— You’ve bought that farm! —
— Come out to celebrate with me. —
— Where? —
Not yet the house; but soon, soon there. — Wherever you like. The Carlton. —
— Oh God, no. Not champagne and smoked salmon. —
— An Italian place? —
— No, no. Parma ham and melon. —
— All right, you don’t like restaurants. —
— We can eat here. Better than those lousy expensive places where you go. I prefer my own cooking. But you must bring wine, I’ve got nothing worthy of celebrating your farm. -
— My latest property deal. — It was part of the tone of their getting together for him to guy her attitude towards him, in his turn to assume her assumptions.
Where she lived looked inside as he would have thought, glimpsing it once from the front door when he fetched her for that lunch. A large secretive, overgrown garden and small rooms with books and her husband’s family furniture in need of repair. Native pots. Leftist newspapers. She stopped him sitting in a chair that could take light people only. The whisky was low because her husband was ‘on loan’ to an Australian university for linguistic research.
— Dusty subject, Bushmen and aborigines. Deserts you have to go to, to find them, the whole thing’s dry, from the past. I’m more interested in people who aren’t just about safely extinct. -
He was always good at understanding what women really were saying to him when they were talking about their husbands.
— People with a future. If I had your money —
They laughed together across the table. A funny thing, the simple pretty ones disintegrate when they drink, the clever handsome ones become more beautiful, their sex comes to the surface. She shone, on wine; not the way a woman has a shiny nose, but like one of those satiny stone eggs, striped brown agate that come from the desert back where he was a child: warmed in armpit or groin, breathed on by the body’s heat, when the bloom was rubbed off again against the leg of his khaki shorts a graining of alluvial light would come up beneath the glassy brown skin. — You would build a school for the piccanins. —
— A charity school on your farm? A Mehring Mission? Not on your life! —
But of course: it would be ‘perpetuating the system’. For Christ’s sake! He should have had more sense than to give her the opening. But — then — what did it matter. They were drinking, and laughing at everything. — You’re the sort who has too much. You’ve brought too much wine. - She was very natural, she belched behind a frown and tightened lips, she said what she thought.
A little brass chandelier suspended over the table held candles that were already burned half-way down before they were lit. She despised elegance. They lasted exactly through the meal, to the coffee. He was watching them; through everything he said and that was being said by both of them. There was a little brass handbell with the figure of a stork-like bird to shake it by, and the meal was punctuated by stages when she tinkled it to summon the servant, but the candles kept an unbroken kind of time. He witnessed how they burned out, one by one. Each flame was a yellow lotus with a brownish shape exactly like it, within it. Within that, at the base, was the same shape, still smaller, and incandescent blue. The blue rests on the wick. When the wax reaches the brass lip of the holder, the wick suddenly collapses over it. It sticks out sideways, as if gasping for air. The flame snuffs; then puffs into life again (no brown kernel — the wick is buried in wax — just the yellow aureole and the blue base, intenser blue now). Out; and then silently exploding into flame (she doesn’t hear it) once more. And again. It dies finally in the form of a thread of dark smoke that rises straight to the ceiling.
He drew her tongue into his mouth as he would suck the flame of a match up into his cigar. Perhaps she deliberately used half-burned candles, knowing they would always last exactly the duration of one meal for two people — the interplay of conversation with more guests would extend the time taken, of course.
Under the net weighted with beads, Alina has today, as usual, set out tomato sauce, marmalade, honey, mustard, uncertain what category of meal it is that he eats when he comes here. The variety assembled goes further than that: it expresses the mystery of eating habits, unimaginable choices of food not open to her. There is also a jar of pickled onions he bought the other weekend from one of those roadside lorries that sell home produce and handcrafts, fireside pouffes made of off-cuts of fake leather, stuffed cotton toys. It is true, lately he quite often eats at the farm, and at odd times — he may work through lunch and then, on impulse, leave the office at three and pick up provisions whose nature is determined by whatever shop’s convenient, on the way. There are no lunch parties down at the river. Not since before he was in Japan. The willows have moulted entirely and the grass, grazed down to earth, anyway, has a layered, slippery covering of narrow brown leaves. Dead, and buried, down there — the summer. Whenever he thinks of bringing some friends out from town… it would amount to the same old crowd, the good friend of fifteen years and her set, the daughter who was the playmate of his son. On the farm it is the time for conservation — buildings to be repaired, fire-breaks cleared, he must go round all the fences with Jacobus. The sort of jobs they’ll never think to do unless you push them to it. A place must be kept up. His energy rises in inverse proportion to winter slackness: sitting there warming themselves against the wall of the kraal, while the weekly bags of mealie meal are sure to be doled out and their poor little devils trail to the pump for water. Jacobus reports that there has been frost already: he has him up on the roof of the shed, hammering down a dog-eared sheet of galvanized iron, sniffing raucously, drawing mucus back into his running nose as he will all winter. On the fences they work together, as they do, from time to time; it is the only way to get the job done properly. Jacobus calls out some reproach, in their language, to chase away the children who are hanging around, not really noisily, just scuffling and stiffling giggles, and, of course, coughing all over the place. — Here, wait! — There seem to be more of them every time he comes out. He has got rid of the two- and one-cent pieces in his pocket and they are happy.
Yes, happy. His hand comes into contact, in the pocket, with the letter addressed in a schoolboy hand that he has not opened.
— Why you don’t ask that master what he do? Why he break that light in the back? Is long time now, then he going to say somebody else you break you pick-up —
The letter crepitates against the lining of the pocket with every movement of the right thigh. - You worry about what you do to the tractor, using it like a location taxi. —
— Me! — But the wire is held steady, no fool; presence of mind, that one.
— Yes, you know what I’m talking about. -
The job is finished in the silence of wire squeaking under strain round the new creosoted posts, twanging like broken guitar strings when released.