Now she hears from a friend that he wants to marry her. Only yesterday, in the course of a phone conversation with a woman for whom a call is a confession of her own intimate decisions and a preoccupation with those of others. The man 'is in love with her'. At his age, more than sixty-five, when it does, can happen. They have not gone to bed.
She picks up Klara, this circumstance of hers, happened, chosen, to distract the child, pointing out a big black bird balanced there on the rock.
Marry her. Do you become a virgin again, to an ageing man? That's why first there's a rumour as a preparation for the unexpected passionate kiss in place of the civilised goodnight peck between new friends, which she tolerated, come on – half-enjoyed – put down to the bottle of good wine finished over dinner. For him, not to be attributed to wine but as a show of confidence in his ability – still – as a lover. The idea of marriage a kind of delicacy, a prelude, because they are not young, to becoming lovers.
Klara struggles, she is not interested in something you can't grab for, far away.
The water is so loud you could almost shout against it without being heard. Not here in the nature conservation park or in Stavanger.
Middle-age folly – how old, in my forties. But our time after, and the last time whenever it was. Adrian.
The last man inside me.
Mate for life.
Klara slides free down that body.
His mother rejoined Paul who was reading out to his wife further information he had found in an array of pamphlets on a bench. Only two eggs, that's the entire clutch. It'll happen next month, June. The first egg laid hatches and is followed about a week later by a second. The two chicks, known as Cain and Abel. The first-born, Cain, has already grown when Abel comes out of his shell. Cain and Abel fight and generally Abel is killed by Cain and thrown from the nest. The survivor is fed by both parents until around December when it's able to fly… five years to reach adulthood and black plumage… time for the eagle to find its own mate and territory.
Cain and Abel. But what if one chick's a female – suppose you can't call one of these birds a hen.
Benni/Berenice is right. Lyndsay offers – She also gets kicked out, I suppose, it's a way of keeping the balance of nature, Paul? Neither too many nor too few males and females for breeding. But it's horrible. -
Leaning on the balustrade of rough steps hewn into the cliff, the language of the pamphlet in hand fails to represent the being of the withdrawn black entity on the bed of dead wood and the other disappearing off into the sky and returning in the guise of a menace or as deliverance of omniscience, as the surveyors' plans and the reports he writes fail to represent the Okavango or the Pondoland dunes. Oh this is not the smallness of man stuff, against nature. Romanticising what's too heavy to handle. Cain and Abel. The old Bible provides an object lesson here in the non-human, the creatures who according to evolutionary hierarchy go back too far to have developed a morality.
Except that of survival.
If you thrust a toll highway through the centre of endemism, the great botanical marvel, n'swebu, and you gouge ten million tons of heavy minerals and eight million tons of ilmenite from the sea-sculpted landscape of sand dunes, isn't that the morality of survival. Isn't that to industrialise? And isn't industrialisation, exploitation (it's termed that only in its positive meaning) of our rich resources, for the development of the economy, the uplift of the poor. What is survival if not the end of poverty. It's been pledged at the third inauguration of democratic government: the end of poverty. And if Abel has to be thrown from the nest by Cain; isn't that for a greater survival. The eagle allows this to happen, its all-powerful wings cannot prevail against it. Survival. Ten dams for one delta seen from Space. Civilisation goes against nature, that's the credo for what I do, I am. Protect. Preserve. But is that the law of survival. You preserve, Chief, and you're the one who trusts nature? Co-existence in nature is limited brutally – Cain throws Abel out of the nest – among creatures of which we're an animal species. Knowledge come in the quarantine of the childhood garden that perhaps whatever civilisation does to destroy nature, nature will find its solution in a measure of time we don't have (the pamphlet informs that this area was a sea, uncountable time before the rocks were pushed upward), that knowledge doesn't go far enough. A cop-out. Civilisation as you see it in your opposition of nature to the Australians' mining, the ten dams in the Okavango – it's child's play, a fantasy, when you admit the pragmatism in nature. No use returning to the photograph reproduced of the piece of fluff, morsel of life that is Abel, and looking for a solution.
The family outing is over. Monday the four-wheel drive back to the wilderness with Derek, Thapelo, according to the week's plan of research to which there is never a final solution, ever. That's the condition on which the work goes on, will go on. Phambili.
Benni was approaching, in her face the questioning brightness of one who has been wondering where he's got to. Berenice's had enough of nature, then, is coming to suggest they go home.
But when up the rock she reaches him, she says nothing. Their attention is attracted by an intense shadow above the trees whose lighter shade and sunlight break up the solid outlines of his face and body and hers. The grand stunt of the eagles, there, maybe the courting display described in the pamphlet.
The eagles have lifted away to their higher altitudes. The branches obscure viewing.
She has taken a step down, from him, backwards.
– Paul -
A signal for him to follow; he hands her the pamphlet, souvenir.
– I'm pregnant. Another child. -
– How did that happen. -
She shakes her head tenderly, in guilt. It's not because she tried another man, the cruelty he sees, of that solution. – I didn't tell you, but I haven't been taking any precaution. -
– So. For how long. – If the roving cells had continued to survive in his body, they could have disappeared by now, the pilot light of deadly radiance that he believed pursued them, could have gone out.
– Only the last two months. -
– So. What do you want to do. -
– Want to tell you. -
'So': it means there is an alternative he wants, abortion.
If Berenice would crumple into tears, effective in TV imagist resolution of confrontation, Benni waited steadily, only her hands came up, the fingers interlaced and her chin rested on this fist of – supplication, defiance.
He did not jump down to embrace her he stretched out his hand the palm wide the fingers spaced and curved and her hand came from support of her face to meet his grasp as if she were to be pulled from a foundering boat or a landfall.
Not an epiphany, life moves more slowly and inexorably than any belief in that. Except there's the question of why she chose that moment and place to announce herself. Well. Did she think, was she given courage (what a bastard to have said, Get yourself another man), the telling of the abortion of Abel from the nest made time and place propitiate, for the right perception.