Get A Life Page 10

  Was it Berenice or Benni who proposed it.

  The two personae were more and more mingled in the life they lived now. It was certainly after the several months following that Saturday, months during which there were the same kind of easy invitations in response to her trial one; she was asked by her Agency colleagues to bring along those nice bushmates of Paul, Thapelo and Derek whatsisname, with their kids, and Thapelo and his wife Thandike in return included the copywriter (who was this time accompanied by her woman), the photographer and his American girlfriend, to celebrate a birthday in Thapelo's family.

  Let's have a baby.

  Another child. She did not tell him it was even a career decision; she was prepared to lose some of her energy, her drive towards success after success, to give her body over to the disadvantages of distortion and accept the distracting, absorbing emotions of loving care for an infant.

  – It's right for Nickie. An only child – that's lonely. -

  God knows, he must have had enough experience of loneliness, those days weeks that have to be forgotten, made up for somehow (how was she to decide), to understand loneliness although there was no comparison in kind… childhood is another state.

  He said nothing, met her eyes for slow moments; the hold twitched away and his head stirred in what could be a questioning or assent.

  Anyway. – I'm not using – taking anything. – It was up to nature to decide.

  Berenice had no doubt of her fecundity. Most of her sexual life had been focused on avoiding it. But months went by and there was no conception. Blood every twenty-eight days. Was she prematurely ageing – at thirty-two, ridiculous. She had announced to her close colleagues that they'd have to find a temporary executive-level replacement at her desk, her computer, her conference telephone, for some months soon, she and her man had decided to have a second child. Now she confided it didn't seem to be happening. She took their experienced advice. It's nothing a gynaecologist can't prescribe for. The tests for fertility showed normal ovulation. On the prescription of the gynaecologist she instructed Paul and herself in what she called 'acrobatics', and intense frequency of lovemaking during fertile periods indicated by a rise in temperature she was to measure in her vagina. Strangely – unexpectedly in a male who had recently survived terminality – this vigorous frequent call on his sexual potency did not seem to affect him. When she alerted him in the wilderness over the radio contact (mobiles do not work too remotely from any power source) that the fertile period was warm in her, he came home to serve, and then to return to his wilderness.

  There was still no conception. She consulted the gynaecologist again.

  You ovulate all right, that's established. Your husband should have a sperm count.

  Paul is to make an appointment with his doctor.

  When is it?

  He has not made an appointment.

  Shall I give a call?

  No, I'll do it.

  He doesn't. Berenice/Benni stops asking.

  Cannot.

  Cannot submit himself, this self, to more tests, more procedures invading, monitoring his body. It performs, the penis is eveready, at hand, when he wakes in the morning, it gives and takes excitement when called upon, so frequently, to enter and empty itself to her in spurts of pleasure. Without reason, without any means of knowing by all the tests a laboratory trusts, without knowing if there could be any such reason, he half-believes the roving cells perhaps have not given up, the radiance that pursued to kill them keeps a pilot light somewhere low within him. His sperm may carry this. What kind of child could come of it.

  He cannot trust his body. It remains the stranger that was made of it.

  After some months of the good enough quality of the ordinary life that is valued only when it has been destroyed and then in some effort put together again – she has been made deputy director of the advertising agency, he has completed his on-location report on the Okavango for his team to place before the Minister of Environmental Affairs and release to the press – she brings up the subject of the second child. Not reproachfully, almost with a kind of hesitant tenderness?

  – If you want another child you'll have to find another man. -

  iv / Get a Life

  Lyndsay didn't expect to be met at the airport. Paul was in Pretoria that day with a delegation of the World Conservation Union to the Minister of Environmental Affairs and it wasn't in any way Benni's obligation, indispensable to her clients as she was – advertising is a very personal transaction. But the mother had dinner with the son and his little family the evening of her arrival and Lyndsay and Paul spent time often, for one mutually-found reason or another, together while Adrian was away. Lunch when Paul found himself at his city offices, a walk with her on a Sunday (his suggestion, unexpectedly thoughtful, he certainly would have more interesting things to do). They carried something unexpressed between them. He didn't go to see her at the old house. She didn't ask him to. They had lived another time, another country, in common rather than actually together; it was not such an intimacy, elsewhere. They both, however, shared a sense of the rightness of Adrian having his chanced archaeological venture, the justice of the recognition of an avocation by the civil rights lawyer and the ecologist who had achieved their vocations. They'd never talked of this, but now that so many situations had come about that should never have been, in the home where he had been a child, she was able to reflect to him, with some questioning acceptance, how his father, her man, had given up the intention to be an archaeologist – at least until a time that never came. To dig into the prehistoric past didn't look likely to provide for the home-and-family contracted in marriage.

