Vera looked at her with a flash of anguish. —Annie, what did I do to put you off men?—
—What makes you always think what I am is determined by you! It’s against all your principles vis-à-vis other people, isn’t it.—
It was not only the door that closed them off from the house and its familiars, their separate existences. They had moved into a territory that might never be re-entered, never found again. As voices that come out of the mouth of a medium, they spoke with the dreamy groping of the subconscious, silences aloud between them.
Coming into the kitchen—the woman with wet tendrils of hair fresh from the bath at One-Twenty-One taken to disguise the roused flush of love-making—startled, because she was so far out of mind, to see the schoolgirl at the table with a mug of cocoa, doing her homework: —Did I disgust you?—
—No no. I was sorry for you, I don’t know why. I wanted to comfort you. Seeing you come home, fucked out. I thought you’d come to the age when you’d need peace instead of what you were doing. What age! At seventeen anyone over forty seemed old to me.— The sense of a conspiracy unacknowledged in the past; neither brought up the name of Ben. —Tell me. We disgust you—Lou and I.—
—Of course you don’t.—
—No ‘of course’ about it. Tell me.—
—Not disgust—
—‘So long as I’m happy’, mnh?—what all the parents deprived of grandchildren swallow bravely and say.—
—No—I don’t disapprove, I don’t consider what you do is wrong. It’s just the penis. I have to say it. I regret for you—no penis.—
Annie gave the smile that acknowledged: you mean well, and they both laughed. —What about Ivan? With the penis, and the grandchild, it still didn’t work out.—
—Ah, it doesn’t solve everything, I’ll admit—
—But it’s the essential.—
—For me, yes.—
—So you see— Someone was rattling at the glass door, the eager black face of Thandeka was distorted through it. Annie thrust in quickly, their eyes already on the door: —You really have the same view as Dad, for him that thing’s also the essential, because he has it, he can’t bear to think of any woman rejecting what’s gained for him the treasure of his life, you, you— Thandeka burst out onto the stoep, her face the standard-bearer of the old man’s presence back in the house, and the lifeline between Annie and Vera fell before alarm that some crisis in his state had occurred.
But it was only that Vera was wanted on the telephone. Thandeka, so close to the drama of death, seemed to transfer a disproportionate sense of events to everything, even a telephone call.
Sally Maqoma: she stuttered interruptions through Vera’s expressions of pleasure at hearing from her again after many-weeks and cut short the exchange of circling civilities by which friends excuse neglect of one another. She had something to speak to Vera about, it could not be discussed over the phone. Vera felt the valves of her heart exposed, her blood vessels lying open from the time and place with Annie from which she had just emerged. Sally’s voice came as a disembodied assault loud in her ear. She recoiled, distrait. She explained that her father in-law had had another stroke, nurses in the house, confusion —could whatever it was possibly wait a day or two?
Without a man.
Bereft.
To imagine that state.
Why, if Renoir could say he painted with his prick, has no woman ever had the guts to say I live by my vagina? Love affairs as a neat motif, a sprig recurring woven in the textile of her life—it’s been nothing like that. She is the one who, she understands, sent her soldier husband a photograph ringed in revenge—that was it; she has never forgotten or forgiven him premature ejaculation. That’s the fact of it. The only time he didn’t end up by himself like an excited little boy was after they had parted for divorce. A lover only in name; a father who has never known he is one. Wasn’t that the real reason for abandoning him, never mind all the others more acceptable she gave to all around her: his conservatism, his love of sport that she didn’t share, the mistake, for which neither was to blame, of wartime marriages between people too young to commit themselves.
Wasn’t that the real reason for the passion for Bennet; not his remarkable beauty nor his attraction as an artist, a creator in clay, but his ability discovered on the mountain holiday to sustain what the other had failed at, to stay within her and exchange the burden of self.
Make the beast with two backs.
The emblem under which her Hitler Baby remains with her is that of the first image that drew her attention to his flesh. As he sat in her office one of his gestures brushed against a wire letter basket and loosened a scab from a scratch; he ignored it while she was aware of a trickle of blood below his rolled-up sleeve tracing a hieroglyph down his forearm—a warm message to her.
Spending on silk shirts and gold weights while the schoolgirl is kept short of clothes and once from a school camp wrote a pleading note because she hadn’t had money to buy toothpaste and was ashamed to keep using other girls’; she must understand her parents are not rich, she must not be indulged.
And then to come home fucked out.
The shower in One-Twenty-One, the dousing with perfume, the careful rearrangement of the hair (still so long, then, she could caress his breast with it)—nothing could disguise sexuality. A sign of life. Without knowing it, she had ringed herself just as she once ringed a photograph.
