Absolution (31 page)

‘I was hoping you might be able to tell me something about Laura.’

When Lionel hears it again the name seems to hit him like a bullet: his chest deflates and all the animation in his face dies; his body becomes rigid as he turns away from me to shuffle the countless piles of paper on his desk. My entrance into this space is somehow a transgression that I didn’t intend. I want to go, and I can see that Lionel needs for me to go.

‘Yes, of course you would. I’m afraid I have these interviews just now, so you’ll really have to excuse me. Perhaps we can take this up again at another point. I’m sorry I can’t talk now.’

I invite him to dinner but he’s going away for the holidays and says I should phone him in the New Year. I know he’s trying to give me the brush-off. I resolve not to give up, no matter how long it may take.

Tonight Sarah and I go to a busy restaurant at the mall in Rosebank and get a table outside where we can watch the foot
traffic. We place our order, but then decide we want cocktails instead of wine so I go inside to the bar. There are half a dozen wait staff running around – too many of them for the small space at the cash register behind the bar, and too few of them for all the patrons in the restaurant at this hour. I change the order and decide to wait while the bartender makes the drinks. There’s a young woman behind the cash register who looks shyly at me, and then smiles. Without thinking, I smile back and as soon as she sees me smile she returns the smile, looking ecstatic, but then she winces and swoons, like she could die from embarrassment, spinning around and sinking below the bar. Her co-workers look at her and pull her up and look at me and ask the woman what’s going on. She shakes her head and disappears into the kitchen.

I take the drinks back out to Sarah.

‘Cheers,’ she says, clinking her glass against mine. ‘What just happened there? All you did was smile and the girl acted like you’d presented her with a diamond ring or something.’

‘I don’t know. Most whites look through blacks. Security guards. Servers. Clerks. You get what you give. I smiled back, and maybe it was the first time a young white guy ever did that to her.’

Our dinners come and we order another round of cocktails. The night is warm with no breeze and there are buskers further down the street, a group singing an old Dolly Rathebe hit. As we wait for a dessert menu an elderly white woman weaves along the pavement towards us.

‘
Ek soek ’n honderd rand
,’ she says, putting out her hand.

I tell her I’m sorry, that I don’t have a hundred rand to give her, even though this isn’t true. I can see Sarah start to go for her wallet until I give her a look that makes her stop. The woman curses us and moves on to another table where the diners, too embarrassed not to give her something, offer a handful of change. She picks out the large denomination coins and leaves the rest. A few cents – forget it, she doesn’t want it.

‘Who can blame her?’ I say, accepting a dessert menu from
our server. ‘Five rand buys next to nothing. Greg says he should get a special tax break for being white. This is Greg, who must be the most radical-thinking person I know in the country. He calculated he gives away ten thousand rand a year to people asking for money. And that’s not even factoring in all the help he gives to his domestic worker and gardener and nanny, or the official charity work that his gallery sponsors. “Life on the plantation,” he says. “This is the price.” ’ I gesture at the well-dressed diners around us, the extravagant portions of food, the booze sold at a premium but still running like water.

‘It’s not so different in New York these days, or London,’ Sarah says. ‘It’s not a matter of one place or another. These are not just problems of place.’

Absolution

The man reached out his hands, removing a pair of thin leather gloves. Squinting into the light from the corridor, Clare recognized him all at once. It was no one she might have expected.

‘Heavens!’ she cried out, her heart leaping about against her ribs. ‘What on earth do you think you’re doing here?’

‘You knew I was coming,’ her son said, taking off his jacket. ‘You told me to let myself in.’

‘I did nothing of the kind, Mark! I’m minded to phone the police.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Mother. I’ve come for the week, as you must remember. What are you doing in bed so early? It’s not even ten.’

‘You call that early? I have no memory of inviting you to visit.’ Clare watched as Mark slumped on the taffeta-upholstered chair nearest her bedroom door. Propping herself up against the headboard, she turned on the bedside light. Her son looked tired, his skin bluish, claws of wrinkles deepening at his temples. How irritating it was to be interrupted in this way. She knew she would never get back to sleep, and feared that the entire week, which should have been one of intense, undisrupted work, would be lost to the demands and petulant whims of her son.

