Entertaining Angels

by Marita van der Vyver

  No, thought Griet, George didn’t have a sufficiently Greek temperament for that. She was the glass-smasher in their house. She was the one who lost control of her emotions, throwing things and slamming doors. Finally even hitting her husband.

  She’d slapped his face one night, blind, deaf and dumb with rage, and then pounded him with her fists. It was definitely a low point in her life – nearly as low as the oven episode. If she were to compare low points.

  And George had just stood there as though he were carved from stone, his face expressionless, no shock or disappointment or even satisfaction at her pathetic outburst. If only he’d wanted to hit her back! But George would never let himself go like that. George would never hit anyone, she realised that night with devastating certainty. The only emotion he had displayed during their seven years together was sometimes to groan slightly more loudly during an orgasm. And that time he smashed the car window. And that one time, long ago, when he’d wept.

  It was when Griet had decided enough was enough and moved in with one of her girlfriends. She’d scarcely had time to dry her eyes before she was involved with another man. It was nothing more than a crutch to lean on during those first unbearable months without George. But George reacted like a child who has discarded a toy and then desperately wants it back when he sees another child playing with it.

  He rang her three times a day. He invited her to the most expensive restaurants in town. He even sent her flowers. As a last resort, he hammered on her friend’s front door late one night.

  ‘I love you, Griet,’ he mumbled when she finally opened the door. He was flopped against the door jamb and his breath smelt of whisky. ‘I want to marry you. I want to have a child with you.’

  She didn’t know what to say. Her heart wanted him. Her body wanted him.

  ‘Why do you have to drink yourself into a stupor before you can tell me this, George?’

  ‘I love you.’

  And then he wept. She opened the door wider and allowed him in. What woman could resist a weeping man?

  That was how her unfortunate marriage began, with booze and tears, and that’s how it dragged on. The wife had cried buckets in this house. The man had drunk buckets.

  ‘Right.’ Petra got up to rinse the newspaper ink from her hands. ‘What next?’

  If Petra’s ambitious husband hadn’t decided to study in New York, Griet would never have landed up in a depressing flat with a lethal gas oven and blocked drains. If Petra hadn’t wanted to take a bite of the Big Apple, she would have arranged a proper place to stay for her sister long ago. Petra could lay on polar bears in the Sahara and camels in Antarctica. Just give her a telephone and a day or two.

  Now she’d pitched up on holiday unexpectedly, just in time to organise her sister’s emotional and physical move. Deus ex machina, thought Griet gratefully, if there ever was such a thing. She rang George’s attorney – Griet simply hadn’t been able to scrape together the courage to do it – and it had only taken her a couple of minutes to arrange that they should come and pack Griet’s things today.

  ‘But a day isn’t long enough,’ Griet had protested. ‘We’re talking about the possessions of seven years.’

  ‘A day will be enough if I help you,’ was Petra’s determined answer. ‘Come on, Griet, you aren’t Elize Botha moving out of Tuynhuys.’

  ‘It isn’t as though I can walk in there and chew through the house like a caterpillar. I have to sort out my towels and leave his behind. We don’t have His-and-Hers sets.’

  ‘You can sort and I’ll pack. And then we’ll ask Marko and one of your strong men friends to come and help us load.’

  ‘I don’t have strong men friends,’ Griet said despondently.

  ‘I’m only talking about a couple of muscles, Griet,’ Petra sighed. ‘You must know someone with a couple of muscles?’

  Tienie had muscles, thought Griet, but she was hibernating somewhere in a beach house with her new lover.

  In the end she asked Jans. He had muscles and he was reliable.

  ‘Now for the books,’ said Griet, dragging her feet unwillingly to the living room.

  ‘I’ll just make sure all the boxes are securely fastened,’ called the practical Petra.

  Perhaps it was a good thing that she was granted a few minutes on her own in front of the wall-to-wall bookcase in her living room. This was the most difficult task of the day. A bookcase is the heart of a house, she’d always believed, whether it was a plank and brick affair in a student flat or an impressive wall unit in a designer residence. When you took the books away, the heart stopped beating.

