Three days before the date of his delayed arrival – she had saved and stacked in his retreat newspapers and journals of particular interest that he'd missed – she came with another letter. Paul was at home with Nickie, his opponent in some electronic game. After a few minutes as spectator she oddly asked her son if she could be alone with him. She spoke as if she could not believe what she heard herself saying. But the strangeness couldn't be questioned; an emanation, this time from her. He bribed the child to go to the care of the nanny (politically-correct: child-minder). The boy loved the woman, a cousin supplied by Primrose, and, without being aware of it, was learning to speak Setswana with her; a new generation that might produce white multi-linguists, if not quite up to the level of Thapelo. The father grinned with pleasure, each time, to hear the little boy's few words.
Paul first stood a moment in front of his mother; then sat down not beside her, but in a chair, not far apart.
If anybody could have understood, it should have been she.
But when she unfolded the flimsy pages of handwriting as definitive as the features of the – Adrian's – face familiar to her as her own encountered in a mirror – ready for another account of the pleasures of his ancient discoveries, she did not understand what she was reading. She actually moved away the hand that was holding the letter, a moment, and then read again the first paragraphs. He wanted to be direct and honest with her, as he'd always been. Anything else would not be worth the value of their life together. Long life, including the indescribable recent experience in the house with their son. Long throughout her so deservedly successful career, his pride in it that would never change, and long through his working years to his retirement.
He found himself in love with the Norwegian girl. Woman really, she was nearly thirty-five. 'I am sixty-five. I had never imagined this could happen, not alone to me but to anyone this age, I'm a grandfather, for God's sake, I know, my working life is over. How can this begin again. I know you won't be able to believe it. I can't. But darling Lyn, it is. It's happened to Hilde and me. Thirty years between us. She was divorced from an Argentinian living in Mexico some years back, she's never had a child. And now she loves an old man who is somebody else's husband. I can't tell you how awful she feels about you, she liked you so much, we all got on well. So nobody wanted this to happen but it has, it has.
'We've suddenly been having what should be, I suppose, an affair. Holiday affair. I know, I know, old man's last fling. It seems I don't have flings; I fell in love with you and that was all I needed. For a lifetime as one has a life's work. Now I love this woman and can't deny it.
'What will happen I don't know. Although that's not the truth, I do know that I'm going to stay here in Mexico, with her, for the present.
'What's going to happen to us – you'll be asking as you read. I don't know. Only that I can't go on living in this state, behind your back, out of sight in Mexico. Of all places. It's had to happen in Mexico, where I've been able to follow the dream of anyone interested in archaeology to get to sites you've only read about. Through my bringing up the names of old aficionados, amateurs I've known, and some of the great discoverers like Tobias; and others, Wadley, Parkington and young Poggenpoel. I've even been able to spend a day sifting the dust on a current dig. Isn't that enough.
'It isn't. I can't lie.
'I can't say now, when I'll be coming back. To arrange things, whatever that may mean, for us to sit down and talk about this.
'No way to think of, to end the letter, for you.'
Just the signature, Adrian.
I thought you were going to tell me you were leaving.
He doesn't mention what else happened, what took away four years of the lifetime of loving me. He's not forgotten, ageing can't be as kind as that, he's wanting to make clear there is no claim of justification, never mind revenge, in what he's doing. Not true, for him or me or anyone, that this 'happens'; there is readiness for it and will, in entering it, the state, even though it is alienation while it is fulfilment. It doesn't 'happen' the way what happened to our son did. You have to have known disaster to know the difference.
You are telling me you are leaving me.
She had to go to someone, take this second letter to be verified in someone else's eyes, decoded independently. Not information – family news – to give over a call to Emma in Brazil. Or take to Jacqueline in her suburb north of the city, or the resort of boarding a plane and going to Susan. Although none of the adult children knows of the mother who was competent (not like Adrian's honest inability) to lie for four years, the only one she can approach is the one who came back in awful radiance to shelter in the childhood home. The shared knowledge of the unspeakable makes it possible to speak together of what is a banal disruption of intimate life. With this son it can be as if it were not the situation of his parents: a certain objectivity she can count on because of the remove, even from those who risked occupying the same house, at which he lived for a period. It's in her nature as a lawyer, what else is there to place trust in, if not objectivity; truth – that's a matter far beyond. The judge declares it while it exists – escaped.
Yet it will be difficult, full of silences, to talk even to this son while she knows about the four years she lost for herself and his father. So the lie is back in the present. Lying once begun never ends.
She hopes, again, to find him alone. Imagine the embarrassment – or sophisticated lack of it – of Benni. Elderly men fall for women who could be their daughters, every day, maybe (interesting?) it could be repressed incest having a late try. Female sympathy would be forthcoming, you know how men are, while it's always been evident Benni can have no such complaint against hers, handsome and unusual a man as he must seem to other women.
One cannot be sure Benni/Berenice won't be there. She thought of calling. Might gather indirectly whether he was likely to be alone. He was back from one of his research assignments. She had learnt, when she took the couple to try with her a new Indian restaurant the week before, that he was having consultations about how best to take advantage of the extended deadline for objection to the Pondoland toll highway. He responded to her enquiry about how consultations were going and then mentioned he and Nicholas were a couple of bachelors, Benni away launching a wine festival at the Cape.
Could she come round? Of course. What about tomorrow, supper. But he at once acceded when she said couldn't it be today, this evening. He thought he should ask, are you all right – something must be bothering her. I'm all right. They were not two people who needed to or would press further on the tightrope of a telephone wire.
His mother put her palm over her mouth.
He waited for her – apparently to recover herself. It's an ambiguous gesture, it can hide laughter, shock, many conditions incapable of being conveyed. Embarrassment. But she was not embarrassed. Too many simple intimacies brought about by the incapacities of illness had existed between them for either to be embarrassed by anything, since.
– This has come from Adrian. -
He took the letter. Almost to himself, frowning in reproach – He hasn't gone and fallen down in one of his digs… -
She did not allow herself to look at the son's face as he read, slowly turning the two pages, and turning back to the first, as she had, to read again. If she has her habits of careful comprehension as a lawyer, as a student of scientific data in relation to experience on the ground he has his instinctive discipline of reassessing what are presented as the facts.