She was not accustomed to so much intrusion, especially now that she had, at long last, begun to feel at home in this new house. Quite apart from the adjoining study and bedroom, it afforded her a much larger measure of privacy and separation from the wider world. Mendicants could no longer come directly to her door. Only the truly brazen or desperate rang the intercom at the gate to the drive. Marie, feeling even this was inadequate, had proposed a secondary gate such as she had seen at some homes in Johannesburg, thereby creating a kind of security decontamination zone. The idea was that if one needed a delivery of groceries, for instance, the deliveryman would be allowed through the first gate, could deposit the groceries in the secure zone, Marie could sign for the delivery while remaining separated from the deliveryman by the secondary gate, and only after he had left and the first gate closed would she open it to retrieve the delivery. Clare had dismissed the proposal as ludicrously paranoid. Cape Town was not yet Johannesburg, where entire neighbourhoods had become privatized security zones and armed guards patrolled grocery-store parking lots from bulletproof watchtowers. Besides, the truly determined would still find ways around any number of secondary or tertiary defences; they would cut through wires and tunnel under walls. Nowhere was truly secure.
Mark produced the coffee tray and Clare could not help taking note of the mugs — mugs rather than cups and saucers — and the plastic container of milk. Marie would have laid a placemat or cloth on the tray, used the china, poured the milk into a pitcher, and put the rusks with slices of cake on a plate. Such things made life in this country more bearable at the same time that they pointed up the irony of living as one did in the place where one happened to have been born.
‘It seems terribly unjust, this life,’ Clare said, accepting a mug. ‘That we should be able to live like this. It would not surprise me if, one day very soon, it should all be taken away from us. Nor would I think it an entirely unjustified deprivation.’
‘The government should make you head of land reform, Mother. You sound like some kind of radical.’
‘Have you ever thought I was anything else?’
‘I once thought you were a liberal,’ Mark said, stirring milk and sugar into his coffee, tapping his spoon on the mug in a way that made Clare flinch. He had learned the tapping habit from his father. ‘A good old-fashioned white liberal.’
‘That’s a very offensive thing to say. Whatever could have made you think I was a liberal?’
‘It was before I understood what it meant. I was only a child. And then, when I realized you weren’t a liberal, nothing so tame or easy to label as that, I thought you might be a pragmatist.’
‘An even worse offence. What else would you call me? An opportunist? A reactionary? An appeaser?’
Mark laughed and shook his head. ‘Now I see that you’re not only a radical but also a strict non-conformist, if such a definition is possible.’
‘Let’s say that it is and leave it at that. This need not be a pinning down of my politics, which become ever more mercurial. I see ineptitude and shoddiness and for a brief moment think of how efficient things once were. People in this country don’t complain enough when goods or services — services in particular — are substandard. I am of the generation, as are you (more’s the pity), who will be able to say that they lived through two corrupt nationalist governments. The question is whether we will survive the second, some members of which see us as its unfinished business, its potential fifth columnists, and its dormant antagonists. One settler, one bullet. They are the ones who see all whites as parasites, and they are the analogues to those of the old regime who saw all blacks as terrorists or idlers. It may only be a matter of time before the likes of me, and you in particular given the nature of your work, are described as enemies of the state. We are the new sleeper cells, the plotters in the dark. To dissent now is to commit treason, in a way that could not even have been imagined by the old apartheid government.’
‘And now you do sound like a racist and a reactionary.’
‘And truly I think myself neither. I know that I am the one — one of the ones, one of the few remaining — who is keeping faith with the struggle. Not the men and women who now use their struggle credentials as smokescreens, who pull strings and make magic happen and watch as their speeding tickets and even worse disappear like pixie dust. Your sister would have had something to say. She would have been scathing. She would have spoken as I speak, but even more boldly. We may yet find ourselves relying on her, claiming her legacy as our own political bona fides. I wish Laura had seen fit to trust us more, and that we had given her greater reason to trust.’
Mark wheezed and shifted in the white wrought-iron chair, looking uncomfortable, as if mention of his sister were too painful to bear. It was possible, Clare realized, that there were things about Laura he knew and had never shared.
‘You make Laura sound like some kind of hero — or heroine. I’m not at all sure that was the case,’ Mark said. ‘She was a terror as a child. And not much better as she grew up.’
‘The media has debased and perverted the idea of heroism. Successful sportsmen and women are now almost habitually accorded the status of hero. Laura does not fit that kind of category. What she did, what I assume she did, was both too great and selfless as well as too dishonourable and horrific to be called heroic. The term lacks the necessary ambiguity to describe your sister’s activities — what I know she did, and what I can guess she may have done. She was something more than human, but less than a goddess. Unlike heroes of antiquity, I don’t believe that Laura was a favourite of the gods, or even of one particular god — certainly not the God of Christianity, who was, besides everything else, a god in whom she did not hold much faith. Do you think that’s a fair assessment?’
‘Before she was ten years old she was already terrifying me. I suppose she was a kind of heroine to me, as a child, if not the typical kind. I can’t speak for what she did or might have done as an adult. To be honest, I’ve tried to remain ignorant of the details, to protect my sense of her.’
‘And what sense is that?’
‘As a person of total independence. Like you.’
Clare looked for a smile but Mark was as solemn as if preparing for the judicial chamber; if there were humour or empathy there, another part of him sat holding down the cage that contained them. She wished he were not so inhuman.
‘No one can flatter as a child can flatter. Total independence, for me at least, is long in the past — if I ever had it to begin with. It was to your father that I first ceded control for the routine manoeuvres required to get myself through life on an ordinary day. Your father hired and fired the staff, managed the household accounts, arranged a cook to be sure we did not starve and a nanny to look after you and your sister when I refused to do so because I was too busy with my work. Your father played all the domestic roles that society, culture, religion, and the state had for centuries ascribed to the wife. That was not, however, the reason for the end of our marriage. About that I want there to be no misunderstanding. There were a great many other women, and I would not be surprised if he had other children besides you and Laura. Don’t look so shocked. What I hope for him now is that he is happy with his new Mrs Wald.’
‘Aisyah.’
‘I am told that is her name.’
‘I’d be lying if I said I had a totally easy relationship with her. She acts as though she expects white people to treat her like a maid, and then she goes and acts like one anyway: lots of milk and four sugars in her coffee. She doesn’t like me at all, I think, and can’t stand Coleen or the kids. She dotes on Dad day and night — half-maid, half-concubine. It’s quite disgusting.’