‘Since it’s a nice day, I was hoping we might go for a walk,’ she says, stepping down into the gravelled parking area at the front and taking my hand as if I were a beau picking her up for a date. ‘What we need to say is not for note-taking and audio recording. Do you agree?’
‘Yes. Today is not for the book.’
We head west, back into town past the university. Clare moves with surprising agility and at times I struggle to keep pace. At Ryneveld we turn south, as I did yesterday, and Clare pauses in a café for a coffee and pastry. ‘I am learning to indulge myself,’ she says. ‘I think indulgence is not such a bad thing at my age. My son says I am too thin and should eat more. He did not stipulate what I should eat.’
As we approach the intersection with Dorp Street, standing for a moment outside an old whitewashed house with a single elegant gable over the door, I thank her for the text she gave me yesterday. I don’t know what else to call it, so I refer to it as the letter, her letter to Laura.
‘Letter, yes,’ Clare says, ‘it’s a letter of sorts. More like one half of a diary I’ve been keeping since you arrived last August. Your coming occasioned it.’
‘Of course, Laura must be dead. You say as much in the book, after all.’
‘Logic would say so. No contact, no word, no sign — at least, no natural sign. There is another me, one afflicted by nightmares, who is not so convinced — the me who is suspicious of certainties, who still clings to the hope of mysterious things in heaven and earth. Miracles and resurrections and hauntings. But we are dodging the main point of the letter. Were you not surprised that I remembered you all this time?’
‘In all our meetings you’ve never given any indication that you knew who I was. For ages you acted as though you didn’t even recognize that I was South African. So yes, I was very surprised.’
‘Cruel of me, I know. But then you have played a kind of game as well, keeping your cards hidden, or at least you thought they were hidden. Little did you know that I had dealt the deck.’
‘I can’t help feeling that everything might have been easier if one of us had said something in the first place.’
‘Or it might all have fallen apart. I might have snapped, or you might have taken flight. Listen, I know I am not an easy person to deal with. Truth be told I have cultivated my difficult persona. But then easy is not necessarily good, as any philosopher will tell you. Part of me felt you needed to earn that recognition. And also, there was a significant part that feared what you might do if I admitted to remembering you. I was afraid of your anger.’
Stopping to finish her coffee, she puts the empty cup in a bin with great attentiveness, as though wanting to credit the cup and its disposal with as much significance as our conversation. She brushes crumbs from her fingers and takes my hand as if picking up a small bird. ‘Did you think you got this job on the basis of your intellect alone, on supreme good luck, the quality of your work, and the references of a few scrappy scholars who think themselves gods?’
‘I supposed that I had. I thought it was chance that brought me back to you. And my own talent.’
‘A flattering rationale, but no. I chose you. I commanded your presence. I said to my editor, “If you’re going to insist on this project, for the sake of book sales after my death, then I get to choose my biographer.” And I chose you, which pleased me a great deal more than my editor, who had half a dozen much higher-profile writers just waiting to do the job. Seeing you in Amsterdam was terrifying but also something like a gift. You were the answer to my problem. I knew immediately who you were: the boy at the door.’
‘I never saw so much as a flicker of recognition.’
She raises a hand in modesty. ‘We’re dealing with two matters here. The first matter is the project at hand, the biography. If it serves to create new interest in my work, and prevents it falling out of print when I am dead, then that will make my son happy, no matter how he protests, and it will make my publishers very happy indeed. The second matter is: why you? I chose you not because I respect your work more than anyone else’s. I have read more insightful scholarship, more theoretically sophisticated engagements, and better written ones, too. You’re here because of who you are, because of your place in my family, or the place that I denied you in my family. You’re here also because I hoped you might know something more about my daughter in the days before she disappeared. Let us be honest about that at least.’
I feel my legs begin to wobble as she smiles her child’s smile, pursing her lips. Standing here with her now, I know I can never tell her what I’ve learned from Timothy and Lionel. Whatever she may or may not guess about Laura, to tell her what I now believe to be the truth would, I fear, destroy her. Despite whatever lingering resentment I may feel about the past, the last thing I want to do is hurt her.
‘I have never forgotten you, Sam. How could I? That day, I saw you before you knocked. Lionel, Timothy, and you, all three emerged from a bright little car and stared at my house, consulting a piece of paper, a slip with an address, I presume, then crossed the street and knocked. My husband was at a conference in Johannesburg and I was alone in the house. Suddenly here were these two strange men and a boy on my doorstep, so it was not a good beginning because I was already on guard. Lionel and Timothy introduced themselves and Timothy presented an envelope from my daughter, and her notebooks, and Lionel’s photographs. One of them asked if I had heard from Laura. I said no, and pointed at you, and asked who you were. Timothy spoke. He said, “This boy was with your daughter. It seems she was taking him to his aunt in Beaufort West. But then we were in Beaufort West some days ago and we found Sam on the street, running around like a stray. He says his aunt couldn’t take him in. She did at first, to please your daughter, but as soon as Laura left, his aunt kicked him out onto the street, in a town where he doesn’t know anyone. We just found him in the street.” I asked them where Laura was now and they said they could not tell me because they did not know themselves. Is this the way you remember it?’
‘More or less,’ I say. ‘But you don’t know the whole story. They were making it up. At that point I hadn’t even been to see my aunt.’
‘We’ll come to that. For now, what is important is what I remember of that day. I asked them why they had brought you to me, of all people in the world. Timothy spoke again. He explained that because you were with my daughter, they thought perhaps I might be some relation of yours. “At first,” said Timothy, “we actually thought Sam was Laura’s son, but she told us that wasn’t so. But maybe a cousin, we thought, a nephew or cousin. And since she’d asked us to bring these papers to you when we could, we thought maybe you’d know what to do with Sam.” I looked at you, sternly I think now, and knew that you were no relation of mine. You were not the son of my son, not the child of my cousins or my cousins’ children. You stared so blankly at me, Sam, with those dead eyes that I see even now in moments when your mind is elsewhere, and when you think no one is looking. There were bruises on your gangly arms. Your hair was long, fraying at the ends, and even though it was obvious that you’d just been washed, you looked like someone who had been filthy for a long time before that, like a tramp, or a stray. Dusty and ashen.’
‘Do you remember what you said next?’
‘Yes. And I have regretted it since. It is but one in the long catalogue of my regrets. I said, “I’m sorry, I don’t know this boy. He is not one of my relatives. Do you know me, child?” You shook your head, holding tightly, so tightly to Lionel’s hand. And Timothy asked, as if he couldn’t believe my cold-heartedness, “He isn’t one of your family? You have no obligation?” ’