Absolution (10 page)

I shake my head and hunch my shoulders. ‘I don’t have any experience of staff. I wouldn’t have any idea how to terminate a relationship. I’ve never been in a position of authority over another person.’

‘I’m not sure I believe that,’ she says, glancing back at me. ‘All right, let’s get back to it. You may turn on your recorder thingy again, darling.’ Do I imagine the
darling
? No, I hear it distinctly. It’s the word I’ve been waiting for that I didn’t know I needed to hear. My chest is a hot flood.
Darling, darling
. I shuffle papers to kill time and fiddle with the recorder.
Darling
. I try to find my composure.

I invent a question.

‘Do you think other writers in this country imagined themselves as their own censors?’

‘How should I know? Ask them,’ she says coolly, and it’s as if the conversation of a few seconds ago never happened. It was off the record. The record is something separate. It’s a different register and another kind of contract. There is no room on the record for
darling
.

The sun flashes into the room, reflecting off the windows of a neighbouring house. She draws the blinds and returns to her desk, again to shuffle papers, as though it’s a code we’ve agreed: to shuffle papers is to buy time. It isn’t about pretending to be otherwise occupied, or at least this is how I begin to interpret it. Without looking up at me she speaks.

‘Don’t you want to ask me about my childhood?’ Three fingers pull the hair away from her face on one side.

I want to hear her call me
darling
again, that’s what I want. I want her to hug me at the end of each meeting, pat my head, tell me I’m doing a good job. She teases me with a photo of her as a girl, on a horse, somewhere on a farm in the Karoo.

‘I thought there were no clues to your fiction in your own life,’ I say, trying to tease back.

‘That is true, but you are writing a biography, are you not? Should we not be talking about my life instead of my work? Or what kind of biography is this?’

‘As you’ve said, much of your life is a matter of public record.’

‘If not my own life, then the lives of those around me.’

We spend a further two hours talking about the themes of her works, historicizing the texts, exploring obvious resonances with her own life that even she is willing to acknowledge, while asserting
the process of mystification and mythification
she undertook to make
the personal more complex and more significant than mere autobiography
. Her words, not mine.

At one o’clock Marie taps once on the door, doesn’t wait for Clare’s reply, and wheels in a cart bearing two covered trays. Placing each tray on the low coffee table in the middle of the room, she removes the covers: sandwiches, a selection of salads. She bows (is that my imagination?) and wheels the cart from the room, closing the door behind her.

We eat in a concentrated silence, punctuated by the sounds of our chewing and breathing, our movements across upholstery, readjusting our weight to find more comfortable positions. A hadeda screams in the garden. One gardener shouts to another. A plane passes overhead. A house further down the street cries out in alarm. We say nothing over the food, and nothing about it.

In all the hours I’ve been in the house I’ve never heard a telephone ring. Maybe there’s a phone in the other wing, with a quiet ringer that only Marie hears and answers. There’s no phone in the office. Clare has no contact with the rest of the world except through the windows, which she opens throughout the day to direct the gardeners in an unbroken stream of language that I know will only ever be sound to me. It’s a language I won’t learn because I don’t have the time or the will.

She chews, her movements slow and methodical, as though
every bite demands full attention. Her large, straight teeth work through the bread and fillings, the salad leaf and tomatoes, all simply but carefully prepared. She likes good things, good food, good clothes, good furniture, and a good house. The success of her books has afforded a comfortable lifestyle – an extravagant lifestyle compared to what most have in this country, or in any country for that matter. When we’ve finished the sandwiches, she presses a button on the wall by her desk. A minute later Marie returns with coffee and a plate of Tennis Biscuits and Romany Creams. She takes the empty plates, and again leaves us in privacy.

‘I thought I was supposed to bring my own food.’

‘I don’t like strange smells. Everything becomes more intense when one lives alone. I don’t like going out. I hate travelling. Going to London was almost more than I could manage. I slept for a month afterward.’ She affects a smile. ‘I wasn’t always this way. I haven’t left this house in over three weeks, nearly a month. Twenty-four days: a single day containing many.’

