Disgrace (9 page)

‘I brought it on myself. I was offered a compromise, which I wouldn't accept.'

‘What kind of compromise?'

‘Re-education. Reformation of the character. The code-word was
counselling
.'

‘And are you so perfect that you can't do with a little counselling?'

‘It reminds me too much of Mao's China. Recantation, self-criticism, public apology. I'm old-fashioned, I would prefer simply to be put against a wall and shot. Have done with it.'

‘Shot? For having an affair with a student? A bit extreme, don't you think, David? It must go on all the time. It certainly went on when I was a student. If they prosecuted every case the profession would be decimated.'

He shrugs. ‘These are puritanical times. Private life is public business. Prurience is respectable, prurience and sentiment. They wanted a spectacle: breast-beating, remorse, tears if possible. A TV show, in fact. I wouldn't oblige.'

He was going to add, ‘The truth is, they wanted me castrated,' but he cannot say the words, not to his daughter. In fact, now that he hears it through another's ears, his whole tirade sounds melodramatic, excessive.

‘So you stood your ground and they stood theirs. Is that how it was?'

‘More or less.'

‘You shouldn't be so unbending, David. It isn't heroic to be unbending. Is there still time to reconsider?'

‘No, the sentence is final.'

‘No appeal?'

‘No appeal. I am not complaining. One can't plead guilty to charges of turpitude and expect a flood of sympathy in return. Not after a certain age. After a certain age one is simply no longer appealing, and that's that. One just has to buckle down and live out the rest of one's life. Serve one's time.'

‘Well, that's a pity. Stay here as long as you like. On whatever grounds.'

He goes to bed early. In the middle of the night he is woken by a flurry of barking. One dog in particular barks insistently, mechanically, without cease; the others join in, quiet down, then, loth to admit defeat, join in again.

‘Does that go on every night?' he says to Lucy in the morning.

‘One gets used to it. I'm sorry.'

He shakes his head.

EIGHT

H
E HAS FORGOTTEN
how cold winter mornings can be in the uplands of the Eastern Cape. He has not brought the right clothes: he has to borrow a sweater from Lucy.

Hands in pockets, he wanders among the flowerbeds. Out of sight on the Kenton road a car roars past, the sound lingering on the still air. Geese fly in echelon high overhead. What is he going to do with his time?

‘Would you like to go for a walk?' says Lucy behind him.

They take three of the dogs along: two young Dobermanns, whom Lucy keeps on a leash, and the bulldog bitch, the abandoned one.

Pinning her ears back, the bitch tries to defecate. Nothing comes.

‘She is having problems,' says Lucy. ‘I'll have to dose her.'

The bitch continues to strain, hanging her tongue out, glancing around shiftily as if ashamed to be watched.

They leave the road, walk through scrubland, then through sparse pine forest.

‘The girl you were involved with,' says Lucy – ‘was it serious?'

‘Didn't Rosalind tell you the story?'

‘Not in any detail.'

‘She came from this part of the world. From George. She was in one of my classes. Only middling as a student, but very attractive. Was it serious? I don't know. It certainly had serious consequences.'

‘But it's over with now? You're not still hankering after her?'

Is it over with? Does he hanker yet? ‘Our contact has ceased,' he says.

‘Why did she denounce you?'

‘She didn't say; I didn't have a chance to ask. She was in a difficult position. There was a young man, a lover or ex-lover, bullying her. There were the strains of the classroom. And then her parents got to hear and descended on Cape Town. The pressure became too much, I suppose.'

‘And there was you.'

‘Yes, there was me. I don't suppose I was easy.'

They have arrived at a gate with a sign that says ‘SAPPI Industries – Trespassers will be Prosecuted'. They turn.

‘Well,' says Lucy, ‘you have paid your price. Perhaps, looking back, she won't think too harshly of you. Women can be surprisingly forgiving.'

There is silence. Is Lucy, his child, presuming to tell him about women?

‘Have you thought of getting married again?' asks Lucy.

