A Fork in the Road Read online

  The weekend following our meeting, I spent in the small Bantry Bay apartment which Ingrid shared with a good friend, Lena Oelofse. Late on the Friday afternoon Nico unexpectedly turned up, with a nervous young woman in tow. He had come, he announced, to inform Ingrid of his wedding earlier that same day. She was speechless with shock. It transpired that she had been having an affair with Nico and that he had already proposed marriage to her.

  ‘We would love to have you as a friend,’ he beamed.

  ‘Fuck your friendship!’ Ingrid responded in rage. ‘Get the hell out of here, you bloody traitor!’

  She promptly withdrew into the warm amniotic water of a bath, where she sat for an hour in total silence, smoking one cigarette after the other. We had already arranged to go out for a meal, but it was almost impossible to extricate her from the bath. In the end she agreed to go with me – not to eat, but to drink. ‘I want to get drunk tonight,’ she said.

  Outside the restaurant she collapsed in tears. When at last she became calmer, she started talking compulsively. How could Nico have hurt her in such way? And he wasn’t the only one. Everybody took advantage of her, used and abused her. What was wrong with her? Because, surely, it was all her own fault …

  It took a long time before we went inside. Over the meal – she did consent to eat something, in the end – she told me the whole convoluted story of her life and loves. Over and over, obsessively, she returned to Simone, who was with Piet Venter in Johannesburg at the time. ‘They’re going to take away my child. And the court will side with them. Because I take drugs. I drink. I sleep around. But I want my child!’ And like so many times during that weekend, she spoke of suicide. She showed me the thin white scars on her wrists from a previous attempt. Yet when I left very early on the Monday morning to drive the nearly 1,000 kilometres to Grahamstown, there was something incredibly serene and almost happy in the smile with which she said goodbye.

  We had both assumed that our weekend together would remain outside of time, outside of our ordinary lives; we never believed it could have a sequel. But within a week everything had changed. We both realised that we were too deeply in love to extricate ourselves. By coincidence I received an invitation to return to Cape Town for a series of lectures at the end of May. For Ingrid, this seemed like an unexpected new lease on life. At the same time my appearance on the scene had rekindled Jack’s amorous interest which had waned in recent times while she’d had her affair with Nico. Whereas previously he had kept her at a distance, seeing her for sex when he needed it and then – literally – throwing her out of the bed when he wanted to be alone, he now assured her of his undying love and for the first time began to mention marriage as an option. This, at least, was how she represented it to me.

  There was one near-farcical writers’ party at Paarl where he cornered her to assure her, ‘Do you realise that you’re the only woman I have ever loved?’ In reply, she showed him a small ring with a red stone I had given her earlier in the day. ‘I’ll buy you a bigger one,’ he promised. Yet as soon as I had returned to Grahamstown, all promises were forgotten.

  For the rest of the year, unable to stay away, I drove down to Cape Town every few weeks. Ingrid had become a fever in the blood. When we were together, the ordinary flow of life stopped; time no longer existed. We would spend the weekends in romantic hideouts: country hotels near Stellenbosch, Franschhoek, Gordon’s Bay, Hout Bay. She was swept along on a new wave of writing poetry. Even I began to write poems – very bad ones, terribly derivative, but I needed the outlet. Our relationship became an extension of our writing. But very soon a fatal pattern was established: my life became a frantic pendulum oscillating between Cape Town and Grahamstown. The moment I was home, the longing for the freedom and wildness Ingrid represented, would become overwhelming and I would rush back to her in a frenzy of desire, only to find that in my absence she had been with Jack again – sometimes because he would not leave her in peace, just as often because she could not bear to be alone. This vacillation would inhibit my urge for commitment, and I would become serious about returning to Grahamstown and the security and comfort of my marriage. And of course this decision would then persuade Ingrid to turn to Jack again – by which time, back at the ranch, I would decide that my marriage had failed after all, and I would dash back to Cape Town, only to find that in my absence … et cetera.

