by Gerda Pearce
His son, explains Isaac, with infinite poignancy and patience, has bequeathed her some things. Gin sits down on the couch opposite him and watches while he pulls out some papers and a package. She listens as Simon’s father tells her that his son has left her the flat in Grahamstown. The little flat in the cobbled courtyard, beneath the sun. Where love had lived. Gin feels her legs start to shake uncontrollably.
Simon, you sentimental fool. To put it all at risk, for me.
“So you’ll need to sign there,” Isaac stabs the sheet. “And then there is the money.”
Gin is still trying to absorb the flat. “Money?” she breathes.
A large amount, substantial. A policy Simon took many years ago, as if this explains it all. Gin’s hands are trembling. Isaac must be wondering why Simon had left all this to her, but he carries on nonetheless, passing form after form that later, he explains, Gin must sign. She sits and stares at him and the pages, brilliantly white, that pile up in front of her.
Eventually Isaac looks up. “There’s one more thing. He also left you this.”
Carefully he hands her the package that Gin must find a way to take from him without convulsing. She knows what it is.
Inside is a book. The book is oblong and pastel blue. The top right hand corner of the cover is well worn, with a fold from use. The title is written up along the vertical axis, in a yellowed script that, when new, was white. Somehow we Survive. It is underlined by part of a drawing, the line which forms the outer edge of a prison bar. The subtitle An Anthology of South African Writing is written parallel, so that it too is underlined, but by the line that is the inner edge of the bar. Wrapped around the bar is a man’s hand, sketched in charcoal. In striations, a man’s face, with closed eyes, large nostrils, and open-mouthed in a scream, or perhaps, Gin had always imagined, more hopefully a song. Lines run alongside his mouth, into his throat, where the clavicular ends are large, grotesque even, his bones protruding through the thin skin.
Simon, you sentimental fool.
In its day, deemed subversive, the book had been banned. Simon had smuggled it back from San Francisco after a medical conference. Saved it, as a surprise, for several months. Wrapped it plainly for her birthday, that first year. Wrapped it plainly, but with obvious care, in neat folds of cream-coloured paper, the Sellotape cut with surgical precision. Found, he said, at the back of a bookstore in the Heights. Writings of exile, of longing, of love. And in the front, inscribed to her, incongruously, Yeats’ poem: When you are old and grey and full of sleep, and nodding by the fire, take down this book…
He had been the man who loved the pilgrim soul in her. When he gave it to her, smuggled and illicit, South Africa had been in a state of emergency. Now, her country is free, struggling with its new-found freedom, but free nonetheless. Now, Simon is dead. Yet the book’s relevance endures. Now she knows for herself the meaning of exile, of longing, of love. Now she knows that, despite death and destruction, somehow we survive.
Simon. You sentimental fool. What were you thinking?
Gin clasps the book tightly to her chest, her knuckles white. She stares at Isaac, words trying to exit her strangled throat. All she can think of is how, even after his death, he has risked their secret coming out. For her.
Simon had kept the book, though she had left it. The sentimental fool.
“I’m sorry, Virginia. I’ve upset you.”
She shakes her head, wordless. Isaac starts to say something but is interrupted by the sound of the front door opening.
Jonnie. Ellie. Home.
“Gin?” Jonnie calls from the hall. She knows he will be hanging up his coat, folding up the pram, one-handed as he always does, Ellie clasped to him with his free hand.
She stands up as he enters the room. Jonnie stops at the sight of Isaac. Ellie is held to his chest, her face obscured, her curls covered in a crocheted yellow hat with pink flowers. Isaac stands too. They are both looking at her now.
Gin wills herself to talk. Her voice squeaks out. “Isaac, this is Jonnie Kassan. Jonnie, this is Isaac Gold. He is a very dear family friend.”
The men shake hands.
“And who is this?” Isaac peeks at Ellie, then steps back, his mouth slack.
“This is Ellie, Isaac,” says Gin, “Ellie is my daughter.”
