A Dry White Season (19 page)

He waited quietly, aware of a growing relaxation, an openness made possible by the increasing darkness outside and the gentleness of the old house.

“I was brought up in a very sheltered way,” she said. “Not that he was possessive – not openly, anyway. I think he’d just seen enough of the mess the world was in to want to protect me as much as he could. Not against suffering as such, but against unnecessary suffering. And later, at university, I took a nice, safe course. Literature mainly. Hoping to become a teacher. Then I got married to a man I’d met at school, he’d been one of my teachers. He adored me, carried me on his hands, just like Dad had done.” She moved her head; her dark hair stirred. “I suppose that was where the trouble started.”

“But why?” He felt a sudden pang of longing for Linda.

“I don’t know. Perhaps there’s always been something contrary inside me. Or is it the opposite? I’m a Gemini, you see.” A provocative smile. “Deep down, I suppose, I’m just lazy. Nothing would be easier than to indulge myself, to allow myself to sink back into it, like in one of these old easy-chairs. But it’s dangerous. Do you understand what I’m trying to say? I mean, one can lead such a delightfully cushioned existence that you
actually stop living, stop feeling, stop caring. As if you’re in a trance, living in a constant high.” She was toying with her glass. “Then, one day, you discover that life itself is slipping past and you’re just a bloody parasite, something white and maggot-like, not really a human being, just a thing, a sweet and ineffectual thing. And even if you try to call for help, they don’t understand you. They don’t even hear you. Or they think it’s just a new craze and start doing their best to humour you.”

“So what happened? What made you break out of it?”

“I’m not sure that anything really dramatic or spectacular is necessary. It just happens. One morning you open your eyes and discover something prickly and restless inside, and you don’t know what’s the matter. You take a bath and go back to your room and suddenly, as you pass the wardrobe, you see yourself. And you stop. You look at yourself. You look at yourself naked. A face, a body you’ve seen in the mirror every day of your life. Except you’ve never
really
seen it. You’ve never really
looked.
And now, all of a sudden, it comes as a shock, because you’re looking at a total stranger. You look at your eyes and your nose and your mouth. You press your face against the smooth, cold surface of the mirror, until it’s fogged up, trying to get right into it, to look right into your eyes. You stand back and look at your body. You touch yourself with your hands, but it remains strange, you cannot come to grips with it. Some mad urge gets into you. An urge to run out into the street just as you are, naked, and to shout the filthiest obscenities you can think of at people. But you repress it, of course. And it makes you feel even more caged in than before. And then you realise that all your life you’ve been hanging around waiting for something to happen, something special, something really worthwhile. But all that happens is that time passes.”

“I know,” Ben said quietly, more to himself than to her. “Don’t you think I know what it feels like? Waiting and waiting: as if life is an investment in a bank somewhere, a safe deposit which will be paid out to you one day, a fortune. And then you open your eyes and you discover that life is no more than the small change you’ve got in your back pocket today.”

She got up out of the chair and went over to the window
behind the overloaded desk, a narrow figure against the darkening evening outside, a childlike defencelessness about her shoulders and the trim roundness of her bottom.

“If there really was a specific incident which made me open my eyes,” she said, turning back to him, “it was something utterly trivial in itself. One day our housemaid fell ill at work and in the afternoon I took her home to Alexandra. She’d been with us for years, first with Dad and me; then, after my marriage, with Brian and me. We got along very well; we paid her decent wages and everything. But that was the first day I’d ever set foot in her house, you know. And it shook me. A tiny brick house with two rooms. No ceiling, no electricity, concrete floor. In the dining-room there was a table covered with a piece of linoleum, and two rickety chairs, I think, and a small cupboard for crockery; and in the other room a single bed and some paraffin boxes. That was all. That was where she lived, with her husband and their three youngest children and two of her husband’s sisters. They took turns with the bed; the rest slept on the floor. There were no mattresses. It was winter, and the children were coughing.” Her voice suddenly choked. “Do you understand? It wasn’t the poverty as such: one knows about poverty, one reads the newspapers, one isn’t blind, one even has a ‘social conscience’. But Dorothy was someone I thought I
knew;
she’d helped Dad to bring me up; she lived with me in the same house every day of my life. You know, it felt like the first time I’d ever really looked right into someone else’s life. As if, for the first time, I made the discovery that other lives
existed.
And worst of all was the feeling that I knew just as little about my own life as about theirs.” With a brusque movement she came from behind the desk and picked up his empty glass. “I’ll get you some more.”

“I’ve had enough,” he said. But she had already disappeared, followed by a couple of soundless cats.

“Surely you didn’t get divorced because of that?” he asked when she came back.

Her back turned to him, she put a record on the player, one of the late Beethoven sonatas, turning the volume down very low; almost imperceptibly the music flowed into the cluttered room.

“How can one pinpoint such a decision?” she said, curling
up in her chair again. “That wasn’t the only thing that happened. Of course not. I just felt more and more claustrophobic. I became irritable and unreasonable and uptight. Poor Brian had no idea of what was happening. Neither did Dad. As a matter of fact, for about a year I stayed away from him altogether, I couldn’t face him, I didn’t know what to say to him. And after the divorce I moved into my own flat.”

“Now you’re back with your father,” he reminded her.

“Yes. But I didn’t come back to get pampered and spoilt again. Only because, this time, he needed
me.”

“And then you became a journalist?”

“I thought it would force me, or help me, to expose myself. To prevent myself from slipping back into that old euphoria again. To force me to see and to take notice of what was happening around me.”

“Wasn’t that rather drastic?”

