Disgrace Page 7

  ‘Shot? For having an affair with a student? A bit extreme, don’t you think, David? It must go on all the time. It certainly went on when I was a student. If they prosecuted every case the profession would be decimated.’

  He shrugs. ‘These are puritanical times. Private life is public business. Prurience is respectable, prurience and sentiment. They wanted a spectacle: breast-beating, remorse, tears if possible. A TV show, in fact. I wouldn’t oblige.’

  He was going to add, ‘The truth is, they wanted me castrated,’ but he cannot say the words, not to his daughter. In fact, now that he hears it through another’s ears, his whole tirade sounds melodramatic, excessive.

  ‘So you stood your ground and they stood theirs. Is that how it was?’

  ‘More or less.’

  ‘You shouldn’t be so unbending, David. It isn’t heroic to be unbending. Is there still time to reconsider?’

  ‘No, the sentence is final.’

  ‘No appeal?’

  ‘No appeal. I am not complaining. One can’t plead guilty to charges of turpitude and expect a flood of sympathy in return. Not after a certain age. After a certain age one is simply no longer appealing, and that’s that. One just has to buckle down and live out the rest of one’s life. Serve one’s time.’

  ‘Well, that’s a pity. Stay here as long as you like. On whatever grounds.’

  He goes to bed early. In the middle of the night he is woken by a flurry of barking. One dog in particular barks insistently, mechanically, without cease; the others join in, quiet down, then, loth to admit defeat, join in again.

  ‘Does that go on every night?’ he says to Lucy in the morning.

  ‘One gets used to it. I’m sorry.’

  He shakes his head.

  EIGHT

  HE HAS FORGOTTEN how cold winter mornings can be in the uplands of the Eastern Cape. He has not brought the right clothes: he has to borrow a sweater from Lucy.

  Hands in pockets, he wanders among the flowerbeds. Out of sight on the Kenton road a car roars past, the sound lingering on the still air. Geese fly in echelon high overhead. What is he going to do with his time?

  ‘Would you like to go for a walk?’ says Lucy behind him.

  They take three of the dogs along: two young Dobermanns, whom Lucy keeps on a leash, and the bulldog bitch, the abandoned one.

  Pinning her ears back, the bitch tries to defecate. Nothing comes.

  ‘She is having problems,’ says Lucy. ‘I’ll have to dose her.’

  The bitch continues to strain, hanging her tongue out, glancing around shiftily as if ashamed to be watched.

  They leave the road, walk through scrubland, then through sparse pine forest.

  ‘The girl you were involved with,’ says Lucy – ‘was it serious?’

  ‘Didn’t Rosalind tell you the story?’

  ‘Not in any detail.’

  ‘She came from this part of the world. From George. She was in one of my classes. Only middling as a student, but very attractive. Was it serious? I don’t know. It certainly had serious consequences.’

  ‘But it’s over with now? You’re not still hankering after her?’

  Is it over with? Does he hanker yet? ‘Our contact has ceased,’ he says.

  ‘Why did she denounce you?’

  ‘She didn’t say; I didn’t have a chance to ask. She was in a difficult position. There was a young man, a lover or ex-lover, bullying her. There were the strains of the classroom. And then her parents got to hear and descended on Cape Town. The pressure became too much, I suppose.’

  ‘And there was you.’

  ‘Yes, there was me. I don’t suppose I was easy.’

  They have arrived at a gate with a sign that says ‘SAPPI Industries – Trespassers will be Prosecuted’. They turn.

  ‘Well,’ says Lucy, ‘you have paid your price. Perhaps, looking back, she won’t think too harshly of you. Women can be surprisingly forgiving.’

  There is silence. Is Lucy, his child, presuming to tell him about women?

  ‘Have you thought of getting married again?’ asks Lucy.

  ‘To someone of my own generation, do you mean? I wasn’t made for marriage, Lucy. You have seen that for yourself.’

  ‘Yes. But – ’

  ‘But what? But it is unseemly to go on preying on children?’

  ‘I didn’t mean that. Just that you are going to find it more difficult, not easier, as time passes.’

  Never before have he and Lucy spoken about his intimate life. It is not proving easy. But if not to her, then to whom can he speak?

