Every time Vera leaves Ben out — isn’t that simply a different kind of unfaithfulness? Different from leaving him out by making love with someone else, that’s all. And just as after those times of love-making in One-Twenty-One, she ‘makes it up’ to him. Not by repairing the omission of telling him Rapulana instead of Feldman had accompanied her back along that road where she, too, could have met her death and left him to live without her — the trivial omission, as it could have been presented, of one name for another. When Ivan went off to London she asked Ben to come with her to Cape Town, where there were problems for her to solve at the Foundation’s branch office. Ivan was gone; —We can see something of Annie. — If he was lonely, he must be reminded that he had a daughter.
Annie insisted that they stay with Lou and her. Vera and Ben had never been in this common household. It was everything Annie’s parents’ was not. Vera’s house, that Ben had entered to live among the wartime makeshift provided by her first husband’s parents, donated beds and mismatched chairs, was aesthetically unified — if it could be called that — by coffee-stained newspapers and journals where fish-moth scuttled, grotesque woodcuts and figurines bought at charity sales of African art, photographs of the children who once lived there, poster souvenirs of travel, bureaux lacking handles, box files and old utensils that were meant to be thrown away but might come in useful. From this collage of hazard Annie had taken what had been consciously created within the house, the female torsos Ben had sculpted years ago. They were encountered in a Victorian house balanced on a steep street, one at the archway into the livingroom and the other at the centre of a small patio created by knocking down a wall, Lou explained. Old Cape furniture with the patina of acorns smelled of beeswax. There was a single huge abstract painting that suggested the sea. Flowers filled the fireplaces and plants trailed in the remodelled bathrooms. The kitchen was ranged like a surgery with glass-fronted and steel-topped equipment. Indolent cats slept, hetaerae on a velvet chaise-longue, in the room Ben and Vera were allotted. Whisky in a cut-crystal decanter and ice in an Italian-designed insulated bucket; bedside books, Thomas Bowler views of the nineteenth-century Cape, and a collection of poetry by black women writers. The Bowler, presumably, was a guess at what Ben would appreciate, and the other, for Vera, chosen by Lou on the principle that the lives of blacks were Vera’s particular province and that women ought to be, if they weren’t.
Ben was alarmed to notice that Vera limped slightly going to bed up the narrow staircase with its perfectly restored brass stair-rods. — You were all right at home, what’s gone wrong—
— There aren’t any stairs at home, are there!—
Annie was called to examine her mother’s leg while he stood by ignoring dismissal of his alarm, his frown turned away to ward off the example of the young man who had been with her on the road and died of injuries from which, like her, he was supposed to be recovered. — There’s probably some slight shortening in the tendons, really nothing. It’s inevitable, Daddy, the human body replaces, repairs, and in some instances it can adapt one function to substitute for another, but nothing’s ever quite the way it was.—
— I’m not even aware of it, I told you, Ben. Thank god I’m not a ballet dancer and I’m too old to enter a beautiful-legs contest, eh. I haven’t worn anything but trousers for years— nobody sees those scars.—
In the bedroom, naked, she smiled at him as he lay in the bed. — Nobody but you. — Nakedness in men and women who have lived together a long time is clothed by familiarity, a garment of self. Now she presented her body before him as nude again, consciously so. If that body was damaged by births and time, so that vanity would save her from presenting it before anyone else, for him (there’s the advantage) it took the beautiful form of its known capacities, the flesh remembered everything between them. Vera seduced Ben again, for all that she withheld from him, she flung herself into his embrace, took the force of his entry into her body as a diver plunges to emerge unharmed from under a high surf. They were making love the way a man and woman do, in this house where, on the other side of a wall, two women lay enlaced. The awareness became a kind of excitement, a defiance for her, an assertion for him.
In the early morning they stood against the wooden balustrade of the verandah outside the room. The black velvet curtain of mountain held back the day, breathing smoke from its folds. As the sun splayed over the top it rounded up in light a flock of pines huddled like sheep on its flank. — When did Annie take those torsos from the house?—
— Oh, the last time she came. After the old man died, don’t you remember? She had them packed and sent down by road transport.—
— I know nothing about it.—
— But she must have asked you?—
— She asked you?—
— Of course, and I understood you’d agreed, I thought you’d given them to her.—
— I would never have given those to her.—
— I can’t believe she’d do that.—
— Can hardly ask to have them back now.—
— No don’t. It must have been because she wanted them so badly, she thinks your work was so good.—
Do you lie to him often. Vera knew that Lou had admired them, Lou had thought they were — how did she put it — exceptionally explicit. Lou was the one who had chosen the paintings, collected the old furniture, designed and put into effect the adaptation of an old house to express a chosen way of life without disturbing the shell of its style, formed to contain a way of life the women lovers rejected. The quaint wooden valances on the verandahs and the white-painted wrought-iron fence were in place, but the nursery was some sort of private retreat the two women shared and where others were never invited; the family bedrooms, with the exception of a single guest-room, had been knocked into one grand space, the room where the heart of the house stood, a great low Oriental bed under a canopy mounted on carved posts adapted from Zanzibar lintels.
Ben had created Vera for himself as body, a torso without a head. As such it was (indeed, connoisseur Lou had observed) exceptionally explicit of the power of the body. It had no identity beyond body, and so the body that was Vera, that Ben could not live without, was transformed into the expression of desire between woman and woman. In Annie’s house the headless torsos were become household gods.
Arrivals
Chapter 19
Not now, not now. The day would come — no need to be a prophet, a little political nous is all that’s needed — when Didymus would be resuscitated from beyond his lifetime as one of the band of Jacobin heroes who had done terrible things to save liberation in a terrible time. But for the present his greatest service was for him to be forgotten. The chroniclers of history are not those who make it; sufficient honour is being done him in giving him the task of writing the history of struggle in exile. A university press in the United States would publish it and advertise it in literary journals among other books of specialist interest, black studies, women’s studies, homosexual studies, theses on child abuse, drug abuse, holes in the ozone layer. Friends like Vera Stark asked how the book was getting on as if showing attention to a child by enquiring about its progress at school, and when he encountered members of the multi-party Forum on which Sibongile served they absently, looking past his head at someone who interested them more, shouted ‘That’s great, that’s great’ before he could finish answering their enquiry.