None to Accompany Me

She was moved, and blurted with awkward flippancy — Well why not, there are many who have done so for other reasons.—

He had come to the city because there was to be a further meeting with a provincial official over application to have the land purchased from Odendaal declared a site-and-service settlement for the people known as the Odensville squatters. The Chief was expected to accompany Vera and Zeph Rapulana to Pretoria; apparently he had stayed over the weekend with friends not known to Rapulana, since their arrival in the city together. As Vera and Zeph walked into the Foundation’s lobby, he entered with an attendant a few steps behind him. He was the son of the first of his father’s wives, a young man who held his head tilted back so that he looked down with half-closed eyes at those who greeted him. The hand, when Vera shook it, was the coldly damp one of someone who has had a drinking night. Zeph Rapulana in all his mature dignity placed his palms together, bowed with knees stiff, and pronounced a formal greeting in the terms of traditional obeisance. Yet both knew the Chief would be saying to the official only what Rapulana had coached him to say, only what Rapulana and Mrs Stark of the Legal Foundation had decided upon. Rapulana had said as if to himself — His interests are elsewhere. He wanted to come to Johannesburg and learn to play in a band, but his late father wouldn’t allow it … Perhaps he was wrong.—

Vera stood by, as an unbeliever before any ritual. Zeph was his own man with masters and slaves, yet he knew how to dissemble; but whether it was to the Chief or whether to show that he himself, his own man, was definitively a black man, her observation of him did not easily reveal. At the same time, she was beginning to have an inkling that her sense of connection with this man was that she had something to learn from him, as all unbelievers secretly hope to appropriate a value without adopting a faith.

Their daughter is back sleeping, breathing in the house as she did when she was a child.

Ben turns off the light above the bed where he and her mother lie.

— I still hope she’ll fall in love one day.—

— She is in love.—

We can’t talk now.

He didn’t have a name any more. They spoke of him as the old man; he had had a second stroke and lost the power of speech. He was incontinent and Vera had the impression that the whole house smelled like the primates’ cage at a zoo, although Thandeka’s care was supplemented by a trained nurse brought in on night duty. Ben saw Vera’s nostrils pinching and felt anxious for her — this was his father, after all. It was as if he himself were in danger of becoming repulsive to her. He suggested it would be best to put the old man in a private hospital where he’d be well cared for. It was Annick who objected. — He’s quite adequately cared for here, there’s nothing more to be done: it’s a massive stroke.—

— So it doesn’t make any difference where he is, Annie. And this house really isn’t geared to hold nurses and all the paraphernalia — it’s just distressing for everyone to no purpose.—

But Annick was a doctor, she did not need to remind her father. She had taken over from him the necessary contact with the old man’s doctor, since colleagues can be more open with one another, even if they may be mistaken in their perceptions, as the doctor was when he told Annie he did not want to cause pain to her father by telling him that this stroke was terminal and the sooner life ended the better. — It does make every difference. He may not be able to move or speak to you, but he’s not unconscious. He knows where he is. He knows he’s at home.—

— Hardly that. He had to give up his own place, as you know. He’s been with us only a few months.—

Annick opened her clear-lipped mouth and touched the tip of her tongue to her teeth, his mannerism inherited along with his beauty; so often, in her presence, it seemed that nature was mocking him in his own image, a reluctant Narcissus. She spoke gently. — Home where you are, Dad.—

She came out to the stoep-study and hitched her hip onto the table where Vera was doing some weekend work for the Foundation. — Would it be better for you if Lou and I cut short our stay. Don’t be worried about saying so.—

— My god Annie, no. It’s better for us that you’re here.—

— But we’re occupying the second bathroom … —

— It doesn’t matter. You know how to see that the nurse and Thandeka are doing what they ought to.—

— Lou would like to take over the cooking, you know. She’s damn good, at our place she does it all, I don’t have to boil an egg.—

— Is that a fair division of labour — you both work. — Vera did not lift her head from her papers.

Her daughter’s gaze drifted relaxedly out of the window for a moment, where the sheen of a hadeda’s back took on peacock colours as it dug its beak-probe into the grass. — What about you and Ben? I remember when we were kids, he did most of the fetching and carrying to school and so on. — She smiled, for admittance. — Hasn’t he always indulged you — quite in awe of your career, you’re his priority, and yours … well you’ve always been available to so many other people. Is there ever a really fair division of labour, as you call it, between couples?—

The sense of approaching some move that would change what they were, what they had been since Vera had wept with the joy of absolution when the girl child was born in the image of Bennet, grew between them, a supersonic hum only they could hear. Instinctively — the Foundation papers were under her hand — Vera took on the impersonal openness of her professional manner: Mrs Stark spoke.

— Ben can’t believe you are a couple. He refuses to see it.—

— You mean, accept it?—

— But also to see. He doesn’t interpret what he sees.—

Annie wriggled her way more comfortably onto the table, pushing papers aside. — What does he think he sees.—

— Well, when I told him you were sleeping in one bed, that it’s your choice, he took it as a sign of some sort of immaturity. He said why not a teddy-bear.—

Annie laughed. Clients often laughed when they were about to defend themselves from some real or imagined accusation. — But you have gay friends, you and Dad, there were gays at the party. Some of your Foundation people.—

— Men. Not his daughter. He just can’t believe it. He was matchmaking with Lazar, he saw that Lazar was attracted to you — you are beautiful you know, men could be mistaken into thinking … can’t blame them—

Vera had emerged, looking fully at her daughter, and the girl was amazed to see her eyes trembling with tears. To help her, Annie was casual. — Poor Lazar, my guess is he’s a bee that bumbles into any flower. Anyway, he didn’t object to us both going walking with him. I suppose he’d invite a girl to bring her mother along if he thought that would help his pursuit.—

— Perhaps he saw, but he thought it worth taking a chance that there could be a man who’d convert you to men. It’s surely natural, if you’re a man.—

— Their arrogance.—

— Not really. Maybe there’s a chance, always.—

— That’s Ben, not you! That’s what Ben really believes, doesn’t he? You know I’ve had men. I used to bring them home to my room occasionally.—

Somewhere in the house lies an old man who has lost the power: here, it’s time to talk. Vera overcomes the urge to touch her daughter, place a hand on her cheek, trace her features. It’s as if over thirty years she has missed the times to do so, she has always been looking elsewhere, turned away, while the girl grew and changed and moved into another self.

— That’s why I don’t understand. My darling, how can you do without a man?—