Life Times: Stories 1952-2007

Loot

Once upon our time, there was an earthquake: but this one is the most powerful ever recorded since the invention of the Richter scale made it possible for us to measure apocalyptic warnings.

It tipped a continental shelf. These tremblings often cause floods; this colossus did the reverse, drew back the ocean as a vast breath taken. The most secret level of our world lay revealed: the sea-bedded — wrecked ships, façades of houses, ballroom candelabra, toilet bowl, pirate chest, TV screen, mail coach, aircraft fuselage, cannon, marble torso, Kalashnikov, metal carapace of a tourist bus-load, baptismal font, automatic dishwasher, computer, swords sheathed in barnacles, coins turned to stone. The astounded gaze raced among these things; the population who had fled from their toppling houses to the maritime hills ran down. Where terrestrial crash and bellow had terrified them, there was naked silence. The saliva of the sea glistened upon these objects; it is given that time does not, never did, exist down here where the materiality of the past and the present as they lie has no chronological order, all is one, all is nothing — or all is possessible at once.

People rushed to take; take, take. This was — when, anytime, sometime — valuable, that might be useful, what was this, well someone will know, that must have belonged to the rich, it’s mine now, if you don’t grab what’s over there someone else will, feet slipped and slithered on seaweed and sank in soggy sand, gasping sea-plants gaped at them, no one remarked there were no fish, the living inhabitants of this unearth had been swept up and away with the water. The ordinary opportunity of looting shops which was routine to people during the political uprisings was no comparison. Orgiastic joy gave men, women and their children strength to heave out of the slime and sand what they did not know they wanted, quickened their staggering gait as they ranged, and this was more than profiting by happenstance, it was robbing the power of nature before which they had fled helpless. Take, take; while grabbing they were able to forget the wreck of their houses and the loss of time-bound possessions there. They had tattered the silence with their shouts to one another and under these cries like the cries of the absent seagulls they did not hear a distant approach of sound rising as a great wind does. And then the sea came back, engulfed them to add to its treasury.

That is what is known; in television coverage that really had nothing to show but the pewter skin of the depths, in radio interviews with those few infirm, timid or prudent who had not come down from the hills, and in newspaper accounts of bodies that for some reason the sea rejected, washed up down the coast somewhere.

But the writer knows something no one else knows; the sea-change of the imagination.

Now listen, there’s a man who has wanted a certain object (what) all his life. He has a lot of — things — some of which his eye falls upon often, so he must be fond of, some of which he doesn’t notice, deliberately, that he probably shouldn’t have acquired but cannot cast off, there’s an art nouveau lamp he reads by, and above his bedhead a Japanese print, a Hokusai, The Great Wave, he doesn’t really collect oriental stuff, although if it had been on the wall facing him it might have been more than part of the furnishings, it’s been out of sight behind his head for years. All these — things — but not the one.

He’s a retired man, long divorced, chosen an old but well-appointed villa in the maritime hills as the site from which to turn his back on the assault of the city. A woman from the village cooks and cleans and doesn’t bother him with any other communication. It is a life blessedly freed of excitement, he’s had enough of that kind of disturbance, pleasurable or not, but the sight from his lookout of what could never have happened, never ever have been vouchsafed, is a kind of command. He is one of those who are racing out over the glistening seabed, the past — detritus=treasure, one and the same — stripped bare.

Like all the other looters with whom he doesn’t mix, has nothing in common, he races from object to object, turning over the shards of painted china, the sculptures created by destruction, abandonment and rust, the brine-vintaged wine casks, a plunged racing motorcycle, a dentist’s chair, his stride landing on disintegrated human ribs and metatarsals he does not identify. But unlike the others, he takes nothing — until: there, ornate with tresses of orange-brown seaweed, stuck fast with nacreous shells and crenellations of red coral, is the object. (A mirror?) It’s as if the impossible is true; he knew that was where it was, beneath the sea, that’s why he didn’t know what it was, could never find it before. It could be revealed only by something that had never happened, the greatest paroxysm of our earth ever measured on the Richter scale.

He takes it up, the object, the mirror, the sand pours off it, the water that was the only bright glance left to it streams from it, he is taking it back with him, taking possession at last.

And the great wave comes from behind his bedhead and takes him.

His name well known in the former regime circles in the capital is not among the survivors. Along with him among the skeletons of the latest victims, with the ancient pirates and fishermen, there are those dropped from planes during the dictatorship so that with the accomplice of the sea they would never be found. Who recognised them, that day, where they lie?

No carnation or rose floats.

Full fathom five.

The Generation Gap

He was the one told: James, the youngest of them. The father to the son — and it was Jamie, with whom he’d never got on since Jamie was a kid; Jamie who ran away when he was adolescent, was brought back resentful, nothing between them but a turned-aside head (the boy’s) and the tight tolerant jaw of suppressed disapproval (the father’s). Jamie who is doing — what was it now? Running a cybersurfers’ restaurant with a friend, that’s the latest, he’s done so many things but the consensus in the family is that he’s the one who’s done nothing with his life. His brother and sisters love him but see it as a waste: of charm and some kind of ill-defined talent, sensed but not directed in any of the ways they recognise.

So it was from Jamie that they received the announcement. The father had it conveyed by Jamie to them — Virginia, Barbara, and Matthew called at some unearthly hour in Australia. The father has left the mother.

A husband leaves his wife. It is one of the most unexceptional of events. The father has left the mother: that is a completely different version, their version.

A husband leaves his wife for another woman. Of course. Their father, their affectionate, loyal, considerate father, announces, just like that: he has left their mother for another woman. Inconceivable.

And to have chosen, of all of them, the younger brother as confidant, confessor, messenger — whatever the reasoning was?

They talked to each other on the telephone, calls those first few days frustratingly blocked while numbers were being dialled simultaneously and the occupied whine sounded on and on. Matthew in Brisbane sent an email. They got together in Barbara’s house — his Ba, his favourite. Even Jamie appeared, summoned — for an explanation he could not give.

Why should I ask why, how?

Or would not give. He must have said something beyond this announcement; but no. And Jamie had to get back to the bar nook and the espresso machine, leave them to it with his archaic smile of irresponsible comfort in any situation.

And suddenly, from the door — We’re all grown up now. Even he.

It was established that no one had heard from the mother. Ginnie had called her and waited to see if she would say anything, but she chatted about the grandchildren and the progress of a friend she had been visiting in hospital. Not a word. Perhaps she doesn’t know. But even if he kept the affair somehow secret from her until now, he would hardly ‘inform’ his children before telling his wife of a decision to abandon her.

Perhaps she thinks we don’t know.

No, can’t you see — she doesn’t want us to know because she thinks he’ll come back, and we don’t need ever to know. A private thing. As Jamie said.

That’s ridiculous, she’s embarrassed, ashamed, I don’t know what — humiliated at the idea of us. .

Ginnie had to intervene as chairperson to restore clarity out of the spurting criss-cross of sibling voices. Now what do we do? What are we talking about: are we going to try and change his mind? Talk some sense into him. Are we going to go to her?

We must. First of all.

Then Ba should go.

One would have thought Ba was the child he would have turned to. She said nothing, stirred in her chair and took a gulp of gin and tonic with a pull of lip muscles at its kick. There was no need to ask, why me, because she’s her Daddy’s favourite, she’s closest to him, the one best to understand if anyone can, what has led him to do what he has done — to himself, to their mother.

