‘Was the censor embodied in your imagination?’
‘Why?’ She looks startled; the question seems to catch her by surprise.
‘I wondered if you envisioned the censor as a person, rather than an abstraction, or a worm, as you said last week.’
‘Yes, I did,’ she says — no hesitation now.
‘Would you care to say what he, or she, looked like?’
‘Why?’
‘Curiosity.’
‘The censor looked like me. She was an internal doppelgänger, hovering just behind me with a blue pencil, poised to attack. I often thought that if I was very still, writing at my desk, and turned around suddenly, I might see her there, just behind me. You will think me insane,’ she says, sounding amused by her own confession. ‘It is a good question, you know. No one has ever asked me that. I called her Clara — the censoring half of my mind. Not half — maybe quarter or eighth, the little bit I allowed her to occupy, the bit she claimed.’
‘Clara?’
‘It sounded smug to me. A smug little housewife censor who thinks she knows what literature is. The fear I’ve always had—’ She stops and raises her hands. ‘Turn off your recorder.’ I switch it off and put down my pencil. ‘The fear … I’m just a smug little housewife who thinks she knows what literature is. Unlike you, I have no doctorate. I belong to a generation of academics who could build a career on a first degree alone, and a generation of writers who did not go to school to learn how to tell stories. Often I wonder how much of Clara I have let take over. More than an eighth? More than half?’ She holds my gaze, shaking her head. ‘I don’t know, you know, that’s the thing.’
The gardener, who seems to be here every day, draws her attention away from me. ‘What does one do with a man like that? I certainly don’t know what to do. I don’t want to be thought rude, even by him. Especially by him, I mean — by someone like him. I don’t want to be like my mother was. I don’t want to be the imperious white madam who can’t help being an autocrat with the servants. Even that, you know — I’m aware what I give away in calling them servants instead of staff. Don’t think I don’t know. But what is one to do? This is life on the feudal estate. I want to tell him to go away and not come back. Fire him as Americans say — such a violent way of ending a professional relationship, burning the terminated, or firing upon them, executing them. But I don’t know how to fire him. My mother never taught me how to terminate a relationship — any kind of relationship. What is one to do? If I fired him, how many lives would I imperil?’
I shake my head and hunch my shoulders. ‘I don’t have any experience of staff. I wouldn’t have any idea how to terminate a relationship. I’ve never been in a position of authority over another person.’
‘I’m not sure I believe that,’ she says, glancing back at me. ‘All right, let’s get back to it. You may turn on your recorder thingy again, darling.’ Do I imagine the darling? No, I hear it distinctly. It’s the word I’ve been waiting for that I didn’t know I needed to hear. My chest is a hot flood. Darling, darling. I shuffle papers to kill time and fiddle with the recorder. Darling. I try to find my composure.
I invent a question.
‘Do you think other writers in this country imagined themselves as their own censors?’
‘How should I know? Ask them,’ she says coolly, and it’s as if the conversation of a few seconds ago never happened. It was off the record. The record is something separate. It’s a different register and another kind of contract. There is no room on the record for darling.
The sun flashes into the room, reflecting off the windows of a neighbouring house. She draws the blinds and returns to her desk, again to shuffle papers, as though it’s a code we’ve agreed: to shuffle papers is to buy time. It isn’t about pretending to be otherwise occupied, or at least this is how I begin to interpret it. Without looking up at me she speaks.
‘Don’t you want to ask me about my childhood?’ Three fingers pull the hair away from her face on one side.
I want to hear her call me darling again, that’s what I want. I want her to hug me at the end of each meeting, pat my head, tell me I’m doing a good job. She teases me with a photo of her as a girl, on a horse, somewhere on a farm in the Karoo.
‘I thought there were no clues to your fiction in your own life,’ I say, trying to tease back.
‘That is true, but you are writing a biography, are you not? Should we not be talking about my life instead of my work? Or what kind of biography is this?’
‘As you’ve said, much of your life is a matter of public record.’
‘If not my own life, then the lives of those around me.’
We spend a further two hours talking about the themes of her works, historicizing the texts, exploring obvious resonances with her own life that even she is willing to acknowledge, while asserting the process of mystification and mythification she undertook to make the personal more complex and more significant than mere autobiography. Her words, not mine.
At one o’clock Marie taps once on the door, doesn’t wait for Clare’s reply, and wheels in a cart bearing two covered trays. Placing each tray on the low coffee table in the middle of the room, she removes the covers: sandwiches, a selection of salads. She bows (is that my imagination?) and wheels the cart from the room, closing the door behind her.
We eat in a concentrated silence, punctuated by the sounds of our chewing and breathing, our movements across upholstery, readjusting our weight to find more comfortable positions. A hadeda screams in the garden. One gardener shouts to another. A plane passes overhead. A house further down the street cries out in alarm. We say nothing over the food, and nothing about it.
In all the hours I’ve been in the house I’ve never heard a telephone ring. Maybe there’s a phone in the other wing, with a quiet ringer that only Marie hears and answers. There’s no phone in the office. Clare has no contact with the rest of the world except through the windows, which she opens throughout the day to direct the gardeners in an unbroken stream of language that I know will only ever be sound to me. It’s a language I won’t learn because I don’t have the time or the will.
She chews, her movements slow and methodical, as though every bite demands full attention. Her large, straight teeth work through the bread and fillings, the salad leaf and tomatoes, all simply but carefully prepared. She likes good things, good food, good clothes, good furniture, and a good house. The success of her books has afforded a comfortable lifestyle — an extravagant lifestyle compared to what most have in this country, or in any country for that matter. When we’ve finished the sandwiches, she presses a button on the wall by her desk. A minute later Marie returns with coffee and a plate of Tennis Biscuits and Romany Creams. She takes the empty plates, and again leaves us in privacy.
‘I thought I was supposed to bring my own food.’
‘I don’t like strange smells. Everything becomes more intense when one lives alone. I don’t like going out. I hate travelling. Going to London was almost more than I could manage. I slept for a month afterward.’ She affects a smile. ‘I wasn’t always this way. I haven’t left this house in over three weeks, nearly a month. Twenty-four days: a single day containing many.’
Absolution
After the initial police investigation into the house invasion, as Clare insisted on calling it, she had no further contact with the authorities. No suspects were presented for her to identify, no one apprehended, and no one, so far as she could remember, had ever asked her for a description of the invaders. The police had failed to recover her father’s wig in its black tin box. And then, a few months after moving from the old house on Canigou Avenue to her new fortress in Bishopscourt, there was a buzz at the outer gate and Marie admitted a black car with government registration plates. The driver, a man with pinched features and a thin neck, opened the door for a petite woman whose hair was swept up behind her head.