Absolution (44 page)

‘I was a member of the Progressive Party. Give me that at least.’

‘Fine. You belonged to a political party that was a small voice of opposition, but your primary concern, as you yourself have made clear, was personal. You feared I would be taken away from you. Your secondary motivation was even more personal: the selfish wish to appear useful to people you respected and feared. Perhaps you now rationalize this as political intent, but in truth it was not. You sat behind your desk and removed yourself from conflict and gossiped with friends and fellow travellers. You might have attended meetings in the early Sixties, but by the second half of the decade you were retreating ever further into your work and your teaching. Don’t deny it.’

‘I suppose I cannot, if you put it that way.’

‘So if your crime was not political, then amnesty is not possible. Assuming you are guilty of what you suspect, you are a mere criminal in the eyes of the law, and should be treated as such.’

‘And what does that mean?’

‘It means nothing. Because you are guilty of nothing. Loose lips sink ships. You spoke when you should have had better sense, but you didn’t pull the trigger. You did not plan the killings. You are not even an accomplice. You have overplayed your role in history, Mother, and I suggest you do nothing else but get over it. I should find you in contempt for wasting the court’s time and let them put you in irons and send you down. Perhaps a little punishment would silence your mind.’

‘You make me out to be just some cloistered housewife, peddling words. Nothing but a paper tiger in a paper cage.’

‘You’ve sentenced yourself to your own imprisonment, Mother.’ Mark stuffed the newspaper in his attaché and clicked it shut, scrambled the twin combination locks on the case, and straightened his tie. ‘You never needed me in the first place.’

Clare spent the rest of the morning trying to read but found it easier to plot other plantings of tulips with Adam than to focus her mind on words. Words were too prone to suggest other words, and in reading an innocuous sentence like ‘the fish leapt from the lake and turned in mid-air, catching the light as the gemsbok charged into the water’, Clare’s mind could drift to memories of herself as a child, and her sister as a teenager, and, once again, the cake emerging from the pantry, crowned with shit, the accusation that followed, the whole history of their lives as sisters. Tulips and weeding, the silence of garden work with a man she had come to understand a little and trust a bit more – it was an easier way to make the day pass as she waited for her son’s inevitable return.

At least, she assumed it was inevitable. She checked the guest room and found his suitcase was still there, his clothes in the
closet. He had left the house after breakfast, and she expected he would be coming back for dinner, although he had given no indication of his plans. But for the suitcase, she might have assumed he had already returned to Johannesburg, to the wife who disliked Clare and the grandchildren she never saw.

As evening came, and still with no word from Mark, she put her defrosted dinner in the oven and watched the news while the nut loaf baked. Taxi drivers, irate that their monopoly should be challenged, had opened fire with automatic weapons on a city bus full of morning commuters coming from the townships; three were dead, scores injured. This was not what was supposed to happen, not how things were intended to work out after all the decades of darkness, but Clare could no longer force herself to feign surprise. Surprise and outrage were taxing emotions. It was easier and less exhausting to resign oneself to the state of things and hope to live out the full span of one’s natural life as little disturbed by the world as might be possible.

Following the news were the soaps and, after discovering that Zinzi and Frikkie were going to be married against the protestations of their two families, Clare began to feel herself nodding off. She made a cup of coffee and lowered the blinds in the kitchen, so that Donald Thacker, his kitchen windows open and lights on next door, could not look in on her. He had taken to waving from his own windows when he caught sight of Clare in hers. It was an intrusion too far, to be hailed like that as one went about one’s evening.

Perked up by the caffeine, she decided to watch a locally made espionage thriller about a mercenary who had been involved in every ‘low-intensity conflict’ of the second half of the twentieth century – the Congo, Angola, Nicaragua, etc. – and specialized in infiltrating liberation movements believed to have Communist backing. In the film, the man finally meets his match in the head of a special MK unit planning the Church Street bombings in 1983. Over the course of the film the mercenary infiltrates
the unit, but begins to find himself sympathizing with the very ANC agents he is attempting to undermine, and whose bombs he has been ordered to sabotage, in hopes that they will blow up themselves instead of the South African Air Force headquarters.

