Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [18]
At the end of his visit, before he goes back to Pretoria, Norman takes him aside and slips a brown ten-shilling note into his shirt pocket. ‘For ice cream,’ he murmurs: the same words every year. He likes Norman not only for the present – ten shillings is a lot of money – but for remembering, for never failing to remember.
His father prefers the other brother, Lance, the schoolteacher from Kingwilliamstown who did join up. There is also the third brother, the eldest, the one who lost the farm, but no one mentions him except his mother. ‘Poor Roland,’ murmurs his mother, shaking her head. Roland married a woman who calls herself Rosa Rakocka, daughter of an exiled Polish count, but whose real name, according to Norman, is Sophie Pretorius. Norman and Lance hate Roland because of the farm and despise him because he is under the thumb of Sophie. Roland and Sophie run a boarding house in Cape Town. He went there once, with his mother. Sophie turned out to be a large blonde woman who wore a silk dressing gown at four in the afternoon and smoked cigarettes in a cigarette-holder. Roland was a quiet, sad-faced man with a bulbous red nose from the radium treatment that had cured him of cancer.
He likes it when his father and his mother and Norman get into political arguments. He enjoys the heat and passion, the reckless things they say. He is surprised that his father, the one he least wants to win, is the one he agrees with: that the English were good and the Germans bad, that Smuts was good and the Nats are bad.
His father likes the United Party, his father likes cricket and rugby, yet he does not like his father. He does not understand this contra diction, but has no interest in understanding it. Even before he knew his father, that is to say, before his father returned from the war, he had decided he was not going to like him. In a sense, therefore, the dislike is an abstract one: he does not want to have a father, or at least does not want a father who stays in the same house.
What he hates most about his father are his personal habits. He hates them so much that the mere thought of them makes him shudder with distaste: the loud nose-blowing in the bathroom in the mornings, the steamy smell of Lifebuoy soap that he leaves behind, along with a ring of scum and shaving-hairs in the washbasin. Most of all he hates the way his father smells. On the other hand, he likes, despite himself, his father’s natty clothes, the maroon cravat he wears instead of a tie on Saturday mornings, his trim figure, his brisk way of walking, his Brylcreemed hair. He Brylcreems his own hair, cultivates a quiff.
He dislikes visiting the barber, dislikes it so much that he even tries, with embarrassing results, to cut his own hair. The barbers of Worcester seem to have decided in concert that boys should have short hair. Sessions begin as brutally as possible with the electric trimmer scything his hair away on the back and sides, and continue with a remorseless snick-snack of scissors till there is only a brush-like stubble left, with perhaps a saving cowlick at the front. Even before the session ends he is squirming with shame; he pays his shilling and hurries home, dreading school the next day, dreading the ritual jeers that greet every boy with a fresh haircut. There are proper haircuts and then there are the haircuts one suffers in Worcester, charged with the barbers’ vindictiveness; he does not know where one has to go, what one has to do or say, how much one has to pay, to get a proper haircut.
Six
Though he goes to thebioscope every Saturday afternoon, films no longer have the hold on him that they used to have in Cape Town, where he had nightmares of being crushed under