by Zoe Wicomb
‘Don’t bother with tea on my account,’ I say with my eye longingly on the whisky, and carry on in the same breath, ‘Are you still in touch with Martin? I wouldn’t mind seeing him after all these years.’
Moira’s admirers were plentiful and she generously shared with me the benefits of her beauty. At parties young men straightened their jackets and stepped over to ask me to dance. Their cool hands fell on my shoulders, bare and damp with sweat. I glided past the rows of girls waiting to be chosen. So they tested their charm – ‘Can I get you a lemonade? Shall we dance again?’ – on me the intermediary. In the airless room my limbs obeyed the inexorable sweep of the ballroom dances. But with the wilder Twist or Shake my broad shoulders buckled under a young man’s gaze and my feet grew leaden as I waited for the casual enquiry after Moira. Then we would sit out a dance chatting about Moira and the gardenia on my bosom meshed in maddening fragrance our common interest. My hand squeezed in gratitude with a quick goodnight, for there was no question about it: my friendship had to be secured in order to be considered by Moira. Then in the early hours, sitting cross-legged on her bed, we sifted his words and Moira unpinned for me the gardenia, crushed by his fervour, when his cool hand on my shoulder drew me closer, closer in that first held dance.
Young men in Sunday ties and borrowed cars agreed to take me with them on scenic drives along the foot of Table Mountain, or Chapman’s Peak where we looked down dizzily at the sea. And I tactfully wandered off licking at a jumbo ice-cream while they practised their kissing, Moira’s virginity unassailable. Below, the adult baboons scrambled over the sand dunes and smacked the bald bottoms of their young and the sunlicked waves beckoned at the mermaids on the rocks.
Desmond replies, ‘Martin’s fallen in love with an AZAPO woman, married her and stopped coming round. Shall we say that he finally lost interest in Moi?’
The whisky in his glass lurches amber as he rolls the stem between his fingers.
‘Would you like a Coke?’ he asks.
I decline but I long to violate the alcohol taboo for women. ‘A girl who drinks is nothing other than a prostitute,’ Father said. And there’s no such thing as just a little tot because girls get drunk instantly. Then they hitch up their skirts like the servant girls on their days off, caps scrunched into shopping bags, waving their Vaaljapie bottles defiantly. A nice girl’s reputation would shatter with a single mouthful of liquor.
‘The children are back from their party,’ Moira says. There is a shuffling outside and then they burst in blowing penny whistles and rattling their plastic spoils. Simultaneously they reel off the events of the party and correct each other’s versions while the youngest scrambles on to his mother’s lap. Moira listens, amused. She interrupts them, ‘Look who’s here. Say hallo to the auntie. Auntie Frieda’s come all the way from England to see you.’ They compose their stained faces and shake hands solemnly. Then the youngest bursts into tears and the other two discuss in undertones the legitimacy of his grievance.
‘He’s tired,’ Desmond offers from the depths of his whisky reverie, ‘probably eaten too much as well.’
This statement has a history, for Moira throws her head back and laughs and the little boy charges at his father and butts him in the stomach.
‘Freddie, we’ve got a visitor, behave yourself hey,’ the eldest admonishes.
I smile at her and get up to answer the persistent knock at the back door which the family seem not to hear. A man in overalls waiting on the doorstep looks at me bewildered but then says soberly, ‘For the Missus,’ and hands over a bunch of arum lilies which I stick in a pot by the sink. When I turn round Moira stands in the doorway watching me. She interrupts as I start explaining about the man.
‘Yes, I’ll put it in the children’s room.’
I want to say that the pot is not tall enough for the lilies but she takes them off hurriedly, the erect spadices dusting yellow on to the funnelled white leaves. Soon they will droop; I did not have a chance to put water in the pot.
I wait awkwardly in the kitchen and watch a woman walk past the window. No doubt there is a servant’s room at the far end of the garden. The man must be the gardener but from the window it is clear that there are no flowers in the garden except for a rampant morning glory that covers the fence. When Moira comes back she prepares grenadilla juice and soda with which we settle around the table. I think of alcohol and say, ‘It’s a nice kitchen.’ It is true that sunlight sifted through the lace curtains softens the electric blue of the melamine worksurfaces But after the formality of the sitting room the clutter of the kitchen comes as a surprise, the sink is grimy and harbours dishes of surely the previous day. The grooved steel band around the table top holds a neat line of grease and dust compound.