And the woman? The voices rise as a temperature of the room, what about the woman? Anybody have any idea of who she might be. None of those wives in their circle of friends — it’s Alister, Ginnie’s husband, considering — Just look at them. Your poor dad.

But where did he and she ever go that he’d meet anyone new?

Well, she’ll know who it is. Ba will be told.

Nothing sure about that.

As the youngest of them said, they’re all grown up, there are two among the three present (and that’s not counting sports commentator Matthew in Brisbane) who know how affairs may be and are concealed; it’s only if they take the place of the marriage that they have to be revealed.

Sick. That’s what it is. He’s sick.

Ba — all of them anticipating for Ba to deal with the mother — expected tears and heartbreak to burst the conventions that protect the intimacy of parents’ marriage from their sons and daughters. But there are no tears.

Derision and scorn, from their mother become the discarded wife. Indeed she knows who the woman is. A pause. As if the daughter, not the mother, were the one who must prepare herself.

She’s exactly your age, Ba.

And the effect is what the mother must have counted on as part of the kind of triumph she has set herself to make of the disaster, deflecting it to the father. The woman has a child, never been married. Do? Plays the fiddle in an orchestra. How and where he found her, God only knows — you know we never go to concerts, he has his CD collection here in this room. Everything’s been just as usual, while it’s been going on — he says, very exact — for eight months. So when he finally had the courage to come out with it, I told him, eight months after forty-two years, you’ve made your choice. May he survive it.

When I said (Ba is reporting), doesn’t sound as if it will work for him, it’s just an episode, something he’s never tried, never done, a missing experience, he’ll come back to his life (of course, that would be the way Ba would put it), she said — I won’t give it back to him. I can’t tell you what she’s like. It’s as if the place they were in together — not just the house — is barricaded. She’s in there, guns cocked.

What can they do for her, their mother, who doesn’t want sympathy, doesn’t want reconciliation brokered even if it were to be possible, doesn’t want the healing of their love, any kind of love, if the love of forty-two years doesn’t exist.

His Ba offers to bring the three available of his sons and daughters together again to meet him at her house, but he tells her he would rather ‘spend some time’ with each separately. She is the last he comes to and his presence is strange, both to him and to her. How can it be otherwise? When he sleeps with the woman, she could have been his daughter. It’s as if something forbidden has happened between him and his favourite child. Something unspeakable exists.

Ba has already heard it all before — all he will allow himself to tell — from the others. Same story to Ginnie, Jamie and according to an email from Matthew, much the same in a ‘bloody awful’ call to him. Yes, she is not married, yes, she plays second violin in a symphony orchestra, and yes — she is thirty-five years old. He looks up slowly and he gives his daughter this fact as if he must hold her gaze and she cannot let hers waver; a secret between them. So she feels able to ask him what the others didn’t, perhaps because the enquiry might somehow imply acceptance of the validity of happenstance in a preposterous decision of a sixty-seven-year-old to overturn his life. How did he meet this woman?

He shapes that tight tolerant jaw, now not of disapproval (he has no right to that, in these circumstances) but of hurt resignation to probing: on a plane. On a plane! The daughter cannot show her doubtful surprise; when did he ever travel without the mother? While he continues, feeling himself pressed to it: he went to Cape Town for negotiations with principals from the American company who didn’t have time to come to him up in Pretoria. The orchestra was going to the coast to open a music festival. He found her beside him. They got talking and she kindly offered to arrange a seat for him at the over-subscribed concert. And then? And then? But her poor father, she couldn’t humiliate him, she couldn’t follow him, naked, the outer-inner man she’d never seen, through the months in the woman’s bed beside the violin case.

What are you going to do, she asked.

It’s done.

That’s what he said (the siblings compare notes). And he gave such explanation as he could. Practical. I’ve moved out — but Isabel must have told you. I’ve taken a furnished flat. I’ll leave the number, I’d rather you didn’t call at the office, at present.

And then? What will happen to you, my poor father — but all she spoke out was, So you want to marry this girl. For in comparison with his mate, his wife of forty-two years, his sixty-seven years, she is no more than that.

I’ll never marry again.

Yes, he told the others that, too. Is the vehemence prudence (the huge age difference, for God’s sake: Matthew, from Australia) or is it telling them something about the marriage that produced them, some parental sorrow they weren’t aware of while in the family home, or ignored, too preoccupied with their own hived-off lives to bother with, after.

There’s nothing wrong between Isabel and me, but for a very long time there’s been nothing right, either.

Wishing you every happiness. The wedding gift maxim. Grown apart? Put together mistakenly in the first place — they’re all of them too close to the surface marriage created for them, in self-defence and in protection of them, the children, no doubt, to be able to speculate.

And what is going to happen to our mother, your Isabel?

And then. And then. That concert, after the indigestion of a three-hour lunch and another three hours of business-speak wrangling I had with those jocular sharks from Seattle. Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 following Respighi. I’ve forgotten there’s no comparison between listening to recorded music in a room filled with all the same things — the photographs, the glass, the coffee cup in your hand, the chair that fits you — and hearing music, live. Seeing it, as well, that’s the difference, because acoustically reproduction these days is perfect — I know I used to say it was better than the bother of driving to concerts. Watching the players, how they’re creating what you’re hearing, their movements, their breathing, the expressions of concentration, even the way they sit, sway in obedience to the conductor, he’s a magician transforming their bodies into sound. I don’t think I took particular notice of her. Maybe I did without knowing it, these things are a human mystery, I’ve realised. But that would have been that — she’d told me her name but I didn’t know where she lived, so I wouldn’t even have known where to thank her for the concert reservation — if it hadn’t been that she was on the plane again next day when I was returning home. We were seated in the same row, both aisle seats, separated this time only by that narrow gap we naturally could talk across. About the concert, what it was like to be a musician, people like myself are always curious about artists — she was teasing, saying we regard theirs as a free, undisciplined life compared with being — myself — a businessman, but it was a much more disciplined life than ours — the rehearsals, the performance, the ‘red-eye night-work, endless overtime’ she called it, while we others have regular hours and leisure. We had the freebie drink together and a sort of mock argument about stress, hers, facing an audience and knowing she’d get hell afterwards if she played a wrong note, and mine with the example of the principals from Seattle the day before. The kind of exchange you hear strangers making on a plane, and that I always avoid.

I avoid now talking about her to my children — what can you call sons and daughters who are far from children. I know they think it’s ridiculous — it’s all ridiculous, to them — but I don’t want anyone running around making ‘enquiries’ about her, her life, as if her ‘suitability’ is an issue that has anything to do with them. But of course everything about what I suppose must be called this affair has to do with them because it’s their mother, someone they’ve always seen — will see — as the other half of me. They’ll want to put me together again.

The children (he’s right, what do you call a couple’s grown-up children) often had found weeks go by without meeting one another or getting in touch. Ginnie is a lecturer in the maths department at the university and her husband is a lawyer, their friends are fellow academics and lawyers, with a satisfying link between the two in concerns over the need for a powerful civil society to protect human rights. Their elder son and daughters are almost adult, and they have a latecomer, a four-year-old boy. Ba — she’s barren — Ginnie is the repository of this secret of her childlessness. Ba and her husband live in the city as week-long exiles: from the bush. Carl was manager of a wildlife reserve when she fell in love with him, he now manages a branch of clothing chain stores and she is personal secretary to a stockbroker; every weekend they are away, camping and walking, incommunicado to humans, animal-watching, bird-watching, insect-watching, plant-identifying, returned to the lover-arms of the veld. As Ginnie and Alister have remarked, if affectionately, her sister and brother-in-law are more interested in buck and beetles than in any endangered human species. Jamie — to catch up with him, except for Christmas! He was always all over the place other than where you would expect to find him. And Matthew: he was the childhood and adolescence photographs displayed in the parents’ house, and a commentator’s voice broadcasting a test cricket match from Australia in which recognisable quirks of home pronunciation came and went like the fading and return of an unclear line.

