— Oh he says it was the time of his life. Dad as a pick-up! It’s sure out of character.—
— What do you think of as Ivan’s character?—
— Well he’s not — spontaneous (pleased at finding the right word), like you must have been. He weighs things up. Look how long it took him to make up his mind between my mother and the Hungarian. But maybe it was because of the man knowing you. Not just any stranger in a bar.—
— Maybe. We never know what a son or daughter understands about us; what we think of as ourselves.—
— Well old people are so cagey! … d’you ever tell Ivan what you’ve just said, about the war and sex and everything? — He slowly moved his head in certainty of her joining him in the denial, and she did, the two of them smiling at her compliance.
They returned to the computer. — It’s really bombed out. I’ll see if I can recover the data, try the back-ups.—
She said she’d leave him to it. He sensed that he had gained some advantage over her: she was at once Vera, to him, and his grandmother. He turned. — I’ll take some other girl — you’ll lend me your car for Saturday?—
Consequences.
Father and son.
Vera sees them. They swim towards each other through ruined palaces of coral, flippered feet undulating, ribbons of current and light passing, and, magnified by water: recognize. Ivan’s face is the face of the young woman on the bedroom floor, the wriggling sperm magnified by time out of sight and mind into the man picked up, tagged, in a bar. Without the tag, he might have been taken for one of those coincidental likenesses that share no blood: at one side of the ocean and another two beings happen to have been born with the same conformation of features. Vera, that wilful sexy bitch Vera, had to transform fertilization into parthenogenesis, the proof of her deceit being that she reproduced herself, only herself, in male form, for her new lover. And Ivan is drawn to the man never seen, never talked of, who once was married to a girl who became his mother; such attraction is a kind of recognition. The time of his life, together.
Father and son. No end to consequences. This consequence is that the seventeen-year-old boy has become one of Vera’s confidants. He knows there is something about herself she conceals, making other confessions round about it. He does that kind of thing himself, to protect himself from adults. In recognition — another kind of recognition — of this, she lets him drive without a valid licence, and both of them, as friends, are concealing this from Ben.
She has a need to redefine. Friends. Friends are differing individuals who are the repositories of confidences and confessions. The act of these friendships, in which the various aspects of self cannot be placed all upon one person, is the equivalent of placing the burden of self within the other by which she used to define the sexual act.
Chapter 24
Ms Vera Stark, Deputy Director of the Legal Foundation (in the end she has not been able to avoid a title), is among the faces in the newspapers captioned as nominated to serve on the Technical Committee on Constitutional Issues. Vera had heard that her name was being considered, but had not taken the possibility seriously; there were so many commissions and committees sitting, more set up every day either to pass the heat of change from hand to hand or keep an ethos of democracy evolving while the set of the old hegemony theatre was being struck, its now incongruous flats still lumbering people’s lives. Some groups wanted to keep them in the way, hoping that an ivy of acceptability might be able to be painted over them; others wanted to cart the junk off to live by in some enclave of a single skin colour or language, and pranced the streets with guns in mounted commando to make their Nazi neo-Arcadian cause a threat. Some enterprising adapters to a coming order where it might be possible still to make money while losing political control, wanted to lease the ultimate relic of the dead regime’s power, Robben Island, to a resort developer. A former political prisoner whose people the Foundation was representing in a land dispute made to Vera the counterclaim: We spent our lives there. We earned it. The Island is ours.
Vera was cautious not to decide at once on what the nomination meant. Not in terms of how she was favoured publicly: with committees on all questions — and what was not in question now? — there was surely a desperate search for people even marginally qualified to deliberate them.
Ben looked at her with admiration, seeing the light of others playing upon her and taking pride in it. He chided her hesitation. — You don’t refuse an honour! And you damn well deserve it. Your qualification as a lawyer is as good as any of the others— better. None of them has your experience. What do they know about rural communities and squatter camps, all those constituencies to be considered?—
They had met for lunch at his suggestion, the new development providing the occasion to take up again what once had been a means of seeing one another during the separation of the working day. She went on picking olives out of her salad. He watched her. — You’re not thinking of turning it down, are you, Vera. — She did not know what she was waiting for him to say, what it was she wanted from him. When the coffee came she sat over her cup, dragging the skin of her cheekbones under her fingers towards the temples. All she received from Ben was distress at her indecision, and her apparent lack of ability to explain it. Then she had to get back to the office; there was the awkward fact that he was in no hurry, unfortunately his business was doing poorly and there was no urgency or incentive to cut short the distraction of lunch. She touched his hand in acknowledgement and left, not looking back at him sitting there, alone.
She sat at her desk gazing at the door so familiar she no longer saw it, following the gauze of an after-image, the old entry of Oupa with his papers for her and his plastic tray of curried chicken and pap. If he was no longer there, neither was she. When did she first start suddenly seeing a familiar scene (bedroom at night, the level of a glass of water, the abandoned clothes) as if she were describing to herself something already past? It was when she had beside her in One-Twenty-One, so real, a young lover. The Hitler Baby. Long ago as that. Her sense of her existence was as if she had entered someone’s house and seen a letter she had written, addressed in her own hand, lying there, delivered and as yet unopened: the impulse to gather it up, gather it in.
One by one her colleagues finished the day’s work and left the offices. She could hear the cleaner emptying paper baskets with a slap on the base accompanied by singing in the strange soprano, almost atonal, of black women, the Greek chorus to their lives. They passed one another in the corridor on Vera’s way out, Vera prompted to come up on cue with the usual enquiry for Bella’s amour propre, how was the Dobsonville Ladies’ Choir doing in competitions lately, and Bella responding with the appreciation expected of her in return — Oh very good, very good, just won second place.
The lopsided Stop sign at a crossroad, the splendid purple bougainvillaea espaliered on a wall, the fence where the black-and-white mask of a Husky was always pressed yearningly against the lattice, the place at which the elephant’s-foot roots buttressing a belhambra tree had raised the tarmac of the pavement like the bedclothes of a restless sleeper; the turn into a side street where these signals reached a destination. She picked up the evening paper at Zeph Rapulana’s mail-box and took it with her to the front door. Rang; stood there patiently. The silence of an empty house where his electric wall clock (a stickler, he says, no African time for him!) whirrs on the edge of audibility, and documents shift under the current of air from a fanlight left open. After a while she turned and went into the garden where a neat arrangement of two plastic chairs and a table was kept under the jacaranda. There she sat reading the paper. She did not find it difficult to give it her full attention. The dimension of awareness she had inhabited at the office had closed away. Vera was not even waiting for the owner of the haven she occupied to come to his home. If he had not, she would simply have stood up and left, when she was ready, refolding the paper and placing it carefully on the doorstep. But his car was heard slurring into the garage, and in a few moments he came through a side gate into the small garden claimed with palms and tree ferns he had brought from some ancestral home in the Lowveld that was not the Odensville squatter camp which for her was his place of origin.