‘To someone of my own generation, do you mean? I wasn't made for marriage, Lucy. You have seen that for yourself.'

‘Yes. But – '

‘But what? But it is unseemly to go on preying on children?'

‘I didn't mean that. Just that you are going to find it more difficult, not easier, as time passes.'

Never before have he and Lucy spoken about his intimate life. It is not proving easy. But if not to her, then to whom can he speak?

‘Do you remember Blake?' he says. ‘Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires'?

‘Why do you quote that to me?'

‘Unacted desires can turn as ugly in the old as in the young.'

‘Therefore?'

‘Every woman I have been close to has taught me something about myself. To that extent they have made me a better person.'

‘I hope you are not claiming the reverse as well. That knowing you has turned your women into better people.'

He looks at her sharply. She smiles. ‘Just joking,' she says.

They return along the tar road. At the turnoff to the smallholding there is a painted sign he has not noticed before: ‘
CUT FLOWERS. CYCADS
,' with an arrow: ‘
1 KM
'.

‘Cycads?' he says. ‘I thought cycads were illegal.'

‘It's illegal to dig them up in the wild. I grow them from seed. I'll show you.'

They walk on, the young dogs tugging to be free, the bitch padding behind, panting.

‘And you? Is this what you want in life?' He waves a hand toward the garden, toward the house with sunlight glinting from its roof.

‘It will do,' replies Lucy quietly.

It is Saturday, market day. Lucy wakes him at five, as arranged, with coffee. Swaddled against the cold, they join Petrus in the garden, where by the light of a halogen lamp he is already cutting flowers.

He offers to take over from Petrus, but his fingers are soon so cold that he cannot tie the bunches. He passes the twine back to Petrus and instead wraps and packs.

By seven, with dawn touching the hills and the dogs beginning to stir, the job is done. The kombi is loaded with boxes of flowers, pockets of potatoes, onions, cabbage. Lucy drives, Petrus stays behind. The heater does not work; peering through the misted windscreen, she takes the Grahamstown road. He sits beside her, eating the sandwiches she has made. His nose drips; he hopes she does not notice.

So: a new adventure. His daughter, whom once upon a time he used to drive to school and ballet class, to the circus and the skating rink, is taking him on an outing, showing him life, showing him this other, unfamiliar world.

On Donkin Square stallholders are already setting up trestle tables and laying out their wares. There is a smell of burning meat. A cold mist hangs over the town; people rub their hands, stamp their feet, curse. There is a show of bonhomie from which Lucy, to his relief, holds herself apart.

They are in what appears to be the produce quarter. On their left are three African women with milk,
masa
, butter to sell; also, from a bucket with a wet cloth over it, soup-bones. On their right are an old Afrikaner couple whom Lucy greets as Tante Miems and Oom Koos, and a little assistant in a balaclava cap who cannot be more than ten. Like Lucy, they have potatoes and onions to sell, but also bottled jams, preserves, dried fruit, packets of buchu tea, honeybush tea, herbs.

Lucy has brought two canvas stools. They drink coffee from a thermos flask, waiting for the first customers.

Two weeks ago he was in a classroom explaining to the bored youth of the country the distinction between
drink
and
drink up
,
burned
and
burnt
. The perfective, signifying an action carried through to its conclusion. How far away it all seems! I live, I have lived, I lived.

Lucy's potatoes, tumbled out into a bushel basket, have been washed clean. Koos and Miems's are still speckled with earth. In the course of the morning Lucy takes in nearly five hundred rand. Her flowers sell steadily; at eleven o'clock she drops her prices and the last of the produce goes. There is plenty of trade too at the milk-and-meat stall; but the old couple, seated side by side wooden and unsmiling, do less well.

Many of Lucy's customers know her by name: middle-aged women, most of them, with a touch of the proprietary in their attitude to her, as though her success were theirs too. Each time she introduces him: ‘Meet my father, David Lurie, on a visit from Cape Town.' ‘You must be proud of your daughter, Mr Lurie,' they say. ‘Yes, very proud,' he replies.

