Perhaps I was flattering myself (dreary flattery, balm that burned like ice, if it was) and there was someone else by now in whose eye he saw himself — friend, woman — it didn’t matter whom. But I knew, when I read the telegram, it was for me. The worn phrases of human failure, ‘everything was finished’, ‘broken up’, have taken on a new lease of literal meaning between Max and me, we have truly gone through every possibility by which attachment can survive, worn them all threadbare, until any kind of communication was no longer contained, but went like a fist through empty air. And as for broken up — the successive images in which I — we — had seen ourselves together were splintered to crystal dust — like the broken glass, residue of some collision, that I swerved to avoid on the road. But Max would kick from the wreckage the button that asserts the identity of the dead.
The anger left me, then, melted. I always like driving by myself, it brings back something of the self-sufficiency of childhood, and in addition I had the curious freedom of a break in routine. Max was dead; I felt nothing directly about the fact except that I believed it. Yet it divided the morning before I had read the telegram from the morning after I had done so, and in the severance I was cut loose. Of course I can do what I like on Saturday mornings, but it’s been weeks since I’ve done anything but have Graham in to breakfast, wash my hair, and perhaps go to the suburban shops. Even as irregular (in every sense of the word) a thing as this business with Graham and me has taken on a sort of pattern; we go away on holidays together but we don’t sleep together often at home — and yet this casualness has become an ‘arrangement’ in itself, and even my evenings in bars and clubs with people he’s never heard of are part of habit.
It is also rare for me to get a chance to see Bobo on a Saturday; he’s allowed out only twice a month, on Sundays, and the school discourages visits from parents in between times. I realized I hadn’t got anything for him. Perhaps they’d let me take him out and I could buy him tea and cream scones at the country hotel near the school. Anyway, I’m the one for whom it is necessary to have presents for Bobo. I see this in his face when I anxiously lay out my carriers of apples and packets of sweets. I know that it is my way of trying to make up for sending him to that place — the school. And yet I had to do it; I have to cover up my reasons by letting it be taken for granted that I want him out of the way. For the truth is that I would hold on to Bobo, if I let myself. I could keep him clamped to my belly like one of those female baboons who carry their young clinging beneath their bodies. And I would never let go.
I can’t give him the life with the indispensable units, a mother and father and family, I was taught was a sacred trust to provide for any child I might ‘bring into the world’. I’m not even sure it would be enough, either, if I could. I had that life, Max had it, and yet it hasn’t seemed to have provided what it turned out we needed. Oh I know it’s easy enough to blame our parents for our troubles, and we belong to the generation that lays down its burdens on Freud, as our parents were exhorted to lay down theirs on Jesus. But I don’t think that the code of decent family life, kindness to dogs and neighbours, handouts to grateful servants, has brought us much more than bewilderment. What about all those strangers the code didn’t provide for, the men who didn’t feel themselves to be our servants and had nothing to be grateful for in being fobbed off with handouts, the people who weren’t neighbours and crowded in on us with hurts and hungers kindness couldn’t appease? I don’t know what will be asked of Bobo by the time he grows up, but I do know that the sort of background I was told a child should expect would leave him pretty helpless. I can only try to see to it that he looks for his kind of security elsewhere than in the white suburbs.
He wasn’t made there, thank God. It was in a car — which is where the white suburbs keep their sex. But at least it was out in the veld. One of the millions of babies made in cars, plantations, parks, alleys, all over the world. Because the suburbs, while talking romantic rubbish about ‘the young people’ among the flowers and decanters of the living room, ignore sex, the defining need of their youth. There are bedrooms, studies, dens, porches; but no place for that. I said to Max, ‘You forgot.’ He shrugged gloomily, as if he had never promised. But I knew it was my ‘fault’ as much as his. Then he said, speaking without any relation to circumstances, as he often did, ‘I’d like to have a child of my own. I’d like to have a child following me round, there’s nothing doggy about children. A child shouts “Look!” all the time and you see real things, colours of stones, and bits of wood.’ The last time he saw Bobo was more than a year ago. I could see that he liked him better than when he was little and used to yell; I was pleased that he could fool with him and forget that he used to yell back until the child’s open mouth went soundless with fright and I had to take him away and carry him round the streets.
Just before I reached the school there was one of those lorries that sell fruit at the side of the road, and a black man jumped up from a little fire he’d made himself and pranced out with an orange stuck on a stick. I bought a packet of nartjies for Bobo.
The school has very large grounds with a small dam and a plantation of eucalyptus trees — that was one of the reasons why I chose it: so that he would have somewhere that at least he could pretend was wild, to get away from playing fields and corridors. It’s difficult to remember what it was like being a child, but I do know that it was essential to have such a place. The buildings (and the gateposts with their iron arch bearing the school crest, and name in Celtic lettering) are of yellow brick that breaks out in crosses, raised like Braille bumps, all over the place. The sight of the school produces a subdued and cowed mood in me; I go on mental tiptoe from the moment I enter that gateway. Black men in neat overalls are always busy in the grounds trimming the hedges at sharp right angles and digging round the formal beds and clipped shrubs; they were sweeping up leaves, this time. Tin signs cut in the shape of a hand with pointing forefinger and painted in the headmaster’s wife’s Celtic lettering, indicate ‘Visitors’ Parking’, ‘Staff Only’, ‘Office’. The whole curve of the drive before the main building was empty but in the subservient anxiousness to do right that comes over me, I left the car in the visitors’ parking ground. It was about eleven o’clock and the cries of the boys at break came from the quadrangles and playing fields behind the buildings. I know that my view of the place is absurdly subjective, but how like a prison it was! Behind the clean and ugly bricks, a great shout of life going up, fading into the sunlit vacuum. I went up the polished steps and dropped the heavy knocker on the big oiled door.
It was opened by what must have been a new junior master, heavy-jawed, nice-looking, with the large, slightly shaky hands, powerful but helpless, of the young man who is going through the stage of intense desire for women without knowing how to approach any. He wore shabby, fashionably narrow-legged pants and a knitted tie and was obviously one of the Oxford or Cambridge graduates working their way round Africa who are counted on to bring a healthy blast of contemporaneity into the curriculum. (Bobo has told me about one who played the guitar and taught the boys American anti-bomb and anti-segregation folk songs.)
The headmaster was at tea in the staffroom, but the young man took me to the headmaster’s study and asked me to sit down while he fetched him. I’ve been in that study a number of times; hostilely clean, hung with crossed-armed athletic groups, the shiny brown plastic flooring covered with a brown carpet in the standard concession to comfort to be found in the rooms of administrators of institutions. There was even a framed cartoon of the headmaster, cut from the school magazine; everyone said what an ‘approachable’, ‘human’ man he was.