Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [122]
The man rises to his full height and faces him. ‘Diana asked you what specifically?’
‘Not to allow anything to leave the flat.’
‘Nonsense. These are my records, she has no use for them.’ Coolly he resumes his search, removing more records. ‘If you don’t believe me, give her a call.’
The child clumps into the room in her heavy boots. ‘Ready to go, are we, darling?’ says the man. ‘Goodbye. I hope all goes well. Goodbye, Theodora. Don’t worry, we’ll be back before bath time.’ And, bearing his daughter and the records, he is gone.
Sixteen
A letter arrives from his mother. His brother has bought a car, she writes, an MG that has been in a crash. Instead of studying, his brother is now spending all his time fixing the car, trying to get it to run. He has found new friends too, whom he does not introduce to her. One of them looks Chinese. They all sit around in the garage, smoking; she suspects the friends bring liquor. She is worried. His brother is on the downward path; how is she to save him?
For his part, he is intrigued. So his brother is at last beginning to free himself from their mother’s embrace! Yet what an odd way to choose: automotive mechanics! Does his brother really know how to fix cars? Where did he learn? He had always thought that, of the two, he was better with his hands, more blessed with mechanical sense. Was he wrong about that all the time? What else does his brother have up his sleeve?
There is further news in the letter. His cousin Ilse and a friend will shortly be arriving in England en route to a camping trip in Switzerland. Will he show them around London? She gives the address of the hostel in Earls Court where they will be staying.
He is astonished that, after all he has said to her, his mother can think that he wants contact with South Africans, and with his father’s family in particular. He has not laid eyes on Ilse since they were children. What can he possibly have in common with her, a girl who went to school in the back of nowhere and can think of nothing better to do with a holiday in Europe – a holiday no doubt paid for by her parents – than to tramp around gemütliche Switzerland, a country that in all its history has not given birth to one great artist?
Yet now that her name has been mentioned, he cannot put Ilse out of his mind. He remembers her as a rangy, swift-footed child with long blonde hair tied in a pigtail. By now she must be at least eighteen. What will she have turned into? What if all that outdoor living has made of her, for however brief a spell, a beauty? For he has seen the phenomenon many times among farm children: a springtime of physical perfection before the coarsening and thickening commences that will turn them into copies of their parents. Ought he really to turn down the chance of walking the streets of London with a tall Aryan huntress at his side?
In his fantasy he recognizes the erotic tingle. What is it about his girl cousins, even the idea of them, that sparks desire in him? Is it simply that they are forbidden? Is that how taboo operates: creating desire by forbidding it? Or is the genesis of his desire less abstract: memories of tussles, girl against boy, body to body, stored since childhood and released now in a rush of sexual feeling? That, perhaps, and the promise of ease, of easiness: two people with a history in common, a country, a family, a blood intimacy from before the first word was spoken. No introductions needed, no fumbling around.
He leaves a message at the Earls Court address. Some days later there is a call: not from Ilse but from the friend, the companion, speaking English clumsily, getting is and are wrong. She has bad news: Ilse is ill, with flu that has turned into pneumonia. She is in a nursing home in Bayswater. Their travel plans are held up until she gets better.
He visits Ilse in the nursing home. All his hopes are dashed. She is not a beauty, not even tall, just an ordinary moon-faced girl with mousy hair who wheezes when she talks. He greets her without kissing her, for fear of infection.
The friend is in