Now they are in touch again as they have not been since a time, times, they wouldn’t remember or would remember differently, each according to a need that made this sibling then seek out that, while avoiding the others.

Ginnie and Ba even meet for lunch. It’s in a piano bar-cum-bistro with deep armchairs and standing lamps which fan a sunset light to the ceiling beneath which you eat from the low table at your knees. A most unlikely place to be chosen by Ba, who picks at the spicy olives and peri-peri cashew nuts as if she were trying some unfamiliar seed come upon in the wild; but she has suggested the place because she and Carl don’t go to restaurants and it’s the one she knows of since her stockbroker asks her to make bookings there for him. When the sisters meet they don’t know where to begin. The weeks go by, when the phone rings and (fairly regularly, duty bound) it’s the father, or (rarely, she’s in a mood when duty is seen to be a farce) it’s the mother, the siblings have a high moment when it could be another announcement — that it is over, he’s back, she’s given his life back to him, the forty-two years. But no, no.

May he survive. That’s the axiom the daughters and sons have, ironically, taken from her. Who is this woman who threatens it?

Her name is Alicia (affected choice on the part of whoever engendered her?), surname Parks (commonplace enough, which explains a certain level of origin, perhaps?). She was something of a prodigy for as long as childhood lasts, but has not fulfilled this promise and has ended up no further than second violinist in a second-best symphony orchestra — so rated by people who really know music. Which the father, poor man, doesn’t, just his CD shelf in the living room, for relaxation with his wife on evenings at home. The woman’s career will have impressed him; those who can, play; those who can’t, listen: he and Isabel.

What happened to the man, father of the child? Has their father a rival? Is he a hopeful sign? Or — indeed — is he a threat, a complication in the risk the darling crazy sixty-seven-year-old is taking, next thing he’ll be mixed up in some crime passionnel — but Jamie, captured for drinks at Ginnie’s house, laughs — Daddy-O, right on, the older man has appeal! And Jamie’s the one who does what as youngsters they called ‘picking up stompies’ — cigarette butts of information and gossip. The child’s father lives in London, he’s a journalist and he’s said to be a coloured. So the little boy to whom he must be playing surrogate father is a mixed-blood child, twice or thrice diluted, since the father might be heaven knows what concoction of human variety.

At least that shows this business has brought progress in some way. Ginnie is privately returning to something in her own experience of the parental home only one other sibling (Matthew) happens to know about. The parents always affirmed they were not racist and brought up their children that way. So far as they felt they could without conflict with the law of the time. Ginnie, as a student, had a long love affair with a young Indian who was admitted to study at the white university on a quota. She never could tell the parents. When it came to a daughter or son of their own. .

The fact of the child obviously doesn’t matter to him, now. Of course the mother, in her present mood, if she gets to hear. .

Ginnie was at a door of the past, opening contiguous to the present. You never know about anything like that. Principles. Look at me. I wear a ribbon in support of no discrimination against Aids victims, but what if I found the woman who takes care of my kid was HIV positive — would I get rid of her?

Alister, merely a husband among them, had something to say to the siblings. The matter of the child might be an added attraction for him. The rainbow child. Many well-meaning people in the past now want some way to prove in practice the abstract positions they hid in, then. Of course I don’t know your father as well as you do.

His wife had something to add.

Or as we think we do.

Ba did not speak at these family meetings.

She is in a house with her father. The house is something familiar to her but it isn’t either the family home or her own. Or maybe it’s both — dreams can do these things. Just she and her father; she wonders why he’s there in the middle of the day. He says he’s waiting for the arrival of the maid. There’s the tring-tring of an old-fashioned bicycle bell, the kind they had on their bikes as children. She looks out the window, he’s standing behind her, and she sees — they see, she’s aware he knows she’s looking — a young and pretty redhead/blonde dismount from a bicycle, smiling. But there are no whites who work as maids in this country.

Ginnie and Ba, not telling anyone else, go to a concert. Seats chosen neither too near nor too far back. Yes, she is there with the violin nestling between jaw and shoulder. Follow white hands doing different intricate things, some fingers depressing strings, those of the other hand folded around the bow. She wears the sort of informal evening dress the other women players in the orchestra wear, not quite a uniform; the equivalent of the not quite black-tie outfits the male players allow themselves — roll-collar shirts and coloured cummerbunds. There’s some sort of fringed shawl slipped off the side of the bowing arm. Apparently the dress is quite sexily décolleté. They’ll verify when the orchestra rises at interval. She is certainly very slim — the left leg stretched gracefully, and there’s a lot of hair piled on top of her head. Not blonde, not redhead. It’s the colour of every second woman’s at present, an unidentifiable brown overlaid with a purplish shine of henna. She rests her bow, plays when summoned by the conductor, and the sisters are summoned to listen to her. They feel she knows they are there, although she doesn’t know them. She’s looking at them although blinded by the stage lights. She’s playing to them.

The palm of the hand.

All that you go through your life (sixty-seven years, how long it’s been) without knowing. Most of it you’ll never suspect you lack and it’s pure chance that you may come upon. An ordinary short flight between one familiar city and another in daily, yearly time. The palm of a hand: that it can be so erotic. Its pads and valleys and lines to trace and kiss; she laughs at me and says they’re lines of fortune, that’s why I’m here with her. The palm that holds enfolds the rod of the bow and it sings. Enfolds holds me.

Matthew mustn’t think he can stay out of it! They send him email letters, dispatched by Ginnie but addressing him as from a collective ‘we’ — the sisters and their husbands, the younger brother — who expect him to take part in decisions: whatever there is to be done. Matthew writes, I suppose we gave them the general amount of trouble sons and daughters do. The parents, he means. And what is meant by that? What’s that got to do with anything that can be done? What’s he getting at? Is it that it’s the parents’ turn now — for God’s sake, at their, at his age! Or is it that because of their past youth the sons and daughters ought to understand the parents better? All these irrelevances — relevances, who knows — come upon, brought up by the one nice and far away among the cricket bats and kangaroos. What is there for Matthew to disinter; he was always so uncomplicated — so far as they know, those who grew up close to him in the entanglements of a family; never ran away from anything — unless you count Australia, where he’s made what is widely recognised as a success.

The general amount of trouble. Jamie. And for the parents he’s unlikely ever to be regarded as anything other than troubling. As long as they’re happy, parents say of their engendered adults, swallowing dismay and disappointment. What did the parents really know of what was happening to their young, back then. Ginnie’s Indian; the irony, she sees it now, that it was his parents who found out about the affair and broke it off. Never mind falling in love, that kind of love was called miscegenation in those days, punishable by law, and would have put his studies at risk; his parents planned for him to be a doctor, not a lover — in prison. Ba’s abortion. How he would have anguished over his favourite daughter if he had known. Only Ginnie knows that this botched back-room process is the reason why Ba is childless. No one else; not Carl. It belongs to a life before Ba found him, her rare and only elect mate, come upon in the bush. It’s unlikely that Jamie has a passing thought (in the reminder of the general amount of trouble they’ve given) for what he arranged for his frantic sister, that time; even as a teenager he had precociously the kind of friends who were used to mutual efforts in getting one another out of all manner of youthful trouble. Yes, it was Jamie — Jamie of all of them — Ba turned to; as it was Jamie — of all of them — her father had turned to in his trouble, now.

