His door of heavy brown wood, covered in posters about direct action and anti-globalization rallies, is midway down a long corridor with high ceilings. It’s enough for now to know where it is. I can make contact in time, once I’ve mustered the courage. Though I tell myself that I want to ask him about Laura, my hesitation, I realize, is as much to do with what he may remember about me as a child.
I turn to walk away when the door opens. He stands looking at me, unmistakably Lionel, though his hair is thinner and wilder than it was two decades ago. It’s a relief to see him and I feel an unexpected flush of happiness. For the first time, I understand that we’re not that far apart in age — he must be only six years or so older than me, but at the time he seemed remotely adult.
‘Are you waiting for someone?’ he asks.
‘Lionel Jameson.’
‘That’s the name on the door.’ He’s gruffer than I remember him, louder too, his voice booming down the corridor and bouncing off the high ceiling.
‘I’m Sam.’
He studies my face and shakes his head. ‘Sorry, are you one of the candidates for the lectureship? The interviews are down the hall.’
‘I’m Sam Leroux. I used to be Sam Lawrence. That was the name you would have known at the time. Laura Wald brought me to you.’ I watch his face change, the furrows in his brow flatten, his pupils dilate.
‘Come inside,’ he says, swinging open the office door. ‘I’m afraid I’m in a hurry.’
Lionel’s office is full of book boxes that have never been unpacked from some prior move. It has the feeling of antiquity, of a storehouse forgotten by everyone except its lone attendant. I’m making him more than he is. He’s just a prematurely ageing academic, a typical professor, blind to chaos or too overworked to bring order to his own mess. The shelves are stacked with papers and files and it looks like nothing has been dusted in months.
‘I’m so relieved you’re okay,’ he says, studying my face. ‘Not a boy any more! You are all right, aren’t you?’
‘So you do remember me.’
‘You sound almost as American as I do now. Tell me you weren’t in Chicago too?’
‘New York.’
He shakes his head, crossing his arms over his chest and laughing. The drawers of the filing cabinet in the corner of the room are open, disgorging bundles of paper-clipped documents and hanging folders. ‘There are so many questions,’ he says, pulling his red hair away from his head. ‘But you are all right after all? I worried so much when we left you.’ His face twitches as he fidgets with a paperclip holding together a sheaf of papers. I reassure him, tell him I’m fine. This was never the reaction I expected. ‘You must have questions for me, too. Whatever I can tell you— ’ He pauses, shakes his head again, as if thinking better of something he was about to say.
I tell him that I’m writing Clare’s biography, that I’ve almost finished the research, but still have a few leads I’d like to pursue. Even though Clare has been unwilling to talk to me about Laura, I don’t feel I can let the story go. It deserves at least a small place in the book.
‘I was hoping you might be able to tell me something about Laura.’
When Lionel hears it again the name seems to hit him like a bullet: his chest deflates and all the animation in his face dies; his body becomes rigid as he turns away from me to shuffle the countless piles of paper on his desk. My entrance into this space is somehow a transgression that I didn’t intend. I want to go, and I can see that Lionel needs for me to go.
‘Yes, of course you would. I’m afraid I have these interviews just now, so you’ll really have to excuse me. Perhaps we can take this up again at another point. I’m sorry I can’t talk now.’
I invite him to dinner but he’s going away for the holidays and says I should phone him in the New Year. I know he’s trying to give me the brush-off. I resolve not to give up, no matter how long it may take.
Tonight Sarah and I go to a busy restaurant at the mall in Rosebank and get a table outside where we can watch the foot traffic. We place our order, but then decide we want cocktails instead of wine so I go inside to the bar. There are half a dozen wait staff running around — too many of them for the small space at the cash register behind the bar, and too few of them for all the patrons in the restaurant at this hour. I change the order and decide to wait while the bartender makes the drinks. There’s a young woman behind the cash register who looks shyly at me, and then smiles. Without thinking, I smile back and as soon as she sees me smile she returns the smile, looking ecstatic, but then she winces and swoons, like she could die from embarrassment, spinning around and sinking below the bar. Her co-workers look at her and pull her up and look at me and ask the woman what’s going on. She shakes her head and disappears into the kitchen.
I take the drinks back out to Sarah.
‘Cheers,’ she says, clinking her glass against mine. ‘What just happened there? All you did was smile and the girl acted like you’d presented her with a diamond ring or something.’
‘I don’t know. Most whites look through blacks. Security guards. Servers. Clerks. You get what you give. I smiled back, and maybe it was the first time a young white guy ever did that to her.’
Our dinners come and we order another round of cocktails. The night is warm with no breeze and there are buskers further down the street, a group singing an old Dolly Rathebe hit. As we wait for a dessert menu an elderly white woman weaves along the pavement towards us.
‘Ek soek ’n honderd rand,’ she says, putting out her hand.
I tell her I’m sorry, that I don’t have a hundred rand to give her, even though this isn’t true. I can see Sarah start to go for her wallet until I give her a look that makes her stop. The woman curses us and moves on to another table where the diners, too embarrassed not to give her something, offer a handful of change. She picks out the large denomination coins and leaves the rest. A few cents — forget it, she doesn’t want it.
‘Who can blame her?’ I say, accepting a dessert menu from our server. ‘Five rand buys next to nothing. Greg says he should get a special tax break for being white. This is Greg, who must be the most radical-thinking person I know in the country. He calculated he gives away ten thousand rand a year to people asking for money. And that’s not even factoring in all the help he gives to his domestic worker and gardener and nanny, or the official charity work that his gallery sponsors. “Life on the plantation,” he says. “This is the price.” ’ I gesture at the well-dressed diners around us, the extravagant portions of food, the booze sold at a premium but still running like water.
‘It’s not so different in New York these days, or London,’ Sarah says. ‘It’s not a matter of one place or another. These are not just problems of place.’
Absolution
The man reached out his hands, removing a pair of thin leather gloves. Squinting into the light from the corridor, Clare recognized him all at once. It was no one she might have expected.
‘Heavens!’ she cried out, her heart leaping about against her ribs. ‘What on earth do you think you’re doing here?’
‘You knew I was coming,’ her son said, taking off his jacket. ‘You told me to let myself in.’
‘I did nothing of the kind, Mark! I’m minded to phone the police.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Mother. I’ve come for the week, as you must remember. What are you doing in bed so early? It’s not even ten.’