Of course there’s nothing. The book was written before I started interviewing Clare and I can’t detect so much as an indirect reference to me, not even a meaningful silence. I try not to be disappointed. By the time I finish it’s late evening, almost dark outside.
Standing in the kitchen, the doors and windows closed and locked though the air inside is stifling, I pour a glass of wine and hold the book at arm’s length, turning it over in my hands, feeling the smoothness of its cover. On the back the publisher has categorized the volume as FICTION, in case we have any doubts. But doubts are exactly what it seems like we should be having, because here is Clare, named in the text, and there is Marie, as well as Clare’s son Mark, who can’t be happy about the way his mother has represented him. The book offers what appears to be an accurate description of Clare and Marie’s unusual domestic arrangement, which is too intimate, too symbiotic to be only a business matter. While they are two professionals, employer and employee, they have become inseparable and interdependent in a way that speaks more of friendship or love than of contract and remuneration. I see Marie wheeling a lunch cart into Clare’s study, the silent communication between them expressed through the eyes and other body language — a barely lifted finger, the tiniest raising of the chin, a tightening of lips. It’s a kind of magic that two people should be able to read each other so fluently.
Whether or not Clare suffered a robbery or house invasion I do not know — she has never spoken of one to me. In counterpoint to the book’s narrative of recent trauma and upheaval, there are long discursions about her ancestors, their migration from England to South Africa in the 1820s, and the economic histories of the family, all rendered in a distant third-person voice. The balance between the two — the sometimes surreal narrative of trauma, and the rather dry historiography of family and childhood — does not seem like fiction per se. Clare tells me in a covering note that it’s as close to a memoir as anything she’ll ever write, but it isn’t presented as one and at the same time I can’t quite see how it operates as fiction. Or maybe the real question I should be asking is: what does calling it fiction allow Clare to do?
The real shock is Clare’s discussion of her sister, Nora. This is what she was getting at all along, I think — the question she expected me to ask at our last meeting in Cape Town, the trail she thought I’d caught! It is tempting to read the book as nothing more than the occasion for an elaborate confession of her complicity in a capital crime, namely that she carelessly provided information that led to the assassination of her sister and brother-in-law. The turn towards history might be construed as a way of placing her actions in a larger context, if not an actual defence or apology for what she did: look at where I came from to understand what I did, what I had to do. History deceives, she seems to be saying, it makes us vain. Of course, categorizing the book as fiction allows her to dodge any legal question of her responsibility for those deaths if it were ever to be put to her. This is a novel, she could say, a version of me that bears only passing resemblance to the historical me. Do not confuse that person, the individual speaking to you now, with the person on the page. Many people wanted to kill my brother-in-law. I had no part to play. On the copyright page is a disclaimer: Any resemblance to real people, living or dead, is entirely coincidental, including those characters that share the same names as my son, Mark Wald, my assistant, Marie de Wet, and my ex-husband, William Wald. I use those names with the permission of the historical subjects to whom they are attached.
I write a note thanking Clare for the book and flattering her style at the same time that I remain a little confused; the ‘house invasion’, which is of considerable importance at the beginning of the book, is never resolved. But there is also fatigue in its pages, beneath which courses a puzzled anger at the way the world has turned out — more specifically at what our country has become after all the initial hope, the expectation of a society that would transform itself by a collective force of goodwill and selfless love into a model for the way the world might yet be. Instead, Clare seems to say, the country has shown itself to be a cruel microcosm for the way the world really is, the war of all against all, red in tooth and claw, a waking nightmare of exploitation and corruption and hideous beauty that appears doomed never to end or to end in only one possible way. One could be forgiven for reading the book as a particular kind of Afro-pessimism, although I suspect this is not her intention.
But I say none of this in my response and tell her I look forward to seeing her in Stellenbosch in May, and to continuing our conversation. In fact, I don’t need to conduct further interviews. As for the stray lingering question, the occasional need for some local clarification, it could all be done from here, over the phone or by e-mail. The truth is that I long to see her. Searching for her in the text, I flip through the book again, and suddenly see the formal dedication I missed the first time, the pages stuck together:
For my children — those I kept close, and those I denied.
I feel my throat tighten and surge into my mouth, acid rising. Perhaps, I think, she remembers me after all.
Absolution
As Mark stared at his mother’s reflection in the window, Clare knew that if she stopped before the picture was clear the unresolved story would forever be rumbling around between them, causing trouble. She tore at her piece of bread and then, finding she still had no appetite, put it down on the plate.
‘You were the perfect baby. You almost never cried or fussed. You smiled and laughed and had the biggest eyes of any child I’d ever seen, as though you were desperate to take in everything around you. I thought you were going to be a scientist, because you seemed to have such a natural capacity for observation. That was before we knew you were so short-sighted.’ Before that, she thought, and before they knew about the other problems, the heart murmur that she had always refused to call a defect, the severe asthma that appeared in adolescence — problems that had been blessings of a sort.
Mark grinned in a way that reminded Clare of William, charming and persuasive, and put his fingers to the frames of his glasses. ‘The law is a good antidote, my own pair of binoculars.’
Clare wondered if he knew how little one could see through binoculars — detail of one small object at a distance, but nothing around it or in between: the thing but not the context for the thing.
‘As a baby you looked as though you’d been minted by the gods, or sent from Hollywood central casting. If there were ever a born hero, you appeared to be he.’
‘You’re saying Nora was jealous.’
‘From the earliest days of her marriage she had tried to get herself pregnant. Eventually they did tests and nothing, she confided to my mother, was found to be wrong with her, which meant the problem was with Stephan — which meant, in those days, no option but childlessness or adoption. And Stephan was wholly against adoption. He said there was no way of knowing what might be lurking in the genes of a stranger’s baby. He feared a racial throwback that would only display the telltale characteristics later in life. So imagine when your aunt’s hated baby sister produced this divine-looking infant! It was the slap Nora had been bracing herself against since the day of Dorothy’s birthday party. It signalled the beginning of total war between us, though for me it felt as if nothing had changed. I had always known that she regarded me as an adversary at best, if not something much less benign. For some, it is possible to be the object of hatred and continue responding with love, or if not with love then at least with indifference. And then there are people like me,’ Clare said, resting her head on one hand. ‘I did not want to hate my sister, truly I didn’t. I wanted to be more virtuous than her, more loving. But I was not good enough. Her hatred fostered my hatred. I lacked the moral maturity to answer evil with love, to be selfless in the best possible way.’