Clare fell asleep before she could discover what happened to the mercenary – whether he became a turncoat and helped the ANC, or proceeded with the sabotage. She could not remember the details of the actual case, but seemed to recall that things had not gone strictly as planned. She assumed, though, that the film was fiction, that no mercenary mole working on behalf of the apartheid government had been involved, at least not in that particular case.

She opened her eyes to find the test pattern humming on the television screen, and above that the insistent buzzing of the intercom. It was ten past midnight.

‘Who is that? Mark?’ she shouted, squinting at the intercom’s video monitor and turning on the floodlights to illuminate the front gate.

‘I’ve lost your clicker, Mother,’ he said, leaning out the window of his hire car. ‘You don’t need to shout. It’s not a transatlantic link.’

‘Are you alone?’

‘Yes, I’m alone. It’s perfectly safe for heaven’s sake. Just hurry up before someone does come along.’

Clare pushed the button to open the gate and watched on the monitor as Mark’s car lurched up the drive. She waited until the gate had closed, certain that no one had followed him in, before opening the front door. Perhaps Marie’s idea for a double set of gates was not so ludicrous. It was possible to imagine how one might be followed or ambushed. It drove Clare mad that her own country could make her think in this damnable way, make her lose all trust and belief in the best nature of her fellow citizens.

‘What are you still doing up?’ gesturing at Clare’s creased day clothes, her shirt stained with red wine and a glob of drying gravy.

‘What else did you expect me to do? You didn’t call, you didn’t let me know when to expect you.’

‘I thought I said–’ stammering, unknotting his tie, out of breath and still holding his attaché case in one hand ‘–I thought I explained that I had an all-day meeting with clients, and dinner with colleagues this evening.’

‘You charged out of the house without saying a word to me. Perhaps you mentioned it yesterday.’

‘I was feeling distracted this morning and not in the best of moods. I apologize unreservedly. Honestly, Mother, I’ve had a guilty conscience about you all day, after what I said to you this morning.’ He paced around at the entrance to the lounge, still working his tie with one hand, until it came loose and he was able to whip it off and throw it over a chair. It was unlike him to shed something in this way, to be anything less than fastidious.

She picked up their earlier conversation as though there had been no lapse. ‘Perhaps I have held an inflated sense of my own importance, but I hoped you might understand why this should be so. There is nothing to prove that Nora and Stephan’s deaths were
not
the result of my carelessness, Mark, just as there is, admittedly, nothing concrete to say that they were. But I cannot help feeling what I do. Harsh words or the suggestion of draconian punishment, those do not help in a case like mine. I do not respond well to threats of punishment. When I raised the matter with you, what I wished for was an open engagement. I spoke of it only because I respect your mind, and your sense of justice, not because I wished to burden you. I want you to understand what haunts me, what increasingly and quite literally keeps me awake at night. If I cannot tell you, then whom can I tell?’

He shook his head and rolled his eyes. ‘If it helps you to forgive my brusqueness, then try to understand that part of my response this morning was total exasperation with the role you had assigned me. I didn’t want to play it. I didn’t like the choice of dialogue. I wanted to write my own response, but felt I couldn’t. I said what
I believed you wanted me to say, in the way that you wanted to hear it. If you love me then give me the chance to speak my own words and not yours. Stop playing ventrilo–’

‘Then speak! Say what you have to say.’

‘Then don’t interrupt me!’ he shouted, his face reddening. They stood in silence for a moment and then the phone rang. Clare wanted to ignore it but feared it might be Marie.

‘Mrs Wald?’

‘Yes? Who is this?’

‘It’s your neighbour, Donald Thacker.’

‘What do you want?’

‘I saw that your lights were all on, and that a car had come in. I wanted to be sure there was nothing the matter.’

‘Nothing in the least. Thank you for your concern. I must say goodnight now. I have a guest,’ she said, and put down the phone. ‘My neighbour,’ she said to Mark. ‘A busybody English widower.’