Isaac turns from staring at Ellie to look at her. He runs a pale tongue over dry lips. She does not know if he is about to say something or is merely astonished by Ellie’s existence. Oh God, she thinks, he knows. Ellie looks too much like Simon. No, she’s mine. I will not lose her, I will not share her. She looks across to Jonnie. Her eyes widen, willing him to play along with the lie she is about to tell. He cocks his head slightly, frowning, not understanding.
Isaac opens his mouth. Desperate to stop any words, she adds swiftly, before he can speak, “Jonnie is her father.”
It is Jonnie who is slack-jawed now. He recovers admirably, although his eyes slant dangerously at her and she can see his mouth tighten with disapproval.
Please, please. She begs him with pleading eyes.
Still holding Jonnie’s gaze, she directs her words to Isaac. “Jonnie’s also a doctor, Isaac.” Then to Jonnie, “Isaac is a surgeon.”
“Retired now,” corrects Isaac. His voice is strained but polite. He looks at Jonnie. “My son was also a doctor.”
Jonnie’s eyes flick to Gin then back to Isaac. “Was?”
Isaac looks as if he might crumble. “Yes, was. He’s dead, you see. A car accident.”
Both men look her way.
She looks away from them, her eyes finding the pine needles scattered below the tree. Her hold on the book tightens, and her knuckles start to hurt.
A white car, heading directly at them.
“I’m sorry,” says Jonnie in a voice weighted down with an emotion Gin cannot identify. He shifts Ellie to the opposite arm. Ellie sticks her fist in her mouth and closes her eyes.
But now Jonnie is saying something much worse. He is asking Isaac if by any chance his son was called Simon. Gin steps backwards, feels the couch hit the back of her knees, and she sits down heavily, listening to Isaac exclaim in the affirmative, listening to Jonnie tell Simon’s father that yes, he knew his son, that they had studied together in Cape Town, at medical school. Gin feels her world contract.
She sits, watching her life unravel before her.
39. VIVIENNE
It is a sunny afternoon and the clothes will dry quickly. Viv packs another load into the washing machine and takes the basket out to the line, starts to peg up the clothes. Through the slits in the back fence she can see the neighbours’ children playing, kicking a ball, chasing each other emitting high shrieks of laughter. Her neighbour emerges onto her back step, calls to one of the children. As they go inside, the woman turns, sees Viv, and waves. Viv grits her teeth and waves back. She hangs up Kayleigh’s favourite striped shirt. She ought to get over her resentment of the woman. After all, it wasn’t the woman’s fault she had witnessed the fights, heard the arguments.
“Does he drink?” The woman’s brown eyes were full of concern, full of pity.
Viv hated her. Why had she arrived home then, and seen it all through the gap in the fence? If he drank, maybe they could understand. Maybe Viv herself could understand.
“No, I’ll be fine, thanks.” She could feel her face flush with shame.
He had not stayed out long. He stood at the door, sheepish, lost. Jonnie was always irresistible. She reached out her hand to him and he came to her, buried his face in her neck.
“I’m so sorry, Viv. I didn’t mean it to get out of control.”
She had heard it all before.
Viv hangs up the final two pieces of clothing and goes back inside. She blames last night’s dream for her reminiscence. She had spent the night with Nick, beneath cool sheets, the windows open to the warm summer air, but she had dreamed she was still married to Jonnie.
They had moved into a new house, with no lawn. The house was one of
the new-build developments, everything shining and pristine. The lawns, although laid, had yet to grow, and the house was surrounded by bare earth. Rich and brown, but bare. She had gone walking into a forest, green and shaded. The path disappeared and she found herself walking on sticks and leaves. They crunched underfoot and suddenly with horror she had realised she was walking, not on undergrowth, but bones. Human bones. Looking down, she had recognised them. Gabe’s rib, Gabe’s spine, Gabe’s skull. She woke, heart pounding, the horror sublimating to gratitude. I am awake, I am here, there is no forest, no bones. It is morning.
Viv dumps the laundry basket on top of the machine, goes into the kitchen. She will have to go shopping again. Her teenagers are like locusts, but she is grateful they are healthy and, she reckons, well-adjusted, despite the awfulness of her marriage to Jonnie. But they’d been so young, she tells herself, and she’d hidden it well. And besides, it hadn’t always been awful.
