You are telling me you are leaving me.
She had to go to someone, take this second letter to be verified in someone else's eyes, decoded independently. Not information – family news – to give over a call to Emma in Brazil. Or take to Jacqueline in her suburb north of the city, or the resort of boarding a plane and going to Susan. Although none of the adult children knows of the mother who was competent (not like Adrian's honest inability) to lie for four years, the only one she can approach is the one who came back in awful radiance to shelter in the childhood home. The shared knowledge of the unspeakable makes it possible to speak together of what is a banal disruption of intimate life. With this son it can be as if it were not the situation of his parents: a certain objectivity she can count on because of the remove, even from those who risked occupying the same house, at which he lived for a period. It's in her nature as a lawyer, what else is there to place trust in, if not objectivity; truth – that's a matter far beyond. The judge declares it while it exists – escaped.
Yet it will be difficult, full of silences, to talk even to this son while she knows about the four years she lost for herself and his father. So the lie is back in the present. Lying once begun never ends.
She hopes, again, to find him alone. Imagine the embarrassment – or sophisticated lack of it – of Benni. Elderly men fall for women who could be their daughters, every day, maybe (interesting?) it could be repressed incest having a late try. Female sympathy would be forthcoming, you know how men are, while it's always been evident Benni can have no such complaint against hers, handsome and unusual a man as he must seem to other women.
One cannot be sure Benni/Berenice won't be there. She thought of calling. Might gather indirectly whether he was likely to be alone. He was back from one of his research assignments. She had learnt, when she took the couple to try with her a new Indian restaurant the week before, that he was having consultations about how best to take advantage of the extended deadline for objection to the Pondoland toll highway. He responded to her enquiry about how consultations were going and then mentioned he and Nicholas were a couple of bachelors, Benni away launching a wine festival at the Cape.
Could she come round? Of course. What about tomorrow, supper. But he at once acceded when she said couldn't it be today, this evening. He thought he should ask, are you all right – something must be bothering her. I'm all right. They were not two people who needed to or would press further on the tightrope of a telephone wire.
His mother put her palm over her mouth.
He waited for her – apparently to recover herself. It's an ambiguous gesture, it can hide laughter, shock, many conditions incapable of being conveyed. Embarrassment. But she was not embarrassed. Too many simple intimacies brought about by the incapacities of illness had existed between them for either to be embarrassed by anything, since.
– This has come from Adrian. -
He took the letter. Almost to himself, frowning in reproach – He hasn't gone and fallen down in one of his digs… -
She did not allow herself to look at the son's face as he read, slowly turning the two pages, and turning back to the first, as she had, to read again. If she has her habits of careful comprehension as a lawyer, as a student of scientific data in relation to experience on the ground he has his instinctive discipline of reassessing what are presented as the facts.
He could not say to her what was ready on his tongue: I thought he'd broken a leg or something, after all, nearly sixty-six, isn't he, climbing about in excavations. But no doubt, like himself, a young man accustomed to taking chances in difficult terrain, that would have been something she could have expected might catch up with retirement age.
The real circumstance made it impossible for the son to be (what she had counted on) objective; she became primary, there in front of him, his mother, threatened by that other primary, his father. He tried: retreated from the instinct to get up and embrace, make her, let her cry, and asked about the woman. As if his mother could find support in the familiar procedures of the court. Evidence.
– This's the woman you hired to go around with you, the guide you wrote was so excellent, not the usual boring windbag, not intrusive? -
– Yes. She was that. -
Not giving any come-on. To an old man. But he did not ask.
– The Norwegian. -
– The Norwegian. She was tactful, naturally we expected to have meals and so on with her along, but sometimes she would make it clear – some excuse, telephone calls, reminders of a private life somewhere – that she'd understand we'd want to be by ourselves, say, for dinner. -
From the father's, Adrian 's side, what would be the attraction. First, what type of woman, what does she look like. – Is she pretty, beautiful, I mean what is there about… -
– How can I say. I'm a woman. I don't see what a man sees, you might see. Dark-haired, shapely plump but only in the right places, very intelligent. There's something I never understand, she has all the time that smile, the archaic smile that's characteristic of those ancient Greek statues, you know, the young men – what are they called, Khouroi? Adrian and I saw them once in Athens. Or was it a Roman museum. Even when the three of us rested somewhere with our eyes closed against the glare, stretched out on our chairs, whenever I happened to open my eyes there was this smile. Closed eyes, smile. -
– Irritating. -
– No. I thought it rather enviable, really. If I'd had to earn my living taking strangers about repeating the same information and listening to the same comments – what's a new way to say beautiful, disappointing – I don't think I could maintain that smile. And it was discreet. -
– And Adrian? -
– What about Adrian. -
– Did he ever say – anything – about her? -
– You know how he would naturally remark on the beauty of a woman, someone among our friends or yours we'd met. But I don't think he saw her as a beautiful woman. He would have said something… when we talked of what luck it was we'd found a Scandinavian, typically competent and friendly but keeping a distance. -
And now Lyndsay did not smile but gave a burst of breath, cutting herself off.
He still held the letter and began to skim it again, while half-handing it back to her.
Neither of them wanted it; it lay on the low table where the child's game was set out.
– So that's all changed. Just in the time they went off together? The car and the adobe hut. Two weeks? -
– A few days more. I was going to meet him at the airport this coming Saturday, his postponed date to come home. -
– Ma (he reverted to the childhood address, once grown up he and his sisters, most often, called their parents as the parents preferred, by their names)… Ma, what are you thinking of doing. -
She said nothing and neither did he. The lively frolic of an exchange between Nickie and Primrose's cousin sounded from the kitchen.
– I've come to you. -
– But I can't know how you feel. He's my father, that's not the husband, the man, your man. -
– Are you angry with him. – As his mother's son.
– I suppose I am. Of course you are. -
– No, no, not angry. No right to be angry. -
If she had said something that might lead to doubts about his mother's own record, she quickly covered with a succeeding generalisation. – We don't own one another. Men and women don't. – If there's no barnyard hen there's no barnyard rooster.