‘It’s a bit picture-postcard, but still.’
‘All the dawns and sunsets in all the albums rolled into one. The apotheosis of picture-postcard. Just imagine a colour photograph of that, exhibited in a hundred years’ time. Things are not like that with us at all.’
The dark was coming now, graining the texture of the lilac space. A sharp star came through like a splinter of glass. Usually when I say something that doesn’t particularly engage his mind, but that he thinks sensible, he will say, ‘You have a point there.’ It doesn’t exactly irritate me; it is one of the gauges in which I read what he thinks of me. When people know each other as well as he and I do, this is what is really taking place all the time, no matter what they are talking about. Never mind whether they’re discussing politics, or gossiping about friends or planning a holiday — the important thing is the constant shifting and maintaining of balance, the endless replaying of the roles each has secretly chosen the other to present, and which the other secretly contrives to appear to fulfil by nature. Even though I know I’m a damned intelligent woman — by far the most intelligent female he’s ever had any sort of dealings with — and that a relationship with a woman of my kind implies the acceptance not only of intellectual equality but also coeval commonsense (none of the patronizing affection towards precocious feminine cleverness) — in spite of this, even when I’m holding up my end in discussion a shade better than he is, there’s a sort of backward glance, in me, at my performance before him. And this corresponds to a hidden expectation from him that he will be intrigued by the quality of a female mind — that mind whose quality is accepted rationally as taken for granted. In Europe last year, arguing about paintings and buildings we saw together, in discussions of various kinds at friends’ dinner tables, in his house or my flat, talking politics as we do most of the time — underneath, he coaxes me, and I show off to him, I coax him and he performs for me.
While we were talking I was aware, as if standing aside from us both, that this other dialogue of ours was soothingly being taken up. Our speaking voices went on, a bit awkwardly, but, like the changing light in the Son et Lumière performances we saw in France, illuminating, independent of the narration, the real scene of events as it moved from walls to portal to courtyard and window, the light and shadow of the real happening between us was going on as usual, in silence.
Then instead of saying, ‘You have a point there,’ Graham said, ‘How would you say things are with us?’
For a second I took it as going straight to all that we competently avoided, a question about him and me, the lie he had caught me out with on my hands — and I could feel this given away, in my face.
I did not know what to say.
But it was a quiet, impersonal demand, the tone of the judge exercising the prerogative of judicial ignorance, not the partisan one of the advocate cross-examining. There was what I can only describe as a power failure between us; the voices went on but the real performance had stopped in darkness.
I said, ‘Well, I’d find it difficult to define — I mean, how would you describe — what could one say this is the age of? Not in terms of technical achievement, that’s too easy, and it’s not enough about us — about people — is it?’
‘Today, for instance.’ He was serious, tentative, sympathetic.
Yes, this day. This morning I was driving through the veld and it was exactly the veld, the sun, the winter morning of nine years old, for me; for Max. The morning in which our lives were a distant hum in the future, like the planes a distant hum in the sky (there was a big air-force training camp, near my home, during the war). Grow big, have a job, be married, pray to the blond Christ in the white people’s church, give the nanny your old clothes. This same morning and our lives were here and Max had been in prison and was dead and I was not a widow. What happened? That’s what she asked, the old lady, my grandmother. And while I was driving through the veld to see Bobo (Max heard the ducks quacking a conversation he never understood) a man was walking about in space. I said, ‘Graham, what on earth do you think they’ll call it in history?’ and he said, ‘I’ve just read a book that refers to ours as the Late Bourgeois World. How does that appeal to you?’
I laughed. It went over my skin like wind over water; that feeling you get from a certain combination of words, sometimes. ‘It’s got a nice dying fall. But that’s a political definition, they’re no good.’
‘Yes, but the writer — he’s an East German — uses it as a wider one — it covers the arts, religious beliefs, technology, scientific discoveries, love-making, everything —’
‘But excluding the Communist world, then.’
‘Well no, not really’ — he loves to give me a concise explanation — ‘it exists in relation to the early Communist world — shall we call it. Defining one, you assume the existence of the other. So both are part of a total historical phenomenon.’
I poured him another drink because I wanted him to go, and although he wanted to go, he accepted it. ‘Did you work all afternoon? Or did you really sleep?’
But I knew that he had worked; he gave the admission of a dry, dazed half-smile, something that came from the room where he’d been shut up among documents, as a monk, who during his novitiate still makes some sorties into the life outside, is claimed by the silence of the cell that has never really relinquished him. Even the Friday night love-making had not made Graham sleepy in the afternoon; in that room of his, he wrote and intoned into the dictaphone, alone with his own voice. I’ve heard it sometimes from outside the door; like someone sending up prayer.
I mentioned I’d noticed that the arrow-and-spear sign was still on the walls of the viaduct near the Home.
‘I’m not surprised. I think there are a few new ones round the town, too. Somebody’s brave. Or foolhardy.’ He told me last week that a young white girl got eighteen months for painting the same symbol; but of course in the Cape black men and women are getting three years for offences like giving ten bobs’ worth of petrol for a car driven by an African National Congress member.
‘D’you think it’s all right, using that spear thing? I mean, when you think who it was who had the original idea.’ It came out in a political trial not long ago that this particular symbol of resistance was the invention of a police agent provocateur and spy. I’d have thought they’d want to find another symbol.
He laughed. ‘I don’t suppose the motives of the inventor’ve much to do with it. After all, look at advertising agencies — do you think the people who coin the selling catchword believe in what they’re doing?’
‘Yes, I suppose so. But it’s queer. A queer situation. I mean one could never think it would be like that.’
We were silent for a moment; he was, so to speak, considerately bare-headed in these pauses in which the thought of Max was present. There was nothing to say about Max, but now and then, like the silent thin spread of spent water coming up to touch your feet on a dark beach at night, his death or his life came in, and a commonplace remark turned up reference to him. Graham asked, ‘The flowers arrive for your grandmother all right?’ I told him how they were kept outside the door; and how she had cried out when she saw a figure in the doorway.