Absolution (33 page)

This, however, like his health and a great many other things between them, was something that Clare and Mark did not discuss. When she asked about his work, he turned either silent or defensive. She hoped that he could talk about the law with his father, who had been his model in so many things. For the sake of both men, she hoped that they enjoyed that kind of intimacy, though as the years passed she believed this was not so, that Mark’s best and closest interlocutor was his own mind. And in this, perhaps, he was more like his mother.

Clare

As the day progresses and I try to ignore Nosipho’s enthusiastic vacuuming, Adam’s mowing and hedge-trimming, and Marie’s clip-clopping back and forth from her study to mine, I become incapacitated by a migraine. It starts at the base of the skull, and then grinds across the right side of my head like tectonic plates sliding against each other in a crescent arcing from my forehead to occipital bone. Then comes the nausea and visual distortions, the twin kidney shapes I always see, forms that pixelate the world within their borders. The first time it happened I thought I was going blind. I have learned that the only way to make it stop is to close my eyes and hope it may pass in an hour or two. So I put myself back to bed, but the headache is relentless, and the pain spreads, running along my clavicle and radiating demonic wings across the planes of my shoulder blades. After an hour of turning first left and then right, lying on my stomach and then back, pillows over and under my head, I finally fall asleep to one of the most troubling of my recurring dreams, one which takes various forms but always involves a similar scenario.

At some point in the recent past, so the narrative usually goes, I have made a commitment to look after the dogs belonging to a young couple that lived down the road from my childhood home. In most versions of this dream, on the afternoon the owners are due back from their holiday, I remember at the last minute that for several days I have failed to attend to the animals, leaving them without food and without access to the garden. Visions of frantic dogs, paws smeared with their own shit, the house rendered uninhabitable from the mess, overcome me. Knowing that, at worst, one or both of the animals might be dead, I race
to the house, arriving just as the couple does; there is no hope of rectifying the situation before they can discover it. In the variation of the dream I have today, however, I remember the neglected dogs only after the couple’s return, making my irresponsibility all the worse. I become aware that the couple has not phoned me to retrieve their spare keys, but, being overcome with shame, I cannot bring myself to contact them. The threat of some kind of legal sanction against me lurks at the edge of the dream’s contents: I will be marked in the courts, and thus in the public record, as an abuser and neglecter of animals, someone so irresponsible I cannot even be trusted to look after myself and should therefore be locked away where I can do no harm to anyone.

Each time I have dreamed this particular dream it involves the same couple. They either have two dogs, or one dog, or a cat and a dog. I always fail to do what I have promised, resulting not only in acute embarrassment, but also potentially in the deaths of those entirely innocent other lives, the companion animals who relied upon me for their most basic needs. What always troubles me more than anything on waking is that I can think of no reason for feeling I ever disappointed this particular couple. They had no pets, but as an adolescent during the school holidays I was sometimes paid to look after their young daughter. I know that I always took good care of the girl, reading stories until it was her bedtime, tucking her in, consoling her when she cried for her mother (always her mother and never her father), waiting up for the parents to return from their dinner party, then being walked home by Rodney, the husband, who looked like a more dissolute Cary Grant. He would always press the money into my hands as we reached my gate, his palms sweaty and the notes limp with perspiration. At the time, I would not have minded if Rodney had drawn me aside, against a tree, and kissed me. Although nothing of the sort ever happened, this feeling runs like under-stitching through the fabric of the dreams, invisible but holding firm the lining that keeps everything else tidy, the seams obscured, the
construction masked under a shimmer of subconscious satin. Looking back on my desire for Rodney I suspect that if he had actually kissed me, pushing my body up against the bark of a stinkwood, insinuating his tongue into my mouth, I would have been horrified.

I know, too late, that this series of dreams has nothing to do with Rodney, or his wife, or their daughter, whom I looked after so well, and about whom I have no reason to suffer a guilty conscience. These dreams have everything to do with you, Laura, the wild beast daughter I neglected, failed to feed and water, failed to hold myself account to in the way that you needed. I should not have waited for you to ask for help. I should have known what you needed, anticipated your requirements, and foreseen what you would feel compelled to do. I should have known you could not be domesticated or broken. If I had tried to stop you, would you have let me?

‘No,’ you say, coming into my bed tonight, unfurling yourself around me, enclosing my limbs in yours. ‘You could not have stopped me.’

‘But if I had been different, if I had known another way to be, if I could have given with both hands instead of always,
always
holding something back, then surely you might have let me help you!’

‘There is no undoing the past, old woman. You must accept what you are.’

‘What am I?’ I implore, as you rise and retreat. ‘Tell me what I am!’

‘A monster,’ you say, your voice unravelling sadness. ‘A monster like me.’

*

Since I don’t know what else to do, I return to what I was reading the other day. I realize, for the first time, that all ten of your notebooks are nothing more than school exercise books – the
very same kind that I used to compose the first half-dozen of my novels, convinced that if the authorities ever raided the old house on Canigou Avenue the police would assume they were nothing but the work of children and posed no threat. I intentionally made my handwriting juvenile, even sloppy in places. But your handwriting, Laura, is always precise and, though unusual, unmistakably adult. One would look at your script and say it was the hand of a writer, unlike mine.

After first meeting Ilse at the newspaper you saw her again a few days later and, trying to sound as though you’d been struck by some spontaneous inspiration, invited her to join you for lunch. She suggested a small hostel on Church Street.

If you knew about her relationship with your father, you gave nothing away, attempting instead to play the ingénue seeking advice and friendship from a woman more experienced of the world – a role I never fulfilled for you; if you ever asked for my advice, I cannot remember it. You turned to the men of the family, to your brother and father, and even to your uncles, but the women you ignored – not just me, but your aunts and cousins in equal measure – as though you suspected that only men had access to the truth, that women were, in this society, no more than ornaments, impedimenta on the path you wanted to travel.

