Scenes from Provincial Life

by J. M. Coetzee

  The trouble with Le Roux deepens. There are long telephone calls. A new name starts cropping up: Bensusan. Bensusan is dependable, says his mother. Bensusan is a Jew, he doesn’t drink. Bensusan is going to rescue Jack, put him back on the right track.

  But there is not only Le Roux, it turns out. There are other men, other drinking companions, to whom his father has been lending money. He cannot believe it, cannot understand it. Where does all this money come from, when his father has only one suit and one pair of shoes and has to catch the train to work? Does one really make so much money so quickly getting people off?

  He has never seen Le Roux but can picture him easily enough. Le Roux will be a ruddy Afrikaner with a blond moustache; he will wear a blue suit and a black tie; he will be slightly fat and sweat a lot and tell dirty jokes in a loud voice.

  Le Roux sits with his father in the bar in Goodwood. When his father isn’t looking Le Roux winks behind his back to the other men in the bar. Le Roux has picked out his father as a sucker. He burns with shame that his father should be so stupid.

  The money his father has been lending, as it turns out, is not actually his to lend. That is why Bensusan has involved himself. Bensusan is acting for the Law Society. The matter is serious: the money has been taken from the trust account.

  ‘What is a trust account?’ he asks his mother.

  ‘It’s money he holds in trust.’

  ‘Why do people give him their money in trust?’ he says. ‘They must be mad.’

  His mother shakes her head. All attorneys have trust accounts, she says, God only knows why. ‘Jack is like a child when it comes to money.’

  Bensusan and the Law Society have entered the picture because there are people who want to save his father, people from the old days when he was Controller of Letting. They are well disposed towards him, they don’t want him to go to jail. For old times’ sake, and because he has a wife and children, they will close their eyes to certain things, make certain arrangements. He can make repayments over five years; once that is done, the book will be closed, the matter forgotten.

  His mother takes legal advice herself. She would like her own possessions to be separated from her husband’s before some new disaster strikes: the dining-room table, for instance; the chest of drawers with the mirror; the stinkwood coffee table that Aunt Annie gave her. She would like their marriage contract, which makes the two of them responsible for each other’s debts, to be amended. But marriage contracts, it turns out, are immutable. If his father goes down, his mother goes down too, she and her children.

  Eksteen and the typist are given notice, the practice in Goodwood is closed. He never gets to see what happens to the green window with the gold lettering. His mother continues to teach. His father starts looking for a job. Every morning, punctually at seven, he sets off for the city. But an hour or two later – this is his secret – when everyone else has left the house, he comes back. He puts on his pyjamas and gets back into bed with the Cape Times crossword and a quarter-litre of brandy. Then at about two in the afternoon, before his wife and children return, he dresses and goes to his club.

  His club is called the Wynberg Club, but it is really just part of the Wynberg Hotel. There his father has supper and spends the evening drinking. Sometime after midnight – the noise wakes him, he does not sleep heavily – a car pulls up before the house, the front door opens, his father comes in and goes to the lavatory. Soon afterwards, from his parents’ bedroom, comes a flurry of heated whispering. In the morning there are dark-yellow splashes on the lavatory floor and on the toilet seat, and a sickly sweet smell.

  He writes a notice and puts it in the lavatory: PLEASE LIFT THE SEAT. The notice is ignored. Urinating on the toilet seat becomes his father’s ultimate act of defiance against a wife and children who have turned their backs on him.

  His father’s secret life is revealed to him when one day he stays away from school, ill or pretending to be ill. From his bed he hears the scrape of the key in the front-door lock, hears his father settling down in the next room. Later, guilty, angry, they pass each other in the passage.

  Before he leaves the house in the afternoons his father takes care to empty the mailbox and remove certain items, which he hides at the bottom of his wardrobe under the paper lining. When at last the floodgates burst, it is the cache of letters in the wardrobe – bills from the Goodwood days, letters of demand, lawyers’ letters – that his mother is most bitter about. ‘If I had only known, I could have made a plan,’ she says. ‘Now our lives are ruined.’