Mrs Stark at her desk was working on the Foundation’s yearly report and clerks and colleagues came in and out with documents she requested or advice she sought. The tension between tenant-labourers and white farmers had come into prominence alongside that of the old squatter removals and their consequences. The Foundation had had successes in overturning eviction notices farmers served on tenant-labourers for fear these might make a claim to their share-crop holdings under a future majority government, but already in one case success ended in tragedy. Philemon Maseko—in this very office he had spoken through an interpreter—was shot dead by a group of white farmers a few days after his case was won. There were no arrests, no names of the farmers published; the Foundation was to prosecute on behalf of the man’s family. Whether it was a general disturbance, with doubts about the apparent consequences of some of their work, that produced a distracted mood among Foundation people, or whether this was something she projected from herself, it was present. Even Oupa seemed inattentive and distant. There was agreement among senior colleagues that they ought to publish some sort of ‘crisis’ paper in addition to the report, urging that a drastic revision of property and land laws was necessary to forestall disaster in the growing conflict between white and black over access to land. She worked at night, at home, on a draft. Annie’s Lou shopped and did the cooking. Ben entertained his daughter become a guest, and her friend, taking them to the cinema or one of the so-called clubs where they could hear black groups play the kind of music they enjoyed. The night nurse creaked heavily up and down the passage to make herself tea.
No arsenal of repressive laws, no army, no police force can stabilize the situation—catch herself out in the jargon officialdom used to abstract and distract, draw the shroud of order over the body of Maseko with his bit of legal paper in his dead hand. No laws, no army, no police force can protect white farmers from the need and right of people desperate to find a place to live. She wrote and rewrote. Who will read what is happening on the farm Rietvlei, Mooiplaas, Soetfontein, Barendsdrif, at Odensville? The newspapers paraphrase a paragraph or two, even those who read the original will be those who do not know, have never seen Odensville or lived, neither as farmer nor tenant-labourer paid once a year when he harvests his crops, on the ‘pretty farm’, at the ‘sweet fountain’ or the river-crossing Barend claimed for himself. Who, understanding by ‘land reform’ the loss of his weekend fishing retreat, you chaps won’t be invited down any longer, will be interested to hear that without reform tenant-labourers are losing the mealies and millet they have worked the land for
, every day, for generations? How far from one another. The commissions in session, the politicians promising, the Foundation challenging the law by means of its interstices and the great principles of justice beyond it: these stand somewhere between. Through the will to formulate the Foundation’s understanding of the meaning of land, her own life was gathered in. She had no thought, no space in herself for anything else. When she stood up a moment to place her hands at the small of her back and arch it, face upturned to the ceiling, to ease tension, with the slight dizzy lurch there came the presence of Annick, Annie, about the house, although the girl might be out at that particular hour: the fact of her.
You’ve always been available to so many other people.
The seventeen-year-old schoolgirl alone in the kitchen over those textbooks she used to cover with fancy paper and stickers of film stars. She looks up from the conventional wisdom of adults she’s been taught, parents love one another, that’s the goal of sex children are taught, for parents their children come before everything and all others—her mother walks in warm from the body of another man. Fucked out. How can that schoolgirl be expected to know the family never was the way she’s been told families are, to accept that her own father was ‘another man’, her mother’s sexuality something that made a claim above the love of children?
There came to Vera, as what had been a long time waiting to be admitted: it was because of her that Ben’s daughter was a lesbian.
During the night she went into the room where he was dying. The black nurse was dozing in a chair, her uniform ridden up her thick thighs. Her stockings were stretched so tight over the flesh that they shone, catching the light silvery from the shaded lamp.
She looked at her father-in-law. His hand lay palm up outside the covers. She looked a long time. She knelt at the side of the bed and said close to his poor flabby ear, with prurient curiosity: What’s it like?
He couldn’t hear; or he heard only as an echo in an empty chamber. His head stirred, she thought—imagined?—as if he were somewhere shaking it. The side of his mouth twisted. It was the way a baby’s did when it was too young to smile—could be mistaken for a smile.
The Egyptians took with them furniture, jewellery, food, wine and oil, and attendants who must finish their lives in the next world. Even his false teeth had been taken from him. His watch, his time run out, had been handed to Ben for safekeeping. His attendant, as usual for whites in this country, was a black woman, caring for the failing functions of the body without shaming him. This black face crumpled with weariness, a deep division of effort frowning between the eyes, as if in perpetual anxiety to catch the crammed minibus that brought her back and forth from Moletsane or Chiawelo or Zondi to be with him on the last threshold.
There was no one else.
When the nurse saw he had crossed she would replace her knitting in its plastic bag, pack up her cardigan and tube of lip salve, collect her pay and maybe a gift of oranges from a box bought thriftily in bulk by Lou, and leave.
