J. Coetzee - Disgrace

Ample is a kind word for Lucy. Soon she will be positively heavy. Letting herself go, as happens when one withdraws from the field of love. Qu'est devenu ce front poli, ces cheveux blonds, sourcils voхtйs?

Supper is simple: soup and bread, then sweet potatoes. Usually he does not like sweet potatoes, but Lucy does something with lemon peel and butter and allspice that makes them palatable, more than palatable.

'Will you be staying a while?' she asks.

'A week? Shall we say a week? Will you be able to bear me that long?'

'You can stay as long as you like. I'm just afraid you'll get bored.'

'I won't be bored.'

'And after the week, where will you go?'

'I don't know yet. Perhaps I'll just go on a ramble, a long ramble.'

'Well, you're welcome to stay.'

'It's nice of you to say so, my dear, but I'd like to keep your friendship. Long visits don't make for good friends.'

`What if we don't call it a visit? What if we call it refuge? Would you accept refuge on an indefinite basis?'

'You mean asylum? It's not as bad as that, Lucy. I'm not a fugitive.'

'Roz said the atmosphere was nasty.'

'I brought it on myself. I was offered a compromise, which I wouldn't accept.'

'What kind of compromise?'

'Re-education. Reformation of the character. The code-word was counselling.'

'And are you so perfect that you can't do with a little counselling?'

'It reminds me too much of Mao's China. Recantation, self-criticism, public apology. I'm old-fashioned, I would prefer simply to be put against a wall and shot. Have done with it.'

`Shot? For having an affair with a student? A bit extreme, don't you think, David? It must go on all the time. It certainly went on when I was a student. If they prosecuted every case the profession would be decimated.'

He shrugs. 'These are puritanical times. Private life is public business. Prurience is respectable, prurience and sentiment. They wanted a spectacle: breast-beating, remorse, tears if possible. A TV show, in fact. I wouldn't oblige.'

He was going to add, The truth is, they wanted me castrated,' but he cannot say the words, not to his daughter. In fact, now that he hears it through another's ears, his whole tirade sounds melodramatic, excessive.

'So you stood your ground and they stood theirs. Is that how it was?'

'More or less.'

'You shouldn't be so unbending, David. It isn't heroic to be unbending. Is there still time to reconsider?'

'No, the sentence is final.'

'No appeal?'

'No appeal. I am not complaining. One can't plead guilty to charges of turpitude and expect a flood of sympathy in return. Not after a certain age. After a certain age one is simply no longer appealing, and that's that. One just has to buckle down and live out the rest of one's life. Serve one's time.'

'Well, that's a pity. Stay here as long as you like. On whatever grounds.'

He goes to bed early. In the middle of the night he is woken by a flurry of barking. One dog mechanically, without cease; the loth to admit defeat, join in again.

'Does that go on every night?'

'One gets used to it. I'm sorry.'

He shakes his head.

EIGHT

HE HAS FORGOTTEN how cold winter mornings can be in the uplands of the Eastern Cape. He has not brought the right clothes: he has to borrow a sweater from Lucy.

Hands in pockets, he wanders among the flowerbeds. Out of sight on the Kenton road a car roars past, the sound lingering on the still air. Geese fly in echelon high overhead. What is he going to do with his time?

'Would you like to go for a walk?' says Lucy behind him.

They take three of the dogs along: two young Dobermanns, whom Lucy keeps on a leash, and the bulldog bitch, the abandoned one.

Pinning her ears back, the bitch tries to defecate. Nothing comes.

'She is having problems,' says Lucy. 'I'll have to dose her.'

The bitch continues to strain, hanging her tongue out, glancing around shiftily as if ashamed to be watched.

They leave the road, walk through scrubland, then through sparse pine forest.

'The girl you were involved with,' says Lucy - 'was it serious?'

'Didn't Rosalind tell you the story?'

'Not in any detail.'

'She came from this part of the world. From George. She was in one of my classes. Only middling as a student, but very attractive. Was it serious? I don't know. It certainly had serious consequences.'

'But it's over with now? You're not still hankering after her?' Is it over with? Does he hanker yet? 'Our contact has ceased,' he says.

'Why did she denounce you?'

'She didn't say; I didn't have a chance to ask. She was in a difficult position. There was a young man, a lover or ex-lover, bullying her. There were the strains of the classroom. And then her parents got to hear and descended on Cape Town. The pressure became too much, I suppose.'

'And there was you.'

'Yes, there was me. I don't suppose I was easy.'

They have arrived at a gate with a sign that says 'SAPPI Industries - Trespassers will be Prosecuted'. They turn.

'Well,' says Lucy, 'you have paid your price. Perhaps, looking back, she won't think too harshly of you. Women can be surprisingly forgiving.'

There is silence. Is Lucy, his child, presuming to tell him about women?

'Have you thought of getting married again?' asks Lucy.

'To someone of my own generation, do you mean? I wasn't made for marriage, Lucy. You have seen that for yourself '

'Yes. But - '

'But what? But it is unseemly to go on preying on children?'

'I didn't mean that. Just that you are going to find it more difficult, not easier, as time passes.'

Never before have he and Lucy spoken about his intimate life. It is not proving easy. But if not to her, then to whom can he speak?

'Do you remember Blake?' he says. 'Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires'?

'Why do you quote that to me?'

'Unacted desires can turn as ugly in the old as in the young.' Therefore?'

'Every woman I have been close to has taught me something about myself. To that extent they have made me a better person.'

'I hope you are not claiming the reverse as well. That knowing you has turned your women into better people.'

He looks at her sharply. She smiles. 'Just joking,' she says.

They return along the tar road. At the turnoff to the smallholding there is a painted sign he has not noticed before: 'CUT FLOWERS. CYCADS,' with an arrow:

'Cycads?' he says. 'I thought cycads were illegal.'

'It's illegal to dig them up in the wild. I grow them from seed. I'll show you.'

They walk on, the young dogs tugging to be free, the bitch padding behind, panting.

'And you? Is this what you want in life?' He waves a hand toward the garden, toward the house with sunlight glinting from its roof.

'It will do,' replies Lucy quietly.

It is Saturday, market day. Lucy wakes him at five, as arranged, with coffee. Swaddled against the cold, they join Petrus in the garden, where by the light of a halogen lamp he is already cutting flowers. He offers to take over from Petrus, but his fingers are soon so cold that he cannot tie the bunches. He passes the twine back to Petrus and instead wraps and packs.

By seven, with dawn touching the hills and the dogs beginning to stir, the job is done. The kombi is loaded with boxes of flowers, pockets of potatoes, onions, cabbage. Lucy drives, Petrus stays behind. The heater does not work; peering through the mistedwindscreen, she takes the Grahamstown road. He sits beside her, eating the sandwiches she has made. His nose drips; he hopes she does not notice. So: a new adventure. His daughter, whom once upon a time he used to drive to school and ballet class, to the circus and the skating rink, is taking him on an outing, showing him life, showing him this other, unfamiliar world.