  – Even though you were a working woman, a lawyer? Able to contribute? Must have been some other reason, in my father, that he couldn't – didn't want -

  – I was a struggling beginner! A junior way down on the legal profession ladder, earning a clerk's salary. Not everyone wants as single-mindedly, absolutely as you do, has – what is it – all right, a calling that's significant of general survival and comes first, to be followed before everything, everyone, all else. Hardly anybody has the luck. – She looked away for a moment as if something had been forgotten. Smiled. – Or the loss. -

  Was he a poor family-man, that what she meant. But the three words dropped away. What had emanated from him, isolated as a threat to others, means that the usual standards, rewards and punishments should not be applicable, so soon, to him. She read out from a letter she'd had a mishap related humorously, exasperation become a good story, from his father. A car the usually trusty Norwegian had hired suddenly began to behave like one of the volcanoes, smoking wildly, and the guide and her charge had to leave it burning itself out while they spent a night sitting up in the single-room adobe house of Indians with whom even the Norwegian linguist couldn't communicate. Not to worry, help came in the form of a passing bus next morning. He was sensibly staying on in the country a few days longer than the date he was expected home because the incident had wrecked not only the car but the trip to a site he most wanted of all to see, and who knows when he'd ever get the chance again. There followed a description of what he sought, was dug up there, which Lyndsay handed over to be read by Paul himself. – Sounds wonderful. I know the feeling, when we're out in the bundu and can't get to where we should be. -

  The letter was warmth between them. She spoke of the third who belonged in it. – Really finding himself. I can see us having to pay a return visit. -

  Three days before the date of his delayed arrival – she had saved and stacked in his retreat newspapers and journals of particular interest that he'd missed – she came with another letter. Paul was at home with Nickie, his opponent in some electronic game. After a few minutes as spectator she oddly asked her son if she could be alone with him. She spoke as if she could not believe what she heard herself saying. But the strangeness couldn't be questioned; an emanation, this time from her. He bribed the child to go to the care of the nanny (politically-correct: child-min
der). The boy loved the woman, a cousin supplied by Primrose, and, without being aware of it, was learning to speak Setswana with her; a new generation that might produce white multi-linguists, if not quite up to the level of Thapelo. The father grinned with pleasure, each time, to hear the little boy's few words.

  Paul first stood a moment in front of his mother; then sat down not beside her, but in a chair, not far apart.

  If anybody could have understood, it should have been she.

  But when she unfolded the flimsy pages of handwriting as definitive as the features of the – Adrian's – face familiar to her as her own encountered in a mirror – ready for another account of the pleasures of his ancient discoveries, she did not understand what she was reading. She actually moved away the hand that was holding the letter, a moment, and then read again the first paragraphs. He wanted to be direct and honest with her, as he'd always been. Anything else would not be worth the value of their life together. Long life, including the indescribable recent experience in the house with their son. Long throughout her so deservedly successful career, his pride in it that would never change, and long through his working years to his retirement.

  He found himself in love with the Norwegian girl. Woman really, she was nearly thirty-five. 'I am sixty-five. I had never imagined this could happen, not alone to me but to anyone this age, I'm a grandfather, for God's sake, I know, my working life is over. How can this begin again. I know you won't be able to believe it. I can't. But darling Lyn, it is. It's happened to Hilde and me. Thirty years between us. She was divorced from an Argentinian living in Mexico some years back, she's never had a child. And now she loves an old man who is somebody else's husband. I can't tell you how awful she feels about you, she liked you so much, we all got on well. So nobody wanted this to happen but it has, it has.

  'We've suddenly been having what should be, I suppose, an affair. Holiday affair. I know, I know, old man's last fling. It seems I don't have flings; I fell in love with you and that was all I needed. For a lifetime as one has a life's work. Now I love this woman and can't deny it.

  'What will happen I don't know. Although that's not the truth, I do know that I'm going to stay here in Mexico, with her, for the present.

  'What's going to happen to us – you'll be asking as you read. I don't know. Only that I can't go on living in this state, behind your back, out of sight in Mexico. Of all places. It's had to happen in Mexico, where I've been able to follow the dream of anyone interested in archaeology to get to sites you've only read about. Through my bringing up the names of old aficionados, amateurs I've known, and some of the great discoverers like Tobias; and others, Wadley, Parkington and young Poggenpoel. I've even been able to spend a day sifting the dust on a current dig. Isn't that enough.

  'It isn't. I can't lie.

  'I can't say now, when I'll be coming back. To arrange things, whatever that may mean, for us to sit down and talk about this.

  'No way to think of, to end the letter, for you.'

  Just the signature, Adrian.

  I thought you were going to tell me you were leaving.

  He doesn't mention what else happened, what took away four years of the lifetime of loving me. He's not forgotten, ageing can't be as kind as that, he's wanting to make clear there is no claim of justification, never mind revenge, in what he's doing. Not true, for him or me or anyone, that this 'happens'; there is readiness for it and will, in entering it, the state, even though it is alienation while it is fulfilment. It doesn't 'happen' the way what happened to our son did. You have to have known disaster to know the difference.

