Entertaining Angels

by Marita van der Vyver

  Her hand was cool against the feverish warmth of her groin. She rubbed her ring finger lightly over her clitoris, drew her middle finger up to the hollow of her navel, spelled out her hunger with an index finger on her stomach. Then she let the witching finger sink slowly down to where she’d grown moist with longing.

  As an inhibited schoolgirl she hadn’t been able to thrust even the smallest of Lil-lets – ‘designed by a female gynaecologist for safety’ – into this secret opening. The thought of anything bigger or harder – like a finger designed by a male god – threw her into paroxysms of anxiety. A male sex organ would definitely be a fate worse than death.

  What do you do, she’d wondered, panic-stricken, if you get stuck? Two dogs could be dragged to the nearest tap, but two people?

  And when she finally laid down her arms at the feet of that young surfer who was riding the waves of success in the business world these days, she was almost disappointed that everything went so smoothly. A few drops of blood later she began to suspect that the fearful barbarian invasion she’d been fighting off for so many years might even become a source of delicious pleasure. Like most late developers, she immediately set about making up for lost time; but, like all respectable girls, she had to burrow out from under a mountain of guilt and old wives’ tales before she could start enjoying sex. And then she was married.

  And that is where the story ends.

  When the urge for procreation charged in through the front door, sexual pleasure slipped out through the back.

  And now that she had been freed from marriage at long last – kicking and screaming all the way – she was frozen in a new nightmare. Just when she thought it was safe to venture into the deep end of sex again, she was frightened off by a monster that made Jaws look like a goldfish. You just can’t win, as her sister Petra always said. You can’t win in a world where something like Aids has become possible.

  No one needed devils nowadays. Fear of Aids had created a private hell for every sinner.

  This had to be the curse that the thirteenth fairy had laid on modern man. A malevolent maiden who wanted to punish mortals where it would hurt most: sex, the thing that separated earthlings from fairies.

  In the last two decades before the year two thousand, this fiendish fairy had decreed, sex will become a more dangerous weapon than the spinning wheel ever was. Sleeping Beauty and everyone around her will live in anxiety, day and night, until life becomes so unbearable that no one can take comfort in sex any more. Humanity will be damned to a sleep of celibacy.

  And this time Sleeping Beauty will just have to save herself. With her own hands. For what is left but hope and masturbation?

  ‘Masturbation, like voyeurism, paedophilia and sadism, is perverted in nature, in other words it is sexual satisfaction other than normal sexual intercourse that takes place within marriage.’ That was where everything had begun this morning, with this item in the newspaper. It had her all but choking on her coffee. It had also started a train of thought she’d tried to stop all day. Then she’d been to a party tonight and that had stoked the fire burning in her.

  She stood in the crowded kitchen, a bottle of wine in one hand and a glass in the other, when her friend Anton-the-Advocate put his hands unexpectedly on her hips. She raised the bottle and the glass above her head as he pulled her against him and she laughed, more in surprise than pleasure, as he kissed her left ear.

  ‘You’re a very erotic woman,’ he said with his mouth against her ear. ‘You’ve got this way of brushing your fanny against the furniture when you walk through a room, as though you want to fuck the chairs and tables.’

  Then he laughed too, probably at the shocked expression on her face, and asked her to dance. ‘Light My Fire’, Jim Morrison sang in the living room, sounding far too cool to be set alight. Luckily the music was so loud it was impossible to talk, because she didn’t know what to say. ‘Masculine desire is as much an offence as a compliment’, Simone de Beauvoir had said. Maybe not quite an offence, Griet thought. Heaven knew, she was grateful that there was still someone who found her desirable after her husband had so completely lost interest. But how the hell did you react when you heard something like this from a good friend – a good married friend, someone you’d never contemplated as a prospective bed-mate?

  The worst of all was that Anton and Sandra were just about the only couple in her circle of friends whom she’d always regarded as happily married.

  He probably only wanted to be nice, she decided. Anyone could see her self-confidence had taken a terrible knock. But the way he danced with her, his hands still on her hips, made her wonder.

  She’d always found him attractive, in a boyish way, sunburnt and blond as the surfers of her schooldays. The Doors were still singing ‘Light My Fire’, just as they’d sung twenty years ago at school parties. Her lawyer friends alleged that a woman in the throes of divorce was the easiest prey on earth. She looked Anton straight in the eye, and then she couldn’t fool herself any longer. She danced herself free of his hands. She could never again be the respectable schoolgirl who wouldn’t know when the boy beside her was wanking off.

  What if he’d been married to someone else, a devil whispered in her ear, someone she didn’t know? Where were her grandfather’s angels, she wondered, when she really needed them?

  Jim Morrison had started singing something else. To burn off the worst of her libido, she danced until she was ready to drop. And to drown her spasms of guilt, she drank hopelessly too much.

  And now she lay in the moonlight wishing that someone could help her through this sweaty night.

  ‘All this the world well knows; yet none knows well: To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.’ Shakespeare said all there was to say about lust, Griet decided, and gave herself up to the mercy of her own hands. Shakespeare probably said all there was to say about anything.

