Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [124]
The bleeding does not stop. Marianne falls asleep with the towel, growing more and more soggy, stuffed between her legs. He lies awake beside her fretting. Should he be calling an ambulance? Can he do so without waking Theodora? Marianne does not seem to be worried, but what if that is only pretence, for his sake? What if she is too innocent or too trustful to assess what is going on?
He is convinced he will not sleep, but he does. He is woken by voices and the sound of running water. It is five o’clock; already the birds are singing in the trees. Groggily he gets up and listens at the door: Theodora’s voice, then Marianne’s. What they are saying he cannot hear, but it cannot reflect well on him.
He strips off the bedclothes. The blood has soaked through to the mattress, leaving a huge, uneven stain. Guiltily, angrily, he heaves the mattress over. Only a matter of time before the stain is discovered. He must be gone by then, he will have to make sure of that.
Marianne returns from the bathroom wearing a robe that is not hers. She is taken aback by his silence, his cross looks. ‘You never told me not to,’ she says. ‘Why shouldn’t I talk to her? She’s a nice old woman. A nice old aia.’
He telephones for a taxi, then waits pointedly at the front door while she dresses. When the taxi arrives he evades her embrace, puts a pound note in her hand. She regards it with puzzlement. ‘I’ve got my own money,’ she says. He shrugs, opens the door of the taxi for her.
For the remaining days of his tenancy he avoids Theodora. He leaves early in the mornings, comes home late. If there are messages for him, he ignores them. When he took on the flat, he engaged to guard it from the husband and generally be at hand. He has failed in his undertaking once and is failing again, but he does not care. The unsettling lovemaking, the whispering women, the bloody sheets, the stained mattress: he would like to put the whole shameful business behind him, close the door on it.
Muffling his voice, he calls the hostel in Earls Court and asks to speak to his cousin. She has left, they say, she and her friend. He puts the telephone down and relaxes. They are safely away, he need not face them again.
There remains the question of what to make of the episode, how to fit it into the story of his life that he tells himself. He has behaved dishonourably, no doubt about that, behaved like a cad. The word may be old-fashioned but it is exact. He deserves to be slapped in the face, even to be spat on. In the absence of anyone to administer the slap, he has no doubt that he will gnaw away at himself. Agenbyte of inwit. Let that be his contract then, with the gods: he will punish himself, and in return will hope the story of his caddish behaviour will not get out.
Yet what does it matter, finally, if the story does get out? He belongs to two worlds tightly sealed from each other. In the world of South Africa he is no more than a ghost, a wisp of smoke fast dwindling away, soon to have vanished for good. As for London, he is as good as unknown here. Already he has begun his search for new lodgings. When he has found a room he will break off contact with Theodora and the Merrington household and vanish into a sea of anonymity.
There is more to the sorry business, however, than just the shame of it. He has come to London to do what is impossible in South Africa: to explore the depths. Without descending into the depths one cannot be an artist. But what exactly are the depths? He had thought that trudging down icy streets, his heart numb with loneliness, was the depths. But perhaps the real depths are different, and come in unexpected form: in a flare-up of nastiness against a girl in the early hours of the morning, for instance. Perhaps the depths that he has wanted to plumb have been within him all the time, closed up in his chest: depths of coldness, callousness, caddishness. Does giving rein to one’s penchants, one’s vices, and then afterwards gnawing at oneself, as he is