It became possible to have him to eat a meal at one or other of their homes, without the mother. As if it were normal. And not easy to convey to him implicitly that it was not; that his place as a lover was not at this table, his place here was as a husband with his wife, mother-and-father. This displacement did not apply to their mother because she, as they saw it, was the victim of this invading lover in the family circle. She had accepted to come to them, in her own right (so to speak), now and then, her carefully erected composure forbidding any discussion of the situation at table, and now she had gone to spend a holiday with her cousin, a consular official in Mauritius.

After the meal with her at Ginnie’s or Ba’s house, one of them, her daughters or their husbands, insisted on a sense of reality by bringing up the subject; the only subject. How did things stand now? Was there any exchange of ideas, say, about the future, going on between him and her?

Her lawyer had met him and an allowance for her had been arranged; there were other matters to be cleared up. Possessions. These were not specified, as if it had nothing to do with anyone but herself. It was Carl who was able to say, out of his privileged innocence close to nature’s organic cycles of change and renewal, Maybe your absence will be the right thing. For both of you. When you come back you may find you can work things out again together.

She looked at him half-pityingly, for his concern.

Things are worked out. It was his work.

And she turned away as of her right to grandmotherly talk with Ginnie’s small boy, for whom she had brought a model jeep, and then to a low exchange in intimate tone with her favourite, the elder of the two teenage daughters, who happened to be at home in the family that evening. No boyfriends around tonight? Usually when I come at the weekend I hear a lot of music and laughing going on upstairs. Helen’s friends, the girl says. And not yours, not your type — I understand. What’s your type. . all right, the one, then — I have a pretty good idea of what would interest you, you know.

And the girl lies, describing the non-existent one as she thinks an adult would wish him to be.

When the mother-grandmother had left, Ginnie’s husband Alister told them: Isabel thinks we’re on his side, that’s the problem.

Why should we be.

Nobody takes up Ba’s statement.

May he survive.

Best of all. Early in the morning some days to wake at the sound of the key turning in the lock; her key. Hear it but not sufficiently awake to open eyes; and there’s a cold fresh cheek laid against the unshaven one. She’s left her apartment before seven to deliver the child to nursery school and after, she’s suddenly here. Yesterday. Heard her shoes drop and opened eyes to follow her clothes to the floor. She glides into bed, the cheek is still cold and the rest of her is her special warmth. Not today: waiting for the key to turn. Tomorrow. Again it will turn. Again and again.

They broach to one another the obligation — the usefulness, perhaps — of inviting him to bring her along some time. Sunday lunch? No, too familial a gesture, and Ba and Carl would not be there, why should Ginnie and Alister deal with this on their own, you can’t count on Jamie. Come by for a drink sixish, that would do. What’s she like — look like? The two men want to know in advance — after all, they are the father’s fellow males — what to expect in order to put themselves in his place. But the splash of stage lights drops a mask on faces, there were cave-hollows of eyes, white cheeks, bright mouth. It was the hands in movement by which an identity was followed.

The man who brings her to Ginnie’s house is another personage: their father? He who always listened, talks. Although this is not his home, he is not the host, he rises to refill glasses and offer snacks. He is courting her, in front of them, they see it! Their mother is much better-looking; still beautiful; this one has a long, thin, voracious face, the light did not exaggerate its hollows, and her intelligently narrowed eyes — hazel? greenish? doesn’t matter — are iconised by make-up in the style of Egyptian statues. She’s chosen a loose but clinging tunic and the sisters see that she has firm breasts. When they compare impressions afterwards it seems it was the women who noted this rather than, as they would have thought, the men. Her hands are unadorned (the mother has had gifts of beautiful rings from him, over the years) and lie half-curled, the palms half-open on chair-arm or lap; it’s as if the hands’ lack of tension is meant to put them at ease, these hands that make music. And pleasure their father. She has a voice with what the women suspect as an adopted huskiness they believe men find attractive. It turns out no one of the men — Jamie was present — noticed it either as an affectation or an attraction he might have responded to.

The talk was quite animated and completely artificial; they were all other people; chatting about nothing that mattered to whom and what they really were. There are so many harmless subjects, you can really get along in any situation by sticking to what has been in the newspapers and on television about the floods/drought, the times of day to avoid driving in traffic congestion (keep off wars and politics, both local and international, those are intimate subjects), and, of course about music. It is the lover who brings that up; Ginnie and Ba would have preferred to keep off that, too. She might somehow sense how their eyes had been upon her while she played. . He even boasts about her: Alicia will go with the orchestra to an international music festival in Montreal in the winter, and it will be particularly enjoyable for her because Alicia also speaks fluent French. He might be — ought to be — boring someone with the achievements of his seventeen-year-old granddaughter, Ginnie’s eldest child. Ginnie’s biological afterthought, four-year-old Shaun, had been playing with his jeep around everyone’s feet. When the father and his woman were leaving, she bent to the child: I’ve got a little boy like you, you know. He has a collection of cars but I don’t think he has a jeep, yours’s great.

They are not embarrassed about anything, these lovers.

The new father of some other man’s progeny makes a pledge for the rainbow child. We’ll have to find one for him. Where did you get it?

Shaun asserts the presence not admitted to the drinks party. My grandmother did bring it for me.

A curious — almost shaming — moment comes to the siblings and husbands when they suddenly laugh about the whole business — mother, father, the woman. It begins to happen when they get together — less and less frequently — dutifully to try and decide yet again what they ought to be doing about it. The outbreak’s akin to the hysterical giggle that sometimes accompanies tearful frustration. What can you do about Papa in his bemused state, and oh my God, next thing is he’ll get her pregnant, he’ll be Daddy all over again. No no no — spare us that! What do you mean no — presumably that’s what it’s all about, his pride in an old man’s intact male prowess! And Alister in an aside to Jamie — Apparently he’s still able to get it up — right on, as you would say — and they all lose control again. What is there to do with the mother who is unapproachable, wants to be left alone like a sulky teenager, and a father who’s broken loose like a youth sowing wild oats? Who could ever do anything with people in such conditions? Ah — but these are mature people! So nobody knows what maturity is, after all? Is that it? Not any longer, not any more, now that the mother and father have taken away that certainty from their sons and daughters. Matthew calls and sends email from his safe distance, reproaching, What is the matter with all of you? Why can’t you get some reality into them, bring them together for what’s left after their forty-two years? How else can this end?

Well, the mother seems to be making an extended holiday-of-a-lifetime out of the situation, and he, he’s out of reach (spaced out: Jamie) dancing to a fiddle. Shaking their heads with laughter; that dies in exasperation. There’s nothing you can do with the parents.

Only fear for them. Ba’s tears are not of laughter.

At least adolescents grow up; that could have been counted on to solve most of the general trouble they’d given. In the circumstances of parents it seems there isn’t anything to be counted on, least of all the much-vaunted wisdom of old age. The mother wrote a long round-robin letter (copy to each sibling, just a different name after ‘Dearest’) telling that she was going to Matthew in Australia. So Mauritius had been halfway there, halfway from her rightful home, all along, in more than its geographical position across the Indian Ocean between Africa and Australia. She would ‘keep house’ in Matthew’s bachelor apartment while she looked for a new place of her own, with space enough for them to come and visit her. Send the grandchildren.

