Patrick Flanery - Absolution

Throughout lunch, Ilse raged about the repressive new laws imposed on the country and spoke hopefully about the return of opposition figures from abroad, come home to liberate with jewels of fire. Afraid someone might be listening, you looked around the café, monitoring reactions, comings and goings, whilst Ilse spoke, her small body generating so much anger it was like suffering an assault just sitting across from her.

‘It’s a reasonably safe place,’ she said, noticing your unease, ‘and the owner is a fellow traveller of sorts.’

‘You should be careful in any case.’

‘Careful people don’t make things happen. Until people like us — like our parents and cousins — begin to feel directly threatened, then nothing will change.’ She groaned and put her head in her hands, always dramatic. It was the kind of explosive passion that your father found irresistible, a quality I could never offer. ‘I must apologize,’ she said, looking up at you through her dark fringe of hair, ‘it’s unfair of me to assume that you would necessarily agree with my opinions. But I know where Bill’s sympathies lie, so I imagined that you—’

‘No,’ you assured her, taking her hand across the table, shaking it as if in compact, ‘you’re exactly right. I agree with you completely.’

She smiled, folding your hand between both of hers. ‘I knew it. I’m so pleased. You must meet Peter. We’ve been looking for someone like you.’

You were flattered by this opening, but felt you could not trust her. Perhaps you were right: she had been your father’s lover, had forced herself into his arms when you were still a child, knowing that he had a family. She had been to the house, met the wife and children, and still she seduced him, aware of the harm it might do.

‘I would like that very much,’ you said, almost flirting with her. You decided that day to accept whatever invitation was extended, to infiltrate yourself into her life, finding a way to return the sting of her transgression.

*

I have told Adam to come later today so that I may enjoy my swim in private, watching the early morning light penetrate the dark teardrop blossoms of the agapanthus on one side of the white gravel path that bisects the most formal beds, and on the other side catching the dew that rests on the fireball lilies. I realize with horror that the previous owners arranged this planting to suggest the old South African flag, stripes of blue, white, and orange. I make a mental note to have Adam pull out the lilies; I have never liked those poisonous hot colours anyway.

When Adam arrives I go inside and spend the morning reviewing a transcript from one of my interviews with Sam, who now writes to me as if I were something like a lover, or if not a lover, then the mother he wishes he’d had. It pricks my conscience but I cannot yet bring myself to give him more than I have already.

After lunch, I return to your words, Laura, feeling with each page that, rather than bringing you closer to me, far from leading me to the truth of your destiny, your notebooks only push you further from my sense of who you were. With each line I know you less and less, to the point that I begin to think you are not even yourself, not in this notebook, not in the way you are in the final volume, the one where, even when you confound my expectations, I can see the humanity of your choices, or if not that then your rationalization of those choices, the ways you saw that they might yet be humane. But in this book, in these pages, you are nothing but cold intention, a young woman of focussed determination, doing only what you wish to do, what you have decided or been directed to do. What I cannot discern is the precise nature of that desire.

On their suggestion you arranged to meet Ilse and Peter at a tavern in Observatory — it meant that after coming home from the office on Friday you could park and walk less than a minute up the street to find them, already at a table in a private corner, out of the flow of traffic, a place where the three of you might talk and not have to worry about being overheard.

Given Ilse’s exuberance and reckless pronouncements at lunch, it was a surprise to find Peter so controlled, conservative in his dress and demeanour — the kind of thirty-something graduate student who would have spent his entire school career at Bishops or SACS and gone directly to the University of Cape Town, before, say, winning a Rhodes Scholarship to read Politics at Oxford; in other words, he appeared on the surface to be a carbon copy of your brother or one of your brother’s friends. He was nothing at all like what he appeared. He’d never lived outside the country, and years after finishing his undergraduate degree and surviving national service he was only now about to begin work on a masters degree under the supervision of your father. You wondered to yourself what and how much Peter knew about Ilse and ‘Bill’, as she insisted on calling him. (He was never ‘Bill’ to me, not once in our life together, and the revelation of it in your notebook wounds me more than I could have expected. Foolishly, I assumed the old weapons had lost their power to maim.) I stagger across the line when I come to it: I know about Ilse and Dad. Does Mom? How could you not bring yourself to confide in me what you knew?

Despite yourself you liked both of them, finding they were easy company in the way that your other colleagues — mostly men, mostly older, hardened and hard-drinking, some risking their lives to cover stories the government did not want told — might never be, at least not with you, a young woman who had no right to look as striking as you did and yet remain so unreachable.

At first, politics was not on the agenda that evening and the three of you swapped life histories. Ilse had survived a cloistered girlhood in Graaff-Reinet with a doctor father who shot himself in the head one Sunday after church.

‘And your mother?’ you asked, curious to know as much as you could about them both — especially the woman who had so attracted your father.

‘Not so long after my father died she drank herself into a fatal car crash — drove off a cliff in the Valley of Desolation.’ You could see the high mound of rock and soil, the pinnacle outcroppings and the sheer drops to the unyielding floor of the Karoo.

After her mother’s accident Ilse moved to Cape Town where she and Peter met as students. They married just after graduation, to the disapproval of Peter’s banker father and housewife mother, who had both died in the past year — he of cancer, she of a heart attack.

‘So you’re orphans now,’ you said, ‘adult orphans.’ They looked at you as though the idea had never struck them before and was something that changed how they thought of themselves, both as individuals and as two people together in the world. And you, though younger than them by more than a decade, childless as you were and always would be, an orb to the grave, presented yourself as the mother they both sought.

It was clear, however, that this was a topic that disturbed Ilse. She did not want to talk about parents and children, least of all about loss.

‘Don’t you hate the Record ?’ she demanded, as Peter went to get another round of beers. ‘They won’t print a story about a stray cat if they think it might get them into trouble. And when they do cover the townships, which is almost never, they act as though they’re reporting from the darkest heart of the Congo.’

‘Then why do you work for them?’

‘The alternative papers don’t pay as well. I have a child, Peter’s at university again, what can you do? We have to make compromises. It won’t always be this way. Things will change. We’re going to make them change, aren’t we?’ She stared at you intently, unblinking, her gaze half-obscured by the lengths of dark hair that fell around her face.