Scenes from Provincial Life

by J. M. Coetzee

  So why did I have second thoughts? Why did I turn back? Not an easy question to answer. If there is such a thing as taking to a person, I am not sure that I took to John, not for a long time. John was not easy to take to, his whole stance towards the world was too wary, too defensive for that. I presume his mother must have taken to him, when he was little, and loved him, because that is what mothers are there for. But it was hard to imagine anyone else doing so.

  You don’t mind a little frank talk, do you? So let me fill out the picture. I was twenty-six at the time, and had had carnal relations with only two men. Two. The first was a boy I met when I was fifteen. For years, until he was called up into the army, he and I were as tight as twins. After he went away I moped for a while, kept to myself, then found a new boyfriend. With the new boyfriend I remained as tight as twins throughout my student years; as soon as we graduated he and I married, with both families’ blessing. In each case it was all or nothing. My nature has always been like that: all or nothing. So at the age of twenty-six I was in many respects an innocent. I had not the faintest idea, for instance, how one went about seducing a man.

  Don’t misunderstand me. It was not that I led a sheltered life. A sheltered life was not possible in the circles in which we, my husband and I, moved. More than once, at cocktail parties, some man or other, usually a business acquaintance of my husband’s, had manoeuvred me into a corner and leant close and asked in a low voice whether I didn’t feel lonely out in the suburbs, with Mark away so much of the time, whether I wouldn’t like to get away one day next week for lunch. Of course I didn’t play along, but this, I inferred, was how extramarital affairs were initiated. A strange man would take you to lunch and after lunch drive you to a beach cottage belonging to a friend to which he happened to have a key, or to a city hotel, and there the sexual part of the transaction would be carried out. Then the next day the man would phone to say how much he had enjoyed his time with you and would you like to meet again next Tuesday? And so it would proceed, Tuesday after Tuesday, the discreet lunches, the episodes in bed, until the man stopped calling or you stopped answering his calls; and the sum of it all was called having an affair.

  In the world of business – I’ll say more about my husband and his business in a moment – there was pressure on men – at least it was so in those days – to have presentable wives, and therefore on their wives to be presentable; to be presentable and to be accommodating too, within bounds. That is why, even though my husband would get upset when I told him about the overtures his colleagues were making to me, he and they continued to have cordial relations. No displays of outrage, no fisticuffs, no duels at dawn, just now and then a bout of quiet fuming and bad temper in the confines of the home.

  The whole question of who in that little enclosed world was sleeping with whom seems to me now, as I look back, darker than anyone was prepared to admit, darker and more sinister. The men both liked and disliked it that their wives were coveted by other men. They felt threatened but they were nevertheless excited. And the women, the wives, were excited too: I would have had to be blind not to see that. Excitement all around, an envelope of libidinous excitement. From which I purposely excised myself. At the parties I mention I was as presentable as one was required to be but I was never accommodating.

  As a result I made no friends among the wives, who accordingly put their heads together and decided I was cold and supercilious. What is more, they made certain their verdict got relayed to me. As for me, I would like to be able to say I could not have cared less, but that would not be true, I was too young and unsure of myself.

  Mark did not want me to sleep with other men. At the same time he wanted other men to see what kind of woman he had married, and envy him. Much the same, I presume, held for his friends and colleagues: they wanted the wives of other men to succumb to their advances but they wanted their own wives to remain chaste – chaste and alluring. Logically it made no sense. As a social microsystem it was unsustainable. Yet these were businessmen, what the French call men of affairs, astute, clever (in another sense of the word clever), men who knew about systems, about which systems are sustainable and which are not. That is why I say that the system of the licit illicit in which they all participated was darker than they were prepared to admit. It could continue to function, in my view, only at considerable psychic cost to them, and only as long as they refused to acknowledge what at some level they must have known.

  At the beginning of our marriage, Mark’s and mine, when we were so sure of each other that we did not believe anything could shake us, we made a pact that we would have no secrets from each other. As far as I was concerned, that pact still held at the time I am telling you about. I hid nothing from Mark. I hid nothing because I had nothing to hide. Mark, on the other hand, had once transgressed. He had transgressed and had confessed his transgression, and been shaken by the consequences. After that jolt he privately concluded it was more convenient to lie than to tell the truth.

  The field Mark was employed in was financial services. His firm identified investment opportunities for clients and managed their investments. The clients were for the most part wealthy South Africans trying to get their money out of the country before the country imploded (the word they used) or exploded (the word I preferred). For reasons that were never made clear to me – there were, after all, even in those days, such things as telephones – his job required him to travel once a week to their branch office in Durban for what he called consultations. If you added up the hours and days, it turned out he was spending as much time in Durban as at home.

  One of the colleagues Mark needed to consult with at their Durban office was a woman named Yvette. She was older than he, Afrikaans, divorced. At first he used to speak freely of her. She even telephoned him at home, on business, he said. Then all mention of Yvette dried up. ‘Is there some problem with Yvette?’ I asked Mark. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Do you find her attractive?’ ‘Not really.’

