Disgrace

TWENTY

HE RE-ENTERS Cape Town on the N2. He has been away less than three months, yet in that time the shanty settlements have crossed the highway and spread east of the airport. The stream of cars has to slow down while a child with a stick herds a stray cow off the road. Inexorably, he thinks, the country is coming to the city. Soon there will be cattle again on Rondebosch Common; soon history will have come full circle.

So he is home again. It does not feel like a homecoming. He cannot imagine taking up residence once more in the house on Torrance Road, in the shadow of the university, skulking about like a criminal, dodging old colleagues. He will have to sell the house, move to a flat somewhere cheaper. His finances are in chaos. He has not paid a bill since he left. He is living on credit; any day now his credit is going to dry up.

The end of roaming. What comes after the end of roaming? He sees himself, white-haired, stooped, shuffling to the corner shop to buy his half-litre of milk and half-loaf of bread; he sees himself sitting blankly at a desk in a room full of yellowing papers, waiting for the afternoon to peter out so that he can cook his evening meal and go to bed. The life of a superannuated scholar, without hope, without prospect: is that what he is prepared to settle for?

He unlocks the front gate. The garden is overgrown, the mailbox stuffed tight with flyers, advertisements. Though well fortified by most standards, the house has stood empty for months: too much to hope for that it will not have been visited. And indeed, from the moment he opens the front door and smells the air he knows there is something wrong. His heart begins to thud with a sick excitement.

There is no sound. Whoever was here is gone. But how did they get in? Tiptoeing from room to room, he soon finds out. The bars over one of the back windows have been torn out of the wall and folded back, the windowpanes smashed, leaving enough of a hole for a child or even a small man to climb through. A mat of leaves and sand, blown in by the wind, has caked on the floor.

He wanders through the house taking a census of his losses. His bedroom has been ransacked, the cupboards yawn bare. His sound equipment is gone, his tapes and records, his computer equipment. In his study the desk and filing cabinet have been broken open; papers are scattered everywhere. The kitchen has been thoroughly stripped: cutlery, crockery, smaller appliances. His liquor store is gone. Even the cupboard that had held canned food is empty.

No ordinary burglary. A raiding party moving in, cleaning out the site, retreating laden with bags, boxes, suitcases. Booty; war reparations; another incident in the great campaign of redistribution. Who is at this moment wearing his shoes? Have Beethoven and Janбcek found homes for themselves or have they been tossed out on the rubbish heap?

From the bathroom comes a bad smell. A pigeon, trapped in the house, has expired in the basin. Gingerly he lifts the mess of bones and feathers into a plastic packet and ties it shut. The lights are cut off, the telephone is dead. Unless he does something about it he will spend the night in the dark. But he is too depressed to act. Let it all go to hell, he thinks, and sinks into a chair and closes his eyes.

As dusk settles he rouses himself and leaves the house. The first stars are out. Through empty streets, through gardens heavy with the scent of verbena and jonquil, he makes his way to the university campus. He still has his keys to the Communications Building. A good hour to come haunting: the corridors are deserted. He takes the lift to his office on the fifth floor. The name-tag on his door has been removed. DR S. OTTO, reads the new tag. From under the door comes a faint light.

He 'mocks. No sound. He unlocks the door and enters.

The room has been transformed. His books and pictures are gone, leaving the walls bare save for a postersize blowup of a comic-book panel: Superman hanging his head as he is berated by Lois Lane. Behind the computer, in the half-light, sits a young man he has not seen before. The young man frowns.

'Who are you?' he asks. 'I'm David Lurie.'

'Yes? And?'

'I've come to pick up my mail. This used to be my office.' In the past, he almost adds.

'Oh, right, David Lurie. Sorry, I wasn't thinking. I put it all in a box. And some other stuff of yours that I found.' He waves. 'Over there.'

'And my books?'

'They are all downstairs in the storage room.'

He picks up the box. 'Thank you,' he says.

'No problem,' says young Dr Otto. 'Can you manage that?'

He takes the heavy box across to the library, intending to sort through his mail. But when he reaches the access barrier the machine will no longer accept his card. He has to do his sorting on a bench in the lobby.

He is too restless to sleep. At dawn he heads for the mountainside and sets off on a long walk. It has rained, the streams are in spate. He breathes in the heady scent of pine. As of today he is a free man, with duties to no one but himself. Time lies before him to spend as he wishes. The feeling is unsettling, but he presumes he will get used to it.

His spell with Lucy has not turned him into a country person. Nonetheless, there are things he misses - the duck family, for instance: Mother Duck tacking about on the surface of the dam, her chest puffed out with pride, while Eenie, Meenie, Minie and Mo paddle busily behind, confident that as long as she is there they are safe from all harm.

As for the dogs, he does not want to think about them. From Monday onward the dogs released from life within the walls of the clinic will be tossed into the fire unmarked, unmourned. For that betrayal, will he ever be forgiven?

He visits the bank, takes a load of washing to the laundry. In the little shop where for years he has bought his coffee the assistant pretends not to recognize him. His neighbour, watering her garden, studiously keeps her back turned.

He thinks of William Wordsworth on his first stay in London, visiting the pantomime, seeing Jack the Giant Killer blithely striding the stage, flourishing his sword, protected by the word Invisible written on his chest.

In the evening he calls Lucy from a public telephone. 'I thought I'd phone in case you were worried about me,' he says. 'I'm fine. I'll take a while to settle down, I suspect. I rattle about in the house like a pea in a bottle. I miss the ducks.'

He does not mention the raid on the house. What is the good of burdening Lucy with his troubles?

'And Petrus?' he asks. 'Has Petrus been looking after you, or is he still wrapped up in his housebuilding?'

'Petrus has been helping out. Everyone has been helpful.'

'Well, I can come back any time you need me. You have only to say the word.'

'Thank you, David. Not at present, perhaps, but one of these days.'

Who would have guessed, when his child was born, that in time he would come crawling to her asking to be taken in?

Shopping at the supermarket, he finds himself in a queue behind Elaine Winter, chair of his onetime department. She has a whole trolleyful of purchases, he a mere handbasket. Nervously she returns his greeting.