Alicia Parks, second violinist, did not return from Montreal. He continued to exchange letters and calls with her over many months. The family gathered this when he gave them news of her successes with the orchestra on tour, as if whether this was of interest or welcome to them or not, they must recognise her as an extension of his life — and therefore theirs. They, it obviously implied, could make up their minds about that.

What he did not tell them was that she had left the orchestra at the invitation to join a Montreal chamber group. As first violinist: an ambition he knew she had and he wanted to see fulfilled for her. But Canada. She had taken into consideration (that was her phrase) that there were not many such opportunities for her back in Africa.

With him. In his long late-night calls to her he completed, to himself, what she didn’t say.

She sent for her child; told him only after the child had left the country. Then she did not tell him that she was with someone other than her child, a new man, but he knew from her voice.

Ginnie came out with it to their father. Is she coming back?

When she gets suitable engagements here, of course. She’s made a position for herself in the world of music.

So he’s waiting for her, they decided, poor man. Why can’t he accept it’s over, inevitably, put the whole thing behind him, come back to ageing as a father, there’s a dignified alternative to this disastrous regression to adolescence.

May he survive.

Together and individually, they are determined in pursuit of him.

The best was the cold cheek. Just that. What alternative to that.

In the mirror in the bathroom, there was her body as she dried herself after the love-making bath together, towelling between her spread legs, and then across the back of her neck as beautifully as she bowed across the violin, steam sending trickles of her hair over her forehead. A mirror full of her. For me, old lover she knew how to love so well, so well, her old lover sixty-seven. What alternative.

Death is a blank mirror, emptied of all it has seen and shown.

Death waits, was waiting, but I took the plane to Cape Town, instead.

Look-Alikes

It was scarcely worth noticing at first; an out-of-work lying under one of the rare indigenous shrubs cultivated by the Botany Department on campus. Some of us remembered, afterwards, having passed him. And he — or another like him — was seen rummaging in the refuse bins behind the Student Union; one of us (a girl, of course) thrust out awkwardly to him a pitta she’d just bought for herself at the canteen, and she flushed with humiliation as he turned away mumbling. When there were more of them, the woman in charge of catering came out with a kitchen-hand in a blood-streaked apron to chase them off like a band of marauding monkeys.

We were accustomed to seeing them panhandling in the streets of the city near the university and gathered in this vacant lot or that, clandestine with only one secret mission, to beg enough to buy another bottle; moving on as the druids’ circle of their boxes and bits of board spread on the ground round the ashes of their trash fires was cleared for the erection of postmodern office blocks. We all knew the one who waved cars into empty parking bays. We’d all been confronted, as we crossed the road or waited at the traffic lights, idling in our minds as the engine of the jalopy idles, by the one who held up a piece of cardboard with a message running out of space at the edges: NO JOB IM HUNGRY EVEYONE HELP PLeas.

At first; yes, there were already a few of them about. They must have drifted in by the old, unfrequented entrance down near the tennis courts, where the security fence was not yet completed. And if they were not come upon, there were the signs: trampled spaces in the bushes, empty bottles, a single split shoe with a sole like a lolling tongue. No doubt they had been chased out by a patrolling security guard. No student, at that stage, would have bothered to report the harmless presence; those of us who had cars might have been more careful than usual to leave no sweaters or radios visible through the locked windows. We followed our familiar rabbit-runs from the lecture rooms and laboratories back, forth and around campus, between residences, libraries, Student Union and swimming pool, through avenues of posters making announcements of debates and sports events, discos and rap sessions, the meetings of Muslim, Christian or Jewish brotherhoods, gay or feminist sisterhoods, with the same lack of attention to all but the ones we’d put up ourselves.

It was summer when it all started. We spend a lot of time on the lawns around the pool, in summer. We swot down there, we get a good preview of each other more or less nude, boys and girls, there’s plenty of what you might call foreplay — happy necking. And the water to cool off in. The serious competitive swimmers come early in the morning when nobody else is up, and it was they who discovered these people washing clothes in the pool. When the swimmers warned them off they laughed and jeered. One left a dirt-stiff pair of pants that a swimmer balled and threw after him. There was argument among the swimmers; one felt the incident ought to be reported to Security, two were uncomfortable with the idea in view of the university’s commitment to being available to the city community. They must have persuaded him that he would be exposed for elitism, because although the pool was referred to as The Wishee-Washee, among us, after that, there seemed to be no action taken.

Now you began to see them all over. Some greeted you smarmily (my baas, sir, according to their colour and culture), retreating humbly into the undergrowth, others, bold on wine or stoned on meths, sentimental on pot, or transformed in the wild hubris of all three, called out a claim (Hey man, Ja boetie) and even beckoned to you to join them where they had formed one of their circles, or huddled, just two, with the instinct for seclusion that only couples looking for a place to make love have, among us. The security fence down at the tennis courts was completed, reinforced with spikes and manned guardhouse, but somehow they got in. The guards with their Alsatian dogs patrolled the campus at night but every day there were more shambling figures disappearing into the trees, more of those thick and battered faces looking up from the wells between buildings, more supine bodies contoured like sacks of grass cuttings against the earth beneath the struts of the sports grandstands.

And they were no longer a silent presence. Their laughter and their quarrels broadcast over our student discussions, our tête-à-tête conversations and love-making, even our raucous fooling about. They had made a kind of encampment for themselves, there behind the sports fields where there was a stretch of ground whose use the university had not yet determined: it was for future expansion of some kind, and in the meantime equipment for maintenance of the campus was kept there — objects that might or might not be useful, an old tractor, barrels for indoor plants when the Vice-Chancellor requested a bower to decorate some hall for the reception of distinguished guests, and — of course — the compost heaps. The compost heaps were now being used as a repository for more than garden waste. If they had not been there with their odours of rot sharpened by the chemical agents for decay with which they were treated, the conclave living down there might have been sniffed out sooner. Perhaps they had calculated this in the secrets of living rough: perhaps they decided that the Alsatians’ noses would be bamboozled.

So we knew about them — everybody knew about them, students, faculty, administrative staff, Vice-Chancellor — and yet nobody knew about them. Not officially. Security was supposed to deal with trespassers as a routine duty; but although Security was able to find and escort beyond the gates one or two individuals too befuddled or not wily enough to keep out of the way, they came back or were replaced by others. There was some kind of accommodation they had worked out within the order of the campus, some plan of interstices they had that the university didn’t have; like the hours at which security patrols could be expected, there must have been other certainties we students and our learned teachers had relied on so long we did not realise that they had become useless as those red bomb-shaped fire extinguishers which, when a fire leaps out in a room, are found to have evaporated their content while hanging on the wall.

