None to Accompany Me (29 page)

They talked many times, many nights. Ben's practical propositions of how they tactfully could take care of the boy for Ivan—

—He's not a boy—

—how they could make arrangements for his needs and anticipate his preferences—

—Arrange our lives.—

Vera's sense of resentment. Half-defiant, half-ashamed, she had never realized how much her (what was it?) sense of privacy had grown. How could someone like herself whose preoccupations of work were so public, so intertwined with other lives, have at the same time this sense? She did not know, could not
decide whether it was protective, necessary (she saw how those who, unlike herself, really were public figures, were surrounded by piranhas of public adulation), or whether it was the early sign of some morbid onset, like the first unnoticed symptom of a loss of physical function. It was linked in an obscure way—she chased it in random dissociation down labyrinths of the subconscious—with the voice that had come up in her several times, the impulse she had had to ask: What am I to do with this love?

Ivan, Ivan. Her double (how Ben loves them both, her in him and him in her); her invader. He had germinated in her body, interloper from an episode into her definitive life. And now he sent his representative, his replacement, for her to ‘make arrangements' for in that life, over again.

Her
daily life.
This became the irritable obsessive expression of her emotions;
daily life
, she challenged and argued with Ben over details that astonished him, housewifely niggles of anticipated disruptions of petty routines she had no more thought worth discussing than she would have needed deliberation about brushing her teeth. Young men always dumped bundles of dirty clothes about; Esther Dhlomo, who came to wash and iron once a week, would have to be engaged to come twice. The kind of simple meals Ben was satisfied to eat and Vera quickly cooked when she came home from the Foundation; a young man would want red meat. And the telephone? He would be on the phone for hours, no one would be able to reach her. It would be necessary to apply well in advance for another line, have a phone installed in the room he occupied.

Ben countered all these problems and was only occasionally impatient. He smiled, offering Vera the bonus, in the life of parents of adults, of what was surely an empty space in that life about to be filled. —He'll have Ivan's old room.—

What pleased Ben as a destined occupancy, a heritage binding son to father, Vera recoiled from. With a sudden switch of her emotions in an insight: she had been seeing the son as the father, but Ivan was what Adam was being rescued from.

Ivan's room; yes, because it had become the room of Annick and her woman lover. A room that imposed no succession upon a male. So there he could be himself, whatever that might turn out to be.

Past the signs.

A powdery Transvaal day at the end of summer drought rested the eye. Pale friable grass flattened at the highwayside, fine dust pastel upon leaves and roofs pressed under the sky night had breathed on and polished. Driving in quiet to the airport together, something more than a truce in their opposing anticipations of arrival came upon Ben and Vera. He put the seal of his hand in her lap; upon not only the contention that set them one against the other in acceptance of Ivan's proposal—Ivan's blackmail, for Vera; his right, and proof of love, for Ben. Also upon all that had broken between them over their years, and hairline cracks where the impossibility of knowing another being had impacted, despite confidences, the exchange of the burdens of self Vera put so much value on in entry to and acceptance of the body they had experienced together countless times since initiation in the mountains. She, who had been hostilely apprehensive, was serene; Mrs Stark of the Foundation had trained Vera that once a circumstance has no chance of avoidance it must be accepted without further capacity for conflict and loss of energy. Ben was the one whose eager anticipation of receiving Ivan's son had become apprehension. Yet there was an atmosphere between them as if they were sharing one diastole
and systole in existence that may come briefly between people who have been living together a long time, and disappears, impossible to hold on to or recapture by any intention or will. This bubble of existence was trapped within the car's isolation—airconditioning, locked doors and closed windows—from the landscape they could see: that landscape was not innocent. There were shootings along the highways and roads every day, attacks like the one that had killed Oupa, shots in the cross-fire between rival political groups, ambushes by gangs representing themselves as revolutionaries. Vera had said to Ben, when final dates for the boy's arrival were being discussed, that Ivan should be told of the risks his son would be subject to, the ordinary risks of every-day in this country, this time. Ben was ashamed of distrust of her motives. To him it was unthinkable that Vera, who had chosen him so openly, could ever be devious, but he had written soberly to Ivan, a constriction in his fingers at the idea that this might mean the boy would not be sent, after all. Although Ivan must have known that, unlike any risks he admonished his mother not to put his son to by finding him employment in her circles, these risks were not ones that anyone could arrange to avoid, he replied he was sure his parents would take good care of the boy.
I only hope there won't be a last minute objection from his mother because she hears something … But then she never did take much interest in what was going on in the world.
Whatever Vera's motives had been, at this reply she was concerned that Ben (his dark head bent, considering) might not become aware of how determined Ivan was to get rid of the boy. She somehow owed Bennet his illusions—thought of him as Bennet again, when seeking to honour this debt.

