My Life as a Man (19 page)

Her smile faded as he stared at her in silence.

‘You spoke in Afrikaans?’ Eileen asked.

‘Oh . . . yes,’ Beate said.

Don’t you mean Gaelic? I wanted to ask. It would be reckless to goad him, but I was sick of their talk of South Africa. As if they were mocking us, it seemed a private game to test our
gullibility. I asked, ‘Your first language wasn’t English?’

‘One day the whole world will be talking English,’ he said. When he turned his head, the lamplight played on one side of his face, leaving the other in a luminous shadow.
‘It’s the law of the jungle. Survival of the fittest, Darwin called it. And it’s the same for languages. Languages are for buying and selling and winning wars. The weak languages
go to the wall. The number of languages will narrow down and down. English beat French. Now it’s beaten German. Russian’s turn comes next. If an African or a Chink asked me, I’d
say learn English.’ His voice stayed quiet but became heavier and more emphatic. ‘Go where the power is, I’d tell them. Bang your head hard enough against a brick wall,
you’ll crush your skull. In the end, the whole world will have just the one language to think in.’

‘What a horrible world,’ Eileen said.

‘You’re going to talk about culture? Forget about culture. You can translate poetry.’

‘I don’t think you can.’ And she said something I couldn’t understand but recognised as French.

He repeated her last words, so lingeringly I could pick them out. ‘
Luxe, calme et volupté
.’

In his caressing of the words, he seemed to have lost the thread of his argument. His lips moved as if he were saying them over to himself.

‘A teacher taught me that. I’ve never forgotten it. The French wouldn’t give that up easily,’ Eileen said. ‘And won’t the Chinese feel the same about the
things they love? There are an awful lot of Chinese.’ Her tone was lighter as if affected by his response to the poetry she had quoted.

‘That’s their funeral,’ Beate said.

‘Try not to be stupid,’ August told her.

She frowned at him and said, ‘When my grandmother died, they couldn’t find her rosary beads. Catholics have to be buried with their rosary beads, so my mother gave hers – she
didn’t use them. They were put in Grandmother’s coffin. The funeral was – on an island; you wouldn’t have heard of it. I said to my mother, “Could they not make the
funeral later in the day?” “The funerals are always at ten o’clock,” she said. They didn’t have a hearse, you see, so they used the school bus. It had
“School” on the side of it. They dug her grave in the sand, and then they came to a rock base, so they had to build a wooden frame for the grave. It was raining so hard my father said
to the priest, “Look, the coffin’s floating,” so they just had to fill it in right away.’

Eileen was listening with a little frown between her brows. ‘This was in South Africa?’

Before Beate could respond, August said, ‘The liner we came in from Africa was sunk by a torpedo. From the raft, I watched it go down bow first, heaving up its great behind to dry in the
sun while a million sparkling drops showered from it into the sea.’

Beate said, ‘If you weren’t here, he wouldn’t be so polite.’

‘Polite?’ Eileen shook her head. ‘I could see it. It’s vivid like a poem. I don’t know about polite.’

‘He’d have called its arse its arse,’ Beate said.

‘Oh.’

‘But with you here and being a lady . . . What does your husband do?’

Eileen stared at her a moment, then said, ‘He owns a factory.’

‘I knew you were rich,’ Beate said with satisfaction.

‘No!’ I protested.

They all looked at me.

‘
He
may be rich. We’re not.’

I didn’t dare meet Eileen’s eyes. What she thought I was doing, God knows.

August, though, nodded as if it made perfect sense to him that I should claim we were penniless.

‘The two of you have run off.’ He nodded again and threw up his hands palms upwards. ‘Of course.’

Not long afterwards, Eileen went to bed and I was left alone with the pair of them. It was hard to stop thinking of them as husband and wife, but it was hard, too, not to see resemblance between
them. He was almost ugly and she wasn’t pretty, but there it was – in the nose and the shape of the eyes. If I’d just met them and been told they were brother and sister, I would
have said, yes, I could see it: the family resemblance.