Absolution

After the initial police investigation into the house invasion, as Clare insisted on calling it, she had no further contact with the authorities. No suspects were presented for her to identify, no one apprehended, and no one, so far as she could remember, had ever asked her for a description of the invaders. The police had failed to recover her father’s wig in its black tin box. And then, a few months after moving from the old house on Canigou Avenue to her new fortress in Bishopscourt, there was a buzz at the outer gate and Marie admitted a black car with government registration plates. The driver, a man with pinched features and a thin neck, opened the door for a petite woman whose hair was swept up behind her head.

The woman did not wait to be offered a seat, but slid down onto the couch opposite Clare’s desk, and opened a binder containing a thick wad of documents.

‘You were previously resident on Canigou Avenue,’ the woman said.

‘Yes, that’s correct.’

‘You suffered a house invasion, I believe.’

‘Come to your point.’

‘You employ a personal assistant, Ms Marie de Wet.’

‘Correct.’

‘
She
repelled the intruders,’ the woman said, and sniffed.

‘That is also correct.’

‘With a gun.’

‘Licensed. With a licensed gun. She did all that was necessary – a competency test, background checks, registration. I was unaware of it all. I did not know she had one,’ Clare protested. ‘I
have since made her get rid of it. I believe she turned it over to the police, to have it destroyed. There are no guns in this house. I have very strong feelings about guns.’

‘Indeed.’ The woman curled her lip, as if to say,
We all have strong feelings about guns
.

‘Have you caught any of the intruders?’ Clare asked.

The woman, who Clare thought of as Ms White, looked startled, as if it were a strange question, and jerked her head in silent answer,
no
.

‘Why would you wish for so long to live in such an insecure house?’ Ms White asked.

‘I don’t think I understand your question.’

‘Why did you choose to live so long on Canigou Avenue when your house was clearly no longer safe? You did not even have a proper gate or razor wire or an electric fence, as you do now. Any so-and-so could have got in. Why did you stay there so long when it was clear the neighbourhood was no longer safe for a woman such as yourself?’

No longer safe because the neighbourhood was too mixed, not white enough any more, too near the crime of the Cape Flats, even if only psychologically so? Clare knew that her intruders had nothing to do with those places, nothing to do with poverty or material deprivation.

‘It was my house. It was where I raised my children, and where I spent the whole of my former married life,’ Clare said. ‘Is this relevant to the case? Could I see your identification?’

The woman produced a badge, but Clare had no means of judging its authenticity.

‘You must have known it wasn’t safe to be there, without even an alarm, without the proper measures taken. You are a celebrity of sorts, madam, aren’t you? You are wealthy. People know you have money, even in this country.’

‘Even in this country, Ms White, where the government does not necessarily like what I have to say.’

‘I did not say
that
. I meant only that not quite so many people know in
this
country who
you
are, but that enough do that you must look after yourself.’

‘It is
my
country. You need not refer to it as “this country”, as if to suggest I am a visitor,’ Clare said, hoping she sounded authoritative.

‘Are you not a kind of visitor?’ the woman asked.

‘I was born here, as were my parents and grandparents. And while they may not have done so, I have made a point, a very conscious point, of washing myself in every culture of this country, of making myself a part of it entirely.’

‘And yet you remain unchanged by the experience, madam. You are still quite foreign. Like those settler ancestors of yours. They were visitors – or maybe not visitors, something not so nice as just
visitors
. I can think of another word. Yes, I think with ancestors like that you are still quite foreign.’

‘I am changed in ways you cannot see, Ms White, that are beneath the skin. We could, for instance, speak in your mother tongue if you wished, instead of mine, and then you would have an even greater advantage over me, but I would still be able to hold my own. I am not a stranger anywhere that I go. I can speak with everyone. How can you call me foreign? I have always been a citizen of this country. I have never been anything but a citizen of this country, no matter the history of my ancestors or the history of the country itself. This is
my
country. I have a birth certificate. I have a passport. I do not appreciate your tone.’