  From his evasiveness I guessed something was brewing. I began to pay attention to odd details: messages that inexplicably didn’t reach him, missed flights, things like that.

  One day, when he came back from one of his lengthy absences, I confronted him head-on. ‘I couldn’t get hold of you last night at your hotel,’ I said – ‘Were you with Yvette?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘Did you sleep with her?’

  ‘Yes,’ he replied (I am sorry but I cannot tell a lie).

  ‘Why?’ I said.

  He shrugged.

  ‘Why?’ I said again.

  ‘Because,’ he said.

  ‘Well, bugger you,’ I said, and turned my back on him and locked myself in the bathroom, where I did not cry – the thought of crying did not so much as cross my mind – but on the contrary, choking with vengefulness, squeezed a full tube of toothpaste and a full tube of hair-mousse into the handbasin, flooded the mess with hot water, stirred it with a hairbrush, and flushed it down the sink.

  That was the background. After that episode, after his confession did not win him the approval he was expecting, he turned to lying. ‘Do you still see Yvette?’ I asked after another of his trips.

  ‘I have to see Yvette, I have no choice, we work together,’ he replied.

  ‘But do you still see her in that way?’

  ‘What you call that way is over,’ he said. ‘It only happened once.’

  ‘Once or twice,’ I said.

  ‘Once,’ he repeated, cementing the lie.

  ‘In fact, it was just one of those things,’ I offered.

  ‘Exactly. Just one of those things.’ And therewith words ceased between Mark and me, words and everything else, for the night.

  Each time Mark lied he would make sure he looked me straight in the eye. Levelling with Julia: that must be how he thought of it. It was from this level look of his that I could tell – infallibly – that he was lying. You won’t believe how bad Mark was at lying – how bad men are in general. What a pity I had noth
ing to lie about, I thought. I could have shown Mark a thing or two, technique-wise.

  Chronologically speaking, Mark was older than me, but that was not how I saw it. The way I saw it, I was the oldest in our family, followed by Mark, who was about thirteen, followed by our daughter Christina, who would be two at her next birthday. In respect of maturity my husband was therefore closer to the child than he was to me.

  As for Mister Prod, Mister Nudge, the man shovelling sand from the back of the truck – to return to him – I had no idea how old he was. For all I knew, he might be another thirteen-year-old. Or he might actually, mirabile dictu, be a grown-up. I was going to have to wait and see.

  ‘I was out by a factor of six,’ he was saying (or maybe it was sixteen, I was only half listening). ‘Instead of one ton of sand, six (or sixteen) tons of sand. Instead of one and a half tons of gravel, ten tons of gravel. I must have been out of my mind.’

  ‘Out of your mind,’ I said, playing for time while I caught up.

  ‘To make a mistake like that.’

  ‘I make mistakes with numbers all the time. I get the decimal point in the wrong place.’

  ‘Yes, but a factor of six isn’t like misplacing the decimal point. Not unless you are a Sumerian. Anyway, the answer to your question is, it is going to take for ever.’

  What question, I asked myself? And what is this it that is going to take for ever?

  ‘I have to go now,’ I said. ‘I have a child waiting for her lunch.’

  ‘You have children?’

  ‘Yes, I have a child. Why shouldn’t I? I am a grown woman with a husband and a child whom I have to feed. Why are you surprised? Why else should I need to spend so much time in Pick n Pay?’

  ‘For the music?’ he offered.

  ‘And you? Don’t you have a family?’

  ‘I have a father who lives with me. Or with whom I live. But no family in the conventional sense. My family has flown.’

  ‘No wife? No children?’

  ‘No wife, no children. I am back to being a son.’

  They have always interested me, these exchanges between human beings when the words have nothing to do with the traffic of thoughts through the mind. As he and I were speaking, for instance, my memory threw up the visual image of the really quite repulsive stranger, with thick black hair sprouting from his earholes and over the top button of his shirt, who at the most recent barbecue had ever so casually placed a hand on my bottom as I stood dishing up salad for myself: not to stroke me or pinch me, just to cup my buttock in his big hand. If that image was filling my mind, what might be filling the mind of this other, less hirsute man? And how fortunate that most people, even people who are no good at straight-out lying, are at least competent enough at concealment not to reveal what is going on inside them, not by the slightest tremor of the voice or dilation of the pupil!

  ‘Well, goodbye,’ I said.

  ‘Goodbye,’ he said.

  I went home, paid the house-help, gave Chrissie her lunch, and put her down for her nap. Then I baked two sheets of chocolate cookies. While the cookies were still warm I drove back to the house on Tokai Road. It was a beautiful, wind-still day. Your man (remember, I did not know his name at that point) was in the yard doing something with timber and a hammer and nails. He was stripped to the waist; his shoulders were red where the sun had caught them.

  ‘Hello,’ I said. ‘You should wear a shirt, the sun isn’t good for you. Here, I’ve brought some cookies for you and your father. They are better than the stuff you get at Pick n Pay.’

