At the house we rearrange the furniture that Jason and other correspondents have left behind. We’ll need to buy chairs, a new couch, but will wait until the container arrives with our things. For now we can live with what’s here. Though she’s exhausted, Sarah feels compelled to check in with her editor in New York. There’s no gradual settling in with a job like this — she’ll be working on a story from first thing tomorrow, getting herself set up, ‘learning the lay of the land,’ she says, with the kind of enthusiasm that made me fall for her in the first place. There’s a study in the main house where I can work when I’m at home. The garden cottage has always functioned as the resident correspondent’s office space, and we’ve agreed it should continue that way — a clear separation between work and home, even if they’re only a few metres apart. In any case, I’ll have an office at the university. Before going to bed, I send Clare a message, my first communication to her since our last meeting.
*
Dear Clare,
I write with greatest appreciation and gratitude for your patience over the last four months. I hope, as you say, that we’ll meet again. It seems likely that I’ll return to Cape Town at some point in the next year.
I have started to transcribe the interviews and will undoubtedly have further questions as I begin to map the shape of the book. In some cases I may send you the transcript if the recording is poor. In fact, I include a transcript here, from early on in the process, where the sound suddenly goes and your voice with it. I think there was a house alarm going off in the background. I’ve done my best but there are some unintelligible passages and I would be grateful if you felt able to reconstruct what they might have been (or to construct them anew or revise them or insist on their irrelevance).
I hope I do not overstep the mark in saying that the last four months have been transformative for me in so many ways. It is my fondest hope that we’ll meet again someday soon and continue our conversations. I also hope that you may be able to forgive me for my less honourable questions and revelations at our last meeting.
With all best wishes for a happy holiday season and prosperous New Year,
Sam Leroux
*
I hold it together until we’re in bed, and then, finding the reassurance of Sarah next to me, the experiences of the last four months all burst from my face, running out of me, my heart seizing up, limbs twitching. I lose control, I rock, shake against her as she holds me, wait for her to put me back together again.
Absolution
Now that the terribly hot days had all but passed and the mist fell down more abundantly from the mountain, spreading its cloth of ephemeral whiteness through Clare’s garden, she gave Marie, who so rarely had a holiday, the week off for Easter.
‘I do not know how I shall cope on my own,’ Clare said, performing an exasperation she did not entirely feel. ‘I have almost forgotten how to cook.’
‘Shame, Clare. You’d think you were helpless. Listen, I’ve left meals in the freezer and all you have to do is take one out in the morning, let it defrost throughout the day, and just put it in the oven in the evening. I’ve written up some instructions for each one,’ Marie said, tying a scarf round her neck and handing Clare a printed sheet with cooking and household directions for each day of her absence. Marie was going to see a niece in Rustenburg and had plans to indulge in a little gambling, church going, and game viewing in the Pilanesberg Reserve. ‘I’m going to see a black rhino this time, finally. I’ve never seen a black rhino. And a wildehond. I can’t tell you how I long to see one of those. The countryside in that part of the world is unequalled in my mind. It is where I shall retire—’ she said, laughing, and then caught herself, a hand to the mouth in tentative regret. She was already past retirement age and for her to suggest the end of her working career was somehow also to imply the end of Clare’s life. For all that Clare knew they lacked common ground on the most basic and fundamental beliefs, Marie was a more efficient archivist and manager and all around helpmate than Clare had any hope of finding elsewhere. Mutual disagreement was part of their contract, and while she had no wish to hear Marie’s old-fashioned opinions on the majority government or blacks in general or the rights of sexual minorities, Clare could not live without her; it was impossible to conceive of going forward without Marie.
With no one else to flick switches or close cupboards, open doors or answer the telephone on the rare occasions it rang, the few sounds that did occur of their own accord were magnified, reverberating as if in an echo chamber and imposing themselves upon Clare’s ears as a tangible rush of pressure. The crunch of the freezer contracting brought Clare to her feet, certain that someone must be in the kitchen, that perhaps Marie had changed her mind and would not abandon her after all, or that an intruder had somehow managed to stride across the dry grass, disable the alarm, force the locks, and was brazenly liberating Clare’s possessions in the next room. This was how it would happen, alone, the predators of the world sensing Clare’s vulnerability, the oldest member of the pack abandoned by the others and left for dead, for nature to work its efficient illusionism in which those who disappear are not merely offstage, slipped through a trapdoor, but are gone entirely, bodily.
After a day of starting even at the wind at the door, Clare spent twenty minutes closing all the curtains and blinds against the fast-falling night. Then, in a moment of irrational panic, she engaged the armoured external shutters that motored into place, sliding with the penitentiary ping of metal meeting metal. The special ventilation system came on automatically, blowing air of such bracing freshness, the moist feral smell of the mountain rushing in, that Clare felt almost liberated in her cell. She would put the alarm on later. She had never used the shutters before, insisting to Marie they would not succumb to the siege mentality. Unlike her neighbours’ houses, there was no threatening plaque with the face of an Alsatian on her perimeter wall, only the wall itself and its subtle fortifications, its shocking iron ivies and invisible motion-detector beams. The electrified wires bore no warning of GEVAAR or INGOZI, those conscientious betrayals alerting the criminal to present danger. Those who would dare to intrude, Clare had decided, could risk pain or worse.
The defrosted meal for the first day of Marie’s absence was a tuna quiche typical of her culinary skills, which had been honed in the middle part of the last century when tinned vegetables and commercially preserved meats had their vogue. Since moving to the house Clare had taken to eating in front of the television, fatigued by the formality of laying a table every night, the two of them sitting and trying to make polite conversation about days that were so alike as to be indistinguishable one from the other. Now they had adopted a new pattern. Putting out a small dish of pretzels or potato chips for Clare, shredded kudu biltong for herself, and two glasses of wine poured from a box, Marie would ask at six each evening whether Clare wanted table or trays. Although making a performance of considering her mood, Clare would nonetheless now always settle on trays. Then they would sit in the lounge, eating from the freestanding wooden trays and watching Marie’s favourite soap operas. Outraged at the latest high jinks and proof of social chaos the soap stories seemed to offer, Marie would comment on the lives of the characters as if they were real people. ‘It’s this teenage pregnancy story again,’ she would say, shaking her head and clicking her tongue against her palate. ‘Remember earlier this year Teresa was pregnant from Frikkie.’ Or ‘It’s this whole discrimination story again, as if we haven’t had enough of that already.’ Story for problem or palaver — it was a way that Clare’s sister and the Pretorius in-laws once had of speaking. After a couple hours of such entertainment Clare would excuse herself, going to bed with a book, which she would read on and off throughout the night between short periods of sleep.