‘Bev runs the animal refuge,' says Lucy, after one of the introductions. ‘I give her a hand sometimes. We'll drop in at her place on the way back, if that is all right with you.'

He has not taken to Bev Shaw, a dumpy, bustling little woman with black freckles, close-cropped, wiry hair, and no neck. He does not like women who make no effort to be attractive. It is a resistance he has had to Lucy's friends before. Nothing to be proud of: a prejudice that has settled in his mind, settled down. His mind has become a refuge for old thoughts, idle, indigent, with nowhere else to go. He ought to chase them out, sweep the premises clean. But he does not care to do so, or does not care enough.

The Animal Welfare League, once an active charity in Grahamstown, has had to close down its operation. However, a handful of volunteers led by Bev Shaw still runs a clinic from the old premises.

He has nothing against the animal lovers with whom Lucy has been mixed up as long as he can remember. The world would no doubt be a worse place without them. So when Bev Shaw opens her front door he puts on a good face, though in fact he is repelled by the odours of cat urine and dog mange and Jeyes Fluid that greet them.

The house is just as he had imagined it would be: rubbishy furniture, a clutter of ornaments (porcelain shepherdesses, cowbells, an ostrich-feather flywhisk), the yammer of a radio, the cheeping of birds in cages, cats everywhere underfoot. There is not only Bev Shaw, there is Bill Shaw too, equally squat, drinking tea at the kitchen table, with a beet-red face and silver hair and a sweater with a floppy collar. ‘Sit down, sit down, Dave,' says Bill. ‘Have a cup, make yourself at home.'

It has been a long morning, he is tired, the last thing he wants to do is trade small talk with these people. He casts Lucy a glance. ‘We won't stay, Bill,' she says, ‘I'm just picking up some medicines.'

Through a window he glimpses the Shaws' back yard: an apple tree dropping wormridden fruit, rampant weeds, an area fenced in with galvanized-iron sheets, wooden pallets, old tyres, where chickens scratch around and what looks uncommonly like a duiker snoozes in a corner.

‘What do you think?' says Lucy afterwards in the car.

‘I don't want to be rude. It's a subculture of its own, I'm sure. Don't they have children?'

‘No, no children. Don't underestimate Bev. She's not a fool. She does an enormous amount of good. She's been going into D Village for years, first for Animal Welfare, now on her own.'

‘It must be a losing battle.'

‘Yes, it is. There is no funding any longer. On the list of the nation's priorities, animals come nowhere.'

‘She must get despondent. You too.'

‘Yes. No. Does it matter? The animals she helps aren't despondent. They are greatly relieved.'

‘That's wonderful, then. I'm sorry, my child, I just find it hard to whip up an interest in the subject. It's admirable, what you do, what she does, but to me animal-welfare people are a bit like Christians of a certain kind. Everyone is so cheerful and well-intentioned that after a while you itch to go off and do some raping and pillaging. Or to kick a cat.'

He is surprised by his outburst. He is not in a bad temper, not in the least.

‘You think I ought to involve myself in more important things,' says Lucy. They are on the open road; she drives without glancing at him. ‘You think, because I am your daughter, I ought to be doing something better with my life.'

He is already shaking his head. ‘No . . . no . . . no,' he murmurs.

‘You think I ought to be painting still lives or teaching myself Russian. You don't approve of friends like Bev and Bill Shaw because they are not going to lead me to a higher life.'

‘That's not true, Lucy.'

‘But it is true. They are not going to lead me to a higher life, and the reason is, there is no higher life. This is the only life there is. Which we share with animals. That's the example that people like Bev try to set. That's the example I try to follow. To share some of our human privilege with the beasts. I don't want to come back in another existence as a dog or a pig and have to live as dogs or pigs live under us.'

‘Lucy, my dearest, don't be cross. Yes, I agree, this is the only life there is. As for animals, by all means let us be kind to them. But let us not lose perspective. We are of a different order of creation from the animals. Not higher, necessarily, just different. So if we are going to be kind, let it be out of simple generosity, not because we feel guilty or fear retribution.'