  ‘Do you remember Blake?’ he says. ‘Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires’?

  ‘Why do you quote that to me?’

  ‘Unacted desires can turn as ugly in the old as in the young.’

  ‘Therefore?’

  ‘Every woman I have been close to has taught me something about myself. To that extent they have made me a better person.’

  ‘I hope you are not claiming the reverse as well. That knowing you has turned your women into better people.’

  He looks at her sharply. She smiles. ‘Just joking,’ she says.

  They return along the tar road. At the turnoff to the smallholding there is a painted sign he has not noticed before: ‘CUT FLOWERS. CYCADS,’ with an arrow: ‘1 KM’.

  ‘Cycads?’ he says. ‘I thought cycads were illegal.’

  ‘It’s illegal to dig them up in the wild. I grow them from seed. I’ll show you.’

  They walk on, the young dogs tugging to be free, the bitch padding behind, panting.

  ‘And you? Is this what you want in life?’ He waves a hand toward the garden, toward the house with sunlight glinting from its roof.

  ‘It will do,’ replies Lucy quietly.

  It is Saturday, market day. Lucy wakes him at five, as arranged, with coffee. Swaddled against the cold, they join Petrus in the garden, where by the light of a halogen lamp he is already cutting flowers.

  He offers to take over from Petrus, but his fingers are soon so cold that he cannot tie the bunches. He passes the twine back to Petrus and instead wraps and packs.

  By seven, with dawn touching the hills and the dogs beginning to stir, the job is done. The kombi is loaded with boxes of flowers, pockets of potatoes, onions, cabbage. Lucy drives, Petrus stays behind. The heater does not work; peering through the misted windscreen, she takes the Grahamstown road. He sits beside her, eating the sandwiches she has made. His nose drips; he hopes she does not notice.

  So: a new adventure. His daughter, whom once upon a time he used to drive to school and ballet class, to the circus and the skating rink, is taking him on an outing, showing him life, showing him this other, unfamiliar world.

  On Donkin Square stallholders are already setting up trestle tables and laying out their wares. There is a smell of burning meat. A cold mist hangs over the town; people rub their hands, stamp their feet, curse. There is a show of bonhomie from which Lucy, to his relief, holds herself apart.

  They are in what appears to be the produce quarter. On their left are three African women with milk, masa, butter to sell; also, from a bucket with a wet cloth over it, soup-bones. On their right are an old Afrikaner couple whom Lucy greets as Tante Miems and Oom Koos, and a little assistant in a balaclava cap who cannot be more than ten. Like Lucy, they have potatoes and onions to sell, but also bottled jams, preserves, dried fruit, packets of buchu tea, honeybush tea, herbs.

  Lucy has brought two canvas stools. They drink coffee from a thermos flask, waiting for the first customers.

  Two weeks ago he was in a classroom explaining to the bored youth of the country the distinction between drink and drink up, burned and burnt. The perfective, signifying an action carried through to its conclusion. How far away it all seems! I live, I have lived, I lived.

  Lucy’s potatoes, tumbled out into a bushel basket, have been washed clean. Koos and Miems’s are still speckled with earth. In the course of the morning Lucy t
akes in nearly five hundred rand. Her flowers sell steadily; at eleven o’clock she drops her prices and the last of the produce goes. There is plenty of trade too at the milk-and-meat stall; but the old couple, seated side by side wooden and unsmiling, do less well.

  Many of Lucy’s customers know her by name: middle-aged women, most of them, with a touch of the proprietary in their attitude to her, as though her success were theirs too. Each time she introduces him: ‘Meet my father, David Lurie, on a visit from Cape Town.’ ‘You must be proud of your daughter, Mr Lurie,’ they say. ‘Yes, very proud,’ he replies.

  ‘Bev runs the animal refuge,’ says Lucy, after one of the introductions. ‘I give her a hand sometimes. We’ll drop in at her place on the way back, if that is all right with you.’

