Adrian must have given some consideration about where to go. He was a sensitive man who loved and appreciated women and had always chosen for a woman the kind of restaurant where she would feel and look her best, her sort of place, no matter how strange the occasion might be. When he began to be drawn with such finality to Lyndsay he had ended a dwindling love affair, outworn on both sides, over a meal in a restaurant that the woman favoured, and he had chosen for his first meal with Lyndsay the restaurant he felt he knew instinctively would be the setting for her to begin her place in his life, for life.
This young woman his son had chosen.
The restaurant was not one of those where family celebrations were held because they were familiar to the parents – good food and wine list to be counted on. It was in a suburb where white civil servants, mainly Afrikaners, had lived neatly around their Apostolic and Dutch Reformed churches, and had been deserted by them when after their regime had been defeated, black people had the right to move in as neighbours. Then it had become a place where all that had been clandestine, the mixing of blacks and whites, not necessarily the political activists who had won that freedom, was open. People in television, the theatre, advertising, journalists, and all the hangers-on of the arts and crafts, made it fashionable among themselves. An alternative to corporate chic, which they couldn't have afforded anyway. And in addition to rap and jazz bars and restaurants which gays or blacks favoured like clubs, vegetarians could find dishes to conform to different versions of their faith, mixed-race lovers were not something exotic confined to the new black upper class and their white partners patronising elegant enclaves of the old white rich. And there was something the corporate rich hadn't thought of as part of night life, a bookshop that stayed open very late.
Yes of course, this was one of the restaurants she'd been to customarily, with Agency pals and sometimes with Paul. The quarter was lively, scents of herb shops, marijuana, spicy cooking drifted into the streets along with wafts of music. Paul had found treasures of old books, scuffed and rat-nibbled early accounts of pre-white-settled terrain, river courses, and information on pre-industrial climate, in the bookshop's secondhand bins.
His father had chosen what he thought would be her kind of place. She wanted to respond to this wish to please, to divert – and – was it – console both the father and herself by breaking bread, drinking wine in a covenant of those invisible liens that must exist, unthought-of, unrecognised in the Christmas pecks on the cheek, between the one who generated, from his body, the son, and the one who receives the son in hers. Presence of death standing by makes a sacrament of tenuous relationships. They talked quite animatedly. He smilingly half-confessed his choice of the restaurant. – Thank you for the pretext that's brought us here! Never tried Melville before. I don't know about Lyn, she might have, with some young legal colleague. I think she'd like it anyway, we must come and have a meal. What good and imaginative food. -
He was interested in the ethics of advertising, how did the industry expect to make up, for instance, for the loss of exposure it could offer now that beer promotion for the huge sports-events market was banned by the government: this must be a headache for the agencies? He was not afraid, either, of bringing up matters which assumed, as present, opinions of the quarantined. What kind of school did she and his son think of for their son, only a baby still, but he supposes a changed country both made a 'normal' education possible as it never was under segregation when Paul was a child, and raised new questions of choice, nevertheless. No segregation, black and white; but boys' school or co-ed?
The pleasant warmth of people her own age and kind around her, the food and wine to her taste; it was the element lapping about someone other than herself, as she talked, she contributed to an exchange with the well-informed and attentive man opposite her – the son closely resembled the mother, this man could be taken without any other recognition, for himself, and whatever hidden self might be. She heard her own voice speak, a professional facility. She ate without distinguishing one flavour or consistency from another. The wine stirred someone else's blood, not hers. She, so naturally sociable, called to in greeting of lifted glasses from other tables, where fellow habitués happened to be, endured in desperation – surrounded by – the alien presence that was other people.
In her call next morning she was telling the son what a good time she had.
Why? So that he wouldn't worry about her. So that he wouldn't be saddened by the thought that she could enjoy herself without him? Perhaps forever. Her own behaviour most of the time is an enigma to her. Had she ever found the atmosphere in that place her native element; yet this must have been evident in her, else why would a man like his father – no, Adrian, a man revealed as one of sensibility – have known it would be the place to take her to outside the anonymity of past family treats.
Paul. Often silent, when they were there partying with her colleagues? Just thoughtfully listening or, she would think, his head full of those vast contradictory factors in his beloved wilderness just left. Paul with her and not present. Cosmic problems. Another 'why'; why must her man take on the survival of the whole bloody world, and now himself a threatened species.
Calls cut off more than the telephonic connection through wires glittering in the air, cabled underground, bounced from satellites, when the receiver goes silent and is put down.
How's today? You up and about… I'll fetch you at ten-thirty tomorrow, time enough, don't you think, traffic's not heavy then. Lyndsay. The event is the occasion of tests at a laboratory.
I'm furious, as you can hear, darling – some bloody client's complaining about a TV slot, the handsome guy lounging on the new state-of-the-art sports car looks too much like a queen, I have to meet our offended corporate late this afternoon. But I'll come early before I go to work tomorrow. Berenice/Benni. We'll be with the early birds in the garden.
There is even a call on a mobile from Derek who is driving back to the city from reconnaissance of the proposed pebble-bed nuclear site. His findings so far are a bit too complex to go into on the phone while driving, he'll rough out a report and get it over to Benni. Derek does not want to risk breaching the quarantine in any way, does not really trust proximity in the fresh air of No-Man's-Land. And this is all right, quite understood, Derek has kids, you know. The mobile doesn't wait for the conclusion of Derek's apologies, cuts off into the ether between one syllable and the next.
The disappearances of these disembodied callers leave the room a vacuum at the same time filling up with the overwhelming furtive sounds, even when inert stretched on the bed or standing there, in the middle of staring emptiness, of himself: the breathing, fingers stirring in the current of blood as hands hang from wrists, odour of himself distilled by days and nights here undiluted by contact with the bodies, with the essence of others. Lyndsay is quickly in and out as she makes the bed. The old dog the parents think of as at least some sort of companion has come in only once, twitched its flared nose along the hospital hold-all which it rejected on the day of arrival, turned from it again.
Go out and play.
For the first few moments there, eyelids alternately squeezing and lifting wide at the immersion in that benign illumination, of the sun, birds who ring out like mobile phones. But there is no connection to be made between wild creatures, even the half-domesticated frequenters of the suburbs feeding on cultivated flowers, lawn worms, compost bugs, and the summons of technology. Telephone ring. In the bush in the forest among the dunes the mangroves the swamps, the creatures ignore you. Devices that regulate your being have nothing to do with theirs – unless they are hunted, expelled from their places in the universe – yes, air habitat as well as land – by logging, burning off, urban, industrial and rural pollution. Radiant nuclear fallout.