'And how is the department getting on without me?' he asks as cheerily as he can. Very well indeed - that would be the frankest answer: We are getting on very well without you. But she is too polite to say the words. 'Oh, struggling along as usual,' she replies vaguely.

'Have you been able to do any hiring?'

'We have taken on one new person, on a contract basis. A young man.'

I have met him, he might respond. A right little prick, he might add. But he too is well brought up. 'What is his specialism?' he inquires instead.

'Applied language studies. He is in language learning.'

So much for the poets, so much for the dead masters. Who have not, he must say, guided him well. Aliter, to whom he has not listened well.

The woman ahead of them in the queue is taking her time to pay. There is still room for Elaine to ask the next question, which should be, And how are you getting on, David?, and for him to respond, Very well, Elaine, very well.

'Wouldn't you like to go ahead of me?' she suggests instead, gesturing toward his basket. 'You have so little.'

'Wouldn't dream of it, Elaine,' he replies, then takes some pleasure in observing as she unloads her purchases on to the counter: not only the bread and butter items but the little treats that a woman living alone awards herself - full cream ice cream (real almonds, real raisins), imported Italian cookies, chocolate bars - as well as a pack of sanitary napkins.

She pays by credit card. From the far side of the barrier she gives him a farewell wave. Her relief is palpable. 'Goodbye!' he calls over the cashier's head. 'Give my regards to everyone!' She does not look back.

As first conceived, the opera had had at its centre Lord Byron and his mistress the Contessa Guiccioli. Trapped in the Villa Guiccioli in the stifling summer heat of Ravenna, spied on by Teresa's jealous husband, the two would roam through the gloomy drawing-rooms singing of their baulked passion. Teresa feels herself to be a prisoner; she smoulders with resentment and nags Byron to bear her away to another life. As for Byron, he is full of doubts, though too prudent to voice them. Their early ecstasies will, he suspects, never be repeated. His life is becalmed; obscurely he has begun to long for a quiet retirement; failing that, for apotheosis, for death. Teresa's soaring arias ignite no spark in him; his own vocal line, dark, convoluted, goes past, through, over her.

That is how he had conceived it: as a chamber-play about love and death, with a passionate young woman and a once passionate but now less than passionate older man; as an action with a complex, restless music behind it, sung in an English that tugs continually toward an imagined Italian. Formally speaking, the conception is not a bad one. The characters balance one another well: the trapped couple, the discarded mistress hammering at the windows, the jealous husband. The villa too, with Byron's pet monkeys hanging languidly from the chandeliers and peacocks fussing back and forth among the ornate Neapolitan furniture, has the right mix of timelessness and decay. Yet, first on Lucy's farm and now again here, the project has failed to engage the core of him. There is something misconceived about it, something that does not come from the heart. A woman complaining to the stars that the spying of the servants forces her and her lover to relieve their desires in a broom-closet - who cares? He can find words for Byron, but the Teresa that history has bequeathed him - young, greedy, wilful, petulant - does not match up to the music he has dreamed of, music whose harmonies, lushly autumnal yet edged with irony, he hears shadowed in his inner ear.

He tries another track. Abandoning the pages of notes he has written, abandoning the pert, precocious newlywed with her captive English Milord, he tries to pick Teresa up in middle age. The new Teresa is a dumpy little widow installed in the Villa Gamba with her aged father, running the household, holding the purse-strings tight, keeping an eye out that the servants do not steal the sugar. Byron, in the new version, is long dead; Teresa's sole remaining claim to immortality, and the solace of her lonely nights, is the chestful of letters and memorabilia she keeps under her bed, what she calls her reliquie, which her grandnieces are meant to open after her death and peruse with awe. Is this the heroine he has been seeking all the time? Will an older Teresa engage his heart as his heart is now?

The passage of time has not treated Teresa kindly. With her heavy bust, her stocky trunk, her abbreviated legs, she looks more like a peasant, a contadina, than an aristocrat. The complexion that Byron once so admired has turned hectic; in summer she is overtaken with attacks of asthma that leave her heaving for breath.

In the letters he wrote to her Byron calls her My friend, then My love, then My love for ever. But there are rival letters in existence, letters she cannot reach and set fire to. In these letters, addressed to his English friends, Byron lists her flippantly among his Italian conquests, makes jokes about her husband, alludes to women from her circle with whom he has slept. In the years since Byron's death, his friends have written one memoir after another, drawing upon his letters. After conquering the young Teresa from her husband, runs the story they tell, Byron soon grew bored with her; he found her empty-headed; he stayed with her only out of dutifulness; it was in order to escape her that he sailed off to Greece and to his death. Their libels hurt her to the quick. Her years with Byron constitute the apex of her life. Byron's love is all that sets her apart. Without him she is nothing: a woman past her prime, without prospects, living out her days in a dull provincial town, exchanging visits with women-friends, massaging her father's legs when they give him pain, sleeping alone.

Can he find it in his heart to love this plain, ordinary woman? Can he love her enough to write a music for her? If he cannot, what is left for him?

He comes back to what must now be the opening scene. The tail end of yet another sultry day. Teresa stands at a second-floor window in her father's house, looking out over the marshes and pine-scrub of the Romagna toward the sun glinting on the Adriatic. The end of the prelude; a hush; she takes a breath. Mio Byron, she sings, her voice throbbing with sadness. A lone clarinet answers, tails off, falls silent. Mio Byron, she calls again, more strongly.

Where is he, her Byron? Byron is lost, that is the answer. Byron wanders among the shades. And she is lost too, the Teresa he loved, the girl of nineteen with the blonde ringlets who gave herself up with such joy to the imperious Englishman, and afterwards stroked his brow as he lay on her naked breast, breathing deeply, slumbering after his great passion.

Mio Byron, she sings a third time; and from somewhere, from the caverns of the underworld, a voice sings back, wavering and disembodied, the voice of a ghost, the voice of Byron. Where are you? he sings; and then a word she does not want to hear: secca, dry. It has dried up, the source of everything. So faint, so faltering is the voice of Byron that Teresa has to sing his words back to him, helping him along breath by breath, drawing him back to life: her child, her boy. I am here, she sings, supporting him, saving him from going down. I am your source. Do you remember how together we visited the spring of Arqu?? Together, you and I. I was your Laura. Do you remember?

