Double Negative (11 page)

‘As it comes.'

‘Milk, one sugar?'

‘Fine.'

She vanished through a doorway. When I heard the water running, I went and looked through the velvet curtains. A garden had been left to grow wild there. The grass was so high that a table top appeared to be floating on it like a raft. Shrubbery frothed up on one side, a hedge of unpruned ivy was piled in thunderheads on the other. As I looked out, a ripple passed through the leafy pelt as if the garden had sensed my presence and shuddered. I thought I saw little houses in the foam, things that had been swept away in a flood, adrift but miraculously intact.

In the kitchen, cups rattled into saucers. Letting the curtain fall, I went and waited on the island. She came in drying her hands on a dishcloth and gave the room the once-over like a stage manager checking that the props are all in place. She had put on a pair of school shoes with thick rubber soles, and although they added an inch to her height they made her look smaller.

‘Please sit,' she said from the doorway.

I sat at one end of the
pew.

‘History,' she said, pressing her palms together and raising them towards the ceiling. ‘I suppose it keeps you busy. There's always something happening, isn't there.'

‘It's one thing after another.'

‘Good things, bad things.'

‘Naturally.'

‘What do you focus
on?'

‘We historians look at things from all sides. It isn't important if the glass is half-full or half-empty, what matters is how it got that
way.'

‘You don't have a speciality?'

‘No.'

She seemed satisfied with that. She looked at the toe of her shoe. I puzzled over the meaning of the hand gesture. Was it an expression of gratitude?

‘Except for boxing,' she
said.

‘Well, yes, you could say
so.'

‘What's boxing got to do with
it?'

While I was trying to find an answer, the kettle whistled and she went back to the kitchen.

Dr Pinheiro. He seemed to be in quarantine. Something about that tight-lipped door said that it was closed on a sickroom. What was the matter with him? A disease of the mind, I imagined, or a sleeping sickness. I could feel the air pressing against the door, dream-stained, thick with make-believe, while he lay on his back on a camp bed with his striped pyjamas open to the waist, his hairy belly heaving, his nose sticking up like a skeg. Sweat ran down off his bald head. A tendril of vine reached in under the sash and groped for his pulse in the gloom.

Camilla came back with a tray. The teapot was in a knitted cosy shaped like a brooding
hen.

‘Dr Pinheiro …' I began, but she hushed me with a fluttered
palm.

‘We'll get to him later. I want to hear more about your boxer.'

She set the tray down on the table under the window, poured tea into two cups and offered me a shortbread finger from a plate in the shape of a vineleaf. Then she sat behind the table like a schoolteacher in front of the class.

At first, I did most of the talking. Bits and pieces of Rosco Dunn, cobbled together from boxing films and the sports pages, more or less convincingly rendered, and then scenes from my schooldays, less so. I told a story about being bullied that I'd heard from a drunken business journalist in the Ship one evening and connected that to the appeal of biography. Why I had become an historian, why Rosco had become a boxer. Stratagems banged around the truth like moths around an oil lamp. The whole exercise was soothing.

She refilled the teacups and began to speak. She told me how she had always wanted to travel, but never had the means. There were things she hoped to see before she died: the pyramids, the Edinburgh Tattoo, the Bridge of Sighs, the rainforests of the Amazon, the Panama Canal. She and Dr Pinheiro had marked their ports of call in an atlas with a dotted line that plunged off the edge of the Pacific near the Cook Islands, passed through many zones of darkness, and returned to the navigable world in the coastal waters of Fiji. Their Grand Tour! I gathered from the way she said ‘Doctor Pinheiro', giving both elements equal emphasis, that he was the main author of their plans. Perhaps his illness had scuppered everything? I asked questions about the itinerary and made some comments about Cheops and Champollion to demonstrate my knowledge of history, but these interruptions made her impatient. She no longer needed me to speak, it was enough that I listen.

