Disgrace Read online

  If Pollux insults his daughter again, he will strike him again. Du musst dein Leben ändern!: you must change your life. Well, he is too old to heed, too old to change. Lucy may be able to bend to the tempest; he cannot, not with honour.

  That is why he must listen to Teresa. Teresa may be the last one left who can save him. Teresa is past honour. She pushes out her breasts to the sun; she plays the banjo in front of the servants and does not care if they smirk. She has immortal longings, and sings her longings. She will not be dead.

  He arrives at the clinic just as Bev Shaw is leaving. They embrace, tentative as strangers. Hard to believe they once lay naked in each other’s arms.

  ‘Is this just a visit or are you back for a while?’ she asks.

  ‘I am back for as long as is necessary. But I won’t be staying with Lucy. She and I aren’t hitting it off. I am going to find a room for myself in town.’

  ‘I’m sorry. What is the problem?’

  ‘Between Lucy and myself? Nothing, I hope. Nothing that can’t be fixed. The problem is with the people she lives among. When I am added in, we become too many. Too many in too small a space. Like spiders in a bottle.’

  An image comes to him from the Inferno: the great marsh of Styx, with souls boiling up in it like mushrooms. Vedi l’anime di color cui vinse l’ira. Souls overcome with anger, gnawing at each other. A punishment fitted to the crime.

  ‘You are talking about that boy who has moved in with Petrus. I must say I don’t like the look of him. But as long as Petrus is there, surely Lucy will be all right. Perhaps the time has come, David, for you to stand back and let Lucy work out solutions for herself. Women are adaptable. Lucy is adaptable. And she is young. She lives closer to the ground than you. Than either of us.’

  Lucy adaptable? That is not his experience. ‘You keep telling me to stand back,’ he says. ‘If I had stood back from the beginning, where would Lucy be now?’

  Bev Shaw is silent. Is there something about him that Bev Shaw can see and he cannot? Because animals trust her, should he trust her too, to teach him a lesson? Animals trust her, and she uses that trust to liquidate them. What is the lesson there?

  ‘If I were to stand back,’ he stumbles on, ‘and some new disaster were to take place on the farm, how would I be able to live with myself?’

  She shrugs. ‘Is that the question, David?’ she asks quietly.

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know what the question is any more. Between Lucy’s generation and mine a curtain seems to have fallen. I didn’t even notice when it fell.’

  There is a long silence between them.

  ‘Anyway,’ he continues, ‘I can’t stay with Lucy, so I am looking for a room. If you happen to hear of anything in Grahamstown, let me know. What I mainly came to say is that I am available to help at the clinic.’

  ‘That will be handy,’ says Bev Shaw.

  From a friend of Bill Shaw’s he buys a half-ton pickup, for which he pays with a cheque for R1000 and another cheque for R7000 postdated to the end of the month.

  ‘What do you plan to use it for?’ says the man.

  ‘Animals. Dogs.’

  ‘You will need rails on the back, so that they won’t jump out. I know someone who can fit rails for you.’

  ‘My dogs don’t jump.’

  According to its papers the truck is twelve years old, but the engine sounds smooth enough. And anyway, he tells himself, it does not have to last for ever. Nothing has to last for ever.

  Following up an advertisement in Grocott’s Mail, he hires a room in a house near the hospital. He gives his name as Lourie, pays a month’s rent in advance, tells his landlady he is in Grahamstown for outpatient treatment. He does not say what the treatment is for, but knows she thinks it is cancer.

  He is spending money like water. No matter.

  At a camping shop he buys an immersion heater, a small gas stove, an aluminium pot. Carrying them up to his room, he meets his landlady on the stairs. ‘We don’t allow cooking in the rooms, Mr Lourie,’ she says. ‘In case of fire, you know.’

  The room is dark, stuffy, overfurnished, the mattress lumpy. But he will get used to it, as he has got used to other things.

  There is one other boarder, a retired schoolteacher. They exchange greetings over breakfast, for the rest do not speak. After breakfast he leaves for the clinic and spends the day there, every day, Sundays included.