  Time and time again we would break up, sometimes with a whimper, often with a bang. Time and time again we would return to the love which beckoned like a dark and dangerous current. It could not possibly last. The guilt attached to both my shrinking worlds was becoming unbearable; the fire of uncertainty and doubt was devastating. It was the only time in my life – apart from a moment in Paris in 1968 after the shipwreck of another love – that I actually started thinking about suicide.

  One of the most agonising moments came during my visit to Cape Town in November 1963, when Ingrid had gone to work and I found on her table a writing pad she had left open, deliberately for me to see, as she admitted afterwards. The top page was covered with an almost illegible scribble, in English, written the night before, after I had already gone to bed. That evening, during a meal in a restaurant, we had quarrelled – an argument, in fact, that followed an angry contretemps she’d had with Jack earlier in the day, when he had contemptuously called her ‘a minor poet’. How ironical that Jack’s own hang-up had been that, compared to Nadine Gordimer and others, he would be classified by history as a minor political writer from South Africa.

  In tears, I copied out what she had written that previous night:

  One’s art which is a justification for your existence but when you have seen through that justification, is it then still possible to exist for it? One tries to compensate for something, but when there is nothing to compensate for, is it still important? Question for the minor artist. To live hereafter; to give to the future? No voice is wholly lost. No SMALL voice is lost – but does that really matter? When one is selfish, and minor, as your talent? No. It is not worthwhile. The small voice dies. And it deserves to die. The small-hearted selfish person deserves to die. He will not have, doesn’t deserve, life eternal. I deserve to die.

  The people important to my small existence:

  Jack Cope: who doesn’t want to be burdened (right!) with this small voice.

  Simone: whom I cannot give emotional and material security. A good start. No more.

  André: who has other obligations.

  Sum total.

  Which leaves ‘left over life to kill.’ ‘For each man kills the thing he loves’ – differently – goodbye to Jack, Simone, André

  Sick sick sick

  Do you understand, Jack Cope, that I am sans Jack, sans Simone, sans André

  The biggest conflict

  Ever, for me

  And as I exit

  – to ‘free’?

  Left over life to kill. If one has the ‘organising power’

  I don’t I go And this is nothing else but the small ‘personal’ problem – ‘de versmorende ik’ [‘the suffocating I’: this phrase was a quote from a Dutch poem] And when this ‘I’ these adult obligations – there is no way out. I do not say this to alarm or to hurt you – it has been thus for a long time; the usefulness of this life is gone: I can’t live for myself or my ART; everything is gone – all service, which is and gives meaning. Blame my past, or whatever has made me, ‘all is vanity, says the prediker’ [‘preacher’, written in Afrikaans]; I have failed everyone and everything, I have indeed a left-over life to kill, I will kill it. And, last dignity (sic!), on my own terms. Even now there is an impure element, and I’ll have to stop. I have failed, FAILED, which is a personal ‘begrip’ [‘concept’, written in Afrikaans]: I cannot be cheerful, loving, giving; I am mean and turned in on to my own conscience. I do not like it. It influences my ‘sanity’.

  I am Ingrid. Pity, but there it is.

  This was raw despair. And yet, not only in the confession itself but in her decision to
leave it open on the table for me to see, I could sense – unbearably cruel as this might seem – her urge to ‘act out’ her anguish, to play a role she had come to appropriate for herself – the urge to be seen as the outcast, the despised, the rejected, the misunderstood, who soaks up the pity of others to feed her emotions and to squeeze poetry out of it. For Ingrid could be unbelievably cruel herself, inconsiderate of others (friends, lovers, family, child), wrapped up only in herself and her own needs. For those of us who lived close to her, such bouts of histrionic despair were exquisitely balanced with periods of serenity and considerateness, of loving and cherishing; and of laughter and fun. Perhaps, deep down, she was really meant to be a summer child, who loved dancing and teasing and frolicking; there were days and nights when she and her lover could laugh uncontrollably throughout a long bout of lovemaking. And this is what one tends to remember: wandering hand in hand over dunes or just inside the delicate lace of foam at the edge of the sea; or rushing out, on an impulse, at midnight or one o’ clock in the night, to Clifton or Llandudno, to run naked along the beach, and into the literally breathtaking cold of the Atlantic, arctic icicles stabbing up through our veins, then darting out again to make love on the sand, or to lie on the side of a mountain staring up at the clouds drifting past and imagine distant places, magic places, worlds forever beyond our reach but worthy of being dreamt about. But somewhere in the background there was this darkness lying in wait, this constant doubt, this undirected and unresolvable rage, this urge to hurt and wound and destroy.

