A Dry White Season Page 2

  Only once, as far as I can remember, I caught a glimpse of something else in him, something normally obscured by his attitude of placid withdrawal. It happened in our third year, in History, when for one semester during the sabbatical of our regular Senior Lecturer a temporary bloke took over. We couldn’t stand his schoolmasterly habits and discipline soon became a problem. On the day in question, catching me in the act of launching a paper missile, he promptly, in nearly apoplectic rage, ordered me out of the room. That would have been the end of it, had Ben not decided to emerge from his habitual lethargy and protest against my being singled out for punishment while the whole class had been equally guilty.

  When the lecturer refused to budge Ben drew up a petition and spent a weekend collecting the signatures of all the class members, threatening a boycott of lectures unless an apology was offered. When the ultimatum was delivered, the lecturer read it, turned white, and summarily tore it up. Whereupon Ben led the threatened walk-out. In this era of demos and Student Power his action might appear ludicrously insignificant; but in those days, in the heart of the war years, it caused a sensation.

  Before the end of the week Ben and the temporary lecturer were both called in by the Head of the department. What happened during the meeting leaked out to us much later, via some of the other academic staff, as Ben himself offered no more thana very brief summary.

  The prof, a benevolent old bod loved and respected by everybody, expressed his regrets over the whole unfortunate affair and announced that he was prepared to treat it as a mere misunderstanding, provided Ben would apologise for his impetuous action. Ben politely expressed his appreciation of the prof’s goodwill, but insisted on an apology from the lecturer who, he said, had offended the class with his unjust behaviour and ineffectual teaching methods.

  This caused the lecturer to lose his temper once again and to start fulminating against students in general and Ben in particular. Ben quietly reacted by pointing out that this outburst was typical of the behaviour the students had been protesting against. Just when everything was becoming hopelessly complicated the lecturer offered his resignation and walked out. The prof punished the class by setting a test (in which Ben eventually obtained third or fourth highest marks); and the Administration solved their part of the problem by rusticating Ben for the rest of the semester.

  It probably hit him harder than it would any of us, for his parents were poor and his grants were dependent on living in residence, so he had to find money for digs in town. I suppose we all felt a bit guilty about the outcome but the general attitude was that he had really brought it on himself. In any case no-one ever heard him complain. Neither did he embark, as far as I know, on any further rash ventures of that kind. Almost effortlessly he sank back below the unrippled surface of his sedate existence.

  The evening paper carried a brief announcement on the funeral arrangements. I had planned to attend, but in the end it didn’t work out. That morning I had to come in to the city centre for a lunch date with a visiting woman writer and I’d hoped to use the funeral as a pretext for getting rid of her in reasonable time: one of those ladies addicted to cream cakes and the wearing of lilac hats, who write about blood, tears and unmarried mothers, and who guarantee tens of thousands of readers for our journal. Which explains why I wasn’t in the best of moods as I set out on foot from my parking spot towards the Carlton Centre, more than fifteen minutes late to start with. Moodily withdrawn into my own thoughts, I wasn’t paying much attention to my surroundings, but in the vicinity of the Supreme Court I became aware of something unusual and stopped to look about. What was happening? It took a while before it struck me: the silence. The customary lunchtime din of the city had subsided around me. Everywhere people were standing still. Traffic had stopped. The very heart of the city appeared to have been seized in a cramp, as if an enormous invisible hand had reached into its chest to grasp the heart in a suffocating grip. And what sound there was resembled nothing so much as the dull thud of a heartbeat, a low rumble, almost too low for the ear to catch, so it had to be insinuated into the body through blood and bone. Like a subterranean shudder, but different from the mine shocks which one experiences in Johannesburg every day.

  After some time we became aware of movement too. Down from the station a slow wall of people were approaching in the street pushing the silence ahead of them: a dull, irresistible phalanx of blacks. There was no shouting, no noise at all. But the front lines were marching with raised clenched fists, like branches protruding from an indolent tide.

  From the streets where we were standing innumerable other blacks started drifting towards the oncoming crowd, as silent as the rest, as if drawn by a vast magnet. We whites – suddenly very isolated in the expanse among the stern concrete of the buildings – began to edge towards the reassurance of walls and pillars. No-one spoke or made a sudden gesture. All action was delayed like a playback on TV.

  It was only later I realised that judgement had been set for that day in one of the numerous terrorism trials of these recent months; and this crowd was on its way from Soweto in order to be present at the verdict.

  They never arrived, though. While we were still standing there police sirens started wailing and from all directions vans and armoured vehicles converged. The sudden sound shocked us from our trance. In a moment noise came washing over the central city like a tidal wave. But by that time I had already moved away from the scene.

  At least that gave me a valid explanation for arriving late at the Carlton Centre; and I still proffered the funeral as an excuse to make an early escape from my lilac lady. But by that time I no longer wanted to attend; I simply couldn’t face it.

  In the CNA Bookshop in Commissioner Street I bought a card of condolence which I signed in the shop and posted in Jeppe Street on my way back to the car. And then I went straight back home – I wasn’t expected back at the office anyway – and began to work almost compulsively through Ben’s papers again.