When I was alone, I lay awake under the blanket on the couch. In my thoughts August went by the name he had given me, but it was as if now another man stood behind him in the shadows; and Angus
frightened me more than August ever had, for if he existed he lived a hard life in a remote place to hide a guilty secret. He was an educated man with half a shelf of books. A man full of ideas
with no one to discuss them with. The truth is, if Angus existed, he was poor and needed to be rich. How could he know the money was in the case, and not want to have it? But how could he get it,
be able to keep it, be sure of going unpunished, if Eileen and I were alive? I could believe the act of murder might be a horror to him. But how could he give up the money? I could see how the days
might pass while he tried to make up his mind.

But when I sat up on the edge of the bed it was August who was standing by the stove, stirring the pot.

‘Beate’s gone to take the eggs from under the hen,’ he said. ‘And there’s porridge on the go.’

I’d never seen him lift a hand to help inside the house. I stood and put on a shirt over the vest I’d worn to sleep in; then pulled on my trousers and zipped up. When I turned, he
was watching me. ‘Beate told me you were a modest boy.’

The half-smile that accompanied the words completed my uneasiness. It took an effort to go over beside him to the cupboard where the bowls were kept.

‘Do you want one, too?’

‘I’ll breakfast with you,’ he said.

I put a bowl on either side of the table. He poured porridge into them, almost filling each one. It was far more than I had taken on the other mornings. When I put milk in, my bowl was full to
overflowing. He went back to the cupboard and fetched a third bowl, poured milk into it and set it beside his other one. Then he started to eat, spooning up porridge and milk in turns. I scattered
salt on mine and began.

‘It’s a pity the hives aren’t ready,’ he said. ‘Some honey goes well with porridge. Often and often enough, my father told me he despised that, but it didn’t
stop me – I’ve always had a sweet tooth. Now that he’s dead, I can’t help being sorry I defied him. What harm would the salt have done me?’

Porridge and a battle over whether or not it should be sweetened. That sounded like the childhood of someone called Angus, a countryman of mine. His pause seemed to challenge me to comment as if
he read my thoughts. I said nothing.

‘What kind of factory is it?’ he asked.

The spoon paused halfway to my mouth.

‘This factory your father owns? What does it make?’

‘I wouldn’t call it a factory. More like a workshop than a factory. Small stuff

Yes, but what exactly? I waited for him to ask. I’m a poor liar; my mind had gone blank. As he watched me, head to one side, I felt sweat run down my back.

Leaning forward, he asked, ‘What made you run off?’

I stammered, ‘It – it’s not something I want to talk about.’

‘Some people would preach about putting up with what a father does, however bad it is. But some things are hard to put up with. A bad father.’ His tongue was fat and red as he licked
the spoon. ‘A bad husband. Better out than in, get it off your chest. I’m a good listener.’

After an endless waiting, he pushed back his chair. I took it as a release and got to my feet.

‘Don’t let me keep you back,’ I said. ‘You’re late this morning.’

‘No, I’m early. I’ve done what had to be done.’ He piled one bowl into the other. ‘Soon as we’re finished, we can go.’

‘Go where?’

He looked at me as if I was stupid, and of course the answer was obvious. Go to town. Where else? He put the bowls in the sink and sat down again. After a moment, I took my place opposite
him.

Beate came back with the eggs. It was strange. Everything was so normal. The eggs were boiled and we ate them with butter and salt and drank tea. All the time the two of them talked, just a few
words back and forward, with more missed out than said, as people do when they’ve known each other all their lives. They even smiled at the same moment and once laughed together. I might as
well have been invisible. Desperately, I wanted Eileen to be there, but it was just eight in the morning and she had slept heavily since her illness.

There was still no sign of her when we set out.

August was cramped in the car, crouched down turning the wheel with one hand, his shoulder rubbing against mine though I sat over as far as I could. ‘I’ll take a guess,’ he
said. ‘If
your
father had been South African, he’d have been in the Broederbond. One of the old ones behind the scenes pulling the strings. You get them in every country. Here as
well, but there’s no name for them here.’

‘Masons?’

‘Playing at it,’ he said scornfully. ‘Not the same thing at all.’ After that, he never said a word or spared a glance from the tortuous narrow road.