‘And now you live in this grand mansion, with your high walls. It is almost like a palace. Perhaps you think you are some kind of queen.’

‘I think no such thing. I am very humble.’ Perhaps not humble enough. Clare had caught the scent of the hunt, knew that she was not going to be accorded the rights and privileges of an innocent victim; she was a victim, perhaps, but not innocent.

‘You still employ the same personal assistant, Ms Marie de Wet,’ the woman continued.

‘You know I do. She showed you into my house. Forgive me, Ms White, but could you explain the purpose of your questions?’

‘All part of the investigations, to be sure we have missed nothing that might help the case – nothing that might help, as you would say, with apprehending your intruders.’

‘They are not
my
intruders.’

‘
The
intruders, then, if you prefer.’ Ms White managed to look down her nose at Clare, even though, seated as she was, Clare remained taller than the other woman. ‘You use a private security firm?’

‘It is private to my knowledge. Perhaps the state has some interest in it?’

‘I do not know. Perhaps
you
know something we do not,’ the woman said, and sniffed again.

‘No,’ said Clare. ‘Do you need a tissue?’

‘It occurs to me, Mrs Wald, that surely your private security firm employs men with guns. Would they not respond with guns if you summoned them?’

‘I have not yet needed to summon them. We might try now, if you like,’ Clare said, daring a curl of the lip. A silence rolled around between them on the floor and Clare wondered how responsive her security men would be. ‘I hope you get them, the intruders.’

‘Show them to me, madam, and I will. Just show them to me,’ said Ms White, as if Clare herself were one of the intruders.

‘Your officers never even asked me for a statement.’

‘But that I think is a lie.’ Ms White riffled through the papers in her binder and retrieved a single page. ‘
Four men, aged twenty-five to forty. Average height, muscular build. Race uncertain
.’

‘I did not say anything of the kind. I have no idea what their age might have been. I could not even say with certainty that they were definitely men.’ Clare wondered if, in the aftermath of the
invasion, she had given a statement she could not now remember.

‘You signed the document,’ said Ms White, holding it up for inspection.

Clare was certain it was not her signature – too jagged, too unkempt. ‘I did not,’ she said, but then had a moment of doubt. If the panic had been as acute as she remembered, then it was entirely possible that a shaking hand would have distorted her signature. The name on the document was, she could see, the issue of a hand wandering free of the brain’s control.

‘Are you accusing my officers of something?’

‘No, I cannot do that. I am – uncertain. All that I am doing is accusing someone of making a mistake. I do not
remember
giving a description. I do not remember putting my signature to that document. But no, thinking about it again, I am certain that I never gave an official statement. I was never taken to a police station – that is beyond doubt. I have never been called to testify or witness. That scrawl, the signature, it could be anything. I do not think it is mine. I say that emphatically.’ In fact, Clare doubted herself even more, and, after all, the woman was only trying to do her job.

Ms White clicked her tongue, shook her head, looked concerned, sniffed again. ‘It seems there is some very grave misunderstanding, then. Because here, quite clearly, someone purporting to be you –
I
can read your name – has levelled the blame at four men, aged twenty-five to forty, of average height and muscular build, and indeterminate race. Indeterminate race. Is that a euphemism, madam?’

‘As I did not make the statement, how can I know whether it was meant as a euphemism or a statement of fact? I think you should leave, Ms White.’

‘You should be careful, madam, because someone I think is pretending to be you. Or else you are forgetting who
you
are, and where
you
have been. Why do you think that would be? Why should someone give us evidence on your behalf that was not you,
and pretend to be you? It seems a very strange situation. I think you are forgetting something. I think you are not feeling well. There are places for the sick to get well, if you are sick. It could be arranged.’