Scenes from Provincial Life

by J. M. Coetzee

  The child is winding cord around her dolls, stuffing them into a laundry bag, pulling them out again. If it is a game, it is a game whose meaning he cannot fathom.

  ‘What are your dolls’ names?’ he asks.

  She does not reply.

  ‘What is the golliwog’s name? Is it Golly?’

  ‘He’s not a golliwog,’ says the child.

  He gives up. ‘I have work to do now,’ he says, and retires.

  He has been told to call the nanny Theodora. Theodora has yet to reveal her name for him: certainly not the master. She occupies a room at the end of the corridor, next to the child’s. It is understood that these two rooms and the laundry room are her province. The living room is neutral territory.

  Theodora is, he would guess, in her forties. She has been in the Merringtons’ service since their last spell in Malawi. The hot-tempered ex-husband is an anthropologist; the Merringtons were in Theodora’s country on a field trip, making recordings of tribal music and collecting instruments. Theodora soon became, in Mrs Merrington’s words, ‘not just a house-help but a friend’. She was brought back to London because of the bond she had forged with the child. Each month she sends home the wages that keep her own children fed and clothed and in school.

  And now, all of a sudden, a stranger half this treasure’s age has been put in charge of her domain. By her bearing, by her silences, Theodora gives him to understand that she resents his presence.

  He does not blame her. The question is, is there more underlying her resentment than just hurt pride? She must know he is not an Englishman. Does she resent him in his person as a South African, a white, an Afrikaner? She must know what Afrikaners are. There are Afrikaners – big-bellied, red-nosed men in short pants and hats, rolypoly women in shapeless dresses – all over Africa: in Rhodesia, in Angola, in Kenya, certainly in Malawi. Is there anything he can do to make her understand that he is not one of them, that he has quit South Africa, is resolved to put South Africa behind him for ever? Africa belongs to you, it is yours to do with as you wish: if he were to say that to her, out of the blue, across the kitchen table, would she change her mind about him?

  Africa is yours. What had seemed perfectly natural while he still called that continent his home seems more and more preposterous from the perspective of Europe: that a handful of Hollanders should have waded ashore on Woodstock beach and claimed ownership of foreign territory they had never laid eyes on before; that their descendants should now regard that territory as theirs by birthright. Doubly absurd, given that the first landing-party misunderstood its orders, or chose to misunderstand them. Its orders were to dig a garden and grow spinach and onions for the East India fleet. Two acres, three acres, five acres at most: that was all that was needed. It was never intended that they should steal the best part of Africa. If they had only obeyed their orders, he would not be here, nor would Theodora. Theodora would happily be pounding millet under Malawian skies and he would be – what? He would be sitting at a desk in an office in rainy Rotterdam, adding up figures in a ledger.

  Theodora is a fat woman, fat in every detail, from her chubby cheeks to her swelling ankles. Walking, she rocks from side to side, wheezing from the exertion. Indoors she wears slippers; when she takes the child to school in the mornings she squeezes her feet into tennis shoes, puts on a long black coat and knitted hat. She works six days of the week. On Sundays she goes to church, but otherwise spends her day of rest at home. She never uses the telephone; she appears to have no social circle. What she does when she is by herself he cannot guess. He does not venture into her room or the child’s, even when they are out of the flat: in return, he hopes, they will not poke around in his room.

  Among the Merringtons’ books is a folio of pornographic pictures from imperial China. Men in oddly shaped hats part their robes and aim grossly distended penises at the genitals of tiny women who obligingly part and raise their legs. The women are pale and soft, like bee-grubs; their puny legs seem merely glued to their abdomens. Do Chinese women still look like that, he wonders, with their clothes off, or has re-education and labour in the fields given them proper bodies, proper legs? What chance is there he will ever find out?

  Since he got free lodging by masquerading as a dependable professional man, he has to keep up the pretence of having a job. He gets up early, earlier than he is used to, in order to have breakfast before Theodora and the child begin to stir. Then he shuts himself up in his room. When Theodora returns from taking the child to school, he leaves the flat, ostensibly to go to work. At first he even dons his black suit, but soon relaxes that part of the deception. He comes home at five, sometimes at four.

