The Conservationist (24 page)

He put down the cup. He was not sitting - no chairs in a place like that - but he stood away from the ledge, the pillar, he took a step, drawn up, as if he rose from a table.

She had slid round and off her stool in one easy movement and was coming to him.

— Hul-
lo
. We haven’t seen you for such a long time. Mummy was saying only yesterday. And someone said you were in Japan or Brazil or somewhere. —

— No. Not at the moment. As you see —

They laughed, and without meaning to he actually opened his hands as if to display - one of the half-dozen well-cut summer suits, the edges of the trousers giving him away by just a hairline of grass-stained wet where they hung at the right length over his shoes.

— What’re you doing here? - So early, in our coffee bar, the smile suggested, not unwelcomingly.

-Thirsty. And what about you? Why aren’t you at school? Or am I being insulting - you’ve left school, that’s it? You’re a lady of leisure. -

— Oh ho. Am I! Slaving away. I’m at art school. I have to get up at quarter-to-six to catch the bus every morning. -

— Why doesn’t Dad buy you a car? —

— I know. It’s mean. — She was laughing as if this were the wittiest conversation of her life.

— I’ll have to talk to him about that. —

— I just wish you would. You tell him. -

-A nice little sports car. What would you like? A Jag? A Triumph? Something with wire wheels? —

She pulled a face that made white dents in her firm pink-brown flesh. — I’ll take
any
thing. Any old jalopy. And what’s Terry doing? I suppose he’s got a car, lucky thing. -

— Not so lucky. Writing matric at the moment. Still incarcerated at school. -

- Good. Good - she said, vaguely.

There was a pause; the espresso machine made a gargling, hawking racket at which he raised his eyebrows and she laughed again, the
habituée
.

— But this coffee’s wonderful. My second round. Will you have one with me? —

— I know. It’s great. I’ve just got mine. Wait I’ll fetch it. — With a turn of the long waist, she was off and back again, pushing through her friends or at least contemporaries. He had guarded the ledge against the intrusion of anyone else who might approach with wobbling cup. The two of them leant over their coffee a moment, breathing it in. — You don’t smoke, do you? I don’t have to incur parental wrath by offering you one of these? —

She shook her head. — You’ve always smoked that kind. I used to know you’d come when I smelt that smell in the house. —

He blew away the cloud that in the close atmosphere made a curly nimbus round her hair. He was obliged to ask: — And how’s your mother? I’ve been away such a lot —

— Oh fine. We had a bit of a hassle over my flunking out before matric. You can’t imagine. Dad was all right but she was difficult. She wanted me to go to a finishing school in Switzerland ... no
thanks
—

- If you go to Switzerland it’ll be to ski. —

- Exactly. —

— You’re enjoying this art school of yours? Have you any talent? —

— I don’t know. I don’t suppose I’ll ever do anything inspired. But it’s fun. -

— Specially the part that’s spent in places like this, mmh? —

- If I’d still been in that bloody school, do you know where I’d be now? At prayers! —

— So it’s gossip and romances and slipping off to drink espresso and go to the pictures? —

— Of course. You know it all! —

— Lucky thing. —

She smiled debunkingly at his use of her idiom. - What stops you? You can just walk out of your office and go to a movie if you feel like it? Why not? Daddy always groans as if he were in chains in that big plush office of his - I think you people make it all up. Why can’t you just say, I’m going to a movie this afternoon? If you feel like it? —

— Will you play hookey with me? What about something called
Trinity — Trinity Was Here —

— Oh you mean
Trinity Is Still My Name —

— I hear it’s a good blood-and-thunder Western –

— I’ve seen it. Not bad. —

— How many cinemas have you been to this week, mmh? —

She lowered her voice to her mother’s pitch. — I don’t think there’s a show in town I haven’t seen. Isn’t that awful. And some are such trash. It’s just a game, to us. We’ll get sick of it in time. I suppose so. — You don’t really feel like it, or you would just walk out. —

— That’s so. —

— There’re other things though, I mean that you really want to do, perhaps ...? —

— Sometimes. —

A thin blonde with hunched shoulders attracted her attention and pointed at a huge wristwatch.