  I am Ingrid. Pity, but there it is.

  Early in 1964 Ingrid was awarded the biggest literary prize in South Africa at the time for Rook en Oker. She decided that she would use the money to go to Europe, where she had never been, possibly to study in Holland. The first person she telephoned with the news of the prize, offering to pay for his air ticket to the awards ceremony in Johannesburg, was Abraham Jonker. He coolly declined. We agreed that as soon as possible I would follow her to Europe. We would go to Paris, the city I loved more than any other; afterwards we would travel through Spain. Our travel plans had to be kept secret, of course: Jack was not to know; and my own marriage was still precariously surviving, even though the consciousness of failure and betrayal was becoming an almost unbearable burden.

  At the end of March Ingrid left Cape Town for Southampton on the Windsor Castle. Almost every day she wrote letters to her two lovers left behind, Jack and I; on board she also met the writer Laurens van der Post, something of a legend, largely self-consciously created, in his lifetime. He became her new mentor and undertook to introduce her to the literary world in London. At the same time it was clear from Ingrid’s letters that, if his attitude was, above all, fatherly, it was not without incestuous undertones. Ingrid told me that van der Post had been castrated as a prisoner of war in a Japanese camp: if this was indeed so, it might explain the ambiguities in his relationship with Ingrid, and his attitude towards other, younger men who came close to her.

  The six weeks in Britain were both exhilarating and bewildering; she never quite felt at ease, and her nostalgia for South Africa became worse. When she moved to Amsterdam, the sense of dépaysement increased. A particular source of distress was that her small rented room had no mirror. Ingrid had always been obsessed with mirrors, with the need to see herself reflected. Her dream was a bedroom and a bathroom with floor, walls and ceiling covered in mirrors. There was nothing narcissistic about it, and no vanity at all: what she needed, more and more, was the constant reassurance that she was there. As her confidence ebbed, this need became almost pathological.

  The stay in Amsterdam – relieved by meeting some Dutch writers and poets to whom Jan Rabie and others had provided her with introductions – became, in her own words, ‘a waking nightmare’. The most memorable poem ringing out like a vox clamantis from this darkness, was ‘Waiting in Amsterdam’, based on a dream about my imminent arrival. In it, the absent lover returns to a table she has set for him, but instead of sitting down, he unscrews his penis, places it on the table, and leaves without a word. She copied it out for Jack, and dedicated it to him; with another copy for me, dedicated accordingly.

  On Saturday 20 June I arrived in Amsterdam – to find that, instead of the secrecy we had planned for the visit, Ingrid had already arranged radio interviews for us jointly and severally and had thoroughly briefed everybody at the NZAV (the Dutch-South Africa Society) about our impending ‘honeymoon’. This, linked to her insistence that we dine at the most expensive restaurants and live it up as much as possible, and the almost impossibly high expectations we had both brought to the visit, created tensions from the first hour. These were carried over to Paris, where we lodged in a seedy but charming little hotel in the rue Monsieur-le-Prince, off the boulevard Saint-Michel. The tensions were temporarily held in check by the magic of Paris itself and by meetings with colourful and stimulating people, especially Breyten Breytenbach, who was an old friend of Ingrid’s and with whom I’d been corresponding for a long time although we’d never met. Breyten had by then married the beautiful Vietnamese Yolande, a union regarded as ‘immoral’ in terms of South African legislation, which meant that he could not take her back to his country.

