‘O God, Pa!’ one of my sisters cried. ‘You knock that lady’s bucket out of her hand.’
He had. The woman was at the roadside standpipe, bucketless, a picture of shock and amazement. My father looked back to see. And at that moment I saw a cyclist, leaning on his bike and chatting on the verge, suddenly, with the briskness of a character in an animated cartoon, twist the handle of his cycle out of the path of the Austin.
‘O God, Pa! Look where you going.’
It was the irritation in my sister’s voice which annoyed my father, the irritation which broke into his own high-pitched mood and mocked it. He fell silent, and in silence we drove on for some time. He began to mutter to himself and to bite his lower lip. He always overacted, even when his emotions were genuine.
The winding road straightened out on an embankment lined at the foot of each steep slope with poui trees. The sight of the straight empty road seemed to decide my father.
‘Bitches!’ he said, taking his hands off the steering wheel and accelerating.
We shot across the road and rolled swiftly down the embankment. A split second separated this abrupt deviation from my sisters’ screams. We rolled swiftly — but to me it was all in slow motion — towards the trunks of the poui trees. The baby Austin model had its points, though. We went straight between the tree trunks without touching. A series of soft grassy bumps, and the car came to rest, slightly on its side. The engine cut out and there was silence until my sisters remembered to scream again. Abandoning modesty, they scrambled out of the car as fast as they could and climbed up to the road, getting such purchase as they could out of grass and weeds. They said they had no intention of driving back to the city with my father; they would walk until they found a bus or a taxi. My mother called them back, not to make them change their minds, but to give them money for the journey. Her manner indicated that it was her own duty to stay with the Austin, come what might.
It didn’t take much to right the Austin. And presently we were pulled out by a passing lorry, with whose driver and driver’s family — all brilliantly dressed, all in the cab: their Sunday afternoon outing as well — my father exchanged the lightest of banter. We picked up my sisters. They had already begun to wilt a little and scarcely needed to be persuaded; they also welcomed the opportunity to abuse my father. My father ignored them; he sang all the way back. But as soon as we were home he became morose. His face was drawn; the pouches under his eyes went dark; and the unusual mood of the day now showed itself to have been a type of hysteria. He locked himself in his room, answered none of my mother’s calls, and didn’t come out even to have a cup of tea.
So our first and last Sunday family outing ended; and so our Sunday lunches ended as well. My father withdrew once more. The baby Austin ceased to be comic and became to us a symbol of indefinable terror. We were happier when it was garaged with some defect. Since then, I might add here, I have looked upon the little-man type in his little car with feelings which, to say the least, are mixed. My sisters and I began spending our week-ends freely again with my mother’s family. The suspicion came to me that between Cecil and one of my sisters there existed an incestuous relationship. I had nothing to go by, but with these things one just suddenly knows.
I was walking home from school one rainy afternoon. They were laying cables and the roads were dug up. The bright red clay ran like paint in the gutters. Here and there on the pavement were enormous cable bobbins. The cables were dusted with a white powder and looked like mass-manufactured pastry, a type of strudel, produced in enormous lengths and conveyed in this way — on the bobbins, pushed through the streets by straining barebacked men — to the retailers, who would chop it into small pieces. I heard a fresh shower of rain coming and I began to run. At a corner, as though he had been there a long time, expecting me, was my father. He was sitting on his bicycle with one foot on the pavement; the Austin was in some mechanic’s garage.
‘Hop on,’ he said. ‘I think we can take a chance.’
To me towing on bicycles was one of the deep, tempting illegalities. It ranked with cycling at night without a light or riding an unlicensed bicycle; it ranked, in illegality if not yet in temptation, with driving an uninsured motorcar or driving without a permit. It astonished me that my father, a government servant, should choose on a main road so openly to break the law. But his arm was outstretched in invitation, and it was raining.
I sat on the crossbar. I felt the awkwardness of my protruding limbs and the burden of my weight. His arms imprisoned me. We went off shakily. I could hear his tremulous breathing and was aware of the difficulty of every manœuvre on the muddy, slippery asphalt. I concentrated on the road. The rain was heavy and stinging; we were soon both soaked. People sheltering under the eaves of shops — as still and as meditative as people in the tropics appear when they shelter from a downpour — stared at us. We didn’t take shelter ourselves. We didn’t say a word to one another. We went on, concentrating on the road and its difficulties. The gutters were full and racing. We sank some inches in water once when the flooded road dipped without warning. We slipped and had little skids. But no accident befell us. When we got home my hair was dripping, my nose was dripping, my books were a pulpy mess, and my shirt was ticklingly stuck in patches to my chest and back. My father’s suit was ruined. But still we said nothing; and in silence we separated, to dry ourselves.
I wonder if I would have said anything, if I would have made some statement of gratitude or sympathy, if I had known that that was to be our last contact, that afterwards we were both to follow our separate destinies and that mine, for all my unwillingness, was to be linked to his.
My mother had a theory about the lower classes. She needed one because on our street we were surrounded by them. Apart from one or two very rich areas and three or four very poor areas, all our city was like this, with the slum shack in the unfenced lot next to the two-storeyed mansion. The system or lack of system had its points. Since for most of us there was nothing like a good address or a bad address, everyone submitted to an individual assessment, and this was invariably fair. Everyone received his due and there was harmony. My mother’s theory was that the lower classes respected only those who respected themselves. She used to tell the story of a middle-aged white woman who had lived on the street for years, respected by all; but had then so enraged the lower classes by briefly taking one of their number as a lover that she had had to move. Her house was stoned and broken into; when she walked down the street she was insulted by the very people who before would have been delighted to help with the garden or with a heavy box or suitcase. And now, without warning, we found ourselves in the position of that woman. We were not stoned or abused. But we fell definitely into the category of those who had ceased to respect themselves.