She was still so young she did not know how to take leave. She hitched her bag like a navvy. — Well, are we going to see you and Terry at Plettenberg Bay? We’re going down next week — Daddy’ll follow, he’s got a meeting or something. —

— Terry’s off to America to see his mum. —

— But you? —

He put money down beside the cup and the three walked out together. They had to make their way through people entering, jostling; she didn’t introduce her friend, didn’t remember she had had no answer. — Fine. I’ll tell Mummy —

His smiling gesture of correction, protest, uncommitted denial she - already a few yards off, accustomed to the easy uncertainty of her own plans — took laughing, miming the business of not having quite heard or understood. — What?
What
? You’ll be around, then — okay — lovely —

The newspaper that was placed folded on his desk each morning usually went straight into the basket. Today he had not already read it in bed in his flat. Iron ore and manganese were steady; copper down a few points. He started near the back, at the financial pages, and worked his way to the front, where there was a report of yet another scandal in the business world - this time a big construction firm in trouble. No one he knew personally seemed directly involved, but he made a note to speak to his broker about some stock he held in a company subsidiary to the firm. He had bought because he’d been tipped off the company was in line for government contracts for the Sishen-Saldanha railway, if that ever came to anything.

He had lunch with someone out from Bethlehem Steel and an old friend, now busy negotiating royalties for Platinum Holdings with the native chiefs in whose Bantustan the mine was, on the one hand, and the General Motors people who wanted the platinum for anti-pollution exhaust devices, on the other. Quite a story.

They had scarcely parted - he was hardly at his desk - when the friend he had left phoned to say that someone with whom they’d both been associated for years had just been found gassed in his car near the Country Club. It was the girl’s father. He was chairman of a bank, an investment trust, and connected with half a dozen other concerns, including perhaps (even those who knew him best would not be familiar with all his interests) the bankrupt construction company.

Thus it is with black men; they did not come into being when it was said, ‘There are no Amatongo.’ They came into being when it was already said, ‘There are Amatongo.’ But we do not know why the man which first came into being said, ‘There are Amatongo.’

... since the white men came and the missionaries, we have heard it said that there is God.

It’s me.

Drawn up, he has been seized, he is going to be confronted, at last, at last. Here it is. This is it. It is true that he did not recognize her because he doesn’t know that he has been expecting anyone - anything. Yet it’s as if he must be eternally waiting, eternally expecting, eter illy dreading. The excitation is suffocating; men have died in the act.

No one’ll even remember where you’re buried.

He is not the sort of person given to morbid reconstruction of how it must be when these people are waiting for the carbon monoxide to take effect. Before you actually pass out or however it comes: do they arrange themselves head in hands, registering despair etc. Just keep eyes fixed on the instrument panel: speedometer, oil gauge, engine heat. Grit in the mouth, face-down.

No one’ll even remember where

Stood up, stood back - or was it a step forward he took, dreadfully - good god, one immigrant girl in a city full of girls, she can hardly make herself understood, she is there somewhere all the time. Or you - it would be typical of you to appear just like that, stirring up
trouble
, enjoying the sensation: They’ve graciously allowed me back in again, of course they’re following me everywhere –

It’s me: don’t you know me? (Her mother would have corrected the grammar, she takes care not to speak like a colonial.) Don’t you know me? Even Japan isn’t far enough, even getting away to your own four hundred acres, disappearing in the grass (almost could, now in certain places) isn’t far enough.

He gave a name to what was there only when he saw the wide belt that pressed down where that long waist stemmed or ended at the ledge of hip-bone (couldn’t call those hips). More medieval cuirass or Elizabethan stomacher than what one understands by a woman’s belt. The great round medallion dipped in front, slightly convex to follow exactly and flatly the slight curve where there would be a belly if she had one. He admired the belt; oh yes, somebody had just brought it back from Paris, mummy or daddy, everyone in Paris was wearing them. It’s a suggestive piece of rubbishy embellishment behind which her body approaches (across the coffee bar) and is guarded, she perhaps knows this. As she leans over the pun-gence of the coffee, elbows on the ledge (tall, the top of her head would come up to his eyes) the medallion holds her under there like a cupped hand. Don’t you recognize

What a bloody fool, burn to remember how you rose to it, think you’d never seen a woman before. If it’d been all the women ever had, suddenly there in one body, as it seems to be with the first one when you finally get the door open and at last, at last - this little schoolgirl. If it were some sort of seizure or attack for which one goes to the doctor. Or makes up one’s mind to ignore. Except for the excessive smoking, there’s been nothing wrong.