  There were magical nights at the Coupole or the Sélect or on the place Saint-Sulpice, or up on Montmartre, or along the banks of the Seine. But there were also eruptions of temper, recriminations, shouting, tears. The trip was already beginning to flounder.

  And then came Spain, which was to be the culmination of our travels. Before we could rent a car, I had to spend several days in Barcelona meeting publishers on behalf of my Cape Town publisher. But Ingrid refused to be left alone in the hotel, and was too scared to venture out on her own. I reasoned, argued, pleaded. To which she would respond by trying to taunt and lure me sexually, at first subtly, then blatantly, crudely, into staying. But in the end, hyperconscious of my obligations to the publishers who had made the trip possible, I had to go ahead, making appointments and keeping them. On my return the door would be locked. If I insisted, she would start screaming so loudly that people came running to see who was being assaulted or murdered. Even the management, though undoubtedly accustomed to the legendary furia español, became concerned. Our whole relationship was turning fatally destructive, self-destructive.

  There were a few happier interludes, including an afternoon at a corrida – in its own right, and when it works, a performance that marries beauty and cruelty. But our time of light and lightness – inasmuch as these were evident, except in brief flashes – was over.

  In a moment of quiet despair soon after the corrida we both agreed that it would be better for her to return to Paris, where Breyten and Yolande could take care of her, and where, we both thought, she could still turn her holiday into something rewarding. Finding it impossible to reach him by telephone, I notified Breyten by telegram. When we set out for the airport Ingrid was unnaturally subdued. As her flight was called she suddenly became hysterical and refused to go to the departure gate, throwing such a tantrum that half of the airport officials came running to add to the commotion. In the end a doctor was called, who gave her an injection. And we returned to the hotel, silent, tight-lipped and resentful.

  The following day, with due warning to Breyten, the exercise was repeated, but this time in a minor key and without histrionics. Ingrid flew to Paris, and I set out for a month’s exploration of Spain. Not until the very end of the holiday did I learn, with shock, in a letter from my publisher, that Ingrid had in fact returned to Cape Town.

  It was only much later that the details were filled in. How her mental state in Paris had deteriorated so suddenly that Breyten had to arrange for her to be hospitalised in the institution of Sainte-Anne; how through the intervention of Roy Macnab, cultural attaché at the South African Embassy, she had been released and put on a plane. She also revealed in letters and telephone calls after my return that Jack wanted nothing more to do with her; and the only ray of light was that her
period had come on time, so at least she was not pregnant as we had feared.

  It should have been the end, but it wasn’t. Within a month or two our correspondence resumed in all its intensity. Moments of disillusionment and rebellion were swept away by rekindled passion. Early in December I was back in Cape Town.

  On the surface, everything seemed to have returned to how it had been before. Yet not really. Something had been lost; there was a touch of urgency, an almost frantic need to reassure ourselves that all was still well. But we both knew, and in vulnerable moments openly acknowledged, that our love could no longer be what it had been. The pain was almost unbearable; for Ingrid it implied a final loss of innocence, that childlike quality, as of an elf or a sprite, which should remain forever untouched by the pettiness of the ordinary world.

  One particularly stormy episode still haunts my memory: it was a night in December; I was to drive home to Grahamstown very early the next morning. An argument arose and became hideous. Near midnight, beside herself with rage, Ingrid ran out of her apartment in an ugly modern block on the beachfront where Three Anchor Bay merges into Sea Point, screaming that she was going to kill herself. By this time I was so utterly worn out, and had heard the threat so many times, that I did not believe it. An hour later a stranger brought her back to the door: she had tried to jump in front of his car. We were both in shock. For hours we talked, and cried, and slowly found our way back, as always, to concern and forgiveness and love. And then, exhausted, I went to sleep. Ingrid stayed awake, and on the narrow porch outside the room, with her small writing pad on her lap, wrote the moving poem ‘Plant me a Tree André’, in which she dreams of a small paradise where we would plant a tree and squirrels would come to collect the acorns, and where there would be a dog to cuddle, and where there would be an open house, the windows of which would discover the day, green or gold or grey, and beautiful.