That is how it must be from here on: Teresa giving voice to her lover, and he, the man in the ransacked house, giving voice to Teresa. The halt helping the lame, for want of better. Working as swiftly as he can, holding tight to Teresa, he tries to sketch out the opening pages of a libretto. Get the words down on paper, he tells himself. Once that is done it will all be easier. Then there will be time to search through the masters - through Gluck, for instance - lifting melodies, perhaps - who knows? - lifting ideas too.

But by steps, as he begins to live his days more fully with Teresa and the dead Byron, it becomes clear that purloined songs will not be good enough, that the two will demand a music of their own. And, astonishingly, in dribs and drabs, the music comes. Sometimes the contour of a phrase occurs to him before he has a hint of what the words themselves will be; sometimes the words call forth the cadence; sometimes the shade of a melody, having hovered for days on the edge of hearing, unfolds and blessedly reveals itself. As the action begins to unwind, furthermore, it calls up of its own accord modulations and transitions that he feels in his blood even when he has not the musical resources to realize them. At the piano he sets to work piecing together and writing down the beginnings of a score. But there is something about the sound of the piano that hinders him: too rounded, too physical, too rich. From the attic, from a crate full of old books and toys of Lucy's, he recovers the odd little seven-stringed banjo that he bought for her on the streets of KwaMashu when she was a child. With the aid of the banjo he begins to notate the music that Teresa, now mournful, now angry, will sing to her dead lover, and that pale-voiced Byron will sing back to her from the land of the shades.

The deeper he follows the Contessa into her underworld, singing her words for her or humming her vocal line, the more inseparable from her, to his surprise, becomes the silly plink-plonk of the toy banjo. The lush arias he had dreamed of giving her he quietly abandons; from there it is but a short step to putting the instrument into her hands. Instead of stalking the stage, Teresa now sits staring out over the marshes toward the gates of hell, cradling the mandolin on which she accompanies herself in her lyric flights; while to one side a discreet trio in knee-breeches (cello, flute, bassoon) fill in the entr'actes or comment sparingly between stanzas.

Seated at his own desk looking out on the overgrown garden, he marvels at what the little banjo is teaching him. Six months ago he had thought his own ghostly place in Byron in Italy would be somewhere between Teresa's and Byron's: between a yearning to prolong the summer of the passionate body and a reluctant recall from the long sleep of oblivion. But he was wrong. It is not the erotic that is calling to him after all, nor the elegiac, but the comic. He is in the opera neither as Teresa nor as Byron nor even as some blending of the two: he is held in the music itself, in the flat, tinny slap of the banjo strings, the voice that strains to soar away from the ludicrous instrument but is continually reined back, like a fish on a line. So this is art, he thinks, and this is how it does its work! How strange! How fascinating!

He spends whole days in the grip of Byron and Teresa, living on black coffee and breakfast cereal. The refrigerator is empty, his bed is unmade; leaves chase across the floor from the broken window. No matter, he thinks: let the dead bury their dead.

Out of the poets I learned to love, chants Byron in his cracked monotone, nine syllables on C natural; but life, I found (descending chromatically to F), is another story. Plink-plunk-plonk go the strings of the banjo. Why, O why do you speak like that? sings Teresa in a long reproachful arc. Plunk-plink-plonk go the strings.

She wants to be loved, Teresa, to be loved immortally; she wants to be raised to the company of the Lauras and Floras of yore. And Byron? Byron will be faithful unto death, but that is all he promises. Let both be tied till one shall have expired.

My love, sings Teresa, swelling out the fat English monosyllable she learned in the poet's bed. Plink, echo the strings. A woman in love, wallowing in love; a cat on a roof, howling; complex proteins swirling in the blood, distending the sexual organs, making the palms sweat and voice thicken as the soul hurls its longings to the skies. That is what Soraya and the others were for: to suck the complex proteins out of his blood like snake-venom, leaving him clear-headed and dry. Teresa in her father's house in Ravenna, to her misfortune, has no one to suck the venom from her. Come to me, mio Byron, she cries: come to me, love me! And Byron, exiled from life, pale as a ghost, echoes her derisively: Leave me, leave me, leave me be!

Years ago, when he lived in Italy, he visited the same forest between Ravenna and the Adriatic coastline where a century and a half before Byron and Teresa used to go riding. Somewhere among the trees must be the spot where the Englishman first lifted the skirts of his eighteen-year-old charmer, bride of another man. He could fly to Venice tomorrow, catch a train to Ravenna, tramp along the old riding-trails, pass by the very place. He is inventing the music (or the music is inventing him) but he is not inventing the history. On those pine-needles Byron had his Teresa - 'timid as a gazelle,' he called her - rumpling her clothes, getting sand into her underwear (the horses standing by all the while, incurious), and from the occasion a passion was born that kept Teresa howling to the moon for the rest of her natural life in a fever that has set him howling too, after his manner.

Teresa leads; page after page he follows. Then one day there emerges from the dark another voice, one he has not heard before, has not counted on hearing. From the words he knows it belongs to Byron's daughter Allegra; but from where inside him does it come? Why have you left me? Come and fetch me! calls Allegra. So hot, so hot, so hot! she complains in a rhythm of her own that cuts insistently across the voices of the lovers.

To the call of the inconvenient five-year-old there comes no answer. Unlovely, unloved, neglected by her famous father, she has been passed from hand to hand and finally given to the nuns to look after. So hot, so hot! she whines from the bed in the convent where she is dying of la mal'aria. Why have you forgotten me?

Why will her father not answer? Because he has had enough of life; because he would rather be back where he belongs, on death's other shore, sunk in his old sleep. My poor little baby! sings Byron, waveringly, unwillingly, too softly for her to hear. Seated in the shadows to one side, the trio of instrumentalists play the crablike motif, one line going up, the other down, that is Byron's.

