… since the white men came and the missionaries, we have heard it said that there is God.
It’s me.
Drawn up, he has been seized, he is going to be confronted, at last, at last. Here it is. This is it. It is true that he did not recognize her because he doesn’t know that he has been expecting anyone — anything. Yet it’s as if he must be eternally waiting, eternally expecting, eter illy dreading. The excitation is suffocating; men have died in the act.
No one’ll even remember where you’re buried.
He is not the sort of person given to morbid reconstruction of how it must be when these people are waiting for the carbon monoxide to take effect. Before you actually pass out or however it comes: do they arrange themselves head in hands, registering despair etc. Just keep eyes fixed on the instrument paneclass="underline" speedometer, oil gauge, engine heat. Grit in the mouth, face-down.
No one’ll even remember where
Stood up, stood back — or was it a step forward he took, dreadfully — good god, one immigrant girl in a city full of girls, she can hardly make herself understood, she is there somewhere all the time. Or you — it would be typical of you to appear just like that, stirring up trouble, enjoying the sensation: They’ve graciously allowed me back in again, of course they’re following me everywhere –
It’s me: don’t you know me? (Her mother would have corrected the grammar, she takes care not to speak like a colonial.) Don’t you know me? Even Japan isn’t far enough, even getting away to your own four hundred acres, disappearing in the grass (almost could, now in certain places) isn’t far enough.
He gave a name to what was there only when he saw the wide belt that pressed down where that long waist stemmed or ended at the ledge of hip-bone (couldn’t call those hips). More medieval cuirass or Elizabethan stomacher than what one understands by a woman’s belt. The great round medallion dipped in front, slightly convex to follow exactly and flatly the slight curve where there would be a belly if she had one. He admired the belt; oh yes, somebody had just brought it back from Paris, mummy or daddy, everyone in Paris was wearing them. It’s a suggestive piece of rubbishy embellishment behind which her body approaches (across the coffee bar) and is guarded, she perhaps knows this. As she leans over the pun-gence of the coffee, elbows on the ledge (tall, the top of her head would come up to his eyes) the medallion holds her under there like a cupped hand. Don’t you recognize
What a bloody fool, burn to remember how you rose to it, think you’d never seen a woman before. If it’d been all the women ever had, suddenly there in one body, as it seems to be with the first one when you finally get the door open and at last, at last — this little schoolgirl. If it were some sort of seizure or attack for which one goes to the doctor. Or makes up one’s mind to ignore. Except for the excessive smoking, there’s been nothing wrong.
The degrees of hotness, the sweetness, and the bitter consistency of the coffee is something he is precisely aware of; he’s not avuncular, he’s never had any special way of talking to young people because there’s not much to say to them, anyway, but while he chides her easily, nice kid, about her lazy life and she pretends to be complaining to her father’s friend about not having a car, she too is feeling some precise process taking place, as specifically as the progress of some hot sweet liquid tracing a passage of the body of which one is normally not consciously aware. He’s sure of it.
Thank God I have no daughters.
His gullet retains the burning trail. Like a kind of heartburn, but recalled at will. Some of them take poison. A dose of cyanide, it’s quicker. But that’s for spies and brave revolutionaries — ay? Not the tycoon’s way. Cyanide is the stuff that is used in the most effective and cheapest process for extracting gold from the auriferous reef. It is what saved the industry in the early 1900s. It is what makes yellow the waste that is piled up in giant sandcastles and crenellated geometrically-stepped hills where the road first leaves the city. The freeway gives a balcony view of them and of the stumped and straggling eucalyptus plantations between which used to provide timber for these old mines. He drives past so often, approaching from this side on the way out, and that on the way back, that he doesn’t see them any more than he sees people thumbing for lifts.
He has escaped his colleague’s funeral by sending, in addition to one of his junior directors to represent him, and a large donation in lieu of wreath to the black charity appointed by the widow, a huge bouquet to convey his sympathy to mother and daughter. They are all such old friends. The only way to get out of it was to be unavailable — most unfortunately out of town on business. Out of the country. A sudden call to Japan. Australia. They won’t know the difference.
He and a few other colleagues may have to set up some kind of fund for the two women if it turns out that there is nothing left But it will take months for that financial tangle to be sorted out.
There is always an autopsy in a case like this, and by the time — as the front page of the newspaper puts it — the verdict of suicide and no foul play suspected is confirmed medically, it is Thursday before the funeral is fixed, and he invariably spends most of the weekend on the farm anyway. Just as well be Melbourne. No one will ever know. She stood silently with her mother and sister in line at customs waiting only to declare the plant tied up in newspaper and plastic.
A narrow escape.
Probably they will still go to Plettenberg Bay, after all they have that nice house there, and friends will rally round and persuade them to get away; for the girl’s sake, if nothing else, the women friends will urge: she’s so young, life must go on. (And the widow herself not old; soon they will be looking for a suitable partner for her at dinners.) You could at least write the girl a line from your beloved mother’s apartment in New York — after all, you grew up together. But there’s no contact; the only person who ever mentions your name is the native on the farm. Every time I go there since the schools closed for the Christmas holidays: Terry he’s not coming to help us? Terry he’s not in Jo’burg? Why Terry he isn’t here? —
Let the telephone recording device answer when the telephone rings in the flat. We phoned repeatedly over the holidays but you were just never home. We’d like to have seen something of you — Flung down hidden in the grasses, no one would know there is anyone lying there. Walls of soft silvery-beige lean over him. The grasses are just breaking into their kind of fruition. They are tipped with water-colour brushes, feathers, and beaded with fine-whiskered seeds. He is open only to the sky and that huge jet mouthing its roar high up in space couldn’t pick him out any more than a grain of sand can be singled out while flying over the deserts. The reeds have pennants of bladed leaf. They seethe softly. On their thin masts that would bend under the weight of a moth, plush red Bishop birds cling, dandled and danced. He is alone down at the third pasture, so sure to be undisturbed. Alone and not alone. In the heat of the day flies and midges fly into the eyes and nose as if one were a corpse.
Without the services of the Girl Friday (his office is watched over by her in his absences abroad as a kind of disused parlour, the rolled financial journals put aside on his desk, the air-conditioner kept going and the ashtrays kept empty) bonsellas for the boys are not bought, ready for him, this Christmas. He has remembered just in time, and there is the Indians’ — he can stop a minute and find something that will do. Months have gone by, they must have found some solution to their troubles long ago — anyway it’s just too bad, he has no intention of driving back to town to shop.