Gin had taken her in, given her somewhere to stay, and Viv realised, something to live for. Her world had died with Gabe. She was so alone, with Gabe’s child to care for. She hated people’s pity. Gin had not pitied her. Gin had lost him too. Instead they had laughed a lot together. They had given each other an odd sort of courage. Things she would not have done on her own, Viv found she could do with Gin. Chores that were overwhelming became bearable. She was healing. And then, one night, Gin had brought Jonnie home. It was the first time she had met the man Gin was clearly in love with. Viv sat across the table from him, this enigmatic stranger. And then, he had looked at her.
She could not have described the look, other than to say it had gone right through her, like an X-ray to the white opacity of her bones. It was a look that said: I know you, I know who you are, and what you are, and what is more, I know exactly what it is you want. And I can give it to you.
Viv opens cupboards, noting what is needed, makes her list for the supermarket. She had never wanted to hurt Gin but she had forgotten everything. Forgotten Gin, even Abbie. And for some terrible moments, she had even forgotten Gabe. Mostly when she and Jonnie were making love.
She will go later to the supermarket, she decides, and tries to settle to some work, but finds her attempt fractured constantly by memories of Jonnie. She cannot let it go today. She puts her head in her hands, gives herself up to her thoughts. They had become a somewhat celebrated couple, in the last throes of the old government, others eager to affiliate themselves with the dashing Indian doctor and his pretty white wife. She used to see the other wives looking at him, at her, envying her. She used to wonder which of them had fucked him.
She slumped in the chair, her thin red dress no defence against the glacial shock. Thinking about it then, it was almost laughable, the inevitability of it. She had not seen it, had dismissed the late nights he said he was working. She had dismissed Leila’s mild comments that all the nurses fell for Jonnie. Now the odd phone calls, the short conversations, made sense. How clichéd, she thought, that she would find it in his jacket pocket.
Viv shakes herself. His affairs had hurt as much as the beatings, if not more. Prison had changed him. The anger, the violence, had stemmed from that. Which is why she had let it go on for so long, she understands this now. Had forgiven him, over and over, because of what he had been through. She had even initiated sex after the fights, something it had been hard to understand in herself. In the end, it had felt less shameful for her to cite his violence rather than his infidelity as reason for the divorce.
The sun has dipped below the mountain. Her work has been a write-off. She might as well go to the supermarket now. Viv sorts her files, leaves a note for the girls, picks up her keys. She is on her way out of the door when the phone rings. It is Nick.
“I’m about to go to Pick and Pay,” she tells him.
He will meet her there, he says.
They walk at a leisurely pace down each aisle, talking and laughing. He puts food in the trolley that she has to take out, knowing the girls will wrinkle their noses at it in distaste. When it is piled with all the essentials she needs, she heads for the queue. There are not enough cashiers and each line distends with people.
Nick has forgotten something. “Back in a sec,” he heads down one aisle.
Viv, bored, looks around. A familiar face is studying a rack of magazines. She hesitates. She has not seen Leila for some time. Friends were split in the divorce, and although she and Leila had tried for a while, the woman had been Jonnie’s friend foremost, and it had petered out. Viv feels she ought to greet her now, but the supermarket is crowded and she will have to relinquish her place in the queue. Nick is nowhere to be seen. Mostly, she is not sure what to say. Perhaps Leila will not notice her. Guilt wins, and Viv pushes her trolley over to where the woman stands, a half-filled basket slung around her forearm.
“Leila?” she says, peering at her face.
Leila looks up. “Viv! How are you?”
Her voice is the same husky honey, she wears the same lilac lipstick, but something has changed about her. Leila’s eyes, once so alluring, appear apathetic and unfocused, and circled by heavy rings. Her hair, once lustrous, seems thinner, almost unkempt. And Viv detects a nervousness in her demeanour. The woman’s free hand plays with her hair. Maybe, thinks Viv, she has as little to say to me as I to her. Yet they spend some minutes catching up. Viv fills her in on the girls. Yes, says Leila, she is still at the hospital, still living in Steenberg. They avoid the subject of Jonnie.
