John Coetzee - Scenes from Provincial Life

‘What I do with my time is none of your business,’ he said. ‘If you want to stay away, stay away.’

Even on the telephone I could hear he was still in a rage. When Mark was cross he would explode his plosives: none of your business, with a puff of infuriated air on the b that would make your eyeballs shrivel. Memories of everything I disliked about him came flooding back. ‘Don’t be silly, Mark,’ I said, ‘you don’t know how to look after a child.’

‘Nor do you, you filthy bitch!’ he said, and slammed down the receiver.

Later that morning, when I went to the shops, I found my bank account had been blocked.

I drove out to Constantiaberg. My latchkey turned the latch, but the door was double-locked. I knocked and knocked. No reply. No sign of Maria either. I circled the house. Mark’s car was gone, the windows were closed.

I telephoned his office. ‘He’s away at our Durban office,’ said the girl at the switchboard.

‘There’s an emergency at his home,’ I said. ‘Could you contact Durban and leave a message? Ask him to give his wife a call as soon as he can, at the following number. Say it’s urgent.’ And I gave the hotel number.

For hours I waited. No call.

Where was Chrissie? That was what I needed to know most of all. It seemed beyond belief that Mark could have taken the child with him to Durban. But if he hadn’t, what had he done with her?

I telephoned Durban direct. No, said the secretary, Mark was not in Durban, was not expected this week. Had I tried the firm’s Cape Town office?

Distraught by now, I telephoned John. ‘My husband has taken the child and decamped, vanished into thin air,’ I said. ‘I have no money. I don’t know what to do. Do you have any suggestions?’

There was an elderly couple in the lobby, guests, openly listening to me. But I had ceased to care who knew of my troubles. I wanted to cry, but I think I laughed instead. ‘He has absconded with my child, and because of what?’ I said. ‘Is this’ — I gestured towards my surroundings, that is, towards the interior of the Canterbury Hotel (Residential) — ‘is this what I am being punished for?’ Then I really began to cry.

Being miles away, John could not have seen my gesture, therefore (it occurred to me afterwards) must have attached a quite different meaning to the word this . I must have seemed to be referring to my affair with him — to have been dismissing it as unworthy of such a fuss.

‘Do you want to go to the police?’ he said.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I said. ‘You can’t run away from your husband and then turn around and accuse him of stealing your child.’

‘Would you like me to come over and fetch you?’ I could hear the caution in his voice. And I could sympathize. I too would have been cautious in his position, with an hysterical female on the line. But I didn’t want caution, I wanted my child back. ‘No, I would not like to be fetched,’ I snapped.

‘Have you at least had something to eat?’ he said.

‘I don’t want anything to eat,’ I said. ‘That’s enough of this stupid conversation. I’m sorry, I don’t know why I called. Goodbye.’ And I put down the phone.

I didn’t want anything to eat, though I wouldn’t have minded something to drink: a stiff whisky, for instance, followed by a dead, dreamless sleep.

I had just slumped down in my room and covered my head with a pillow when there was a tapping at the French door. It was John. Words between us, which I won’t repeat. To be brief, he took me back to Tokai and bedded me down in his room. He himself slept on the sofa in the living room. I was half expecting him to come to me during the night, but he didn’t.

I was woken by murmured talk. The sun was up. I heard the front door close. A long silence. I was alone in this strange house.

The bathroom was primitive, the toilet not clean. An unpleasant smell of male sweat and damp towels hung in the air. Where John had gone, when he would be back, I had no idea. I made myself coffee and did some exploring. From room to room the ceilings were so low I felt I would suffocate. It was only a farm cottage, I understood that, but why had it been built for midgets?

I peered into the elder Coetzee’s room. The light had been left on, a single dim bulb without a shade in the centre of the ceiling. The bed was unmade. On a table by the bedside, a newspaper folded open to the crossword puzzle. On the wall a painting, amateurish, of a whitewashed Cape Dutch farmhouse, and a framed photograph of a severe-looking woman. The window, which was small and covered with a lattice of steel bars, looked out onto a stoep empty but for a pair of canvas deckchairs and a row of withered ferns in pots.

John’s room, where I had slept, was larger and better lit. A bookshelf: dictionaries, phrasebooks, teach yourself this, teach yourself that. Beckett. Kafka. On the table, a mess of papers. A filing cabinet. Idly I searched through the drawers. In the bottom drawer, a box of photographs, which I burrowed amongst. What was I looking for? I didn’t know. For something I would recognize only when I found it. But it was not there. Most of the photographs were from his school years: sports teams, class portraits.

From the front I heard noises, and went outdoors. A beautiful day, the sky a brilliant blue. John was unloading sheets of galvanized iron roofing from his truck. ‘I’m sorry if I forsook you,’ he said. ‘I needed to pick these up, and I didn’t want to wake you.’

I drew up a deckchair in a sunny spot, closed my eyes, and indulged in a little day-dreaming. I wasn’t about to abandon my child. I wasn’t about to walk out on my marriage. Nevertheless, what if I did? What if I forgot about Mark and Chrissie, settled down in this ugly little house, became the third member of the Coetzee family, the adjunct, Snow White to the two dwarves, doing the cooking, the cleaning, the laundering, maybe even helping with roof repairs? How long before my wounds healed? And then how long before my true prince rode by, the prince of my dreams, who would recognize me for who I was, lift me onto his white stallion, and bear me off into the sunset?

Because John Coetzee was not my prince. Finally I come to the point. If that was the question at the back of your mind when you came to Kingston — Is this going to be another of those women who mistook John Coetzee for their secret prince? — then you have your answer now. John was not my prince. Not only that: if you have been listening carefully you will have understood by now how very unlikely it was that he could have been a prince, a satisfactory prince, to any maiden on earth.

You don’t agree? You think otherwise? You think the fault lay with me, not with him — the fault, the deficiency? Well, cast your mind back to the books he wrote. What is the one theme that keeps recurring from book to book? It is that the woman doesn’t fall in love with the man. The man may or may not love the woman; but the woman never loves the man. What do you think that theme reflects? My guess, my highly informed guess, is that it reflects his life experience. Women didn’t fall for him — not women in their right senses. They inspected him, they sniffed him, maybe they even tried him out. Then they moved on.

They moved on as I did. I could have remained in Tokai, as I said, in the Snow White role. As an idea it was not without its seductions. But in the end I did not. John was a friend to me during a rough patch in my life, he was a crutch I sometimes leant on, but he was never going to be my lover, not in the real sense of the word. For real love you need two full human beings, and the two need to fit together, to fit into each other. Like Yin and Yang. Like an electrical plug and an electrical socket. Like male and female. He and I didn’t fit.