TWENTY-ONE

ROSALIND TELEPHONES. 'Lucy says you are back in town. Why haven't you been in touch?'

‘I'm not yet fit for society,' he replies. 'Were you ever?' comments Rosalind drily. They meet in a coffee-shop in Claremont. 'You've lost weight,' she remarks. 'What happened to your ear?'

'It's nothing,' he replies, and will not explain further.

As they talk her gaze keeps drifting back to the misshapen ear. She would shudder, he is sure, if she had to touch it. Not the ministering type. His best memories are still of their first months together: steamy summer nights in Durban, sheets damp with perspiration, Rosalind's long, pale body thrashing this way and that in the throes of a pleasure that was hard to tell from pain. Two sensualists: that was what held them together, while it lasted.

They talk about Lucy, about the farm. 'I thought she had a friend living with her,' says Rosalind. 'Grace.'

'Helen. Helen is back in Johannesburg. I suspect they have broken up for good.'

'Is Lucy safe by herself in that lonely place?'

'No, she isn't safe, she would be mad to feel safe. But she will stay on nevertheless. It has become a point of honour with her.'

'You said you had your car stolen.'

'It was my own fault. I should have been more careful.'

'I forgot to mention: I heard the story of your trial. The inside story.

'My trial?'

'Your inquiry, your inquest, whatever you call it. I heard you didn't perform well.'

'Oh? How did you hear? I thought it was confidential.'

'That doesn't matter. I heard you didn't make a good impression. You were too stiff and defensive.'

'I wasn't trying to make an impression. I was standing up for a principle.'

'That may be so, David, but surely you know by now that trials are not about principles, they are about how well you put yourself across. According to my source, you came across badly. What was the principle you were standing up for?'

'Freedom of speech. Freedom to remain silent.'

'That sounds very grand. But you were always a great self-deceiver, David. A great deceiver and a great self-deceiver. Are you sure it wasn't just a case of being caught with your pants down?'

He does not rise to the bait.

'Anyway, whatever the principle was, it was too abstruse for your audience. They thought you were just obfuscating. You should have got yourself some coaching beforehand. What are you going to do about money? Did they take away your pension?'

'I'll get back what I put in. I am going to sell the house. It's too big for me.'

'What will you do with your time? Will you look for a job?'

'I don't think so. My hands are full. I'm writing something.'

'A book?'

'An opera, in fact.'

'An opera! Well, that's a new departure. I hope it makes you lots of money. Will you move in with Lucy?'

'The opera is just a hobby, something to dabble at. It won't make money. And no, I won't be moving in with Lucy. It wouldn't be a good idea.'

'Why not? You and she have always got on well together. Has something happened?'

Her questions are intrusive, but Rosalind has never had qualms about being intrusive. 'You shared my bed for ten years,' she once said - 'Why should you have secrets from me?'

'Lucy and I still get on well,' he replies. 'But not well enough to live together.'

'The story of your life.'

'Yes.'

There is silence while they contemplate, from their respective angles, the story of his life.

'I saw your girlfriend,' Rosalind says, changing the subject. 'My girlfriend?'

'Your inamorata. Melanie Isaacs - isn't that her name? She is in a play at the Dock Theatre. Didn't you know? I can see why you fell for her. Big, dark eyes. Cunning little weasel body. Just your type. You must have thought it would be another of your quick flings, your peccadilloes. And now look at you. You have thrown away your life, and for what?'

'My life is not thrown away, Rosalind. Be sensible.'

'But it is! You have lost your job, your name is mud, your friends avoid you, you hide out in Torrance Road like a tortoise afraid to stick its neck out of its shell. People who aren't good enough to tie your shoelaces make jokes about you. Your shirt isn't ironed, God know who gave you that haircut, you've got - ' She arrests her tirade. 'You are going to end up as one of those sad old men who poke around in rubbish bins.'

'I'm going to end up in a hole in the ground,' he says. 'And so are you. So are we all.'

'That's enough, David, I'm upset as it is, I don't want to get into an argument.' She gathers up her packages.

'When you are tired of bread and jam, give me a call and I'll cook you a meal.'

The mention of Melanie Isaacs unsettles him. He has never been given to lingering involvements. When an affair is over, he puts it behind him. But there is something unfinished in the business with Melanie. Deep inside him the smell of her is stored, the smell of a mate. Does she remember his smell too? Just your type, said Rosalind, who ought to know. What if their paths cross again, his and Melanie's? Will there be a flash of feeling, a sign that the affair has not run its course?

Yet the very idea of reapplying to Melanie is crazy. Why should she speak to the man condemned as her persecutor? And what will she think of him anyway - the dunce with the funny ear, the uncut hair, the rumpled collar?

The marriage of Cronus and Harmony: unnatural. That was what the trial was set up to punish, once all the fine words were stripped away. On trial for his way of life. For unnatural acts: for broadcasting old seed, tired seed, seed that does not quicken, contra naturam. If the old men hog the young women, what will be the future of the species? That, at bottom, was the case for the prosecution. Half of literature is about it: young women struggling to escape from under the weight of old men, for the sake of the species. He sighs. The young in one another's arms, heedless, engrossed in the sensual music. No country, this, for old men. He seems to be spending a lot of time sighing. Regret: a regrettable note on which to go out.

Until two years ago the Dock Theatre was a cold storage plant where the carcases of pigs and oxen hung waiting to be transported across the seas. Now it is a fashionable entertainment spot. He arrives late, taking his seat just as the lights are dimming. 'A runaway success brought back by popular demand': that is how Sunset at the Globe Salon is billed in its new production. The set is more stylish, the direction more professional, there is a new lead actor. Nevertheless, he finds the play, with its crude humour and nakedly political intent, as hard to endure as before.

