If his need of Hannah was terrible — in a magnificent way— then there was no need of anything or anyone else. She knew a lot of poetry — his Shakespeare was a poor stock, compared with hers. She taught him a love-poem he had never heard of, didn't know it was something done to death everyone who had taken a university first-year course in English literature could reel off. It described perfectly those months when Hannah's one room, for them, was 'an everywhere'.
This perfect isolation existed while Sonny and Hannah seemed to themselves to be getting away with the impossible. Its very intensity was granted on the condition that it could not last. Everything outside was ready to rupture it. Circumstance, conscience — there was a rictus of dire fear, to admit it — might take her from him, him from her, any day. But months went by. Their concealment of each other from the world continued to be successful. And now they passed into the second stage of the syndrome that Sonny, never having had the experience before, did not recognize. The fascination in living something totally removed from domestic love with its social dimensions of ordinary shared pleasures among other people gave way to dissatisfaction that they could not do these ordinary things together. For these belonged to Aila, Aila and the children. He could visit friends with Aila, and have her sitting there talking trivialities in the usual corner with the women while he was in a discussion at the other end of the room, a discussion Hannah would have been taking part in, they would have been contributing to together, complementing each other's ideas. He could go to a play (since they had moved to the city he had encouraged his family to take the opportunity to enjoy black theatre) with Aila and his son and daughter but there would not come from them the kind of comment, challenging his own thoughts, he would have had if Hannah had been with him. And there grew in him, in her — he knew it was against all sense and reason— a defiant desire to be seen to belong together. To show each other off. They didn't admit it, but knew it was there, as they knew everything about one another while in their chosen isolation.
Once they were taken by an obstinate, irresistible hankering to see a film together. An ordinary thing like that, which any other couple could do. Instead of spending the afternoon making love, they went across the city to a cinema complex in a suburb where neither knew anyone, a suburb of rich white people who never attended protest meetings or knew, had seen in flesh and blood, anyone who had been a political prisoner. And there, of course — they might have known it. The one encounter they never could have envisaged, something utterly against all probability. They walked out of the dark cinema straight into the afternoon glare and his son. They showed themselves off; to his son.
The instinct was to go to her cottage and hide. Sonny was silent, his eyes concealed from Hannah, as he could do, drawing his thick eyebrows down around their deep darkness. She was afraid. But he did not leave her, he did not say you have destroyed my family. She saw how he had changed; how she had changed him without knowing. They talked of the Italian film and not about the boy. He embraced her passionately before he left her in the early evening and went back to his family; he must already have made up his mind, calmly, how he would deal with his son. He said only: —Don't worry. Not about Will, either.—
And however it was that he managed, it was clear, later, that the boy never said anything — to his mother, to anyone. — He didn't mention it to you?—
— No. It's as if it never happened.—
All Hannah said was: —That can't be.—
The room was not an everywhere because it could not contain the commonplaces of being together, the boring humdrum pleasures, the very state of daily deadened life their relationship escaped and was superior to, the state — of marriage?
From the surety of having everything, they had changed to wanting everything. Even that. They began to make more little excursions outside her bed and the cottage. She had a friend who was an absentee farmer. They went to picnic on the farm.
At the beginning of the drive the freeway took them past the Reef town in whose area for his kind he had grown up, taught school, shopped trailing his children on Saturday mornings… as he turned his head to watch glint past the lake made of pumped water from the mines, the buff yellow slopes of abandoned dumps, he had the tingling feeling of the unaccountable familiarity of a foreign country. She promised him fields of sunflowers because he liked so much the Van Gogh reproduction that was stuck up in her tiny kitchen among the drawings made by black children. But she had mistaken the season. The sunflower fields were a vast company of the dead, with black faces bowed. She swung against him in contrition as they walked through the veld; they laughed and kissed. He got splinters of fibre in his hands as he picked a dead flower for her, a souvenir.
He had such good alibis. Like all lovers, they longed to sleep together for a whole night, nights. Sonny could be absent from home without explanation, and the old restrictions of colour were abolished in most hotels and resorts. So they were free; once they spent two days of this kind of freedom somewhere in the Eastern Transvaal, and even stood among white Sunday families with grannies and squealing children, watching the young hatch on a crocodile farm. After intervals imposed by Sonny's political obligations — and neither he nor she ever neglected their work — and when another kind of absence from home could be justified by these demands, they went away together, even if sometimes only for a night. He had promised her a whole weekend again, and he managed it, not without some embarrassing lying to be done, to his comrades — a pretence, to them as well, that he would be incommunicado because of some contacts to be made about which he couldn't talk. When he left his home on Saturday morning he had, for the first time, instead of euphoria inside him, a surly unease; there was a moment, as his son stood back as he passed him in the passage, when he almost turned and put down that briefcase (briefcase!) and didn't leave. But the moment was forgotten as soon as he left the house. In a rondavel resort among orange blossom near Rustenburg Sonny and Hannah were unspeakably happy. People say one could die for such happiness, but one also could kill for it, kill all other claims on oneself by people who have failed to bring it about. The scent of orange blossom was air itself, night and day, every drawn breath like the manifest emanation of private happiness, the wafting secretion of their one body, joined in love-making.
When Sonny came back on Sunday night he found his daughter had cut her wrists.
That didn't put an end to it. What Baby did that time.
We were sitting in the kitchen, my mother and I — as if we were back in the old place at Benoni — when we heard him come home. We heard the briefcase put down and the creak of his soles, we were so quiet because Baby was asleep down the passage with her bandaged wrists laid outside the sheet. My mother stood up and went to stop him coming into the kitchen where I was. I heard her soft voice telling him — and then suddenly, high — Don't! — as his tread broke out hard and fast along the passage.
He came back slowly, and into the kitchen. He had seen my sister but not wakened her. My mother was sitting there again. I was with her, I had been with her ever since it happened, he had to face me. And I to face him. He wandered to the fridge and poured himself his glass of water. I wanted to laugh and knock it out of his hand. He stood there drinking and his head moved, he was not exactly shaking it, it moved vaguely like the involuntary movement of an old man. But it's no good putting on a performance for me, he was not a poor distraught old father, he was only too strong and healthy, a fucker. What could my father say? If Baby had died on Saturday he wouldn't have been there. Couldn't be reached. He made sure of that. Nobody knew where he was. My mother was the one who saw the blood. And I.