‘Ms Semenya, that’s right. Thanks for your call.’ Anton slapped the phone back into its cradle. ‘Patronising bitch! That was the High Commission.’
‘They must be getting twitchy in Pretoria. The High Commission wouldn’t have made that call off its own bat. And what did she mean come and talk to them first?’
‘They’re frightened by the publicity,’ said Anton. ‘I’d say they’re more worried about their precious land-sales programme getting a bad name than worrying about Lesedi. Listen, I’ve got a board meeting, another four hours of listening to the great and good pontificating. Let’s thrash out what we should do. Where were we?’
‘Whether I should go or not. The thing is, we never get involved unless we’re invited and both sides want us to intervene. But who’s inviting us in this instance?’
Normally he would find it hard to argue with her logic, but Anton was in full flow by now.
‘The most important rule of all is that we are here to prevent conflict, not wait till it happens and then start picking up the pieces. Let’s leave that shit to the cotton-frocked aid workers.’ Anton stopped himself. If he hadn’t, Lindi would have done it for him. She knew that particular rant inside out. She thought it was mostly unfair and bordering on misogynist. In Anton’s world, the aid workers were never men in jeans.
‘Find these people,’ Anton said, ‘the Land Collective, you know, whoever is writing this stuff for them, and you have one side. As for the other – well, it’s the big farmers, it’s the government, the greedy bastards right here in this city, it’s the Arabs, Chinese, it’s the unions – the whole lot of them.’
‘I think you’ve just about covered all bases.’
‘So you’ll go?’
Lindi’s mind drifted back to the call she’d received earlier that morning from Missenden and then even further back to the way he’d treated her at the Foreign Office. Just the thought of it was like being humiliated all over again. She’d lost count of the number of times she’d told herself that she’d moved on. She knew now that she hadn’t. It wasn’t so much what Missenden had done but her failure to react, to stand her ground, to call him out that left her feeling, well, less than the woman she wanted to be.
‘I’ll go,’ she said at last. ‘I’ll need a couple of days to get ready.’
‘Sure? You don’t want to think about it?’
‘I have thought about it.’