  The clinic, more than the boarding-house, becomes his home. In the bare compound behind the building he makes a nest of sorts, with a table and an old armchair from the Shaws and a beach umbrella to keep off the worst of the sun. He brings in the gas stove to make tea or warm up canned food: spaghetti and meatballs, snoek and onions. Twice a day he feeds the animals; he cleans out their pens and occasionally talks to them; otherwise he reads or dozes or, when he has the premises to himself, picks out on Lucy’s banjo the music he will give to Teresa Guiccioli.

  Until the child is born, this will be his life.

  One morning he glances up to see the faces of three little boys peering at him over the concrete wall. He rises from his seat; the dogs start barking; the boys drop down and scamper off whooping with excitement. What a tale to tell back home: a mad old man who sits among the dogs singing to himself!

  Mad indeed. How can he ever explain, to them, to their parents, to D Village, what Teresa and her lover have done to deserve being brought back to this world?

  TWENTY-FOUR

  IN HER WHITE nightdress Teresa stands at the bedroom window. Her eyes are closed. It is the darkest hour of the night: she breathes deeply, breathing in the rustle of the wind, the belling of the bullfrogs.

  ‘Che vuol dir,’ she sings, her voice barely above a whisper – ‘Che vuol dir questa solitudine immensa? Ed io,’ she sings – ‘che sono?’

  Silence. The solitudine immensa offers no reply. Even the trio in the corner are quiet as dormice.

  ‘Come!’ she whispers. ‘Come to me, I plead, my Byron!’ She opens her arms wide, embracing the darkness, embracing what it will bring.

  She wants him to come on the wind, to wrap himself around her, to bury his face in the hollow between her breasts. Alternatively she wants him to arrive on the dawn, to appear on the horizon as a sun-god casting the glow of his warmth upon her. By any means at all she wants him back.

  Sitting at his table in the dog-yard, he harkens to the sad, swooping curve of Teresa’s plea as she confronts the darkness. This is a bad time of the month for Teresa, she is sore, she has not slept a wink, she is haggard with longing. She wants to be rescued – from the pain, from the summer heat, from the Villa Gamba, from her father’s bad temper, from everything.

  From the chair where it rests she picks up the mandolin. Cradling it like a child, she returns to the window. Plink-plunk goes the mandolin in her arms, softly, so as not to wake her father. Plink-plunk squawks the banjo in the desolate yard in Africa.

  Just something to dabble at, he had said to Rosalind. A lie. The opera is not a hobby, not any more. It consumes him night and day.

  Yet despite occasional good moments, the truth is that Byron in Italy is going nowhere. There is no action, no development, just a long, halting cantilena hurled by Teresa into the empty air, punctuated now and then with groans and sighs from Byron offstage. The husband and the rival mistress are forgotten, might as well not exist. The lyric impulse in him may not be dead, but after decades of starvation it can crawl forth from its cave only pinched, stunted, deformed. He has not the musical resources, the resources of energy, to raise Byron in Italy off the monotonous track on which it has been running since the start. It has become the kind of work a sleepwalker might write.

  He sighs. It would have been nice to be returned triumphant to society as the author of an eccentric little chamber opera. But that will not be. His hopes must be more temperate: that somewhere from amidst the welter of sound there will dart up, like a bird, a single authentic note of immortal longing. As for recognizing it, he will leave that to
the scholars of the future, if there are still scholars by then. For he will not hear the note himself, when it comes, if it comes – he knows too much about art and the ways of art to expect that. Though it would have been nice for Lucy to hear proof in her lifetime, and think a little better of him.

  Poor Teresa! Poor aching girl! He has brought her back from the grave, promised her another life, and now he is failing her. He hopes she will find it in her heart to forgive him.

  Of the dogs in the holding pens, there is one he has come to feel a particular fondness for. It is a young male with a withered left hindquarter which it drags behind it. Whether it was born like that he does not know. No visitor has shown an interest in adopting it. Its period of grace is almost over; soon it will have to submit to the needle.