‘Yes,’ she says, ‘I like it. The living room is Desmond’s. He has no interest in the kitchen.’
And all the while she chops at the parsley, slowly chops it to a pulp. Then beneath the peelings and the spilled contents of brown paperbags she ferrets about until she drags out a comb.
‘Where the hell are the bay leaves?’ she laughs, and throws the comb across the worksurface. I rise to inspect a curious object on the windowsill from which the light bounces frantically. It is a baby’s shoe dipped into a molten alloy, an instant sculpture of brassy brown that records the first wayward steps of a new biped. I tease it in the sunlight, turning it this way and that.
‘Strange object,’ I say, ‘whose is it?’
‘Ridiculous hey,’ and we laugh in agreement. ‘Desmond’s idea,’ she explains, ‘but funnily enough I’m quite attached to that shoe now. It’s Carol’s, the eldest; you feel so proud of the things your child does. Obvious things, you know, like walking and talking you await anxiously as if they were man’s first steps on the moon and you’re so absurdly pleased at the child’s achievement. And so we ought to be, not proud I suppose, but grateful. I’m back at work, mornings only, at Manenberg, and you should see the township children. Things haven’t changed much, don’t you believe that.’
She picks up the shoe.
‘Carol’s right foot always leaned too far to the right and Desmond felt that that was the shoe to preserve. More character, he said. Ja,’ she sighs, ‘things were better in those early days. And anyway I didn’t mind his kak so much then. But I’d better get on otherwise dinner’ll be late.’
I lift the lace curtain and spread out the gathers to reveal a pattern of scallops with their sprays of stylised leaves. The flower man is walking in the shadow of the fence carrying a carrierbag full of books. He does not look at me holding up the nylon lace. I turn to Moira bent over a cheese grater, and with the sepia light of evening streaming in, her face lifts its sadness to me, the nutbrown skin, as if under a magnifying glass, singed translucent and taut across the high cheekbones.
‘Moira,’ I say, but at that moment she beats the tin grater against the bowl.
So I tug at things, peep, rummage through her kitchen, pick at this and that as if they were buttons to trigger off the mechanism of software that will gush out a neatly printed account of her life. I drop the curtain still held in my limp hand.
‘What happened to Michael?’ she asks.
‘Dunno. There was no point in keeping in touch, not after all that. And there is in any case no such thing as friendship with men.’ I surprise myself by adding, ‘Mind you, I think quite neutrally about him, even positively at times. The horror of Michael must’ve been absorbed by the subsequent horror of others. But I don’t, thank God, remember their names.’
Moira laughs. ‘You must be kinder to men. We have to get on with them.’
‘Yes,’ I retort, ‘but surely not behind their backs.’
‘Heavens,’ she says, ‘we were so blarry stupid and dishonest really. Obsessed with virginity, we imagined we weren’t messing about with sex. Suppose that’s what we thought sex was all about: breaking a membrane. I expect Michael was as stupid as you. Catholic, wasn’t he?’
I do not want to
talk about Michael. I am much more curious about Desmond. How did he slip through the net? Desmond scorned the methods of her other suitors and refused to ingratiate himself with me. On her first date Moira came back with a headache, bristling with secrecy no doubt sworn beneath his parted lips. We did not laugh at the way he pontificated, his hands held gravely together as in prayer to prevent interruptions. Desmond left Cape Town at the end of that year and I had in the meantime met Michael.
There was the night on the bench under the loquat tree when we ate the tasteless little fruits and spat glossy pips over the fence. Moira’s fingers drummed the folder on her lap.
‘Here,’ she said in a strange voice, ‘are the letters. You should just read this, today’s.’
I tugged at the branch just above my head so that it rustled in the dark and overripe loquats fell plop to the ground.
‘No, not his letters, that wouldn’t be right,’ I said. And my memory skimmed the pages of Michael’s letters. Love, holy love that made the remembered words dance on that lined foolscap infused with his smell. I could not, would not, share the first man to love me.
