Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [52]
Good heavens, but you’re tarted up tonight, what’s got into you, Jak said when you came out onto the stoep where he was waiting.
You smiled.
My dear husband, you said, you look so good yourself in that tuxedo of yours and just look at the new bow tie!
You felt it coming out of your mouth. Like a noose it fell around his neck. You drew him nearer, pulled up his cummerbund slightly, adjusted one cuff link, dusted the shoulders of his jacket.
You started laughing. You couldn’t believe it. You no longer needed him so badly. You needed nothing and nobody as badly as before.
What are you laughing at? Jak asked.
Because you look like a model, you said, because I can’t believe it.
So, you think I look good? He inspected himself from all angles in the mirror in the entrance hall while you were grooming him.
Fantastic, you said, absolutely fantastic, you belong in a fashion magazine, in Paris.
Clay in your hands. And you could flatter him from pure generosity.
Pregnant.
He could not know it. He had caused it, but he could not know it with his body. It was your knowing alone. In you it was attached, a glomerule of cells that for three weeks already had been sprouting and dividing at its own tempo and with its own plan while you had been eating and sleeping and working.
You noticed that evening how other men looked at you. You looked back, nodded, smiled, felt that you had the right to enjoy yourself.
You look breathtaking, Beatrice came and whispered in your ear, is there something I don’t know?
And you look stunning, you said, how are your suckling pigs?
Jak darted you a look.
Over coffee the people at your table bickered over agricultural matters. The new owner of Frambooskop excused himself, clearly didn’t want to get involved in an argument at his own party. It was about profits and costs and optimal utilisation of soil.
Two-stage! Two-stage! everybody shouted and Beatrice’s Thys beat out the syllables on the table with his hand. Wheat, fallow, wheat, fallow, or, better still, wheat on wheat. With the new fertilisers one couldn’t go wrong, was the consensus, bumper crops every year, it was an Overberg miracle. They looked at Jak, who was living proof of the miracle, even though after five years he’d sold the land that had treated him so well to start farming beef cattle.
Jak hit the right notes. The soil analysis laboratory of FOSFANITRA had impressed him from the start, he said.
Modest enough he could be.
With his gentleman’s hands he demonstrated. They could scientifically determine exactly how much phosphate, how much nitrogen, how much potassium one needed per morgen for a good yield.
Scientific or not, I don’t agree, you said.
Jak looked at you, taken aback. You felt yourself blushing, took another sip of wine, but you could also see the people waiting to hear.
That’s a mistake farmers can always make, you said, that they prepare a rod for themselves and their dependants with which everybody will be beaten one day when the wheel turns.
Ag, Milla, what rod and what wheel are you talking of now, my dear wife?
You laughed. He was so hypocritical. ‘My dear wife’ before the guests, my dear tarted-up wife who looks like nothing unless something gets into her.
You were angry, twelve years’ worth of anger. You intercepted quite a few covert glances. People didn’t want to say it out loud, but everybody knew that Dirk du Toit, to whom Jak had sold the land on which he had made his profits, was as good as bankrupt. You knew why.
I’m speaking of the wheel of Lady Fortune, you said, and I’m speaking of her assistants the moneylenders, my dear husband, they who make themselves indispensable by offering certain essential services and goods on credit, and I’m speaking of monopolies.
They