The degrees of hotness, the sweetness, and the bitter consistency of the coffee is something he is precisely aware of; he’s not avuncular, he’s never had any special way of talking to young people because there’s not much to say to them, anyway, but while he chides her easily, nice kid, about her lazy life and she pretends to be complaining to her father’s friend about not having a car, she too is feeling some precise process taking place, as specifically as the progress of some hot sweet liquid tracing a passage of the body of which one is normally not consciously aware. He’s sure of it.

Thank God I have no daughters.

His gullet retains the burning trail. Like a kind of heartburn, but recalled at will. Some of them take poison. A dose of cyanide, it’s quicker. But that’s for spies and brave revolutionaries - ay? Not the tycoon’s way. Cyanide is the stuff that is used in the most effective and cheapest process for extracting gold from the auriferous reef. It is what saved the industry in the early 1900s. It is what makes yellow the waste that is piled up in giant sandcastles and crenellated geometrically-stepped hills where the road first leaves the city. The freeway gives a balcony view of them and of the stumped and straggling eucalyptus plantations between which used to provide timber for these old mines. He drives past so often, approaching from this side on the way out, and that on the way back, that he doesn’t see them any more than he sees people thumbing for lifts.

He has escaped his colleague’s funeral by sending, in addition to one of his junior directors to represent him, and a large donation in lieu of wreath to the black charity appointed by the widow, a huge bouquet to convey his sympathy to mother and daughter. They are all such old friends. The only way to get out of it was to be unavailable - most unfortunately out of town on business. Out of the country. A sudden call to Japan. Australia. They won’t know the difference.

He and a few other colleagues may have to set up some kind of fund for the two women if it turns out that there is nothing left But it will take months for that financial tangle to be sorted out.

There is always an autopsy in a case like this, and by the time - as the front page of the newspaper puts it - the verdict of suicide and no foul play suspected is confirmed medically, it is Thursday before the funeral is fixed, and he invariably spends most of the weekend on the farm anyway. Just as well be Melbourne. No one will ever know. She stood silently with her mother and sister in line at customs waiting only to declare the plant tied up in newspaper and plastic.

A narrow escape.

Probably they will still go to Plettenberg Bay, after all they have that nice house there, and friends will rally round and persuade them to get away; for the girl’s sake, if nothing else, the women friends will urge: she’s so young, life must go on. (And the widow herself not old; soon they will be looking for a suitable partner for her at dinners.)
You
could at least write the girl a line from your beloved mother’s apartment in New York - after all, you grew up together. But there’s no contact; the only person who ever mentions your name is the native on the farm. Every time I go there since the schools closed for the Christmas holidays: Terry he’s not coming to help us? Terry he’s not in Jo’burg? Why Terry he isn’t here? —

Let the telephone recording device answer when the telephone rings in the flat. We phoned repeatedly over the holidays but you were just
never
home. We’d like to have seen something of you - Flung down hidden in the grasses, no one would know there is anyone lying there. Walls of soft silvery-beige lean over him. The grasses are just breaking into their kind of fruition. They are tipped with water-colour brushes, feathers, and beaded with fine-whiskered seeds. He is open only to the sky and that huge jet mouthing its roar high up in space couldn’t pick him out any more than a grain of sand can be singled out while flying over the deserts. The reeds have pennants of bladed leaf. They seethe softly. On their thin masts that would bend under the weight of a moth, plush red Bishop birds cling, dandled and danced. He is alone down at the third pasture, so sure to be undisturbed. Alone and not alone. In the heat of the day flies and midges fly into the eyes and nose as if one were a corpse.