‘Hercules van der Westhuizen,' she said, ‘now there's a saga. Walking around in the same pair of shoes for more than fifty years! He bought them at a store in Oudtshoorn in 1937, he's worn them at least once a week ever since, and they've never been resoled. He says they've lasted so long because he polishes them after every outing, paying special attention to the seams.'

She paused and gazed at me unevenly. Did she expect me to tell a story in turn? I racked my brain, riffling through the Black Magic box of my memory, but nothing came to
me.

‘You know your sport,' she continued. ‘Who is the greatest driver this country ever
saw?'

Again nothing came. Should I mention my
dad?

‘Most people say Jody Scheckter, but I say Willie Nel! You can quote me on that. No man on earth ever drove further in one car in a single year. Between May 1989 and May 1990, he clocked nearly half a million kilometres on the freeways of the Transvaal in his Opel Monza. Up at three in the morning, on the road till late at night, six days a week. He couldn't have done it without his wife Rentia, who worked to pay for the petrol.'

It struck me that Willie Nel must have been driving
–
but where exactly?
–
when Nelson Mandela walked out of Victor Verster prison. I wanted to say something about this, to draw some meaningful parallels between Madiba's long walk and Willie's long drive, but as soon as I cleared my throat she patted me into silence and went
on.

‘Mrs Macfarlane of Edinburgh? No? She could teach this Hercules a thing or two about walking. She tramped from Land's End to John o' Groats in thirty-three days to raise money for brain research. What a story: she woke up one morning with a South African accent! Foreign accent syndrome is harder to deal with than aphasia, according to the experts, because the patient is regarded as a foreigner, and may even be treated like one by family and friends.'

I squirmed on the wooden chair. When I glanced at my watch, she took off her glasses and gave me a level look. Then she propped her elbows on the table, steepled her fingers and spoke more urgently, until the spit flew from her storytelling mouth. She spoke and spoke about driving and walking and talking in tongues. As hard as it had been to get into the house, it now seemed harder to get out again. Her voice changed and I lost the thread. After a while, I wasn't sure she was speaking English at all. I stopped trying to understand and simply followed the music.

The room faded to
grey.

At last, like a man in a dream who feels the weight of the whole world on his shoulders, I struggled to my feet, and she fell silent. ‘It's getting dark. If I don't take a photograph now, it will be too late.'

The car cheeped as if it were pleased to see me. With the tar tilting under my feet, I reeled across Fourth Avenue and got in behind the wheel. The sheepskin was a comfort. In this scented interior, where everything was soft and yielding, I felt that I had survived a trial. A car came down the avenue and its headlights picked out the old woman in the doorway, as tattered as a shadow, but still looking out for me. I should drive away now, I thought, it's too late for pictures anyway.

I went back over and spoke to her from the gate. ‘We've lost the light,' I said. ‘But I would like to get some photographs for my book. Do you mind if I come back?'

‘Rosco Dunn! You've created a monster.'

We were sitting on the enclosed balcony of my mother's flat in Melrose. Usually, I saw her on Sunday afternoons, and we walked in the bird sanctuary or the botanical gardens and had tea under the trees, but in the hope of casting off the pall of my visit to Fourth Avenue I'd broken with routine and come to tell her about it. Her flat was as far from that airless Bez Valley lounge as you could get, its third-floor balcony a sunlit cabin caught in the crowns of plane trees. The old sofa from the house in Bramley was too big for the space, but we'd agreed not to replace it. What would a couple of leather armchairs set you back? The rubbish they advertised in the papers as if it came from Italy. Milano! my mother would say. The only people in Milan who would dream of buying such a thing are immigrants from Romania.

‘Rosco Dunn and the Widow Pinheiro,' she went on. ‘It's like something by one of those Latin Americans. How old is this woman?'

‘I told you: old enough to be my grandmother …
your
grandmother. And she's not a widow, not
yet.'

‘She sounds quite glamorous in her own
way.'

‘Glamorous! She's an old crone. I've really given you the wrong impression.'

‘What kind of man is the doctor?'

‘No idea. We weren't introduced. He seems to be ill
–
although I can't be sure.'

