None to Accompany Me (36 page)

—I've sold the house.—

Annie was instantly, frighteningly indignant: home, the old home, it must be kept intact even if one never sees it again, doesn't want to. —You've what? For God's sake! When? And what about Ben, when he comes back? Where'll you live?—

Vera let her lift the baby against her shoulder, patting it in the ritual of aiding digestion, before she spoke.

—Ben won't come back.—

Annie did not look at her mother. —And when was that decision taken.—

—There's no decision, but he won't come back.—

—Don't tell me you and he are getting divorced at your age.—

—No, not divorced. No. I'll go and see him and Ivan when I'm overseas.—

She was amazed to see Annie's face reddening as it did when as a child she was about to lose her temper. The black eyes hostile behind a thick distortion of tears.

—How nice of you. What has he done?—

—Done. Nothing.—

So now she—Vera, the mother—who came home to him fucked out from another man, was abandoning that home, nothing for her father to come back to. Shut out.

—For Christ's sake, why do you do this?—

Vera was looking with incomprehension at something else before her, the baby back at the breast of a woman who wouldn't have a man. —Because I cannot live with someone who can't live without me.—

—That's right. Answer in riddles.—

—When someone gives you so much power over himself he makes you a tyrant.—

A few tears fell on the baby's spongy filaments, glistening there, Annie brushed off the contamination fiercely. —Like the penis business. You and the penis, I couldn't understand that, either, could I.—

Vera wanted to bow her head, walk indoors hangdog, and despised herself for it. Always she had had a masochistic need to be chastised by Annie in expiation of the times when, loving her, she had neglected her by having her
out of mind
, that most callous form of neglect; while caring for nothing but making love in One-Twenty-One Delville Wood. She resisted the need by coldness. —By now we ought to have accepted there are things about each other neither of us understands.—

Above the head of the baby Annie screwed up the left side
of her face as if to focus better, ward off. —And what are you going to do?—

—When the Committee's finished, I'll be back at the Foundation of course.—

—You know I don't mean that. Where're you intending to live? You're not going to buy another house, are you? A flat? I can't see you in one of those buildings where you have to sign in and out every time with some security thug in the foyer.—

—I'm moving to the annexe of Zeph's house.—

No recognition of the name.

—Zeph Rapulana. You know him. He was at the party we gave when you and Lou were staying with us.—

—When my grandfather died.— A reproof asserting the order of events in better proportion to their significance.

—I think you and Lou talked to him for a while, in the garden that night.—

—The man who sits on boards and is a director of banks and whatnot, you told us? The smooth-talking representative of the new middle class?—

—The squatter camp leader I've known for a long time. A good friend.—

Annie was looking at her in sour derisory disbelief. —You've always dominated in your own house. You're going to share with someone, now? Why?—

—It's an annexe. Quite separate, own entrance and so on. There's no question of any intrusion, either way. We respect each other.—

—But how did this decision come about? Not out of thin air! Not because you answered an offer of accommodation in the newspaper!—

—We talked about it together.—

—So you're such great friends.— No reaction: something else Annie sees she is not expected to understand. —And how will you get on with his family. The wife? D'you at least know her? All very well your professional friendships, Vera—

—She lives in the house he built in an area the Foundation fought a successful action over. She doesn't like the city; the children are all away, grown-up—like mine.—

Annie's body began to rock gently back and forth, soothing the baby to sleep, and, as if with the movement, her sense of her mother changed, she felt that her mother needed protection from herself—her headstrong naivety. —Ma, so you're virtually moving in with a man. What will people think?—

From Annie! Vera laughed. What a consideration, from a lesbian, a lesbian parent—Annie! —D'you mean a black man, then?—

—I mean just what I said: my father's gone to live in London, you move in with another man.—

—I don't think anyone could think
anything
about someone my age, and a man.—

Vera had her palms raised in a steeple against her mouth in her familiar attitude of obduracy. Annie seemed to have to capture her attention against the fascination with which she was following the darting ballet of the squirrel approaching and retreating near the verandah.

—Ma, you're wrong. They'll think.— She continued to rock, in embarrassment at what she was about to deliver. —And they'll laugh at you.—

Vera was deeply curious rather than hurt in some residual sexual vanity. —Do you think so? That's interesting.—

And this roused Annie's curiosity, or wonder. —What are you experimenting with?—

—Not experimenting.— Vera kindly, but to the point. —You're the one who's doing that.—

—We're doing what we know we want, Lou and I. Simple. I don't know what it is you think you want.
Still.
Oh I know— your work, what's coming for the country—but you? What have you wanted?—

Only someone young could ask this as the single question. Yet she was forced into response. —Now. To find out about my life. The truth. In the end. That's all.—

—Oh Vera!— A gesture with a hand free of the baby, flourishing the size, the presumption of the answer. —And have you?—

—I'm getting there.—

—‘The truth about your life.' But that's not the question. Was it worth it?—

—What?—

—Everything. All that you made happen. The way you're suddenly making something else happen now.—

—But
that's
not the question. It's not a summing-up. It's not (Vera has the expression of someone quoting) a bag of salt weighed against a bag of mealies.—

—And so? You're not obliged to answer because I'm your daughter. I'm not looking for a guiding light …—

But a key opening a door they had looked for entry to only once before, they were in some place of confidence.

