None to Accompany Me (16 page)

Sally raised eyebrows and poked her head forward comically. —Sounds unlikely.— She took a long draught and, as she
put the glass down close to Vera Stark's hand, let her touch nudge it. —Everything unlikely has become likely. That's our politics these days.—

In their laughter the side-current of family lives surfaced, the intimacy of the times in one another's four walls when they had pooled their children, danced to Didy's records; the weeks when, on return from exile, the Maqomas had moved in with the Starks. —Did I tell you, some changes. Ivan's divorced, and Ben's father's living with us now.—

—Oh naughty Ivan. Young people are not like us, no staying power. But I remember, she wasn't much of a personality, you said …? It mustn't be too good for you, having the old man in the house.—

—I've always got on all right with him but he needs time, from others. Us.—

—Get someone in to look after him, Vera, you can't do it, you mustn't. You've got more important things … I'm sure I can find someone for you, there're always people coming round my office, out-of-work nurses, nice elderly mamas, long-lost cousins, God knows what—I'll find someone who can live in, that's what you need.—

—I don't know. D'you know it's going to be awful to be really old, no one wants to touch you any more, no one likes the smell of your skin, no one ever kisses you … And Ben's never loved his father, it seems. Some sort of resentment from childhood, you know those mysteries no one but the one who was himself the child can understand.—

—Ben? Really? Ben's such a darling, such an affectionate man.—

The limits of confidences between two people constantly shift, opening here, there closing off one from the other. Vera Stark could not speak what she was saying to herself, Bennet
loved, Ben loves, only me; loves in Ivan only me, and what shall I do with that love— The thought rising like a wave of anxiety trapped in voices at a restaurant full of people; no place to deal with it. —I hear Didy's commissioned to do a book. A history of the exile period, is it?—

—He's supposed to be researching. Don't ask me … Let's order coffee— Sally had the alert shifting glance of a bird on a tree-top, surveying the comings and goings of waiters. When the coffee came she arranged the cups and poured, measuring out words with the flow. —Half the time he doesn't even get up in the mornings. I go to work, I don't know what time he gets round to shaving and so on. Always some pain or ache. When I say in the evening, how did it go today—I mean, Vera, I'm showing
interest
, I'm talking about whether he's written letters to people who can give him material, whether he's organizing his notes— then he'll say something like, How did what go? To put me down. To imply I'm humouring him … Because of where I've been all day, at headquarters. Is what happened
my
fault? Can I help it? He's got to stop this wallowing in self-pity. I can tell you (her eyes shifted focus, round the neighbouring tables, where other people's talk and self-absorption made a wall of protection) I'm beginning to find it disgusting. He doesn't realize that; it disgusts me.—

This confidence almost alarms; to meet it means it should be matched, and Vera does not know, does not yet understand, what it is exactly that she needs to confide, or if that impulse is any longer something to be heeded. Who can give answers? A bearded man in a preacher's dog-collar stood in the doorway,
How mean of you Vera.
—He's become history rather than a living man. How can anyone be expected to accept that about himself.—

Sally made a fist above her cup, she was shaking her head
vehemently. —That's just the problem. He does
think
he's history. He's copping out because he's not centre stage any more, he sees himself as history and history stops with
him.
He won't accept that it goes on being made and we all have to make it, my part has changed, his part has changed. He's still a living man who has work to do even though it can't be what he'd choose.—

—Writing a history? That's the past.—

Sally leant on the table in silence but did not let it widen between them. —I came back from a trip—a mission—you'd think I'd never been away. He doesn't bring me home.—

They are not two young women, after all, exchanging bedroom secrets. Vera may take the odd phrase as some locution for welcome slipped in from an African language. And she's white, she has never known what exiles have, the return of your man from god knows where doing god knows what he had to do (Didymus's name as someone connected with one of those camps luckily hasn't become public). She may or may not have understood what Sally is saying. Didymus doesn't bring her home by making love to her, as she used to, for him.

When Didymus did make the approaches of love-making Sibongile felt no response. Mpho had appeared from her room one evening charmed—in the sense of talented, gifted—with youth. The clarity of the lines of her body in a scrap of a dress, of her lips and long shining eyes with their fold of laughter at the outer corners, the cheap, wooden-toy ear-rings in the shape of parrots hanging from the delicate hieroglyph of her ears— she was the embodiment of happiness. Waiting to be called for; where was she going? A party, there were so many parties parents couldn't keep up with the names of all the friends with whom
she was apparently so popular. A girl-friend bustled in to fetch her, they chattered their way out. A thin chain looped through a pendant lay curled on the table where she had dropped it after lifting it from her neck over her carefully arranged hair when the friend pulled a face: the pendant clashed with the ear-rings. Didymus poured the chain from hand to hand, smiling. He came into the kitchen where Sibongile stood stirring a stew and, with the pretext of looking to see what was in the pot, leant his chin on her shoulder. His hand came round over her belly that was swelled forward as she moved the meat about with a fork, circled the navel in a half-humorous caress in anticipation of a meal, and then moved down over her pelvis a moment.

After they had eaten she seated herself at the computer they had bought for his work on the history of exiles. Staring at the luminous waver of the screen a moment, arrested, as if for some indication whether he had used it that day at all; she turned to him.

—Go ahead.— He chose to understand that she was asking whether he needed the machine now. She spilled out and sorted her papers exasperatedly. He switched on the TV, volume low in order not to disturb concentration on whatever it was she was writing. Swells of music and the exaggerated pitch of broadcast emotions emanated from where he sat, as she removed from and inserted words and phrases in a speech she was due to deliver in a few days. His back faced her every time she lifted her eyes from the juggled text swimming in phosphorescence; something about the droop of the head showed that he wasn't seeing, he wasn't hearing. Didymus was asleep, carried along, unconscious, like a drunk at a carnival, in the meaningless impersonal familiarity of the medium that invades everywhere and recognizes no one.

