period, look very
well in Harry's big drawing room. They are keeping company with some
unusual, very fine pieces of Chinese porcelain. On the high
mantelpiece are a few late seventeenth-century plates bearing the
insignia of the Dutch East India Company. This company, of course,
founded Cape Town. There aren't a lot of the plates around any more.
"But
I don't collect from a historical point of view," said Harry one
evening before dinner when his guests commented on the Chinese pieces.
"I don't really collect at all in the true sense of the word.
Collectors fix on one sort of thing at a time, don't they? I just buy a
thing now and then if it has beauty."
It
was shortly before nine-year-old Nicholas was to leave for England and
his first term at boarding school, and Harry's wife had gone upstairs
to try to persuade the youngster, and the Op-penheimers' other child,
twelve-year-old Mary, that the time had come to go to bed. Sounds of
giggling and scuffling at the head of the staircase indicated that her
efforts were not proving altogether successful. Gradually, however,
things became quiet overhead, and then Mrs. Oppenheimer returned to the
drawing room. "Those children!" she said to her husband. "They simply
won't settle down. They were having a pillow fight and one of the
pillows came down the stairs."
An
important debate was pending in the House of Assembly, following on the
annual presentation of "the budget" by the Minister of Finance and a
formal request to the government to vote funds for the coming year's
administration. For some years now, Harry Oppenheimer's speech for the
Opposition in reply to the budget has been acknowledged as the high
point of the political year; it is a social event.
