Small Circle of Beings

by Galgut, Damon

  ‘All right then,’ she said.

  I went back to the study after supper, duster in hand. Sunk into a kind of white and featureless despair, I began to go through the books in the bookcases, wiping them clean, opening them up and riffling through their pages. He’d always loved reading, though she hadn’t approved and had insisted after a while that he take books out of the library instead of buying them. ‘The expense, Ivor. We cannot afford …’ I also loved reading, and the bedroom of my tiny flat in town was packed with shelves and shelves of books: thrillers, biographies, literature and trash. I tried to imagine now how those books would look in here, in this room: arranged in rows against the one bare wall. I tried to imagine myself behind the desk, my back to the garden, as I sat and listened to the soft slurping noise of my mother’s footsteps in the passage outside. It was too much to conceive of.

  I’d known, I suppose, that this would be the nature of my dry and tedious fate: to return to this sombre house in which I had been born and spent my first twenty years of life, to become the father I had never begun to recognise or comprehend. I’d known this, I suppose, since he had first taken to his bed on his long, stuttering decline into death. But now that she had made her pact with me, her pagan contract across the shining surface of the table and the steaming bowls of soup, I felt my frightened soul go into revolt. I wanted to scream and cry. I wanted to bang my head against the walls and tear at the drab, fading wallpaper, in which the dim outline of a pattern could still vaguely be seen.

  I didn’t, of course. I continued to stand, cloth in hand, and wipe stupidly at the covers of the books as I took them one by one from the shelves. In the small oval mirror to the right of the desk I caught a brief glimpse of myself and saw with horror that I was still bloodless and anaemic, that I still looked out at the world through thick glasses. I hadn’t even rescued myself from this, the earliest prison I could recall.

  At the end of the top row was a copy of Ivanhoe. It had always been his favourite book and I touched it now with a reluctant reverence. As I lifted it down it opened of its own accord in a flurry of dust and gave up its secrets. They fell past my nose, too quick to be seen, and landed on the carpet at my feet. I stood and looked down for a long while before I was brave enough to bend and pick them up.

  I sat at the desk. I unfolded the letter. The paper was wrinkled and old and had been rubbed thin with much reading. It was covered in blue ink. The writing wasn’t familiar to me; big and loopy and full of sudden strokes and dots. There was a grace in it, and a kind of anger.

  Dear Ivor, it said, I know I promised I wouldn’t write, I know you said you wouldn’t (couldn’t?) write back, but how is it possible for me not to want to speak to you with any voice at all? I thought of phoning you, I have even thought of coming up to Johannesburg to look for you, but I know already that it would be no use. I cannot tell you how I’ve thought of you since you left … Only two weeks! How is it possible …

  Here I looked up. The room before me, with its rigid, implacable lines, wavered and went soft. It was a while before I could breathe properly again and focus my eyes on the page:

  … Isn’t it strange, the lies that we conceive, the lies that we believe … What three short days have given us! Or is it only me? Have you forgotten me, wasn’t I important after all? Will I ever know? … I know nothing of you, I know where you live, the room you sleep in … And her … You did describe her to me, but she was only more difficult to imagine afterward … You said that you could never leave her, you said it wasn’t possible. I didn’t understand, but I couldn’t ask. Is it your son that makes it so? Is it him? …

  And:

  I remember as we walked out on the last night under the trees, there was a smell, a weight, you could say, of honeysuckle on the air. You said the scent reminded you of things. You said, I think, that it was painful to you … We searched for the flowers, but we couldn’t find them in the dark. After you’d gone I walked out along the path and found the flowers there where we’d stood … I picked this one, I send it to you as a gift, a token, a remembrance perhaps, but I hope not only that … Can you smell it still?

  I looked past her name – scribbled, huge – to the small dry flower, pressed flat between the pages where it had lain so long. How long? It had no colour, no hue … I didn’t take it in my hand again for fear that it might break, but bent down over it and held my nose close to the crushed petals. Though I strained and strained, I could smell nothing at all.