Throughout lunch, Ilse raged about the repressive new laws imposed on the country and spoke hopefully about the return of opposition figures from abroad, come home to liberate with jewels of fire. Afraid someone might be listening, you looked around the café, monitoring reactions, comings and goings, whilst Ilse spoke, her small body generating so much anger it was like suffering an assault just sitting across from her.

‘It’s a reasonably safe place,’ she said, noticing your unease, ‘and the owner is a fellow traveller of sorts.’

‘You should be careful in any case.’

‘Careful people don’t make things happen. Until people like us – like our parents and cousins – begin to feel directly threatened,
then nothing will change.’ She groaned and put her head in her hands, always dramatic. It was the kind of explosive passion that your father found irresistible, a quality I could never offer. ‘I must apologize,’ she said, looking up at you through her dark fringe of hair, ‘it’s unfair of me to assume that you would necessarily agree with my opinions. But I know where Bill’s sympathies lie, so I imagined that you–’

‘No,’ you assured her, taking her hand across the table, shaking it as if in compact, ‘you’re exactly right. I agree with you completely.’

She smiled, folding your hand between both of hers. ‘I knew it. I’m so pleased. You must meet Peter. We’ve been looking for someone like you.’

You were flattered by this opening, but felt you could not trust her. Perhaps you were right: she had been your father’s lover, had forced herself into his arms when you were still a child, knowing that he had a family. She had been to the house, met the wife and children, and still she seduced him, aware of the harm it might do.

‘I would like that very much,’ you said, almost flirting with her. You decided that day to accept whatever invitation was extended, to infiltrate yourself into her life, finding a way to return the sting of her transgression.

*

I have told Adam to come later today so that I may enjoy my swim in private, watching the early morning light penetrate the dark teardrop blossoms of the agapanthus on one side of the white gravel path that bisects the most formal beds, and on the other side catching the dew that rests on the fireball lilies. I realize with horror that the previous owners arranged this planting to suggest the old South African flag, stripes of blue, white, and orange. I make a mental note to have Adam pull out the lilies; I have never liked those poisonous hot colours anyway.

When Adam arrives I go inside and spend the morning reviewing a transcript from one of my interviews with Sam, who now writes to me as if I were something like a lover, or if not a lover, then the mother he wishes he’d had. It pricks my conscience but I cannot yet bring myself to give him more than I have already.

After lunch, I return to your words, Laura, feeling with each page that, rather than bringing you closer to me, far from leading me to the truth of your destiny, your notebooks only push you further from my sense of who you were. With each line I know you less and less, to the point that I begin to think you are not even yourself, not in this notebook, not in the way you are in the final volume, the one where, even when you confound my expectations, I can see the humanity of your choices, or if not that then your rationalization of those choices, the ways you saw that they might yet be humane. But in
this
book, in these pages, you are nothing but cold intention, a young woman of focussed determination, doing only what you wish to do, what you have decided or been directed to do. What I cannot discern is the precise nature of that desire.

On their suggestion you arranged to meet Ilse and Peter at a tavern in Observatory – it meant that after coming home from the office on Friday you could park and walk less than a minute up the street to find them, already at a table in a private corner, out of the flow of traffic, a place where the three of you might talk and not have to worry about being overheard.

Given Ilse’s exuberance and reckless pronouncements at lunch, it was a surprise to find Peter so controlled, conservative in his dress and demeanour – the kind of thirty-something graduate student who would have spent his entire school career at Bishops or SACS and gone directly to the University of Cape Town, before, say, winning a Rhodes Scholarship to read Politics at Oxford; in other words, he appeared on the surface to be a carbon copy of your brother or one of your brother’s friends. He was
nothing at all like what he appeared. He’d never lived outside the country, and years after finishing his undergraduate degree and surviving national service he was only now about to begin work on a masters degree under the supervision of your father. You wondered to yourself what and how much Peter knew about Ilse and ‘Bill’, as she insisted on calling him. (He was never ‘Bill’ to me, not once in our life together, and the revelation of it in your notebook wounds me more than I could have expected. Foolishly, I assumed the old weapons had lost their power to maim.) I stagger across the line when I come to it:
I know about Ilse and Dad. Does Mom?
How could you not bring yourself to confide in me what you knew?

Despite yourself you liked both of them, finding they were easy company in the way that your other colleagues – mostly men, mostly older, hardened and hard-drinking, some risking their lives to cover stories the government did not want told – might never be, at least not with you, a young woman who had no right to look as striking as you did and yet remain so unreachable.

At first, politics was not on the agenda that evening and the three of you swapped life histories. Ilse had survived a cloistered girlhood in Graaff-Reinet with a doctor father who shot himself in the head one Sunday after church.

‘And your mother?’ you asked, curious to know as much as you could about them both – especially the woman who had so attracted your father.

‘Not so long after my father died she drank herself into a fatal car crash – drove off a cliff in the Valley of Desolation.’ You could see the high mound of rock and soil, the pinnacle outcroppings and the sheer drops to the unyielding floor of the Karoo.

After her mother’s accident Ilse moved to Cape Town where she and Peter met as students. They married just after graduation, to the disapproval of Peter’s banker father and housewife mother, who had both died in the past year – he of cancer, she of a heart attack.

‘So you’re orphans now,’ you said, ‘adult orphans.’ They looked at you as though the idea had never struck them before and was something that changed how they thought of themselves, both as individuals and as two people together in the world. And you, though younger than them by more than a decade, childless as you were and always would be, an orb to the grave, presented yourself as the mother they both sought.

It was clear, however, that this was a topic that disturbed Ilse. She did not want to talk about parents and children, least of all about loss.