We came to recognise some of the bolder characters; or rather it was that they got to recognise us — with their streetwise judgement they knew who could be approached. For a cigarette. Not money — you obviously don’t ask students for what they themselves are always short of. They would point to a wrist and ask the time, as an opener. And they must have recognised something else, too; those among us who come to a university because it’s the cover where you think you can be safe from surveillance and the expectations others have of you — back to play-school days, only the sand pit and the finger-painting are substituted by other games. The dropouts, just cruising along until the end of the academic year, sometimes joined the group down behind the grandstands, taking a turn with the zol and maybe helping out with the donation of a bottle of wine now and then. Of course only we, their siblings, identified them; with their jeans bought ready-torn at the knees, and hair shaved up to a topknot, they would not have been distinguished from the younger men in the group by a passing professor dismayed at the sight of the intrusion of the campus by hobos and loafers. (An interesting point, for the English Department, that in popular terminology the whites are known as hobos and the blacks as loafers.) If student solidarity with the underdog was expressed in the wearing of ragged clothes, then the invaders’ claim to be within society was made through adoption of acceptable fashionable unconventions. (I thought of putting that in my next essay for Sociology II.) There were topknots and single earrings among the younger invaders, dreadlocks, and one had long tangled blond hair snaking about his dark-stubbled face. He could even have passed for a certain junior lecturer in the Department of Political Science.

So nobody said a word about these recruits from among the students, down there. Not even the Society of Christian Students, who campaigned for moral regeneration on the campus. In the meantime, ‘the general situation had been brought to the notice’ of Administration. The implication was that the intruders were to be requested to leave, with semantic evasion of the terms ‘squatter’ or ‘eviction’. SUJUS (Students For Justice) held a meeting in protest against forced removal under any euphemism. ASOCS (Association of Conservative Students) sent a delegation to the Vice-Chancellor to demand that the campus be cleared of degenerates.

Then it was discovered that there were several women living among the men down there. The white woman was the familiar one who worked along the cars parked in the streets, trudging in thonged rubber sandals on swollen feet. The faces of the two black women were darkened by drink as white faces are reddened by it. The three women were seen swaying together, keeping upright on the principle of a tripod. The Feminist Forum took them food, tampons, and condoms for their protection against pregnancy and Aids, although it was difficult to judge which was still young enough to be a sex object in need of protection; they might be merely prematurely aged by the engorged tissues puffing up their faces and the exposure of their skin to all weathers, just as, in a reverse process, pampered females look younger than they are through the effect of potions and plastic surgery.

From ASOCS came the rumour that one of the group had made obscene advances to a girl student — although she denied this in tears, she had offered him her pitta, which he had refused, mumbling ‘I don’t eat rubbish’. The Vice-Chancellor was importuned by parents who objected to their sons’ and daughters’ exposure to undesirables, and by Hope For The Homeless who wanted to put up tents on this territory of the overprivileged. The City Health authorities were driven off the campus by SUJUS and The Feminist Forum while the Jewish Student Congress discussed getting the Medical School to open a clinic down at the grandstands, the Islamic Student Association took a collection for the group while declaring that the area of their occupation was out of bounds to female students wearing the chador, and the Students Buddhist Society distributed tracts on meditation among men and women quietly sleeping in the sun with their half-jacks, discreet in brown paper packets up to the screw top, snug beside them as hot-water bottles.

These people could have been removed by the police, of course, on a charge of vagrancy or some such, but the Vice-Chancellor, the University Council and the Faculty Association had had too much experience of violence resulting from the presence of the police on campus to invite this again. The matter was referred back and forth. When we students returned after the Easter vacation the blond man known by his head of hair, the toothless ones, the black woman who always called out Hello lovey how’you and the neat queen who would buttonhole anyone to tell of his student days in Dublin, You kids don’t know what a real university is, were still there. Like the stray cats students (girls again) stooped to scratch behind the ears.

And then something really happened. One afternoon I thought I saw Professor Jepson in a little huddle of four or five comfortably under a tree on their fruit-box seats. Someone who looked the image of him; one of the older men, having been around the campus some months, now, was taking on some form of mimesis better suited to him than the kid-stuff garb the younger ones and the students aped from each other. Then I saw him again, and there was Dr Heimrath from Philosophy just in the act of taking a draw, next to him — if any social reject wanted a model for look-alike it would be from that department. And I was not alone, either; the friend I was with that day saw what I did. We were the only ones who believed a student who said he had almost stepped on Bell, Senior Lecturer from Maths, in the bushes with one of the three women; Bell’s bald head shone a warning signal just in time. Others said they’d seen Kort wrangling with one of the men, there were always fights when the gatherings ran out of wine and went on to meths. Of course Kort had every kind of pure alcohol available to him in his domain, the science laboratories; everybody saw him, again and again, down there, it was Kort, all right, no chance of simple resemblance, and the euphoria followed by aggression that a meths concoction produces markedly increased in the open-air coterie during the following weeks. The papers Maths students handed in were not returned when they were due; Bell’s secretary did not connect calls to his office, day after day, telling callers he had stepped out for a moment. Jepson, Professor Jepson who not only had an international reputation as a nuclear physicist but also was revered by the student body as the one member of faculty who was always to be trusted to defend students’ rights against authoritarianism, our old prof, everybody’s enlightened grandfather — he walked down a corridor unbuttoned, stained, with dilated pupils that were unaware of the students who shrank back, silent, to make way.

There had been sniggers and jokes about the other faculty members, but nobody found anything to say over Professor Jepson; nothing, nothing at all. As if to smother any comment about him, rumours about others got wilder; or facts did. It was said that the Vice-Chancellor himself was seen down there, sitting round one of their trash fires; but it could have been that he was there to reason with the trespassers, to flatter them with the respect of placing himself in their company so that he could deal with the situation. Heimrath was supposed to have been with him, and Bester from Religious Studies with Franklin-Turner from English — but Franklin-Turner was hanging around there a lot, anyway, that snobbish closet drinker come out into the cold, no more fastidious ideas about race keeping him out of that mixed company, eh?

And it was no rumour that Professor Russo was going down there, now. Minerva Russo, of Classics, young, untouchable as one of those lovely creatures who can’t be possessed by men, can be carried off only by a bull or penetrated only by the snowy penis-neck of a swan. We males all had understood, through her, what it means to feast with your eyes, but we never speculated about what we’d find under her clothes; further sexual awe, perhaps, a mother-of-pearl scaled tail. Russo was attracted. She sat down there and put their dirty bottle to her mouth and the black-rimmed fingernails of one of them fondled her neck. Russo heard their wheedling, brawling, booze-snagged voices calling and became a female along with the other unwashed three. We saw her scratching herself when she did still turn up — irregularly — to teach us Greek poetry. Did she share their body-lice too?

It was through her, perhaps, that real awareness of the people down there came. The revulsion and the pity; the old white woman with the suffering feet ganging up with the black ones when the men turned on the women in the paranoia of betrayal — by some mother, some string of wives or lovers half-drowned in the bottles of the past — and cursing her sisters when one of them took a last cigarette butt or hung on a man the white sister favoured; tended by the sisterhood or tending one of them when the horrors shook or a blow was received. The stink of the compost heaps they used drifted through the libraries with the reminder that higher functions might belong to us but we had to perform the lower ones just like the wretches who made us stop our noses. Shit wasn’t a meaningless expletive, it was part of the hazards of the human condition. They were ugly, down there at the grandstands and under the bushes, barnacled and scaled with disease and rejection, no one knows how you may pick it up, how it is transmitted, turning blacks grey and firing whites’ faces in a furnace of exposure, taking away shame so that you beg, but leaving painful pride so that you can still rebuff, I don’t eat rubbish, relying on violence because peace has to have shelter, but sticking together with those who threaten you because that is the only bond that’s left. The shudder at it, and the freedom of it — to let go of assignments, assessments, tests of knowledge, hopes of tenure, the joy and misery of responsibility for lovers and children, money, debts. No goals and no failures. It was enviable and frightening to see them down there — Bester, Franklin-Turner, Heimrath and the others, Russo pulling herself to rights to play the goddess when she caught sight of us but too bedraggled to bring it off. Jepson, our Jepson, all that we had to believe in of the Old Guard’s world, passing and not recognising us.

