Although the fire was cold, he has come up to the house feeling and looking like an exhausted fire-fighter, and now the tension and weariness of the morning give way to hunger. He does not wait for Alina to bring the food but himself fetches the body-warm brown loaf he brought from town and cuts a rough slice in the meantime. Yes, one forgets; he really has not remembered until today, and the whole month has gone by. Too late for a letter. He is eating the bread without having quartered or buttered it, tearing the crust from the clinging, soft interior and stuffing it into his mouth; he eats slightly piggishly when he’s alone here. There is a pleasure in it, even if there are no other pleasures in the house, the beds empty and that piano silent. He really ought to do something about fixing things up a bit; why must the refrigerator be in this room? Yet it is convenient, just to get up from the table and take what you want. Alina brings in a plate of tomatoes wet from the tap and the half-pound of delicatessen ham with slivers of red cellophane sticking to the fat. While he eats he does not look up to the window through which he could see the farm’s bums, the beggared willows. He deliberately keeps his gaze the other way, towards the smaller window that gives on a peach-tree, a water-tank, and the utilitarian scrap — a car seat, the frame of an old electric stove — they won’t ever throw away.
Chill around him, shadow over his head, wax-polished underfoot — the house is that part of the farm which matters least. What’s appreciated is the value of the land. Inflation has contributed to that, but nevertheless it was not a foolish buy in the first place, and it’s well cared-for. The land itself must be worth as much, now, as land-plus-house when he bought. There are other houses, other beds (he can never bring himself to lie down in the dingy bedroom, he doesn’t mind if his boots smear ash on the sofa). She knew that, of course, though it is difficult with her kind to tell what is grand theory (what she thinks she ought to think) and what actuality. After all, she says ‘Namibia’ too, something that doesn’t exist, an idea in the minds of certain people, as the name of a country where he was born and brought up and she had probably never been. Shoulders hunched, mouth clamped, show of a burst of laughter breaking forth: — And in what way, if you please, is your concept of the place any more than an idea? To the Ovambos and Hereros and Damaras? Can you tell me that? You who ‘know’ the country? Little white baas who ran barefoot with the little black sons of servants, now fathers of servants? A name on a map. A label stuck on them. ‘South West Africa.’ ‘Mandatory territory.’ You don’t ‘own’ a country by signing a bit of paper the way you bought yourself the title deed to that farm. -
It is in opposition (the disputed territory of argument, the battle for self-definition that goes on beneath the words) that attraction lies, with a woman like that. It’s there (in the divorce-court phrase) that intimacy takes place. Not that he has ever been mixed up in one of those affairs that end in court with detectives and accusing husbands; for a man in his position a scandal is out of the question. Her husband was safely more interested in his Bushmen than the activities of his wife.
She would talk about sex, too, as part of an ideology he couldn’t share. Athough she visited that territory with him a few times. He wants the boy to have a good time while he is a youngster — that was the way he put these things to her — get it out of his system, not miss anything, so that he’ll see the whole business isn’t all that important, when he is older.
— What bunk. A simplistic view of sex. As if you can get it over and done with. If you haven’t ‘missed anything’ when you’re young, this doesn’t mean you have no more to discover in your own sexuality. It’s idiotic to ignore that sex is mixed up with emotional ideas that’ve grown round it and become part of it, from courtly love to undying passion and all that stuff, and these are not growing pains. They’re as demanding at forty as at seventeen. More. The more you mature the greater and humbler the recognition of their importance. -
— I don’t think about it. —
— No, you just do it. —
— That’s right. — With a particular smile that she took eagerly as evidence against him but that roused her to him in spite — or because? — of this.
— I remember you told me you rather liked to buy a woman now and then — to think, she’s doing this because I’ve paid her; she has to. Sexual fascism. Pure and simple. —
Why not this house? There was not time; she has friends to stay and they would wonder at her lengthy absence. She laughs at the suggestion of the hairdresser. — Do I look as if I spend hours getting myself back-combed and tinted? — He had given himself away and she never left him unaware of such proof, to her, of what he was: the sort of women he was used to had nothing better to do than spend hours in beauty salons. And what was the corollary of that? — he could have trotted it out pat for her. ‘while blacks did all their work’. If such women wanted to make love, their alibi was in character.
Since she was such a free spirit, then: — Why do you have to account to your friends for where you go? —
— I have bonds with my friends that are more important than anything else. -
Of course. She didn’t even allow herself to mention the friends’ names. Some instruction to keep your mouth shut, keep your contacts isolated from one another, if I don’t come back from my mission by twenty-one-O-five hours, alert everyone that I’ve been picked up, destroy documents. all that incompetent cloak-and-dagger romanticism she elevated to a moral code. Didn’t it provide her, within its limits, with an alibi as good as that of any woman who goes to the hairdresser? Very convenient. After all, not telling anyone where you were going so that they couldn’t reveal your whereabouts even under interrogation made it safe as houses for her to come to his flat those times, even if she had to be home before dark or whenever the countdown with her friends was.
— A duplex, isn’t that what the estate agents call them? — Coming downstairs, she looks under her eyelids at her stomach; it is her moment of giving herself away. She watches herself. She flaunts early grey hairs but she fears, too — a slack belly. It is true that she is not flat, when you lie on her you do not feel, anymore, that ass’s jawbone thrust forward down there. When you look down on her, there is no smooth concave pinned on either side by a hipbone, that charming reminder of a nakedness beyond nakedness, a nakedness so complete it goes beyond flesh right to the bone, that some young girls show in a bikini, with cover over only the little padded beak that brings the female body to a point. She did not have a particularly beautiful body even then, five years ago, before she need really have begun to worry about what will happen to it, what happens to them all, around the waist.
— What, no sauna bath? No swimming-pool? —