John Coetzee - Scenes from Provincial Life

They circle past the farm-workers’ quarters, keeping a decent distance. Through the dark the coals of a cooking-fire glow in fierce points of red.

‘How long will you be staying?’ she asks. ‘Will you still be here for New Year’s Day?’ Nuwejaar : for the volk, the people, a red letter day, quite overshadowing Christmas.

‘No, I can’t stay so long. I have things to attend to in Cape Town.’

‘Then why don’t you leave your father behind and come back later to fetch him? Give him time to relax and build up his strength. He doesn’t look well.’

‘He won’t stay behind. My father has a restless nature. Wherever he happens to be, he wants to be somewhere else. The older he grows, the worse it gets. It’s like an itch. He can’t keep still. Besides, he has his job to get back to. He takes his job very seriously.’

The farmhouse is quiet. They slip in through the back door. ‘Goodnight,’ she says, ‘sleep tight.’

In her room she hurries to get into bed. She would like to be asleep by the time her sister and brother-in-law come indoors, or at least to be able to pretend she is asleep. She is not keen to be interrogated on what passed during her ramble with John. Given half a chance, Carol will prise the story out of her. I was in love with you when I was six; you set the pattern of my love for other women. What a thing to say! Indeed, what a compliment! But what of herself? What was going on in her six-year-old heart when all that premature passion was going on in his? She consented to marry him, certainly, but did she accept that they were in love? If so, she has no recollection of it. And what of now — what does she feel for him now? His declaration has certainly made her heart glow. What an odd character, this cousin of hers! His oddness does not come from the Coetzee side, that she is sure of, she is after all half Coetzee herself, so it must come from his mother’s, from the Meyers or whatever the name was, the Meyers from the Eastern Cape. Meyer or Meier or Meiring.

Then she is asleep.

‘He is stuck up,’ says Carol. ‘He thinks too much of himself. He can’t bear to lower himself to talk to ordinary people. When he isn’t messing around with his car he is sitting in a corner with a book. And why doesn’t he get a haircut? Every time I lay eyes on him I want to slap a pudding-bowl over his head and snip off those hideous greasy locks of his.’

‘His hair isn’t greasy,’ she protests, ‘it’s just too long. I think he washes it with hand soap. That’s why it is all over the place. And he is shy, not stuck up. That’s why he keeps to himself. Give him a chance, he’s an interesting person.’

‘He is flirting with you. Anyone can see it. And you are flirting back. You, his cousin! You should be ashamed of yourself. Why isn’t he married? Is he homosexual, do you think? Is he a moffie ?’

She never knows whether Carol means what she says or is simply out to provoke her. Even here on the farm Carol goes about in modish white slacks and low-cut blouses, high-heeled sandals, heavy bracelets. She buys her clothes in Frankfurt, she says, on business trips with her husband. She certainly makes the rest of them look very dowdy, very staid, very country-cousin. She and Klaus live in Sandton in a twelve-room mansion owned by Anglo-American, for which they pay no rent, with stables and polo-ponies and a groom, though neither of them knows how to ride. They have no children yet; they will have children, Carol informs her, when they are properly settled. Properly settled means settled in America.

In the Sandton set in which she and Klaus move, Carol once confided, quite advanced things go on. She did not spell out what these advanced things might be, and she, Margot, did not want to ask, but they seemed to have to do with sex.

I won’t let you write that. You can’t write that about Carol.

It’s what you told me.

Yes, but you can’t write down every word I say and broadcast it to the world. I never agreed to that. Carol will never speak to me again.

All right, I’ll cut it out or tone it down, I promise. Just hear me to the end. Can I go on?

Go on.

Carol has broken completely from her roots. She bears no resemblance to the plattelandse meisie, the country girl, she once used to be. She looks, if anything, German, with her bronzed skin and coiffeured blonde hair and emphatic eyeliner. Stately, big-busted, and barely thirty. Frau Dr Müller. If Frau Dr Müller decided to flirt in the Sandton manner with cousin John, how long would it be before cousin John succumbed? Love means being able to open your heart to the beloved, says John. What would Carol say to that? About love Carol could teach her cousin a thing or two, she is sure — at least about love in its more advanced version.

John is not a moffie : she knows enough about men to know that. But there is something cool or cold about him, something that if not neuter is at least neutral, as a young child is neutral in matters of sex. There must have been women in his life, if not in South Africa then in America, though he has said not a word about them. Did his American women get to see his heart? If he makes a practice of it, of opening his heart, then he is unusual: men, in her experience, find nothing harder.

She herself has been married for ten years. Ten years ago she said goodbye to Carnarvon, where she had a job as a secretary in a lawyer’s office, and moved to her bridegroom’s farm east of Middelpos in the Roggeveld where, if she is lucky, if God smiles on her, she will live out the rest of her days.

The farm is home to the two of them, home and Heim , but she cannot be at home as much as she wishes. There is no money in sheep-farming any more, not in the barren, drought-ridden Roggeveld. To help make ends meet she has had to go back to work, as a bookkeeper this time, at the one hotel in Calvinia. Four nights of the week, Monday through Thursday, she spends at the hotel; on Fridays her husband drives in from the farm to fetch her, delivering her back in Calvinia at the crack of dawn the next Monday.

Despite this weekly separation — it makes her heart ache, she hates her dreary hotel room, sometimes she cannot hold back her tears, but lays her head on her arms and sobs — she and Lukas have what she would call a happy marriage. More than happy: fortunate, blessed. A good husband, a happy marriage, but no children. Not by design but by fate: her fate, her fault. Of the two sisters, one barren, the other not yet settled .

A good husband but close with his feelings. Is a guarded heart an affliction of men in general or just of South African men? Are Germans — Carol’s husband, for instance — any better? At this moment Klaus is seated on the stoep with the troop of Coetzee kinsfolk he has acquired by marriage, smoking a cheroot (he freely offers his cheroots around, but his rookgoed is too strange, too foreign for the Coetzees), regaling them in his loud baby-Afrikaans, of which he is not in the slightest ashamed, with stories of the times he and Carol have gone skiing in Zermatt. Does Klaus, in the privacy of their Sandton home, open up his heart to Carol once in a while in his slick, easy, confident European manner? She doubts it. She doubts that Klaus has much of a heart to show. She has seen little evidence of one. Whereas of the Coetzees it can at least be said that they have hearts, to a man and to a woman. Too much heart, in fact, sometimes, some of them.

‘No, he’s not a moffie ,’ she says. ‘Talk to him and you will see for yourself.’

‘WOULD YOU LIKE TO go for a drive this afternoon?’ John offers. ‘We could do a grand tour of the farm, just you and I.’

‘In what?’ she says. ‘In your Datsun?’