In the early-morning light, the town looked prosperous and smug. All the buildings were of stone, cream stone and two different shades of brown, each sharp-cut rectangle so new and clean it
might have been freshly scrubbed. There was a long stripe of grass on either side of the main street with parking spaces facing into the pavement. We stopped in front of a building that looked as
if it must once have been a rich man’s house; it had steps up to its front door and a Bank of Scotland sign. To the side there was a shop with an enormous glass window with a display of long
tartan skirts.

‘I won’t be long,’ August said.

I watched until he went round the corner. He walked very upright and swung his arms as if keeping step to a marching song. It was so quiet I heard a little broken sighing sound. It was my own
breath, coming hard as if I had been running. A man went by with his jacket over his arm. As he passed, he broke step and stared in at me. I wondered if he had expected to see August, and somehow
the idea of anyone knowing August surprised me. Anyway, after the briefest hesitation he walked on. Maybe it was just that he had thought the cars were empty, then sensed he was being observed from
one of them. I thought about getting out. I listened to my breath slowing. After a time, a stout man in a blue suit went up the steps of the bank, unlocked the front door and went inside. Shortly
afterwards, two younger men arrived, staff, I supposed; the day’s business of the small town beginning.

I got out of the car and walked slowly in the direction August had gone. Before the corner, there were half a dozen shops, a butcher, a window full of balls of wool, a little café with
net curtains and a hand-printed card taped to the door. I read slowly down the list of prices: eggs and bacon and ham salad and cakes and tea. Behind the curtain I could make out the shape of a
woman with a fistful of cutlery going from table to table as slowly as a diver groping across an ocean floor.

From the corner the side street ran down past a building with posters by the door about the importance of pregnant mothers collecting their ration of cod liver oil and orange juice, a row of
bungalows with cropped lawns and rose bushes, a square stone house with its name worked into the iron gate: Tigh-na-mara. At the bottom, there was a path by a river with a little island in the
middle and trees hanging their branches down towards the water. I stood there for a bit, watching two swans sail along on top of their reflections, then retraced my steps.

As I came back on to the main street, I saw August approaching the car from the other direction. He was carrying a large metal can, which he put into the boot.

Slamming the lid, he said, ‘Two birds with one stone. We were needing oil for the lamps.’

‘I’m sorry I left the car.’

‘What’s to be sorry about?’

‘Unlocked, I mean.’

‘It makes no difference. You could leave it for a week here and no one would touch it. Tell you what.’ He pulled a key ring from his pocket and gave it a long, considering look, and
then turned one of the keys in the lock of the boot. ‘That should keep my oil safe.’ He was laughing at me.

‘Can we go to the garage now?’ I asked.

When he started across the road, I thought that was where we were going; but when I caught up with him, he said, ‘Since we’re here anyway, we could buy beans. I forgot beans
yesterday.’

I followed him into the grocer’s and stood by as he bought beans and a packet of custard creams and a box of chocolate biscuits, a pot of jam and one of thick-slice orange marmalade, and
half a dozen bars of fudge.

Outside, he handed me the bags of groceries and the key ring and said, ‘Put these in the boot.’

As he turned away, I said, ‘Are you going to the garage?’

I was determined to go with him.

‘Give it till Monday, they said.’

‘What?’

I caught him by the upper arm, the muscle hard as stone. He frowned down at my hand and I took it away.

‘I asked about your starting motor when I was getting oil for the lamps. Now I feel the sweet tooth needs feeding. Yesterday I resisted temptation. Today I don’t. So you could say
it’s your fault.’

I followed him along the pavement. He stopped at a window set with pastries on trays and mounds of soft rolls in one corner.

‘When you don’t have much money, treats are few and far between,’ he said, not removing his gaze from the window. ‘But Beate will understand this one. I’ll say to
her, “The time’s come for treating ourselves. Get used to it.” ’ He smiled as if he had made a joke and I thought the smile, like everything about him, was false. Only the
greed with which he stared into the window seemed genuine. ‘Meringues. Eclairs. Even the words make your mouth water. Go over and wait for me. I’ll not be a minute.’ As I turned
away, he murmured, ‘I like to take my time choosing.’