  You are telling me you are leaving me.

  She had to go to someone, take this second letter to be verified in someone else's eyes, decoded independently. Not information – family news – to give over a call to Emma in Brazil. Or take to Jacqueline in her suburb north of the city, or the resort of boarding a plane and going to Susan. Although none of the adult children knows of the mother who was competent (not like Adrian's honest inability) to lie for four years, the only one she can approach is the one who came back in awful radiance to shelter in the childhood home. The shared knowledge of the unspeakable makes it possible to speak together of what is a banal disruption of intimate life. With this son it can be as if it were not the situation of his parents: a certain objectivity she can count on because of the remove, even from those who risked occupying the same house, at which he lived for a period. It's in her nature as a lawyer, what else is there to place trust in, if not objectivity; truth – that's a matter far beyond. The judge declares it while it exists – escaped.

  Yet it will be difficult, full of silences, to talk even to this son while she knows about the four years she lost for herself and his father. So the lie is back in the present. Lying once begun never ends.

  She hopes, again, to find him alone. Imagine the embarrassment – or sophisticated lack of it – of Benni. Elderly men fall for women who could be their daughters, every day, maybe (interesting?) it could be repressed incest having a late try. Female sympathy would be forthcoming, you know how men are, while it's always been evident Benni can have no such complaint against hers, handsome and unusual a man as he must seem to other women.

  One cannot be sure Benni/Berenice won't be there. She thought of calling. Might gather indirectly whether he was likely to be alone. He was back from one of his research assignments. She had learnt, when she took the couple to try with her a new Indian restaurant the week before, that he was having consultations about how best to take advantage of the extended deadline for objection to the Pondoland toll highway. He responded to her enquiry about how consultations were going and then mentioned he and Nicholas were a couple of bachelors, Benni away launching a wine festival at the Cape.

  Could she come round? Of course. What about tomorrow, supper. But he at once acceded when she said couldn't it be today, this evening. He thought he should ask, are you all right – something must be bothering her. I'm all right. They were not two people who needed to or would press further on the tightrope of a telephone wire.

  His mother put her palm over her mouth.

  He waited for her – apparently to recover herself. It's an ambiguous gesture, it can hide laughter, shock, many conditions incapable of being conveyed. Embarrassment. But she was not embarrassed. Too many simple intimacies brought about by the incapacities of illness had existed between them for either to be embarrassed by anything, since.

  – This has come from Adrian. -

  He took the letter. Almost to himself, frowning in reproach – He hasn't gone and fallen down in one of his digs… -

  She did not allow herself to look at the son's face as he read, slowly turning the two pages, and turning back to the first, as she had, to read again. If she has her habits of careful comprehension as a lawyer, as a student of scientific data in relation to experience on the ground he has his instinctive discipline of reassessing what are presented as the facts.

  He could not say to her what was ready on his tongue: I thought he'd broken a leg or something, after all, nearly sixty-six, isn't he, climbing about in excavations. But no doubt, like himself, a young man accustomed to taking chances in difficult terrain, that would have been something she could have expected might catch up with retirement age.

  The real circumstance made it impossible for the son to be (what she had counted on) objective; she became primary, there in front of him, his mother, threatened by that other primary, his father. He tried: retreated from the instinct to get up and embrace, make her, let her cry, and asked about the woman. As if his mother could find support in the familiar procedures of the court. Evidence.

  – This's the woman you hired to go around with you, the guide you wrote was so excellent, not the usual boring windbag, not intrusive? -

  – Yes. She was that. -

  Not giving any come-on. To an old man. But he did not ask.

  – The Norwegian. -

  – The Norwegian. She was tactful, naturally we expec
ted to have meals and so on with her along, but sometimes she would make it clear – some excuse, telephone calls, reminders of a private life somewhere – that she'd understand we'd want to be by ourselves, say, for dinner. -

  From the father's, Adrian 's side, what would be the attraction. First, what type of woman, what does she look like. – Is she pretty, beautiful, I mean what is there about… -

  – How can I say. I'm a woman. I don't see what a man sees, you might see. Dark-haired, shapely plump but only in the right places, very intelligent. There's something I never understand, she has all the time that smile, the archaic smile that's characteristic of those ancient Greek statues, you know, the young men – what are they called, Khouroi? Adrian and I saw them once in Athens. Or was it a Roman museum. Even when the three of us rested somewhere with our eyes closed against the glare, stretched out on our chairs, whenever I happened to open my eyes there was this smile. Closed eyes, smile. -

  – Irritating. -

  – No. I thought it rather enviable, really. If I'd had to earn my living taking strangers about repeating the same information and listening to the same comments – what's a new way to say beautiful, disappointing – I don't think I could maintain that smile. And it was discreet. -

  – And Adrian? -

  – What about Adrian. -