Absolution (38 page)

I’m about to go buy a cold drink and a bag of popcorn when the phone rings. It’s Lionel Jameson.

‘I was hoping you might forgive my brusqueness back in December.’ His voice squeaks and hums, fast and hoarse with digital static; if I didn’t know better I’d think he was on the other side of the world. ‘To be honest, your visit took me completely by surprise – it was a real shock.’

‘Did you think I was dead or something?’

There’s a silence on the line and then, without answering my question, he blurts out: ‘If the offer of dinner still stands, I’d like to accept it. I think you owe me that much at least.’

I don’t know what to make of his tone, but I speak with Sarah and we agree to have him over on Friday. She goes to Angola early next week and for some reason I feel now that I’d rather not see Lionel alone.

When I phone him back with the address he says, ‘Oh, very posh. Another thing, there’s someone else I’d like to bring along, if that’s okay?’ He doesn’t need to tell me it’s Timothy – I know it already, as if by a premonitory nightmare.

*

On Friday evening, while it’s still light, they arrive in a sleek black car – Timothy’s not Lionel’s. We watch as the gate closes and though we’re reasonably secure in this miniature compound, Timothy gives a practised wave of the device that engages the central-locking mechanism.

‘I know who you are,’ he says, pressing a ten-year-old bottle of Kanonkop Pinotage into my hands, ‘and I assume you remember who I am.’

The difference between the two men could not be more pronounced. As shabby and drawn as Lionel is, his skin climate-damaged and eyes bloodshot, face unshaven for several days, Timothy is overripe and over-processed. His nails have been manicured, his suit is more expensive than anything I’ll ever be able to afford. He’s rotten with success.

After I make the introductions the four of us sit by the pool, drinking sundowners until it gets dark. Timothy now works for the South African Tourist Board. He listens while the rest of us talk, staying silent in a way that unsettles me. Sarah excuses herself every few minutes to take a call or answer an e-mail, absences during which I might have expected either man to say something complimentary about her, but as soon as she leaves Lionel falls silent and both men stare at the ground, swirling their glasses, waiting for a top-up. The cheese and crackers and olives I put out disappear; Sarah and I barely touch them.

I’m about to suggest we go inside for dinner when Timothy finally speaks.

‘Lionel tells me you want to know about Laura Wald.’

‘Yes, though we don’t have to do it now. I just hoped you might be able to tell me something about what happened to her.’

The two men look at each other, as if to check they are still in agreement about some point decided earlier. Minutes pass and it’s almost dark, the sun going down in a single rapid shuttering as a chill spreads across the lawn. A hadeda erupts from the garden next door, beaten metal wings flapping, and lets out a single
monstrous cry. Timothy stares at me in a strange, assessing way.

‘Listen, my friend – you don’t have any idea what you’re asking.’

Over dinner, the four of us chat as if there were no history between the men and me. Timothy gives us tips on what to do and see in Johannesburg, where not to go, how seriously to take the security and personal safety warnings. Lionel insists it isn’t as dangerous as we’ve been made to believe. I struggle to concentrate on the conversation, wondering all the while what Timothy meant, catching his eye in brief moments, seeing him studying me when he thinks no one will notice, as if he might not believe I am who I claim to be.

When we finish dinner Sarah excuses herself again, explaining that she’s trying to finish a story before she goes to bed – we agreed in advance that she’d give me space to talk alone with the men. There is no story to finish, no late-Friday deadline she has to meet.

Left alone, silence again overtakes us. They ask me nothing about myself, about my life in the years since I last saw them. If I don’t ask questions, the men don’t speak – I think of them as men in a way that I don’t think of myself. There’s a raw hardness and danger about them, a lack of domestication and care, as though they might break a chair or smash a glass if the fancy struck them, thinking nothing of the consequences. It’s not the way I remember either of them.

‘Is there nothing you can tell me about Laura?’

I’m perplexed by their hesitation and wonder if this is just a particular kind of South African awkwardness that I’ve forgotten – the unwillingness to speak, the filling of silence with small talk, or talking all the way around a subject without ever landing on it.

‘Just what is it exactly that you think you want to know, my friend?’ Timothy asks, smiling in a way that is not remotely amused.

‘I’d like to know what happened to her.’

‘
Ag
, no, you wouldn’t, really,’ he says, shaking his head rhythmically, each turn to the left or right punctuating a syllable.

