Her own motives were suspect to her. Then they were of no concern, she and this stranger with a vividly distinct self, stranger no more, had a life in common. A nursery school accepted her, dropped off there every morning by Lyndsay on the way to Chambers, and Primrose kept her fluent in a mother tongue in the afternoons. Lyndsay did mention to a colleague that she was taking care of someone's black child; it was not the sort of temporary situation without precedent in the individual social conscience of their legal practice – at least had not been during the apartheid years when clients defended on charges of treason sometimes had no choice but to leave a child abandoned. There was a good chance, said the paediatrician Lyndsay took the child to, that her HIV-positive status would correct itself shortly; the blood count was encouragingly mounting. This reprieve could happen only in children. So there was an interim decision; don't look further than that. She wrote one of the spaced letters she and Adrian exchanged, like the form letters to aunts etc. taught to phrase, at school, where she told that Paul was in a helicopter monitoring the terrible floods in the Okavango, and related the progress of Nicholas swimming over-arm instead of dog-paddling, beginning to count up to twenty-five, recognise words in story-books. (Relating to herself; Klara, able already to string red and white beads alternately on a cord, has to be stopped from attempting to climb the jacaranda in the garden, insists on mastering the use of a fork at the age of about two-and-a-half or three.)
Enquiries, to someone who dealt with these things, about the processes of adoption are routine in informing oneself how the child might better be offered to someone where she could grow up in the company of siblings, a father and mother. There was no point she would really remember when instead she had become the adoption applicant, informing herself. The process is not simple, even in the case of a child of unknown parentage, abandoned no-one knows by whom. But it was the time to inform her son and his family.
Should Paul's mother be invited to bring along the child when she came to his house; where Nickie was? Lyndsay, that awesome lawyer rationalist (Berenice's one of the impoverishers of their mother tongue who make the epithet as devoid of religious force as 'fuck' is devoid of force to shock), not only decides at her age and in her situation to adopt a small child but must have one who is infected with the Disease. Does anyone honestly know whether or not it can be transmitted ways other than sexually or by blood? If by blood, what happens when two children play together and there are scratches, blood exchanged. Nickie's a boy, quite rough, if still small. Benni/Berenice – everything must be taken into consideration – decides to put a hold on such visits, tactfully, until Paul is home. She knows Lyndsay well enough, in the shift the plight of Adrian has somehow brought about, to think Lyndsay will understand, not comment upon to Paul.
– The child's accepted at a nursery school. – Paul's like his mother, depends on evidence, whether it's a conservation back-of-beyond or their private lives in question.
– Not all nursery schools. Wasn't there even a case – a woman went to court when a kid was refused. The nursery school pointed out that very young children bite when they get in a temper. -
– The child's how old? -
– It's not sure, about three. I suppose they tell by the teeth and not all come out at the same rate. Nickie's were early. -
Benni was not particularly surprised, not confused as he was, he saw, when his mother came out with it just before he went to the drowned Okavango that now was the scene in unobliterated vision, present after-image in his awareness. He could not place, with Lyndsay, this action. She had never been particularly fond of children, it seemed, kept a kind of privacy even between herself and the four she bore (had it been Adrian who wanted a family, and now left them to her) and she didn't drool and coo over her grandchildren although she and Nickie were rather companionable, he loved this special friend.
Benni appeared rather to be amused by his discomfiture. The wilderness is an innocent environment whatever else he exposes there; he doesn't know what goes on in the real world. Doesn't know it's become quite trendy to adopt a black child, or an orphan from, say, Sarajevo or India. She could tell him it proves something. But in Lyndsay's instance, she can't hazard what.
She sees he won't oppose – whatever Lyndsay decides, he is convinced is all right. For Nicholas: he doesn't decide, for Nicholas. She should, she wants – fuck him if he doesn't put his child first, above all the orphans in the world – to turn on him angrily but she does not. In this life put together since the time he went home again, out of touch, there is still, underneath, something between him and the woman who is his mother that shuts out everyone. He's here in the bedroom but the lines are down.
Whatever it is she wanted to prove by adopting in old age, and on her own, a child who might die and whose physical possibilities of growing up with the birthright of a female, clitoris, labia, and vagina, must be damaged however clever the surgery was, his mother's choice isn't an easy one. This bright and beguiling little girl is self-willed in excess of her size and approximate age, manipulative, a show-off in the spotlight of demanded attention and the next half-hour gloweringly withdrawn. – Just plain naughty. – The foster-mother/grandmother laughs even when exasperated.
Who knows if the virus covertly hunts this child down as rogue cells may still be holed up somewhere along his bloodstream. His mother is an old hand at interpreting prognosis, monitoring it coming about either in its negative or positive proof, back in the quarantine, his. And as then, she somehow establishes, creates ordinariness in this other unwelcome metamorphosis of a family – Adrian missing, some other being added – out of uncertainty, the unresolved. Which surely you've learnt by example of ecological solutions, is a condition of existence? No? Is she compensating for lack loss of him, Adrian – is he coming back? Is she punishing Adrian by showing she makes bolder choices than his, going all the way to the exhibition (no less) of extreme moral choice, taking on some child not orphaned but even worse, abandoned, and still further from human to inhuman act, a victim raped, disease-infected, while in the state of total innocence. Is his mother showing off; as the showing-off, the rages, the defiance of the flirtatious round-eyed, soft-mouthed near-baby is a punishment of whoever conceived her, abandoned her, thrust and tore open her body, planted a virus there.
Lyndsay takes Nickie and Klara to the zoo. Klara demands, The sa-el, the sa-el, and Lyndsay corrects her. The two children raise a chant: The see-al, the see-al! Other visitors smile at the little scene, assuaging pleasantly their guilt of the past when the zoo was closed to blacks except on one day a week and black and white children did not chant together.