Absolution (39 page)

I write a note thanking Clare for the book and flattering her style at the same time that I remain a little confused; the ‘house invasion’, which is of considerable importance at the beginning of the book, is never resolved. But there is also fatigue in its pages, beneath which courses a puzzled anger at the way the world has turned out – more specifically at what our country has become after all the initial hope, the expectation of a society that would transform itself by a collective force of goodwill and selfless love into a model for the way the world might yet be. Instead, Clare seems to say, the country has shown itself to be a cruel microcosm for the way the world really is, the war of all against all, red in tooth and claw, a waking nightmare of exploitation and corruption and hideous beauty that appears doomed never to end or to end in only one possible way. One could be forgiven for reading the book as a particular kind of Afro-pessimism, although I suspect this is not her intention.

But I say none of this in my response and tell her I look forward to seeing her in Stellenbosch in May, and to continuing our conversation. In fact, I don’t need to conduct further interviews. As for the stray lingering question, the occasional need for some local clarification, it could all be done from here, over the phone or by e-mail. The truth is that I long to see her. Searching for her in the text, I flip through the book again, and suddenly see the formal dedication I missed the first time, the pages stuck together:

For my children – those I kept close, and those I denied
.

I feel my throat tighten and surge into my mouth, acid rising. Perhaps, I think, she remembers me after all.

Absolution

As Mark stared at his mother’s reflection in the window, Clare knew that if she stopped before the picture was clear the unresolved story would forever be rumbling around between them, causing trouble. She tore at her piece of bread and then, finding she still had no appetite, put it down on the plate.

‘You were the perfect baby. You almost never cried or fussed. You smiled and laughed and had the biggest eyes of any child I’d ever seen, as though you were desperate to take in everything around you. I thought you were going to be a scientist, because you seemed to have such a natural capacity for observation. That was before we knew you were so short-sighted.’ Before that, she thought, and before they knew about the other problems, the heart murmur that she had always refused to call a defect, the severe asthma that appeared in adolescence – problems that had been blessings of a sort.

Mark grinned in a way that reminded Clare of William, charming and persuasive, and put his fingers to the frames of his glasses. ‘The law is a good antidote, my own pair of binoculars.’

Clare wondered if he knew how little one could see through binoculars – detail of one small object at a distance, but nothing around it or in between: the thing but not the context for the thing.

‘As a baby you looked as though you’d been minted by the gods, or sent from Hollywood central casting. If there were ever a born hero, you appeared to be he.’

‘You’re saying Nora was jealous.’

‘From the earliest days of her marriage she had tried to get herself pregnant. Eventually they did tests and nothing, she confided to my mother, was found to be wrong with her, which
meant the problem was with Stephan – which meant, in those days, no option but childlessness or adoption. And Stephan was wholly against adoption. He said there was no way of knowing what might be lurking in the genes of a stranger’s baby. He feared a racial throwback that would only display the telltale characteristics later in life. So imagine when your aunt’s hated baby sister produced this divine-looking infant! It was the slap Nora had been bracing herself against since the day of Dorothy’s birthday party. It signalled the beginning of total war between us, though for me it felt as if nothing had changed. I had always known that she regarded me as an adversary at best, if not something much less benign. For some, it is possible to be the object of hatred and continue responding with love, or if not with love then at least with indifference. And then there are people like me,’ Clare said, resting her head on one hand. ‘I did not want to hate my sister, truly I didn’t. I wanted to be more virtuous than her, more loving. But I was not good enough. Her hatred fostered my hatred. I lacked the moral maturity to answer evil with love, to be selfless in the best possible way.’

‘You say it was the start of a war, but I can’t imagine what you mean,’ Mark said, turning to look directly at his mother once again. ‘The thing at Dorothy’s party, the cake, I understand how that could affect your relationship as children. But as adults, she must have done something terrible for you to talk about her like this. I didn’t have any idea you hated her.’