  Looking suspicious, in fact looking quite irritated, he put aside his tools and took the parcel. ‘I can’t invite you in, too much of a mess,’ he said. I was clearly not welcome.

  ‘That’s all right,’ I said. ‘I can’t stay anyway, I have to get back to my child. I was just making a neighbourly gesture. Would you and your father like to come over for a meal one evening? A neighbourly meal?’

  He gave a smile, the first smile I had had from him. Not an attractive smile, too tight-lipped. He was self-conscious about his teeth, which were in bad shape. ‘Thank you,’ he said, ‘but I’ll have to check with my father first. He isn’t one for late nights.’

  ‘Tell him it won’t be a late night,’ I said. ‘You can eat and go, I won’t be offended. It will just be the three of us. My husband is away.’

  You must be getting worried, Mr Vincent. What have I let myself in for? you must be asking yourself. How can this woman pretend to have total recall of mundane conversations dating back three or four decades? And when is she going to get to the point? So let me be candid. I am making up the words, the dialogue, as I go along. Which I presume is permitted, since we are talking about a writer. What I am telling you may not be true to the letter, but it is true to the spirit, be assured of that. Can I proceed?

  [Silence.]

  I scribbled my phone number on the box of cookies. ‘And let me tell you my name too,’ I said, ‘in case you were wondering. My name is Julia.’

  ‘Julia. How sweetly flows the liquefaction of her clothes.’

  ‘Really,’ I said. Liquefaction. What did he mean?

  He arrived as promised the next evening, but without his father. ‘My father is not feeling well,’ he said. ‘He has taken an aspirin and gone to bed.’

  We ate at the kitchen table, the two of us, with Chrissie on my lap. ‘Say hello to the uncle,’ I said to Chrissie. But Chrissie would have nothing to do with the strange man. A child knows when something is up. Feels it in the air.

  In fact Christina never took to John, then or later. As a young child she was fair and blue-eyed, like her father and quite unlike me. I’ll show you a picture. Sometimes I used to feel that, because she did not take after me in looks, she would never take to me. Strange. I was the one who did all the caring and caring-for in the household, yet compared with Mark I was the intruder, the dark one, the odd one out.

  The uncle. That was what I called John in front of her. Afterwards I regretted it. Something sordid in passing off a lover as one of the family.

  Anyway, we ate, we chatted, but the zest, the excitement was beginning to go out of me, leaving me flat. Aside from the wrapping paper incident in the supermarket, which I might or might not have misread, I was the one who had made all the overtures, issued the invitation. Enough, no more, I said to myself. It is up to him now to push the button through the hole or else not push the button through the hole. So to speak.

  The truth is, I was not cut out to be a seductress. I did not even approve of the word, with its overtones of lacy underwear and French perfume. It was precisely in order not to fall into the role of seductress that I had not dressed up for the present occasion. I wore the same white cotton blouse and green Terylene slacks (yes, Terylene) that I had worn to the supermarket that morning. What you see is what you get.

  Don’t smile. I am perfectly aware how much I was behaving like a character in a book – like one of those high-minded young women in Henry James, say, determined, despite her better instincts, to do the difficult, the modern thing. Particularly when my peers, the wives of Mark’s colleagues at the firm, were turning for guidance not to Henry James or George Eliot but to Vogue or Marie Claire or Fair Lady. But then, what are books for if not to change our lives? Would you have come all the way to far Ontario to hear what I have to say if you did not believe books are important?

  No. No, I wouldn’t.

  Exactly. And John wasn’t exactly a snappy dresser himself. One pair of good trousers, three plain white shirts, one pair of shoes: a real child of the Depression. But let me get back to my story.

  For supper that night I made a simple lasagne. Pea soup, lasagne, ice cream: that was the menu, bland enough for a two-year-old. The lasagne was sloppier than it should have been because it was made with cottage cheese instead of ricotta. I could have made a second dash to the shops for ricotta, but on principle I did not, just as on principle I did not change my outfit.

  What did we talk abou
t over supper? Nothing much. I concentrated on feeding Chrissie – I didn’t want her to feel neglected. And John was not a great talker, as you must know.

  I don’t know. I never met him in the flesh.

  You never met him? I’m surprised to hear that.

  I never sought him out. I never even corresponded with him. I thought it would be better if I had no sense of obligation towards him. It would leave me free to write what I wished.

  But you sought me out. Your book is going to be about him yet you chose not to meet him. Your book is not going to be about me yet you asked to meet me. How do you explain that?

  Because you were a figure in his life. You were important to him.

  How do you know that?

  I am just repeating what he said. Not to me, but to lots of people.

  He said that I was an important figure in his life? I am surprised. I am gratified. Gratified not that he should have thought so – I agree, I did have an impact on his life – but that he should have said so to other people.

  Let me make a confession. When you first contacted me, I nearly decided to turn you down, not to speak to you. I thought you would be some busybody, some academic newshound who had come upon a list of John’s women, his conquests, and would now be going down the list, ticking off the names, hoping to get some dirt on him.

  You don’t have a high opinion of academic researchers.