Burger's Daughter (14 page)

—No, no. I see them sometimes.—

—Perhaps William Donaldson will give you a job.—Ivy addressed her husband, taking the opportunity of bringing up tongue-in-cheek, before a third person, something neither would have suggested in private.—He's going to be retired next year in July, is Dick.—

—I'm four years younger than Lionel. He was twentieth November nineteen-o-five, mmh ?—

Regina, with the glance from face to face of one who has lost the room's attention, brought in and set out the tea-tray.

Rosa's profile was very like her father's as she looked down with light eyes hidden, sugaring her cup from the bowl Ivy held in a hand from which a cigarette rippled smoke.—When did you get to know Lionel, then—I thought you were together in Moscow that first time ?—

—She means 1928.—

Dick and Ivy's response to other people was close as if there existed between them a mutual system of cerebral impulses.—I wasn't interested in the C.P. Soccer mad. And girls. When I was a youngster.—

—We didn't meet until 1930.—Ivy sugared and stirred his tea and gave it to him.

Rosa had her jaw thrust, jaunty, smiling, the young flattering in unconscious patronage of the past:—Girls.—

He nodded, feeling for a spoon with a thick hand pied with scaly pink patches of skin cancer.—
It's stirred.
—Ivy's words issued in smoke as those of comic book characters are carried by a bubble. —He was too young. I was meant to go but Lionel was already in Edinburgh, it was cheaper to send him from there... I'm the one as old as Lionel.—

—Did he take someone along—a girl ?—

—Girl! We all had girls.—

But the wife required more female precision in these matters. —What girl ?—

—Katya, wasn't it ? David's mother.—

—Oh Colette. Could have been. I suppose they must have been together by then. The future star of Sadler's Wells. I don't know when that affair started up—Dick ?—

—Were they married when we met ?—

But neither was sure.

—She wrote me a letter.—They knew Rosa meant when her father died. Ivy's broad alert face, powdered to the strict limit of jowls, relaxed into a coaxing expression of scepticism and expectancy. The woman Rosa had never seen had been materialized by her.—She did ? Where has she landed up by now?—

—She heard via Tanzania. From David. She lives in France. The South of France.—

—D'you hear that, Dick? What'd she say in the letter ?—Ivy's lips shaped to lend themselves to the offensive or absurd.

Rosa was odd-man-out in the company of three, one absent, who had known each other too well. She spoke with the flat hesitancy of one who cannot guess what indications her hearers will read in what she is relating.—The usual things.—There had been many letters of sympathy, following one formula or another. But the Terblanches were waiting. Rosa stroked under the hard feral jaw of the cat that treaded her lap and smiled, placing words exactly.—She wrote about here. Well, she said something... ‘It's strange to live in a country where there are still heroes.'—

Ivy lifted her hair theatrically through the outstretched fingers of both hands, suddenly someone unrecognizable.—About him.—

Dick, commenting, not participating, confirmed hoarsely. —Sounds like her.—

—When I saw the signature it didn't strike me for a moment. She doesn't use Lionel's name.—

—And she calls herself Katya ?—

—Ivy, they must have been married already when I met you.—

—You're right. Ay. I don't think he'd've found it easy, otherwise, with her.—

—Perhaps he wouldn't've asked.—Dick drew his lips in over his teeth, turning on his wife an old man's bristled jaw and frown.

Rosa contemplated them as a child opens a door on a scene whose actions she cannot interpret.—It is true you didn't marry without the Party's consent ?—

—Some of us were required not to marry at all.—Dick's formal, Afrikaans-accented phrasing quoted; he relaxed the grim jaw and smiled her fondly away from matters she shouldn't bother with.

—Colette Swan was not the wife for Lionel by anyone's standards. —Ivy thrust out the teapot.

Rosa got up to have her cup refilled.—And she wrote about you, Ivy.—

The nostrils opened pugnaciously, the wattles shook at Dick. —Good god, what could she have to say about me.—

He gave his slow, Afrikaner's smile.—Wait, man, let's hear.—

—‘You did what she would have expected.'—

Dick pulled an impressed face and Ivy made it clear she hadn't listened; there are people whose approval or admiration is as unwelcome as criticism.

