Disgrace Read online

Is Ettinger right? If he had had a gun, would he have saved Lucy? He doubts it. If he had had a gun, he would probably be dead now, he and Lucy both.

  His hands, he notices, are trembling ever so lightly. Lucy has her arms folded across her breasts. Is that because she is trembling too?

  He was expecting Ettinger to take them to the police station. But, it turns out, Lucy has told him to drive to the hospital.

  ‘For my sake or for yours?’ he asks her.

  ‘For yours.’

  ‘Won’t the police want to see me too?’

  ‘There is nothing you can tell them that I can’t,’ she replies. ‘Or is there?’

  At the hospital she strides ahead through the door marked CASUALTIES, fills out the form for him, seats him in the waiting room. She is all strength, all purposefulness, whereas the trembling seems to have spread to his whole body.

  ‘If they discharge you, wait here,’ she instructs him. ‘I will be back to fetch you.’

  ‘What about yourself?’

  She shrugs. If she is trembling, she shows no sign of it.

  He finds a seat between two hefty girls who might be sisters, one of them holding a moaning child, and a man with bloody wadding over his hand. He is twelfth in line. The clock on the wall says 5.45. He closes his good eye and slips into a swoon in which the two sisters continue to whisper together, chuchotantes. When he opens his eye the clock still says 5.45. Is it broken? No: the minute hand jerks and comes to rest on 5.46.

  Two hours pass before a nurse calls him, and there is more waiting before his turn comes to see the sole doctor on duty, a young Indian woman.

  The burns on his scalp are not serious, she says, though he must be wary of infection. She spends more time on his eye. The upper and lower lids are stuck together; separating them proves extraordinarily painful.

  ‘You are lucky,’ she comments after the examination. ‘There is no damage to the eye itself. If they had used petrol it would be a different story.’

  He emerges with his head dressed and bandaged, his eye covered, an ice-pack strapped to his wrist. In the waiting-room he is surprised to find Bill Shaw. Bill, who is a head shorter than he, grips him by the shoulders. ‘Shocking, absolutely shocking,’ he says. ‘Lucy is over at our place. She was going to fetch you herself but Bev wouldn’t hear of it. How are you?’

  ‘I’m all right. Light burns, nothing serious. I’m sorry we’ve ruined your evening.’

  ‘Nonsense!’ says Bill Shaw. ‘What else are friends for? You would have done the same.’

  Spoken without irony, the words stay with him and will not go away. Bill Shaw believes that if he, Bill Shaw, had been hit over the head and set on fire, then he, David Lurie, would have driven to the hospital and sat waiting, without so much as a newspaper to read, to fetch him home. Bill Shaw believes that, because he and David Lurie once had a cup of tea together, David Lurie is his friend, and the two of them have obligations towards each other. Is Bill Shaw wrong or right? Has Bill Shaw, who was born in Hankey, not two hundred kilometres away, and works in a hardware shop, seen so little of the world that he does not know there are men who do not readily make friends, whose attitude toward friendships between men is corroded with scepticism? Modern English friend from Old English freond, from freon, to love. Does the drinking of tea seal a love-bond, in the eyes of Bill Shaw? Yet but for Bill and Bev Shaw, but for old Ettinger, but for bonds of some kind, where would he be now? On the ruined farm with the broken telephone amid the dead dogs.

  ‘A shocking business,’ says Bill Shaw again in the car. ‘Atrocious. It’s bad enough when you read about it in the paper, but when it happens to someone you know’ – he shakes his head – ‘that really brings it home to you. It’s like being in a war all over again.’

  He does not bother to reply. The day is not dead yet but living. War, atrocity: every word with which one tries to wrap up this day, the day swallows down its black throat.

  Bev Shaw meets them at the door. Lucy has taken a sedative, she announces, and is lying down; best not to disturb her.

  ‘Has she been to the police?’

  ‘Yes, there’s a bulletin out for your car.’

  ‘And she has seen a doctor?’

  ‘All attended to. How about you? Lucy says you were badly burned.’

  ‘I have burns, but they are not as bad as they look.’

  ‘Then you should eat and get some rest.’

  ‘I’m not hungry.’

