Summertime (4 page)

No. No, I wouldn't.

Exactly. And John wasn't exactly a snappy dresser himself. One pair of good trousers, three plain white shirts, one pair of shoes: a real child of the Depression. But let me get back to the story.

For supper that night I made a simple lasagne. Pea soup, lasagne, ice cream: that was the menu, bland enough for a two-year-old. The lasagne was sloppier than it should have been because it was made with cottage cheese instead of ricotta. I could have made a second dash to the shops for ricotta, but on principle I did not, just as on principle I did not change my outfit.

What did we talk about over supper? Nothing much. I concentrated on feeding Chrissie – I didn't want her to feel neglected. And John was not a great talker, as you must know.

I don't know. I never met him in the flesh.

You never met him? I'm surprised to hear that.

I never sought him out. I never even corresponded with him. I thought it would be better if I had no sense of obligation toward him. It would leave me free to write what I wished.

But you sought me out. Your book is going to be about him yet you chose not to meet him. Your book is not going to be about me yet you asked to meet me. How do you explain that?

Because you were a figure in his life. You were important to him.

How do you know that?

I am just repeating what he said. Not to me, but to lots of people.

He said that I was an important figure in his life? I am surprised.

I am gratified. Gratified not that he should have thought so – I agree, I did have quite an impact on his life – but that he should have said so to other people.

Let me make a confession. When you first contacted me, I nearly decided not to speak to you. I thought you were some busybody, some academic newshound who had come upon a list of John's women, his conquests, and was now going down the list, ticking off the names, hoping to get some dirt on him.

You don't have a high opinion of academic researchers.

No, I don't. Which is why I have been trying to make it clear to you that I was not one of his conquests. If anything, he was one of mine. But tell me – I'm curious – to whom did he say that I was important?

To various people. In letters. He doesn't name you, but you are easy enough to identify. Also, he kept a photograph of you. I came across it among his papers.

A photograph! Can I see it? Do you have it with you?

I'll make a copy and send it.

Yes, of course I was important to him. He was in love with me, in his way. But there is an important way of being important, and an unimportant way, and I have my doubts that I made it to the important important level. I mean, he never wrote about me. I never entered his books. Which to me means I never quite flowered within him, never quite came to life.

[Silence.]

No comment? You have read his books. Where in his books do you find traces of me?

I can't answer that. I don't know you well enough to say. Don't you recognize yourself in any of his characters?

No.

Perhaps you are in his books in a more diffuse way, not immediately detectable.

Perhaps. But I would have to be convinced of that. Shall we go on? Where was I?

Supper. Lasagne.

Yes. Lasagne. Conquests. I fed him lasagne and then I completed my conquest of him. How explicit do I need to be? Since he is dead, it can make no difference to him, any indiscreetness on my part. We used the marital bed. If I am going to desecrate my marriage, I thought, I may as well do so thoroughly. And a bed is more comfortable than the sofa or the floor.

As for the experience itself – I mean the experience of infidelity, which is what the experience was, predominantly, for me – it was stranger than I expected, and then over before I could get accustomed to the strangeness. Yet it was exciting, no doubt about that, from start to finish. My heart did not stop hammering. Not something I will forget, ever. Going back to Henry James, there are plenty of betrayals in James, but I recall nothing about the sense of excitement, of heightened self-awareness, during the act itself – the act of betrayal, I mean. Which suggests to me that, though James liked to present himself as a great betrayer, he had never actually done the deed itself, bodily.

My first impressions? I found this new lover of mine bonier than my husband, and lighter.
Doesn't get enough to eat
, I remember thinking. He and his father together in that mean little cottage on Tokai Road, a widower and his celibate son, two incompetents, two of life's failures, supping on polony sausage and biscuits and tea. Since he didn't want to bring his father to me, would I have to start dropping in on them with baskets of nourishing goodies?

The image that has stayed with me is of him leaning over me with his eyes shut, stroking my body, frowning with concentration as if trying to memorize me through touch alone. Up and down his hand roamed, back and forth. I was, at the time, quite proud of my figure. The jogging, the callisthenics, the dieting: if there is no payoff when you undress for a man, when is there ever going to be a payoff? I may not have been a beauty, but at least I must have been a pleasure to handle: nice and trim, a good piece of woman-flesh.

If you find this kind of talk embarrassing, say so and I will shut up. I am in one of the intimate professions, so intimate talk doesn't trouble me as long as it doesn't trouble you. No? No problem? Shall I go on?

That was our first time together. Interesting, an interesting experience, but not earth-shaking. But then, I never expected it to be earth-shaking, not with him.

What I was determined to avoid was emotional entanglement. A passing fling was one thing, an affair of the heart quite another.

Of myself I was fairly sure. I was not about to lose my heart to a man about whom I knew next to nothing. But what of him? Might he be the type to brood on what had passed between us, building it up into something bigger than it really was? Be on your guard, I told myself.