‘This, again, is where you fit in, or not just fit, but are the keystone of the whole architecture of what I perceived – for admittedly it is my subjective view – as her plot against me. Do not scoff. Remarkable a child as you might have been, you were not old enough to be aware, certainly not to have any memory of those days. Within a month of your birth Nora was driving into town and dropping by the house on Canigou Avenue completely unannounced, at all hours, accompanied by the driver she and Stephan employed. Often she brought a camera and insisted on
taking pictures of you, her “darlingest” as she put it – not her “darlingest nephew”, but “
her
darlingest” – as if you belonged to her and not to me. At first I was confused, surprised but also hopeful, imagining that she might let go of the old animosities and take a positive role in our lives. I was hopeful, too, that her sudden interest in you might signal a diminishing involvement in the politics of Stephan and his party. If she could drift so far from where she had begun, I thought, there was no telling what might yet become of me. We do not, as young people, know that drift and realignment are not always to be feared. Nora, however, had drifted blindly, putting herself to sea quite happy to embrace whatever port she arrived in first.’

‘But the visits, and the photos of me – have I seen those photos?’

‘I never saw them myself. I imagine they must have been sinister, unrepresentative of the way things were. Because she came unannounced at odd hours, she often found – and eventually I understood that she knew she would find and
expected
to find – the house in some significant disarray. No doubt she hoped to catch you gnawing on a contraband copy of
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
. In those early years of our marriage your father and I lived like bohemians. We had no servants to help us keep the place clean, and I was struggling to write and to look after you and to keep house while your father did little on the domestic front apart from dandle you and coo and pronounce you the most beautiful and intelligent baby that ever was. I accept that he was busy, but it did not make things any easier.’

‘So you never actually saw the photographs. You only assume they were sinister.’

‘I think I have grounds to assume as much. Not long after she started visiting, my parents, who had already moved down to Fish Hoek at that point, phoned to ask if all was well. They wanted to know if your father and I were coping. I said, with not a little shock, that we were certainly coping just fine. They wondered if they could come up for a visit one day. I told them they were
welcome at any time, but reminded them that I was trying to work as well as be the housekeeper and mother. I thought it would end at that.’

‘But the photos – assuming there were any – didn’t end with Granny and Grandpa?’

‘This is the point where I became quite seriously unsettled – frightened even. I think the idea was to lay a certain kind of groundwork with your grandparents. Some weeks after they had phoned, your father’s head of department called him in for a meeting and asked if all was well at home, and made noises about creating the right kind of environment to safeguard a child’s welfare. He mentioned the importance of the moral as well as the physical environment, as if to suggest that in our case both might be in question. Your father assured him everything was perfectly fine at home and the next week we hired our first maid. I’ve forgotten her name – Pamela or Pumla. Your father built a well-camouflaged locker in the loft space above our bedroom and there I hid the risky books and papers, better than I had in the past. In a way Nora did us a favour. When the police did come knocking there was nothing for them to find. We presented an unremarkable bourgeois front that, on the surface, no one could question. We got our act together, thanks in large part to Nora’s harassment.’

‘But you don’t have hard evidence that she said anything against you to anyone. You just assume–’

‘You did not know your aunt, my dear. I must ask you to trust my version.’

‘It seems highly subjective and conjectural. It doesn’t sound as though you’ve anything apart from circumstantial evidence. Did your parents or Dad’s department head mention any photos?’

‘No, but–’

‘So it ended with that.’ Mark sounded as though he had heard more than enough. Clare wondered if he was as belligerent in the courtroom as he was with her. No wonder he was so successful.

‘No, it did not end there. A month after your father had the meeting with his head, a social worker of sorts came to visit me at home. She was unannounced, but everything was in order, clean, tidy, nothing amiss, a true vision of suburban perfection, achieved at great cost, mind you. The woman apologized and left after half an hour of chatting with me, playing with you, and refusing to answer my questions. A week later the police came, explaining that someone had phoned with a tip that we were endangering a child. They found nothing, bid us a rather menacing farewell, and then left us alone.’

