Lucy is not improving. She stays up all night, claiming she cannot sleep; then in the afternoons he finds her asleep on the sofa, her thumb in her mouth like a child. She has lost interest in food: he is the one who has to tempt her to eat, cooking unfamiliar dishes because she refuses to touch meat. This is not what he came for - to be stuck in the back of beyond, warding off demons, nursing his daughter, attending to a dying enterprise. If he came for anything, it was to gather himself, gather his forces. Here he is losing himself day by day.
The demons do not pass him by. He has nightmares of his own in which he wallows in a bed of blood, or, panting, shouting soundlessly, runs from the man with the face like a hawk, like a Benin mask, like Thoth. One night, half sleepwalking, half demented, he strips his own bed, even turns the mattress over, looking for stains.
There is still the Byron project. Of the books he brought from Cape Town, only two volumes of the letters are left - the rest were in the trunk of the stolen car. The public library in Grahamstown can offer nothing but selections from the poems. But does he need to go on reading? What more does he need to know of how Byron and his acquaintance passed their time in old Ravenna? Can he not, by now, invent a Byron who is true to Byron, and a Teresa too?
He has, if the truth be told, been putting it off for months: the moment when he must face the blank page, strike the first note, see what he is worth. Snatches are already imprinted on his mind of the lovers in duet, the vocal lines, soprano and tenor, coiling wordlessly around and past each other like serpents. Melody without climax; the whisper of reptile scales on marble staircases; and, throbbing in the background, the baritone of the humiliated husband. Will this be where the dark trio are at last brought to life: not in Cape Town but in old Kaffraria?
FIFTEEN
THE TWO YOUNG sheep are tethered all day beside the stable on a bare patch of ground. Their bleating, steady and monotonous, has begun to annoy him. He strolls over to Petrus, who has his bicycle upside down and is working on it. 'Those sheep,' he says - 'don't you think we could tie them where they can graze?'
'They are for the party,' says Petrus. 'On Saturday I will slaughter them for the party. You and Lucy must come.' He wipes his hands clean. 'I invite you and Lucy to the party.'
'On Saturday?'
'Yes, I am giving a party on Saturday. A big party.'
'Thank you. But even if the sheep are for the party, don't you think they could graze?'
An hour later the sheep are still tethered, still bleating dolefully. Petrus is nowhere to be seen. Exasperated, he unties them and tugs them over to the damside, where there is abundant grass. The sheep drink at length, then leisurely begin to graze. They are black-faced Persians, alike in size, in markings, even in their movements. Twins, in all likelihood, destined since birth for the butcher's knife. Well, nothing remarkable in that. When did a sheep last die of old age? Sheep do not own themselves, do not own their lives. They exist to be used, every last ounce of them, their flesh to be eaten, their bones to be crushed and fed to poultry.
Nothing escapes, except perhaps the gall bladder, which no one will eat. Descartes should have thought of that. The soul, suspended in the dark, bitter gall, hiding.
'Petrus has invited us to a party,' he tells Lucy. 'Why is he throwing a party?'
'Because of the land transfer, I would guess. It goes through officially on the first of next month. It's a big day for him. We should at least put in an appearance, take them a present.'
'He is going to slaughter the two sheep. I wouldn't have thought two sheep would go very far.'
'Petrus is a pennypincher. In the old days it would have been an ox.'
'I'm not sure I like the way he does things - bringing the slaughter-beasts home to acquaint them with the people who are going to eat them.'
'What would you prefer? That the slaughtering be done in an abattoir, so that you needn't think about it?'
'Yes.'
'Wake up, David. This is the country. This is Africa.'
There is a snappishness to Lucy nowadays that he sees no justification for. His usual response is to withdraw into silence. There are spells when the two of them are like strangers in the same house. He tells himself that he must be patient, that Lucy is still living in the shadow of the attack, that time needs to pass before she will be herself. But what if he is wrong? What if, after an attack like that, one is never oneself again? What if an attack like that turns one into a different and darker person altogether?
There is an even more sinister explanation for Lucy's moodiness, one that he cannot put from his mind.
'Lucy,' he asks the same day, out of the blue, 'you aren't hiding something from me, are you? You didn't pick up something from those men?'
She is sitting on the sofa in pyjamas and dressing-gown, playing with the cat. It is past noon. The cat is young, alert, skittish. Lucy dangles the belt of the gown before it. The cat slaps at the belt, quick, light paw-blows, one-two-three-four.
'Men?' she says. 'Which men?' She flicks the belt to one side; the cat dives after it. Which men? His heart stops. Has she gone mad? Is she refusing to remember?
But, it would appear, she is only teasing him. 'David, I am not a child any more. I have seen a doctor, I have had tests, I have done everything one can reasonably do. Now I can only wait.'
'I see. And by wait you mean wait for what I think you mean?'
'Yes.'
'How long will that take?'
She shrugs. 'A month. Three months. Longer. Science has not yet put a limit on how long one has to wait. For ever, maybe.'
The cat makes a quick pounce at the belt, but the game is over now.
He sits down beside his daughter; the cat jumps off the sofa, stalks away. He takes her hand. Now that he is close to her, a faint smell of staleness, unwashedness, reaches him. 'At least it won't be for ever, my dearest,' he says. 'At least you will be spared that.'
The sheep spend the rest of the day near the dam where he has tethered them. The next morning they are back on the barren patch beside the stable.
Presumably they have until Saturday morning, two days. It seems a miserable way to spend the last two days of one's life. Country ways - that is what Lucy calls this kind of thing. He has other words: indifference, hardheartedness. If the country can pass judgment on the city, then the city can pass judgment on the country too.
He has thought of buying the sheep from Petrus. But what will that accomplish? Petrus will only use the money to buy new slaughter-animals, and pocket the difference. And what will he do with the sheep anyway, once he has bought them out of slavery? Set them free on the public road? Pen them up in the dog-cages and feed them hay?
A bond seems to have come into existence between himself and the two Persians, he does not know how. The bond is not one of affection. It is not even a bond with these two in particular, whom he could not pick out from a mob in a field. Nevertheless, suddenly and without reason, their lot has become important to him.
He stands before them, under the sun, waiting for the buzz in his mind to settle, waiting for a sign. There is a fly trying to creep into the ear of one of them. The ear twitches. The fly takes off; circles, returns, settles. The ear twitches again.
He takes a step forward. The sheep backs away uneasily to the limit of its chain. He remembers Bev Shaw nuzzling the old billy-goat with the ravaged testicles, stroking him, comforting him, entering into his life. How does she get it right, this communion with animals? Some trick he does not have. One has to be a certain kind of person, perhaps, with fewer complications. The sun beats on his face in all its springtime radiance. Do I have to change, he thinks? Do I have to become like Bev Shaw?