—So it was all right for Lionel and my mother to marry ?—

—How d'you mean ?—

But Dick looked at his wife and she spoke again.—Cathy was right for everything.—

It was not what the girl had asked.—They were approved first, before they married ?—

Dick began to giggle a bit to himself at the past.—Hell, it's not exactly that everyone, I mean it's not as if...—

—If you'd ever known Colette Swan you wouldn't talk about her in the same breath as Cathy.—

Like many people who have high blood pressure, Ivy Terblanche's emotions surfaced impressively; her voice was off-hand but her eyes glittered liquid glances and her big breast rose against abstract-patterned nylon. Lionel Burger once described how, when she was still permitted to speak at public meetings, she ‘circled beneath the discussion and then spouted like some magnificent female whale'.

—Oh Ivy man! After all, it was someone her father was married to the first time! Have a heart!—

The Terblanche daughter who had stood pregnant outside the prison had left the country long ago with her husband. It was the younger one who came in raking down dun wet hair.—What're you getting het up about now ?—

—Nothing, nothing. Things that happened before you girls were ever thought of, nothing.—

With the ease of being a contemporary of the guest, the girl wandered before the glass louvres Dick had fitted, flicking her comb at the avocado pips growing in jam-jars on the sill, her head interrupting the sunlight.—Where're you staying now, Rosa ?—

—A little flat, not bad.—

—Sharing ?—

—No. It's my own.—

—What d'you pay ?—

—Clare my girlie, look what you're doing.—

She twisted her head clumsily, sent another shower of drops over her father's bare knees in shorts, laughed—Don'tfuss—and mopped him with the end of her long denim skirt.—I mean I've been looking for a place for someone—a girl with a kid, she's coming up from Port Elizabeth—but the rents are terrible.—

—Well, mine's just one room. I don't know whether that would do, with a child. But I know there's an empty flat in the building—or was, anyway, last week.—

Clare poured herself tea, paused critically at the array on the tray, poured the tea back into the pot and filled a cup with milk. —What happened to that garden cottage ?—

—It disappeared with the freeway.—

—Not even a biscuit—I've had no breakfast you know. You two have filled yourselves up with scrambled eggs. Why do old people and babies get up so early ?—

Ivy took the wet comb from where it had been dropped beside her papers.—Well go into the kitchen and fetch yourself something. There're baked apples. But don't cut the date loaf Regina's made—if it's cut while it's hot it gets sad. She's vegetarian these days, is Clare, and she thinks it gives her the right to priority with everything that isn't meat.—

The girl ignored her mother, amiably sulky.—You're still at the hospital.—

—No, that's over, too.—

Dick had gone into the kitchen and come back with a thick slice of date loaf.—Here, man, eat.—Before Ivy could speak, his patient-sounding Afrikaner voice assured—With Regina's permission. —A quick, comedian's twitch of the nose for Rosa alone.

The skin bridging Clare's heavy eyebrows was inflamed by dandruff. Between bites, she was preoccupied with details of a toilet to which she turned probably infrequently: pushing back the cuticles of her nails with smoke-blued teeth, looking at the strands of hair that came away in her fingers when she tested the length of the ends against her shoulders, noticing intently—as if the presence of the other, Rosa, brought her attention down to these things—her pink feet (thick as her father's hands) like strangers in curling brown sandals.

