—There, you know it all. Tell them you’re saying it in their language for me.—
He became again as he was when he was among his own people at Odensville; the cadence of his voice, his gestures, transformed a fragmented life into wholeness, he knew exactly how to do it, it came to him from within himself in symbiosis with the murmuring group gathered. They understood the tradition and she understood, without words, without tradition, their understanding. It was not true; the son and husband of this place left behind did not think only of his family, he yearned for a girl who had seen things and possessed knowledge he would never have, he did not die peacefully, his body, in attempts made to keep it alive, suffered tortures his interrogators in prison had not thought of. It was not true, in fact, but this stranger she had brought with her made it so beyond evidence. Who was Mrs Stark, herself to some the forbidding eminence of the Legal Foundation, to others the procuress of convenient abortion, to know what was between the young man and the clumsy-bodied young woman with her peasant stance and the classical three lines of beauty round her neck? Who was to know whether or not the sister in charge was right when she said, finally, he doesn’t feel what we’re doing to him?
Vera had cleansed her hands of death, with the others. In the car driving to the city she reflected differently, now. —At least we saw him come back. At least he’s home.—
The sonorous, lyrical, stately persona created by the company in which Zeph had found himself had retired somewhere within where it had its place and would never leave him. He spoke out of what he had perfectly reconciled with it, in his dealings with laws made to manipulate him, and the entry into relationships for which there was no pre-existing formula of hostility or friendship, suspicion or trust; combinations thrown together by compatibilities discovered, side by side, in conflict and in change. —He didn’t want to go back, did he.—
How did Rapulana know? He’d seen him only a few times, first at Odensville and then at the Foundation, and, of course, at the party in Vera’s house. —He’d had something to drink that night … yes … he told me he was going to do what he thought about when he was in prison. He was going to disappear and travel the world, he was going to Cuba—to England, China, specially Cuba—everywhere.—
The end of the joy-ride.
Chapter 18
Lucky to be alive.
Ivan paid the courtesy visit expected of a son’s interest in his mother’s work and the assumed interest of her colleagues in her family; the Foundation is not a business, where directors and staff have no connection outside the purpose of making money. The very nature of their work, concerned with the condition of personal lives in communities, influences their own sense of community. One or two of the older lawyers remembered him as a schoolboy or youth; others, such as Lazar Feldman, exchanged ready-made friendliness established by proxy through their familiarity with his mother. That he looked so like her made this oddly easy. Chatting with him, Lazar remarked how sorry he was to have had to let Vera down over the trip to Oupa’s funeral, he really would have liked to be there.
From the Foundation, Ivan took Vera out to lunch. Just the two of them, the son’s treat, she walking before him to the table he had reserved in the quietest corner of a good restaurant, the succession to clandestine lunches taken with a lover.
—Is this the time when we compare notes?— She was contentedly flippant, using the phrasing he would remember from the days when he came from boarding school and the right moment suddenly arrived for wariness to dissolve, so that they had no age, either of them, moved into knowing each other as an element common to them.
—I was thinking all the time I was there—(he read up and down the wine list, looking for something special) you’re lucky, with the Foundation. They’re such a good crowd, so absolutely dedicated but intelligently tough—you know what I mean? None of the feeling that it’s a refuge for the well-meaning who can’t face the kind of world I work in, can’t face that you have to deal with it, with the Haves, if you’re going to achieve anything for the Have-nots. And the way they value you and you’re so completely absorbed in what you do … lucky.—
—Are you thinking of yourself?—
—Myself? How, myself?—
—Oh I’m not suggesting you haven’t been successful, exceptionally so. But that doesn’t always mean you don’t sometimes think there could have been something else. Something you didn’t know about at the time; time of choice.—
He said it for her: —There’s always something you didn’t know about at the time. Are you going to have meat, then, with that wine? D’you still like calamari so much—we could have a small starter, and a half bottle of white, first.— The habit of discretion in their working lives—his in banking, hers in the confidentiality of the law—tacitly guarded their tongues while the waiter stood by.
—I was thinking about Dad—Ben. What he’s doing. It’s marginal in his life, somehow. He laughs about it. But I wonder. No … I actually see.— At once he sensed intrusion: leaning on the table his mother linked her hands in a single fist and covered her mouth against it. —I don’t know what the centre is. He says this luggage thing is to provide … for the two of you. That’s all.—
—All this concern, it’s something new, with him; age syndrome, turning in on himself. If you live here, the future—not the one you can provide for with suitcases—the future’s more like a pile of bricks. You can only opt to help sort out a few.—
—According to a plan you believe in.—
—Yes. Pretty much.—
—And you’ve got the satisfaction that whatever goes wrong with it, at least what you’re doing now realizes something of it, in advance.—
—Oh— she lifted her head, fanned out her hands —So little, such a dab of cement filling in a corner. Typical that I’m using the old image of a building, while people have nowhere to live.—
—They were telling me, Odensville, what are the others— is it Moutse?—people with the right to live in these places, now. Of course it must be a satisfaction, it’s there with you, in your busyness, your preoccupation—I don’t mean that as a reproach—I see it in your face, everything about you since I’ve been here. But him. In him. None of that, in him. And I’m in London, Annie—well he mourns for Annie, d’you know that, you’d think she’d died—that’s another story. What has he got apart from his damn suitcases?—
She looked up at him to see what he knew.