‘Is he getting on OK in Durban?’ I asked.
‘Yes, I expect he still has many friends there. I’m going up just after the finals and then perhaps he’ll come back to Cape Town. Let’s see if we can spit two pips together and hit the fence at the same time.’
So we sat in the dark, between swotting sessions, under the tree with yellow loquats lustrous in the black leaves. Perhaps she mimicked his Durban voice, waiting for me to take up the routine of friendly mockery. I try in vain to summon it all. I cannot separate the tangled strands of conversation or remembered letters. Was it then, in my Durban accent, that I replied with Michael’s views about the permanence and sanctity of marriage?
‘Ja-ja-ja,’ Moira sighs, pulling out a chair. And turning again to check a pot on the stove, her neck is unbecomingly twisted, the sinews thrown into relief. How old we have grown since that night under the loquat tree, and I know that there is no point in enquiring after Desmond.
‘Do you like living here?’ I ask instead.
‘It’s OK, as good as anything.’
‘I was thinking of your parents’ home, the house where I stayed. How lovely it was. Everything’s so new here. Don’t you find it strange?’
‘Ag Frieda, but we’re so new, don’t we belong in estates like this? Coloureds haven’t been around for that long, perhaps that’s why we stray. Just think, in our teens we wanted to be white, now we want to be full-blooded Africans. We’ve never wanted to be ourselves and that’s why we stray . . . across the continent, across the oceans and even here, right into the Tricameral Parliament, playing into their hands. Actually,’ and she looks me straight in the eye, ‘it suits me very well to live here.’
Chastened by her reply I drum my fingertips on the table so that she says gently, ‘I don’t mean to accuse you. At the time I would have done exactly the same. There was little else to do. Still, it’s really nice to see you. I hope you’ll be able to stay tomorrow.’ Her hand bums for a moment on my shoulder.
It is time for dinner. Moira makes a perfunctory attempt at clearing the table, then, defeated by the chaos, she throws a cloth at me.
‘Oh God, I’ll never be ready by seven.’
I am drawn into the revolving circle of panic: washing down, screwing lids back on to jars, shutting doors on food that will rot long before discovery. Moira has always been hopeless in a kitchen so that there is really no point in my holding up the bag of potatoes enquiringly.
‘Oh stick it in there,’ and with her foot she deftly kicks open a dank cupboard where moisture tries in vain to escape from foul-smelling cloths. In here the potatoes will grow eyes and long pale etiolated limbs that will push open the creaking door next spring.
Her slow voice does not speed up with the frantic movements; instead, like a tape mangled in a machine, it trips and buzzes, dislocated from the darting sinewy body.
The children watch television. They do not want to eat, except for the youngest who rubs his distended tummy against the table. We stand in silence and listen to the child, ‘I’m hungry, really hungry. I could eat and eat.’ His black eyes glint with the success of subterfuge and in his pride he tugs at Moira’s skirt, ‘Can I sit on your knee?’ and offers as reward, ‘I’ll be hungry on your knee, I really will.’
Something explodes in my mouth when Desmond produces a bottle of wine, and I resolve not to look at his chin, not even once.
‘I’ve got something for you girls to celebrate with; you are staying in tonight, aren’t you? Frieda, I promise you this is the first Wednesday night in years that Moira’s been in. Nothing, not riots nor disease will keep her away from her Wednesday meetings. Now that women’s lib’s crept over the equator it would be most unbecoming of me to suspect my wife’s commitment to her black-culture group. A worthy affair, affiliated to the UDF you know.’ The wine which I drink too fast tingles in my toes and fingertips.
‘So how has feminism been received here?’ I ask.
‘Oh,’ he smiles, ‘you have to adapt in order to survive. No point in resisting for the sake of it, you have to move with the times . . . but there are some worrying half-baked ideas about . . . muddled women’s talk.’
‘Actually,’ Moira interjects, ‘our group has far more pressing matters to deal with.’
‘Like?’ he barks.
‘Like community issues, consciousness raising,’ but Desmond snorts and she changes direction. ‘Anyway, I doubt whether women’s oppression arises as an issue among whites. One of the functions of having servants is to obscure it.’
