Which brings me to a tremendous worry. The usual. AIDS. He’s had all the information and warnings (they educate even small children as well as adolescents at schools here) and I’ve added mine, told him that as he never goes out without his credit card he must never go out without his condom — but … What I’m getting at I’d better come right out with. If his mother is not fit to look after him at this stage in his life, neither — and it’s hard for me to admit it — am I. I think he needs time to mature, away from both of us, before he goes to university or trains for whatever else it is he wants to do (as yet undecided, of course; that’s part of the trouble). Once he’s in training for a career and living independently — I’ll set him up in a flat or something — I’m sure he and I will get on and become closer. (It’s not that we don’t get on well now, it’s that I know I can’t give him what he doesn’t know he needs.) So I’m going to ask you if he couldn’t come to you, to the house at home, our old place that doesn’t refuse anyone or anything, not that I know of, Ma. I have a feeling his mother will consent, though she’d raise all hell if I wanted to move him in with the Hungarian and me. If Vera and you, Dad, would let him live with you for, say, a year, I think he’d gain a new perspective on his life. If Ben could find him something to do, some work — no offence, Vera, but quite honestly I don’t want him getting out of one kind of mess here and getting into another kind because of becoming involved in politics. Anything you’d offer him wouldn’t be without that risk. One bullet in a leg’s enough. So no good works, please, no brave works. He doesn’t belong in that country, he doesn’t owe it anything. He did fairly well in his A levels and, at my insistence, is taking another at a crammers to be sure he’ll be well qualified to get into a university eventually. This course will be over soon. Ideally, he should go to you then. The handwriting became larger and wide across the page. No immediate hurry. Think about it. Do it for me. I can ask you because I love you, Ben, Vera.
We can talk now.
This is something they can talk about. Now; any time. What concerns Ivan occupies Ben’s attention and energy openly. He remembered Vera’s dismayed silence when — some time ago, he’d been thinking about this solution for the boy even then — there was the divorce and he suggested they might take the boy for a while. Ben rose, turned her to him and with his index fingers lifted her short hair where it lay behind each ear as if it were the long tresses he used to loop back to study her face when it was new to him. He kissed her, one of his long embraces, sensuous as they always became at any contact with her, the letter hidden in one hand of the arms that held her. — It’ll be like having Ivan back again. It’ll be all right.—
They talked many times, many nights. Ben’s practical propositions of how they tactfully could take care of the boy for Ivan—
— He’s not a boy—
— how they could make arrangements for his needs and anticipate his preferences—
— Arrange our lives.—
Vera’s sense of resentment. Half-defiant, half-ashamed, she had never realized how much her (what was it?) sense of privacy had grown. How could someone like herself whose preoccupations of work were so public, so intertwined with other lives, have at the same time this sense? She did not know, could not decide whether it was protective, necessary (she saw how those who, unlike herself, really were public figures, were surrounded by piranhas of public adulation), or whether it was the early sign of some morbid onset, like the first unnoticed symptom of a loss of physical function. It was linked in an obscure way — she chased it in random dissociation down labyrinths of the subconscious — with the voice that had come up in her several times, the impulse she had had to ask: What am I to do with this love?
Ivan, Ivan. Her double (how Ben loves them both, her in him and him in her); her invader. He had germinated in her body, interloper from an episode into her definitive life. And now he sent his representative, his replacement, for her to ‘make arrangements’ for in that life, over again.
Her daily life. This became the irritable obsessive expression of her emotions; daily life, she challenged and argued with Ben over details that astonished him, housewifely niggles of anticipated disruptions of petty routines she had no more thought worth discussing than she would have needed deliberation about brushing her teeth. Young men always dumped bundles of dirty clothes about; Esther Dhlomo, who came to wash and iron once a week, would have to be engaged to come twice. The kind of simple meals Ben was satisfied to eat and Vera quickly cooked when she came home from the Foundation; a young man would want red meat. And the telephone? He would be on the phone for hours, no one would be able to reach her. It would be necessary to apply well in advance for another line, have a phone installed in the room he occupied.
Ben countered all these problems and was only occasionally impatient. He smiled, offering Vera the bonus, in the life of parents of adults, of what was surely an empty space in that life about to be filled. — He’ll have Ivan’s old room.—
What pleased Ben as a destined occupancy, a heritage binding son to father, Vera recoiled from. With a sudden switch of her emotions in an insight: she had been seeing the son as the father, but Ivan was what Adam was being rescued from.
Ivan’s room; yes, because it had become the room of Annick and her woman lover. A room that imposed no succession upon a male. So there he could be himself, whatever that might turn out to be.
Past the signs.
A powdery Transvaal day at the end of summer drought rested the eye. Pale friable grass flattened at the highwayside, fine dust pastel upon leaves and roofs pressed under the sky night had breathed on and polished. Driving in quiet to the airport together, something more than a truce in their opposing anticipations of arrival came upon Ben and Vera. He put the seal of his hand in her lap; upon not only the contention that set them one against the other in acceptance of Ivan’s proposal — Ivan’s blackmail, for Vera; his right, and proof of love, for Ben. Also upon all that had broken between them over their years, and hairline cracks where the impossibility of knowing another being had impacted, despite confidences, the exchange of the burdens of self Vera put so much value on in entry to and acceptance of the body they had experienced together countless times since initiation in the mountains. She, who had been hostilely apprehensive, was serene; Mrs Stark of the Foundation had trained Vera that once a circumstance has no chance of avoidance it must be accepted without further capacity for conflict and loss of energy. Ben was the one whose eager anticipation of receiving Ivan’s son had become apprehension. Yet there was an atmosphere between them as if they were sharing one diastole and systole in existence that may come briefly between people who have been living together a long time, and disappears, impossible to hold on to or recapture by any intention or will. This bubble of existence was trapped within the car’s isolation — airconditioning, locked doors and closed windows — from the landscape they could see: that landscape was not innocent. There were shootings along the highways and roads every day, attacks like the one that had killed Oupa, shots in the cross-fire between rival political groups, ambushes by gangs representing themselves as revolutionaries. Vera had said to Ben, when final dates for the boy’s arrival were being discussed, that Ivan should be told of the risks his son would be subject to, the ordinary risks of every-day in this country, this time. Ben was ashamed of distrust of her motives. To him it was unthinkable that Vera, who had chosen him so openly, could ever be devious, but he had written soberly to Ivan, a constriction in his fingers at the idea that this might mean the boy would not be sent, after all. Although Ivan must have known that, unlike any risks he admonished his mother not to put his son to by finding him employment in her circles, these risks were not ones that anyone could arrange to avoid, he replied he was sure his parents would take good care of the boy. I only hope there won’t be a last minute objection from his mother because she hears something … But then she never did take much interest in what was going on in the world. Whatever Vera’s motives had been, at this reply she was concerned that Ben (his dark head bent, considering) might not become aware of how determined Ivan was to get rid of the boy. She somehow owed Bennet his illusions — thought of him as Bennet again, when seeking to honour this debt.