  I couldn’t imagine her face. I tried to, of course, over the time that followed, but all I could see in my mind’s eye was the sheet of paper rubbed thin by touch and covered in electric squiggles of ink. Was she even alive still? The possibility that she was not, that she may have preceded him, filled me with nauseous fear. I thought only of her, faceless though she was, as I moved about the murky passages of the so-silent house. When I looked at my mother I saw – as he must surely have done – her form moving softly at the edge of my sight. And while we stood about the sides of the grave, suitably subdued as he was lowered beneath the grass, I thought of her in her home beside the sea.

  It was a small funeral. He didn’t have many friends and, of those, many had moved or passed away. There was the expected group of ex-colleagues and a few sad relatives. I stood beside my mother and she leaned on my arm. I could feel all her frail weight pressing into my palm. As the first spadefuls of earth began to fall on the coffin I turned to glance at her: I saw her stern profile, composed of downward lines, of strokes of flesh attracted by gravity. Her mouth had no colour and, under the tight black hat, her face seemed shaped from some heavy, thick, wet stone. I turned away.

  That night at supper she said to me, ‘Will you be moving your things this week?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But not immediately. I have to go away,’ I told her, ‘for a day or two.’

  She looked at me; a direct glare full of angry surprise. But I didn’t quail. I swallowed a piece of chicken from the end of my fork. She dropped her eyes.

  We, neither of us, said more than that. But it was understood between us that I had failed her in a duty. She did not approve.

  And I, for now, didn’t care. On the following morning, when the sun was high enough to cast shadows in the garden, I left her alone in the dark two-storeyed house and got into my car and set off in pursuit of the address just legibly written in the top righthand corner of the paper that had fallen from my father’s copy of Ivanhoe.

  I parked the car under some low trees at the end of the dust road. Although the house was visible from here, to the right and up, it wasn’t possible to drive any further. No other signs of human presence were to be seen; there were no roofs, no cars. There was only the heavy jungle foliage on every side, dark green in colour but static and black in the last light coming in from the sea.

  It was dusk; I had driven steadily for many hours with only a single break. As I got out of the car and locked it behind me, I became aware of sharp twinges in the small of my back. (As a child I was always weak. My bones would ache.) The air smelt strongly of salt. I breathed very deeply and looked about me at the leaves that seemed to be oozing from the fat trunks of trees. From over the rise to the right, on the crest of which lights had begun to burn in the house, I could hear the stony throbbing of the sea. It was a sound as relentless and heavy as the beating of my heart.

  I wasn’t afraid. I can say with certainty that I was strangely calm, as if I knew with complete assurance just what would take place and how.

  I doubted nothing. As if I’d been here many times before, I bent under a hanging creeper and started up the narrow path that moved away faintly beneath the trees. The air parted thickly before me and trailed away over my face, slow and warm. After I had travelled only a few metres I could see nothing at all: my car had vanished behind me and the lights of the house were hidden by the slope. The path began to climb. I followed it fairly easily, though I almost fell on roots that lay underfoot like steps. After a minute or two I w
as breathing heavily and my legs were hurting.

  It was a longer walk than it had first appeared to be. As I climbed, I imagined him moving in just this way on such a night as this. So that he was suddenly there with me, exhaling his breath into the warm dark, stepping over the unseen roots, clambering up through the trees towards the top of the rise.

  We emerged at last, and stood for a moment to catch our breath. The house was before us, against the edge of the forest which rose behind it in a clean wall. Where we stood, the path petered out into a neat acre of lawn, trimmed and cropped. There were bushes here and there, but no flowerbeds. To the left the ridge fell away sharply again to the beach and there seemed to be another path leading downwards. Standing again under the open sky, it was possible to see the last yellow gleams of sun over the horizon. The sea lay utterly still, utterly calm, like a vast grey field.