Melanie has kept her part as Gloria, the novice hairdresser. Wearing a pink caftan over gold lame tights, her face garishly made up, her hair piled in loops on her head, she totters onstage on high heels. The lines she is given are predictable, but she delivers them with deft timing in a whining Kaaps accent. She is altogether more sure of herself than before - in fact, good in the part, positively gifted. Is it possible that in the months he has been away she has grown up, found herself? Whatever does not kill me makes me stronger. Perhaps the trial was a trial for her too; perhaps she too has suffered, and come through. He wishes he could have a sign. If he had a sign he would know what to do. If, for instance, those absurd clothes were to burn off her body in a cold, private flame and she were to stand before him, in a revelation secret to him alone, as naked and as perfect as on that last night in Lucy's old room. The holidaymakers among whom he is seated, ruddy-faced, comfortable in their heavy flesh, are enjoying the play. They have taken to Melanie-Gloria; they titter at the risque jokes, laugh uproariously when the characters trade slurs and insults.

Though they are his countrymen, he could not feel more alien among them, more of an impostor. Yet when they laugh at Melanie's lines he cannot resist a flush of pride. Mine! he would like to say, turning to them, as if she were his daughter.

Without warning a memory comes back from years ago: of someone he picked up on the N1 outside Trompsburg and gave a ride to, a woman in her twenties travelling alone, a tourist from Germany, sunburnt and dusty. They drove as far as Touws River, checked into a hotel; he fed her, slept with her. He remembers her long, wiry legs; he remembers the softness of her hair, its feather-lightness between his fingers. In a sudden and soundless eruption, as if he has fallen into a waking dream, a stream of images pours down, images of women he has known on two continents, some from so far away in time that he barely recognizes them. Like leaves blown on the wind, pell-mell, they pass before him. A fair field full of-folk: hundreds of lives all tangled with his. He holds his breath, willing the vision to continue. What has happened to them, all those women, all those lives? Are there moments when they too, or some of them, are plunged without warning into the ocean of memory? The German girl: is it possible that at this very instant she is remembering the man who picked her up on the roadside in Africa and spent the night with her?

Enriched: that was the word the newspapers picked on to jeer at. A stupid word to let slip, under the circumstances, yet now, at this moment, he would stand by it. By Melanie, by the girl in Touws River; by Rosalind, Bev Shaw, Soraya: by each of them he was enriched, and by the others too, even the least of them, even the failures. Like a flower blooming in his breast, his heart floods with thankfulness. Where do moments like this come from? Hypnagogic, no doubt; but what does that explain? If he is being led, then what god is doing the leading?

The play is grinding on. They have come to the point where Melanie gets her broom tangled in the electric cord. A flash of magnesium, and the stage is suddenly plunged into darkness. 'Jesus Christ, jou dom meid!' screeches the hairdresser.

There are twenty rows of seats between himself and Melanie, but he hopes she can at this moment, across space, smell him, smell his thoughts.

Something raps him lightly on the head, calling him back to the world. A moment later another object flits past and hits the seat in front of him: a spitball of paper the size of a marble. A third hits him in the neck. He is the target, no doubt of that.

He is supposed to turn and glare. Who did that? he is supposed to bark. Or else stare stiffly ahead, pretending not to notice.

A fourth pellet strikes his shoulder and bounces into the air. The man in the next seat steals a puzzled glance.

On stage the action has progressed. Sidney the hairdresser is tearing open the fatal envelope and reading aloud the landlord's ultimatum. They have until the end of the month to pay the back rent, failing which the Globe will have to close down. 'What are we going to do?' laments Miriam the hair-washing woman.

'Sss,' comes a hiss from behind him, soft enough not to be heard at the front of the house. Sss.'

He turns, and a pellet catches him on the temple. Standing against the back wall is Ryan, the boyfriend with the ear-ring and goatee. Their eyes meet. 'Professor Lurie!' whispers Ryan hoarsely. Outrageous though his behaviour is, he seems quite at ease. There is a little smile on his lips. The play goes on, but there is around him now a definite flurry of unrest. Sss,' hisses Ryan again. 'Be quiet!' exclaims the woman two seats away, directing herself at him, though he has uttered not a sound. There are five pairs of knees to fight past ('Excuse me .. . Excuse me'), cross looks, angry murmurings, before he can reach the aisle, find his way out, emerge into the windy, moonless night. There is a sound behind him. He turns. The point of a cigarette glows: Ryan has followed him into the parking lot.

'Are you going to explain yourself?' he snaps. 'Are you going to explain this childish behaviour?'

Ryan draws on his cigarette. 'Only doing you a favour, prof. Didn't you learn your lesson?'

'What was my lesson?'

'Stay with your own kind.'

Your own kind: who is this boy to tell him who his kind are? What does he know of the force that drives the utmost strangers into each other's arms, making them kin, kind, beyond all prudence? Omnis gens quaecumque se in se pecere vult. The seed of generation, driven to perfect itself, driving deep into the woman's body, driving to bring the future into being. Drive, driven.

Ryan is speaking. Let her alone, man! Melanie will spit in your eye if she sees you.' He drops his cigarette, takes a step closer. Under stars so bright one might think them on fire they face each other. 'Find yourself another life, prof. Believe me.'

He drives back slowly along the Main Road in Green Point. Spit in your eye: he had not expected that. His hand on the steering wheel is trembling. The shocks of existence: he must learn to take them more lightly. The streetwalkers are out in numbers; at a traffic light one of them catches his eye, a tall girl in a minute black leather skirt. Why not, he thinks, on this night of revelations?

They park in a cul-de-sac on the slopes of Signal Hill. The girl is drunk or perhaps on drugs: he can get nothing coherent out of her. Nonetheless, she does her work on him as well as he could expect. Afterwards she lies with her face in his lap, resting. She is younger than she had seemed under the streetlights, younger even than Melanie. He lays a hand on her head. The trembling has ceased. He feels drowsy, contented; also strangely protective.

So this is all it takes!, he thinks. How could I ever have forgotten it?

Not a bad man but not good either. Not cold but not hot, even at his hottest. Not by the measure of Teresa; not even by the measure of Byron. Lacking in fire. Will that be the verdict on him, the verdict of the universe and its all-seeing eye?

The girl stirs, sits up. 'Where are you taking me?' she mumbles. 'I'm taking you back to where I found you.'