  He has not taken to Bev Shaw, a dumpy, bustling little woman with black freckles, close-cropped, wiry hair, and no neck. He does not like women who make no effort to be attractive. It is a resistance he has had to Lucy’s friends before. Nothing to be proud of: a prejudice that has settled in his mind, settled down. His mind has become a refuge for old thoughts, idle, indigent, with nowhere else to go. He ought to chase them out, sweep the premises clean. But he does not care to do so, or does not care enough.

  The Animal Welfare League, once an active charity in Grahamstown, has had to close down its operation. However, a handful of volunteers led by Bev Shaw still runs a clinic from the old premises.

  He has nothing against the animal lovers with whom Lucy has been mixed up as long as he can remember. The world would no doubt be a worse place without them. So when Bev Shaw opens her front door he puts on a good face, though in fact he is repelled by the odours of cat urine and dog mange and Jeyes Fluid that greet them.

  The house is just as he had imagined it would be: rubbishy furniture, a clutter of ornaments (porcelain shepherdesses, cowbells, an ostrich-feather flywhisk), the yammer of a radio, the cheeping of birds in cages, cats everywhere underfoot. There is not only Bev Shaw, there is Bill Shaw too, equally squat, drinking tea at the kitchen table, with a beet-red face and silver hair and a sweater with a floppy collar. ‘Sit down, sit down, Dave,’ says Bill. ‘Have a cup, make yourself at home.’

  It has been a long morning, he is tired, the last thing he wants to do is trade small talk with these people. He casts Lucy a glance. ‘We won’t stay, Bill,’ she says, ‘I’m just picking up some medicines.’

  Through a window he glimpses the Shaws’ back yard: an apple tree dropping wormridden fruit, rampant weeds, an area fenced in with galvanized-iron sheets, wooden pallets, old tyres, where chickens scratch around and what looks uncommonly like a duiker snoozes in a corner.

  ‘What do you think?’ says Lucy afterwards in the car.

  ‘I don’t want to be rude. It’s a subculture of its own, I’m sure. Don’t they have children?’

  ‘No, no children. Don’t underestimate Bev. She’s not a fool. She does an enormous amount of good. She’s been going into D Village for years, first for Animal Welfare, now on her own.’

  ‘It must be a losing battle.’

  ‘Yes, it is. There is no funding any longer. On the list of the nation’s priorities, animals come nowhere.’

  ‘She must get despondent. You too.’

  ‘Yes. No. Does it matter? The animals she helps aren’t despondent. They are greatly relieved.’

  ‘That’s wonderful, then. I’m sorry, my child, I just find it hard to whip up an interest in the subject. It’s admirable, what you do, what she does, but to me animal-welfare people are a bit like Christians of a certain kind. Everyone is so cheerful and well-intentioned that after a while you itch to go off and do some raping and pillaging. Or to kick a cat.’

  He is surprised by his outburst. He is not in a bad temper, not in the least.

  ‘You think I ought to involve myself in more important things,’ says Lucy. They are on the open road; she drives without glancing at him. ‘You think, because I am your daughter, I ought to be doing something better with my life.’

  He is already shaking his head. ‘No . . . no . . . no,’ he murmurs.

  ‘You think I ought to be painting still lives or teaching myself Russian. You don’t approve of friends like Bev and Bill Shaw because they are not going to lead me to a higher life.’

  ‘That’s not true, Lucy.’

  ‘But it is true. They are not going to lead me to a higher life, and the reason is, there is no higher life. This is the only life there is. Which we share with animals. That’s the example that people like Bev try to set. That’s the example I try to follow. To share some of our human privilege with the beasts. I don’t want to come back in another existence as a dog or a pig and have to live as dogs or pigs live under us.’

  ‘Lucy, my dearest, don’t be cross. Yes, I agree, this is the only life there is. As for animals, by all means let us be kind to them. But let us not lose perspective. We are of a different order of creation from the animals. Not higher, necessarily, just different. So if we are going to be kind, let it be out of simple generosity, not because we feel guilty or fear retribution.’

  Lucy draws a breath. She seems about to respond to his homily, but then does not. They arrive at the house in silence.

  NINE

  HE IS SITTING in the front room, watching soccer on television. The score is nil-all; neither team seems interested in winning.

  The commentary alternates between Sotho and Xhosa, languages of which he understands not a word. He turns the sound down to a murmur. Saturday afternoon in South Africa: a time consecrated to men and their pleasures. He nods off.

