Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [121]
Since he got free lodging by masquerading as a dependable professional man, he has to keep up the pretence of having a job. He gets up early, earlier than he is used to, in order to have breakfast before Theodora and the child begin to stir. Then he shuts himself up in his room. When Theodora returns from taking the child to school, he leaves the flat, ostensibly to go to work. At first he even dons his black suit, but soon relaxes that part of the deception. He comes home at five, sometimes at four.
It is lucky that it is summer, that he is not restricted to the British Museum and the bookshops and cinemas, but can stroll around the public parks. This must have been more or less how his father lived during the long spells when he was out of work: roaming the city in his office clothes or sitting in bars watching the hands of the clock, waiting for a decent hour to go home. Is he after all going to turn out to be his father’s son? How deep does it run in him, the strain of fecklessness? Will he turn out to be a drunkard too? Does one need a certain temperament to become a drunkard?
His father’s drink was brandy. He tried brandy once, but can recollect nothing save an unpleasant, metallic aftertaste. In England people drink beer, whose sourness he dislikes. If he doesn’t like liquor, is he safe, inoculated against becoming a drunkard? Are there other, as yet unguessed-at ways in which his father is going to manifest himself in his life?
The ex-husband does not take long to make an appearance. It is Sunday morning, he is dozing in the big, comfortable bed, when suddenly there is a ring at the doorbell and the scrape of a key. He springs out of bed cursing himself. ‘Hello, Fiona, Theodora!’ comes a voice. There is a scuffling sound, running feet. Then without so much as a knock the door of his room swings open and they are surveying him, the man with the child in his arms. He barely has his trousers on. ‘Hello!’ says the man, ‘what have we here?’
It is one of those expressions the English use – an English policeman, for instance, catching one in a guilty act. Fiona, who could explain what we have here, chooses not to. Instead, from her perch in her father’s arms, she looks upon him with undisguised coldness. Her father’s daughter: same cool eyes, same brow.
‘I’m looking after the flat in Mrs Merrington’s absence,’ he says.
‘Ah yes,’ says the man, ‘the South African. I had forgotten. Let me introduce myself. Richard Merrington. I used to be lord of the manor here. How are you finding things? Settling in well?’
‘Yes, I’m fine.’
‘Good.’
Theodora appears with the child’s coat and boots. The man lets his daughter slide from his arms. ‘And do a wee-wee too,’ he tells her, ‘before we get in the car.’
Theodora and the child go off. They are left together, he and this handsome, well-dressed man in whose bed he has been sleeping.
‘And how long do you plan to be here?’ says the man.
‘Just till the end of the month.’
‘No, I mean how long in this country?’
‘Oh, indefinitely. I’ve left South Africa.’
‘Things pretty bad there, are they?’
‘Yes.’
‘Even for whites?’
How does one respond to a question like that? One leaves in order not to perish of shame? One leaves in order to escape the impending cataclysm? Why do big words sound so out of place in this country?
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘At least I think so.’
‘That reminds me,’ says the man. He crosses the room to the rack of gramophone records, flips through them, extracting one, two, three.
This is exactly what he was warned against, exactly what he must not allow to happen. ‘Excuse me,’ he says, ‘Mrs Merrington asked me specifically