A Sport of Nature

That circumcised ox, and he did become rich enough for her to buy a pair of Imari cats and an 18th-century Blackamoor holding up a globe, and Jethro carrying cream scones to her swimming pool.

— My darling Pauline … has she stuck with Joe? I’ve often wondered … though I didn’t write often … No, well, that’s not true, I didn’t write at all after about a year. I’m not going to lie to you. I can’t picture Pauline living a whole lifetime with that nice deadpan stuffed with legal documents, he was like a suit of old clothes filled with paper to keep birds away. I always knew, I hoped she’d still have some other life, she could have done anything — She wasn’t like Olga or me. And all she had was Joe and her drunken black friends sponging on her. How is Pauline?—

But she knew no more than this woman, about the sisters, the aunts. She had been gone since she was nineteen.

— And you don’t write?—

— No. — Gone, like Ruthie.

A black man in a waiter’s suit that gaped between the buttons on jacket and fly stood by with a tin tray. An icecream was ordered — Well, all right, I’ll have something! — and a soda.

— Did you live with Olga or with Pauline? In the end?—

Now it was two schoolgirls meeting years later; the icecream was being smoothed, tiny cardboard spoonful by spoonful, between sentences.

— With both. At different times. I went to boarding-school in Rhodesia and I used to spend the holidays with Olga.—

— She had only the three boys? She always envied me, getting a girl.—

— Clive, Mark and Brian.—

— And Pauline? — Ruthie had never written and now this woman wanted to register a preference for Pauline to have been the surrogate.

— Oh, I used to be invited a lot to Pauline’s. And then when I left Rhodesia, I went to live with her and Joe.—

A smile. — Len. It was he who didn’t want me to write, you know. You were too small to read, anyway.—

But not later. I’ve had a husband, I’ve given birth, these things were done to me, but with you I do things, I’m all over my body, I’m there wherever you touch me, my tongue in your ear, your armpit fur and your sweet backside.

— Pauline had only the two, didn’t she, Alexander — Sasha — and the little girl, just a baby, when I went away.—

— Carole, we went to school together.—

— Sasha was a darling little boy. Did you get on well? You and Pauline’s children?—

— Yes, it was fine.—

— No jealousy? We sisters never quarrelled, we were very, very close.—

— I know. They were always talking about you.—

Sideways on the iron café-chair, the legs were arranged exposed from the knees as they had been on the lobby bench; elegant legs narrow at knee and ankle, displayed as all that was left to display by a woman whose fine breasts (breasts of Hillela) now met, where a waist like Hillela’s had been, a solid bolster that was diaphragm, belly and hips in one. — You wonder why I came. Why I’ve bothered you. Hillela.—

She was smiling without admission or reproach. — No I don’t. Curiosity. It’s natural.—

Offended, all the same; and the momentary twitching expression of one who is used to enduring the carelessness of others. — It’s a bit different from my friend who happens to work here, I think. Not just ‘curiosity’; couldn’t be, could it? If you’d known I was here, would you have looked for me?—

— I don’t know, really. I wouldn’t have known whom to look for. — A lie. Resemblances, sisterly and filial, can’t be avoided. But the General’s consort did not look where she thought they were to be found, in Mozambique.

The red mouth opened a little, the hands with the puffiness round the nails that results from some sort of manual work drew ringed fingers slowly down the powdered cheeks in preparation: —So you don’t remember me at all.—

— I think I was only — how old? — about two. There’s a photograph in Lourenço Marques. I was there with you but I don’t remember — not where it was taken, not the palm tree, not being there with you. Olga framed a photograph — of you — one taken during the war.—

— Nothing later? — Laughter. — That’s Len. He must have torn them up. You had no other idea of me?—

— None. — No pictures, but letters. All sensations alive in the body, breasts, lips of the mouth and the vagina, thorax, thighs. Vasco. A thirst of the skin.

— What’d they tell you? Len?—

— That you’d made another life.—

— Was that all? What could that mean to a child? How ridiculous. Len’s phrase.—

— It didn’t really matter what he said, he was talking about someone I didn’t know, bringing up a subject that didn’t exist, you see. I travelled about with him when I was little, in the car.—

And now remorse. — Oh my God.—

— It was wonderful! I remember it all, sleeping on a teddy-bear cloth blanket in the back, between the sample boxes. We stayed together at hotels in little dorps; slept in the same room with him.—

—‘Another life’. Sounds as if I’d gone into a convent. Len just never could face facts. Wouldn’t let me write, you know. And my sisters? When you were bigger?—

— Pauline explained.—

— That I’d gone away with a man.—

Oh more than that. To another life — Len’s phrase wasn’t a euphemism. To look for passion and tragedy. The wrong place; when it really happens it happens on the kitchen floor.

But a daughter cannot instruct a mother. — Yes, that you hadn’t been — right — for Len, and you’d fallen in love with someone else.—

— So you were old enough to understand, by then.—

— Oh yes. Some of my friends’ parents were divorced.—

Vasco, my Vasco, the taste of you! You are still in my mouth. I read somewhere it’s supposed to be the taste of bitter almonds. Not true, not for yours, anyway. Like strawberries, like lemon rind, I always did eat the rind of the slice of lemon people put in drinks.

The silence came back. The woman braved it. — He left me two years after we moved here.—

— You’re not with Vasco anymore?—

Ruthie, childish, self-absorbed Ruthie, never able to be aware of anything outside her own skin, that’s her charm in a way — doesn’t notice that if nothing else is remembered, the man’s name is known.

— Oh, a long time. Things didn’t work out, here. We had nothing left. Neither of us had a job, so he went to Europe to look for something. He was going to send for me in Lisbon, but it’s never happened.—

Mrs Nunes. — You’re married to someone else, now.—

The woman shook her head slowly, smoothing into silence the remoteness of that possibility. — Not married. When I was still young … younger… I was fooled again a few times. I didn’t understand what men were. — A little late to begin explaining the facts of life. No doubt someone did that; so far as Pauline and Olga could be said to know them. Or poor Len.

But the young woman was smiling at Ruthie as if she were the one capable of giving instruction.

— And I hear you’ve got a daughter, too. I’m a grandmother!—

— Yes, ten years old, she’s called Nomzamo and she’s at school in England.—

— My friend saw the photograph in your room. Is she from this husband you’re with here?—