  When he awakes, Petrus is beside him on the sofa with a bottle of beer in his hand. He has turned the volume higher.

  ‘Bushbucks,’ says Petrus. ‘My team. Bushbucks and Sundowns.’

  Sundowns take a corner. There is a mêlée in the goalmouth. Petrus groans and clasps his head. When the dust clears, the Bushbucks goalkeeper is lying on the ground with the ball under his chest. ‘He is good! He is good!’ says Petrus. ‘He is a good goalkeeper. They must keep him.’

  The game ends scoreless. Petrus switches channels. Boxing: two tiny men, so tiny that they barely come up to the referee’s chest, circle, leap in, belabour each other.

  He gets up, wanders through to the back of the house. Lucy is lying on her bed, reading. ‘What are you reading?’ he says. She looks at him quizzically, then takes the earplugs out of her ears. ‘What are you reading?’ he repeats; and then, ‘It’s not working out, is it? Shall I leave?’

  She smiles, lays her book aside. The Mystery of Edwin Drood: not what he would have expected. ‘Sit down,’ she says.

  He sits on the bed, idly fondles her bare foot. A good foot, shapely. Good bones, like her mother. A woman in the flower of her years, attractive despite the heaviness, despite the unflattering clothes.

  ‘From my point of view, David, it is working out perfectly well. I’m glad to have you here. It takes a while to adjust to the pace of country life, that’s all. Once you find things to do you won’t be so bored.’

  He nods absentmindedly. Attractive, he is thinking, yet lost to men. Need he reproach himself, or would it have worked out like that anyway? From the day his daughter was born he has felt for her nothing but the most spontaneous, most unstinting love. Impossible she has been unaware of it. Has it been too much, that love? Has she found it a burden? Has it pressed down on her? Has she given it a darker reading?

  He wonders how it is for Lucy with her lovers, how it is for her lovers with her. He has never been afraid to follow a thought down its winding track, and he is not afraid now. Has he fathered a woman of passion? What can she draw on, what not, in the realm of the senses? Are he and she capable of talking about that too? Lucy has not led a protected life. Why should they not be open with each other, why should they draw lines, in times when no one else does?

  ‘Once I find things to do,’ he says, coming back from his wanderings. ‘What do you suggest?’

  ‘You cou
ld help with the dogs. You could cut up the dog-meat. I’ve always found that difficult. Then there is Petrus. Petrus is busy establishing his own lands. You could give him a hand.’

  ‘Give Petrus a hand. I like that. I like the historical piquancy. Will he pay me a wage for my labour, do you think?’

  ‘Ask him. I’m sure he will. He got a Land Affairs grant earlier this year, enough to buy a hectare and a bit from me. I didn’t tell you? The boundary line goes through the dam. We share the dam. Everything from there to the fence is his. He has a cow that will calve in the spring. He has two wives, or a wife and a girlfriend. If he has played his cards right he could get a second grant to put up a house; then he can move out of the stable. By Eastern Cape standards he is a man of substance. Ask him to pay you. He can afford it. I’m not sure I can afford him any more.’

  ‘All right, I’ll handle the dog-meat, I’ll offer to dig for Petrus. What else?’

  ‘You can help at the clinic. They are desperate for volunteers.’

  ‘You mean help Bev Shaw.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I don’t think she and I will hit it off.’

  ‘You don’t need to hit it off with her. You have only to help her. But don’t expect to be paid. You will have to do it out of the goodness of your heart.’

  ‘I’m dubious, Lucy. It sounds suspiciously like community service. It sounds like someone trying to make reparation for past misdeeds.’

  ‘As to your motives, David, I can assure you, the animals at the clinic won’t query them. They won’t ask and they won’t care.’

  ‘All right, I’ll do it. But only as long as I don’t have to become a better person. I am not prepared to be reformed. I want to go on being myself. I’ll do it on that basis.’ His hand still rests on her foot; now he grips her ankle tight. ‘Understood?’

  She gives him what he can only call a sweet smile. ‘So you are determined to go on being bad. Mad, bad, and dangerous to know. I promise, no one will ask you to change.’