Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [16]
Sometimes, when she is caught up in a quarrel with his father and wants to score a point, his mother complains bitterly about her treatment at the hands of his family. Mostly, however – for her son’s sake, because she knows how close the farm is to his heart, because she can offer nothing to take its place – she tries to ingratiate herself with them in ways he finds as distasteful as her jokes about money, jokes that are not jokes.
He wishes his mother would be normal. If she were normal, he could be normal too.
It is the same with her two sisters. They have one child each, one son, over whom they hover with suffocating solicitude. His cousin Juan in Johannesburg is his closest friend in the world: they write letters to each other, they look forward to holidays together at the sea. Nevertheless, he does not like to see Juan shamefacedly obeying his mother’s every instruction, even when she is not there to oversee him. Of all the four sons, he is the only one who is not wholly under his mother’s thumb. He has broken away, or half broken away: he has his own friends, whom he has chosen for himself; he goes out on his bicycle without saying where he is going or when he will be back. His cousins and his brother have no friends. He thinks of them as pale, timid, always at home under the eye of their fierce mothers. His father calls the three sister-mothers the three witches. ‘Double, double, toil and trouble,’ he says, quoting Macbeth. Delightedly, maliciously he echoes his father.
When she feels particularly bitter about her life in Reunion Park, his mother laments that she did not marry Bob Breech. He does not take her laments seriously. Yet at the same time he cannot believe his ears. If she had married Bob Breech, where would he be? Who would he be? Would he be Bob Breech’s child? Would Bob Breech’s child be him?
Only one piece of evidence remains of a real Bob Breech. He comes across it by chance in one of his mother’s albums: a blurred photograph of two young men in long white trousers and dark blazers standing on a beach with their arms around each other’s shoulders, squinting into the sun. One of them he knows: Juan’s father. Who is this other man? he asks his mother. Bob Breech, she replies. Where is he now? He is dead, she says.
He stares hard into the face of the dead Bob Breech. He can find nothing of himself there.
He does not interrogate her further. But, listening to the sisters, putting two and two together, he learns that Bob Breech came to South Africa for his health; that after a year or two he went back to England; that there he died. He died of consumption, but, it is implied, a broken heart may have contributed to his decline – a heart broken because of the dark-haired, dark-eyed, wary-looking young schoolteacher whom he met at Plettenberg Bay and who refused to marry him.
He loves to page through his mother’s albums. No matter how indistinct the images, he can always pick her out from the group: the one in whose shy, defensive look he recognizes himself. In her albums he follows her life through the 1920s and 1930s: first the team pictures (hockey, tennis), then the pictures from her tour of Europe: Scotland, Norway, Switzerland, Germany; Edinburgh, the fjords, the Alps, Bingen on the Rhine. Among her mementoes there is a pencil from Bingen with a tiny peephole in its side allowing a view of a castle perched on a cliff.
Sometimes they page through the albums together, he and she. She sighs, she says she wishes she could visit Scotland again, see the heather, the bluebells.