  She runs water for him in their big, old-fashioned, cast-iron bath. He stretches out his pale length in the steaming water and tries to relax. But when it is time to get out, he slips and almost falls: he is as weak as a baby, and lightheaded too. He has to call Bill Shaw and suffer the ignominy of being helped out of the bath, helped to dry himself, helped into borrowed pyjamas. Later he hears Bill and Bev talking in low voices, and knows it is he they are talking about.

  He has come away from the hospital with a tube of painkillers, a packet of burn dressings, and a little aluminium gadget to prop his head on. Bev Shaw settles him on a sofa that smells of cats; with surprising ease he falls asleep. In the middle of the night he awakes in a state of the utmost clarity. He has had a vision: Lucy has spoken to him; her words – ‘Come to me, save me!’ – still echo in his ears. In the vision she stands, hands outstretched, wet hair combed back, in a field of white light.

  He gets up, stumbles against a chair, sends it flying. A light goes on and Bev Shaw is before him in her nightdress. ‘I have to speak to Lucy,’ he mumbles: his mouth is dry, his tongue thick.

  The door to Lucy’s room opens. Lucy is not at all as in the vision. Her face is puffy with sleep, she is tying the belt of a dressing-gown that is clearly not hers.

  ‘I’m sorry, I had a dream,’ he says. The word vision is suddenly too old-fashioned, too queer. ‘I thought you were calling me.’

  Lucy shakes her head. ‘I wasn’t. Go to sleep now.’

  She is right, of course. It is three in the morning. But he cannot fail to notice that for the second time in a day she has spoken to him as if to a child – a child or an old man.

  He tries to get back to sleep but cannot. It must be an effect of the pills, he tells himself: not a vision, not even a dream, just a chemical hallucination. Nevertheless, the figure of the woman in the field of light stays before him. ‘Save me!’ cries his daughter, her words clear, ringing, immediate. Is it possible that Lucy’s soul did indeed leave her body and come to him? May people who do not believe in souls yet have them, and may their souls lead an independent life?

  Hours yet before sunrise. His wrist aches, his eyes burn, his scalp is sore and irritable. Cautiously he switches on the lamp and gets up. With a blanket wrapped around him he pushes open Lucy’s door and enters. There is a chair by the bedside; he sits down. His senses tell him she is awake.

  What is he doing? He is watching over his little girl, guarding her from harm, warding off the bad spirits. After a long while he feels her begin to relax. A soft pop as her lips separate, and the gentlest of snores.

  It is morning. Bev Shaw serves him a breakfast of cornflakes and tea, then disappears into Lucy’s room.

  ‘How is she?’ he asks when she comes back.

  Bev Shaw responds only with a terse shake of the head. Not your business, she seems to be saying. Menstruation, childbirth, violation and its aftermath: blood-matters; a woman’s burden, women’s preserve.

  Not for the first time, he wonders whether women would not be happier living in communities of women, accepting visits from men only when they choose. Perhaps he is wrong to think of Lucy as homosexual. Perhaps she simply prefers female company. Or perhaps that is all that lesbians are: women who have no need of men.

  No wonder they are so vehement against rape, she and Helen. Rape, god of chaos and mixture, violator of seclusions. Raping a lesbian worse than raping a virgin: more of a blow. Did they know what they were up to, those men? Had the word got around?

  At nine o’clock, after Bil
l Shaw has gone off to work, he taps on Lucy’s door. She is lying with her face turned to the wall. He sits down beside her, touches her cheek. It is wet with tears.

  ‘This is not an easy thing to talk about,’ he says, ‘but have you seen a doctor?’

  She sits up and blows her nose. ‘I saw my GP last night.’

  ‘And is he taking care of all eventualities?’

  ‘She,’ she says. ‘She, not he. No’ – and now there is a crack of anger in her voice – ‘how can she? How can a doctor take care of all eventualities? Have some sense!’

  He gets up. If she chooses to be irritable, then he can be irritable too. ‘I’m sorry I asked,’ he says. ‘What are our plans for today?’

  ‘Our plans? To go back to the farm and clean up.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Then to go on as before.’

  ‘On the farm?’

