Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [56]
He flung his arm across the pillow and straightened his legs, foot on your face where you were lying at the end of the bed.
You pushed his feet out of your face. You looked at yourself in the shattered mirror until he started snoring. Then you went and ran a bath and lay in it for hours adding hot water. You listened to the sounds of the house.
Before going to sleep, you picked up the shards of mirror and gathered your torn clothes in a bundle and threw them away in the bin in the backyard. The side panels of the mirror were undamaged. You turned the panels towards each other and inspected yourself from one side and the other. You couldn’t get enough. After twelve years of despoilment you, Milla de Wet née Redelinghuys, were going to be a mother.
You folded the wings of the mirror so that in the morning the damage to the central panel would not be visible.
The bigger you grew with child the more time Jak spent on his appearance. He became fastidious about what he ate, combinations of certain foods at certain times, power supplements that stood around in tins in the kitchen. You couldn’t keep up with cooking what he wanted and the servants understood nothing of it.
Then cook your own food, you said, and so he ate nothing but raw grated vegetables and macaroni. Every night before coming to bed he trained with his weights in the stoep room. Every morning and every evening he went for long runs in the mountains and almost every weekend since you fell pregnant he went off to take part in tennis tournaments or races. He became the Overberg long-distance champion and the Tradouw’s prime mountaineer. His only responsibility towards the world, he seemed to think, was that he shouldn’t get fat, that he shouldn’t with time come to seem coarse and heavy like most other farmers. His only bailiff was his stop-watch, his only judge the bathroom scale.
His achievements he displayed all around him. He kept the maps of Grootmoedersdrift in his new stoep room. If he could have lifted his leg like a fox terrier, he might have had his way with them. There they hung surrounded by his shelves full of trophies and mounted medals with ribbons in display cases, amongst his photos of himself.
The photos in themselves constituted a whole history of one man’s vanity.
Jak on graduation day in his gown, Jak at Elsenburg with the agriculture students’ athletics team. Jak with his first sheaf of short-stem wheat, Jak with the agent next to the new combine, with a glass of wine in his hand at the regional caucus of the NP, Jak on his Arab mare, booted and spurred for a horserace, Jak at a farmer’s day in his white clothes, leaning against his first red open sports car, Jak in close-up, in a studio portrait, brilliantined hair, smoothed back, charming Jak de Wet, the gentleman farmer. A dead ringer for Gregory Peck, as your mother used to say.
In the time of the fixing up of the new rooms you got into the habit of going into Jak’s office when he wasn’t there. Who is this beautiful man? you wondered. What has he got in him? Nobody can be so beautiful from the outside and so hollow from inside. Not even in a third-rate novel. When is he going to reveal himself? When is he going to show who he really is? You could tell that he was brooding on something, but what?
Over and over again you looked at the display, picked up all the trophies and read the inscriptions, removed the medals with their satin ribbons from the glass cabinets and weighed them in your hand, examined the photos from up close, touched all his strange hard apparatus and reins and harnesses, fastened and unfastened the buckles and belts, tried to budge the weights, smelt and tested the powders and oils between your fingers.
Perhaps there were other reasons for these sessions. If Jak, indeed if anybody, had had to see you in his room, they would have imagined that you were feasting on his fame.
That may be what Beatrice thought when she found you there one day. You hadn’t heard her approach. Then she saw you there in front of the photos, came and stood next to you, and produced