– 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. -
Was he a poor family-man, that what she meant. But the three words dropped away. What had emanated from him, isolated as a threat to others, means that the usual standards, rewards and punishments should not be applicable, so soon, to him. She read out from a letter she'd had a mishap related humorously, exasperation become a good story, from his father. A car the usually trusty Norwegian had hired suddenly began to behave like one of the volcanoes, smoking wildly, and the guide and her charge had to leave it burning itself out while they spent a night sitting up in the single-room adobe house of Indians with whom even the Norwegian linguist couldn't communicate. Not to worry, help came in the form of a passing bus next morning. He was sensibly staying on in the country a few days longer than the date he was expected home because the incident had wrecked not only the car but the trip to a site he most wanted of all to see, and who knows when he'd ever get the chance again. There followed a description of what he sought, was dug up there, which Lyndsay handed over to be read by Paul himself. – Sounds wonderful. I know the feeling, when we're out in the bundu and can't get to where we should be. -
The letter was warmth between them. She spoke of the third who belonged in it. – Really finding himself. I can see us having to pay a return visit. -
Three days before the date of his delayed arrival – she had saved and stacked in his retreat newspapers and journals of particular interest that he'd missed – she came with another letter. Paul was at home with Nickie, his opponent in some electronic game. After a few minutes as spectator she oddly asked her son if she could be alone with him. She spoke as if she could not believe what she heard herself saying. But the strangeness couldn't be questioned; an emanation, this time from her. He bribed the child to go to the care of the nanny (politically-correct: child-minder). The boy loved the woman, a cousin supplied by Primrose, and, without being aware of it, was learning to speak Setswana with her; a new generation that might produce white multi-linguists, if not quite up to the level of Thapelo. The father grinned with pleasure, each time, to hear the little boy's few words.
Paul first stood a moment in front of his mother; then sat down not beside her, but in a chair, not far apart.
If anybody could have understood, it should have been she.
But when she unfolded the flimsy pages of handwriting as definitive as the features of the – Adrian's – face familiar to her as her own encountered in a mirror – ready for another account of the pleasures of his ancient discoveries, she did not understand what she was reading. She actually moved away the hand that was holding the letter, a moment, and then read again the first paragraphs. He wanted to be direct and honest with her, as he'd always been. Anything else would not be worth the value of their life together. Long life, including the indescribable recent experience in the house with their son. Long throughout her so deservedly successful career, his pride in it that would never change, and long through his working years to his retirement.
He found himself in love with the Norwegian girl. Woman really, she was nearly thirty-five. 'I am sixty-five. I had never imagined this could happen, not alone to me but to anyone this age, I'm a grandfather, for God's sake, I know, my working life is over. How can this begin again. I know you won't be able to believe it. I can't. But darling Lyn, it is. It's happened to Hilde and me. Thirty years between us. She was divorced from an Argentinian living in Mexico some years back, she's never had a child. And now she loves an old man who is somebody else's husband. I can't tell you how awful she feels about you, she liked you so much, we all got on well. So nobody wanted this to happen but it has, it has.
'We've suddenly been having what should be, I suppose, an affair. Holiday affair. I know, I know, old man's last fling. It seems I don't have flings; I fell in love with you and that was all I needed. For a lifetime as one has a life's work. Now I love this woman and can't deny it.
'What will happen I don't know. Although that's not the truth, I do know that I'm going to stay here in Mexico, with her, for the present.
'What's going to happen to us – you'll be asking as you read. I don't know. Only that I can't go on living in this state, behind your back, out of sight in Mexico. Of all places. It's had to happen in Mexico, where I've been able to follow the dream of anyone interested in archaeology to get to sites you've only read about. Through my bringing up the names of old aficionados, amateurs I've known, and some of the great discoverers like Tobias; and others, Wadley, Parkington and young Poggenpoel. I've even been able to spend a day sifting the dust on a current dig. Isn't that enough.
'It isn't. I can't lie.
'I can't say now, when I'll be coming back. To arrange things, whatever that may mean, for us to sit down and talk about this.
'No way to think of, to end the letter, for you.'
Just the signature, Adrian.
I thought you were going to tell me you were leaving.
He doesn't mention what else happened, what took away four years of the lifetime of loving me. He's not forgotten, ageing can't be as kind as that, he's wanting to make clear there is no claim of justification, never mind revenge, in what he's doing. Not true, for him or me or anyone, that this 'happens'; there is readiness for it and will, in entering it, the state, even though it is alienation while it is fulfilment. It doesn't 'happen' the way what happened to our son did. You have to have known disaster to know the difference.