‘I didn’t realize I needed an invitation to come home,’ he said, loosening his green silk tie and unbuttoning the neck of his shirt to expose a ruff of chest hair that repulsed Clare. The law, which had kept his father and maternal grandfather lean men, had given Mark Wald a paunch he could ill afford.

‘This is my home, not yours. The old house on Canigou Avenue, the house you and your sister grew up in and stormed through
and abused in your way, that house might yet have been your home, but this house is mine alone and no one else’s until I die. I sold your home at a considerable profit and for the sake of my own security. Any home you might now have must by necessity be of your own purchase and deed and responsibility. How did you come by a key to my house?’

‘You made me a copy the last time I was here.’ He sounded as tired and short-tempered as his mother. ‘In case of emergencies. You
wanted
me to be able to get in. At least that’s what you said then.’

‘How short-sighted of me. And why do you trouble me and not your father and stepmother?’ It was a way the two of them had, this needling banter, half-play and half-contretemps, the two of them thrusting at the same time they wished only to tease.

‘Dad’s doing renovations. It wasn’t convenient for me to stay. I can see what you’re thinking but really there isn’t anything else to say about that. You can’t expect me to gossip. Can I make you a cup of tea or something?’

‘I should not presume to know what you
can
or
cannot
do.’

‘
May
I make you a cup of tea?’

‘Allow me the courtesy of offering refreshment in my own house. You realize that because of your intrusion I won’t be able to sleep all night. You’ve disturbed my rest, which is hard won at the best of times,’ she said, swinging her legs out of bed. ‘I suppose since you offer me tea that you want food or drink yourself.’

‘If it isn’t too much trouble.’

‘It is a terrible imposition, but let us see what we can find. Marie left behind a banquet in the freezer. You can eat, and I shall watch.’

Clare found bread and cheese, chutney and mayonnaise, and made her son a sandwich in a way that she had not done for many years. When he and his family came to visit they usually stayed with Clare’s ex-husband, because Mark’s wife Coleen complained that staying with Clare made her nervous, and Clare,
who saw little of interest in Coleen (a believer in what the woman described as ‘traditional feminine roles’), made no objection to the arrangement. The twin grandchildren were too small to be reasoned or conversed with and were themselves chiefly interested in swimming pools, ice creams, and long visits to the aquarium. It was only when Mark came alone to Cape Town on business that he sometimes stayed in his mother’s house.

‘Why are the shutters closed?’ he asked, pouring a glass of wine from the box in the refrigerator.

‘Aren’t you going to ask if you may have any wine?’

‘Don’t change the subject, Mother. The shutters. Has something happened?’

‘You do ask irritating questions. Don’t you want to offer your mother a glass of her own wine?’

‘Would you like a glass of your own wine, Mother?’

‘No, thank you, it will only keep me awake, but do help yourself,’ she said, and winked at him.

‘The shutters, Mother,’ Mark insisted, trying not to smile and swallowing half his glass of Stein. ‘Why do you drink this appalling stuff?’

‘Marie likes it. The shutters are closed because, if you must know, I was feeling vulnerable. Is that what you want to hear? Without Marie here, for the first time since we moved to this country-club fortress, I felt an old woman alone in the world with nothing but fragile glass between me and those–’ for a moment she nearly stopped herself, and then without completely fathoming the implications of what she was about to say, continued ‘–between me and those who would wish to visit their recriminations upon me.’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Nor do I, perhaps. In any case, raking over the past is something best left for daylight,’ she said, rising from the table. ‘If you wish to stay up, stay up. Watch the television if you can find anything decent at this hour, listen to music, whatever you do to make your own nights pass.’

‘Thanks, but I’m exhausted.’ Mark rubbed his face, which had once been so taut and pale, and was now thickening into a pasty blob. ‘I’ve been going since five this morning. There was a hearing at ten and I got the last flight out this evening, which was delayed by an hour. I could sleep for twenty-four hours if I didn’t have commitments tomorrow.’

