Up Against the Night

by Justin Cartwright

  Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

  But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

  If this be error and upon me prov’d,

  I never writ, nor no man ever lov’d.’

  Lucinda smiles as she finishes. I am stunned. Her voice is wonderfully and unexpectedly rich.

  ‘It is so beautiful it makes me cry,’ she says.

  ‘Crying is a family weakness. You spoke it beautifully, darling. Perfect.’

  ‘It is so beautiful. Will you explain some of the words to me?’ Nellie asks.

  ‘Of course, Nell.’

  Nellie asks Lucinda the meaning of ‘bark’ and Lucinda tells her it means boat, as in ‘embark’. I watch them together, Lucinda translating cheerfully. I ask Lucinda if she will read the poem at the wedding.

  ‘Okay. I will. If you and Nellie really want me to.’

  We do.

  I drive out to the airport to get Alec. I see that one of the boxy little taxis has rolled off the road into a culvert. A police van is there and an ambulance arrives. Four feet poke out from underneath a grey blanket beside the road.

  I drive cautiously to the airport. When he emerges from the sliding glass doors, it is immediately obvious to me that Alec is in poor shape. He sees me looking and tells me that he has had a minor stroke. He says it is only a transient ischaemic attack: ‘That means it has gone, as the name suggests. I will live. But I am not allowed to drive for six months, which is a bugger. And I am not really supposed to fly either, but luckily I have friends in high places.’

  The stroke was brought on when he found that his girlfriend, the Latvian lap dancer and budding anthropologist, had stolen a large sum of money from him before leaving for the Baltic forests. He asks me not to tell anybody.

  ‘I don’t want to look like a silly old fool. Which of course I am.’

  ‘Have you been in touch with her?’

  ‘No, I have not. What a stupid question. My lawyer has put the Latvian police on to her. But it’s not really about the money, Frank, it’s more about my naïveté in convincing myself that she liked me. It’s horrible to think that all that sex was a ploy to steal my money.’

  ‘Did she take a lot?’

  ‘Five hundred grand.’

  ‘Jesus, that is a lot. Still, you’ve got plenty.’

  ‘As I said, it’s not about the money. Listen, I envy you marrying someone like Nellie. There is something wholesome about her.’

  ‘You always say that.’

  ‘Yes I do, because I mean it.’

  ‘That she is wholesome? Is that a compliment?’

  ‘Absolutely, in my book it is, and by the way I am not convinced that you deserve her.’

  ‘She doesn’t do lap dancing.’

  ‘Thank God for small mercies.’

  He idealises Nellie because he can’t really get on with women and their more complex feelings. So he has created his own image of Nellie, the perfect woman, wholesome and fragrant. Upper-class Englishmen of a certain age are often awkward and dismissive of their wives. This may be a phenomenon that is passing, but Alec is beached, a right whale on the strand. I imagine his ex-girlfriend is even now planning to build her family a lovely home in the deep forest, impressing them all with her London sophistication. Despite his many millions and many wives and many girlfriends, Alec has never understood women because at a certain level he is frightened of them.

  He is not staying with us because all beds are taken, but has booked himself into an expensive hotel looking across the Atlantic to Robben Island. He would like to come to the house later, perhaps for supper. He looks a little confused. I drop him off; he is walking more carefully than I remember, as if he isn’t certain of where his feet will fall at any moment. But he is already instructing the porters and greeters vigorously as he heads for the lobby. I feel the urge to hug him, and he looks a little reluctant, but soon relents and I hold him close for a minute at least.

  ‘You’ve always been a friend, Alec.’

  ‘I love you, Frank. Before you get nervous, I love you in a manly way.’

  I drive back along the coast road. I take note of the sea conditions and the wind and the mountain, with its blankets of cloud pouring over the flat table like dry ice before evaporating. I stop to watch seals – the active branch of the seal colony – driving an unseen shoal of fish into a small bay. The sardines have arrived. The seals are corralling them, working like sheepdogs. Now they have the fish trapped; they dart about, diving and leaping at high speed, to keep the fish in a compact group. They emerge from the depths, swallowing and leaping, bright silver fish in their mouths. Their indolent colleagues at the harbour should see this and learn.