  ‘Come on, Griet, there’s no time to stand and mope,’ her sister said behind her.

  Griet took a couple of paperbacks off the lowest shelf. Shakespeare’s sonnets and a handful of her best-loved French-women: Colette and Simone de Beauvoir and Anaïs Nin. The diaries of Virginia Woolf, the poems of Sylvia Plath. And it wasn’t only the grim and tortured that she’d find on these shelves either. Everything she’d ever wanted to know about angels: Paradise Lost, Revolt of the Angels, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Each volume a voyage of discovery to her own heart.

  ‘Did this place ever make you really happy?’ asked her sister, pulling a stout box closer.

  ‘It isn’t the house’s fault that I wasn’t happy.’ She passed another handful of French books to Petra. Camus, she noticed. Naturally. ‘I was crazy about this house, about the spiral staircase and the attic room and the squirrels in the garden. If George and I couldn’t be happy together here, we couldn’t be happy together anywhere.’

  ‘But George has been threatening for years to sell the whole caboodle.’

  ‘George will always put the blame for his own personality on something else. It was always either the house or me that made him gloomy. The house was an easier scapegoat: it didn’t answer back.’

  Griet shook her head over four library books George’s sons had taken out shortly before she left. Nearly half a year ago. Maybe she wasn’t the most exemplary wife in the world, but she had at least seen to it that the children returned their library books on time.

  ‘Do you think he’ll sell it now?’

  ‘I think he knows, in his heart of hearts, he’ll be unhappy in any house.’ Griet felt anxious all over again about the children’s welfare when they spent weekends here. Their father hadn’t taken them to the library for six months. How was she to know whether he gave them enough to eat? ‘I think he feels less threatened now that I’ve gone.’

  ‘Until the next woman moves in and makes everything unbearable again?’

  ‘I don’t know, I’m furious about being kicked out, but maybe I should be grateful that I’m the one who can escape all the unpleasant memories.’

  Griet fetched a chair from the dining room so she could reach the books on the highest shelves. Every room in this house was a battlefield in an extended war, she realised. The long dining room table was a trench in which they’d spent hours of silence, the double bed in the bedroom little better than a minefield. The kitchen was the scene of the fiercest assaults, where she’d bombarded him with accusations, screaming, and he’d tried to force her to surrender with annihilating arguments.

  They were so obsessed that they didn’t even spare the bathroom. Long ago they’d sometimes had sex behind a closed bathroom door, the shower taps open full to fool the children. In the last months they’d employed the same tactics to drown out the endless arguments. And in the end they hadn’t hidden either the sex or the rows from the children.

  Children are not as easily deceived as adults, Griet had learnt. They didn’t have any problems believing in Santa Claus or talking animals, but they knew when you were trying to make out you were happily married.

  ‘I don’t believe it!’ Petra picked up a tattered War and Peace, its cover repaired with tape. ‘I thought this book was like The Satanic Verses. People like to keep it in the house to impress their friends, but just try to find someone who has read it from cover t
o cover. I swear this is the first time I can see anyone’s read it.’

  ‘I’ve also read Don Quixote,’ said Griet. ‘Do you think it’s because I’m an oldest child?’

  ‘It’s probably got something to do with your horoscope.’ Petra shook her head as she packed the book. ‘Only someone who has struggled through War and Peace would endure seven years in a toxic relationship.’

  ‘What kind of relationship?’

  ‘Toxic,’ said her sister, who believed in Linda Goodman’s astrology and Cosmopolitan’s psychology. ‘Couples who poison each other. Like Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’.

  I am, thought Griet, I’m afraid. And not just of Virginia Woolf and her watery death. Can’t a poisonous relationship also be a kind of suicide? Look Back in Anger?

  ‘You get ordinary people,’ she tried to explain, more to herself than to her sister, ‘and you get obsessional people. Obsessional people smoke too much or drink too much or …’

  ‘Get up in the middle of the night to scrub floors?’

