John Coetzee - Scenes from Provincial Life

In a perfect world he would sleep only with perfect women, women of perfect femininity yet with a certain darkness at their core that will respond to his own darker self. But he knows no such women. Jacqueline — any darkness at whose core he has failed to detect — has without warning ceased visiting him, and he has had the good sense not to try to find out why. So he has to make do with other women — in fact with girls who are not yet women and may have no authentic core at all, or none to speak of: girls who sleep with a man only reluctantly, because they have been talked into it or because their friends are doing it and they don’t want to be left behind or because it is sometimes the only way to hold on to a boyfriend.

He gets one of them pregnant. When she telephones to break the news, he is astonished, floored. How could he have got someone pregnant? In a certain sense he knows exactly how. An accident: haste, confusion, a mess of the kind that never finds its way into the novels he reads. Yet at the same time he cannot believe it. In his heart he does not feel himself to be more than eight years old, ten at the most. How can a child be a father?

Perhaps it is not true, he tells himself. Perhaps it is like one of those exams you are sure you have failed, yet when the results come out you have not done badly after all.

But it does not work like that. Another telephone call. In matter-of-fact tones the girl reports that she has seen a doctor. There is the tiniest pause, long enough for him to accept the opening and speak. ‘I will stand by you,’ he could say. ‘Leave it all to me,’ he could say. But how can he say he will stand by her when what standing by her will mean in reality fills him with foreboding, when his whole impulse is to drop the telephone and run away?

The pause comes to an end. She has the name, she continues, of someone who will take care of the problem. She has accordingly made an appointment for the next day. Is he prepared to drive her to the place of appointment and bring her back afterwards, since she has been advised that after the event she will be in no state to drive?

Her name is Sarah. Her friends call her Sally, a name he does not like. It reminds him of the line ‘Come down to the sally gardens’. What on earth are sally gardens? She comes from Johannesburg, from one of those suburbs where people spend their Sundays cantering around the estate on horseback calling out ‘Jolly good!’ to each other while black menservants wearing white gloves bring them drinks. A childhood of cantering around on horses and falling off and hurting herself but not crying has turned Sarah into a brick. ‘Sal is a real brick,’ he can hear her Johannesburg set saying. She is not beautiful — too solid-boned, too fresh-faced for that — but she is healthy through and through. And she does not pretend. Now that disaster has struck, she does not hide away in her room pretending nothing is wrong. On the contrary, she has found out what needs to be found out — how to get an abortion in Cape Town — and has made the necessary arrangements. In fact, she has put him to shame.

In her little car they drive to Woodstock and stop before a row of identical little semi-detached houses. She gets out and knocks at the door of one of them. He does not see who opens it, but it can be no one but the abortionist herself. He imagines abortionists as blowsy women with dyed hair and caked makeup and none too clean fingernails. They give the girl a glass of neat gin, make her lie back, then carry out some unspeakable manipulation inside her with a piece of wire, something that involves hooking and dragging. Sitting in the car, he shudders. Who would guess that in an ordinary house like this, with hydrangeas in the garden and a plaster gnome, such horrors go on!

Half an hour passes. He grows more and more nervous. Is he going to be able to do what will be required of him?

Then Sarah emerges, and the door closes behind her. Slowly, with an air of concentration, she walks towards the car. When she gets closer he sees she is pale and sweating. She does not speak.

He drives her to the Howarths’ big house and instals her in the bedroom overlooking Table Bay and the harbour. He offers her tea, offers her soup, but she wants nothing. She has brought a suitcase; she has brought her own towels, her own sheets. She has thought of everything. He has merely to be around, to be ready if something goes wrong. It is not much to expect.

She asks for a warm towel. He puts a towel in the electric oven. It comes out smelling of burn. By the time he has brought it upstairs it can barely be called warm. But she lays it on her belly and closes her eyes and seems to be soothed by it.

Every few hours she takes one of the pills the woman has given her, followed by water, glass after glass. For the rest she lies with her eyes closed, enduring the pain. Sensing his squeamishness, she has hidden from his sight the evidence of what is going on inside her body: the bloody pads and whatever else there is.

‘How are you?’ he asks.

‘Fine,’ she murmurs.

What he will do if she ceases to be fine, he has no idea. Abortion is illegal, but how illegal? If he called in a doctor, would the doctor report them to the police?

He sleeps on a mattress at the bedside. As a nurse he is useless, worse than useless. What he is doing cannot in fact be called nursing. It is merely a penance, a stupid and ineffectual penance.

On the morning of the third day she appears at the door of the study downstairs, pale and swaying on her feet but fully dressed. She is ready to go home, she says.

He drives her to her lodgings, with her suitcase and the laundry bag that presumably contains the bloody towels and sheets. ‘Would you like me to stay a while?’ he asks. She shakes her head. ‘I’ll be all right,’ she says. He kisses her on the cheek and walks home.

She has issued no reproofs, made no demands; she has even paid the abortionist herself. In fact, she has taught him a lesson in how to behave. As for him, he has emerged ignominiously, he cannot deny it. What help he has given her has been fainthearted and, worse, incompetent. He prays she will never tell the story to anyone.

His thoughts keep going to what was destroyed inside her — that pod of flesh, that rubbery manikin. He sees the little creature flushed down the toilet at the Woodstock house, tumbled through the maze of sewers, tossed out at last into the shallows, blinking in the sudden sun, struggling against the waves that will carry it out into the bay. He did not want it to live and now he does not want it to die. Yet even if he were to run down to the beach, find it, save it from the sea, what would he do with it? Bring it home, keep it warm in cotton wool, try to get it to grow? How can he who is still a child bring up a child?

He is out of his depth. He has barely emerged into the world himself and already he has a death chalked up against him. How many of the other men he sees in the streets carry dead children with them like baby shoes slung around their necks?

He would rather not see Sarah again. If he could be by himself he might be able to recover, return to being as he used to be. But to desert her now would be too shameful. So each day he drops by at her room and sits holding her hand for a decent period. If he has nothing to say, it is because he has not the courage to ask what is happening to her, in her. Is it like a sickness, he wonders to himself, from which she is now in the process of recuperating, or is it like an amputation, from which one never recovers? What is the difference between an abortion and a miscarriage and what in books is called losing a child ? In books a woman who loses a child shuts herself off from the world and goes into mourning. Is Sarah still due to enter a time of mourning? And what of him? Is he too going to mourn? How long does one mourn, if one mourns? Does the mourning come to an end, and is one the same after the mourning as before; or does one mourn forever for the little thing that bobs in the waves off Woodstock, like the little cabin boy who fell overboard and was not missed? Weep, weep! cries the cabin boy, who will not sink and will not be stilled.