It’s a strange thing to watch, Clare talking about herself, or some fictional self, in the third person, but I begin to see again the woman I met in Amsterdam, and through the process of reading she becomes someone other than the woman I came to know in Cape Town. Both selves, and the self who is described in the book, if that self is separate, all seem to exist simultaneously. In flashes I think I can see each one of them move across her face, take primacy for a moment, and then recede in deference to one of the others. There’s a dark humour in her reading that I didn’t find in the book when I read it myself. As I listen, I can’t help wondering if she knows the truth about Laura. There are moments towards the end of Absolution when she seems almost to suggest, to hint, that Laura was not what she appeared to be.
The audience is attentive if a little bemused by Clare, as if they aren’t sure what to make of the reading. Some have already managed to get a copy of the book and a man further down our row is following along in the text itself, occasionally shaking his head as though the words Clare is speaking don’t match the words on the page.
She reads for nearly forty minutes, longer than either of the others. At the end the applause isn’t as enthusiastic as it was for the Australian, who condescended to take questions from the Zimbabwean while Clare sat apart to one side, waiting for her turn. She stands on her own at the end and the evening finishes with the MC reminding us that all three authors will be signing books in the lobby, where there is a reception with wine donated by one of the local estates.
By the time Sarah and I make our way out of the auditorium the lines are already twenty-minutes deep and stretch outside to the street — the longest for the Australian, the next longest for Clare. The Zimbabwean has only a few dedicated admirers, alternative student types with Lenin hats and Peruvian cloth bags. Sarah has brought along a first edition of Changed to Trees that she acquired as a student.
As we reach the head of the line Clare sees us and stands. Marie, sitting back to one side, nods at me without smiling, but in a way that looks almost confidential, as if we share a secret. I introduce Sarah to Clare, who is more gracious than I expect her to be.
‘Would you mind signing my book?’ Sarah asks, sounding starstruck. ‘I don’t want to trouble you.’
‘It’s no trouble. After all, it’s why I’m here, holding this pen.’ Clare frowns for a moment, turning her face down to the book, but by the time she puts her name to the page and looks up again the frown is gone. ‘And you, Sam, I shall see you tomorrow at one o’clock sharp,’ she says, giving nothing away. ‘So much more to talk about.’
Saturday. After a morning of attending more readings and book signings with other writers, Sarah goes off to conduct interviews with the Festival organizers. Before we part for the day, she kisses me and takes my hand.
‘Try, if you can, to ask her about the past,’ Sarah says. I know she understands how difficult it is. ‘Try to put it to rest, for your own sake. If she doesn’t remember you, she doesn’t, but this uncertainty is going to drive you crazy.’
When I arrive at the guest house where Clare is staying, she orders coffee for us and sends Marie into town to buy a book the Australian writer recommended last night. ‘One of his own,’ Clare explains, rolling her eyes. ‘I told him I was troubled by the Orientalism I detected in his last novel. He retorted by pointing out that all the black characters in Absolution are maids or gardeners, and said I should read his previous book, because it would make sense of the one that disturbed me, although they are not sequels “in any obvious sense”, according to him. I call that impudence.’
A young woman arrives with the coffee and Clare asks me to pour. The table is so low I have to kneel.
‘It’s been a long time since I’ve had a man down on his knee before me.’
At times it feels like she must have a secret twin, and the two of them trade off, taking over the role of Clare Wald for as long as one can stand it, and then passing the part on to the other, one playing Clare as a brittle authoritarian, the other as a solicitous and gossipy flirt.
‘When we last met,’ I begin, taking out my notebook and audio recorder, ‘we were talking about your work as an advisory reader for the censors.’
‘Yes, what I suspect you regard as my complicity in the workings of a brutally unjust and philistine regime. That was the idea, was it not, behind your little coup de théâtre: the presentation of my censor’s report?’
‘I have to admit, when I first saw the report on Cape Town Nights I thought I had found something extraordinary, because it seemed to run counter to every belief you’ve ever espoused publicly. But the idea that you worked to censor one of your own books — I still don’t know what to make of it,’ I say, thinking all the while of what is really on my mind. Sarah is right. I drive myself mad with hesitation, my inability to be direct and say what I actually think. But the fear of causing offence is so great that it cancels out every other intention.
‘Does it make me less interesting to you?’
‘Not at all. If you had acted to silence another writer, someone you did or didn’t know, then that could have been explained away as necessary if regrettable pragmatism — you feeling forced to do what you did not wish to do. Or even as a momentary lapse, a kind of madness. But to think of all the effort required to produce a text that you knew would in all likelihood be banned, and then to be faced with recommending the banning of your own work, that’s—’
‘Another kind of madness,’ she says, arranging a pillow behind her back and propping herself in the corner of the couch. ‘To be honest, I had no guarantee that the book I wrote as Charles Holz would be sent to me for review. It was, in that case, pure chance, but then pure chance is responsible for many of the most peculiar weirdnesses of history. Poor Charles — I conjured him only as a sacrifice. He was as much a character as all my others, but the fiction of his being was only apparent to me, and was in many ways my most successful creation, until you came along. He has his own bureaucratic life. You can find the entry for the banning of his book in the Government Gazette. His name even appears in a handful of history books and critical studies. One academic has gone so far as to dig up a stray copy of the novel — even banned books found a home in university libraries, as curiosities safe only for academic study — and mentioned it in passing in a larger survey of censored books under the apartheid regime. It makes for entertaining reading, although only, I’m certain, to me. Anyone else could not be very interested in the book. Described as it is — a tale of interracial romance and violence, blasphemy against all three Abrahamic religions, a celebration of Communism, and a sensationalist account of the workings of the ANC and MK — it has only very limited appeal these days. When I embarked on this project of yours it never occurred to me that Charles and his Cape Town Nights would even come up. I thought it was all buried, truly. Now I am toying with the idea of republishing it. I have the manuscript, of course, and a copy of the first — the only — edition. Who, I wonder, sent you the report? As far as I knew, I was the only one who still had a copy of it.’
‘I haven’t found out.’
‘Nor shall we, I suspect,’ Clare says, looking preoccupied. ‘I suppose I could have denied knowing who Charles was or where he might be, but there seemed no point in lying to you. You, I think, would have dug up the truth no matter what I might have said.’