  Sometimes, while he is reading or writing, he releases it from the pen and lets it frisk, in its grotesque way, around the yard, or snooze at his feet. It is not ‘his’ in any sense; he has been careful not to give it a name (though Bev Shaw refers to it as Driepoot); nevertheless, he is sensible of a generous affection streaming out toward him from the dog. Arbitrarily, unconditionally, he has been adopted; the dog would die for him, he knows.

  The dog is fascinated by the sound of the banjo. When he strums the strings, the dog sits up, cocks its head, listens. When he hums Teresa’s line, and the humming begins to swell with feeling (it is as though his larynx thickens: he can feel the hammer of blood in his throat), the dog smacks its lips and seems on the point of singing too, or howling.

  Would he dare to do that: bring a dog into the piece, allow it to loose its own lament to the heavens between the strophes of lovelorn Teresa’s? Why not? Surely, in a work that will never be performed, all things are permitted?

  On Saturday mornings, by agreement, he goes to Donkin Square to help Lucy at the market stall. Afterwards he takes her out to lunch.

  Lucy is slowing down in her movements. She has begun to wear a self-absorbed, placid look. She is not obviously pregnant; but if he is picking up signs, how much longer before the eagle-eyed daughters of Grahamstown pick them up too?

  ‘How is Petrus getting on?’ he asks.

  ‘The house is finished, all but the ceilings and the plumbing. They are in the process of moving in.’

  ‘And their child? Isn’t the child just about due?’

  ‘Next week. All very nicely timed.’

  ‘Has Petrus dropped any more hints?’

  ‘Hints?’

  ‘About you. About your place in the scheme.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Perhaps it will be different once the child’ – he makes the faintest of gestures toward his daughter, toward her body – ‘is born. It will be, after all, a child of this earth. They will not be able to deny that.’

  There is a long silence between them.

  ‘Do you love him yet?’

  Though the words are his, from his mouth, they startle him.

  ‘The child? No. How could I? But I will. Love will grow – one can trust Mother Nature for that. I am determined to be a good mother, David. A good mother and a good person. You should try to be a good person too.’

  ‘I suspect it is too late for me. I’m just an old lag serving out my sentence. But you go ahead. You are well on the way.’

  A good person. Not a bad resolution to make, in dark times.

  By unspoken agreement, he does not, for the time being, come to his daughter’s farm. Nonetheless, one weekday he takes a drive along the Kenton road, leaves the truck at the turnoff, and walks the rest of the way, not following the track but striking out over the veld.

  From the last hillcrest the farm opens out before him: the old house, solid as ever, the stables, Petrus’s new house, the old dam on which he can make out specks that must be the ducks and larger specks that must be the wild geese, Lucy’s visitors from afar.

  At this distance the flowerbeds are solid blocks of colour: magenta, carnelian, ash-blue. A season of blooming. The bees must be in their seventh heaven.

  Of Petrus there is no sign, nor of his wife or the jackal boy who runs with them. But Lucy is at work among the flowers; and, as he picks his way down the hillside, he can see the bulldog too, a patch of fawn on the path beside her.

  He reaches the fence and stops. Lucy, with her back to him, has not yet noticed him. She is wearing a pale summer dress, boots, and a wide straw hat. As she bends over, clipping or pruning or tying, he can see the milky, blue-veined skin and broad, vulnerable tendons of the backs of her knees: the least beautiful part of a woman’s body, the least expressive, and therefore perhaps the most endearing.

  Lucy straightens up, stretches, bends down again. Field-labour; peasant tasks, immemorial. His daughter is becoming a peasant.

  Still she is not aware of him. As for the watchdog, the watchdog appears to be snoozing.

  So: once she was only a little tadpole in her mother’s body, and now here she is, solid in her existence, more solid than he has ever been. With luck she will last a long time, long beyond him. When he is dead she will, with luck, still be here doing her ordinary tasks among the flowerbeds. And from within her will have issued another existence, that with luck will be just as solid, just as long-lasting. So it will go on, a line of existences in which his share, his gift, will grow inexorably less and less, till it may as well be forgotten.

  A grandfather. A Joseph. Who would have thought it! What pretty girl can he expect to be wooed into bed with a grandfather?

