John Coetzee - Scenes from Provincial Life

‘He’s not a golliwog,’ says the child.

He gives up. ‘I have work to do now,’ he says, and retires.

He has been told to call the nanny Theodora. Theodora has yet to reveal her name for him: certainly not the master . She occupies a room at the end of the corridor, next to the child’s. It is understood that these two rooms and the laundry room are her province. The living room is neutral territory.

Theodora is, he would guess, in her forties. She has been in the Merringtons’ service since their last spell in Malawi. The hot-tempered ex-husband is an anthropologist; the Merringtons were in Theodora’s country on a field trip, making recordings of tribal music and collecting instruments. Theodora soon became, in Mrs Merrington’s words, ‘not just a house-help but a friend’. She was brought back to London because of the bond she had forged with the child. Each month she sends home the wages that keep her own children fed and clothed and in school.

And now, all of a sudden, a stranger half this treasure’s age has been put in charge of her domain. By her bearing, by her silences, Theodora gives him to understand that she resents his presence.

He does not blame her. The question is, is there more underlying her resentment than just hurt pride? She must know he is not an Englishman. Does she resent him in his person as a South African, a white, an Afrikaner? She must know what Afrikaners are. There are Afrikaners — big-bellied, red-nosed men in short pants and hats, rolypoly women in shapeless dresses — all over Africa: in Rhodesia, in Angola, in Kenya, certainly in Malawi. Is there anything he can do to make her understand that he is not one of them, that he has quit South Africa, is resolved to put South Africa behind him for ever? Africa belongs to you, it is yours to do with as you wish : if he were to say that to her, out of the blue, across the kitchen table, would she change her mind about him?

Africa is yours . What had seemed perfectly natural while he still called that continent his home seems more and more preposterous from the perspective of Europe: that a handful of Hollanders should have waded ashore on Woodstock beach and claimed ownership of foreign territory they had never laid eyes on before; that their descendants should now regard that territory as theirs by birthright. Doubly absurd, given that the first landing-party misunderstood its orders, or chose to misunderstand them. Its orders were to dig a garden and grow spinach and onions for the East India fleet. Two acres, three acres, five acres at most: that was all that was needed. It was never intended that they should steal the best part of Africa. If they had only obeyed their orders, he would not be here, nor would Theodora. Theodora would happily be pounding millet under Malawian skies and he would be — what? He would be sitting at a desk in an office in rainy Rotterdam, adding up figures in a ledger.

Theodora is a fat woman, fat in every detail, from her chubby cheeks to her swelling ankles. Walking, she rocks from side to side, wheezing from the exertion. Indoors she wears slippers; when she takes the child to school in the mornings she squeezes her feet into tennis shoes, puts on a long black coat and knitted hat. She works six days of the week. On Sundays she goes to church, but otherwise spends her day of rest at home. She never uses the telephone; she appears to have no social circle. What she does when she is by herself he cannot guess. He does not venture into her room or the child’s, even when they are out of the flat: in return, he hopes, they will not poke around in his room.

Among the Merringtons’ books is a folio of pornographic pictures from imperial China. Men in oddly shaped hats part their robes and aim grossly distended penises at the genitals of tiny women who obligingly part and raise their legs. The women are pale and soft, like bee-grubs; their puny legs seem merely glued to their abdomens. Do Chinese women still look like that, he wonders, with their clothes off, or has re-education and labour in the fields given them proper bodies, proper legs? What chance is there he will ever find out?

Since he got free lodging by masquerading as a dependable professional man, he has to keep up the pretence of having a job. He gets up early, earlier than he is used to, in order to have breakfast before Theodora and the child begin to stir. Then he shuts himself up in his room. When Theodora returns from taking the child to school, he leaves the flat, ostensibly to go to work. At first he even dons his black suit, but soon relaxes that part of the deception. He comes home at five, sometimes at four.

It is lucky that it is summer, that he is not restricted to the British Museum and the bookshops and cinemas, but can stroll around the public parks. This must have been more or less how his father lived during the long spells when he was out of work: roaming the city in his office clothes or sitting in bars watching the hands of the clock, waiting for a decent hour to go home. Is he after all going to turn out to be his father’s son? How deep does it run in him, the strain of fecklessness? Will he turn out to be a drunkard too? Does one need a certain temperament to become a drunkard?

His father’s drink was brandy. He tried brandy once, but can recollect nothing save an unpleasant, metallic aftertaste. In England people drink beer, whose sourness he dislikes. If he doesn’t like liquor, is he safe, inoculated against becoming a drunkard? Are there other, as yet unguessed-at ways in which his father is going to manifest himself in his life?

The ex-husband does not take long to make an appearance. It is Sunday morning, he is dozing in the big, comfortable bed, when suddenly there is a ring at the doorbell and the scrape of a key. He springs out of bed cursing himself. ‘Hello, Fiona, Theodora!’ comes a voice. There is a scuffling sound, running feet. Then without so much as a knock the door of his room swings open and they are surveying him, the man with the child in his arms. He barely has his trousers on. ‘Hello!’ says the man, ‘what have we here?’

It is one of those expressions the English use — an English policeman, for instance, catching one in a guilty act. Fiona, who could explain what we have here, chooses not to. Instead, from her perch in her father’s arms, she looks upon him with undisguised coldness. Her father’s daughter: same cool eyes, same brow.

‘I’m looking after the flat in Mrs Merrington’s absence,’ he says.

‘Ah yes,’ says the man, ‘the South African. I had forgotten. Let me introduce myself. Richard Merrington. I used to be lord of the manor here. How are you finding things? Settling in well?’

‘Yes, I’m fine.’

‘Good.’

Theodora appears with the child’s coat and boots. The man lets his daughter slide from his arms. ‘And do a wee-wee too,’ he tells her, ‘before we get in the car.’

Theodora and the child go off. They are left together, he and this handsome, well-dressed man in whose bed he has been sleeping.

‘And how long do you plan to be here?’ says the man.

‘Just till the end of the month.’

‘No, I mean how long in this country?’

‘Oh, indefinitely. I’ve left South Africa.’

‘Things pretty bad there, are they?’

‘Yes.’

‘Even for whites?’

How does one respond to a question like that? One leaves in order not to perish of shame? One leaves in order to escape the impending cataclysm? Why do big words sound so out of place in this country?

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘At least I think so.’

‘That reminds me,’ says the man. He crosses the room to the rack of gramophone records, flips through them, extracting one, two, three.

This is exactly what he was warned against, exactly what he must not allow to happen. ‘Excuse me,’ he says, ‘Mrs Merrington asked me specifically …’