And then one day, they had simply disappeared. Gone. The groundsmen had swept away the broken bottles and discarded rags. The compost was doused with chemicals and spread on the campus’s floral display. The Vice-Chancellor had never joined the bent backs round the zol and the bottle down there and was in his panelled office. The lines caging Heimrath’s mouth in silence did not release him to ask why students gazed at him. Minerva sat before us in her special way with matched pale narrow hands placed as if one were the reflection of the other, its fingertips raised against a mirror. Jepson’s old bristly sow’s ear sagged patiently towards the discourse of the seminar’s show-off.

From under the bushes and behind the grandstands they had gone, or someone had found a way to get rid of them overnight. But they are always with us. Just somewhere else.

The Diamond Mine

I’ll call her Tilla, you may call her by another name. You might think you knew her. You might have been the one: him. It’s not by some simple colloquial habit we ‘call’ someone instead of naming: call them up.

It was during the war, your war, the forties, that has sunk as far away into the century as the grandfathers’ nineteen-fourteen. He was blond, stocky in khaki, attractively short-sighted so that the eyes that were actually having difficulty with focus seemed to be concentrating attentively on her. The impression is emphasised by the lashes blond and curly as his hair. He is completely different from the men she knows in the life of films — the only men she knows apart from her father — and whom she expected to come along one day not too far off, Robert Taylor or even the foreigner, Charles Boyer. He is different because — at last — he is real; she is sixteen. He is no foreigner nor materialisation of projection from Hollywood. He’s the son of friends of a maternal grandmother, detailed to a military training camp in the province where the girl and her parents live. Some people even take in strangers from the camp for the respite of weekend leave; with a young daughter in the house this family would not go so far as to risk that but when the man of the family is beyond call-up age an easy way to fulfil patriotic duty is to offer hospitality to a man vouched for by connections. He’s almost to be thought of as an elective grandson of the old lady. In war these strangers, remember, are Our Boys.

When he comes on Friday nights and stays until Sunday his presence makes a nice change for the three, mother, father and young daughter who live a quiet life, not given to socialising. That presence is a pleasant element in the closeness between parents and daughter: he is old enough to be an adult along with them, and only eight years ahead of her, young enough to be her contemporary. The mother cooks a substantial lunch on the Sundays he’s there; you can imagine what the food must be like in a military camp. The father at least suggests a game of golf — welcome to borrow clubs, but it turns out the soldier doesn’t play. What’s his game, then? He likes to fish. But this hospitality is four hundred miles from the sea; the soldier laughs along in a guest’s concession of manly recognition that there must be a game. The daughter — for her, she could never tell anyone, his weekend presence is a pervasion that fills the house, displaces all its familiar odours of home, is fresh and pungent: he’s here. It’s the emanation of khaki washed with strong soap and fixed, as in perfume the essence of flowers is fixed by alcohol, by the pressure of a hot iron.

The parents are reluctant cinema-goers, so it is thoughtful of this visiting friend of the family that he invites the daughter of the house to choose a film she’d like to see on a Saturday night. She has no driving licence yet (seventeen the qualifying age in those days) and the father does not offer his car to the soldier. So the pair walk down the road from street light to street light, under the trees, all that autumn, to the small town’s centre where only the cinema and the pub in the hotel are awake. She is aware of window dummies in the closed shops her mother’s friends patronise, observing her as she walks past with a man. If she is invited to a party given by a schoolfriend, she must be home strictly by eleven, usually fetched by her father. But now she is with a responsible friend, a family connection, not among unknown youths on the loose; if the film is a nine o’clock showing the pair are not home before midnight, and the lights are already extinguished in the parents’ bedroom. It is then that, schoolgirlish, knowing nothing else to offer, she makes cocoa in the kitchen and it is then that he tells her about fishing. The kitchen is locked up for the night, the windows are closed and it is amazing how strong that presence of a man can be, that stiff-clean clothing warmed — not a scent, not a breath, but, as he moves his arms graphically in description of playing a catch, coming from the inner crease of his bare elbows where the sun on manoeuvres hasn’t got at the secret fold, coming from that centre of being, the pliant hollow that vibrates between collarbones as he speaks, the breast-plate rosy down to where a few brownish-blond hairs disappear into the open neck of the khaki shirt — he will never turn dark, his skin retains the sun, glows. Him.

Tilla has never gone fishing. Her father doesn’t fish. Four hundred miles from the sea the boys at school kick and throw balls around — they know about, talk about, football and cricket. The father knows about, talks about, golf. Fishing. It opens the sea before her, the salt wind gets in the narrowed eyes conveying to her whole nights passed alone on the rocks. He walks from headland to headland on dawn-wet sand, the tide is out — sometimes in mid-sentence there’s a check, half smile, half breath, because he’s thinking of something this child couldn’t know, this is his incantation that shuts out the smart parade-ground march towards killing and blinds the sights the gun trains on sawdust-stuffed figures where he is being drilled to see the face of the enemy to whom he, himself, is the enemy, with guts (he pulls the intricately perfect innards out of the fish he’s caught, the fisherman’s simple skill) in place of sawdust. Sleeping parents are right; he will not touch her innocence of what this century claims, commands from him.

Walking home where she used to race her bicycle up and down under the same trees, the clothing on their arms, the khaki sleeve, the sweater her mother has handed her as a condition of permission to be out in the chill night air, brushes by proximity, not intention. The strap of her sandal slips and as she pauses to right it, hopping on one leg, he steadies her by the forearm and then they walk on hand in hand. He’s taking care of her. The next weekend they kiss in one of the tree-dark intervals between street lights. Boys have kissed her; it happened only to her mouth; the next Saturday her arms went around him, his around her, her face approached, was pressed, breathed in and breathed against the hollow of neck where the pendulum of heartbeat can be felt, the living place above the breast-plate from which the incense of his presence had come. She was there.

In the kitchen there was no talk. The cocoa rose to top of the pot, made ready. All the sources of the warmth that her palms had extended to, everywhere in the house, as a domestic animal senses the warmth of a fire to approach, were in this body against hers, in the current of arms, the contact of chest, belly muscles, the deep strange heat from between his thighs. But he took care of her. Gently loosened her while she was discovering that a man has breasts, too, even if made of muscle, and that to press her own against them was an urgent exchange, walking on the wet sands with the fisherman.

The next weekend leave — but the next weekend leave is cancelled. Instead there’s a call from the public phone at the canteen bar. The mother happened to answer and there were expressions of bright and encouraging regret that the daughter tried to piece into what they were responding to. The family was at supper. The father’s mouth bunched stoically — Marching orders. Embarkation.

The mother nodded round the table, confirming.

She — the one I call Tilla — stood up appalled at the strength to strike the receiver from her mother and the inability of a good girl to do so. Then her mother was saying, But of course we’ll take a drive out on Sunday, say goodbye and Godspeed. Grandma’d never forgive me if she thought. . now can you tell me how to get there, beyond Pretoria, I know. . I didn’t catch it, what mine? And after the turn-off at the main road? Oh don’t bother, I suppose we can ask at a petrol station if we get lost, everyone must know where that camp is, is there something we can bring you, anything you’ll need. .