  9

  Poverty and Humility Land up in Court

  Grandpa Kerneels was a man for fishing and for peace. Not like her lawyer, decided Griet, who was too impatient ever to fish and too aggressive ever to lose an argument. But if her lawyer were like her grandfather, she consoled herself, he probably wouldn’t be a good lawyer.

  She sat in Hilton Dennis’s impressive office and stared gloomily at the sea twenty storeys below. He was dictating a threatening letter to her husband and she wished with every word that she could turn back the Art Deco clock above his glass-topped desk. Seven years, she thought desperately, seven years ago she’d been happy.

  It was unthinkable that seven years of trust and hope and love could end in an impersonal letter from a lawyer. Almost a fifth of her life, weighed and found wanting, wiped out by a cold demand for a cash settlement and some furniture. And all that remained was the echo of unbearable arguments, the bitter taste in her mouth, the blinding rage, the crippling impotence.

  It would pass, she read in superficial magazine articles. The memories would fade like the view through a window that gradually collects grime. But at the moment the window was as clean as a camera lens and the memories so clear that she had to keep blinking.

  ‘I can’t live with you any more,’ she heard George saying one night in the bedroom, his voice unnecessarily loud. She froze, toothpaste in one hand and toothbrush in the other, and stared at her reflection in the bathroom mirror. She looked old, she realised with a shock, old and tired. ‘You sit up writing in the middle of the night when normal people sleep. Your word processor has become a bloody altar. Your stories have taken over the whole house.’

  ‘When should I write if I don’t write at night?’ She came out of the bathroom, still holding the toothbrush, and saw that he’d started to undress. The double bed lay like a minefield between them. ‘During the day I have to work to earn a salary to help you keep this house running and at the weekend I have to do the shopping and cook for the children …’

  ‘Cook!’ George sat down on the edge of the bed to pull his shoes off. His back was turned to her. ‘One
could die of starvation in this house and you wouldn’t even notice. Unless you got up from your word processor by chance and tripped over the corpse.’

  ‘Has it ever crossed your mind that you could stop moaning about what a hopeless loss I am and maybe do something around the house yourself?’

  She heard a voice close to breaking and wondered whether it could be hers. He stood up and stripped off his trousers, his back still turned to her, an impenetrable shield against her anger.

  ‘I told you long ago that you don’t have to cook for me. I can look after myself, I’ll eat in a restaurant, I’d starve rather than …’

  ‘Rather than make a meal for me once a week?’ She watched him unbutton his shirt, letting it fall to the floor near his trousers. Where his wife or the cleaner would pick it up tomorrow. She knew suddenly that she’d never hated anyone as much as she hated him right then. ‘Or buy the toothpaste and toilet paper once a month? Or just once in your life put the bloody rubbish out?’

  ‘Here we go again!’ He swung round to her and she stared at him in amazement, as though she’d never really seen him before, a skinny man in red underpants. ‘Long live the kitchen revolution!’

  She couldn’t believe that she was married to this complete stranger. His pale eyes impersonal, his lips pressed together in a thin line through everything she said. But the vulnerability of his bony body made her heart contract, and she sank down on the bed, defeated. I love him, she thought desperately, with my whole body. And her mind had always been powerless against her body.

  ‘I think we need marriage guidance counselling.’

  ‘I’m sure any therapist would tell us we’re mad to stay together.’ George got in under the sheet and turned his back on her again. ‘Anyone can see that we aren’t suited to each other.’

  ‘Because I’m a lousy housewife?’

  ‘Because we’re different,’ he snapped.

  ‘Because I write stories at night?’

  ‘Because we want different things from life!’

  ‘Do you know what you want from life?’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Griet!’ George sighed heavily. ‘I don’t know why you always pick a quarrel just before we go to bed.’

  ‘But if we want to be together … if we’re prepared to work at the relationship …’

  ‘The question is whether we really want to be together.’ Griet took a deep breath before she could trust her voice to ask the next question.

  ‘Do you want … a divorce?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ George sighed, switching off his bedside light. ‘All I know is that I want to go to sleep now.’

  She sat staring at the frayed bristles of her toothbrush for a long time. In the silence of the bedroom the bathroom tap dripped deafeningly, but she was too old and tired to get up and turn it off.

  This was the night that she was going to tell her husband that she was expecting a child of his for the third time.

  ‘Are you sure you don’t want any more furniture?’ Hilton Dennis’s question flung her back into the present. Alice who fell through a hole into Wonderland. Back to reality which was stranger than Lewis Carroll’s strangest flights of fancy could be.

  ‘No.’

  Her lawyer was short and stocky, with a sparse tuft of hair that he vainly combed over his forehead, and a nose like Napoleon’s. It wasn’t only his nose that made one think of Napoleon, it was his whole bearing, as assertive as only a small man could be. It was this assertiveness that had earned him a good reputation as a divorce lawyer.

  ‘I am not sure of anything any more.’

