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stations, and bus shelters, everywhere where crowds gather. Stephen was only too pleased to accept. He believed the poets who are reputed to be the most difficult are in fact the most accessible. Simone looked at Rosélie angrily, betraying what she thought. Incorrigible Stephen! Once again he had managed to make himself the center of attention. Me, me, me!
    Antoine and Simone were resolutely hostile to Stephen. For Antoine, Stephen remained a son of perfidious Albion, despite his French upbringing. He had not learned “Frère Jacques” at nursery school. He preferred Alice in her Wonderland to General Dourakine, and had never caught himself humming a song by Edith Piaf in the shower. As for Simone, she kept quiet about her real reservations. At the most, she would go as far as accusing him of being a show-off, an actor who always wanted to be center stage.
    Rosélie received the criticism leniently. A little like a mother allowing for her son’s failings. Hadn’t Stephen always dreamed of becoming an actor? He had never achieved his ambition. Instead of sending a thrill through an audience, facing the applause, the standing ovation, and receiving the bouquets of flowers from an enthusiastic crowd, he had to be content with his drawing-room successes.
    The evening at Bebe’s ended in disaster.
    Around two in the morning, Arthur, the half-German, half-English photographer (a hybrid!) who had participated in Piotr’s artistic campaign, turned up perfectly drunk, accompanied by an ebony-skinned whore with hair dyed red, wearing a low-cut dress open to her navel, whom he had picked up at the Green Dolphin, where such creatures guarantee bliss for a few rand. His slurred opinion on the sexuality of black women made everyone feel uncomfortable. While fondling the breasts of his trophy, Arthur claimed he was incapable of getting a hard-on with a white woman.
    â€œWhite women,” he shouted, “are like a meal without salt or spices. A dish without condiments! I never touch them!”
    Everyone looked at one another in embarrassment. Wasn’t it precisely these sorts of clichés they were fighting against? The love of a white man for a black woman is not simply a quest for exoticism or the urgent desire for an orgasm. Let us replace the words “erection,” “blow job,” and “orgasm” with “tenderness,” “communication,” and “respect.”
    Inevitably the operation “Art for the People” was shelved. The morning after Bebe’s reception, Stephen, now sober, recalled the mediocrity of her poems and exclaimed he had no intention of working with her. As a regular client of the girls at the Green Dolphin, Arthur contracted the clap and went straight home to London for a cure. Worse, Piotr broke up with Bebe for a model from Eritrea who had been on the cover of Vogue . But Bebe soon dried her tears. Hardly had he emptied his closets than she moved in the personal belongings of an Australian tennis player, seeded thirtieth internationally but, in the opinion of his coach, destined for stardom.
    This repeat performance of a mixed couple so enraged her detractors that they dared to write in a literary journal for the first time that her poetry was a load of crap.

FOUR
    O nce Simone was gone, Rosélie only had Dido.
    As a Cape coloured, Dido had not experienced all the savagery of apartheid. She was born in Lievland, about twelve miles from Stellenbosch, in a picture-perfect landscape of rugged mountains, jagged-edged against an unchanging blue sky. A mass of flowers. Covered with the curly mop of vineyards. Her family descended from slaves from Madagascar come to work in the vineyards, which the de Louw family had purchased from a French Huguenot.
    Nothing really justified Dido’s familiarity with Stephen and Rosélie. Nevertheless she would say “us,” meaning “us French,” referring to the trio they formed,