Days went by, however, without any word from him. Each time I drove past the house on Tokai Road I slowed down and peered, but caught no sight of him. Nor was he at the supermarket. There was only one conclusion I could come to: he was avoiding me. In a way that was a good sign; but it annoyed me nevertheless. In fact it hurt me. I wrote him a letter, an old-fashioned letter, and put a stamp on it and dropped it in the mailbox. 'Are you avoiding me?' I wrote. 'What do I have to do to reassure you I want us to be good friends, no more?' No response.

What I did not mention in the letter, and would certainly not mention when next I saw him, was how I passed the weekend immediately after his visit. Mark and I were at each other like rabbits, having sex in the marital bed, on the floor, in the shower, everywhere, even with poor innocent Chrissie wide awake in her cot, crying, calling for me.

Mark had his own ideas about why I was in this inflamed state. Mark thought I could smell his girlfriend from Durban on him and wanted to prove to him how much better a – how shall I put it? – how much better a performer I was than she. On the Monday after the weekend in question he was booked to fly to Durban, but he pulled out – cancelled his flight, called the office to say he was sick. Then he and I went back to bed.

He could not have enough of me. He was positively enraptured with the institution of bourgeois marriage and the opportunities it afforded a man to rut both outside and inside the home.

As for me, I was – I choose my words with deliberation – I was unbearably excited to be having two men so close to each other. To myself I said, in a rather shocked way,
You are behaving like a whore! Is that what you are, by nature?
But beneath it all I was quite proud of myself, of the effect I could have. That weekend I glimpsed for the first time the possibility of growth without end in the realm of the erotic. Until then I had had a rather trite picture of erotic life: you arrive at puberty, you spend a year or two or three hesitating on the brink of the pool, then you plunge in and splash around until you find a mate who satisfies you, and that is the end of it, the end of your quest. What dawned on me that weekend was that at the age of twenty-six my erotic life had barely begun.

Then at last I had a response to my letter. A phone call from John. First some cautious probing:Was I alone, was my husband away? Then the invitation:Would I like to come over for supper, an early supper, and would I like to bring my child?

I arrived at the house with Chrissie in her pram. John was waiting at the door wearing one of those blue-and-white butcher's aprons. 'Come through to the back,' he said, 'we're having a braai.'

That was where I met his father for the first time. His father was sitting hunched over the fire as if he was cold, when in fact the evening was still quite warm. Somewhat creakily he got to his feet to greet me. He looked frail, though it turned out he was only sixty-odd. 'Pleased to meet you,' he said, and gave me a nice smile. He and I got on well from the start. 'And is this Chrissie? Hello, my girl! Come to visit us, eh?'

Unlike his son, he spoke with a heavy Afrikaans accent. But his English was perfectly passable. He had apparently grown up on a farm in the Karoo, with lots of siblings. They had learned their English from a tutor – there was no school nearby – a Miss Jones or Miss Smith, out from the Old Country.

In the walled estate where Mark and I lived each of the units came with a courtyard and a built-in barbecue. Here on Tokai Road there was no such amenity, just an open fire with a few bricks around it. It seemed stupid beyond belief to have an unguarded fire when there was going to be a child around, particularly a child like Chrissie, not yet steady on her feet. I pretended to touch the wire grid, pretended to cry out with pain, whipped my hand away, sucked it. 'Hot!' I said to Chrissie.

'Careful! Don't touch!'

Why do I remember this detail? Because of the sucking. Because I was aware of John's eyes on me, and therefore purposely prolonged the moment. I had – excuse me for boasting – I had a nice mouth in those days, very kissable. My family name was Kis?, which in South Africa, where no one knew about funny diacritics, was spelled K-I-S.
Kiss-kiss,
the girls at school used to hiss when they wanted to provoke me.
Kiss-kiss,
and giggles, and a wet smacking of the lips. I could not have cared less. Nothing wrong with being kissable, I thought. End of digression. I am fully aware it is John you want to hear about, not me and my schooldays.

Grilled sausages and baked potatoes: that was the menu these two men had so imaginatively put together. For the sausages, tomato sauce from a bottle; for the potatoes, margarine. God knows what offal had gone into the making of the sausages. Fortunately I had brought along a couple of those little Heinz jars for the child.

I pleaded a ladylike appetite and took only a single sausage on my plate. With Mark away so much of the time, I found I was eating less and less meat. My diet was mainly fruit and cereal and salads. But for these two men it was meat and potatoes. They ate in the same way, in silence, bolting down their food as if it might be whipped away at any moment. Solitary eaters.

'How is the concreting coming along?' I asked.

'Another month and it will be done, God willing,' said John.

'It's making a real difference to the house,' his father said. 'No doubt about that. Much less damp than there used to be. But it's been a big job, eh, John?'

I recognized the tone at once, the tone of a parent eager to boast about his child. My heart went out to the poor man. A son in his thirties, and nothing to be said for him but that he could lay concrete! And how hard for the son too, the pressure of that longing in the parent, the longing to be proud! If there was one reason above all why I excelled at school, it was to give my parents, who lived such lonely lives in this strange country, something to be proud of.