  It is lucky that it is summer, that he is not restricted to the British Museum and the bookshops and cinemas, but can stroll around the public parks. This must have been more or less how his father lived during the long spells when he was out of work: roaming the city in his office clothes or sitting in bars watching the hands of the clock, waiting for a decent hour to go home. Is he after all going to turn out to be his father’s son? How deep does it run in him, the strain of fecklessness? Will he turn out to be a drunkard too? Does one need a certain temperament to become a drunkard?

  His father’s drink was brandy. He tried brandy once, but can recollect nothing save an unpleasant, metallic aftertaste. In England people drink beer, whose sourness he dislikes. If he doesn’t like liquor, is he safe, inoculated against becoming a drunkard? Are there other, as yet unguessed-at ways in which his father is going to manifest himself in his life?

  The ex-husband does not take long to make an appearance. It is Sunday morning, he is dozing in the big, comfortable bed, when suddenly there is a ring at the doorbell and the scrape of a key. He springs out of bed cursing himself. ‘Hello, Fiona, Theodora!’ comes a voice. There is a scuffling sound, running feet. Then without so much as a knock the door of his room swings open and they are surveying him, the man with the child in his arms. He barely has his trousers on. ‘Hello!’ says the man, ‘what have we here?’

  It is one of those expressions the English use – an English policeman, for instance, catching one in a guilty act. Fiona, who could explain what we have here, chooses not to. Instead, from her perch in her father’s arms, she looks upon him with undisguised coldness. Her father’s daughter: same cool eyes, same brow.

  ‘I’m looking after the flat in Mrs Merrington’s absence,’ he says.

  ‘Ah yes,’ says the man, ‘the South African. I had forgotten. Let me introduce myself. Richard Merrington. I used to be lord of the manor here. How are you finding things? Settling in well?’

  ‘Yes, I’m fine.’

  ‘Good.’

  Theodora appears with the child’s coat and boots. The man lets his daughter slide from his arms. ‘And do a wee-wee too,’ he tells her, ‘before we get in the car.’

  Theodora and the child go off. They are left together, he and this handsome, well-dressed man in whose bed he has been sleeping.

  ‘And how long do you plan to be here?’ says the man.

  ‘Just till the end of the month.’

  ‘No, I mean how long in this country?’

  ‘Oh, indefinitely. I’ve left South Africa.’

  ‘Things pretty bad there, are they?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Even for whites?’

  How does one respond to a question like that? One leaves in order not to perish of shame? One leaves in order to escape the impending cataclysm? Why do big words sound so out of place in this country?

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘At least I think so.’

  ‘That reminds me,’ says the man. He crosses the room to the rack of gramophone records, flips through them, extracting one, two, three.

  This is exactly what he was warned against, exactly what he must not allow to happen. ‘Excuse me,’ he says, ‘Mrs Merrington asked me specifically…’

  The man rises to his full height and faces him. ‘Diana asked you what specifically?’

  ‘Not
to allow anything to leave the flat.’

  ‘Nonsense. These are my records, she has no use for them.’ Coolly he resumes his search, removing more records. ‘If you don’t believe me, give her a call.’

  The child clumps into the room in her heavy boots. ‘Ready to go, are we, darling?’ says the man. ‘Goodbye. I hope all goes well. Goodbye, Theodora. Don’t worry, we’ll be back before bath time.’ And, bearing his daughter and the records, he is gone.

  Sixteen

  A letter arrives from his mother. His brother has bought a car, she writes, an MG that has been in a crash. Instead of studying, his brother is now spending all his time fixing the car, trying to get it to run. He has found new friends too, whom he does not introduce to her. One of them looks Chinese. They all sit around in the garage, smoking; she suspects the friends bring liquor. She is worried. His brother is on the downward path; how is she to save him?

  For his part, he is intrigued. So his brother is at last beginning to free himself from their mother’s embrace! Yet what an odd way to choose: automotive mechanics! Does his brother really know how to fix cars? Where did he learn? He had always thought that, of the two, he was better with his hands, more blessed with mechanical sense. Was he wrong about that all the time? What else does his brother have up his sleeve?

