No Time Like the Present: A Novel (15 page)

He was free of any ‘taking care’ of him by the one who’d brought him along with her, made at ease by another family accustomed, as in the Suburb, to additions of passing company. She was keeping up with this one’s news and that one’s questions about what she was up to; he caught snatches of her description of the array of conference delegates between gleeful interjections this encouraged. But once she came over—as she would drop in according to her duty to check all going well with the needs at conference sessions—and saw that he was helping himself to ham, pickles, roast beef, store-boxed quiche, and engaged with Jeremy’s account of a weird burglary at his London house where only sports equipment, his golf clubs, tennis racquets, son’s sailing gear had been taken.—Thieves rather specialised according to the pawn shop demand, these days. Tracy suspects an inside job facilitated by the man who comes to clean the windows, the nice chap she makes coffee for as soon as he arrives…—Someone’s son with a single earring and a tattoo like a secondary venous system on the back of his hand (familiar insignia of white students at home, earrings are not discriminatory, but tattoos don’t show up well on black skin) wants to know if there is good deep-sea diving there, South Africa.

South Africa.

He takes the chance to slip out of the company to find quiet where he can use his mobile. A passage past clamorous timpani of utensils and voices in a kitchen and farther on avoiding an open bedroom where a woman was admonishing a child in the special goodnight register, came upon another open door, a small room evidently the nook of someone who had to keep in touch with principals in the city—there were computers, calendars with circled dates under logos of insurance brokers, industrial companies. The call to the Suburb: summoning as if inside him. Jabu’s voice, no distance.—Jabu, hi you can’t imagine where I’m speaking from, darling, an old English farmhouse used as a weekend place, everybody, family African-style almost—but of course no one actually lives here.——Oh lovely. How’d you come to get there——The conference has a break Saturday Sunday, there are excursions, invitations, this’s the family of the director’s Girl Friday, public relations, she has to make arrangements for us all. She invited a couple of us but the other one didn’t show up. For once it isn’t raining in England, but of course I haven’t had a chance to walk around yet, there’re horses, I could go riding if I knew how…tell Gary I’m told the children have a donkey to ride, wouldn’t he love that——I won’t tell him, he’ll be cross because he’s not there with you! Anyway he’s got his pal to sleep over…but Stevie did you see…a farmer’s shot a man he saw on his mealie field, he says he thought it was a baboon—She doesn’t have to say white farmer (who else).—Justice Centre’s taking up proceedings for the man’s family, he was a worker on another farm coming to see a friend.——Oh my God (though since the days of being taken to church dutifully by his father he hasn’t believed there is One) I see only English papers, they wouldn’t be reporting that, too many big horror stories, Congo, Sudan, Iraq. I’ll go to the Embassy next week, must read our papers.—

She’s to be on the Centre’s team?—but as he begins to ask there’s a scuffle on the line and Gary Elias’s boasting—Dad, I came first in the Junior Marathon, we swam we biked we ran three kilometres—then Jabu called Sindiswa to take her turn.

—Weren’t you supposed to be back?—Of course Sindi’s so absorbed in her adolescent life it doesn’t much matter when it was he went away and when he was due home; it’s the beginning of a healthy independency Jabu didn’t remember—not with Baba. She doesn’t get the mobile back, it’s understood they’ll talk again without these interruptions of claims on him.—Love to you all.—and under contesting voices, for Jabu.—Home soon.—

And back in the present, the lively company, two old men in Fair Isle sweaters are arguing about the failure of some investment pending on the stock exchange (there’s nothing rural about that stock) while Jeremy has turned—his wife Tracy’s remarks affectionately, derisively ‘fantasising’—to talk about restocking what’s left of the old farm with a few cattle.—Stick to your horses.—Everyone helps to clear dishes and wine bottles, including the guest brought by the young woman they call Lyn. As goodnights are being noisily exchanged she waylays her brother.—What’s available?—His eyes swerve left to right as he hunches.—It’ll have to be the mill, everyone’s kids are so grown-up these days, they can’t bed down with mama and papa. Rooms chockablock.——Are there blankets and so on?——Well of course. Always. Beds made up. As far as I know.—