  Griet looked down at Petra, who resembled Grandma Lina more closely than any of the Swart sisters. Dark hair, dark eyes and olive skin. Not quite white, the family had whispered when she was young. Petra’s reputation in the advertising industry was just as important to her as having the whitest washing in the street had been to Grandma Lina. But she hadn’t inherited her grandmother’s fears, thought Griet: those had been destined for the oldest sister.

  In the fairy tale about the twelve princesses who danced the shoes right off their feet every night, the youngest was the timid sister, the one who got premonitions and heard strange noises. The oldest sister had disappeared through the gap in the floor fearlessly, eager to go and dance underground.

  But long ago she’d also been fearless, Griet remembered. Life had made her frightened.

  ‘Do you think I take after Grandma Lina?’

  ‘You live your obsessions out in another way, Griet.’

  That was the difference between her and Adam, she realised. He lived out his fantasies and she lived out her obsessions. She got down from the chair with an armful of collections that she wanted to pack personally: Die Volledige Sprokies van Grimm, The Complete Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales, Die Märchen der Brüder Grimm, so she’d know where they were when she needed them. She looked up, surprised, when her sister took her arm.

  ‘I wish we could have stopped you,’ Petra said quietly. ‘Before it was too late.’

  ‘You couldn’t have done anything.’

  Even Louise couldn’t stop her shutting her eyes tightly and leaping over the chasm.

  ‘Face the facts, Griet. You’ve got one of those long relationships that’s going nowhere,’ Louise had warned her long ago, one of the few people who knew her well enough to be perfectly candid. ‘Except perhaps backwards. I know what I’m talking about, Griet. I learnt my lesson with my own disastrous marriage.’

  ‘You can’t compare relationships,’ said Griet stubbornly. That was the last time Louise said anything critical about her friend’s relationship.

  The most wonderful thing happened to me today [Louise wrote from London], and not a day too soon. I have been seriously considering poisoning my husband this past week. It’s easy with the ghastly coffee we get here, he wouldn’t even taste the difference if I stirred arsenic into it. Otherwise I could shove him into the Thames. If he doesn’t drown, a couple of mouthfuls of that filthy river water should be as good as poison.

  I got a letter from Randy Rony. Remember that insatiable Israeli I had a fling with in Rome in my salad days? We met on the Spanish Steps and screwed just about everywhere except inside the Sistine Chapel. For years afterwards I wouldn’t touch men who weren’t circumcised. Well, he’s based in Hong Kong now, and he’s coming to London for some conference later this year. ‘I’ll never forget you,’ he writes, ‘and the things you did to me! I’d love to see you again.’

  Griet and her husband even fought in the nursery. They’d even fought over the nursery. He’d suggested that she and the baby should sleep in the study on the top floor so that he wouldn’t be disturbed at night. She’d told her friends as though it were a joke. She didn’t realise he was serious.

  When she was eight months pregnant, her gynaecologist assured her that nothing could go wrong now. She began to believe that, like most other women, she was capable of giving birth.

  It was time to get the baby’s room ready. She’d read somewhere that yellow walls can make a child happy. Silly, she thought, and went off to buy yellow paint. She was prepared to sell her soul to the devil for her child’s happiness. Why not try yellow walls too? She put an overall over her enormous stomach and began painting one of the three bedrooms on the ground floor yellow.

  George was sprawled on the sofa in front of the TV. Maybe the programme was even worse than the usual fare; something must have disturbed him before he appeared behind her in the doorway.

  ‘Since you insist on making life totally miserable for me,’ he said in tortured tones, ‘I’ll sleep in the study on the top floor from now on.’

  Don’t allow yourself to get upset, she admonished herself as she painted on, it isn’t good for an unborn baby.

  ‘I don’t expect you to get up if the baby cries at night,’ she said with her back to him. ‘But it would be nice if you were somewhere in the vicinity.’

