‘You say it was the start of a war, but I can’t imagine what you mean,’ Mark said, turning to look directly at his mother once again. ‘The thing at Dorothy’s party, the cake, I understand how that could affect your relationship as children. But as adults, she must have done something terrible for you to talk about her like this. I didn’t have any idea you hated her.’
‘This, again, is where you fit in, or not just fit, but are the keystone of the whole architecture of what I perceived — for admittedly it is my subjective view — as her plot against me. Do not scoff. Remarkable a child as you might have been, you were not old enough to be aware, certainly not to have any memory of those days. Within a month of your birth Nora was driving into town and dropping by the house on Canigou Avenue completely unannounced, at all hours, accompanied by the driver she and Stephan employed. Often she brought a camera and insisted on taking pictures of you, her “darlingest” as she put it — not her “darlingest nephew”, but “her darlingest” — as if you belonged to her and not to me. At first I was confused, surprised but also hopeful, imagining that she might let go of the old animosities and take a positive role in our lives. I was hopeful, too, that her sudden interest in you might signal a diminishing involvement in the politics of Stephan and his party. If she could drift so far from where she had begun, I thought, there was no telling what might yet become of me. We do not, as young people, know that drift and realignment are not always to be feared. Nora, however, had drifted blindly, putting herself to sea quite happy to embrace whatever port she arrived in first.’
‘But the visits, and the photos of me — have I seen those photos?’
‘I never saw them myself. I imagine they must have been sinister, unrepresentative of the way things were. Because she came unannounced at odd hours, she often found — and eventually I understood that she knew she would find and expected to find — the house in some significant disarray. No doubt she hoped to catch you gnawing on a contraband copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. In those early years of our marriage your father and I lived like bohemians. We had no servants to help us keep the place clean, and I was struggling to write and to look after you and to keep house while your father did little on the domestic front apart from dandle you and coo and pronounce you the most beautiful and intelligent baby that ever was. I accept that he was busy, but it did not make things any easier.’
‘So you never actually saw the photographs. You only assume they were sinister.’
‘I think I have grounds to assume as much. Not long after she started visiting, my parents, who had already moved down to Fish Hoek at that point, phoned to ask if all was well. They wanted to know if your father and I were coping. I said, with not a little shock, that we were certainly coping just fine. They wondered if they could come up for a visit one day. I told them they were welcome at any time, but reminded them that I was trying to work as well as be the housekeeper and mother. I thought it would end at that.’
‘But the photos — assuming there were any — didn’t end with Granny and Grandpa?’
‘This is the point where I became quite seriously unsettled — frightened even. I think the idea was to lay a certain kind of groundwork with your grandparents. Some weeks after they had phoned, your father’s head of department called him in for a meeting and asked if all was well at home, and made noises about creating the right kind of environment to safeguard a child’s welfare. He mentioned the importance of the moral as well as the physical environment, as if to suggest that in our case both might be in question. Your father assured him everything was perfectly fine at home and the next week we hired our first maid. I’ve forgotten her name — Pamela or Pumla. Your father built a well-camouflaged locker in the loft space above our bedroom and there I hid the risky books and papers, better than I had in the past. In a way Nora did us a favour. When the police did come knocking there was nothing for them to find. We presented an unremarkable bourgeois front that, on the surface, no one could question. We got our act together, thanks in large part to Nora’s harassment.’
‘But you don’t have hard evidence that she said anything against you to anyone. You just assume—’
‘You did not know your aunt, my dear. I must ask you to trust my version.’
‘It seems highly subjective and conjectural. It doesn’t sound as though you’ve anything apart from circumstantial evidence. Did your parents or Dad’s department head mention any photos?’
‘No, but—’
‘So it ended with that.’ Mark sounded as though he had heard more than enough. Clare wondered if he was as belligerent in the courtroom as he was with her. No wonder he was so successful.
‘No, it did not end there. A month after your father had the meeting with his head, a social worker of sorts came to visit me at home. She was unannounced, but everything was in order, clean, tidy, nothing amiss, a true vision of suburban perfection, achieved at great cost, mind you. The woman apologized and left after half an hour of chatting with me, playing with you, and refusing to answer my questions. A week later the police came, explaining that someone had phoned with a tip that we were endangering a child. They found nothing, bid us a rather menacing farewell, and then left us alone.’
‘And you assume it was Nora.’
‘It must have been.’
‘Might it not have been someone with a grudge against Dad, or against you, or even against Grandpa?’
‘I suppose it is possible. But Nora is the most obvious suspect. In any event, when none of these interventions had the desired effect she began trying to visit again, always dropping by at the most inconvenient times. By that point I had no reservations about refusing to let her inside, but I also became terrified that she would never stop until she had what she truly wanted.’
‘Which was what?’
‘Don’t you see? She wanted to dispossess me of my child, to take you from me, and have you as her own. If she couldn’t conceive her own child, she would have the next best thing. I began to understand that if I wanted to keep you, I was going to have to defend you at all costs. I was going to have to get rid of her. I had to make her disappear.’
As the kettle boiled Clare found a jar of instant coffee in the pantry. She had to read the instructions on the label and was uncertain what a teaspoon might be, whether it meant a formal cooking measure as her mother had once used, or an informal utensil of inexact volume that most people used. She assumed the latter and put two rounded teaspoons of the coffee granules in each cup — it was the way Adam took it, though he always wanted three sugars as well. The water boiled and she poured it, leaving room for milk in one of the cups. Her own coffee she preferred black. She searched the pantry for sugar but could find none, then thought to look in the cupboard next to the stove, but it wasn’t there either. Then she remembered there were canisters on the kitchen counter, and with insulting obviousness there was one marked SUGAR next to the kettle itself. She must ask Marie to start labelling cupboards with detailed inventories of their contents. If a library has a catalogue, so should a kitchen.