As they walked from the parking ground to the airport
terminal he laughed jerkily with nerves and remarked it was a pity it was too early for a drink.

—Well, why not? Let's have one anyway. D'you think the bar'll be open? Yes!—what d'you feel like?— She laughed with him while they suggested to one another what it was appropriate to drink at eleven in the morning ‘like a couple of alkies'. —Gin and tonic?— —No, that'll make me have to go and pee just as the plane lands.— —Sherry, brown sherry, when I was a young girl that was regarded as a suitably mild tipple and I don't remember it being diuretic.—

No prancing, singing, ululating surge pressing to the barriers for the appearance of these tour groups arriving and travellers returning from sightseeing holidays and business trips instead of exile. No banners; travel agents listlessly holding cards with the names of Japanese, Germans, French and Taiwanese they had come to escort to their hotels. No children conceived in strange lands, tossed home from hands to hands; only small Indian boys dwarfed in men's miniature suits and little white girls wearing the duplicate of their mothers' flowered tights, chasing about families patient as cattle, chewing their cud-gum while waiting to greet grandfathers back from Mecca and fathers back from business deals on the other hemisphere. Ben and Vera's passenger came out among the first to emerge. There he was, guiding a trolley unhurriedly while others urged past him, a tall boy with a bronze ponytail switching as he casually looked around. Ben did not move, taking in this first moment, first sight, in emotion. It was Vera who rose on the balls of her feet to wave and smile. Now the boy steered, careening the trolley, for them. They had seen him only less than a year before, in London, he couldn't have changed much, the same—it seemed to Vera—outdated Sixties style, the ear-ring, the long hair; apparently
the hippies had retreated sufficiently far in history to inspire a revival of the way they looked even if their flowered path had become strewn everywhere with guns, their potsmoking dreams had become Mafia drug cartels, and their sexual freedom had been ended, more horribly than any conventional taboos ever could have decreed, by a fatal disease. Only his jaw had changed. Facing them now, he had the squared angle from the joint beneath the ear of a handsome adult male, it was only with his back turned that, ponytail curling on his shoulders, he could have been mistaken for a girl. When they embraced there was the snag of a night's beard on his skin.

He leaned forward from the back seat of the car chattering in a London accent, well-educated but slightly Cockney, telling them of the enormously fat man who had overflowed the armrest in the plane, and how in the middle of the night he'd chatted up the cabin attendant, not the steward who'd said he couldn't do anything about it but the girl, to find him another place— and bumped up to business class it was, too! With his air of zest and confidence it seemed he was arriving on holiday. He had never been in his father's home country before; the woman beside him in business class was going all over the show, Kruger Park, Okavango, the Cape—he was certainly looking forward to getting around a bit. The mood prevailed among the three of them while he was shown his room and Ben opened a bottle of champagne before the special dinner Vera had prepared.