Vera searched there for something partially, tentatively explanatory that would not make some homely philosophy of a process that must not be looked back upon with the glance of Orpheus. —Working through—what shall I say—dependencies.—

—What a strange way to see life. Yours, or others on
you?— But the sound of Lou's third-hand Karmann-Ghia (relic of the days when she was a carefree bachelor, so to speak) braking at the gate made Annie forget about an answer. Lou was coming with a smiling here-am-I stride up the path. A cancelled appointment had given her the chance to slip home for lunch—she brought it with her, a hot loaf and a tray of avocados. She dumped these and kissed Annie, was kissed back while she caressed Annie's nape and both hung over the padded basket where their baby slept.

Home.

Vera is the onlooker to domestic serenity.

Somehow, she and Annie have exchanged places. She has left home, and Annie is making home of a new kind entirely.

 

Perhaps the passing away of the old regime makes the abandonment of an old personal life also possible.

I'm getting there.

Proposals to the Technical Committee on Constitutional Issues come from all groups and formations. And the groupings scarcely can be defined with any accuracy from week to week. Wild alliances clot suddenly in the political bloodstream, are announced, break up, flow in and out of negotiations. Everyone wants their own future arranged around thein, everyone has plans for a structure of laws to contain their ideal existence. It is the nearest humans will ever get to the myth of being God on Creation Day. Vera Stark and her colleagues sit week after week, sometimes into the night, considering the basis of proportional representation, parties qualifying with five per cent or ten per cent, consensus in Cabinet decisions or on the vote of a two-thirds majority; the percentage by which the President should be elected, the percentage by which amendments to the constitution could be made, the percentage by which the Bill of Rights could be amended, the extent of powers and duties to be assigned to regional legislatures. And on and on. The principle of each
proposal is almost without exception the same: every cluster or assembly of individuals wants to protect itself from the power of others. The fallible human beings on the Committee are occupied with the task of finding a way through this that would protect all these without danger or disadvantage to any. Politics began outside the Garden; the violent brotherhood of Cain and Abel can be transformed into the other proclaimed brotherhood only if it is possible to devise laws to bring this about.

Zeph found her in the garden where a place seemed to have been ready for her for some time. He had dinners and evening meetings and she often was in late session with the Committee, so they seldom coincided on working days. But on Sundays they were there. Vera had pensioned off her three-times-a-week maid with her house, but Zeph had an old woman brought in from the country, perhaps a relative, to whom he referred as his ‘housekeeper' since it was delicate for blacks to admit to employing servants. The woman went to the allday open-air gathering of some religious sect on Sundays, as Zeph went to early service in an Anglican church: Vera cooked breakfast and set it out under the jacaranda mid-morning. He was used to being waited on by women but did not expect it of her, always thanked her as if it were a surprise, and carried the dishes with her back to her small kitchen when they had eaten. They read the papers, passing particular pages to one another without comment; each, out of their particular activities and connections, had knowledge to exchange in private of what was omitted there, not for publication. —No one'll trust we're impartial, whatever we put forward to the negotiations, every day when I get to that chair where I sit I have to remind myself of this. And perhaps they're right? I know, for myself— I'm influenced by the land, at the back of my mind I'm seeing every possible check and balance in terms of how it might affect
the question of land distribution. It comes from all my time at the Foundation, it's been the perspective of my life for so long.—

—I don't think
everyone
thinks the Committee isn't impartial. I wouldn't say that, Vera. Just a few who don't understand what impartiality tries for, because preventing ‘abuse of power' only means to them they haven't a hope in hell of succeeding with their own kind of domination.—

—But that's just the problem. You and I, here, we can see those people for what they are, and dismiss them. We know what they are, we've decided they're a dangerous hindrance. But the Committee has to consider all submissions, has to take every one seriously, there we have to correct in each other any personal judgments. Remember I once said to you, a constitution's the practice in law of a Bill of Rights? Well I've found impartiality really means listening to the most obvious contrivances thought up by people who don't care what they'd do to claim legality to hang on to power, finagle power. The use to which they'll put beautiful legal formulations! We're caught up in a jungle of our own negotialionspeak.—

—‘Technical Committee' … yes … sounds so simple … Like knowing how to wire up some lights or keep the airconditioners going … They could have called it something else. But that's a hangover from all the names we had, nothing to do with the circumstances we were supposed to believe were described by the names—remember Separate but Equal, Extension of Universities Act, Immorality Act, whatnot … It's a habit we took over.—

They laughed, matching alone together in the winter sun many of the curious aspects of the changes of which they were part, the time through which they were moving.

If she was grappling in difficulty with what were supposed
to be the technicalities of people's future lives, he had no such officially defined euphemism to protect him. There were scandals in the financial enterprise of empowerment. His face appeared among others in the newspapers they opened. A tangle of loans, debts, transfer of funds from one company to another, and accusations of these being fronts for the Movement. —So are they going to ask you to write into the constitution that no one in a political party can have business interests? That's something, after the way big business and the mines kept the old regime in place since our grandfathers' days!—

—How did it happen? Is there really embezzlement somewhere, people you thought you could trust?—

—I don't like to think so, straight off. We have to sort it all out. It began to get too big too quickly, out of hand. Some sectors—I told you when the figures came out last month how well the insurance company's investment in housing is going?— they're doing well, but the papers don't make much of it. Blacks can't succeed. They mustn't. The old story.—

—Wish-fulfilment rumours. But the figures they quote?—

—I wish it was just rumours. Other things are shaky. We haven't kept strict enough control! … when we've seen some of our brothers heading for trouble we've baled them out on their assurance it was temporary, we believed them, they believed it themselves! We haven't learned yet to be ruthless, and that's the first rule in business, make no mistake; we did.— There came to him the jargon that had entered his vocabulary from the Drommedaris. —Not a question of anyone's hand in the till. I'm prepared to stick by that. It'll be a terrible thing for me, Vera, if it is.—