In their bed he took up the caress begun in the kitchen.
His hand slid from her hips pressing firmer and firmer, smaller and smaller circles over the mound of her pubis, working fingers through the hair and slipping the index one, as if by chance, to touch through the lips. She flung back the covers and swerved out of bed, the mooring of his hand torn away. She stalked about the room with the air of looking for something and when aware of him watching her went out into the other rooms.

She came back and offered: —Verandah light wasn't left on for Mpho.—

—I turned it on.—

—You didn't.—

—My memory, these days …—

She lay beside him, not saying goodnight in case this provided an opening for him to try to rouse her again.

That night, or another night, she woke in a tension of sadness in which she and he were lost together, bound, sunk. The sound of their breathing strung tight between them but the divide of darkness could not be crossed, the weight of fathoms could not be lifted. He had not forgotten the light for Mpho. The pain of repentance, so useless, for this stupid little spite was actual between her ribs, something conjured up from the religious pictures pasted to the kitchen walls in her grandmother's house in Witbank location, where she grew up. She seemed to be living simultaneously in the hum of the night all the images, the moments when she had been most aware of him, scattered through the years. Parted so often; what happens in these partings, his, now hers, in the one who goes away? Is the one who left ever the one who comes back? There are changes in understanding and awareness that can occur only when one is alone, away from containment in the shape of self outlined by another. Such
changes can never be shared. Alone with them for ever. The images are postcards sent from countries that exist only in the personality of the subject; you will never visit them. She had to make sure that he was there, some version of himself, even as a shrouded bulk under the bedclothes. She hesitated where to touch him: on the forehead, the hand pressed against a cheek, the neck below the ear, where a pulse answers. She rested her spinal column back to back along the length of his and felt him break wind as he slept.

 

The old man occupied Annick's room, so she would have to take what had been Ivan's and the friend she was bringing would have to share it with her. Ivan's luxury had been a double bed across which he liked to stretch diagonally his adolescent sprawl. Vera bought a divan to move into the room to accommodate the friend. The old man's presence already had changed the balance of the house. Sally forgot or had been too busy to fulfil her offer but connections at the Foundation supplied a relative in need of work; the path of the old man's movements, on the arm of the woman who came to help him every day, intersected and deflected those of Vera and Ben. Vera's house had the transparent grids of various presences laid upon it—the brief comings and goings of the soldier whose military kit propped against her dressing-table left in the varnish a dent whose cause was forgotten, the clandestine movements Bennet brought in as a lover and established in usage as husband and father, the route the children used to take, out of the window in Annick's room and in through the back stoep door to get at potato chips in the kitchen cupboard without alerting parents, and the invisible trails of Vera herself, changing the function of
a space by bringing Blue Books and White Papers to occupy what had held model plane kits and threadbare stuffed animals, closing windows room by room in a storm, carrying, as if following back in footsteps that have worn grooves in the wood floor of her house, an old photograph to the light. On her barefoot morning scamper to the bathroom the old man might cross her path, wavering ahead with his paralysed hand dangling curled at his side and the other held before him as a blind man senses for obstacles. He was not blind but formed the precautionary habit of keeping the hand in the position of one ready to receive a handshake greeting, because even that side of his body had not survived the stroke unimpaired and it took time and effort to muster the appropriate muscles when the occasion came. She had to remember to wear a gown, as she had done when there were still children at home and a live-in maid coming early from the kitchen to house-clean.

He wandered with a smile of strange sweetness from encounter to encounter, not that he had become simple-minded but because he was reliving the sense of achievement a child has when first it masters how to walk, and the house represented to him territory daily conquered. He did not seem to mind the wheedling patter of Thandeka, who winked and gesticulated behind his back in comment on his infirmity and pride in his progress. How is he today, Ben would enquire of her in the presence of his father; and the hand that he might have touched sank uncertainly out of the way. He bought his father specialist journals and newspapers that should be of interest—he had been a chemical engineer—and left them on the table beside the old man's chair in lieu of a visit. The woman attendant decided, as part of her responsibility for the old man's care, what he felt. —Mama, he's so happy for his granddaughter coming, I tell you, mama! That time she is arrive he's going to be there,
there
,
mama! So happy! Mama, I'm going to put a nice suit he'll wear—

Brought forward on her arm with abstract joy expressed on his behalf as smiling nuns set themselves to beam radiance of the holy spirit and politicians display their amorphous love of humankind, he looked uncertain, for a moment, which of the two young women who arrived was his granddaughter. He had not seen her since she was a high-school girl; but the face, the face of his son, there in hers, was surely unmistakable. Vera and Ben had somehow omitted to mention to her that the grandfather was living with them—as often, with them, each thought the other had done something neither had. But Annick kissed him, took the old hand—cold scaly skin like that of a tortoise she'd kept as a pet as a child—placed it in that of the friend with her, using the childhood form of address. —Grandpops, this is Lou, she's in biology and she's just come from a month on your old stamping ground, wasn't it—Zaire—the Congo.—

His voice snagged on the effort to speak, but he turned the pause into a mock appeal to Vera. —Of course this young lady's in biology, we all
are
biological—what does that mean she does, though?— He enjoyed his little quip and the polite laughter it brought; Ben only smiled, his black eyes unreadable. The granddaughter cuffed her friend lightly so that the girl shook her drape of hair like a mare stung by a fly; both had long hair, but the straight black tresses Annick had from her father had been frizzed since her parents saw her last. —Grandpops she's a professor, she's been doing important research up there, fascinating, we'll tell you about it.—