As they walked from the parking ground to the airport terminal he laughed jerkily with nerves and remarked it was a pity it was too early for a drink.
— Well, why not? Let’s have one anyway. D’you think the bar’ll be open? Yes! — what d’you feel like? — She laughed with him while they suggested to one another what it was appropriate to drink at eleven in the morning ‘like a couple of alkies’. —Gin and tonic? — No, that’ll make me have to go and pee just as the plane lands. — Sherry, brown sherry, when I was a young girl that was regarded as a suitably mild tipple and I don’t remember it being diuretic.—
No prancing, singing, ululating surge pressing to the barriers for the appearance of these tour groups arriving and travellers returning from sightseeing holidays and business trips instead of exile. No banners; travel agents listlessly holding cards with the names of Japanese, Germans, French and Taiwanese they had come to escort to their hotels. No children conceived in strange lands, tossed home from hands to hands; only small Indian boys dwarfed in men’s miniature suits and little white girls wearing the duplicate of their mothers’ flowered tights, chasing about families patient as cattle, chewing their cud-gum while waiting to greet grandfathers back from Mecca and fathers back from business deals on the other hemisphere. Ben and Vera’s passenger came out among the first to emerge. There he was, guiding a trolley unhurriedly while others urged past him, a tall boy with a bronze ponytail switching as he casually looked around. Ben did not move, taking in this first moment, first sight, in emotion. It was Vera who rose on the balls of her feet to wave and smile. Now the boy steered, careening the trolley, for them. They had seen him only less than a year before, in London, he couldn’t have changed much, the same — it seemed to Vera — outdated Sixties style, the ear-ring, the long hair; apparently the hippies had retreated sufficiently far in history to inspire a revival of the way they looked even if their flowered path had become strewn everywhere with guns, their potsmoking dreams had become Mafia drug cartels, and their sexual freedom had been ended, more horribly than any conventional taboos ever could have decreed, by a fatal disease. Only his jaw had changed. Facing them now, he had the squared angle from the joint beneath the ear of a handsome adult male, it was only with his back turned that, ponytail curling on his shoulders, he could have been mistaken for a girl. When they embraced there was the snag of a night’s beard on his skin.
He leaned forward from the back seat of the car chattering in a London accent, well-educated but slightly Cockney, telling them of the enormously fat man who had overflowed the armrest in the plane, and how in the middle of the night he’d chatted up the cabin attendant, not the steward who’d said he couldn’t do anything about it but the girl, to find him another place— and bumped up to business class it was, too! With his air of zest and confidence it seemed he was arriving on holiday. He had never been in his father’s home country before; the woman beside him in business class was going all over the show, Kruger Park, Okavango, the Cape — he was certainly looking forward to getting around a bit. The mood prevailed among the three of them while he was shown his room and Ben opened a bottle of champagne before the special dinner Vera had prepared.
After dinner there was the first of the awkward hours that were to follow each night in the next weeks. Vera customarily went to her private place, the enclosed stoep which was her study, in the evening, and Ben read in the living-room. Although the young man had just spent thirteen hours in a plane he was not tired, he would never be tired at night, he wandered about the living-room looking at books and pictures, picking up newspapers and the art journals Ben subscribed to, the Foundation’s pamphlets and offprints of articles about land laws and removals that overflowed from Vera’s study; he walked out into the night and rounded the limits of the garden. Vera at the living-room window saw him standing at the gate before the streetlights webbed in trees, the blur of an all-night neon sunset burning, away over the city, with the stillness of one listening to the turbines of life sounding distantly: a captured animal pacing its new enclosure, seeing and hearing an unknown freedom, out there.
Kruger, the Okavango, the Cape. — Of course we’ll do some travelling together — naturally — but first I have to find you some sort of work. Have to be a responsible grandfather … What would you like to do? I can’t promise to come up with it exactly, but I’m prepared to try.—
— D’you notice how the people we meet think I’m your son — you don’t look much like my grandfather, Ben!—
Vera broke in with a cry. — And me? I suppose I certainly look like a grandmother!—
— Well, do you dye his hair for him? How come it’s still black?—
This kind of light sparring was the initial communication between Vera and the boy, Adam. — It’s always been black, black, never changed. Just as it was when I first saw him. — The boy doesn’t ask where that was, the youth of someone who is a grandmother is something unimaginable. But her remark succeeds in bringing a smile to Ben. — There are white ones if you look closely enough.—
— What’d I like to do? Now what would I like to do? Vera? Ben? People are always telling me what I ought to do, I’m not used to these big decisions. — The three were sitting in the garden; he was at the age when he could sprawl in the sun for hours, perhaps just growing, completing the physical transition to adulthood, his penis secretly stirring under the warmth.
— That’s why I’m asking.—
— But I really don’t know. — Useless to tell them, hitch the road to Kruger, the Okavango, the Cape; even she, who was holding him in a look as if she knew, smiling with a quirk to the side of her mouth, would not let him go. She might have: but she wanted to please her husband. He had been quick to see that his own presence in this house was some sort of gift to his grandfather, she didn’t really want this grandson there. Yet he’d taken a liking to her; their sparring was an admission that she liked him, too, while both were aware he was not welcome. — Maybe I could do something at Vera’s offices, what she tells about the place sounds quite interesting. I’d meet people.—
— That’s out.—
He looked from Ben to Vera. She stirred in don’t-ask-me amusement.
— Ivan specifically didn’t want that.—
— Ben, surely Ivan’s told him.—
— No I swear to you! He told me nothing.—
— Because I got shot in the leg. He thinks anything connected with the Foundation’s likely to put you in danger.—
— What crap! I could be blown up by an IRA bomb in London, couldn’t I?—