—Me.—
The waiter arrived with plates ranged along his arm. Another hovered with the censer of a giant pepper-mill. The wine was uncorked, Ivan lifted his glass and mouthed a kiss blown to his mother across the table; —Where are the Indian waiters there used to be when I was a kid? They’re all African now.—
—Moved up a rung on the ladder. They’ve taken the place of whites who used to serve in shops—men’s outfitters and so on. You’re like an old man, reminiscing! That’s what happens when you exile yourself.—
They ate and drank, in the charm each invested in the other during absence. In this variation of meals both had eaten as the opening act of a love affair, there was the same calculation going on of how presumptuous each might be, approaching the other. He judged he had cajoled her sufficiently, in the persona of her small boy become an attractive man, out from behind the line of intrusion set up by her. —You didn’t tell us Feldman didn’t go with you to that funeral. You know you shouldn’t have gone alone.—
—I didn’t go alone.— Head cocked at him.
—Oh. That was sensible. But how is it you didn’t mention Feldman was ill and you were going with someone else? Ben thought you were with someone he trusts, back on that road again.—
—I took along a friend he knows, the man who’s just won the Odendaal case, there couldn’t be anyone safer to be with.—
—But Vera.— He tapped a dance between a knife and fork. —You puzzle me.—
—My darling, how do I puzzle you?— Her face thrust towards him in a smile.
>
He wasn’t to be turned aside by any ploy of motherly affection. —Why didn’t you let him know it wasn’t Feldman? He thought you were safely with one person, you were with another. When you talked to us about the funeral you didn’t mention Feldman wasn’t there. It’s childish.— He has the right to be critical with her; that’s the kind of edgy relationship both are aware exists between them.
—I don’t know. It’s the usual form of evasion, to say so. Perhaps I’ll find out now you’ve mentioned it.—
Fascinated, he hesitated, sat back in his chair, and then righted himself. He spoke with an intense curiosity. —Do you often lie to him?—
—Is keeping something for yourself lying.—
—I suppose so. Even if you manage to put it that way.—
—And do you?—
—Who to?—
His mother rounded her eyes exaggeratedly, pulled a face: what are the limits of what you will tell me, what can we divine of one another. —Well, the Hungarian.—
He laughed, and then shook his head, down, down, at what had been come upon. —Well yes. As you say, the Hungarian. She wants a child. From me. For instance, there’s that. I tell her no, it’ll spoil what’s between us, I want her to myself. But that’s not what I want. There’s Adam, one hostage enough between me and a woman I couldn’t go on living with.—
—So you don’t envisage going on living with the Hungarian.—
—She’s got a name, Mother!—Eva. No, we get along well but I’m getting old enough to realize what you don’t know at twenty; life isn’t going to end with the catastrophe of hitting the forties, you’re very likely going to have to continue for a long stretch ahead with what—with whom—you take on now. Eva. It’s not like with you and Ben, something for life. I’m not like him—alas, I suppose. He took you away from that first husband of yours, at least that’s what he’s sure he did, I think it’s the basis of his feeling that he belongs to you entirely. You’ve always been and you are all that he has.—
—You can’t belong to someone else. It’s love-making gives the illusion! You may long to, but you can’t.— She stopped, as if the mouthful of wine she swallowed were some potion that would suffuse them both with clarity. —You see, Ben made a great mistake. Choice.— A flick of a glance returned her conspirator to the earlier remark: something not known about at the time.—He gave up everything he needed, in exchange for what he wanted. The sculpture. Even an academic career—all right, it didn’t look brilliant, but he might have been a professor by now, mightn’t he? What d’you think? That wouldn’t have been marginal? He put it all on me.— She was excited to continue by a sense of approaching danger, saying too much; doing exactly that, herself: putting the weight of all this on a son, a grown child. There is a fine limit beyond which a son or daughter may turn away in revulsion. Parents must be defined as such.
—What on you?—
—The whole weight of his life. That love he had. I love him but it’s hard to remember how much I was in love with him. That love affair that started on a holiday in the Drakensberg, it hasn’t moved, for him. It hasn’t been taken up into other things. Children born, friends disappearing in exile, in prison, killings around us, the death of his father in the house, the whole country changing. It hasn’t moved. Not even his confusion over Annie has shifted it, not even your divorce, because both he’s understood only in relation to his own feelings in the Drakensberg, he hasn’t any other criterion. The violence that was always there, pushing people out into the veld, beating them up at police stations, and the gangster violence that’s taking the opportunities of change, now, that’s killed Oupa Sejake—even that he understands now through me, it’s because it’s something that happened to me, it’s the bullet that went through my leg. Love. There’s been so much else, since then. Ivan, I can’t live in the past.—
—I wish I were nearer. For him. Because I always loved you best, as a kid.—
An offering of complicity she did not choose to see, held out to her.