  The debts stretch everywhere. Callers come at all hours of the day and night, callers whom he does not get to see. Each time there is a knock at the front door his father shuts himself up in his bedroom. His mother greets the visitors in low tones, ushers them into the living room, closes the door. Afterwards he can hear her whispering angrily to herself in the kitchen.

  There is talk of Alcoholics Anonymous, of how his father should go to Alcoholics Anonymous to prove his sincerity. His father promises to go but does not.

  Two court officers arrive to take an inventory of the contents of the house. It is a sunny Saturday morning. He retreats to his bedroom and tries to read, but in vain: the men require access to his room, to every room. He goes into the backyard. Even there they follow him, peering around, making notes on a pad.

  He seethes with rage all the time. That man, he calls his father when he speaks to his mother, too full of anger to give him a name: why do we have to have anything to do with that man? Why don’t you let that man go to prison?

  He has twenty-five pounds in his Post Office savings book. His mother swears to him that no one will take his twenty-five pounds away from him.

  There is a visit from a Mr Golding. Though Mr Golding is Coloured, he is somehow in a position of power over his father. Careful preparations are made for the visit. Mr Golding will be received in the front room, like other callers. He will be served tea in the same tea service. In return for being treated so well, it is hoped that Mr Golding will not prosecute.

  Mr Golding arrives. He wears a double-breasted suit, does not smile. He drinks the tea that his mother serves but will promise nothing. He wants his money.

  After he has left there is a debate about what to do with the teacup. The custom, it appears, is that after a person of colour has drunk from a cup the cup must be smashed. He is surprised that his mother’s family, which believes in nothing else, believes in this. However, in the end his mother simply washes the cup with bleach.

  At the last minute Aunt Girlie from Williston comes to the rescue, for the honour of the family. In return for a loan she lays down certain conditions, one of them that Jack should never again practise as an attorney.

  His father agrees to the conditions, agrees to sign the document. But when the time comes, it takes long cajoling to get him out of bed. At last he makes his appearance, in grey slacks and a pyjama top and bare feet. Wordlessly he signs; then he retires to his bed again.

  Later that evening he gets dressed and goes out. Where he spends the night they do not know; he does not return until the next day.

  ‘What’s the point of making him sign?’ he complains to his mother. ‘He never pays his other debts, so why should he pay Girlie?’

  ‘Never mind him, I’ll pay her,’ she replies.

  ‘How?’

  ‘I’ll work for the money.’

  There is something in his mother’s behaviour that he can no longer close his eyes to, something extraordinary. With each new and bitter revelation she seems to grow stronger, more stubborn. It is as though she is inviting calamities upon herself for no other purpose than to show the world how much she can endure. ‘I will pay all his debts,’ she says. ‘I will pay in instalments. I will work.’

  Her ant-like determination angers him to the point that he wants to strike her. It is clear what lies behind it. She wants to sacrifice herself for her children. Sacrifice without end: he is all too familiar with that spirit. But once she
has sacrificed herself entirely, once she has sold the clothes off her back, sold her very shoes, and is walking around on bloody feet, where will that leave him? It is a thought he cannot bear.

  The December holidays arrive and still his father has no job. They are all four in the house now, with nowhere else to go, like rats in a cage. They avoid each other, hiding in separate rooms. His brother absorbs himself in comics: the Eagle, the Beano. His own favourite is the Rover, with its stories of Alf Tupper, the one-mile champion who works in a factory in Manchester and lives on fish and chips. He tries to lose himself in Alf Tupper, but he cannot help pricking his ears to every whisper and creak in the house.

  One morning there is a strange silence. His mother is out, but from something in the air, a smell, an aura, a heaviness, he knows that that man is still here. Surely he cannot still be sleeping. Is it possible that, wonder of wonders, he has committed suicide? If so, if he has committed suicide, would it not be best to pretend not to notice, so that the sleeping pills or whatever he has taken can be given time to act? And how can he keep his brother from raising the alarm?