  So far, there hasn’t been a thank-you note from Susan. Of course, I didn’t write my address on mine and she may not know where to reach me. Perhaps it’s better that way, for all of us.

  There were those who didn’t regard Susan as the right sort of wife for Ben; but I cannot agree. He always needed someone to urge him on, to prevent him from getting stuck in a rut, to define goals for him and supply him with the energy and the drive to reach them. If it hadn’t been for Susan he might have ended his life in some small, forgotten backveld village, quietly content to teach a bit of history and geography to one generation of school children after the other, or to spend his leisure time “uplifting” the children of the poor. As it turned out, he at least managed to end up in one of the top Afrikaans schools in the city. Whether he would have been happier in a different environment or in different circumstances is a moot point. How am I to judge the components of another man’s happiness? But I really believe Susan knew how to handle him: how to let him have his way when he got one of his crazy notions; how to prod him when he had to do something constructive.

  She probably inherited it from her father who made it from small-town attorney to M.P. Her mother, I believe, was something of a sentimental wash-out who meekly followed her lord and master whever his ambition led them. Of course, the fact that he’d never made it beyond M.P. would have added to Susan’s determination. Caught between a father with great ambition but not enough talent to really reach the top, and a husband with enough talent but no ambition, she made up her mind very early as to who was going to make the important decisions. And in my efforts, at this stage, to sort out and clarify my meagre personal recollections of Ben I find it easier to explain Susan.

  There was something – a magnetic field, a tension, an electricity – between us when I once spent a fortnight with them. It was just before I moved from Cape Town to the North, some twelve years after their marriage. I’d met her a few times before that, of course, but never for long enough really to get to know her. Not that I would like to convey
anything improper in talking about a “magnetic field". We were both too well conditioned by our respectable backgrounds to indulge in anything rash; and both of us, albeit for different reasons I imagine, respected Ben’s position in the middle. At the same time there’s no denying that sometimes, in a sudden and unnerving way, one “recognises” a stranger as an equal, as an ally, as a companion, someone significant to oneself. It doesn’t happen rationally or consciously. It is intuitive, a guts reaction. Call it a soundless cry for help. That was what happened when I saw Susan. Unless it’s the fanciful writer in me taking over again. I really don’t know: I’m not used to this sort of stock-taking and fiction still comes much more naturally to me than brute indecent truth.

  From the beginning she proved to be the perfect hostess, protected by an impenetrable wall of courtesy, correctness, friendliness. Not being of a disposition to get along well with servants, she did everything in the house herself; and her thoroughness and good taste were evident in the smallest detail: the turned-up sheets at night, the small ice-container beside the water carafe, the exquisite little flower arrangement on the tray on which she brought me breakfast in bed in the mornings. Even at that early hour her make-up used to be immaculate, the merest suggestion of moisture on her lips, eye-shadow and mascara heightening discreetly the intense blue of her eyes, her curly blonde hair coiffed in a skilfully contrived look of naturalness. During the last few days of my stay she grew more at ease. Ben had the habit, late in the evening, just before going to bed, of withdrawing to the study he’d installed in what must have been intended as the servants’ quarters in the back yard. Perhaps he left his preparation for the next day’s lessons till then but I had the feeling that his real reason was to have a brief period of silence all to himself; wholeness, self-containment, reassured and surrounded by his books and the familiar objects he’d accumulated over the years. And after he’d withdrawn in this way Susan would bring me a last cup of coffee to my room and unceremoniously seat herself on the edge of my bed to chat.

  On the Friday there was some school function or other which they’d been expected to attend, but at lunchtime Susan casually announced that she was in no mood for the “boring business” and would rather stay at home. “After all,” she added, “we have an obligation to our guest.”

  “I’m sure he wouldn’t mind being left alone for one evening.” Ben looked at me. “He’s not a stranger who must be amused at any cost.”

  “I’ll gladly stay,"I said.

  “I wouldn’t have gone, whether you were here or not,” she insisted, suggesting a rock-hard will of her own below the slightly deliberate musicality of her voice.

  So he went alone, but only after he’d performed his evening ritual of putting the children to bed: two pretty little blond girls, both of them variations of their mother’s beauty – Suzette nine and Linda, if I remember correctly, five.

  In spite of my repeated assurance that I’d be happy with a very simple supper, she prepared an impressive meal and laid the table as formally as was her wont, the full show of crystal and candles and silver. We remained at table for hours. I kept on refilling our glasses and fetched a new bottle from the cabinet after we’d emptied the first; followed by liqueur. Once or twice she covered her glass with her hand as I approached the bottle, but later she no longer bothered. She undoubtedly had too much to drink. One of the narrow straps of her dress slipped from a tanned shoulder but she made no effort to push it back. From time to time she pushed the fingers of one hand through her hair, and as the evening deepened her coiffure became less severe, more gentle, softer. One notices trifling things at a time like that. The sensuality of a lipstick smudge on a white damask napkin. Candlelight touching a ring as the hand makes a gesture. The curve of a neck and naked shoulder. Moisture on the swelling of a lower lip. A conversation pursued in innumerable ways behind the casual movement of words.