  She was waiting on the front stoep, a single, slender figure with her arms wrapped about her. She wore a white shawl and a dress of dark wool. The lights were behind her so that she was only an outline. Her shadow stretched across the grass.

  I took a breath and started down. I must have come into view only when I reached the edge of the light from inside the house; she gave a small start and hugged her arms tighter about herself. But she said nothing as I crossed the last few metres of grass and came to a stop at the foot of the three low stairs going up to the stoep. I was below her, looking up into her face at last. We stood in this way in silence for a minute.

  Then she spoke: ‘I’m sorry …’ she said in a faint voice. ‘I …’ There was a pause before she could talk properly. ‘I thought that you were … someone else …’

  The light over the sea was gone now. The waters were as black and deep as earth. But another glow marked the thin stretched line of the horizon: the moon, below the curve of the world, was about to rise.

  ‘I am his son,’ I said. ‘And he is dead.’

  She was older than me and younger than my father. I looked at her face in the light of the hanging lamp: her skin was breaking into wrinkles and her hair was beginning to turn white. Her body under the woollen dress seemed stiff when she moved. But she didn’t carry herself with pain. She didn’t gesture with embarrassment, as some old people do, as if afraid to squander what little motion may be left to them: her hands were big and she used them as she spoke. I had to lean close to hear her voice, though, for it was soft and hesitant – perhaps with grief, or with fear of me, I cannot tell. I don’t think she was afraid.

  ‘He was here on business,’ she said. ‘In town. I met him at the house of a friend. It was a dinner party, he sat next to me at the table. He was uncomfortable, I think, he didn’t want to be there. He was biting the end of his thumb.’

  ‘He used to do that,’ I said.

  ‘We talked. Rather, I talked at first and he listened. He had a way of listening …’

  ‘I remember – ’

  ‘With his head on one side? I don’t know what I spoke about … Not important things. There were no important things in my life, James … I don’t know if you can understand that …’

  ‘I can understand.’

  ‘Well. There was something between us immediately, we were both aware that something … inevitable would take place if we allowed it to … Can you understand that too?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘But I could, if I tried.’

  She smiled. ‘I asked him to visit me the next day. Here. I didn’t know what he’d say … He did hesitate, you know … He looked down at his wedding ring, it was silver, I think …’

  ‘Gold,’ I said.

  ‘But he agreed to come. I woke early the next morning, I waited, I waited … I was still afraid, you see, that he might change his mind. He was a silent man, your father, he didn’t speak. You had to guess his thoughts from other things – the way he looked at you, what his eye fell upon …’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘I know.’

  ‘He did come, in the end. At noon. I was waiting for him …’

  At this she became quiet and I raised my eyes to the house about us. We sat inside in two cane chairs in front of the fireplace; but there was no fire. The windows and curtains were open to admit the distant noise of the surf. The light in this room – and in all the others – came from lamps which were hung from hooks in the walls and roof. Their glow was yellow and shivery, and fell on bare tiled floors, on simple furniture that was solid and cheap. The house was not very large, but was still too big for what it contained: emptiness quavered around us in rings. Apart from the sound of our voices and the sea, there was only silence here: no noise of engines or children or dogs. It was eerie and sad, and I could not bear to live in it.

  ‘He stayed for three days. He lived with me. At first it was a game – you know the sort of game that people play when there is something that they want from each other, but there are things they cannot tell each other … It was painful for me, but lovely too, to see him in the house, here … Not a day goes by without me remembering him standing in a certain place with the light falling on him in a certain way … This doorway, that stair …’ She became weak and seemed to flatten in her chair like a shadow. She tried to speak but couldn’t.

  ‘Still?’ I asked, incredulous in spite of myself. ‘Surely you cannot still … after all this time.’

  ‘What if I do?’ she said, and her voice was hard again. She leaned quickly forward out of her chair. ‘He loved me too, you know. He told me so. He said it to me so often that I was tired of hearing it.’

