Zoe Wicomb - October

There would be no more children, Nicholas said, confident that he could handle the tricky business of contraception. Nettie had done her duty, producing one of each, so there was no need to saddle themselves like poor and ignorant coloreds with a large brood. The children would be raised to the glory of God, and that could only be achieved by strict discipline and chastisement. To that end Nicholas and Nettie pulled in their belts and, turning each coin this way and that, assiduously squirreled away the cents for school fees.

When Nettie died, as quietly as she had lived, Nicholas was puzzled. Why had she said nothing of her illness? Why had she suffered the pain alone? For pain there must have been. When finally she collapsed into her bed and the doctor was summoned, they learned that she had no more than a week or two left. The cancer had consumed nearly all her organs. Her frame was no more than an eggshell. Nettie did not wait for the second week; she made the tremendous effort to speak of the children, to say that Jake should learn Latin, or that was what Nicholas thought she said. And then she was gone.

Mercia was twelve years old. She tried to summon her mother’s spirit, but discovered that there was no such thing. Nettie was simply dead. Jake said that their father had killed her — the words of a grief-stricken child. But no, Jake said, he had overnight stopped being a child, he knew what he was talking about. Mercia, who had her nose buried in books, knew nothing. Old Who-art-in-heaven had killed their mother — of that he was certain.

Would Jacques have turned out to be such a reprobate, such a failure, had Nettie remained alive? Nicholas did not want to know the answer. But he could not help feeling resentful. Why had she died? He had done everything: he had chastised the boy; he had sacrificed and provided. Nicholas had an idea that cancer was something resistible that you let into your own heart, that you allowed its crabbing into your organs. Why else had Antoinette said nothing of her pain? Why had she not allowed him to gather Jantjie Bêrend that grew in abundance all around, the cancer bush that would certainly have cured her? Never again would he put his faith in a woman.

Mercia woke to the clatter of Craig opening the wooden shutters. Sad October light flooded in, licking the corners of the room. Pulling the duvet over her head, she buried her face in the pillow, protecting herself against the shards of icy sunlight. Glasgow was by no means the deep north, but it would be the death of her all the same.

Come again? Craig said. Naked, his arms raised, and holding on to the window frame as if holding up the golden day, he stood distracted, his back to her.

I want to kill myself.

It’s a gorgeous day. Let’s go out, Craig said.

If you won’t come and live in Cape Town, I’ll kill myself, her muffled voice came through the down.

We’ll go to the Pots of Gartness on Endrick Water. The salmon should be there by now, back from the Atlantic trip. All that way they’ve been, to the bountiful Norwegian sea and now, shining silvery and plump, are on their way back home.

As a teenager Craig had cycled for miles to fish on the river, and in autumn there was the spectacle of the salmon leap. He hadn’t been since then; there was no longer the urge to get out of the city, or rather, to get away from his family. The ice-bright day brought back that adolescence, set him off about his mother, who would not let him be, who went on and on, gnawing away in the hope that something would slip out — what did he think? what did he feel? — wanting something he could not give, something he most probably didn’t even have.

Why, Craig asked, as he struggled to drag off the duvet that Mercia clung to, does this remind me of my mother?

Mercia came up for air. Oh stop. You’re a grown-up, so stop whingeing about your mother. Or, be different — whinge about your father for a change.

How often they competed for center stage. Mercia wanted to talk about the melancholia that descended on her in October, how it took years in the Northern Hemisphere before she realized that the sadness came regularly at autumn. Thus no need to whinge.

I am at one with the universe, with the rhythms of the season, she mocked. Just as I am tuned in to the circadian cycle and must mourn the death of each day.

Aye right, with a glass of bevvy. And that, Craig said, shaking his head, was what made him sick of women, made him think of his mother. All that nasty business of the female psyche. Nothing that a good day of fishing in the rain wouldn’t cure.

I have a lecture to write, essays to mark, a paper to finish, a new course proposal to submit tomorrow. Too much to do, she sighed, to go out gallivanting with a mother-hater.

So what’s new. You always have too much to do. But it’s criminal to allow a rare sunny day in autumn to pass you by, especially when the salmon are doing their high jumps. Come on, we won’t be long.

Mercia staggered out of bed. Shocking, but by now she too thought of the chilly autumnal day as beautiful. Let’s live in proper sunshine, in Cape Town, she howled all the same. Craig was busy making sandwiches and a flask of coffee.

Let’s go, he said. And another thing about women, they always need padkos. As for himself, he could go for hours without something to eat.

Mercia punched his bottom with both her fists, pleased that he remembered the Afrikaans word.

So you’d rather have the good old pub, hey! Let’s remember that Scottish pub food is disgusting. And whoever’s heard of sandwiches without butter? That’s what you get these days.

In the icy sunlight they set out through the city, on to the open road where the hills rose in the distance, the Dumgoyne a sharply outlined lump clad in tweedy autumnal color. They argued about the window. Craig said it had to be open, to savor the loveliness of the autumnal day, of the burnt-red summer bracken snuggling up to the purple haze of heather. Past the Glengoyne distillery.

My father’s generation would have stopped for a wee dram, Craig said.

Mercia wasn’t listening. If she feared the season, she has always loved the written word, autumn, its disdainful letter M ignoring the N, until it takes a suffix, another syllable for the letters to nuzzle each other, bound in articulated intimacy. Au-tum-nal, she said out loud.

They parked on a lane from where the roar of water could be heard. How could she have forgotten the dizzying beauty of a cold bright day? The hedgerows (oh, hardly hedge-rows, little lines of sportive wood run wild) having lost their summer lushness, now hosted valedictory vetch in weak purple and heads of tired honeysuckle holding out valiantly. And there was the starred triumph of autumn — berries. Polished red of oval rose hips, hawthorn, purple opalescent sloes, and clusters of bright black beads — surely too late for elder?

All eyes and ears for the water, Craig nodded absently; he didn’t know; like a frisky retriever he bounded down the steep, slippery steps to the falls.

There it was, the breathtaking Pots. The order of a banked river all broken, its waters parted, smashed up with jutting planes of black rock over which white water roared with fury and boiled into icy maelstroms below. Where the rock was less jagged, water cascaded in beaded curtains and, here and there taking the gradient in its stride, settled into still pools. And all within a single sweep of the eye. The trees along the banks had already taken color. In the autumnal spectrum of yellow through to burnt red, beech, oak, and elder huddled together, waiting to be lashed and stripped by the wind. But the day was still, and where the water pooled quietly, brushstrokes of reflected leaf color quivered on the surface, inverted.