“I had to do something drastic. I knew myself too well. It wouldn’t take much to sink back slowly into self-indulgence and the wonderful luxury of being cared for by others. But I dare not let it happen again. Don’t you understand?”

“Did it work?” Ben asked. The second brandy was reinforcing the effect of the first, causing him to relax in heavy mellowness.

“I wish I could give you a straight answer.” Her eyes were searching him keenly as if hoping for a clue or a cue from him. After a few moments she went on: “I went on a long journey first. Just wandering about. Mainly in Africa.”

“How did you manage that on a South African passport?”

“My mother was English, remember. So I got a British passport. It still comes in handy when the paper wants to send out a reporter.”

“And you came through it all unscathed?”

A brief and almost bitter laugh. “Not always. But then, I couldn’t really expect to, could I? After all, that was one of the reasons I’d broken away.”

“What happened?”

She shrugged, noncommittal. “I really don’t see why I should pour out all my sob-stories on you.”

“Now you’re the one who is evasive.”

She looked straight at him, weighing, reflecting. Then, as if she were depressed or threatened by something unless she could move around, she got up again and started wandering about the room, pushing the odd book into line with the others.

“I was in Mozambique in ‘74,” she said at last. “Just when Frelimo was getting out of hand after the takeover.” For a moment she seemed to have thought better of it; then, her back turned to him, she said: “One night on my way back to the hotel I was stopped by a group of drunken soldiers. I showed them my press-card but they threw it back at me.”

“And then?”

“What do you think?” she asked. “They dragged me off to an empty lot and raped me, the whole lot of them, and left me there.” An unexpected chuckle. “You know what was the worst of it all? Arriving back at my hotel long past midnight and finding that there was no hot water.”

He made a hopeless, angry gesture. “But couldn’t you report it or something?”

“To whom?”

“And the next day you flew straight back?”

“Of course not, “she said. “I had to finish my assignment.”

“It’s madness!”

She shrugged, almost amused by his frustrated anger. “Two years later I was in Angola,” she said calmly.

“Don’t tell me you were raped again?”

“Oh no. But they arrested me with a group of other foreign journalists. Locked us up in a schoolroom until they could check our credentials. Kept us there for five days, about fifty or sixty people in that one room. It was so crowded, there was no space to lie down and sleep. One simply had to prop oneself up against one’s neighbours.” Another chuckle. “The main problem was not so much the heat or the lack of air or the vermin, but a stomach complaint. The worst squitters I’ve had in my life. And there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. I left in the same pair of jeans I’d been wearing when they caught me.”

From the bottle of brandy she’d brought with her, she touched up his glass, uninvited, and her own as well.

“Soon after that the paper sent me up to Zaire,” she went on.
“When the rebellion started. But that wasn’t quite so bad. Except one evening, when we were on the river in a small motor boat and suddenly got caught in crossfire. We had to drift downstream, clinging to any old piece of wreckage, hoping they wouldn’t shoot us all to bits. The man with me got a bullet in the chest but he pulled through. Fortunately it was getting dark, so they couldn’t see us any more.”

After a long silence he asked, aghast: “Didn’t it muck you up completely? That time in Mozambique – didn’t it make you feel you’d never be the same again?”

“Perhaps I didn’t want to be the same.”

“But for someone like you – the way you grew up – a girl, a woman?”

“Does that really make a difference? Perhaps it even made things easier for me.”

“In what possible way?”

“To get out of myself. To free myself from my hangups. To learn to ask less for myself.”

In one gulp he emptied his glass, shaking his head.

“Why does it surprise you?” she asked. “When you first got involved with Gordon – the things that came naturally to you I had to learn from scratch. I had to force myself every inch of the way to get there. And sometimes it still frightens me to think I haven’t got there yet. Perhaps ‘getting there’ is just part of the great illusion.”

“How can you talk about anything coming ‘naturally’ to me?” he protested.

“Didn’t it then?”

And now it was inside
him
it was happening, the sudden loosening, like a great flock of pigeons freed from a cage. Without trying to stop or check it, encouraged by her own confessions and by the lived-in ease of the room in that comforting dusk which made confidence possible, he allowed it to flow from him spontaneously, all the years he’d cooped up inside him. His childhood on the Free State farm, and the terrible drought in which they’d lost everything; the constant wandering when his father had the job on the railways, and the annual train journey to the sea; his university years, and the ridiculous rebellion he’d led against the lecturer who had sent his friend
from the classroom; and Lydenburg, where he’d met Susan; the brief fulfilment of working among the poor in Krugersdorp, until Susan had insisted on a change, embarrassed by living in such a place surrounded by people so far below them; and his children, Suzette headstrong and successful, Linda gentle and loving, Johan frustrated and aggressive and chomping at the bit. He told her about Gordon: about Jonathan working in his garden over weekends and growing moody and recalcitrant, and mixing with questionable friends and disappearing in the riots; and his father’s efforts to find out what had happened, and his death; about Dan Levinson, and Stanley, and his visit to John Vorster Square; and Captain Stolz, with the thin scar on his white cheekbone, and the way he’d stood there leaning against the door throwing and catching the orange, squeezing it with casual, sensual satisfaction every time it came down in his hand; every single thing he could think of, important or irrelevant, up to that day.

After that it was quiet. Outside, night had fallen. From time to time there was sound – a car driving past, the distant siren of an ambulance or a police van, a dog barking, voices in the street – but muffled by the old velvet curtains and the many books padding the walls. The Beethoven had ended long ago. The only movement in the room, now and then, almost unnoticed, like shadows, was that of cats sidling or rippling past, looking for a new spot to sleep, yawning, smoothing their fur with small pink tongues.