—You're not looking for a job, I suppose. With us.—

—Us ?—Rosa took in Ivy and Dick. Ivy's match waved denial, extinguishing its tiny flame invisible in the sun.—She's working with Aletta.—

—Aletta—oh that's wonderful. How's she these days ?—

—A red-head, for the moment.—

—Ma, I must say I think she looks great.—

—But if I did it, you and Dick—

He gazed at Ivy the way familiars seldom consider one another. —You'd look like a bloody Van Gogh sunflower.—

Laughter drew them all together, so that Ivy said what might have been remarked only after she had gone.—And this business of Eckhard—how long's that going to carry on ?—A second's glance not at but in the direction of Dick, as if an invisible thread had been tugged, was followed by quick, smooth deflection:—I mean, aren't you bored yet, Rosa ?—

The chance given her to speak, if she could. A swift temptation to talk. To ask—

—It's a job.—

Rosa had her old childhood self-possession of being able to evade opportunities as well as advances, stubborn little girl in the woman. And she would not make it easier for anyone by changing the subject; other people were both held off, and held to it.

But an atmosphere of convalescence was still allowed her. Ivy strewed commonplaces over the moment.—Oh it could be quite interesting. Yes, useful, give you a practical insight, the way economic power manipulates in this country...one can always learn something...for a while, I mean—She looked around generously.

—A job like any other.—Rosa's stillness opposed the other girl's roaming self-awareness, Ivy's ample concern, Dick's restless inklings. He kept nodding, as if patting a hand or shoulder.

Clare spoke without malice.—I suppose it must be something to be decently paid for once.—

—The usual typist's salary. Nothing out of the ordinary. But nothing's expected—of you, either. It's the faceless kind of job 90 per cent of people do. You only really understand when you do it... there's nothing to show at the end of the day. Telephone calls and paper looping out of the teleprinter, vast sums of money you never see, changing hands—you never touch the hands.—Her father's smile.

Clare rubbed at the inflamed patch between her eyebrows.—Well come down to our place. We're weighing and lugging sacks about—that stuff we sell smells like baby-sick, Aletta says. No, really, Mum, it's okay at first, you think it's pleasant, but with each load, after a few weeks, it's cloying! Can't get the smell out of your hair and clothes. Tactile and whiffy enough for you, I can tell you. But nourishing, nourishing.—The affectation of a mimicking, didactic air, the eyebrows she had inherited from her father, tousled:—You just have to see Aletta with some of these women who come along. She snatches their babies from them, yelling the place down, prods their pot-bellies—you know Aletta—look at this! look at this!—The girl demonstrated on her own slack body, stretched on the frayed grass matting; wobbled with laughter—And then out with the slides showing what awful things happen to bones when they lack vitamin C and skin when there's not enough vitamin B...they get hell for the bits of fur and beads and god knows what they tie round their kids' necks—you know how she is about tribalism. Oh but she's fantastic, eh. They take it from her. They just giggle—Her latest thing, she's going to show them films. This weekend she's seeing that chap who makes short documentaries.—

—A film ?—Ivy counted stitches along her knitting.

—Her nutrition education film. I told you. The fellow who borrowed the Mayakovsky.
The Bedbug.
—

—Clare! Get it back from him for me? So that's where it is! I bought that book thirty years ago in Charing Cross Road. I managed to keep it when the police took away everything in sight that was printed. And then some lad of yours walks off with it...—

Dick was led to recollect, for his guest.—Colette started a theatre group, you know. Must have been about 1933. She was in charge of the cultural programme, class consciousness through art and that.—

—Invented her own programme for herself, more likely. I don't remember anyone else being asked much about it. Her way of getting out of teaching in the night school. You couldn't get her to work for anything she couldn't take the credit for initiating. Not her! But Clare—I mean it, you tell that young whoever-he-is from me—

—We went in a truck to black townships up and down the Reef, Krugersdorp and Boksburg... She made up the plays and I think the songs too. We acted Bloody Sunday and I was Father Gapon. And what was the one about the Gaikas and the British Imperial troops, Ivy ? Blacks from our night school were the Gaikas. We used to have the Red Flag flying on the bonnet of Isaac Lourie's old produce truck.—

The laughter of Dick and Rosa attracted his daughter.—Those were the days, old man. We can't even get into the Transkei with our thrilling kwashiorkor slides.—

—Wait until I'm put out to grass next year. I'mna fit you out a mobile unit in a caboose. You'll see. Bappie's promised to get a lot of the equipment through his father-in-law's wholesale business.—