  Softly he speaks her name. ‘Lucy!’

  She does not hear him.

  What will it entail, being a grandfather? As a father he has not been much of a success, despite trying harder than most. As a grandfather he will probably score lower than average too. He lacks the virtues of the old: equanimity, kindliness, patience. But perhaps those virtues will come as other virtues go: the virtue of passion, for instance. He must have a look again at Victor Hugo, poet of grandfatherhood. There may be things to learn.

  The wind drops. There is a moment of utter stillness which he would wish prolonged for ever: the gentle sun, the stillness of mid-afternoon, bees busy in a field of flowers; and at the centre of the picture a young woman, das ewig Weibliche, lightly pregnant, in a straw sunhat. A scene ready-made for a Sargent or a Bonnard. City boys like him; but even city boys can recognize beauty when they see it, can have their breath taken away.

  The truth is, he has never had much of an eye for rural life, despite all his reading in Wordsworth. Not much of an eye for anything, except pretty girls; and where has that got him? Is it too late to educate the eye?

  He clears his throat. ‘Lucy,’ he says, more loudly.

  The spell is broken. Lucy comes erect, half-turns, smiles. ‘Hello,’ she says. ‘I didn’t hear you.’

  Katy raises her head and stares shortsightedly in his direction.

  He clambers through the fence. Katy lumbers up to him, sniffs his shoes.

  ‘Where is the truck?’ asks Lucy. She is flushed from her labours and perhaps a little sunburnt. She looks, suddenly, the picture of health.

  ‘I parked and took a walk.’

  ‘Will you come in and have some tea?’

  She makes the offer as if he were a visitor. Good. Visitorship, visitation: a new footing, a new start.

  Sunday has come again. He and Bev Shaw are engaged in one of their sessions of Lösung. One by one he brings in the cats, then the dogs: the old, the blind, the halt, the crippled, the maimed, but also the young, the sound – all those whose term has come. One by one Bev touches them, speaks to them, comforts them, and puts them away, then stands back and watches while he seals up the remains in a black plastic shroud.

  He and Bev do not speak. He has learned by now, from her, to concentrate all his attention on the animal they are killing, giving it what he no longer has difficulty in calling by its proper name: love.

  He ties the last bag and takes it to the door. Twenty-three. There is only the young dog left, the one who likes music, the
one who, given half a chance, would already have lolloped after his comrades into the clinic building, into the theatre with its zinc-topped table where the rich, mixed smells still linger, including one he will not yet have met with in his life: the smell of expiration, the soft, short smell of the released soul.

  What the dog will not be able to work out (not in a month of Sundays! he thinks), what his nose will not tell him, is how one can enter what seems to be an ordinary room and never come out again. Something happens in this room, something unmentionable: here the soul is yanked out of the body; briefly it hangs about in the air, twisting and contorting; then it is sucked away and is gone. It will be beyond him, this room that is not a room but a hole where one leaks out of existence.

  It gets harder all the time, Bev Shaw once said. Harder, yet easier too. One gets used to things getting harder; one ceases to be surprised that what used to be as hard as hard can be grows harder yet. He can save the young dog, if he wishes, for another week. But a time must come, it cannot be evaded, when he will have to bring him to Bev Shaw in her operating room (perhaps he will carry him in his arms, perhaps he will do that for him) and caress him and brush back the fur so that the needle can find the vein, and whisper to him and support him in the moment when, bewilderingly, his legs buckle; and then, when the soul is out, fold him up and pack him away in his bag, and the next day wheel the bag into the flames and see that it is burnt, burnt up. He will do all that for him when his time comes. It will be little enough, less than little: nothing.

  He crosses the surgery. ‘Was that the last?’ asks Bev Shaw.

  ‘One more.’

  He opens the cage door. ‘Come,’ he says, bends, opens his arms. The dog wags its crippled rear, sniffs his face, licks his cheeks, his lips, his ears. He does nothing to stop it. ‘Come.’

  Bearing him in his arms like a lamb, he re-enters the surgery. ‘I thought you would save him for another week,’ says Bev Shaw. ‘Are you giving him up?’