‘Client meetings?’

‘Meetings, yes. I’ll need to be up early, but I was thinking that maybe we could have dinner together. Would you like to go out somewhere? I could make a reservation. We could even go up to that restaurant in Franschhoek.’

‘I don’t relish the idea of a night out, or being on the roads after dark.’ In fact, Clare had to admit, she no longer wished to be outside her own locked and gated property after sunset. On the rare recent occasions that she had received evening invitations she turned them down, excusing herself with the lie that neither she nor her assistant could see well enough to drive at night. ‘And in any case, Marie left plenty of food and her cooking is good enough for me. My taste buds are not what they were, so your fine dining would be wasted. You know where the guest bedroom is. No one has stayed here since you last came to visit, so any dirt on the sheets is your own. If it is too disgusting there is clean bedding in the linen closet. I trust you have not been so spoiled by servants that you have forgotten how to make a bed.’

She stood in the doorway for a moment and wondered if she was meant to hug or kiss her son. They had never been demonstrative and after a score of agonizing seconds they both nodded and Mark turned out the light.

Clare was up before dawn the next morning. Too tired to swim she instead went to work before emerging from the study adjoining her bedroom. That was perhaps the greatest advantage of this new house – being able to move from bed to desk before the spell of night had completely lapsed, and without having to encounter anyone but her own reflection, which was disturbance
enough on some mornings. Marie knew not to knock before eleven if the door remained closed. Mark was not so well trained.

‘Are you up, Mother?’ he called from the other side of her study door.

‘A closed door means one wishes not to be bothered,’ Clare shouted, opening the door and taking in the vision of Mark, already showered, his remaining hair combed back and gelled into place, his gut filling out his shirt.

‘My first meeting’s been cancelled.’

‘And you expect me to entertain you.’

‘I thought it would give us an opportunity to talk. Were you working?’

‘Unlike you I am always working, even when it appears I am bent to nothing in particular. But now that you’ve interrupted me I might as well stop the actual mechanical work. The interruption comes at a very high price, you understand. I won’t get back what I’ve lost.’ She pressed her lips into what she hoped was an ironic smile. ‘Perhaps you could make us some coffee, and find where Marie keeps the rusks, and we can reconvene in the garden in half an hour. Adam was going to mow today but I will ask him to wait until tomorrow.’

She was not accustomed to so much intrusion, especially now that she had, at long last, begun to feel at home in this new house. Quite apart from the adjoining study and bedroom, it afforded her a much larger measure of privacy and separation from the wider world. Mendicants could no longer come directly to her door. Only the truly brazen or desperate rang the intercom at the gate to the drive. Marie, feeling even this was inadequate, had proposed a secondary gate such as she had seen at some homes in Johannesburg, thereby creating a kind of security decontamination zone. The idea was that if one needed a delivery of groceries, for instance, the deliveryman would be allowed through the first gate, could deposit the groceries in the secure zone, Marie could sign for the delivery while remaining separated from the deliveryman by the secondary
gate, and only after he had left and the first gate closed would she open it to retrieve the delivery. Clare had dismissed the proposal as ludicrously paranoid. Cape Town was not yet Johannesburg, where entire neighbourhoods had become privatized security zones and armed guards patrolled grocery-store parking lots from bulletproof watchtowers. Besides, the truly determined would still find ways around any number of secondary or tertiary defences; they would cut through wires and tunnel under walls. Nowhere was truly secure.

Mark produced the coffee tray and Clare could not help taking note of the mugs – mugs rather than cups and saucers – and the plastic container of milk. Marie would have laid a placemat or cloth on the tray, used the china, poured the milk into a pitcher, and put the rusks with slices of cake on a plate. Such things made life in this country more bearable at the same time that they pointed up the irony of living as one did in the place where one happened to have been born.

‘It seems terribly unjust, this life,’ Clare said, accepting a mug. ‘That we should be able to live like this. It would not surprise me if, one day very soon, it should all be taken away from us. Nor would I think it an entirely unjustified deprivation.’