The mill. What mill. The purpose of a mill, the idea of a mill as a room for a night. She embraced all round here and there delayed to hear something shielded by the swung blind of her hair, and animated with private intimacies, she called, Come! The summons was to her car, they were to get in and drive to this mill. Only the headlights a monster’s eyes in the dark away from the lit farmhouse, a path crackling across stubble and then the monster’s sight discovering a shelter, small beside a shining—path? Stream. Must be a continuation of what he thought must be hung over by the curve of trees he’d made out in the dusk on arrival. He has no responsibility for anything; pleasurably tired, fed and wined. She’s in charge. The car’s eyes guide to a door, she shoves, it opens and her fingers find the switch, a room comes to life but there isn’t a moment for impression of what’s there, they are bent into the car to retrieve their bundles, she kills the car’s gaze, they bang its door shut and she enters the room for him, with him. She had expected his surprise, his questioning pause, pleasing to them both.

—It’s really a mill? Watermill?—

The bundles are dumped.

—It was; once. Like everything else around this place. No one knows when it was last working. Tomorrow you’ll see the wheel. Pity it’s not yet summer, too bloody cold to skinny-dip. The stream’s so clean, I love to sleep here, good thing there’s no room at the inn.—

It
is
just a room. Camping out: there are two beds as you’d have sleeping bags in a tent.

—But electricity, it surely can’t be coming all the way from the inn.—This is word-sparring fun.

—There’s a generator on, we can have a heater right away. Oh and you don’t have to go out in the dark, that little flap door has a loo behind it.—

—You think of everything. But you didn’t tell me this invitation was going to be an adventure in the wilds of England.—

She pulls an electric heater from under the only other piece of furniture beside beds, a table with a faience flower-patterned basin and matching jug, the kind you see in antique shops. At least she fumbles something: the connection of the heater, and he justifies his skilled male presence.

She emptied her hold-all upside down over a bed. So that’s hers.

He opens the tote bag and looks at what there is to take out. Pyjama shorts. He never wears a top. Perhaps he’ll just doss down as he is. She sweeps an arm in a bow to the flap door, he returns the gesture as she scoops some things from her stash and goes through the flap, there’s the sound of teeth-brushing and a brief rustling pause before she comes out in some sort of bunny-rabbit pyjama suit drawn in round each ankle on bare feet, curling up her toes against the cement floor.—Miracle. There are actually a couple of towels in there.—

In a space where he can hardly turn about himself there are indeed stowed as if in a packing case a toilet bowl, a tank and a shower over a drainage hole, hooked-up towels and a jug half-full of water that as he cups a handful to rinse his brushed teeth doesn’t taste like tap water, he fancies it comes from the mill stream. In his occupancy there’s the rush of the toilet after he’s peed; she evidently hadn’t had the need, hardly one to be shy of the natural, or maybe knowing the mill she’s taken the opportunity up at the house. Women are more private about body functions; they were even in the bush under fire.

She’s not in bed. She’s frustratedly turning over the spread contents of her hold-all.—I lose track of time, here.—He’s come out with his shirt loose over the lower part of him, the inadequate shorts, no fly, just pull up—they aren’t encountering each other at a swimming pool.

—Could kick myself—I’d forgotten way out of my mind I’d promised Professor Jacquard I’d postpone his TV interview.—

—You want to SMS him?—If she’s left her mobile where he saw it in the car, his is in his tote bag.

This Lindsay is someone quick to take charge of herself: she’s let herself down rather than Jacquard. So she’s become another persona. Someone other.—No. No, he’ll be furious woken up what is it midnight, oh bloody hell, so he won’t turn up at the studio there’ll be a big fuss my pal the producer won’t have Jacquard’s mobile number so he can’t reach him in the bus to Stonehenge or whichever tour it is Jacquard’s taken.—

Someone other: in this, the time of here. She lobs the mobile at him, passed on, all in one contiguity it’s back in the tote bag—they are laughing at the dismissal of her conscience and, standing, they confirm this compact, her arms around his shoulders, his arms caught below must go down the slope of her back to her waist. The bunny fleece of cloth suggests a bedtime story, Sindiswa used to feel like this a few years ago. But the bodies of a man and a woman are magnets. She meets the length of his and while they are bending a little back and forward together in the laughter of her release, he feels the rising opportunistic penis. She might pull away. She presses closer. The lips this way and that, caressing, then what is always the real discovery, his tongue in that cave that is the mouth, entry permission gained there to the cave of wild pleasure between the legs.