  There is further news in the letter. His cousin Ilse and a friend will shortly be arriving in England en route to a camping trip in Switzerland. Will he show them around London? She gives the address of the hostel in Earls Court where they will be staying.

  He is astonished that, after all he has said to her, his mother can think that he wants contact with South Africans, and with his father’s family in particular. He has not laid eyes on Ilse since they were children. What can he possibly have in common with her, a girl who went to school in the back of nowhere and can think of nothing better to do with a holiday in Europe – a holiday no doubt paid for by her parents – than to tramp around gemütliche Switzerland, a country that in all its history has not given birth to one great artist?

  Yet now that her name has been mentioned, he cannot put Ilse out of his mind. He remembers her as a rangy, swift-footed child with long blonde hair tied in a pigtail. By now she must be at least eighteen. What will she have turned into? What if all that outdoor living has made of her, for however brief a spell, a beauty? For he has seen the phenomenon many times among farm children: a springtime of physical perfection before the coarsening and thickening commences that will turn them into copies of their parents. Ought he really to turn down the chance of walking the streets of London with a tall Aryan huntress at his side?

  In his fantasy he recognizes the erotic tingle. What is it about his girl cousins, even the idea of them, that sparks desire in him? Is it simply that they are forbidden? Is that how taboo operates: creating desire by forbidding it? Or is the genesis of his desire less abstract: memories of tussles, girl against boy, body to body, stored since childhood and released now in a rush of sexual feeling? That, perhaps, and the promise of ease, of easiness: two people with a history in common, a country, a family, a blood intimacy from before the first word was spoken. No introductions needed, no fumbling around.

  He leaves a message at the Earls Court address. Some days later there is a call: not from Ilse but from the friend, the companion, speaking English clumsily, getting is and are wrong. She has bad news: Ilse is ill, with flu that has turned into pneumonia. She is in a nursing home in Bayswater. Their travel plans are held up until she gets better.

  He visits Ilse in the nursing home. All his hopes are dashed. She is not a beauty, not even tall, just an ordinary moon-faced girl with mousy hair who wheezes when she talks. He greets her without kissing her, for fear of infection.

  The friend is in the room too. Her name is Marianne; she is small and plump; she wears corduroy trousers and boots and exudes good health. For a while they all speak English, then he relents and switches to the language of the family, to Afrikaans. Though it is years since he spoke Afrikaans, he can feel himself relax at once as though sliding into a warm bath.

  He had expected to be able to show off his knowledge of London. But the London Ilse and Marianne want to see is not a London he knows. He can tell them nothing about Madame Tussaud’s, the Tower, St Paul’s, none of which he has visited. He has no idea how one gets to Stratfordon-Avon. What he is able to tell them – which cinemas show foreign films, which bookshops are best for what – they do not care to know.

  Ilse is on antibiotics; it will be days before she is herself again. In the meantime Marianne is at a loose end. He suggests a walk along the Thames embankment. In her hiking boots, with her no-nonsense haircut, Marianne from Ficksburg is out of place among the fashionable London girls, but she does not seem to care. Nor does she care if people hear her speaking Afrikaans. As for him, he would prefer it if she lowered her voice. Speaking Afrikaans in this country, he wants to tell her, is like speaking Nazi, if there were such a language.

  He has made a mistake about their ages. They are not children at all: Ilse is twenty, Marianne twenty-one. They are in their final year at the University of the Orange Free State, both studying social work. He does not voice an opinion, but to his mind social work – helping old women with their shopping – is not a subject a proper university would teach.

  Marianne has never heard of computer programming and is incurious about it. But she does ask when he will be coming, as she puts it, home, tuis.

  He does not know, he replies. Perhaps never. Is she not concerned about the direction in which South Africa is heading?

  She gives a fling of the head. South Africa is not as bad as the English newspapers make out, she says. Blacks and whites would get along fine if they were just left alone. Anyway, she is not interested in politics.

