‘What is a trust account?’ he asks his mother.
‘It’s money he holds in trust.’
‘Why do people give him their money in trust?’ he says. ‘They must be mad.’
His mother shakes her head. All attorneys have trust accounts, she says, God only knows why. ‘Jack is like a child when it comes to money.’
Bensusan and the Law Society have entered the picture because there are people who want to save his father, people from the old days when he was Controller of Letting. They are well disposed towards him, they don’t want him to go to jail. For old times’ sake, and because he has a wife and children, they will close their eyes to certain things, make certain arrangements. He can make repayments over five years; once that is done, the book will be closed, the matter forgotten.
His mother takes legal advice herself. She would like her own possessions to be separated from her husband’s before some new disaster strikes: the dining-room table, for instance; the chest of drawers with the mirror; the stinkwood coffee table that Aunt Annie gave her. She would like their marriage contract, which makes the two of them responsible for each other’s debts, to be amended. But marriage contracts, it turns out, are immutable. If his father goes down, his mother goes down too, she and her children.
Eksteen and the typist are given notice, the practice in Goodwood is closed. He never gets to see what happens to the green window with the gold lettering. His mother continues to teach. His father starts looking for a job. Every morning, punctually at seven, he sets off for the city. But an hour or two later — this is his secret — when everyone else has left the house, he comes back. He puts on his pyjamas and gets back into bed with the Cape Times crossword and a quarter-litre of brandy. Then at about two in the afternoon, before his wife and children return, he dresses and goes to his club.
His club is called the Wynberg Club, but it is really just part of the Wynberg Hotel. There his father has supper and spends the evening drinking. Sometime after midnight — the noise wakes him, he does not sleep heavily — a car pulls up before the house, the front door opens, his father comes in and goes to the lavatory. Soon afterwards, from his parents’ bedroom, comes a flurry of heated whispering. In the morning there are dark-yellow splashes on the lavatory floor and on the toilet seat, and a sickly sweet smell.
He writes a notice and puts it in the lavatory: PLEASE LIFT THE SEAT. The notice is ignored. Urinating on the toilet seat becomes his father’s ultimate act of defiance against a wife and children who have turned their backs on him.
His father’s secret life is revealed to him when one day he stays away from school, ill or pretending to be ill. From his bed he hears the scrape of the key in the front-door lock, hears his father settling down in the next room. Later, guilty, angry, they pass each other in the passage.
Before he leaves the house in the afternoons his father takes care to empty the mailbox and remove certain items, which he hides at the bottom of his wardrobe under the paper lining. When at last the flood-gates burst, it is the cache of letters in the wardrobe — bills from the Goodwood days, letters of demand, lawyers’ letters — that his mother is most bitter about. ‘If I had only known, I could have made a plan,’ she says. ‘Now our lives are ruined.’
The debts stretch everywhere. Callers come at all hours of the day and night, callers whom he does not get to see. Each time there is a knock at the front door his father shuts himself up in his bedroom. His mother greets the visitors in low tones, ushers them into the living room, closes the door. Afterwards he can hear her whispering angrily to herself in the kitchen.
There is talk of Alcoholics Anonymous, of how his father should go to Alcoholics Anonymous to prove his sincerity. His father promises to go but does not.
Two court officers arrive to take an inventory of the contents of the house. It is a sunny Saturday morning. He retreats to his bedroom and tries to read, but in vain: the men require access to his room, to every room. He goes into the backyard. Even there they follow him, peering around, making notes on a pad.
He seethes with rage all the time. That man, he calls his father when he speaks to his mother, too full of anger to give him a name: why do we have to have anything to do with that man? Why don’t you let that man go to prison?
He has twenty-five pounds in his Post Office savings book. His mother swears to him that no one will take his twenty-five pounds away from him.
There is a visit from a Mr Golding. Though Mr Golding is Coloured, he is somehow in a position of power over his father. Careful preparations are made for the visit. Mr Golding will be received in the front room, like other callers. He will be served tea in the same tea service. In return for being treated so well, it is hoped that Mr Golding will not prosecute.
Mr Golding arrives. He wears a double-breasted suit, does not smile. He drinks the tea that his mother serves but will promise nothing. He wants his money.
After he has left there is a debate about what to do with the teacup. The custom, it appears, is that after a person of colour has drunk from a cup the cup must be smashed. He is surprised that his mother’s family, which believes in nothing else, believes in this. However, in the end his mother simply washes the cup with bleach.
At the last minute Aunt Girlie from Williston comes to the rescue, for the honour of the family. In return for a loan she lays down certain conditions, one of them that Jack should never again practise as an attorney.
His father agrees to the conditions, agrees to sign the document. But when the time comes, it takes long cajoling to get him out of bed. At last he makes his appearance, in grey slacks and a pyjama top and bare feet. Wordlessly he signs; then he retires to his bed again.
Later that evening he gets dressed and goes out. Where he spends the night they do not know; he does not return until the next day.
‘What’s the point of making him sign?’ he complains to his mother. ‘He never pays his other debts, so why should he pay Girlie?’
‘Never mind him, I’ll pay her,’ she replies.
‘How?’
‘I’ll work for the money.’
There is something in his mother’s behaviour that he can no longer close his eyes to, something extraordinary. With each new and bitter revelation she seems to grow stronger, more stubborn. It is as though she is inviting calamities upon herself for no other purpose than to show the world how much she can endure. ‘I will pay all his debts,’ she says. ‘I will pay in instalments. I will work.’
Her ant-like determination angers him to the point that he wants to strike her. It is clear what lies behind it. She wants to sacrifice herself for her children. Sacrifice without end: he is all too familiar with that spirit. But once she has sacrificed herself entirely, once she has sold the clothes off her back, sold her very shoes, and is walking around on bloody feet, where will that leave him? It is a thought he cannot bear.
The December holidays arrive and still his father has no job. They are all four in the house now, with nowhere else to go, like rats in a cage. They avoid each other, hiding in separate rooms. His brother absorbs himself in comics: the Eagle, the Beano. His own favourite is the Rover, with its stories of Alf Tupper, the one-mile champion who works in a factory in Manchester and lives on fish and chips. He tries to lose himself in Alf Tupper, but he cannot help pricking his ears to every whisper and creak in the house.
One morning there is a strange silence. His mother is out, but from something in the air, a smell, an aura, a heaviness, he knows that that man is still here. Surely he cannot still be sleeping. Is it possible that, wonder of wonders, he has committed suicide? If so, if he has committed suicide, would it not be best to pretend not to notice, so that the sleeping pills or whatever he has taken can be given time to act? And how can he keep his brother from raising the alarm?