After dinner there was the first of the awkward hours that were to follow each night in the next weeks. Vera customarily went to her private place, the enclosed stoep which was her study, in the evening, and Ben read in the living-room. Although the young man had just spent thirteen hours in a plane he was not tired, he would never be tired at night, he wandered about the living-room looking at books and pictures, picking up newspapers
and the art journals Ben subscribed to, the Foundation's pamphlets and offprints of articles about land laws and removals that overflowed from Vera's study; he walked out into the night and rounded the limits of the garden. Vera at the living-room window saw him standing at the gate before the streetlights webbed in trees, the blur of an all-night neon sunset burning, away over the city, with the stillness of one listening to the turbines of life sounding distantly: a captured animal pacing its new enclosure, seeing and hearing an unknown freedom, out there.

Kruger, the Okavango, the Cape. —Of course we'll do some travelling together—naturally—but first I have to find you some sort of work. Have to be a responsible grandfather … What would you like to do? I can't promise to come up with it exactly, but I'm prepared to try.—

—D'you notice how the people we meet think I'm your son—you don't look much like my grandfather, Ben!—

Vera broke in with a cry. —And me? I suppose I certainly look like a grandmother!—

—Well, do you dye his hair for him? How come it's still black?—

This kind of light sparring was the initial communication between Vera and the boy, Adam. —It's always been black, black, never changed. Just as it was when I first saw him.— The boy doesn't ask where that was, the youth of someone who is a grandmother is something unimaginable. But her remark succeeds in bringing a smile to Ben. —There are white ones if you look closely enough.—

—What'd I like to do? Now what would I like to do? Vera? Ben? People are always telling me what I ought to do, I'm not
used to these big decisions.— The three were sitting in the garden; he was at the age when he could sprawl in the sun for hours, perhaps just growing, completing the physical transition to adulthood, his penis secretly stirring under the warmth.

—That's why I'm asking.—

—But I really don't know.— Useless to tell them, hitch the road to Kruger, the Okavango, the Cape; even she, who was holding him in a look as if she knew, smiling with a quirk to the side of her mouth, would not let him go. She might have: but she wanted to please her husband. He had been quick to see that his own presence in this house was some sort of gift to his grandfather, she didn't really want this grandson there. Yet he'd taken a liking to her; their sparring was an admission that she liked him, too, while both were aware he was not welcome. —Maybe I could do something at Vera's offices, what she tells about the place sounds quite interesting. I'd meet people.—

—That's out.—

He looked from Ben to Vera. She stirred in don't-ask-me amusement.

—Ivan specifically didn't want that.—

—Ben, surely Ivan's told him.—

—No I swear to you! He told me nothing.—

—Because I got shot in the leg. He thinks anything connected with the Foundation's likely to put you in danger.—

—What crap! I could be blown up by an IRA bomb in London, couldn't I?—

—The incidence isn't quite the same. Vera escaped with her life. Living here is dangerous, even this garden, this house, if people come to rob they shoot or knife as well, if you walk up the wrong street and there's a demonstration on, you can get tear-gassed or shot; you'll learn all about this, why it is like that—

—I'm streetwise.—

—No, much more than streetwise—you have to be. You have to accept there are risks you can't do anything much about. Certain aspects of Vera's work simply add a few more. Ivan wants to avoid them.—

—Well, anything. Anything. It's not meant to be a career for life, is it?— He hid in sulks his irritation with his father, with both of them.

—All the same— Ben paused, to reject the too emotional ‘unhappy'. —I don't want you to be bored.—

He didn't answer, sat there sucking at the hollow inside his lower lip. He knew they wanted him to get up and go into the house so that they could discuss him. He didn't move. Vera rose with a leisureliness that challenged him, touching a plant, wiping greenfly off its buds as she left.

—See you later.— Ben followed.

In the bedroom she stood by while he changed into jeans and running shoes. Ben had always liked to run when something was troubling him; a good household remedy. Each has his or her own. Standing in underpants taking the jeans from the generous wall-cupboards the parents of her first husband had fitted, he still had beautiful, strong legs, the ankles and knees perfectly articulated, the thighs—so important if a man is to be a good lover—frontally curved with muscle under smooth black hair. She regarded him as if he were a statue; one of the works of limbs and torsos he used to sculpt.