Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [120]
The child is winding cord around her dolls, stuffing them into a laundry bag, pulling them out again. If it is a game, it is a game whose meaning he cannot fathom.
‘What are your dolls’ names?’ he asks.
She does not reply.
‘What is the golliwog’s name? Is it Golly?’
‘He’s not a golliwog,’ says the child.
He gives up. ‘I have work to do now,’ he says, and retires.
He has been told to call the nanny Theodora. Theodora has yet to reveal her name for him: certainly not the master. She occupies a room at the end of the corridor, next to the child’s. It is understood that these two rooms and the laundry room are her province. The living room is neutral territory.
Theodora is, he would guess, in her forties. She has been in the Merringtons’ service since their last spell in Malawi. The hot-tempered ex-husband is an anthropologist; the Merringtons were in Theodora’s country on a field trip, making recordings of tribal music and collecting instruments. Theodora soon became, in Mrs Merrington’s words, ‘not just a house-help but a friend’. She was brought back to London because of the bond she had forged with the child. Each month she sends home the wages that keep her own children fed and clothed and in school.
And now, all of a sudden, a stranger half this treasure’s age has been put in charge of her domain. By her bearing, by her silences, Theodora gives him to understand that she resents his presence.
He does not blame her. The question is, is there more underlying her resentment than just hurt pride? She must know he is not an Englishman. Does she resent him in his person as a South African, a white, an Afrikaner? She must know what Afrikaners are. There are Afrikaners – big-bellied, red-nosed men in short pants and hats, rolypoly women in shapeless dresses – all over Africa: in Rhodesia, in Angola, in Kenya, certainly in Malawi. Is there anything he can do to make her understand that he is not one of them, that he has quit South Africa, is resolved to put South Africa behind him for ever? Africa belongs to you, it is yours to do with as you wish: if he were to say that to her, out of the blue, across the kitchen table, would she change her mind about him?
Africa is yours. What had seemed perfectly natural while he still called that continent his home seems more and more preposterous from the perspective of Europe: that a handful of Hollanders should have waded ashore on Woodstock beach and claimed ownership of foreign territory they had never laid eyes on before; that their descendants should now regard that territory as theirs by birthright. Doubly absurd, given that the first landing-party misunderstood its orders, or chose to misunderstand them. Its orders were to dig a garden and grow spinach and onions for the East India fleet. Two acres, three acres, five acres at most: that was all that was needed. It was never intended that they should steal the best part of Africa. If they had only obeyed their orders, he would not be here, nor would Theodora. Theodora would happily be pounding millet under Malawian skies and he would be – what? He would be sitting at a desk in an office in rainy Rotterdam, adding up figures in a ledger.
Theodora is a fat woman, fat in every detail, from her chubby cheeks to her swelling ankles. Walking, she rocks from side to side, wheezing from the exertion. Indoors she wears slippers; when she takes the child to school in the mornings she squeezes her feet into tennis shoes, puts on a long black coat and knitted hat. She works six days of the week. On Sundays she goes to church, but otherwise spends her day of rest at home. She never uses the telephone; she appears to have no social circle. What she does when she is by herself he cannot guess. He does not venture into her room or the child’s, even when they are out of the flat: in return, he hopes, they will not poke around in his room.
Among the Merringtons’ books is a folio of pornographic pictures from imperial