John Coetzee - Scenes from Provincial Life

She returns with a bath towel wrapped around her. ‘I must leave,’ she says. ‘The last train has gone,’ he replies. ‘Why don’t you stay the night?’

The bleeding does not stop. Marianne falls asleep with the towel, growing more and more soggy, stuffed between her legs. He lies awake beside her fretting. Should he be calling an ambulance? Can he do so without waking Theodora? Marianne does not seem to be worried, but what if that is only pretence, for his sake? What if she is too innocent or too trustful to assess what is going on?

He is convinced he will not sleep, but he does. He is woken by voices and the sound of running water. It is five o’clock; already the birds are singing in the trees. Groggily he gets up and listens at the door: Theodora’s voice, then Marianne’s. What they are saying he cannot hear, but it cannot reflect well on him.

He strips off the bedclothes. The blood has soaked through to the mattress, leaving a huge, uneven stain. Guiltily, angrily, he heaves the mattress over. Only a matter of time before the stain is discovered. He must be gone by then, he will have to make sure of that.

Marianne returns from the bathroom wearing a robe that is not hers. She is taken aback by his silence, his cross looks. ‘You never told me not to,’ she says. ‘Why shouldn’t I talk to her? She’s a nice old woman. A nice old aia .’

He telephones for a taxi, then waits pointedly at the front door while she dresses. When the taxi arrives he evades her embrace, puts a pound note in her hand. She regards it with puzzlement. ‘I’ve got my own money,’ she says. He shrugs, opens the door of the taxi for her.

For the remaining days of his tenancy he avoids Theodora. He leaves early in the mornings, comes home late. If there are messages for him, he ignores them. When he took on the flat, he engaged to guard it from the husband and generally be at hand . He has failed in his undertaking once and is failing again, but he does not care. The unsettling lovemaking, the whispering women, the bloody sheets, the stained mattress: he would like to put the whole shameful business behind him, close the door on it.

Muffling his voice, he calls the hostel in Earls Court and asks to speak to his cousin. She has left, they say, she and her friend. He puts the telephone down and relaxes. They are safely away, he need not face them again.

There remains the question of what to make of the episode, how to fit it into the story of his life that he tells himself. He has behaved dishonourably, no doubt about that, behaved like a cad. The word may be old-fashioned but it is exact. He deserves to be slapped in the face, even to be spat on. In the absence of anyone to administer the slap, he has no doubt that he will gnaw away at himself. Agenbyte of inwit . Let that be his contract then, with the gods: he will punish himself, and in return will hope the story of his caddish behaviour will not get out.

Yet what does it matter, finally, if the story does get out? He belongs to two worlds tightly sealed from each other. In the world of South Africa he is no more than a ghost, a wisp of smoke fast dwindling away, soon to have vanished for good. As for London, he is as good as unknown here. Already he has begun his search for new lodgings. When he has found a room he will break off contact with Theodora and the Merrington household and vanish into a sea of anonymity.

There is more to the sorry business, however, than just the shame of it. He has come to London to do what is impossible in South Africa: to explore the depths. Without descending into the depths one cannot be an artist. But what exactly are the depths? He had thought that trudging down icy streets, his heart numb with loneliness, was the depths. But perhaps the real depths are different, and come in unexpected form: in a flare-up of nastiness against a girl in the early hours of the morning, for instance. Perhaps the depths that he has wanted to plumb have been within him all the time, closed up in his chest: depths of coldness, callousness, caddishness. Does giving rein to one’s penchants, one’s vices, and then afterwards gnawing at oneself, as he is doing now, help to qualify one to be an artist? He cannot, at this moment, see how.

At least the episode is closed, closed off, consigned to the past, sealed away in memory. But that is not true, not quite. A letter arrives postmarked Lucerne. Without second thought he opens it and begins to read. It is in Afrikaans. ‘Dear John, I thought I should let you know that I am OK. Marianne is OK too. At first she did not understand why you did not phone, but after a while she cheered up, and we have been having a good time. She doesn’t want to write, but I thought I would write anyway, to say I hope you don’t treat all your girls like that, even in London. Marianne is a special person, she doesn’t deserve that kind of treatment. You should think twice about the life you lead. Your cousin, Ilse.’

Even in London . What does she mean? That even by the standards of London he has behaved disgracefully? What do Ilse and her friend, fresh from the wastes of the Orange Free State, know about London and its standards? London gets worse , he wants to say. If you would stay on for a while, instead of running away to the cowbells and the meadows, you might find that out for yourself. But he does not really believe the fault is London’s. He has read Henry James. He knows how easy it is to be bad, how one has only to relax for the badness to emerge.

The most hurtful moments in the letter are at the beginning and the end. Beste John is not how one addresses a family member, it is the way one addresses a stranger. And Your cousin, Ilse : who would have thought a farm girl capable of such a telling thrust!

For days and weeks, even after he has crumpled it up and thrown it away, his cousin’s letter haunts him — not the actual words on the page, which he soon manages to blank out, but the memory of the moment when, despite having noticed the Swiss stamp and the childishly rounded handwriting, he slit open the envelope and read. What a fool! What was he expecting: a paean of thanks?

He does not like bad news. Particularly he does not like bad news about himself. I am hard enough on myself , he tells himself; I do not need the help of others . It is a sophistical trick that he falls back on time and again when he wants to block his ears to criticism. He learned its usefulness when Jacqueline, from the perspective of a woman of thirty, gave him her opinion of him as a lover. Now, as soon as an affair begins to run out of steam, he withdraws. He abominates scenes, angry outbursts, home truths (‘Do you want to know the truth about yourself?’), and does all in his power to evade them. What is truth anyway? If he is a mystery to himself, how can he be anything but a mystery to others? There is a pact he is ready to offer the women in his life: if they will treat him as a mystery, he will treat them as a closed book. On that basis and that alone will commerce be possible.

He is not a fool. As a lover his record is undistinguished, and he knows it. Never has he provoked in the heart of a woman what he would call a grand passion. In fact, looking back, he cannot recall having been the object of a passion, a true passion, of any degree. That must say something about him. As for sex itself, narrowly understood, what he provides is, he suspects, rather meagre; and what he gets in return is meagre too. If the fault is anyone’s, it is his own. For as long as he lacks heart and holds himself back, why should the woman not hold herself back too?

Is sex the measure of all things? If he fails in sex, does he fail the whole test of life? Things would be easier if that were not true. But when he looks around, he can see no one who does not stand in awe of the god of sex, except perhaps for a few dinosaurs, holdovers from Victorian times. Even Henry James, on the surface so proper, so Victorian, has pages where he darkly hints that everything, finally, is sex.