It seems there’s to be an outing made of it. Out of her stun: that essence, ironed khaki and soap, has been swept from the house, from the kitchen, by something that’s got nothing to do with a fisherman except that he is a man, and as her father has stated — Embarkation — men go to war. Her mother makes picnic preparations: do you think a chicken or pickled ox-tongue, hard-boiled eggs, don’t know where one can sit to eat in a military camp, there must be somewhere for visitors. Her father selects from his stack of travel brochures a map of the local area to place on the shelf below the windscreen. Petrol is rationed but he has been frugal with coupons, there are enough to provide a full tank. Because of this, plans for the picnic are abandoned, no picnic, her mother thinks wouldn’t it be a nice gesture to take the soldier out for a restaurant lunch in the nearest city? There won’t be many such luxuries for the young man on his way to war in the North African desert.

They have never shown her the mine, the diamond mine, although since she was a small child they have taken their daughter to places of interest as part of her education. They must have talked about it — her father is a mining company official himself, but the exploitation is gold, not precious stones — or more likely it has been cited in a general knowledge text at school: some famous diamond was dug there.

The camp is on part of the vast mine property, commandeered by the Defence Force, over the veld there are tents to the horizon, roped and staked, dun as the scuffed and dried grass and the earth scoured by boots — boots tramping everywhere, khaki everywhere, the wearers replicating one another, him; where shall they find him? He did give a tent number. The numbers don’t seem to be consecutive. Her father is called to a halt by a replica with a gun, slow-spoken and polite. The car follows given directions retained each differently by the mother and father, the car turns, backs up, take it slowly for heaven’s sake.

She is the one: — There. There he is.

Of course, when you find him you see there is no one like him, no bewilderment. They are all laughing in the conventions of greeting but his eyes have their concentrated attention for her. It is his greeting of the intervals between street lights, and of the kitchen. This weekend which ends weekends seems also to be the first of winter; it’s suddenly cold, wind bellies and whips at that tent where he must have slept, remote, between weekends. It’s the weather for hot food, shelter. At the restaurant he chooses curry and rice for this last meal. He sprinkles grated coconut and she catches his eye and he smiles for her as he adds dollops of chutney. The smile is that of a greedy boy caught out and is also as if it were a hand squeezed under the table. No wine — the father has to drive, and young men oughtn’t to be encouraged to drink, enough of that in the army — but there is ice cream with canned peaches, coffee served, and peppermints with the compliments of the management.

It was too warm in the restaurant. Outside, high-altitude winds carry the breath of what must be early snow on the mountains far away, unseen, as this drive in return to the camp carries the breath of war, far away, unseen, where all the replicas in khaki are going to be shipped. No heating in the family car of those days, the soldier has only his thin, well-pressed khaki and the daughter, of course, like all young girls has taken no precaution against a change in the weather, she is wearing the skimpy flounced cotton dress (secretly chosen although he, being older, and a disciple of the sea’s mysteries, probably won’t even notice) that she was wearing the first time they walked to the cinema. The mother, concealing — she believes — irritation at the fecklessness of the young, next thing she’ll have bronchitis and miss school — fortunately keeps a rug handy and insists that the passengers in the back seat put it over their knees.

It was easy to chat in the preoccupations of food along with the budgerigar chitter of other patrons in the restaurant. In the car, headed back for that final place, the camp, the outing is over. The father feels an obligation: at least, he can tell something about the diamond mine, that’s of interest, and soon they’ll actually be passing again the site of operations though you can’t see much from the road.

The rug is like the pelt of some dusty pet animal settled over them. The warmth of the meal inside them is bringing it to life; a life they share, one body. It’s pleasant to put your hand beneath it; the hands, his right, her left, find one another.

you know what a diamond is, of course, although you look at it as something pretty a woman wears on her finger mmh? well actually it consists of pure carbon crystallised

He doesn’t like to be interrupted, there’s no need to make any response, even if you still hear him. The right hand and left hand become so tightly clasped that the pad of muscle at the base of each thumb is flattened against the bone and the interlaced fingers are jammed down between the joints. It isn’t a clasp against imminent parting, it’s got nothing to do with any future, it belongs in the urgent purity of this present.

the crystallisation in regular octahedrons that’s to say eight-sided and in allied forms and the cut and polished ones you see in jewellery more or less follow

The hands lay together, simply happened, on the skirt over her left thigh, because that is where she had slipped her hand beneath the woolly comfort of the rug. Now he slowly released, first fingers, then palms — at once awareness signals between them that the rug is their tender accomplice, it must not be seen to be stirred by something — he released himself from her and for one bereft moment she thought he had left her behind, his eight-year advantage prevailed against such fusion of palms as it had done, so gently (oh but why) when they were in the dark between trees, when they were in the kitchen.

colourless or they may be tinted occasionally yellow pink even black

The hand had not emerged from the rug. She followed as if her eyes were closed or she was in the dark, it went as if it were playing, looking for a place to tickle as children do to make one another wriggle and laugh, where her skirt ended at her knee, going under her knee without displacing the skirt and touching the tendons and the hollow there. She didn’t want to laugh (what would her father make of such a response to his knowledgeable commentary) so she glided her hand to his and put it back with hers where it had been before.

one of the biggest diamonds in the world after the Koh-i-noor’s hundred-and-nine carats but that was found in India

The hand, his hand, pressed fingers into her thigh through the cotton flounce as if testing to see what was real about her; and stopped, and then out of the hesitation went down and, under the rug, up under the gauze of skirt, moved over her flesh. She did not look at him and he did not look at her.

and there are industrial gems you can cut glass with make bits for certain drills the hardest substance known

At the taut lip of her pants he hesitated again, no hurry, all something she was learning, he was teaching, the anticipation in his fingertips, he stroked along one of the veins in there in the delicate membrane-like skin that is at the crevice between leg and body (like the skin that the sun on manoeuvres couldn’t reach in the crook of his elbow) just before the hair begins. And then he went under the elastic edge and his hand was soft on soft hair, his fingers like eyes attentive to her.

look at this veld nothing suggests one of the greatest ever, anywhere, down there, down in what we call Blue Earth the diamondiferous core

She has no clear idea of where his hand is now, what she feels is that they are kissing, they are in each other’s mouths although they cannot look to one another.

Are you asleep back there? — the mother is remarking her own boredom with the mine — he is eight years older, able to speak: Just listening. His finger explores deep down in the dark, the hidden entrance to some sort of cave with its slippery walls and smooth stalagmite; she’s found, he’s found her.

The car is passing the mine processing plant.

product of the death and decay of forests millennia ago just as coal is but down there the ultimate alchemy you might say

Those others, the parents, they have no way of knowing. It has happened, it is happening under the old woolly rug that was all they can provide for her. She is free; of them. Found; and they don’t know where she is.

At the camp, the father shakes the soldier’s hand longer than in the usual grip. The mother for a moment looks as if she might give him a peck on the cheek, Godspeed, but it is not her way to be familiar.

Aren’t you going to say goodbye? She’s not a child, good heavens, a mother shouldn’t have to remind of manners.

He’s standing outside one of the tents with his hands hanging open at his sides as the car is driven away and the attention is upon her until, with his furry narrowed sight, he’ll cease to be able to make her out while she still can see him, see him until he is made one with all the others in khaki, replicated, crossing and crowding, in preparation to embark.

If he had been killed in that war they would have heard, through the grandmother’s connections.

Is it still you; somewhere, old?