While Sam was away, Sarah had stripped Ellen’s bed, bundling the sheets into a plastic bag whose seams strained under the pressure. What about the mattress? she asked. I don’t think the stain will come out.
The women from the church will know what to do.
If you find me the number I’ll phone them.
Sarah was better than he could have imagined. She made tea and cooked meals that comforted him with their simplicity: macaroni and cheese, spaghetti and meatballs, stew with kudu meat, an omelette and biscuits. She placed phone calls and came through with money when the accounts were not immediately transferrable to Sam. She ordered flowers for the funeral, helped choose the music, and charmed the women of the church where Ellen, although rarely a churchgoer in recent years, was still a member. She sampled food that was new to her and tried to make Sam happy without ever diminishing the solemnity of the situation. With the help of the Women’s Federation she arranged a brunch following the memorial service and helped Sam set up a fund to pay for a scholarship in Ellen’s name at the school where she’d taught. She phoned her father’s lawyers whose firm had a branch in Cape Town and within days the red tape was cleared, the accounts were in Sam’s name, and the property his to do with as he liked. Everything she did was perfectly pitched — efficient and businesslike without being unfeeling. It was a way that reminded Sam, not for the first time, of Laura.
Though grateful for everything she’d done, almost despite himself he began to resent the part Sarah was playing so effortlessly — the American saviour with a golden touch. Without thinking, he began to do little things that might alienate her, forcing her to reveal some hidden selfishness. But when he wanted to sleep alone for a night in the room that had been his since he first came to live with Ellen, Sarah made up the couch in the living room and slept there without complaint.
The police assured Sam they would follow up leads.
Sam
I spend the rest of the summer, the sweltering days of February and the cooler days of early autumn — March, April — trying to forget what Timothy told me, and what Lionel did not deny. Perhaps, I begin to feel now, my Aunt Ellen was right: it is better to forget and move on from the past and its people; we’re mistaken in thinking we know them.
During the days I spend in my cell of a university office, I’m either working on the book or preparing for teaching, though the two are symbiotic, one feeding the other. I only have two classes this term, one an honours-level course on contemporary South African literature, the other a Masters course devoted in its entirety to Clare’s books. The students work hard, they’re engaged, they tease me about my Americanized vowels and ask, as the term progresses, whether I’m getting enough sleep. They express concern for my well-being in a way that both touches and alarms me. I go to bed earlier and get up later each morning. I stop resisting the attempts by the domestic worker to do things like launder and iron my clothes. This is what we are paying her to do. It makes no sense for us to do it ourselves.
On weekends Sarah and I go to the malls, out to dinner in Illovo, on a day trip to Pretoria to see the Voortrekker Monument and the Union Buildings. One Saturday, as we’re about to leave the glitzy mall at Sandton, we overhear a child plead with her parents, ‘Do we have to go back to South Africa?’, as if the mall were not just a different kind of social space, but a separate political entity — the post-apartheid version of an independent homeland for the elite, whatever their colour.
Sarah and I cautiously explore the city centre with one of her fellow correspondents, a reporter for one of the wire services, and while nothing happens, we manage to frighten ourselves back to the northern suburbs. When I tell my colleagues that even the much-lauded Newtown Cultural Precinct felt too edgy for me, most of them laugh. ‘You’ve been in America too long,’ one says, slapping me on the shoulder, trying to be good-natured, I think, but also sounding a little resentful.
Despite these dissonances, I settle back into life in my country. Johannesburg grows on me in a way that I didn’t expect it would. The mania about security mutates into a feeling closer to instinct and reflex. To spend all of one’s life behind one kind of locked door or another, as many locked doors as possible, is simply the way things are, or at least the way Sarah and I choose to live while we’re here. I know my colleagues and my students — perhaps even Greg — would insist there are other ways, perhaps riskier but more alive, more engaged. It’s not a mode I’m capable of embracing.
By early April, as autumn begins to arrive, I finish transcribing my interviews with Clare. I settle on a form and a voice for the book — a rhythm that alternates between the historical account of her life and critical analysis of the novels, unfolding in a voice as closely approximating her own — the cool tone and sometimes angry formality, the dry tease and dismissal — as I find it possible to write. I finish a draft of the first two chapters, one about the English settler ancestors on both sides of her family, and the other about her first novel, Landing. I have always thought of Landing simply as a book about a woman who checks out of her stultifying Lower Albany farm life to live alone in a series of caves on the Tsitsikamma coast — a feminist refusal of gender norms and expectations, of the husband who forces himself on her, and an embrace of the natural world. Rereading it, I see the book is only superficially about these things. It is, more profoundly, about a refusal to be complicit in the privilege that apartheid bestowed upon and codified for whites. The heroine, Larena, instead embraces an outlaw position, living outside and beyond the reach of the law, invisible to the state, governable only by her own idiosyncratic sense of ethics and morals. I read it again and imagine Laura poring over those words as a young woman, finding a forward echo of herself, discovering in its pages a map for the route she might follow.
*
May. Sarah has managed to convince her editors that the Festival is worth a feature, so she accompanies me to Stellenbosch (in fact, having heard me talk endlessly about Clare for years, Sarah’s eager to meet her). The events last from Friday through Sunday and I’ve arranged to see Clare in private on Saturday. We fly to Cape Town on Thursday afternoon. The plane is packed with a sports team from a girls’ school in Johannesburg. All of the girls are in the same T-shirts, and most of them act as if they’ve never been on a plane before: they run around the cabin, talk loudly, begin singing what must be a team song. The adult chaperones and the flight attendants do nothing to control them. I complain to one of the chaperones who tells me that I should just calm down and go to sleep. As we begin the descent to Cape Town, the girls all mass on one side of the plane to get views of the mountain and the city. It feels as though the aircraft might not be able to take it, that the poor distribution of weight will be too much and we’ll fall into a tailspin, crashing into my old neighbourhood.
We pick up a car at the airport and drive through to Stellenbosch; after the sprawl and modernity of Johannesburg, the old town appears like an oasis out of historical fantasy, the Disneyland version of the eighteenth-century Cape, with its whitewashed restaurants and cafés and wine bars. I try to relax over dinner, but feel the tension wrapping itself around inside me. This is the chance, I know, to lay everything out with Clare, to put our mutual past on the table, and decide what it means.
Friday. Clare is one of three writers on the bill at tonight’s event, held in an austere modern lecture theatre in the university’s Arts Faculty building. Of the other two writers, one is an Australian now resident in San Francisco, the other a Zimbabwean who lives in Cape Town. Clare is the last to read and she’s chosen a long passage from near the beginning of Absolution.