  ‘Of course. On the farm.’

  ‘Be sensible, Lucy. Things have changed. We can’t just pick up where we left off.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because it’s not a good idea. Because it’s not safe.’

  ‘It was never safe, and it’s not an idea, good or bad. I’m not going back for the sake of an idea. I’m just going back.’

  Sitting up in her borrowed nightdress, she confronts him, neck stiff, eyes glittering. Not her father’s little girl, not any longer.

  THIRTEEN

  BEFORE THEY SET off he needs to have his dressings changed. In the cramped little bathroom Bev Shaw unwinds the bandages. The eyelid is still closed and blisters have risen on his scalp, but the damage is not as bad as it could have been. The most painful part is the flange of his right ear: it is, as the young doctor put it, the only part of him that actually caught fire.

  With a sterile solution Bev washes the exposed pink underskin of the scalp, then, using tweezers, lays the oily yellow dressing over it. Delicately she anoints the folds of his eyelid and his ear. She does not speak while she works. He recalls the goat in the clinic, wonders whether, submitting to her hands, it felt the same peacefulness.

  ‘There,’ she says at last, standing back.

  He inspects the image in the mirror, with its neat white cap and blanked-out eye. ‘Shipshape,’ he remarks, but thinks: Like a mummy.

  He tries again to raise the subject of the rape. ‘Lucy says she saw her GP last night.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘There’s the risk of pregnancy,’ he presses on. ‘There’s the risk of venereal infection. There’s the risk of HIV. Shouldn’t she see a gynaecologist as well?’

  Bev Shaw shifts uncomfortably. ‘You must ask Lucy yourself.’

  ‘I have asked. I can’t get sense from her.’

  ‘Ask again.’

  It is past eleven, but Lucy shows no sign of emerging. Aimlessly he roams about the garden. A grey mood is settling on him. It is not just that he does not know what to do with himself. The events of yesterday have shocked him to the depths. The trembling, the weakness are only the first and most superficial signs of that shock. He has a sense that, inside him, a vital organ has been bruised, abused – perhaps even his heart. For the first time he has a taste of what it will be like to be an old man, tired to the bone, without hopes, without desires, indifferent to the future. Slumped on a plastic chair amid the stench of chicken feathers and rotting apples, he feels his interest in the world draining from him drop by drop. It may take weeks, it may take months before he is bled dry, but he is bleeding. When that is finished, he will be like a fly-casing in a spiderweb, brittle to the touch, lighter than rice-chaff, ready to float away.

  He cannot expect help from Lucy. Patiently, silently, Lucy must work her own way back from the darkness to the light. Until she is herself again, the onus is on him to manage their daily life. But it has come too suddenly. It is a burden he is not ready for: the farm, the garden, the kennels. Lucy’s future, his future, the future of the land as a whole – it is all a matter of indifference, he wants to say; let it all go to the dogs, I do not care. As for the men who visited them, he wishes them harm, wherever they may be, but otherwise does not want to think about them.

  Just an after-effect, he tells himself, an after-effect of the invasion. In a while the organism will repair itself, and I, the ghost within it, will be my old self again. But the truth, he knows, is otherwise. His pleasure in living has been snuffed out. Like a leaf on a stream, like a puffball on a breeze, he has begun to float toward his end. He sees it quite clearly, and it fills him with (the word will not go away) despair. The blood of life is leaving his body and despair is taking its place, despair that is like a gas, odourless, tasteless, without nourishment. You breathe it in, your limbs relax, you cease to care, even at the moment when the steel touches your throat.

  There is a ring at the doorbell: two young policemen in spruce new uniforms, ready to begin their investigations. Lucy emerges from her room looking haggard, wearing the same clothes as yesterday. She refuses breakfast. With the police following behind in their van, Bev drives them out to the farm.

  The corpses of the dogs lie in the cage where they fell. The bulldog Katy is still around: they catch a glimpse of her skulking near the stable, keeping her distance. Of Petrus there is no sign.

