— Communal. On the roof. You’ll have to be satisfied with the bathrooms, pink with beige john, green with black John. Take your choice. -
— Oh very chic. Which does one use for what? —
If I had your money.
She came to the flat, like the others; it was in the flat, like the others. Only Terry has slept behind the wall of this room (not the wall behind which the kitchen lies, where Alina is talking to somebody); over behind the piano and the wall where a pair of china duck in flight hang up high. On the bed in his school sleeping-bag, Terry — that is certain — had no woman in there, only masturbation and compassion.
The dunes of the desert lie alongside the road between Swakopmund and Walvis Bay. Golden reclining nudes. Torso upon torso, hip sweeping from waist, smooth beyond smoothness, suggesting to the tactile imagining only the comparison, in relation to the hand, of the sensation of the tongue when some substance evanesces on it. The sea is on the other side of the road. There among the rocks pelicans floated at rest like bath toys and those crayfish — lumps under mayonnaise in the sort of place he goes to — were caught by feeling with bare hands under the rock shelf. No fancy gloves and goggles and snorkels that old Kurt and Emmy demand nicely for their princeling visitor. There were old-timers who were friends of Kurt then, too, who knew nature lore and told stories. Could be the same old man. There’s a quality in people like them that makes youngish men seem to have been old, in retrospect. The appellation ‘old so-and-so’ designates something other than age — benignity, perhaps? Some comfortable outgrown quality you don’t see around. Goodness? Emmy and Kurt are good simple people — which means they have been left behind, they don’t change, they are preserved by the desert back there in the past — as good for the boy as they were for himself when he was a boy. Childless women like Emmy are the ones who would have been the best mothers; old chaps like Kurt, who have no son, can do with any boy all those things the father doesn’t have time or the knack for. That little house alone, with its back garden of desert sand raked into a pattern along the paths marked with seashells, and the dog’s kennel Kurt made with the hinged roof so that, like Emmy’s house, the dog’s could be aired every morning. It’s the sort of thing that makes children happy. One would think that for a boy of sixteen, a farm to mess around on would be a paradise; you could keep a horse to ride, if you wanted. If you took an interest.
— You must come out to the farm again, sometime. —
— Oh yes. That was a beautiful place. —
As if he had burned it down or something. Destroyed it by his touch. But it was all part of the sexual game with her, perhaps? He must try to entice her; she must seem to be capitulating. And then she bobs her backside up in his face, so to speak, and is off. - One of these days. —
— Take a picnic lunch. Just for an hour. I’d love to play hookie from the damned office. —
She looks insolently, thrusting her chin and waggling her head, making fun: — I know you would. Perhaps. Next week. -
Once or twice in the flat; that was nothing, really. She was not a woman who had an instinct for what you wanted, at particular moments, when in bed. No doubt she thought she was a remarkably ‘intelligent’ lover. In the flat, just like any other.
— Oh yes… sometimes I wish I had your farm. — She was the one who brought it up again.
He had not mentioned the subject. They had met at an hotel for a drink after he had not seen her for several weeks and did not know whether she would come somewhere — it would have to be his flat, he supposed — or whether they would have one more drink and part for the evening.
— Sometimes for such a small reason — any little thing — this afternoon I was rushing along the street to — I had to get somewhere in a hurry — and I saw a puppy outside one of those little houses with a polished stoep and ferns in a tin — you know. A spindly pup standing with its paws turned in and its silly tail hanging in the air. Then it sat down suddenly and watched everything going by. I wanted to have that puppy and that house and sit and play with it in the afternoons. For a few moments that’s what I wanted. And I understood that by that I meant what it was to be ‘good’. Can you imagine me? —
So you have moments when you want to submit to the ‘system’, keep out of ‘trouble’, be a housewife complacent in her white privilege. Just as you want to go and make love although you are ashamed of having lovers; again a man like him is quick to understand what is being said that can’t be said.
— It presented itself as an awful temptation, honestly just for a flash. I must have been very tired today. —
To understand and to take the opportunity. — You don’t look tired. - She would groan if you told her she was pretty, etc. but at the same time it was what she must hear, not in so many words. Time was measuring as it did when the half-candles were burning; — And if you had my farm? —
She tapped her foot a few moments, her thigh moving in her skirt; smiled, summing herself up in the way she prided. - Same sort of thing, I suppose. —
She looked at him.
— Grow chickens. —
— Raise chickens. -
— Well, whatever. Be a — a — She moved her head attractively, her lips, ready for the words, searching as if for a fruit being dangled at her mouth.
A brave revolutionary. Trouble, you said. You were proud, you had resisted all the temptations: oh shame, dear little puppy, dear little piccanins.
— I don’t know why I tell you these things. - After making love it was always necessary to her ego to establish the difference, the vast gap between herself and a man like him, that might seem to have bridged itself in pleasure. And at the same time she was offering flattery: no ordinary pig-iron dealer, then? — I really don’t know why I do. But don’t you find the people it’s most difficult to make confidences to are the ones who are closest to you? In fact confession is best made to complete strangers. Somebody who gets talking to you on a journey. It’s easier with someone you don’t know at all. —
The house has never been got into shape. He is closing the windows against the dust that is blowing up this afternoon (the burnt vegetation makes it worse) and everything inside is much the same as it must have been when he couldn’t look in properly from the outside the first day. Seeing the black landscape out there, his fingers curl up into his palms, he’s kneading his own flesh, he feels the nails biting and marking him, he can’t help it — how many years have those willows been put back! Even if most survive; it is difficult to tell how dead or alive they are — those that he knows, from inspection close-up, have had the innards burned out of them have, from here, brown wisps blowing about on top, strands dragged over a pate of sky, that appear too high to be harmed. Even if it had been somewhere other than a couple of times at the flat, it would have worn itself out by now. It was wearing thin already. How many more times, before that day in the Greek café where she felt sure no one would recognize them? There are no letters of course. — I won’t write. It might not be healthy for you to get letters from me. — That sort of thing; even when she was on the run as fast as she could scuttle, she still couldn’t resist pulling frightening faces at herself in the mirror.
— Nobody opens my mail, I assure you. Except my secretary, when it isn’t marked personal. —
— Ah yes, that’s the trouble — you think you are inviolate, the Special Branch wouldn’t dare take an interest in you, you’re developing the economy, you’re attracting foreign capital, you’re making friends with the Japanese, you’re helping to balance the balance of payments — She was amusing, all right, when she started with one of her dark political warnings and then took off on one of her flights of fancy into what she thought of — tongue-in-cheek — as his world. — Still, those wholly-owned subsidiaries. Tube Manipulations, what was it? — Hot-Dip-something — you have multiple identities and addresses, chairman of this and that, president of the other. — She was reflecting now, envious, how she might have made use of these identities and addresses, coming to mind too late. He followed the thought across her olive-smooth face: You don’t mind if a few letters come enclosed in envelopes addressed to the chairman? It won’t be often. You can give them to me when we see each other.