  I cannot pretend to remember what we said – it’s seventeen years ago – but I can recall the feel and general drift of it. By that time it was very late. The wine had brought a flush to her cheeks.

  “I envy you, you know,” I said lightly, intimately. “Whenever I find myself in a family like yours I begin to doubt the sense of a bachelor existence like my own.”

  “All happy families are alike.” A small, cynical line tensed her mouth. “But every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, puzzled.

  “Isn’t that what Tolstoy said?”

  “Oh. Yes, of course.”

  “You don’t sound very convinced.”

  “It’s just that I – well, the sort of twaddle I write doesn’t bring me in touch with Tolstoy very much any more.”

  She shrugged. The narrow white band remained slack across her arm.

  “Does it matter?” she asked in a brief surge of passionate feeling. “You can write, whether it’s twaddle or not. In one way or another you can give some sort of shape to whatever happens to you. But what about me?”

  Here we go again, I thought. The story of my life.

  “What are you complaining about?” I asked deliberately. “You have a good husband, you have two beautiful children, you’ve got lots of talent…”

  She drew in her breath very slowly and very deeply.

  “God!”

  I kept my eyes intently on her face.

  For a long time she sat motionless without looking away. Then, with passion just below the surface of her rich voice, she asked:” Is that all you can say to me? Is that all I can hope for?” And, after a pause: “In a year’s time I’ll be thirty-five. Do you realise that?”

  “That’s young. A woman’s best decade.”

  “And if the Bible is anything to go by, I’m halfway now. What do I have to show for it? My God! For years on end one keeps thinking: One day … One day … One day … You hear people talking about ‘life'. You start talking about it yourself. You wait for it to happen. And then? Then, suddenly, you realise: This is the ‘one day’ I’ve been waiting for. ‘One day’ is every bloody day. And it’s never going to be any different.” For a long time she was silent again, breathing deeply. She took a sip of liqueur, then said, as if deliberately trying to shock me: “You know, I can understand very well why some women become terrorists. Or whores. Just to have the experience of knowing you’re alive, to feel it violently and furiously, and not to give a damn about whether it’s decent or not.”

  “Is it really so bad, Susan?”

  She stared past me as if she were not really talking to me – and perhaps she wasn’t. “They always kept me on a tight leash when I was small. Said I was too wild, I had to control myself. ‘Girls don’t do this. Girls don’t do that. What will people think of you?’ I thought, once I’m grown up it will be different. Then I met Ben. We were both teaching in Lydenburg. I don’t suppose there really was anything extraordinary about him. But you know, whenever he sat so quietly while everyone else was talking their heads off, I always tried to imagine what he was thinking. It made him seem different, and special. The way he handled the children, the way he just gently smiled when everybody else was arguing in the common-room … And he never tried to force his opinions on me like other men. I began to think he was the man I’d been waiting for. He seemed to understand people, to understand a woman. He would allow me to live the way I’d always wanted to. I suppose I was being unfair to him. I tried to imagine him the way I wanted him to be. And then—” She fell silent.

  “Then what?”

  “You mind if I smoke?” she asked suddenly. It surprised me, because on previous occasions she’d been very disparaging when Ben took out his pipe at table.

  “Feel free,” I said. “May I – ?”

  “Don’t bother.” She rose and went to the mantlepiece, lit a cigarette, and came back to me. As she sat down she resumed unexpectedly: “It’s not easy for a woman to admit that she’s married to a loser.”

  “I don’t think you’re being fair to Ben now, Su
san.”

  She looked at me wordlessly, took another sip of liqueur, then filled up her glass again.

  At length she asked, “Who was it who said people who are afraid of loneliness should never marry?”

  “Must have been someone who burnt his fingers.” I consciously tried to be facetious, but she paid no attention.

  “After twelve years I still don’t know him,” she went on. The small bitter line appeared at her lips again. “Neither does he know me.” And after a moment: “The worst of all, I suppose, is that I don’t even know myself yet. I’ve lost touch with myself.”

  Angrily she stubbed out the half-smoked cigarette and got up again as if in search of something; then she took another cigarette from the packet on the mantlepiece. This time I got up to light it for her. Her hands were trembling as I briefly touched them. She turned away to the piano and opened the lid, moving her fingers across the keys without depressing them; unexpectedly she looked up at me:

  “If I’d been able to play really well it might have been different. But I’m a dabbler. A bit of music, playreading for the radio, all sorts of unimportant things. Do you think I should resign myself to the thought that one day my daughters may achieve something on my behalf?”

  “Do you know how beautiful you are, Susan?”

  She turned round, leaning back with her elbows resting on the piano, her breasts pointing at me, gently provocative. She still hadn’t replaced her shoulder strap.

  “Virtue is supposed to outlast beauty,” she said with a vehemence which surprised me. Then, after a brief, tense inhalation of smoke: “All I have is the happy family you spoke about. Full time. Not a moment for myself.”