  ‘You know I battle with insomnia! It’ll be unbearable for me to hear a child screaming.’

  ‘All fathers think it’s unbearable in the beginning.’ The hand with the brush was suspended motionless in mid-air, but she managed to keep her voice calm. ‘You’ll get used to it.’

  ‘I already have two children, Griet.’

  She didn’t trust her voice to say any more.

  ‘You are the one who wanted this one,’ he said and stalked off. ‘It’s your responsibility.’

  The brush was hanging at her side and the yellow paint dripped on to her canvas shoes. She gazed at the half yellow wall before her, wondering what to do. What does a woman do when her husband tells her that the baby who’s to be born in a month’s time is her responsibility?

  She could bawl him out. She could run after him and pummel him with her fists. She could try to force him to take responsibility for something that happened to him, just for once in his life. But she had to stay calm for the sake of the unborn baby. She squatted down on her haunches and began to cry.

  I’ve gone right overboard [wrote Louise]. I really want to pick up the fling where we left it ten years ago, but I’m simply not the nymph I was then. He’ll die of shock if he sees me naked. I mean, we all have cellulite on our thighs, but I’ve got it on my ankles! I can’t even remember whether I ever had a waist. And my stomach hangs in these loose folds; like floppy pancakes, just less appetising.

  And who knows what the hell has become of him? He’s probably changed so much that I won’t even recognise him. He’s probably turned into a seedy businessman in a polyester suit. Bald, with a paunch. Not that I deserve anything else, with my cellulite. On the one hand I almost hope he’s become revolting, then I don’t have to feel so bad about my own deterioration. But just picture it, Griet: me with my cellulite and my flabby stomach and he with his bald head and his paunch meeting in a hotel room to try and relive the passion of our youth!

  À la recherche du temps perdu!

  Thank heaven, thought Griet with a pile of children’s books in her arms, she’d emptied out the nursery months ago. Returned the borrowed crib and pram, removed the framed pictures and the pinboard, packed the toys and most of the books into boxes. The baby clothes had been carefully folded in a suitcase. One of her sisters would need them one day, she consoled herself. All that remained of the nursery were the sunny yellow walls.

  ‘Dr Seuss’s Sleepbook!’ Petra yelped. ‘It was one of my favourites before I went to school!’

  ‘If you ever have a baby one day, I’ll give you all my children’s books. I’ll r
egard it as my duty. If it depended on you and François, the poor kid would only get the Wall Street Journal to read.’

  ‘Come on, Griet, if it depended on you, the child would get more books than food!’

  ‘Maybe not altogether a bad thing.’

  Most of the books on the next shelf belonged to her husband. Politics and logic, she thought gloomily, that was all that was going to be left behind in this house. And unpleasant memories.

  But just suppose he hasn’t turned into a seedy businessman [Louise wrote yearningly]. What if he’s just as attractive as ever? What if he’s only become a little short-sighted (or even blind) so he’ll find me attractive too? What if I leave my husband and he his wife (he must be married) and we go to Hong Kong together and live happily ever after?

  Or at least until the colony reverts to China in a few years. There’s no such thing as for ever and ever any more, is there?

  22

  How Many Princesses Can Dance on the Point of a Needle?

  Once upon a time there lived a shepherd’s son who became famous far and wide because he had a good answer for any question he was asked. When a princess asked him how many drops of water there were in the sea, he answered, ‘If the king stopped all the rivers so that not one more drop of river water flowed into the sea, I’d be able to tell you how many drops there are in the sea.’

  George Moore grew up in the Orange Free State, the youngest of three sons of a woman who’d trained as a music teacher and a father who’d left school in Standard Six and gone to work on the farm. His mother was an angel, everyone said, but, like many angels, she didn’t like people to touch her. Not even her own children. His father would have been happy to hug his sons, but fathers weren’t supposed to touch their sons much. And his sons were scared of him because his breath stank of drink and the devil. George spent his life trying to balance on the fence between these two personalities. The chill of the soul and the fever of the body.