Lionel shifts in his chair, fiddles with his glass, clears his throat. ‘You can’t just leave it at that,’ he says to Timothy. ‘You should tell Sam what he wants to know.’

‘I don’t have anyone else to ask,’ I say. ‘I mean, I wouldn’t know who to approach or where to begin. You understand that I’m not asking so much for the sake of the book, as for my own curiosity. Laura was a friend. She was almost like a mother to me then.’

‘No man, this is all ancient history,’ Timothy says, waving his hands, shooing the past back into the lounge. He stands and paces round behind his chair, still shaking his head. Lionel looks embarrassed, raises his eyebrows at me and gives a pained smile as Timothy reaches over for the bottle of wine, pours himself another glass and drinks it in loud slurps. He takes a book on Johannesburg from the shelf and cracks it open. It’s obvious that he knows something about Laura.

‘If you’re not going to tell Sam–’ Lionel begins, but Timothy interrupts him.

‘We’ve been through the resurrection of the dead already, all that poring over the past, the reading of bones. It was exhausting for all of us. It did no good, either. There’s nothing more to say about it, Sam. You don’t want to be asking these questions.’

‘I just want to know what happened to her. You don’t have to tell me anything, I accept that I can’t force you to, but if you know where she ended up …’ I’m aware of the pleading in my voice, uncomfortable because it reminds me of myself as a child, the way I pleaded with Laura, the ways I used to plead to my aunt, teachers, anyone who failed to give me what I wanted.

‘You want to know something?’ Timothy sighs, replacing the book on the shelf and turning to me, pointing with his glass. ‘What I can tell you is that Laura was on the wrong side of history.
That’s
what I can tell you.’

I don’t understand what he means. What he’s suggesting seems
impossible. ‘You mean she was too militant?’

Timothy snorts, sips at his drink. ‘God, you really have no idea, do you?’

‘Come on, Tim, there’s no reason he should.’ Lionel edges forward on the chair as if he’s about to say more, but then Timothy puts out his arm and Lionel slides back into place.

‘She was on the
wrong
side, Sam.’ Timothy sits again; his voice is softer now, as though he’s making an effort to measure his tone against my expression. ‘She was on the wrong side and someone found her out. That’s all I know.’

‘But nothing like that came out in the TRC–’

‘The TRC was imperfect. It was incomplete. It does not represent the totality of late-apartheid history. Listen,’ he says, bringing his hands together like a preacher, ‘she was an embarrassment. No one wanted to talk about her – not us, and not the other side. There was, I don’t know, some kind of cover-up, and that doesn’t happen from the bottom. A cover-up needs a mandate, if you see what I mean. The family, thankfully, never pushed the case. If they had, who knows what would have emerged. We might actually know what happened to her.’

‘Then you don’t know?’

‘I only know that she went away with one of the others, and she never came back. The man who took her, he died not long after, killed by a letter bomb in Mozambique. If anyone knew what happened to her, and where she ended up, where she might be buried, he did. But he can’t tell us. So effectively she disappeared.’

The information comes at me like an invasion or an explosion. I feel assaulted, shattered, interfered with. I want them out of the house. It was a mistake to contact Lionel in the first place. I make sudden excuses, say that Sarah has an early morning. Lionel looks embarrassed and I hear Timothy say something under his breath like, ‘I told you it would end this way.’ Watching the car reverse down the driveway, all I can hope is that I won’t ever see them again. I don’t want to know their version of history.

Back inside, I tell Sarah what Timothy said. As I speak my hands and arms shake and I begin to lose my voice. I manage to tell her that I don’t know how to understand it. She holds on to me, listens as I heave and rant. Laura was supposed to be a friend of my parents, and all that time, I choke, she was deceiving them. Sarah doesn’t tell me to calm down or ask me to try to forget about it.

‘Is it possible,’ I say, seeing red everywhere I look, the room beating and buzzing around me, ‘that she sabotaged my parents?’ Sarah shakes her head. It’s a question she can’t answer.

*

Monday morning. Sarah flies to Angola for the week. I take her to the airport and then barricade myself in the house where I turn to Clare’s new book, which arrived today and is, perhaps ironically, the very distraction I need from thinking about Laura. I have difficulty believing what Timothy told me, and no reason to believe he’d lie. And yet it seems impossible that Laura would have been on the other side. It makes no sense, and at the same time it seems to make perfect sense – not just of her disappearance, but of the way my parents died.