‘And you assume it was Nora.’

‘It must have been.’

‘Might it not have been someone with a grudge against Dad, or against you, or even against Grandpa?’

‘I suppose it is possible. But Nora is the most obvious suspect. In any event, when none of these interventions had the desired effect she began trying to visit again, always dropping by at the most inconvenient times. By that point I had no reservations about refusing to let her inside, but I also became terrified that she would never stop until she had what she truly wanted.’

‘Which was what?’

‘Don’t you see? She wanted to dispossess me of my child, to take you from me, and have you as her own. If she couldn’t conceive her own child, she would have the next best thing. I began to understand that if I wanted to keep you, I was going to have to defend you at all costs. I was going to have to get rid of her. I had to make her disappear.’

As the kettle boiled Clare found a jar of instant coffee in the pantry. She had to read the instructions on the label and was uncertain what a teaspoon might be, whether it meant a formal cooking measure as her mother had once used, or an informal utensil of inexact volume that most people used. She assumed the latter and put two rounded teaspoons of the coffee granules in each cup – it was the way Adam took it, though he always
wanted three sugars as well. The water boiled and she poured it, leaving room for milk in one of the cups. Her own coffee she preferred black. She searched the pantry for sugar but could find none, then thought to look in the cupboard next to the stove, but it wasn’t there either. Then she remembered there were canisters on the kitchen counter, and with insulting obviousness there was one marked
SUGAR
next to the kettle itself. She must ask Marie to start labelling cupboards with detailed inventories of their contents. If a library has a catalogue, so should a kitchen.

Finding two coasters in the corner cabinet in the lounge, she set down the cups on the coffee table. Mark was watching the news and had failed to look at her when she entered the room.

‘I hope it’s all right,’ she said, indicating the coffee. ‘I’m rather lost in a kitchen.’

‘Thank you, I’m sure it’s fine.’ He spoke without looking at her, his eyes on the screen. Not bothering to ask if he minded, Clare turned off the television.

‘Can’t you speak to me as though you were my son, and not just my interlocutor?’

Mark sighed, sipped his coffee, and put down the cup with a force that surprised Clare. ‘You’re expecting me to play too many parts, Mother. You seem to want me to be your confessor and judge, as well as your child. Sometimes I wonder if you even want me to be the last man in your life. I can’t be all of these things at once. If it’s a confessor or a judge that you most need right now, then I suppose that’s what I can be. But if you want a child I can’t play that part any more. You didn’t raise us to be warm. Is there more to your confession about Aunt Nora? Are there further horrors you feel you have to tell me?’

‘If you can bring yourself to listen to this old woman, there is yet only a little more, if you will hear it,’ Clare said, her voice brittle and off-key in her own ears.

‘Of course I can, Mother. That isn’t what I meant. I’m tired, and I’m sorry if I sounded brusque. It wasn’t my intention.’

‘What remains of the Nora saga is the exact circumstance of my betrayal, if it is possible to betray one who is already objectively one’s enemy. After her campaign against me–’

‘Such as you saw it.’

‘Fine, my
sense
of her campaign against me, or what felt like her attempt to have me declared an unfit mother – after that there was a change of events in my favour. As you know, Stephan was more than a rising star in the Party, but something like its hoped-for Messiah, and he was appointed to a diplomatic post that took him and Nora to Washington, DC. I cannot express how relieved I was to see them leave the country.
At last
, I thought,
she is out of my life!
Almost a year passed in great peace and then one day I heard from Nora herself that she and Stephan were returning, and would be in Cape Town for only a few nights before moving to Pretoria. Stephan was being promoted to a senior position in the executive, and all signs pointed to him being tipped for elected office, she told me. As you might guess, the prospect of Nora’s return, and of Stephan’s promotion, filled me with dread. I had visions of her doing whatever it took to remove you from my care, and as soon as I hung up the phone began planning for our own emigration, assuming that would be the only way to keep you safe from her.’