  When I am living here beneath the mountain and close to the sea, I feel alive. I have read that mountains were revered in prehistory because they were believed to be the gathering point of all sacred knowledge. And this mountain above us, always in view, always changing with the wind and cloud, has a similar effect on me. It is probably no different from the consolation believers who live near huge cathedrals, like Rouen or Ely, enjoy; it was the same urgent need to be fixed in the universe that caused palaeolithic man to assemble rock cairns and standing stones in Cornwall.

  Osip Mandelstam wrote, ‘I have cultivated in myself a sixth sense, an Ararat sense: the sense of attraction to a mountain.’

  Me too.

  When I am comfortably tucked up in Notting Hill, I dream of this mountain and its attendant, and often unruly, sea. I also marvel at the small daily natural dramas all around, like the seals rounding up fish.

  The preparations for the wedding have been under way all day. Nellie and Lucinda are firmly in charge of the arrangements. There will be twenty-five people at the lunch. There will be simple posies of local flowers for the bridesmaids and something more elaborate for Nellie. The vicar, Tim Fetch, says that some of his customers – his word – opt for a bower of roses in the garden. If he’s honest, he thinks it is just a little kitsch. He is wearing pink-and-black Lycra cycling shorts. He has come by bicycle for the consultation.

  Later Nellie and I walk on the beach, each of us holding one of little Isaac’s hands and swinging him with every second stride. He says, ‘More, more.’ Bertil waves from the life-savers’ hut, where he is now a regular. We wave in return, and we feel honoured. Isaac deserts us and runs, in his own unstable fashion, along the sand towards the young lovers. They don’t seem to mind his presence. They promise to bring Isaac home for the barbecue. As we look back he is chattering away.

  The last surfers are far out there on huge waves. They bob like corks on the mountains of water, disappearing from sight for long seconds as they wait for the ideal wave. Behind them the cormorants are heading home to roost, flying in anxious, determined formations. They overnight on a huge block of flat stone, almost as big as an aircraft carrier, which can only have fallen from the mountain into the sea many thousands of years ago.

  ‘It frightens me just to see these kids out there,’ says Nellie.

  ‘Me too. Even when I was young I was often frightened.’

  ‘Is that the point? To conquer your fear?’

  ‘Partly. Also to have friends. But it is the simple fact that this is something that doesn’t demand money or dictate what you do or how you do it. In my day, free spirits were called “soul surfers”.’

  ‘Were you a soul surfer, Frank?’

  ‘I tried. But it was a little too precious for the local boys.’

  On the way up the path through the bushes we kiss. The air is fragrant. We are free in our own way.

  ‘My soul surfer,’ she says, still amused.

  Alec arrives just after I have lit the fire. He has commandeered a huge car and a driver.

  ‘Good God, something is on fire,’ he says.

  I tell him that it is a form of heresy to cook indoors when the weather is good. The wind is quickly dying as the sun sets and the smoke is rising straight up in a regular column, like the smoke from fi
res in Cowboy and Indian movies.

  Alec is gazing down towards the beach.

  ‘Beautiful. You are a jammy sort of fellow, aren’t you, Frankie? Bum firmly in the butter.’

  Alec’s slang is about thirty years out of date, but strangely endearing. He is wearing a panama.

  As she brings the plates and the salads and makes sure everyone has a drink, I feel guilty about Lindiwe. She looks happy, as though this is her life’s work. Less than eight miles away, her husband was clubbed to death with a Coca-Cola bottle. Her own young children live in rural nullity with her mother. I have given Lindiwe money, which has enabled her to build a house in her mother’s village. I have paid for schoolbooks and clothes. I adore Lindiwe, yet our relationship is fatally unbalanced: she depends completely on my good will and maybe, I sometimes think, she is obliged to pretend to be fond of me. At the same time I want her affection; it is important to me. At times I think that we are very close, but I know that in reality we are separated by our different lives.