I turn away from these thoughts, churning in a crazy cycle, almost sick with nausea, and hope to find solace, perhaps even insight, in Clare’s words.

Absolution
has a tasteful matte cover with an image of a whitewashed Cape Dutch farmhouse in summer, surrounded by trees with a mountain rearing up behind it, all of it viewed through a broken windowpane with a snail creeping over shards of glass along the sill that frames the scene. If it weren’t for the distorting effect of the window, the image of the house in the landscape would almost be kitsch, a stereotype of the South African pastoral setting, a second-rate Pierneef, but I suppose that might also be intentional. With the framing device, however,
it invites us to speculate on the nature and ownership of the house with the cracked window, and the person or persons who occupy it, who might be looking through the rippling broken glass, past the snail, at the elegant house in the distance. It could be a worker’s cottage on a wine estate, draughty and ill-lit, poorly maintained, close enough to the big house to have a good view of it without encroaching on the idyll, the goats on the lawn, the ducks in a shaded pond, squirrels and oaks imported from England. The text itself has nothing to do with the image, or at least nothing obvious. As I read I know that I’m hoping to find something, even an oblique reference, a whisper or a silence that might refer to me.

Of course there’s nothing. The book was written before I started interviewing Clare and I can’t detect so much as an indirect reference to me, not even a meaningful silence. I try not to be disappointed. By the time I finish it’s late evening, almost dark outside.

Standing in the kitchen, the doors and windows closed and locked though the air inside is stifling, I pour a glass of wine and hold the book at arm’s length, turning it over in my hands, feeling the smoothness of its cover. On the back the publisher has categorized the volume as
FICTION
, in case we have any doubts. But doubts are exactly what it seems like we should be having, because here is Clare, named in the text, and there is Marie, as well as Clare’s son Mark, who can’t be happy about the way his mother has represented him. The book offers what appears to be an accurate description of Clare and Marie’s unusual domestic arrangement, which is too intimate, too symbiotic to be only a business matter. While they are two professionals, employer and employee, they have become inseparable and interdependent in a way that speaks more of friendship or love than of contract and remuneration. I see Marie wheeling a lunch cart into Clare’s study, the silent communication between them expressed through the eyes and other body language – a barely lifted finger, the tiniest
raising of the chin, a tightening of lips. It’s a kind of magic that two people should be able to read each other so fluently.

Whether or not Clare suffered a robbery or house invasion I do not know – she has never spoken of one to me. In counterpoint to the book’s narrative of recent trauma and upheaval, there are long discursions about her ancestors, their migration from England to South Africa in the 1820s, and the economic histories of the family, all rendered in a distant third-person voice. The balance between the two – the sometimes surreal narrative of trauma, and the rather dry historiography of family and childhood – does not seem like fiction per se. Clare tells me in a covering note that it’s as close to a memoir as anything she’ll ever write, but it isn’t presented as one and at the same time I can’t quite see how it operates as fiction. Or maybe the real question I should be asking is: what does calling it fiction allow Clare to do?

The real shock is Clare’s discussion of her sister, Nora. This is what she was getting at all along, I think – the question she expected me to ask at our last meeting in Cape Town, the trail she thought I’d caught! It is tempting to read the book as nothing more than the occasion for an elaborate confession of her complicity in a capital crime, namely that she carelessly provided information that led to the assassination of her sister and brother-in-law. The turn towards history might be construed as a way of placing her actions in a larger context, if not an actual defence or apology for what she did: look at where I came from to understand what I did, what I had to do. History deceives, she seems to be saying, it makes us vain. Of course, categorizing the book as fiction allows her to dodge any legal question of her responsibility for those deaths if it were ever to be put to her.
This is a novel
, she could say,
a version of me that bears only passing resemblance to the historical me. Do not confuse that person, the individual speaking to you now, with the person on the page. Many people wanted to kill my brother-in-law. I had no part to play
. On the copyright page is a disclaimer:
Any resemblance to real people, living or dead, is entirely coincidental, including those characters that share the same names as my son, Mark Wald, my assistant, Marie de Wet, and my ex-husband, William Wald. I use those names with the permission of the historical subjects to whom they are attached
.