Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [154]
Then at last I received a reply to my letter. A phone call from John. First some cautious probing: Was I alone, was my husband away? Then the invitation: Would I like to come over for supper, an early supper, and would I like to bring my child?
I arrived at the house with Chrissie in her pram. John was waiting at the door wearing one of those blue-and-white butcher’s aprons. ‘Come through to the back,’ he said, ‘we’re having a braai.’
That was where I met his father for the first time. His father was sitting hunched over the fire as if he was cold, when in fact the evening was still quite warm. Somewhat creakily he got to his feet to greet me. He looked frail, though it turned out he was only sixty-odd. ‘Pleased to meet you,’ he said, and gave me a nice smile. He and I got on well from the start. ‘And is this Chrissie? Hello, my girl! Come to visit us, eh?’
Unlike his son, he spoke with a heavy Afrikaans accent. But his English was perfectly passable. He had grown up on a farm in the Karoo, I discovered, with lots of siblings. They had learned their English from a tutor – there was no school nearby – a Miss Jones or Miss Smith, out from the Old Country.
In the walled estate where Mark and I lived each of the units came with a built-in barbecue in the back courtyard. Here on Tokai Road there was no such amenity, just an open fire with a few bricks around it. It seemed stupid beyond belief to have an unguarded fire when there was going to be a child around, particularly a child like Chrissie, not yet steady on her feet. I pretended to touch the wire grid, pretended to cry out with pain, whipped my hand away, sucked it. ‘Hot!’ I said to Chrissie. ‘Careful! Don’t touch!’
Why do I remember this detail? Because of the sucking. Because I was aware of John’s eyes on me, and therefore purposely prolonged the moment. I had – excuse me for boasting – I had a nice mouth in those days, very kissable. My family name was Kiš, which in South Africa, where no one knew about funny diacritics, was spelled K-I-S. Kiss-kiss, the girls at school used to hiss when they wanted to provoke me. Kiss-kiss, and giggles, and a wet smacking of the lips. I could not have cared less. Nothing wrong with being kissable, I thought. End of digression. I am fully aware it is John you want to hear about, not me and my schooldays.
Grilled sausages and baked potatoes: that was the menu these two men had so imaginatively put together. For the sausages, tomato sauce from a bottle; for the potatoes, margarine. God knows what offal had gone into the making of the sausages. Fortunately I had brought along a couple of those little Heinz jars for the child.
I pleaded a ladylike appetite and took only a single sausage on my plate. With Mark away so much of the time, I found I was eating less and less meat. But for these two men it was meat and potatoes and nothing else. They ate in the same way, in silence, bolting down their food as if it might be whipped away at any moment. Solitary eaters.
‘How is the concreting coming along?’ I asked.
‘Another month and it will be done, God willing,’ said John.
‘It’s making a real difference to the house,’ his father said. ‘No doubt about that. Much less damp than there used to be. But it’s been a big job, eh, John?’
I recognized the tone at once, the tone of a parent eager to boast about his child. My heart went out to the poor man. A son in his thirties, and nothing to be said for him but that he could lay concrete! How hard for the son too, the pressure of that longing in the parent, the longing to be proud! If there was one reason above all why I excelled at school, it was to give my parents, who lived such lonely lives in this strange country, something to be proud of.
His English – the father’s – was perfectly passable, as I said,