  Now, in this smoke-scented, gentle hubbub, I see Lucinda handing around grilled oysters on Melba toast – a Lindiwe special – and in the very familiarity of it I find hope: the hope that Lucinda is with us for ever, free from the hell she has been through. This evening she is so beautiful, so composed and gentle and warm, that I am convinced she is, as she said, over it. Now I induct Alec into the ritual of the braai, sacred in these parts. Lucinda appears and puts an arm gently around my waist. The children have gathered and some neighbours have arrived; one of them, Neil Battersby, was at school with me years ago. Neil is spattered with sunspots now, so that he has a snow-leopard appearance. He wants to lend his unique skills to the barbecuing. He believes you should never start cooking until the embers are white. He also recommends damping the fire with beer from a can when it is too fierce. His wife, Eleanor, raises her eyebrows eloquently. Alec is staring at the fire as if mesmerised. He moves off cautiously, to talk to Nellie who is talking to Marlene Cook, the wife of Barry. When she discovers that Nellie is Swedish, Marlene says she longs to go to Sweden. She wants to see the Northern Lights and deep, deep snow. She thinks her northern European ancestors are calling to her, reminding her of who she is. It’s a race memory. Or a phyletic memory, the memory we don’t even know we have. It’s nonsense, but it is one of the theories that distract South Africans from looking too closely at what’s around them.

  Still, I think Marlene would find a trip in the Arctic north rewarding, even fascinating. A few years ago Nellie and I flew to Kiruna, inside the Arctic Circle, where the plane landed on skis, and we travelled onwards by dog sled to the Ice Hotel. We were wrapped in reindeer-skin rugs. The huskies were heart-breakingly eager. It was our first escape together from London and toxic memories. We both felt a little jittery, as if we were impostors. The sun, which barely rose above the horizon, produced an unstable and magical half-light that suggested the twilight of the gods. For miles the huskies bounded along, yelping in their ecstasy. It was impossible to resist the feeling that we had arrived in a mystical and myth-laden landscape.

  The Ice Globe Theatre, a replica of Shakespeare’s Globe on the South Bank, made entirely of ice, stood on the bank of the frozen Torne River. The next night we watched a performance of Hamlet in Sami. Hamlet entered on a sledge drawn by reindeer. We sat on reindeer skins, in temperatures of minus 30 degrees Celsius. It was one of those moments you know you will never forget: as we left the Ice Globe, the Northern Lights descended from the heavens and performed their mysterious, swirling rites.

  Little Isaac is once again stealing the limelight. He is enchanting. He asks ‘How are you?’ of everyone. Lindiwe is still trying to teach him to speak Xhosa, as if that is his inalienable heritage, and he can now say a few words, for instance, ‘yebo’, yes, and ‘molo’, hello. He said goodnight to me yesterday, ‘Ulani kahle’ – and ‘Molo, Grandpa’, good morning. I adore his eager, questing conversation. And I am happy because I know that I am free at last of my foreboding about Lucinda, which has never left me for a single day in five years. Every day I would wake up calm and be struck immediately with the knowledge that my daughter was a junkie. She is reassuring me now by putting her arm around me. She squeezes my waist: ‘Are we getting just a little chubby, Daddy?’

  ‘Have you been talking to Nellie?’

  ‘Yours to guess and mine to know.’

  She slips away to help Lindiwe. Not too far out to sea a huge tanker passes very slowly; its lights are blazing and twinkling so that it looks as if an exotic travelling circus has arrived.

  22

  I have ditch the car a week maybe five days ago. I let it run over a cliff near Graaff-Reinet where there is plenty of clapped-out cars lying in the bottom of a kloof. I was hiding for a few days. Now I am riding in a bakkie. The owner of the bakkie is a farmer in the Karoo. He says, Jy stink vreeslik. You smell awful. Fuck him. He won’t say that if he knows I have a Beretta in my pants.

  After a couple of hours I tell him, my ou maat, I need to piss.

  Me too, says he.

  Here’s a good place for a slash.

  We stop by a picnic table behind some big rocks in the middle of fuck all. It can be the Hex River Pass, I don’t know. While he is pissing I get out my gun. He starts squealing when he sees the gun.

  Don’t shoot me, please. I have children. Please.

  I can shoot him and push him over the black-and-white stones what stops you driving off the road and into the bushes below, nobody is going to find him there never except maybe a hungry leopard. I tell him thanks for the ride now give me the keys. He’s so frightened he’s wet himself and he’s already had a piss.

