– I'm afraid of bats. – She was flirtatious on wine although she had no desire to attract men.
Australopithecus, distant relative: told of that in childhood by his father. Paranthropus, not ancestral to the living people gathered on this Saturday, but an evolutionary adaptation (remembered it like a litany) that lasted in Africa for a million years. And the Pleistocene period relating to the time between the ice age and the beginning of humans; Adrian 's passion, amateur palaeontologist, anthropologist, archaeologist. So knowledgeable, and the son who listened to him became equally dedicated but in another 'field'. Professionally, life-work, not a retirement hobby.
The gathering stayed on until early dark. The sunset was spectacular because of pollution in the air, according to Derek – everyone laughed at him for spoiling the effect, better be ignorant of some phenomena. – Anyway, you can't sell anything any more by using the good old riding-off-into-the-sunset image. Get a life! – Benni spoke up happily derisively for her colleagues. This venture went well. Nickie became quite wild, little king who had found companions. When the friends left, she and Paul cleaned up together. She watched him for signs of fatigue she thought, not because any doctor had suggested it, would question his recovery, his return. But he looked fine; in bed she smelled in his hair the homely smoke of the feast he'd duly tended.
Was it Berenice or Benni who proposed it.
The two personae were more and more mingled in the life they lived now. It was certainly after the several months following that Saturday, months during which there were the same kind of easy invitations in response to her trial one; she was asked by her Agency colleagues to bring along those nice bushmates of Paul, Thapelo and Derek whatsisname, with their kids, and Thapelo and his wife Thandike in return included the copywriter (who was this time accompanied by her woman), the photographer and his American girlfriend, to celebrate a birthday in Thapelo's family.
Let's have a baby.
Another child. She did not tell him it was even a career decision; she was prepared to lose some of her energy, her drive towards success after success, to give her body over to the disadvantages of distortion and accept the distracting, absorbing emotions of loving care for an infant.
– It's right for Nickie. An only child – that's lonely. -
God knows, he must have had enough experience of loneliness, those days weeks that have to be forgotten, made up for somehow (how was she to decide), to understand loneliness although there was no comparison in kind… childhood is another state.
He said nothing, met her eyes for slow moments; the hold twitched away and his head stirred in what could be a questioning or assent.
Anyway. – I'm not using – taking anything. – It was up to nature to decide.
Berenice had no doubt of her fecundity. Most of her sexual life had been focused on avoiding it. But months went by and there was no conception. Blood every twenty-eight days. Was she prematurely ageing – at thirty-two, ridiculous. She had announced to her close colleagues that they'd have to find a temporary executive-level replacement at her desk, her computer, her conference telephone, for some months soon, she and her man had decided to have a second child. Now she confided it didn't seem to be happening. She took their experienced advice. It's nothing a gynaecologist can't prescribe for. The tests for fertility showed normal ovulation. On the prescription of the gynaecologist she instructed Paul and herself in what she called 'acrobatics', and intense frequency of lovemaking during fertile periods indicated by a rise in temperature she was to measure in her vagina. Strangely – unexpectedly in a male who had recently survived terminality – this vigorous frequent call on his sexual potency did not seem to affect him. When she alerted him in the wilderness over the radio contact (mobiles do not work too remotely from any power source) that the fertile period was warm in her, he came home to serve, and then to return to his wilderness.
There was still no conception. She consulted the gynaecologist again.
You ovulate all right, that's established. Your husband should have a sperm count.
Paul is to make an appointment with his doctor.
When is it?
He has not made an appointment.
Shall I give a call?
No, I'll do it.
He doesn't. Berenice/Benni stops asking.
Cannot.
Cannot submit himself, this self, to more tests, more procedures invading, monitoring his body. It performs, the penis is eveready, at hand, when he wakes in the morning, it gives and takes excitement when called upon, so frequently, to enter and empty itself to her in spurts of pleasure. Without reason, without any means of knowing by all the tests a laboratory trusts, without knowing if there could be any such reason, he half-believes the roving cells perhaps have not given up, the radiance that pursued to kill them keeps a pilot light somewhere low within him. His sperm may carry this. What kind of child could come of it.
He cannot trust his body. It remains the stranger that was made of it.
After some months of the good enough quality of the ordinary life that is valued only when it has been destroyed and then in some effort put together again – she has been made deputy director of the advertising agency, he has completed his on-location report on the Okavango for his team to place before the Minister of Environmental Affairs and release to the press – she brings up the subject of the second child. Not reproachfully, almost with a kind of hesitant tenderness?
– If you want another child you'll have to find another man. -
iv / Get a Life
Lyndsay didn't expect to be met at the airport. Paul was in Pretoria that day with a delegation of the World Conservation Union to the Minister of Environmental Affairs and it wasn't in any way Benni's obligation, indispensable to her clients as she was – advertising is a very personal transaction. But the mother had dinner with the son and his little family the evening of her arrival and Lyndsay and Paul spent time often, for one mutually-found reason or another, together while Adrian was away. Lunch when Paul found himself at his city offices, a walk with her on a Sunday (his suggestion, unexpectedly thoughtful, he certainly would have more interesting things to do). They carried something unexpressed between them. He didn't go to see her at the old house. She didn't ask him to. They had lived another time, another country, in common rather than actually together; it was not such an intimacy, elsewhere. They both, however, shared a sense of the rightness of Adrian having his chanced archaeological venture, the justice of the recognition of an avocation by the civil rights lawyer and the ecologist who had achieved their vocations. They'd never talked of this, but now that so many situations had come about that should never have been, in the home where he had been a child, she was able to reflect to him, with some questioning acceptance, how his father, her man, had given up the intention to be an archaeologist – at least until a time that never came. To dig into the prehistoric past didn't look likely to provide for the home-and-family contracted in marriage.
– Even though you were a working woman, a lawyer? Able to contribute? Must have been some other reason, in my father, that he couldn't – didn't want -
– I was a struggling beginner! A junior way down on the legal profession ladder, earning a clerk's salary. Not everyone wants as single-mindedly, absolutely as you do, has – what is it – all right, a calling that's significant of general survival and comes first, to be followed before everything, everyone, all else. Hardly anybody has the luck. – She looked away for a moment as if something had been forgotten. Smiled. – Or the loss. -