  He invites her to a film at the Everyman. It is Godard’s Bande à part, which he has seen before but could see many times more, since it stars Anna Karina, with whom he is as much in love now as he was with Monica Vitti a year ago. Since it is not a highbrow film, or not obviously so, just a story about a gang of incompetent, amateurish criminals, he sees no reason why Marianne should not enjoy it.

  Marianne is not a complainer, but throughout the film he can sense her fidgeting beside him. When he steals a glance, she is picking her fingernails, not watching the screen. Didn’t you like it, he asks afterwards? I couldn’t work out what it was about, she replies. It turns out she has never seen a film with subtitles.

  He takes her back to his flat, or the flat that is his for the time being, for a cup of coffee. It is nearly eleven; Theodora has gone to bed. They sit cross-legged on the thick pile carpet in the living room, with the door shut, talking in low tones. She is not his cousin, but she is his cousin’s friend, she is from home, and an air of illegitimacy hangs excitingly around her. He kisses her; she does not seem to mind being kissed. Face to face they stretch out on the carpet; he begins to unbutton, unlace, unzip her. The last train south is at 11.30. She will certainly miss it.

  Marianne is a virgin. He finds this out when at last he has her naked in the big double bed. He has never slept with a virgin before, has never given a thought to virginity as a physical state. Now he learns his lesson. Marianne bleeds while they are making love and goes on bleeding afterwards. At the risk of waking the maid, she has to creep off to the bathroom to wash herself. While she is gone he switches on the light. There is blood on the sheets, blood all over his body. They have been – the vision comes to him distastefully – wallowing in blood like pigs.

  She returns with a bath towel wrapped around her. ‘I must leave,’ she says. ‘The last train has gone,’ he replies. ‘Why don’t you stay the night?’

  The bleeding does not stop. Marianne falls asleep with the towel, growing more and more soggy, stuffed between her legs. He lies awake beside her fretting. Should he be calling an ambulance? Can he do so without waking Theodora? Marianne does not seem to be worried, but what if that is only pretence, for his sake? What if she
is too innocent or too trustful to assess what is going on?

  He is convinced he will not sleep, but he does. He is woken by voices and the sound of running water. It is five o’clock; already the birds are singing in the trees. Groggily he gets up and listens at the door: Theodora’s voice, then Marianne’s. What they are saying he cannot hear, but it cannot reflect well on him.

  He strips off the bedclothes. The blood has soaked through to the mattress, leaving a huge, uneven stain. Guiltily, angrily, he heaves the mattress over. Only a matter of time before the stain is discovered. He must be gone by then, he will have to make sure of that.

  Marianne returns from the bathroom wearing a robe that is not hers. She is taken aback by his silence, his cross looks. ‘You never told me not to,’ she says. ‘Why shouldn’t I talk to her? She’s a nice old woman. A nice old aia.’

  He telephones for a taxi, then waits pointedly at the front door while she dresses. When the taxi arrives he evades her embrace, puts a pound note in her hand. She regards it with puzzlement. ‘I’ve got my own money,’ she says. He shrugs, opens the door of the taxi for her.

  For the remaining days of his tenancy he avoids Theodora. He leaves early in the mornings, comes home late. If there are messages for him, he ignores them. When he took on the flat, he engaged to guard it from the husband and generally be at hand. He has failed in his undertaking once and is failing again, but he does not care. The unsettling lovemaking, the whispering women, the bloody sheets, the stained mattress: he would like to put the whole shameful business behind him, close the door on it.

  Muffling his voice, he calls the hostel in Earls Court and asks to speak to his cousin. She has left, they say, she and her friend. He puts the telephone down and relaxes. They are safely away, he need not face them again.

  There remains the question of what to make of the episode, how to fit it into the story of his life that he tells himself. He has behaved dishonourably, no doubt about that, behaved like a cad. The word may be old-fashioned but it is exact. He deserves to be slapped in the face, even to be spat on. In the absence of anyone to administer the slap, he has no doubt that he will gnaw away at himself. Agenbyte of inwit. Let that be his contract then, with the gods: he will punish himself, and in return will hope the story of his caddish behaviour will not get out.