  Don’t go crying to the police. Just say someone stole your car while you was taking a leak. Unnerstan?

  Yes thank you. Dankie.

  The bakkie goes quite fast. Three hours to Cape Town more or less. It’s a Volkswagen. VW is always good engineered. First class, bakgat. I can see the wine lands now down there maybe near Wellington where Piet Retief was born. He should of stayed at home.

  I am thinking what if Wynand is not dead and what if Elfrieda has gone to the cops and little Junie, how’s she. ‘Ring Of Fire’. It cheers me up but I can’t think right. I want to talk to Oom Frank. He’s clever. He’s slim. He can make a plan for sure. But I don’t know where my oom lives in Cape Town. I can’t ask nobody in case the cops comes after me. Then I have an idea maybe he is in the telephone book. Cape Town/Kaapstad. I ask a lady who has a café place at the top of the pass with fruit and sweets and biltong and dried sausage and magazines if she have the Cape Town phone book.

  Are you all right? she says.

  Tannie, it looks like I may have maybe killed someone who is fucking my wife but I am okay.

  I don’t say this. I say, no fine, Tannie, thanks, and you?

  No not bad can’t complain.

  She gives me the phone book. There’s a hell of a lot of people in Cape Town.

  In Potch the phone book only have about thirty pages. Can you believe it – F. D. J. McAllister, with address and phone number, is right there. Menemsha, 2 Beachfront Road. What is Menemsha? Maybe it’s Xhosa. I must get a map of Cape Town by the petrol station. Now I can see Table Mountain. Tafelberg. It does looks like a table. It’s very windy outside. There’s a sign to Strandfontein Beach and I go there and park the bakkie far away and then I have a dip because I am stinking for real. Shit, the water is cold. I duck my head under and it aches. I am the only person taking a dip. I dry myself extra quick with some paper. Two people is kite surfing. It’s beautiful when they fly over the waves very high. Maybe I can fly also. My underpants is black so that’s okay nobody can know it’s not a cozzie. Near Cape Town I see a sign We buy any car any condition no questions. It’s a place where they smash up cars for spares for sure. Chop it I tell them they gives me three thousand rand no receipt. These coloured guys talks very fast. For sure they knows the VW have been stolen and the sooner they chop it the better for everyone. It’s big busi
ness all over the country. The police knows what’s going on but they get money for going blind.

  I walk into town past the docks. At the station I take a taxi-bus to Camps Bay. I buy a hamburger at Steers. Some of the chicks working there looks at me funny like I crawled out from under a rock. For sure I must get some new clothes. My beard is growing quick. It is black like my famous relative Piet Retief’s beard. Some people says he had a touch of the tar. I don’t know where to go. I must sleep on the mountain that is full with snakes. There’s people living up there smoking tik. They chase me away. I walk along the sea road to find Oom Frank’s house. Menemsha. It’s dark. I walk on the beach near some very big rocks. There’s a cave and I go inside to lie down.

  23

  The wedding is enchanted. It is at Babylonstoeren – Tower of Babylon – a wine farm out of town. Nellie and I had lunch there and she said wouldn’t it be the perfect place for a wedding. For whom? I asked. For anybody, she said, smiling. Her smile is like the sun rising over the sea.

  I think that one of the purposes of a wedding is to endorse the deeper human values that we rarely talk about. And yet there is always something mysterious, and a little unsettling, about weddings – unspoken doubt among the reams of overstatement: all those failed promises and all those disappointments to come.

  Tim the vicar decided to bicycle out here; to him thirty miles is a walk in the park, as he put it. For him the cycling is undoubtedly the main event.

  We have booked cottages for all the guests; as they walk from their front doors they merge to form the procession heading in the direction of the parterre at the back of the main house. This parterre is to act as an outdoor cathedral. Tim the vicar is relaxed about our divorces. God, in his opinion, loves us all equally. Nellie and I follow behind Tim who has changed out of his cycling shorts and is wearing a cassock. The parterre is a kind of Garden of Eden, a bee-loud glade. We were assailed by the scent of rosemary and roses and thyme and allium. Guinea fowl screech, bees hum, ring-necked turtle doves burble. It’s a low-level symphony.