TWENTY-TWO

HE STAYS IN contact with Lucy by telephone. In their conversations she is at pains to assure him that all is well on the farm, he to give the impression that he does not doubt her. She is hard at work in the flowerbeds, she tells him, where the spring crop is now in bloom. The kennels are reviving. She has two dogs on full board and hopes of more. Petrus is busy with his house, but not too busy to help out. The Shaws are frequent visitors. No, she does not need money.

But something in Lucy's tone nags at him. He telephones Bev Shaw. 'You are the only person I can ask,' he says. 'How is Lucy, truthfully?'

Bev Shaw is guarded. 'What has she told you?'

'She tells me that everything is fine. But she sounds like a zombie. She sounds as if she is on tranquillizers. Is she?'

Bev Shaw evades the question. However, she says - and she seems to be picking her words carefully - there have been `developments'.

'What developments?'

'I can't tell you, David. Don't make me. Lucy will have to tell you herself '

He calls Lucy. 'I must make a trip to Durban,' he says, lying. 'There is the possibility of a job. May I stop off for a day or two?'

`Has Bev been speaking to you?'

'Bev has nothing to do with it. May I come?'

He flies to Port Elizabeth and hires a car. Two hours later he turns off the road on to the track that leads to the farm, Lucy's farm, Lucy's patch of earth.

Is it his earth too? It does not feel like his earth. Despite the time he has spent here, it feels like a foreign land.

There have been changes. A wire fence, not particularly skilfully erected, now marks the boundary between Lucy's property and Petrus's. On Petrus's side graze a pair of scrawny heifers. Petrus's house has become a reality. Grey and featureless, it stands on an eminence east of the old farmhouse; in the mornings, he guesses, it must cast a long shadow.

Lucy opens the door wearing a shapeless smock that might as well be a nightdress. Her old air of brisk good health is gone. Her complexion is pasty, she has not washed her hair. Without warmth she returns his embrace. 'Come in,' she says. 'I was just making tea.

They sit together at the kitchen table. She pours tea, passes him a packet of ginger snaps. 'Tell me about the Durban offer,' she says.

`That can wait. I am here, Lucy, because I am concerned about you. Are you all right?'

'I'm pregnant.'

'You are what?'

'I'm pregnant.'

`From whom? From that day?'

`From that day.'

'I don't understand. I thought you took care of it, you and your GP.

'No.'

'What do you mean, no? You mean you didn't take care of it?'

'I have taken care. I have taken every reasonable care short of what you are hinting at. But I am not having an abortion. That is something I am not prepared to go through with again.'

'I didn't know you felt that way. You never told me you did not believe in abortion. Why should there be a question of abortion anyway? I thought you took Ovral.'

'This has nothing to do with belief. And I never said I took Ovral.'

'You could have told me earlier. Why did you keep it from me?'

'Because I couldn't face one of your eruptions. David, I can't run my life according to whether or not you like what I do. Not any more. You behave as if everything I do is part of the story of your life. You are the main character, I am a minor character who doesn't make an appearance until halfway through. Well, contrary to what you think, people are not divided into major and minor. I am not minor. I have a life of my own, just as important to me as yours is to you, and in my life I am the one who makes the decisions.'

An eruption? Is this not an eruption in its own right? 'That's enough, Lucy,' he says, taking her hand across the table. 'Are you telling me you are going to have the child?'

'Yes.'

'A child from one of those men?'

'Yes.'

'Why?'

'Why? I am a woman, David. Do you think I hate children? Should I choose against the child because of who its father is?'

'It has been known. When are you expecting it?'

'May. The end of May.'

'And your mind is made up?'

'Yes.'

'Very well. This has come as a shock to me, I confess, but I will stand by you, whatever you decide. There is no question about that. Now I am going to take a walk. We can talk again later.'

Why can they not talk now? Because he is shaken. Because there is a risk that he too might erupt. She is not prepared, she says, to go through with it again. Therefore she has had an abortion before. He would never have guessed it. When could it have been? While she was still living at home? Did Rosalind know, and was he kept in the dark?

The gang of three. Three fathers in one. Rapists rather than robbers, Lucy called them - rapists cum taxgatherers roaming the area, attacking women, indulging their violent pleasures. Well, Lucy was wrong. They were not raping, they were mating. It was not the pleasure principle that ran the show but the testicles, sacs bulging with seed aching to perfect itself. And now, lo and behold, the child! Already he is calling it the child when it is no more than a worm in his daughter's womb. What kind of child can seed like that give life to, seed driven into the woman not in love but in hatred, mixed chaotically, meant to soil her, to mark her, like a dog's urine?

A father without the sense to have a son: is this how it is all going to end, is this how his line is going to run out, like water dribbling into the earth? Who would have thought it! A day like any other day, clear skies, a mild sun, yet suddenly everything is changed, utterly changed!

Standing against the wall outside the kitchen, hiding his face in his hands, he heaves and heaves and finally cries.

He installs himself in Lucy's old room, which she has not taken back. For the rest of the afternoon he avoids her, afraid he will come out with something rash.

Over supper there is a new revelation. 'By the way,' she says, 'the boy is back.'

'The boy?'

'Yes, the boy you had the row with at Petrus's party. He is staying with Petrus, helping him. His name is Pollux.'

'Not Mncedisi? Not Nqabayakhe? Nothing unpronounceable, just Pollux?'

'P-O-L-L-U-X. And David, can we have some relief from that terrible irony of yours?'

'I don't know what you mean.'

'Of course you do. For years you used it against me when I was a child, to mortify me. You can't have forgotten. Anyway, Pollux turns out to be a brother of Petrus's wife's. Whether that means a real brother I don't know. But Petrus has obligations toward him, family obligations.'

'So it all begins to come out. And now young Pollux returns to the scene of the crime and we must behave as if nothing has happened.'

'Don't get indignant, David, it doesn't help. According to Petrus, Pollux has dropped out of school and can't find a job. I just want to warn you he is around. I would steer clear of him if I were you. I suspect there is something wrong with him. But I can't order him off the property, it's not in my power.'

'Particularly - ' He does not finish the sentence.

'Particularly what? Say it.'