It was simple. She zipped herself out of the bunny in one movement lifting this foot and that to free herself. He steadied her with one hand and began with the other to free himself of the shirt. He shed shorts last; she held gently, a moment, himself declared there, no foreskin shield. Which bed? Of course she decided, it was the other one, apparently allotted to him, she had not entered hers able to invite him. Before making himself welcome inside her he gave attention to, seemed fascinated by the pink nipples of her breasts, licked round them, took them into his mouth pursed over them, traced their aureoles. She murmured, so you like pink ones (some other lover must have remarked them). His tongue was not for talking at this time.

Who was the appallingly exciting lover, he or she, in a generous rivalry. When she innovated that, he found himself innovating this, unimagined. The invasions of passion were a labyrinth where she took in not just what her body was formed to receive, but also the erotic capacity that had ever been secretly inside him. He was, also; someone other.

They slept almost even as he slowly slipped out of her, their bodies finding a situation each on hipside, facing one another as if the narrow space of the bed was the embrace. Just before first light—must have been, the spring light rises not too late in the northern hemisphere to make up for the long dark winter—he wakened and in the silence caught the sound of the stream. Soon perhaps it reached her, she stirred, her eyes still closed and felt for his presence. Out of sleep they made love again.

She got up first. You can’t say to a stranger, come back to bed, let’s lie a little, the day among others, hasn’t begun. She shook her hands through that flung illumination of hair like a gust of wind.—It’s going to be a beautiful day for you, I’ve arranged it with the sun.—Smiling and bending, knees together in nakedness to gather their discarded clothing, tidying up.

Her neat buttocks and the ride of hips as she went to the shower…a happy gasping, the water must be cold despite the generator.

She came out with the towel secured round her tight under the armpit; nakedness now withdrawn from him.—Boarding school, remember ‘cold showers are good for you’…—Smiling Brrrr…

It’s one among the definitely middle-class experiences she knows they have in common.—Breakfast’s the moveable feast. Everyone just goes to the kitchen and fixes their own, how hungry are you? There used to be a gem that came up from the village her scrambled made with eggs laid by her own hens was fabulous, famous, but that cordon bleu’s on pension now. Only don’t ask for kippers, Tracy or somebody brings them, I can’t stomach the smell—

He wants to go up and give the kiss on the forehead but the mood she’s set makes it unnecessary.

If the sun was shining to order there must have been rain overnight, even after the bracing of the shower the outside world returned to tense him in his meagre shelter of a shirt; but why fuss to go back to his jacket. She, wearing the cap with bobbles that held in brief disguise the waterfall hair, took it for granted they’d take the walk to the house, not the car. They paused as she’s said, for him to see the mill wheel first; the old wheel hanging idle like a vacant glance above the stream it was meant to harness.

—Come let’s go.—She swerved and ran across the stubble for him to catch up with her, so now the chill was another kind of physical exhilaration beside her. In the comfortably scented kitchen—burned toast, coffee—there was only a miauling cat. Someone had already breakfasted and others must still be in bed. She assembled everything, he amusingly contrite that he couldn’t cook.—Don’t suppose you have to.—But it might just as well have been the crisp, playful feminist remark, females usually do the cooking, as a reference to a wife. She talked to the cat (whom she called tomcat) the way she had familiarly addressed the parrot, and the cat took up the conversation as if they long understood one another. The other male at least had the attention of being given tomatoes with instruction to halve for frying.—I have my tiger tabby, I couldn’t live without him and my dog.—As occurred:—You have children?——Two. A boy. A girl of fourteen.—It changes nothing. A pubescent girl, a woman like herself. As if he said this aloud to her.

—A boy? Does he look like you?—But it’s not an enquiry it’s a recognition of how he looks, the conference delegate, in her eyes.

He’s not going to ask—does she have a child, by divorce.

What was between them has nothing to do with anything. No relation to others, private and public commitment, loyalties. He takes the board with the precariously wobbling tomatoes to her pan. Now the kiss-touch just a moment on the forehead, the informality appropriately exchanged by delegates at the end of the Canadian’s night-club party.