  In the war he has waged on his father, he has never been entirely sure of his brother’s support. As far back as he can remember, people have remarked that, whereas he takes after his mother, his brother has his father’s looks. There are times when he suspects his brother may be soft on his father; he suspects his brother, with his pale, worried face and the tic on his eyelid, of being soft in general.

  In any event, if his father has indeed committed suicide, it would be best to steer clear of his room, so that if there are questions afterwards, he will be able to say, ‘I was talking to my brother,’ or ‘I was reading in my room.’ Yet he cannot contain his curiosity. On tiptoe he approaches the door. He pushes it open, looks in.

  It is a warm summer morning. The wind is still, so still that he can hear the chirruping of sparrows outside, the whirr of their wings. The shutters are closed, the curtains drawn shut. There is a smell of man’s sweat. In the gloom he can make out his father lying on his bed. From the back of his throat comes a soft gargling as he breathes.

  He steps closer. His eyes are growing accustomed to the dimness. His father is wearing pyjama pants and a cotton singlet. He has not shaved. There is a red V at his throat where sunburn gives way to the pallor of his chest. Beside the bed is a chamber pot in which cigarette stubs float in brownish urine. He has not seen an uglier spectacle in his life.

  There is no sign of pills. The man is not dying, merely sleeping. So: He does not have the courage to take sleeping pills, just as he does not have the courage to go out and look for a job.

  Since the day his father came back from war service they have battled each other in a second war which his father has stood no chance of winning because he could never have foreseen how pitiless, how tenacious his enemy would be. For seven years that war has ground on; today at last he has triumphed. He feels like the Russian soldier on the Brandenburg Gate, raising the red banner over the ruins of Berlin.

  Yet at the same time he wishes he were not here, witnessing this shame. Unfair! he wants to cry: I am just a child! He wishes that someone, a woman, would take him in her arms, make the sore place better, soothe him, tell him it was just a bad dream. He thinks of his grandmother’s cheek, soft and cool and dry as silk, offered to him to be kissed. He wishes his grandmother would come and put it all right.

  A ball of phlegm catches in his father’s throat. He coughs, turns on his side. His eyes open, the eyes of a man fully conscious, fully aware of where he is. The eyes take him in as he stands there, where he should not be, spying. The eyes are without judgment but without human kindness either.

  Lazily the man’s hand sweeps down and rearranges his pyjama pants.

  He wants the man to say something, some ordinary word – ‘What time is it?’ – to make it easier for him. But the man says nothing. The eyes continue to regard him, peaceably, distantly. Then they close and he is asleep again.

  He returns to his room, closes the door.

  Sometimes, in the days that follow, the gloom lifts. The sky, that usually sits tight and closed over his head, not so near that it can be touched but not much further either, opens a slit, and for an interval he can see the world as it really is. He sees himself in his white shirt with rolled-up sleeves and the grey short trousers that he is on the point of outgrowing: not a child, not what a passer-by would call a child, too big for that now, too big to use that excuse, yet still as stupid and self-enclosed as a child: childish; dumb; ignorant; retarded. In a moment like this he can see his father and his mother too, from above, without anger: not as two grey and formless weights seating themselves on his shoulders, plotting his misery day and night, but as a man and a woman living dull and trouble-filled lives of their own. The sky opens, he sees the world as it is, then the sky closes and he is himself again, living the only story he will admit, the story of himself.

  His mother stands at the sink, in the dimmest corner of the kitchen. She stands with her back to him, her arms flecked with soapsuds, scouring a pot, in no great hurry. As for him, he is roaming around, talking about something, he does not know what, talking with his usual vehemence, complaining.

  His mother turns from her chore; her gaze flickers over him. It is a considered look, without any fondness. She is not seeing him for the first time. Rather, she is seeing him as he has always been and as she has always known him to be when she is not wrapped up in illusion. She sees him, sums him up, and is not pleased. She is even bored with him.