“Well,” says Viv, at a loss for anything further to talk about, “it was lovely to see you again.”
“Yes,” agrees Leila, but there is no liveliness to her tone. Again, the nervy touch of her hair. Perhaps she is aware of her own dulled appearance.
Leila, the exotic flower, has wilted. Leila, whose many kindnesses to her when she was pregnant, when Jonnie was in prison, had helped alleviate Viv’s loneliness. The memory fills her with an unexpected rush of warmth and she asks, with genuine concern, “Leila, are you okay?”
Leila’s eyes widen briefly, then narrow again. She seems to shrivel. In a voice that is devoid of feeling, she asks, pronouncing each word alone, the briefest of pauses between, “Why. Do. You. Ask.”
Viv regrets her question. She was about to explain that Leila looks ill to her, but changes her mind at the coldness of Leila’s tone. “You look… tired,” she manages.
Leila’s eyes drop away. Again, the jittery fiddle with her hair. “I’ve not been sleeping well,” she offers. Her eyes flit up to Viv’s, and then away over Viv’s shoulder. Her expression changes. The woman’s face twists in a kind of terror, so much so that Viv looks around to follow her gaze.
Nick is standing in the aisle, not looking at them, but at the shelves. It cannot be Nick, thinks Viv, what motive would Leila have to look at him with such loathing? If he were in uniform, perhaps it might make sense, the leftover dislike for the police. There are three other people in the aisle so it must be one of them or something else, she reasons.
She turns back, “Leila,” she asks again, gently, “Are you okay?”
“I have to go. Bye.” Leila moves away quickly.
Viv, too taken aback to speak, can only watch as Leila scurries away, dropping her half-filled basket near the exit as she leaves the supermarket.
How odd, thinks Viv, how very odd.
40. GIN
Isaac phones and leaves a message, a number where he can be reached. He would very much like to see her again, says the machine, and adds after a pause, “And Ellie.”
Gin cannot bring herself to phone him, and she deletes the message. She cannot face it, cannot face Isaac, and talk about Simon. Not now, not after what Jonnie had told her.
The inevitable post-mortem had followed.
“What the hell was that all about?” Jonnie, as expected, had demanded once Isaac had taken his leave.
Gin, out of politeness, had asked Isaac to stay for a drink but he had demurred, apologetic. He was, he said, meeting old friends for supper. She
suspected that but for Jonnie, he might have accepted. She was thankful. She did not want to talk about Simon.
But then she had to face Jonnie and his ire.
Eyes downcast, she had to apologise. For putting him on the spot. For the lie. She felt she ought to explain further, but she was still digesting the fact that Jonnie had known Simon, that Simon had known Jonnie, and before she had known either of them.
“Tell me,” Jonnie asked, “Simon was Ellie’s father, was he not?”
Gin nodded glumly, her throat too thick to form the words.
His voice had risen, he had pointed at the door. “Then why must that old man go away, not knowing his granddaughter?”
She found her voice along with the reason. “Simon is – was – married.”
“I see.”
But from the way he said it, she knew he was wondering what difference it would make. She could not explain it all to him, the need to protect Simon’s family from the truth. What could she have said, that they had been through enough, that surely her affair with Simon, the existence of Ellie, would make it worse for them, not better? They had lost him and, she reasoned, having had more of him would mean their loss was more than hers. And besides, she thought finally: Ellie is mine. All mine. Mine alone. I will not share her, the way I always shared Simon. Even, it seemed, with Jonnie.
“You knew him.” She tried for it not to sound accusatory, and failed. She fiddled with the edge of her sleeve. She wanted then to talk about Simon, wanted to know every exchange between them. It came upon her like a thirst.
Jonnie was silent for minutes. “Yes,” he said finally, but with a harshness that unnerved her. As if the day had not been unsettling enough. “Yes,” he repeated, “I knew Simon Gold all right. I’m sorry, Gin. I know he was Ellie’s father and I know you must have loved him,” here he paused before adding angrily, “but the man was an absolute bastard.”