Patrick Flanery - Absolution

Whether or not Clare suffered a robbery or house invasion I do not know — she has never spoken of one to me. In counterpoint to the book’s narrative of recent trauma and upheaval, there are long discursions about her ancestors, their migration from England to South Africa in the 1820s, and the economic histories of the family, all rendered in a distant third-person voice. The balance between the two — the sometimes surreal narrative of trauma, and the rather dry historiography of family and childhood — does not seem like fiction per se. Clare tells me in a covering note that it’s as close to a memoir as anything she’ll ever write, but it isn’t presented as one and at the same time I can’t quite see how it operates as fiction. Or maybe the real question I should be asking is: what does calling it fiction allow Clare to do?

The real shock is Clare’s discussion of her sister, Nora. This is what she was getting at all along, I think — the question she expected me to ask at our last meeting in Cape Town, the trail she thought I’d caught! It is tempting to read the book as nothing more than the occasion for an elaborate confession of her complicity in a capital crime, namely that she carelessly provided information that led to the assassination of her sister and brother-in-law. The turn towards history might be construed as a way of placing her actions in a larger context, if not an actual defence or apology for what she did: look at where I came from to understand what I did, what I had to do. History deceives, she seems to be saying, it makes us vain. Of course, categorizing the book as fiction allows her to dodge any legal question of her responsibility for those deaths if it were ever to be put to her. This is a novel , she could say, a version of me that bears only passing resemblance to the historical me. Do not confuse that person, the individual speaking to you now, with the person on the page. Many people wanted to kill my brother-in-law. I had no part to play . On the copyright page is a disclaimer: Any resemblance to real people, living or dead, is entirely coincidental, including those characters that share the same names as my son, Mark Wald, my assistant, Marie de Wet, and my ex-husband, William Wald. I use those names with the permission of the historical subjects to whom they are attached .

I write a note thanking Clare for the book and flattering her style at the same time that I remain a little confused; the ‘house invasion’, which is of considerable importance at the beginning of the book, is never resolved. But there is also fatigue in its pages, beneath which courses a puzzled anger at the way the world has turned out — more specifically at what our country has become after all the initial hope, the expectation of a society that would transform itself by a collective force of goodwill and selfless love into a model for the way the world might yet be. Instead, Clare seems to say, the country has shown itself to be a cruel microcosm for the way the world really is, the war of all against all, red in tooth and claw, a waking nightmare of exploitation and corruption and hideous beauty that appears doomed never to end or to end in only one possible way. One could be forgiven for reading the book as a particular kind of Afro-pessimism, although I suspect this is not her intention.

But I say none of this in my response and tell her I look forward to seeing her in Stellenbosch in May, and to continuing our conversation. In fact, I don’t need to conduct further interviews. As for the stray lingering question, the occasional need for some local clarification, it could all be done from here, over the phone or by e-mail. The truth is that I long to see her. Searching for her in the text, I flip through the book again, and suddenly see the formal dedication I missed the first time, the pages stuck together:

For my children — those I kept close, and those I denied .

I feel my throat tighten and surge into my mouth, acid rising. Perhaps, I think, she remembers me after all.

As Mark stared at his mother’s reflection in the window, Clare knew that if she stopped before the picture was clear the unresolved story would forever be rumbling around between them, causing trouble. She tore at her piece of bread and then, finding she still had no appetite, put it down on the plate.

‘You were the perfect baby. You almost never cried or fussed. You smiled and laughed and had the biggest eyes of any child I’d ever seen, as though you were desperate to take in everything around you. I thought you were going to be a scientist, because you seemed to have such a natural capacity for observation. That was before we knew you were so short-sighted.’ Before that, she thought, and before they knew about the other problems, the heart murmur that she had always refused to call a defect, the severe asthma that appeared in adolescence — problems that had been blessings of a sort.

Mark grinned in a way that reminded Clare of William, charming and persuasive, and put his fingers to the frames of his glasses. ‘The law is a good antidote, my own pair of binoculars.’

Clare wondered if he knew how little one could see through binoculars — detail of one small object at a distance, but nothing around it or in between: the thing but not the context for the thing.

‘As a baby you looked as though you’d been minted by the gods, or sent from Hollywood central casting. If there were ever a born hero, you appeared to be he.’

‘You’re saying Nora was jealous.’

‘From the earliest days of her marriage she had tried to get herself pregnant. Eventually they did tests and nothing, she confided to my mother, was found to be wrong with her, which meant the problem was with Stephan — which meant, in those days, no option but childlessness or adoption. And Stephan was wholly against adoption. He said there was no way of knowing what might be lurking in the genes of a stranger’s baby. He feared a racial throwback that would only display the telltale characteristics later in life. So imagine when your aunt’s hated baby sister produced this divine-looking infant! It was the slap Nora had been bracing herself against since the day of Dorothy’s birthday party. It signalled the beginning of total war between us, though for me it felt as if nothing had changed. I had always known that she regarded me as an adversary at best, if not something much less benign. For some, it is possible to be the object of hatred and continue responding with love, or if not with love then at least with indifference. And then there are people like me,’ Clare said, resting her head on one hand. ‘I did not want to hate my sister, truly I didn’t. I wanted to be more virtuous than her, more loving. But I was not good enough. Her hatred fostered my hatred. I lacked the moral maturity to answer evil with love, to be selfless in the best possible way.’

‘You say it was the start of a war, but I can’t imagine what you mean,’ Mark said, turning to look directly at his mother once again. ‘The thing at Dorothy’s party, the cake, I understand how that could affect your relationship as children. But as adults, she must have done something terrible for you to talk about her like this. I didn’t have any idea you hated her.’

‘This, again, is where you fit in, or not just fit, but are the keystone of the whole architecture of what I perceived — for admittedly it is my subjective view — as her plot against me. Do not scoff. Remarkable a child as you might have been, you were not old enough to be aware, certainly not to have any memory of those days. Within a month of your birth Nora was driving into town and dropping by the house on Canigou Avenue completely unannounced, at all hours, accompanied by the driver she and Stephan employed. Often she brought a camera and insisted on taking pictures of you, her “darlingest” as she put it — not her “darlingest nephew”, but “ her darlingest” — as if you belonged to her and not to me. At first I was confused, surprised but also hopeful, imagining that she might let go of the old animosities and take a positive role in our lives. I was hopeful, too, that her sudden interest in you might signal a diminishing involvement in the politics of Stephan and his party. If she could drift so far from where she had begun, I thought, there was no telling what might yet become of me. We do not, as young people, know that drift and realignment are not always to be feared. Nora, however, had drifted blindly, putting herself to sea quite happy to embrace whatever port she arrived in first.’