Mark dropped into a chair, flinging his attaché case onto the carpet. He took an inhaler from his jacket pocket and administered himself a dose.

‘Please go ahead. I shall remain silent,’ Clare said. ‘For a change, I shall be the one to listen.’

Mark looked exhausted and glanced at Clare in a way that made her feel she was expecting far too much of him. She did not want to cause him further sadness or pain, or to force him to shoulder a duty that was by rights only hers to bear.

‘You gave me your confession,’ he said, his breath coming more steadily. ‘Now I wonder if you’d be willing to hear mine? Like yours, it’s not a confession of a crime per se. I think we can agree that you’ve committed no crime. Equally, mine isn’t a confession of sin, since sin is something I don’t believe in, and I suspect you don’t either, though I realize we’ve never had that conversation. So it’s a secular confession of – I don’t know what to call it. Let’s call it a secular confession of shortcoming, as yours was something like a secular confession of carelessness.
These are confessions that we can only make to each other. Maybe, I don’t know, I might be able to say this to Dad, though he and I don’t speak about things like this. It’s not easy for me, as the person who listens to other people’s grievances and failures and who’s always looking for flaws and shortcomings in my professional life, to describe my own, or even to admit that I have any.’

He paused, and as he was about to speak again the phone rang.

‘Blast that man,’ Clare said, and picked up the phone. ‘What do you want?’

‘Mrs Wald? It’s Donald Thacker again. I’m sorry to bother you but I noticed that the lights were still on and I wondered if perhaps something
was
wrong only you couldn’t say because you would be overheard. If there
is
something wrong, why don’t you say to me “Yes, I would be very happy to join your bridge party,” and then I should know that I ought to phone the police.’

‘Really, Mr Thacker, I must go now. I am busy with my guest,’ she said, and put down the phone. ‘A most insistent man. Please continue.’

‘The year that Laura disappeared, she came to see me in Jo’burg. I was single, working all the time, putting money aside. If things got worse I thought I might emigrate. I’ve never told you this, have I? I was on the verge of packing it in and going abroad – I was also afraid that my medical exemption would no longer be enough to keep me safe from the army, that things were getting so desperate they’d force even the likes of me to shoulder a gun, or at least press me into serving in some more bureaucratic capacity. In any case, the time I’d spent at Oxford convinced me I could live in England if I had to. And if not there, then Australia or New Zealand, or even the Netherlands. So I was saving up in expectation of leaving. I knew it would take everything I could scrape together to do it comfortably, which was the only way I was prepared to do it. I didn’t want to suffer. Laura came to me the spring before she disappeared. It was a strange meeting. She
spoke almost in gibberish. I wondered if she was on drugs of some kind. I knew what she was involved in and even having her in my flat terrified me. The last thing I wanted was her activity attaching itself to me and ruining my own chances of getting out of the country. But what I remember most from that last meeting was how frightened she seemed.’

‘Did she say what she was afraid of?’

‘It was obvious that she believed in what she was doing, but that she was having second thoughts and was worried about her own safety. She said she was being selfish but she needed to get out. So she asked me for help. What she wanted was a loan, to start over somewhere else. That’s what she asked me to give her. She spent two hours that evening asking in about a hundred different ways, promising me that nothing bad would happen if I helped her, that I would pay no price. In the end, I didn’t believe her story. I thought she was lying. I thought she wanted the money for other things.’

‘For her associates.’

‘Yes. I thought it was a ruse. And I didn’t want to be involved in any of that. I was keeping my hands clean. I was afraid that if I gave her anything, and if something happened and the money could be traced back to me, then that would be the end of my career and the end of my chances to get out. So I refused to help. And what was so horrible about the whole thing was that she acted like it was the very answer she’d been expecting. She tried to change my mind even though I think she knew it was impossible. I was so stubborn. When she disappeared I realized that I’d made the wrong decision. She’d never given me any reason to disbelieve her. She was the most truthful person I’ve ever known. Who was I to think she would deceive me?’