Chapter 12
Vera was sorting the clothes to give to charity, taking the opportunity of one of the public holidays renamed like the streets under successive regimes to reflect shifts in the ethos of power: Dingane’s Day, his victors oddly conceding the force of the black warrior-king’s name, changed to Day of the Covenant, commemorating his defeat by the Boers’ hard bargain with God, and become for the present something presumed semantically less offensive to blacks sold out by God: Day of the Vow. It was the first time she had handled a dead person’s clothes; life shed like a skin. Different garments marked the ambivalence of the species to which the old man could be ascribed. Why two dress suits and a white dinner jacket as well, whereas the shirts were so worn they were not worth giving away, and there seemed to be only three pairs of misshapen shoes. A silk dressing-gown with satin revers was folded in tissue paper in its presentation box, apparently never worn, and of a style (she shook it out) that suggested it must have been very costly, even in the Thirties in which it must have originated. The awareness of a survivor that one knows so little about the other and there will be no opportunity to know more, is usual; an accompaniment to death. Only speculation on the evidence of relics: one of the few known personae with which the old man could be identified was as an Englishman among expatriates of various roving nationalities in corporate outposts and Belgian colonial clubs in the Congo. There (Bennet had picked up only the barest outline of his own origin, with which to fascinate her in the mountains) the liaison with the half-Spanish half-Lebanese wife of a dealer in wild animal skins had led to his marriage to his mistress’s daughter. The dressing-gown had no place in the category of charity clothing for refugees or drought victims. But Ben wouldn’t wear it, it was hardly for him, either. She was just thinking that the one person she could imagine it on, to his pleasure, was young Oupa, she would take it to the Foundation and offer the gift in such a way that it would not be a hand-me-down—when the phone rang. There was Oupa’s voice. —Telepathy! You were in my mind—
Agitation made him hoarse. —Mrs Stark, please come over. To the flat.—
A call from Oupa on a public holiday? If he had been in her mind putting a living form into the dressing-gown that, for some reason, the old man had never brought to life, his immediate self had been placed by her, far removed, in however a young man like him would be spending a day at leisure. What on earth—an accident, a mugging, police raid, eviction—all the ordinary hazards that surrounded his life—she thought instantly of what it would be necessary to bring: money and a demeanour to pull rank with the police.
—Mrs Maqoma says you should come.—
—Mrs Maqoma? But what is all this about? Why Mrs Maqoma?—
She heard he was being interrupted by voices in the background. His hand must have cupped the receiver and lifted again. —Please, Mrs Stark, come.—
—Oupa, who’s crying there, tell me what’s happening— But the call was cut off; she had the impression someone had taken the receiver from him and replaced it.
In the living-room Ben was listening to his favourite Shostakovich piano concerto while reading. She stood about a moment; under her own sense of alarm was the serenity he had regained for himself, alone with her, now that his father and daughter were no longer in the house. —There’s just been such a peculiar call from Oupa.—
He looked up over his glasses. —On a holiday? What’s he want.—
—God knows. He said Sally says I must come to the flat— (she corrected)—his flat. Sally—.
—What’s Sally doing there?—
—How would I know?— All she did know was that she had forgotten her promise to call Sally back when she telephoned just before the old man died.
—D’you want me to go with you … what’s that you’ve got— The glasses slipped, his strange deep eyes rested on the dressing-gown lying over her arm; the eyes belonging along with the garment to some unexplained aspect of the old man’s being, perhaps even belonging together?—the mistress’s gift to her lover, and the son her daughter had borne him—in the double liaison out of which Bennet emerged.
—No … no, I’d better do as they asked.—
Oupa belonged to her Foundation responsibilities, Ben had no obligation to get up from his chair, his books, his music. She lifted her arm: —Grandpops’s finery.— Annick’s childish name for the old man.
—When would he ever wear it.—
—Of course not. Someone must’ve given it to him. Long ago, it’s old-fashioned luxury.—
The son put out his sallow hand, as he could do now that her house was theirs alone again, to touch hers as she left, spoke drily. —Some woman.—
Chapter 13
Oupa must have been hanging about at the door waiting to open it to her. There he was. His curly-lashed eyes were lowered sulkily as if to ward off reproach and his tongue comforted dry lips before he spoke. —Sorry. It’s her mother made me call you here.—
—And what is this all about?— But they wer
e already entering the room where her voice invaded a silence so charged she might have been shouting. She had the sudden impulse of distaste—premonition—to turn and leave: what am I doing here? What were they all doing here? Sally sat upright, thrust forward on the single armchair; Didy stood with his back to the television set against images without sound; and on the floor, shockingly, face hidden on her knees and arms shielding her head, was the girl, Mpho. Now Vera, with Oupa a step behind her: all might have been thrust by a stage director—you here, you there. Each waited for someone to speak. Only Didy flicked a blink of greeting at Vera’s presence.
Sally’s face was that of a stranger confronting Vera, broad with hostility and accusation. —Ask your favourite, ask the man you introduced her to, the one she met in your house, the one you liked so much that we let her go around with him and his friends. Ask him.—
Didy dropped back his head and expelled a breath of distressed embarrassment. He made some sort of appeal to her in her own language.
—No, let Vera ask him!—
—I don’t know why you have to drag Vera into it.—
—Well if there’s trouble … among friends … we’re all in it.— Vera lied against the impulse to back out.
—You knew he was married, you know she’s a child, why did you let us believe he and his crowd would be nice company for her, safe? Why didn’t you warn us—
Vera turned from Sally’s assault to Oupa, uncertain whether to defend or accuse. —What’s happened with you and the girl?—
—He’s been sleeping with my child, my daughter. I take her to a doctor and I find she’s pregnant. That’s what’s happened. That’s the result of the nice people you introduced her to! Not a word from you, Vera, not a word of warning, you must have known she was running around with him—
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