Once a year Boswell’s Circus comes to Worcester. Everyone in his class goes; for a week beforehand talk is about the circus and nothing else. Even the Coloured children go, after a fashion: they hang around outside the tent for hours, listening to the band, peering in through gaps in the canvas.
They plan to go on the Saturday afternoon, when his father is playing cricket. His mother makes it into an outing for the three of them. But at the ticket booth she hears with a shock the high Saturday afternoon prices: 2/6 for children, 5/-for adults. She does not have enough money with her. She buys tickets for him and his brother. ‘Go in, I’ll wait here,’ she says. He is unwilling, but she insists.
Inside, he is miserable, enjoys nothing; he suspects his brother feels the same way. When they emerge at the end of the show, she is still there. For days afterwards he cannot banish the thought: his mother waiting patiently in the blazing heat of December while he sits in the circus tent being entertained like a king. Her blinding, overwhelming, self-sacrificial love, for both him and his brother but for him in particular, disturbs him. He wishes she did not love him so much. She loves him absolutely, therefore he must love her absolutely: that is the logic she compels upon him. Never will he be able to pay back all the love she pours out upon him. The thought of a lifetime bowed under a debt of love baffles and infuriates him to the point where he will not kiss her, refuses to be touched by her. When she turns away in silent hurt, he deliberately hardens his heart against her, refusing to give in.
Sometimes, when she is feeling bitter, she makes long speeches to herself, contrasting her life on the barren housing estate with the life she lived before she was married, which she represents as a continual round of parties and picnics, of weekend visits to farms, of tennis and golf and walks with her dogs. She speaks in a low whispering voice in which only the sibilants stand out: he in his room, and his brother in his, strain their ears to hear, as she must know they will. That is another reason why his father calls her a witch: because she talks to herself, making up spells.
The idyll of life in Victoria West is substantiated by photographs from the albums: his mother, together with other women in long white dresses, standing with tennis racquets in what looks like the middle of the veld, his mother with her arm over the neck of a dog, an Alsatian.
‘Was that your dog?’ he asks.
‘That is Kim. He was the best, the most faithful dog I ever had.’
‘What happened to him?’
‘He ate poisoned meat that the farmers had put down for jackals. He died in my arms.’
There are tears in her eyes.
After his father makes his appearance in the album, there are no more dogs. Instead he sees the couple at picnics with their friends from those days, or his father, with his dapper little moustache and his cocky look, posing against the bonnet of an old-fashioned black car. Then the pictures of himself begin, dozens of them, starting with the picture of a blank-faced, pudgy baby being held up to the camera by a dark, intense-looking woman.
In all these photographs, even the photographs with the baby, his mother strikes him as girlish. Her age is a mystery that intrigues him endlessly. She will not tell him, his father pretends not to know, even her brothers and sisters seem sworn to secrecy. While she is out of the house he searches through the papers in the bottom drawer of her dressing table, looking for a birth certificate, but without success. From a remark she has let slip he knows she is older than his father, who was born in 1912; but how much older? He decides she was born in 1910. That means she was thirty when he was born and is forty now. ‘You’re forty!’ he tells her triumphantly one day, watching closely for signs that he is right. She gives a mysterious smile. ‘I’m twenty-eight,’ she says.
They have the same birthday. He was born to her on her birthday. This means, as she has told him, as she tells everyone, that he is a gift of God.
He calls her not Mother or Mom but Dinny. So do his father and his brother. Where does the name come from? No one seems to know; but her brothers and sisters call her Vera, so it cannot come from their childhood. He has to be careful not to call her Dinny in front of strangers, as he has to guard against calling his aunt and uncle plain Norman and Ellen instead of Uncle Norman and Aunt Ellen. But saying Uncle and Aunt like a good, obedient, normal child is as nothing beside the circumlocutions of Afrikaans. Afrikaners are afraid to say you to anyone older than themselves. He mocks his father’s speech: ‘Mammie moet ’n kombers oor Mammie se knieë trek anders word Mammie koud’ — Mommy must put a blanket over Mommy’s knees, otherwise Mommy will get cold. He is relieved he is not Afrikaans and is saved from having to talk like that, like a whipped slave.
His mother decides that she wants a dog. Alsatians are the best — the most intelligent, the most faithful — but they cannot find an Alsatian for sale. So they settle for a pup half Doberman, half something else. He insists on being the one to name it. He would like to call it Borzoi because he wants it to be a Russian dog, but since it is not in fact a borzoi he calls it Cossack. No one understands. People think the name is kos-sak, food-bag, which they find funny.
Cossack turns out to be a confused, undisciplined dog, roaming about the neighbourhood, trampling gardens, chasing chickens. One day the dog follows him all the way to school. Nothing he does will put him off: when he shouts and throws stones the dog drops his ears, puts his tail between his legs, slinks away; but as soon as he gets back on his bicycle the dog lopes after him again. In the end he has to drag him home by the collar, pushing his bicycle with the other hand. He gets home in a rage and refuses to go back to school, since he is late.
Cossack is not quite full grown when he eats the ground glass someone has put out for him. His mother administers enemas, trying to flush out the glass, but without success. On the third day, when the dog just lies still, panting, and will not even lick her hand, she sends him to the pharmacy to fetch a new medicine someone has recommended. He races there and races back, but he comes too late. His mother’s face is drawn and remote, she will not even take the bottle from his hands.
He helps to bury Cossack, wrapped in a blanket, in the clay at the bottom of the garden. Over the grave he erects a cross with the name ‘Cossack’ painted on it. He does not want them to have another dog, not if this is how they must die.
His father plays cricket for Worcester. It ought to be yet another feather in his cap, another source of pride for him. His father is an attorney, which is almost as good as a doctor; he was a soldier in the war; he used to play rugby in the Cape Town league; he plays cricket. But in each case there is an embarrassing qualification. He is an attorney but no longer practises. He was a soldier but only a lance corporal. He played rugby, but only for Gardens second or perhaps even third team, and Gardens are a joke, they always come bottom of the Grand Challenge league. And now he plays cricket, but for the Worcester second team, which no one bothers to watch.
His father is a bowler, not a batsman. There is something wrong with his backlift that bedevils his batting; furthermore, he averts his eyes when he plays fast bowling. His idea of batting seems to be confined to pushing the bat forward and, if the ball slides off it, trotting a sedate single.