He shrugged. ‘Have you a better idea?’
You think I am showing off. I can see that. You think I make up dialogue to show how smart I am. But that is how they were at times, conversations between John and myself. They were fun. I enjoyed them; I missed them afterwards, after I stopped seeing him. In fact our conversations were probably what I missed most. He was the only man I knew who would let me beat him in an honest argument, who wouldn’t bluster or obfuscate or go off in a huff when he saw he was losing. And I always beat him, or nearly always.
The reason was simple. It wasn’t that he couldn’t argue; but he ran his life according to principles, whereas I have always been a pragmatist. Pragmatism beats principles; that is just the way things are. The universe moves, the ground changes under our feet; principles are always a step behind. Principles are the stuff of comedy. Comedy is what you get when principles bump into reality. I know he had a reputation for being dour, but John Coetzee was actually quite funny. A figure of comedy. Dour comedy. Which, in an obscure way, he knew, even accepted. That is why I still look back on him with affection. If you want to know.
[Silence.]
I was always good at arguing. At school everyone used to be nervous around me, even my teachers. A tongue like a knife, my mother used to say half-reprovingly. A girl should not argue like that, a girl should learn to be more soft. But at other times she would say: A girl like you should be a lawyer. She was proud of me, of my spirit, of my sharp tongue. She came from a generation when a daughter was still married out of the father’s home straight into the husband’s, or the father-in-law’s.
Anyway, ‘Have you a better idea,’ John said — ‘a better idea for how to use one’s life than writing books?’
‘No. But I have an idea that might shake you up and help give direction to your life.’
‘What is that?’
‘Find yourself a good woman and marry her.’
He looked at me strangely. ‘Are you making me a proposal?’ he said.
I laughed. ‘No,’ I said, ‘I am already married, thank you. Find a woman better suited to you, someone who will take you out of yourself.’
I am already married, therefore marriage to you would constitute bigamy: that was the unspoken part. Yet what was wrong with bigamy, come to think of it, aside from it being against the law? What made bigamy a crime when adultery was only a sin, or a recreation? I was already an adulteress; why should I not be a bigamist or bigamiste too? This was Africa, after all. If no African man was going to be hauled before a court for having two wives, why should I be forbidden to have two spouses, a public one and a private one?
‘This is not, emphatically not, a proposal,’ I repeated, ‘but — just hypothetically — if I were free, would you marry me?’
It was only an inquiry, an idle inquiry. Nevertheless, without a word he took me in his arms and held me so tight that I could not breathe. It was the first act of his I could recollect that seemed to come straight from the heart. Certainly I had seen him worked on by animal desire — we did not spend our time in bed discussing Aristotle — but never before had I seen him in the grip of emotion. So, I asked myself in some wonderment, does this cold fish have feelings after all?
‘What’s up?’ I said, disengaging myself from his grasp. ‘Is there something you want to tell me?’
He was silent. Was he crying? I switched on the bedside lamp and inspected him. No tears, but he did wear a look of stricken mourn fulness. ‘If you can’t tell me what’s up,’ I said, ‘I can’t help you.’
Later, when he had pulled himself together, we collaborated to make light of the moment. ‘For the right woman,’ I said, ‘you would make a prima husband. Responsible. Hard-working. Intelligent. Quite a catch, in fact. Good in bed too,’ though that was not strictly true. ‘Affectionate,’ I added as an afterthought, though that was not true either.
‘And an artist to boot,’ he said. ‘You forgot to mention that.’
‘And an artist to boot. An artist in words.’
[Silence.]
And?
That’s all. A difficult passage between the two of us, which we successfully negotiated. My first inkling that he cherished deeper feelings for me.
Deeper than what?
Deeper than the feelings any man might cherish for his neighbour’s attractive wife. Or his neighbour’s ox or ass.
Are you saying he was in love with you?
In love … In love with me or with the idea of me? I don’t know. What I do know is that he had reason to be thankful to me. I made things easy for him. There are men who find it hard to court a woman. They are afraid to expose their desire, to open themselves to rebuff. Behind their fear there often lies a childhood history. I never forced John to expose himself. I was the one who did the courting. I was the one who did the seducing. I was the one who managed the terms of the affair. I was even the one who decided when it was over. So you ask, Was he in love? and I reply, He was in gratitude.
[Silence.]
I often wondered, afterwards, what would have happened if instead of fending him off I had responded to his surge of feeling with a surge of feeling of my own. If I had had the courage to divorce Mark back then, rather than waiting another thirteen or fourteen years, and hitched up with John. Would I have made more of my life? Perhaps. Perhaps not. But then I would not be the ex-mistress talking to you. I would be the grieving widow.
Chrissie was the problem, the fly in the ointment. Chrissie was very attached to her father, and I was finding it more and more difficult to handle her. She was no longer a baby — she was getting on for two — and although her progress in speech was disturbingly slow (as it turned out, I needn’t have worried, she made up for it in a burst later on), she was growing more agile by the day — agile and fearless. She had learned to clamber out of her cot; I had to hire a handyman to put in a gate at the head of the stairs in case she came tumbling down.
I remember one night Chrissie appeared without warning at my bedside, rubbing her eyes, whimpering, confused. I had the presence of mind to gather her up and whisk her back to her room before she registered that it wasn’t Daddy in bed beside me; but what if I wasn’t so lucky next time?
I was never quite sure what subterranean effect my double life might be having on the child. On the one hand I told myself that as long as I was physically fulfilled and at peace with myself, the beneficial effects ought to seep through to her too. If that strikes you as self-serving, let me remind you that at that time, in the 1970s, the progressive view, the bien-pensant view, was that sex was a force for the good, in any guise, with any partner. On the other hand it was clear that Chrissie was finding the alternation between Daddy and Uncle John in the household puzzling. What was going to happen when she began to speak? What if she got the two of them mixed and called her father Uncle John? There would be hell to pay.
I have always tended to regard Sigmund Freud as bunk, starting with the Oedipus complex and proceeding to his refusal to see that children were routinely being sexually abused, even in the homes of his middle-class clientele. Nevertheless I do agree that children, from a very early age, spend a lot of time trying to puzzle out their place in the family. In the case of Chrissie, the family had up to then been a simple affair: she herself, the sun at the centre of the universe, plus Mommy and Daddy, her attendant planets. I had put some effort into making it clear that Maria, who appeared at eight o’clock in the morning and disappeared at noon, was not part of the family set-up. ‘Maria must go home now,’ I would say to her in front of Maria. ‘Say ta-ta to Maria. Maria has her own little girl to feed and look after.’ (I referred to Maria’s little girl in the singular in order not to complicate matters. I knew perfectly well that Maria had seven children to feed and clothe, five of her own and two passed on by a sister dead of tuberculosis.)