'Particularly when he may be the father of the child you are carrying. Lucy, your situation is becoming ridiculous, worse than ridiculous, sinister. I don't know how you can fail to see it. I plead with you, leave the farm before it is too late. It's the only sane thing left to do.'

'Stop calling it the farm, David. This is not a farm, it's just a piece of land where I grow things - we both know that. But no, I'm not giving it up.'

He goes to bed with a heavy heart. Nothing has changed between Lucy and himself, nothing has healed. They snap at each other as if he has not been away at all.

It is morning. He clambers over the new-built fence. Petrus's wife is hanging washing behind the old stables. 'Good morning,' he says. 'Molo. I'm looking for Petrus.'

She does not meet his eyes, but points languidly toward the building site. Her movements are slow, heavy. Her time is near: even he can see that.

Petrus is glazing windows. There is a long palaver of greetings that ought to be gone through, but he is in no mood for it. 'Lucy tells me the boy is back again,' he says. 'Pollux. The boy who attacked her.'

Petrus scrapes his knife clean, lays it down. 'He is my relative,' he says, rolling the r. 'Now I must tell him to go away because of this thing that happened?'

'You told me you did not know him. You lied to me.'

Petrus sets his pipe between his stained teeth and sucks vigorously. Then he removes the pipe and gives a wide smile. 'I lie,' he says. 'I lie to you.' He sucks again. Tor why must I lie to you?'

'Don't ask me, ask yourself, Petrus. Why do you lie?'

The smile has vanished. 'You go away, you come back again -why?' He stares challengingly. 'You have no work here. You come to look after your child. I also look after my child.'

'Your child? Now he is your child, this Pollux?'

'Yes. He is a child. He is my family, my people.'

So that is it. No more lies. My people. As naked an answer as he could wish. Well, Lucy is his people.

'You say it is bad, what happened,' Petrus continues. 'I also say it is bad. It is bad. But it is finish.' He takes the pipe from his mouth, stabs the air vehemently with the stem. 'It is finish.'

'It is not finished. Don't pretend you don't know what I mean. It is not finished. On the contrary, it is just beginning. It will go on long after I am dead and you are dead.'

Petrus stares reflectively, not pretending he does not understand. 'He will marry her,' he says at last. 'He will marry Lucy, only he is too young, too young to be marry. He is a child still.'

'A dangerous child. A young thug. A jackal boy.'

Petrus brushes aside the insults. 'Yes, he is too young, too young. Maybe one day he can marry, but not now. I will marry.'

'You will marry whom?'

'I will marry Lucy.'

He cannot believe his ears. So this is it, that is what all the shadow-boxing was for: this bid, this blow!

And here stands Petrus foursquare, puffing on the empty pipe, waiting for a response.

'You will marry Lucy,' he says carefully. 'Explain to me what you mean. No, wait, rather don't explain. This is not something I want to hear. This is not how we do things.'

We: he is on the point of saying, We Westerners.

'Yes, I can see, I can see,' says Petrus. He is positively chuckling. 'But I tell you, then you tell Lucy. Then it is over, all this badness.'

'Lucy does not want to marry. Does not want to marry a man. It is not an option she will consider. I can't make myself clearer than that. She wants to live her own life.'

'Yes, I know,' says Petrus. And perhaps he does indeed know. He would be a fool to underestimate Petrus.

'But here', says Petrus, 'it is dangerous, too dangerous. A woman must be marry.'

'I tried to handle it lightly,' he tells Lucy afterwards. 'Though I could hardly believe what I was hearing. It was blackmail pure and simple.'

‘It wasn't blackmail. You are wrong about that. I hope you didn't lose your temper.'

'No, I didn't lose my temper. I said I would relay his offer, that's all. I said I doubted you would be interested.'

'Were you offended?'

'Offended at the prospect of becoming Petrus's father-in-law? No. I was taken aback, astonished, dumbfounded, but no, not offended, give me credit for that.'

'Because, I must tell you, this is not the first time. Petrus has been dropping hints for a while now. That I would find it altogether safer to become part of his establishment. It is not a joke, not a threat. At some level he is serious.'

'I have no doubt that in some sense he is serious. The question is, in what sense? Is he aware that you are . . . ?'

'You mean, is he aware of my condition? I have not told him. But I am sure his wife and he will have put two and two together.'

'And that won't make him change his mind?'

'Why should it? It will make me all the more part of the family. In any event, it is not me he is after, he is after the farm. The farm is my dowry.'

`But this is preposterous, Lucy! He is already married! In fact, you told me there are two wives. How can you even contemplate it?'

'I don't believe you get the point, David. Petrus is not offering me a church wedding followed by a honeymoon on the Wild Coast. He is offering an alliance, a deal. I contribute the land, in return for which I am allowed to creep in under his wing. Otherwise, he wants to remind me, I am without protection, I am fair game.'

'And that isn't blackmail? What about the personal side? Is there no personal side to the offer?'

'Do you mean, would Petrus expect me to sleep with him? I'm not sure that Petrus would want to sleep with me, except to drive home his message. But, to be frank, no, I don't want to sleep with Petrus. Definitely not.'

'Then we need not discuss it any further. Shall I convey your decision to Petrus - that his offer is not accepted, and I won't say why?'

'No. Wait. Before you get on your high horse with Petrus, take a moment to consider my situation objectively. Objectively I am a woman alone. I have no brothers. I have a father, but he is far away and anyhow powerless in the terms that matter here. To whom can I turn for protection, for patronage? To Ettinger? It is just a matter of time before Ettinger is found with a bullet in his back. Practically speaking, there is only Petrus left. Petrus may not be a big man but he is big enough for someone small like me. And at least I know Petrus. I have no illusions about him. I know what I would be letting myself in for.'

'Lucy, I am in the process of selling the house in Cape Town. I am prepared to send you to Holland. Alternatively I am prepared to give you whatever you need to set yourself up again somewhere safer than here. Think about it.'

It is as if she has not heard him. 'Go back to Petrus,' she says. 'Propose the following. Say I accept his protection. Say he can put out whatever story he likes about our relationship and I won't contradict him. If he wants me to be known as his third wife, so be it. As his concubine, ditto. But then the child becomes his too. The child becomes part of his family. As for the land, say I will sign the land over to him as long as the house remains mine. I will become a tenant on his land.'

