side of a chessboard, and then retired to his post to stand and watch.

      Neil was right. To be a so-called European, here where you were supposed to be top of the heap, was a predicament. You were under surveillance, first of all by other Europeans, and second by the natives, who might have something to gain or to lose, and by Indian waiters beneath their turbans. European women were the most severe on women like Ann. She couldn’t escape the suspicion that, beneath his unshakeable business manners, Lavigne was acting to punish her on behalf of the general opinion.

      —Mrs Rabie.

      —Call me Ann.

      —Ann, then. I have followed Paul since he entered the school in standard seven. I believe he won a scholarship at that time, a minor exhibition. Subsequently I acted as his housemaster, not to say his Geography teacher. I am delegated to take care of our best young scholars, the ones who might proceed to Cambridge. After the last rugby match, I invited Paul, along with three other promising young men, to dine at the Balfour Hotel.

      —I know you have a good relationship, Edward. Whatever has happened has never altered my son’s loyalty to the school.

      —Loyalty is a virtue the school endeavours to inculcate. Allow me to do the honours.

      Lavigne poured the tea through the strainer, offering her the first cup without turning his face. He added a sugar cube to his own cup and then two drops of milk as carefully as if he were using an eye-dropper. He sat up straight and drank, his blue blazer with its heavy gold buttons done up and his long hands almost disappearing into the sleeves. She saw that he was wearing cufflinks and remembered Neil’s pair, inherited from his father, which had been borrowed and never returned by Sartre.

      —I regret you and your husband have been unable to attend any of the important matches that make up our calendar.

      —My husband is busy, Edward. He has taken a big part at the university since we came back from Paris. Sometimes it means that other things go undone.

      —There’s no obligation whatsoever. Some of the boys travel from homes in Johannesburg or London. Others come from remote farms located in Rhodesia. We understand that parents have different circumstances. Nevertheless, it is a shame that our first real conversation should be under these circumstances.

      —I agree.

      —Then we understand each other. You understand the situation. A prefect brought his suspicions to me. Naturally it fell to me to investigate and to search Paul’s locker. That’s when I found the spirits.

      —Should you be encouraging the boys to spy on each other?

      —Spying