  Though I said nothing to her, I reflected that I had never heard him speak those words. For a moment my home and everything in it ballooned in me. I saw my mother as she must surely be sitting, in the wooden straight-backed chair in the lounge, staring out at the garden with her hands folded in her lap. I choked on this image; I tried to vent it from me with speech:

  ‘And?’ I said. ‘More! Tell me more!’

  ‘We ate together at night. During the day he was out, doing the business he’d come down here to do … He was supposed to be staying in a hotel in town. He’d go back to his room there in the late afternoon to change and to phone home. He phoned home every day, he had to, you see … She expected it of him. It wouldn’t have done to arouse her suspicions.’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Then he would come to me, at evening time, the time of day when you arrived … I’d be waiting for him as I was, on the stoep, the lamps all lit …’

  ‘Yes …’

  ‘We walked together every night along the beach. There are some rocks about a kilometre down the sand, he liked to sit there. I don’t know why … he liked that place …’

  ‘And you?’ I said. ‘What did you do while he was out? How did the time pass for you?’

  ‘Slowly. I waited, of course, for him. There were things to occupy my mind …’

  ‘But didn’t you work? Wasn’t there – ’

  ‘I have never worked,’ she said shortly. ‘I have indulged in … pursuits to busy myself now and then. I have been a painter. I have written stories. But I have not worked.’

  ‘How did you – ’

  ‘I was married,’ she murmured, almost as if the thought had nothing to do with our conversation, ‘once. But he died and left me what he owned.’

  ‘Did you,’ I had to know, ‘did you love him too?’

  She paused and then smiled in the liquid light. ‘I did,’ she said. ‘I suppose I did. Yes … There have been one or two, besides him … before him …’ Her smile hadn’t faded yet, but bent her lips gently like a taste she couldn’t share with me. I knew better than to speak. I waited while she remembered – alone in the bare, cold yellow room, I suppose, purged of my presence for a brief time. I wondered if this was the way she spent her nights; without company or consolation, growing mildly mad in her house on the hill. Then she said, in that same soft tone, ‘He is dead now, you say?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. My voice did not emerge properly at first, so I tried again: ‘
Yes.’

  ‘He’s gone then?’

  ‘Yes. Yes.’

  There was another pause.

  ‘He left,’ she said suddenly, ‘after three days. He went away when his business trip was over. I never saw him again. He went back to his wife and to you. He told me about you, you weren’t very old then …’

  ‘How old was I? How long ago was this?’

  ‘I don’t know … Long ago … Or not so long …’

  Her voice trailed away, and she stared at me, clutching a fistful of her dress. Then she spoke, but her voice was harsh now, with a screech in it like wire. ‘Why have you come?’ she said. ‘What do you want from me?’

  ‘I thought that you would want to know,’ I said. ‘I thought – ’

  ‘Why should I want to know? He was nothing to me.’ She brought her face closer to mine, so that a drop of spittle hit my forehead as she spoke. ‘Did he tell you about me? Did you and your mother hear it all, were you laughing at me all the years and years I …’ She paused, and said with difficulty, ‘Were you?’

  ‘No,’ I said. My voice was faint now. ‘You have my word. We knew nothing at all.’

  ‘How is it then – ’

  ‘I found a letter,’ I said. ‘You wrote a letter.’

  There was another pause. She breathed. ‘Ah,’ she said. ‘A letter. Yes.’ And fell back into her chair, panting for air as if she had been climbing the steep path up to her house.

  I looked at her again, this extraordinary woman whose body had begun to shrink and fade on her in preparation for bringing itself to an end. Even then, when she had sat beside my father at the dinner table however many years before, she could not have been remarkably beautiful. Her face was too round, her chin too large. But I could only imagine what beauty had moved in my father when he’d looked at her. The lies that we conceive, the lies that we believe … I took her hand in mine. Her skin was as dry and rough as that of a sow.

  ‘You were lovers,’ I said. ‘Isn’t that consolation enough?’