‘Hm,’ I say, and narrow my eyes thoughtfully, a stalling trick I’ve used with varying success. Then I look directly at Desmond so that he refills my glass and takes the opportunity to propose a toast to our reunion. This is hardly less embarrassing than the topic of servants. The wine on my tongue turns musty and mingles with the smell of incense, of weddings and christenings that his empty words resurrect.
Desmond is in a cooperative mood, intent on evoking the halcyon days of the sixties when students sat on the cafeteria steps soaking up the sun. Days of calm and stability, he sighs. He reels off the names of contemporaries. Faces struggle in formation through the fog of the past, rise and recede. Rita Jantjes detained under the Terrorism act. ‘The Jantjes of Lansdowne?’ I ask.
‘It’s ridiculous of them to keep Rita. She knows nothing; she’s far too emotional, an obvious security risk,’ Moira interjects.
‘No,’ Desmond explains, ‘not the Lansdowne Jantjes but the Port Elizabeth branch of the family. The eldest, Sammy, graduated in Science the year before me.’
I am unable to contribute anything else, but he is the perfect host. There are no silent moments. He explains his plans for the garden and defers to my knowledge of succulents. There will be an enormous rockery in the front with the widest possible variety of cacti. A pity, he says, that Moira has planted those horrible trees but he would take over responsibility for the garden, give her a bit more free time, perhaps I didn’t know that she has started working again?
Moira makes no effort to contribute to the conversation so diligently made. She murmurs to the little one on her knee whose fat fingers she prevents from exploring her nostrils. They giggle and shh-ssht each other, marking out their orbit of intimacy. Which makes it easier for me to conduct this conversation. Only once does he falter and rub his chin but I avert my eyes and he embarks smoothly on the topic of red wine. I am the perfect guest, a deferential listener. I do not have the faintest interest in the production of wine.
When we finish dinner Desmond gets up briskly. He returns to the living room and the children protest loudly as he switches off the television and puts on music. Something classical and rousing, as if he too is in need of revival.
‘Moi,’ he shouts above the trombones, ‘Moi, the children are tired, they must go to bed. Remember it’s school tomorrow.’
‘OK,�
�� she shouts back. Then quietly, Thursdays are always schooldays. But then Desmond isn’t always as sober as I’d like him to be.’
She lifts the sleeping child from her lap on to the bench. We rest our elbows on the table amongst the dirty dishes.
‘He gets his drink too cheaply; has shares in an hotel.’ Moira explains how the liquor business goes on expanding, how many professional people give up their jobs to become liquor moguls.
‘Why are the booze shops called hotels? Who stays in them? Surely there’s no call for hotels in a Coloured area?’
‘Search me, as we used to say. Nobody stays in them, I’m sure. I imagine they need euphemisms when they know that they grow rich out of other people’s misery. Cheap wine means everyone can drown his sorrows at the weekends, and people say that men go into teaching so that they have the afternoons to drink in as well. I swear the only sober man to be found on a Saturday afternoon is the liquor boss. The rest are dronkies, whether they loaf about on street corners in hanggat trousers or whether they slouch in upholstered chairs in front of television sets. And we all know a man of position is not a man unless he can guzzle a bottle or two of spirits. It’s not surprising that the Soweto kids of ’76 stormed the liquor stores and the shebeens. Not that I’d like to compare the shebeen queen making a miserable cent with the Coloured “elite” as they call themselves who build big houses and drive Mercedes and send their daughters to Europe to find husbands. And those who allow themselves to be bought by the government to sit in Parliament . . .’
She holds her head. ‘Jesus, I don’t know. Sometimes I’m optimistic and then it’s worth fighting, but other times, here in this house, everything seems pointless. Actually that wine’s given me a headache.’
I stare into the dirty plate so hard that surely my eyes will drop out and stare back at me. Like two fried eggs, sunnyside-up. Then I take her hand.
‘Listen, I know a trick that takes headaches away instantly.’ And I squeeze with my thumb and index finger deep into the webbed V formed by the thumb of her outstretched hand. ‘See? Give me the other hand. See how it lifts?’ Like a child she stares in wonderment at the hand still resting in mine.