‘And what's the matter with you, telling all these lies?'

‘I don't know. I'm quite truthful, generally, I think.'

‘Your father and I brought you up that way. You must have learned to be devious in England. Why are you pretending to be someone else?'

‘It just came over me. Something in the
air.'

‘What were you doing there in the first place?'

‘It all started with Saul Auerbach's guided tour. Do you remember that?'

‘You were still at school.'

‘No, I was at university. In fact, it was after I dropped
out.'

‘Now I remember. Your father thought you needed vocational guidance and got it into his head that Saul was the man for the
job.'

‘I never told you how it worked out.' That was an understatement. My father had spoken to Auerbach about our day together, I gathered there had been a review of the lesson, but I refused to discuss it with
him.

‘You wouldn't speak about it, no, but you were in high spirits afterwards. He must have taught you something. He obviously inspired you to become a photographer.'

‘It's not that simple,
Mom.'

I told her about going up on Langermann Kop with Auerbach and Brookes; Veronica and the triplets, or rather the twins; the Portuguese restaurant in Troye Street, and everything else. Cast into words for the first time, that day came back in black and white, rendered more stark by the colourful lies of my meeting with Camilla. The time that had passed between my two visits to Fourth Avenue evaporated and the days fell together like photographs laid side by side on a light table.

My mother knew the photos of Veronica and Mrs Ditton. She had a copy of Auerbach's
Accidental Portraits
on the bookshelf in the lounge, which we could have consulted if we'd chosen. But it was Gerald Brookes she was interested in now. I must have given her the wrong impression of him too, and a compellingly unflattering one. What did he make of the
day?

I had asked myself the same question when I began taking photographs in London.

Snooping around in the houses of strangers, English strangers, I was reminded of Brookes and my antipathy for him. So one day I went up to the library in Colindale to look for his article about Johannesburg and found it in the
Guardian
.

It was a long piece, a double-page spread illustrated with two or three of Auerbach's images. The portraits of Veronica and Mrs Ditton were not among them (he was famously slow to publish his work). There were also two snapshots taken by the author: a moody profile of Auerbach on the koppie with the industrial south of the city in the background, a wasteland of mine dumps and ravaged veld; and the skulls on the wall of the Emerald Street house.

The text was predictable. Brookes wrote about the abnormality of the everyday in a police state and drew a comparison between the leafy avenues of Houghton and the treeless shacklands of Alexandra. He had eaten the head of a sheep in an East Rand shebeen and a bucket of caviar at the Johannesburg Country Club. Wherever you turned, he said, there were shattering inequities in high contrast. Then he came to Emerald Street. I had been scrolling through the article on the microfilm reader, registering the phrases indifferently
–
Primus stove … rhinoceros-hide whip … Dimple Haig … here it comes … wishy-washy liberalism
–
but I suddenly felt exposed, as if the text were not on a small screen for my eyes only but projected on the wall where everyone in the reading room could see it. I skimmed ahead to see if my name was there, and then I cranked more slowly down the column, blushing with shame. This feeling returned as I told the story to my mother.

‘Did he mention you?' she asked.

‘Thank God no, not a word. He was too busy giving a frame-by-frame account of what Auerbach was up to. And describing Veronica, finding adjectives to apply to her face like make-up.'

‘I feel sorry for that poor woman,' my mother said. ‘Someone should have been looking after her. And the same goes for your Mrs Ditton, I feel sorry for her
too.'

‘Speaking of Auerbach, have you seen him lately?'

‘Not since the funeral. We've lost touch. He was always your father's friend and your uncle Doug's, and I dare say your Auntie Ellen's, rather than mine.'

My uncle had been dead for years, but Auntie Ellen was going strong, and more prone than ever to hitting the sherry and the dance floor. This is what happens, the men die and the women can get on with things in peace. Now that my father was gone, as they say, my mother's habits had changed, along with the colour of her hair and the tone of her banter. He had been a meat and potatoes man, but she seldom cooked for herself any
more.