Scenes From Provincial Life - J. M. Coetzee [187]
Ons is glad nie honger nie: a lie, of course. She is famished. The very smell of the cold chicken makes her salivate.
‘Sit up front beside the driver,’ John suggests. ‘For our triumphal return.’ And so she does. As they approach the Coetzees, assembled on the stoep exactly as she had foreseen, she takes care to put on a smile and even to wave in a parody of royalty. In response she is greeted with a light ripple of clapping. She descends, ‘Dankie, Hendrik, eerlik dankie,’ she says: Thank you sincerely. ‘Mies,’ says Hendrik. Later in the day she will go over to his house and leave some money: for Katryn, she will say, for clothing for her children, though she knows the money will go on liquor.
‘En toe?’ says Carol, in front of everyone. ‘Sê vir ons: waar was julle?’ Where were you?
Just for a second there is silence, and in that second she realizes that the question, on the face of it simply a prompt for her to come up with some flippant, amusing retort, has a serious core. The Coetzees really want to know where she and John have been; they want to be reassured that nothing truly scandalous has taken place. It takes her breath away, the cheek of it. That people who have known her and loved her all her life could think her capable of misconduct! ‘Vra vir John,’ she replies curtly – ask John – and stalks indoors.
When she rejoins them half an hour later the atmosphere is still uneasy.
‘Where has John gone?’ she asks.
John and Michiel, it turns out, set off just a moment ago in Michiel’s pickup to recover the Datsun. They will tow it to Leeuw Gamka, to the mechanic who will fix it properly.
‘We stayed up late last night,’ says her aunt Beth. ‘We waited and waited. Then we decided you and John must have gone to Beaufort and were spending the night there because the National Road is so dangerous at this time of the year. But you didn’t phone, and that worried us. This morning Michiel phoned the hotel at Beaufort and they said they hadn’t seen you. He phoned Fraserburg too. We never guessed you had gone to Merweville. What were you doing in Merweville?’
What indeed were they doing in Merweville? She turns to John’s father. ‘John says you and he are thinking of buying property in Merweville,’ she says. ‘Is that true, Uncle Jack?’
A shocked silence falls.
‘Is it true, Uncle Jack?’ she presses him. ‘Is it true you are going to move from the Cape to Merweville?’
‘If you put the question like that,’ Jack says – the bantering Coetzee manner is gone, he is all caution – ‘no, no one is actually going to move to Merweville. John has the idea – I don’t know how realistic it is – of buying one of those abandoned houses and fixing it up as a holiday home. That’s as far as we have gone in talking about it.’
A holiday home in Merweville! Who has ever heard of such a thing! Merweville of all places, with its snooping neighbours and its diaken [deacon] knocking at the door, pestering one to attend church! How can Jack, in his day the liveliest and most irreverent of them all, be planning a move to Merweville?
‘You should try Koegenaap first, Jack,’ says his brother Alan. ‘Or Pofadder. In Pofadder the big day of the year is when the dentist from Upington comes visiting to pull teeth. They call it die Groot Trek, the Great Trek.’
As soon as their ease is threatened, the Coetzees come up with jokes. A family drawn up in a tight little laager to keep the world and its menaces at bay. But how long will the jokes go on doing their magic? One of these days the great foe himself will come knocking at the door, the Grim Reaper, whetting his scythe-blade, calling them out one by one. What power will their jokes have then?
‘According to John, you are going to move to Merweville while he stays on in Cape Town,’ she persists. ‘Are you sure you will be able to cope by yourself, Uncle Jack, without a car?’
A serious question. The Coetzees don’t like serious questions. ‘Margie word ’n bietjie grim,’ they will