She prepared herself obediently to speak. A hump under cloth on her back was a baby. A small girl hid against her thick calves. — Friday there by Phambili where we living they come to get my husband. We run away but there’s plenty people running, night-time, and I don’t see where is my two children, the boys children, I was running with the small ones like this— (raised hands towards her back, carrying the weight) — now I don’t see my two children when I’m come to this hospital. Now yesterday I think I must go back to my house and see where is my children, my boys children, but when I come in the veld I see those men again they by my place—
She looked to others, someone, to find words for this sight, an explanation, what to do.
Were they hostel men, did they carry knobkerries, knives, how were they dressed?
The woman pulled the baby’s legs more securely round her waist and took again the long breath of her panic as she fled dragging her children into the veld, how could she be sure what she saw, how could she know anything but the urgency of her flesh and the flesh of her children to get away.
What about you — you get a chance to see who they were, the men who came that night?
The woman with the blanket stood before Mrs Stark on bare planted feet. — Me? You say what you see, your house is burn down or they kill you. Better I see nothing. — A fly was creeping round her cheek under the eye. Too much had happened for her to notice so small a predator treating her as if she were already a corpse.
And the letter. Lying at the bottom of the sling bag under the notes, under the sign of spilt brains and carriage lamp and the people staring for salvation, becoming dark clusters and clumps along a wall as she walked away from them.
When she got home — it was too late to go back to the Foundation — she came upon the letter. She was alone in the house that was hers as the bounty of divorce, in an order of life that could take for granted rights and their material assurances — her normality. It’s always been her house; Ben moved in with her, first as lover, then husband. It contains tables, lamps, posters and framed photographs, worn path on a carpet, bed — silent witness to that normality.
She leant against the windowsill, where there was still sunset light. The handwritten address directed to the Foundation was itself part of the text waiting to be read. Why does he tell me and not his father?
Why did he know — think — she would understand better? The envelope written in the well-rounded upright script she had seen form from his kindergarten alphabet, sent to a clandestine address like a love letter; a claim to share a secret that should not have turned up again at the bottom of a bag of notes. He cannot possibly know what she does not know herself: whether he is the son of love-making on the floor (in this very room where the letter is in her hand) one last time with the returned soldier, or whether he is the son of his mother’s lover, Bennet.
He does know. Somehow he does know. She has an irrational certainty. It was always there, can’t be denied; he doesn’t only look like her, in the genes that formed him is the knowledge of his conception. If she has never known who fathered him, he does. The first cells of his existence encoded the information: he is the child of the childless first marriage, conceived after it was over on this bedroom floor in an hour that should be forgotten. The information was always there: when she and Ben took him into their bed for a cuddle, as a tiny child, and in the inner-focussed emergence from sleep his gaze would be fixed on her eyes; when, a grown man, a banker, he danced with her, each holding the other in their secrecy.
You might have been aware, I think you were aware the last time you were in London that things were not going too well. Alice made me promise we’d keep up the appearance and I gave in — mistakenly, I believe, but when you’re what’s known as the guilty party (that’s my designation with the lawyers …) you try to make small concessions in order not to seem too much of a bastard. I should have known better, not so? Alice was plotting, poor thing, I suppose, every kind of delaying tactic she could think of. I sometimes wish you could be here now to tell her what people like you and I accept, that if you didn’t exactly tell Annie and me, we somehow learned from you about emotions — you can’t fake love. If it’s gone it’s gone. She wants me to stay with her, she says she doesn’t ask me to love her. She’s grown to be the kind of woman who’s content to be used like a prostitute, I should go on sleeping with her for god knows what — hygienic reasons, what she thinks of as the sexual needs of men that have nothing to do with love. She doesn’t understand for a moment that the idea fills me with disgust. I don’t want a vessel for my sex. Vera, I’ve outgrown her, she’s the little girl I took to school dances. For a long time I’ve had nothing I could discuss with her, not my work, not what’s in the newspapers, not my ideas about life. If it’s not concerning Adam, his earache, his school marks, whether he needs a new tennis racket, there’s nothing. I can’t live like that and I’m not going to be party to her weak choice to do so.
I have another woman. Have had, of course, for a long time. She hasn’t pressed me into divorcing Alice, I can tell you that. She’s not the type to go in for emotional blackmail. She’s a Hungarian redhead, if you want to know what she looks like (!), half-Jewish, and she’s very bright, an investment banker. There’s no messy tangle on her side, her husband died at thirty-nine five years ago, a brain tumour. No children. I don’t know whether to contest Alice over Adam. He’s almost grown up. She’s got a strong case for custody, but doesn’t an adolescent boy need a father, more? Difficult for me to judge, because I had both. All the old clichés of what’s best for him etc. Sometimes I just want to get out, I’d agree to anything. Other times, I feel bad about the boy. This is beginning to sound like one of the soap operas Alice watches on tele and quickly switches off when I come in, to pretend she doesn’t. No doubt every divorce is a soap opera. And you get addicted to your own soap opera, never mind the important things that are happening in the world. I’ve just come back from Moscow, the refinancing of part of the arms industry to make vehicle components, the swords into ploughshares operation. But it’s so much more profitable to sell arms, and they need money, no financial aid consortium can give them what can be earned by selling to the Middle East. I’m enclosing a photograph. We’re at some dinner in Budapest a few months ago. She’s the redhead next to the fat man standing up making a speech.
But there was no photograph. He must have thought better of it; had the instinct that a photograph, a face ringed, is no way to announce a betrayal.
When she heard Ben come in, his relaxed home-coming sigh as he paused in the passage at the bookshelf where the day’s mail was always left, her concourse alone with Ivan’s letter sank away; the reason why Ivan didn’t write to Ben was because Ben is his father, of course, must be; he knows how deeply Ben loves him, and doesn’t want to upset him with the sudden evidence of any unhappiness or instability in his son’s life.
Vera threw away the envelope.
Chapter 7
Who are the faces arranged in a collage round the great man himself? The posters are curling at the corners and some have faded strips where sunlight from a window has barred them day after day, month after month. Crowds who dance their manifesto in the streets are too young to recognize anyone who dates from the era before exile unless he is one of the two or three about whom songs were sung and whose images were kept alive on T-shirts. Didymus went about mostly unrecognized; disguised, now, as himself.