'A bywoner.'

'A bywoner. But the house remains mine, I repeat that. No one enters this house without my permission. Including him. And I keep the kennels.'

'It's not workable, Lucy. Legally it's not workable. You know that.'

'Then what do you propose?'

She sits in her housecoat and slippers with yesterday's newspaper on her lap. Her hair hangs lank; she is overweight in a slack, unhealthy way. More and more she has begun to look like one of those women who shuffle around the corridors of nursing homes whispering to themselves. Why should Petrus bother to negotiate? She cannot last: leave her alone and in due course she will fall like rotten fruit.

'I have made my proposal. Two proposals.'

'No, I'm not leaving. Go to Petrus and tell him what I have said. Tell him I give up the land. Tell him that he can have it, title deed and all. He will love that.'

There is a pause between them.

'How humiliating,' he says finally. 'Such high hopes, and to end like this.'

'Yes, I agree, it is humiliating. But perhaps that is a good point to start from again. Perhaps that is what I must learn to accept. To start at ground level. With nothing. Not with nothing but. With nothing. No cards, no weapons, no property, no rights, no dignity.'

'Like a dog.'

'Yes, like a dog.'

TWENTY-THREE

IT IS MID-MORNING. He has been out, taking the bulldog Katy for a walk. Surprisingly, Katy has kept up with him, either because he is slower than before or because she is faster. She snuffles and pants as much as ever, but this no longer seems to irritate him.

As they approach the house he notices the boy, the one whom Petrus called my people, standing with his face to the back wall. At first he thinks he is urinating; then he realizes he is peering in through the bathroom window, peeping at Lucy.

Katy has begun to growl, but the boy is too absorbed to pay heed. By the time he turns they are upon him. The flat of his hand catches the boy in the face. 'You swine!' he shouts, and strikes him a second time, so that he staggers. 'You filthy swine!'

More startled than hurt, the boy tries to run, but trips over his own feet. At once the dog is upon him. Her teeth close over his elbow; she braces her forelegs and tugs, growling. With a shout of pain he tries to pull free. He strikes out with a fist, but his blows lack force and the dog ignores them. The word still rings in the air: Swine! Never has he felt such elemental rage. He would like to give the boy what he deserves: a sound thrashing. Phrases that all his life he has avoided seem suddenly just and right: Teach him a lesson, Show him his place. So this is what it is like, he thinks! This is what it is like to be a savage! He gives the boy a good, solid kick, so that lie sprawls sideways. Pollux! What a name!

The dog changes position, mounting the boy's body, tugging grimly at his arm, ripping his shirt. The boy tries to push her off, but she does not budge. 'Ya ya ya ya ya!' he shouts in pain. 'I will kill you!' he shouts. Then Lucy is on the scene. 'Katy!' she commands.

The dog gives her a sidelong glance but does not obey.

Falling to her knees, Lucy grips the dog's collar, speaking softly and urgently. Reluctantly the dog releases her grip.

'Are you all right?' she says.

The boy is moaning with pain. Snot is running from his nostrils. 'I will kill you!' he heaves. He seems on the point of crying.

Lucy folds back his sleeve. There are score-marks from the dog's fangs; as they watch, pearls of blood emerge on the dark skin.

'Come, let us go and wash it,' she says. The boy sucks in the snot and tears, shakes his head. Lucy is wearing only a wrapper. As she rises, the sash slips loose and her breasts are bared. The last time he saw his daughter's breasts they were the demure rosebuds of a six-year-old. Now they are heavy, rounded, almost milky. A stillness falls. He is staring; the boy is staring too, unashamedly. Rage wells up in him again, clouding his eyes.

Lucy turns away from the two of them, covers herself. In a single quick movement the boy scrambles to his feet and dodges out of range. 'We will kill you all!' he shouts. He turns; deliberately trampling the potato bed, he ducks under the wire fence and retreats toward Petrus's house. His gait is cocky once more, though he still nurses his arm.

Lucy is right. Something is wrong with him, wrong in his head. A violent child in the body of a young man. But there is more, some angle to the business he does not understand. What is Lucy up to, protecting the boy?

Lucy speaks. 'This can't go on, David. I can cope with Petrus and his aanhangers, I can cope with you, but I can't cope with all of you together.'

'He was staring at you through the window. Are you aware of that?'

'He is disturbed. A disturbed child.'

'Is that an excuse? An excuse for what he did to you?' Lucy's lips move, but he cannot hear what she says.

'I don't trust him,' he goes on. 'He is shifty. He is like a jackal sniffing around, looking for mischief. In the old days we had a word for people like him. Deficient. Mentally deficient. Morally deficient. He should be in an institution.'

'That is reckless talk, David. If you want to think like that, please keep it to yourself. Anyway, what you think of him is beside the point. He is here, he won't disappear in a puff of smoke, he is a fact of life.' She faces him squarely, squinting into the sunlight. Katy slumps down at her feet, panting lightly, pleased with herself; with her achievements. 'David, we can't go on like this. Everything had settled down, everything was peaceful again, until you came back. I must have peace around me. I am prepared to do anything, make any sacrifice, for the sake of peace.'

'And I am part of what you are prepared to sacrifice?' She shrugs. 'I didn't say it, you said it.'

'Then I'll pack my bags.'

Hours after the incident his hand still tingles from the blows. When he thinks of the boy and his threats, he seethes with anger. At the same time, he is ashamed of himself. He condemns himself absolutely. He has taught no one a lesson - certainly not the boy. All he has done is to estrange himself further from Lucy. He has shown himself to her in the throes of passion, and clearly she does not like what she sees. He ought to apologize. But he cannot. He is not, it would seem, in control of himself. Something about Pollux sends him into a rage: his ugly, opaque little eyes, his insolence, but also the thought that like a weed he has been allowed to tangle his roots with Lucy and Lucy's existence. If Pollux insults his daughter again, he will strike him again. Du musst dein Leben дndern!: 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 vine 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 R woo 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?