She was examining him lingeringly. —Yes, so far away. You are his favourite. His only child, now. That’s how it turned out.—
Theirs was the last table still occupied but they sat on unnoticing, accepting coffee, more and more coffee, like lovers reluctant to part.
—You don’t need anything, Mother.—
In the clatter of waiters clearing tables he touched her cheek to soften what she might take as judgment.
—On the contrary, I’m finding the answer presents itself before the need. I know only then that it existed.—
They went out into the street roused with wine and confidences, laughing.
‘Do I lie to him often?’
How alike we are, it doesn’t end with the mask that is the face. He knows me because he himself was the first lie. One day I’ll be so old we’ll even talk about that. And he will say, I knew all along, although he couldn’t possibly know except through the code of genes and the language of blood.
Every time Vera leaves Ben out—isn’t that simply a different kind of unfaithfulness? Different from leaving him out by making love with someone else, that’s all. And just as after those times of love-making in One-Twenty-One, she ‘makes it up’ to him. Not by repairing the omission of telling him Rapulana instead of Feldman had accompanied her back along that road where she, too, could have met her death and left him to live without her—the trivial omission, as it could have been presented, of one name for another. When Ivan went off to London she asked Ben to come with her to Cape Town, where there were problems for her to solve at the Foundation’s branch office. Ivan was gone; —We can see something of Annie.— If he was lonely, he must be reminded that he had a daughter.
Annie insisted that they stay with Lou and her. Vera and Ben had never been in this common household. It was everything Annie’s parents’ was not. Vera’s house, that Ben had entered to live among the wartime makeshift provided by her first husband’s parents, donated beds and mismatched chairs, was aesthetically unified—if it could be called that—by coffee-stained newspapers and journals where fish-moth scuttled, grotesque woodcuts and figurines bought at charity sales of African art, photographs of the children who once lived there, poster souvenirs of travel, bureaux lacking handles, box files and old utensils that were meant to be thrown away but might come in useful. From this collage of hazard Annie had taken what had been consciously created within the house, the female torsos Ben had sculpted years ago. They were encountered in a Victorian house balanced on a steep street, one at the archway into the livingroom and the other at the centre of a small patio created by knocking down a wall, Lou explained. Old Cape furniture with the patina of acorns smelled of beeswax. There was a single huge abstract painting that suggested the sea. Flowers filled the fireplaces and plants trailed in the remodelled bathrooms. The kitchen was ranged like a surgery with glass-fronted and steel-topped equipment. Indolent cats slept, hetaerae on a velvet chaise-longue, in the room Ben and Vera were allotted. Whisky in a cut-crystal decanter and ice in an Italian-designed insulated bucket; bedside books, Thomas Bowler views of the nineteenth-century Cape, and a collection of poetry by black women writers. The Bowler, presumably, was a guess at what Ben would appreciate, and the other, for Vera, chosen by Lou on the principle that the lives of blacks were Vera’s particular province and that women ought to be, if they weren’t.
Ben was alarmed to notice that Vera limped slightly going to bed up the narrow staircase with its perfectly restored brass stair-rods. —You were all right at home, what’s gone wrong—
—There aren’t any stairs at home, are there!—
Annie was called to examine her mother’s leg while he stood by ignoring dismissal of his alarm, his frown turned away to ward off the example of the young man who had been with her on the road and died of injuries from which, like her, he was supposed to be recovered. —There’s probably some slight shortening in the tendons, really nothing. It’s inevitable, Daddy, the human body replaces, repairs, a
nd in some instances it can adapt one function to substitute for another, but nothing’s ever quite the way it was.—
—I’m not even aware of it, I told you, Ben. Thank god I’m not a ballet dancer and I’m too old to enter a beautiful-legs contest, eh. I haven’t worn anything but trousers for years— nobody sees those scars.—
In the bedroom, naked, she smiled at him as he lay in the bed. —Nobody but you.— Nakedness in men and women who have lived together a long time is clothed by familiarity, a garment of self. Now she presented her body before him as nude again, consciously so. If that body was damaged by births and time, so that vanity would save her from presenting it before anyone else, for him (there’s the advantage) it took the beautiful form of its known capacities, the flesh remembered everything between them. Vera seduced Ben again, for all that she withheld from him, she flung herself into his embrace, took the force of his entry into her body as a diver plunges to emerge unharmed from under a high surf. They were making love the way a man and woman do, in this house where, on the other side of a wall, two women lay enlaced. The awareness became a kind of excitement, a defiance for her, an assertion for him.
In the early morning they stood against the wooden balustrade of the verandah outside the room. The black velvet curtain of mountain held back the day, breathing smoke from its folds. As the sun splayed over the top it rounded up in light a flock of pines huddled like sheep on its flank. —When did Annie take those torsos from the house?—
—Oh, the last time she came. After the old man died, don’t you remember? She had them packed and sent down by road transport.—
—I know nothing about it.—
—But she must have asked you?—
—She asked you?—
—Of course, and I understood you’d agreed, I thought you’d given them to her.—
—I would never have given those to her.—
—I can’t believe she’d do that.—
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