  Indoors, the two policemen take off their caps, tuck them under their arms. He stands back, leaves it to Lucy to take them through the story she has elected to tell. They listen respectfully, taking down her every word, the pen darting nervously across the pages of the notebook. They are of her generation, but edgy of her nevertheless, as if she were a creature polluted and her pollution could leap across to them, soil them.

  There were three men, she recites, or two men and a boy. They tricked their way into the house, took (she lists the items) money, clothes, a television set, a CD player, a rifle with ammunition. When her father resisted, they assaulted him, poured spirits over him, tried to set him on fire. Then they shot the dogs and drove off in his car. She describes the men and what they were wearing; she describes the car.

  All the while she speaks, Lucy looks steadily at him, as though drawing strength from him, or else daring him to contradict her. When one of the officers asks, ‘How long did the whole incident take?’ she says, ‘Twenty minutes, thirty minutes.’ An untruth, as he knows, as she knows. It took much longer. How much longer? As much longer as the men needed to finish off their business with the lady of the house.

  Nevertheless he does not interrupt. A matter of indifference: he barely listens as Lucy goes through her story. Words are beginning to take shape that have been hovering since last night at the edges of memory. Two old ladies locked in the lavatory / They were there from Monday to Saturday / Nobody knew they were there. Locked in the lavatory while his daughter was used. A chant from his childhood come back to point a jeering finger. Oh dear, what can the matter be? Lucy’s secret; his disgrace.

  Cautiously the policemen move through the house, inspecting. No blood, no overturned furniture. The mess in the kitchen has been cleaned up (by Lucy? when?). Behind the lavatory door, two spent matchsticks, which they do not even notice.

  In Lucy’s room the double bed is stripped bare. The scene of the crime, he thinks to himself; and, as if reading the thought, the policemen avert their eyes, pass on.

  A quiet house on a winter morning, no more, no less.

  ‘A detective will come and take fingerprints,’ they say as they leave. ‘Try not to touch things. If you remember anything else they took, give us a call at the station.’

  Barely have they departed when the telephone repairmen arrive, then old Ettinger. Of the absent Petrus, Ettinger remarks darkly, ‘Not one of them you can trust.’ He will send a boy, he says, to fix the kombi.

  In the past he has seen Lucy fly into a rage at the use of the word boy. Now she does not react.

  He walks Ettinger to the door.

  ‘Poor Lucy,’ remarks Ettinger. ‘It must have been bad for her. Still, it could have been worse.’

  �
��Indeed? How?’

  ‘They could have taken her away with them.’

  That brings him up short. No fool, Ettinger.

  At last he and Lucy are alone. ‘I will bury the dogs if you show me where,’ he offers. ‘What are you going to tell the owners?’

  ‘I’ll tell them the truth.’

  ‘Will your insurance cover it?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know whether insurance policies cover massacres. I will have to find out.’

  A pause. ‘Why aren’t you telling the whole story, Lucy?’

  ‘I have told the whole story. The whole story is what I have told.’

  He shakes his head dubiously. ‘I am sure you have your reasons, but in a wider context are you sure this is the best course?’

  She does not reply, and he does not press her, for the moment. But his thoughts go to the three intruders, the three invaders, men he will probably never lay eyes on again, yet forever part of his life now, and of his daughter’s. The men will watch the newspapers, listen to the gossip. They will read that they are being sought for robbery and assault and nothing else. It will dawn on them that over the body of the woman silence is being drawn like a blanket. Too ashamed, they will say to each other, too ashamed to tell, and they will chuckle luxuriously, recollecting their exploit. Is Lucy prepared to concede them that victory?

  He digs the hole where Lucy tells him, close to the boundary line. A grave for six full-grown dogs: even in the recently ploughed earth it takes him the best part of an hour, and by the time he has finished his back is sore, his arms are sore, his wrist aches again. He trundles the corpses over in a wheelbarrow. The dog with the hole in its throat still bares its bloody teeth. Like shooting fish in a barrel, he thinks. Contemptible, yet exhilarating, probably, in a country where dogs are bred to snarl at the mere smell of a black man. A satisfying afternoon’s work, heady, like all revenge. One by one he tumbles the dogs into the hole, then fills it in.

  He returns to find Lucy installing a camp-bed in the musty little pantry that she uses for storage.