  This is what he fears from her, from the person in all the world who knows him best, who has the huge, unfair advantage over him of knowing all about his first, most helpless, most intimate years, years of which, despite every effort, he himself can remember nothing; who probably knows as well, since she is inquisitive and has sources of her own, the paltry secrets of his school life. He fears his mother’s judgment. He fears the cool thoughts that must be passing through her mind at moments like this, when there is no passion to colour them, no reason for her faculties to be anything but clear; above all he fears the moment, a moment that has not yet arrived, when she will pronounce her judgment. It will be like a stroke of lightning; he will not be able to withstand it. He does not want to hear it. So much does he not want to hear it that he can feel a hand go up inside his own head to block his ears, block his sight. He would rather be blind and deaf than know what his mother thinks of him. He would rather live like a tortoise inside its shell.

  For it is not true that, as he likes to think, this woman was brought into the world for the sole purpose of loving him and protecting him and satisfying his wants. On the contrary, she had a life before he came into being, a life in which she gave him not the slightest thought. Then at a certain moment in history she gave birth to him. She bore him and she decided to love him; perhaps she chose to love him even before she bore him; nevertheless, she chose to love him, and therefore she can choose to stop loving him.

  ‘Wait until you have children of your own,’ she says to him in one of her bitter moods. ‘Then you will know.’ What will he know? It is a formula she uses, a formula that sounds as if it comes from the old days. Perhaps it is what each generation says to the next, as a warning, as a threat. But he does not want to hear it. Wait until you have children. What nonsense, what a contradiction! How can a child have children? Anyway, what he would know if he were a father, if he were his own father, is precisely what he does not want to know. He will not accept the vision of the world that she wants to force upon him: a sober, disappointed, disillusioned vision.

  Nineteen

  Aunt Annie is dead. Despite the promises of the doctors, she never walked after her fall, not even with a stick. From her bed in the Volkshospitaal she was transferred to a bed in an old-age home in Stikland, in the back of beyond, where no one had the time to visit her and where she died alone. Now she is to be buried in Woltemade cemetery no. 3.

  At first he refuses to go. He has
to listen to enough prayers at school, he says, he does not want to hear more. He is vocal in his scorn for the tears that are going to be shed. Giving Aunt Annie a proper funeral is just a way for her relatives to make themselves feel good. She should be buried in a hole in the garden of the old-age home. It would save money.

  In his heart he does not mean it. But he is compelled to say things like this to his mother; he needs to watch her face tighten in hurt and outrage. How much more must he say before she will at last round on him and tell him to be quiet?

  He does not like to think of death. He would prefer it if, when people got old and sick, they simply stopped existing and disappeared. He does not like ugly old bodies; the thought of old people taking off their clothes makes him shudder. He hopes that the bath in their house in Plumstead has never had an old person in it.

  His own death is a different matter. He is always somehow present after his death, floating above the spectacle, enjoying the grief of those who caused it and who, now that it is too late, wish he were still alive.

  In the end, however, he does go with his mother to Aunt Annie’s funeral. He goes because she pleads with him, and he likes being pleaded with, likes the feeling of power it gives; also because he has never been to a funeral and wants to see how deep they dig the grave, how a coffin is lowered into it.

  It is not a grand funeral at all. There are only five mourners, and a young Dutch Reformed dominee with pimples. The five are Uncle Albert and his wife and son, and then his mother and himself. He has not seen Uncle Albert for years. He is bent almost double over his stick; tears stream from his pale-blue eyes; the wings of his collar stick out as though his tie has been knotted by other hands.

  The hearse arrives. The undertaker and his assistant are in formal black, far more smartly dressed than any of them (he is in his St Joseph’s school uniform: he possesses no suit). The dominee says a prayer in Afrikaans for the departed sister; then the hearse is reversed to the graveside and the coffin is slid out, onto poles over the grave. To his disappointment, it is not lowered into the grave – that must wait, it appears, for the graveyard workers – but discreetly the undertaker gestures that they may toss clods of earth on to it.