  Grandpa Kerneels was a post office clerk. From Monday to Friday he endured a white collar round his neck, but at the weekends he put on his oldest clothes and went fishing, like his father and his grandfather before him. He’d grown up in a fishing village, the waves and the legends of the sea in his blood. He’d always be a fisherman at heart.

  He was a fine figure of a man with eyes as blue as the sea on a still summer’s day and a dimple in his sunbrowned chin. In his young days he’d slicked his blond hair down with oil and combed it back with a middle parting. Too beautiful for a man, sighed the women in the family. Little Griet never got tired of studying his wedding picture, one of those old-fashioned portraits that the photographer had touched up by hand with a little colour here and there: Grandma Lina’s lips and cheeks as pink as candy floss; Grandpa Kerneels’s eyes as green as grass.

  For some reason or other, the unknown photographer had decided to give him green eyes. Grandma Lina was so cross that she wanted to send the photograph back immediately. Trees are green and clouds are white, Grandma Lina believed, and her husband’s eyes were blue. And there she was standing beside a stranger with grass-green eyes in her wedding picture!

  But Grandpa Kerneels had an impish streak in him and decided he liked the green-eyed portrait. Why should you go through your whole life with the same colour eyes? A change is as good as a holiday, he was fond of telling little Griet with a wink.

  ‘I think you must also ask for the washing machine and the tumble-dryer.’

  ‘He’d never give those to me.’ You don’t know my husband, she wanted to say to her cocky lawyer. You don’t know how stubborn he can be. ‘It’ll just drag the whole miserable affair out longer. And I’m tired of fighting, I’m losing my self-respect, I’m not prepared to fight over every pot and pan in the kitchen any more. I just want it all over and done with.’

  ‘That’s what they all say.’ Hilton Dennis shook his head sympathetically. ‘And a few months later they’re crying crocodile tears because they didn’t get what they should have asked for in the first place.’

  ‘A washing machine isn’t going to solve my problems,’ sighed Griet, staring at the sea again. Outside, the wind was blowing wildly and the sea, whipped into white foam, looked like a massive kitchen sink. Everything reminded her of a kitchen today, she realised.

  ‘But it’ll help to keep your clothes clean,’ her practical lawyer pointed out. ‘And a tumble-dryer can be worth its weight in gold in the wet winter months.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ Griet shrugged and lit a cigarette. At least this was one place where she could still smoke without feeling guilty about her lack of self-discipline. Hilton Dennis was a chain-smoker. ‘If you think it’s worth the trouble …’

  When the Second World War broke out, Grandpa Kerneels refused to enlist. Not Jan Smuts nor the Ossewabrandwag could make him change his mind. He believed in peace, he said. There were enough people who believed in war.

  Sometimes you have to fight for peace, Grandma Lina said reproachfully, although she was terribly grateful that he wasn’t going to leave her on her own. The war was a nightmare for everyone, but for Grandma Lina it was even worse, because she was afraid of the dark. Streetlights were turned off, car lights had to be dimmed, even house lights were hidden by hanging black paper over the windows. She would never have survived the darkness alone, Grandma Lina believed.

  ‘My husband is better at fighting than I am,’ she told Hilton Dennis, who’d switched off his little dictaphone and lit a cigarette, obviously feeling pleased with himself. He leant back in his chair a little, but without looking too relaxed. His client should realise that he couldn’t devote much more time to her. The glass-topped desk stretched out endlessly in front of him, a frozen lake over which Griet had to skate clumsily. ‘He confiscated my bank statements … He opens my personal mail and threatens me with it … He’s accused me of stealing his video camera, and he …’

  ‘This is why you came to me,’ her lawyer consoled her as she heard the ice cracking around her. ‘I know every trick in the book.’

  ‘I told him I didn’t know what had happened to his video camera.’

  ‘Don’t bother your head about these accusations.’ Hilton Dennis played with his silver cigarette lighter, his child’s hands and stubby fat-crayon fingers fidgeting impatiently. A group of legal people, she’d read without surprise in the paper this morning
, had proved that they were the best liars in Britain. They’d beaten bankers, models, estate agents and clerics in the first annual competition of Perudo, a Peruvian dice game in which the competitors have to lie in order to win. ‘It’s all part of the game. The most important thing is not to lose patience. The one with the greatest patience is usually the one that comes out of it best.’

  Easier said than done, Griet thought bitterly, if you’re camping in your friend’s dirty flat and you have to take crumpled clothes out of a suitcase every morning.

  ‘In the meanwhile you should look for a better place to stay,’ he suggested as though he’d read her mind.

  ‘I can’t afford a better place to stay,’ she said slowly so that her lawyer would understand her. ‘Not until I get back the money that I ploughed into my husband’s house.’

  ‘I’ll see that you get the money back,’ he said, just as slowly. ‘Don’t bother your pretty little head about that. Just you find somewhere to live where you can be happy.’

  Hold your tongue, Griet told herself.

  He stood up and came round his desk to her.

  ‘How much longer?’ she asked. ‘How long do I still have to wait?’

  ‘He gets a week’s grace now to have his say,’ he answered, resting a sympathetic hand on her shoulder.

  ‘And then we apply for Rule Forty-one?’

  ‘Rule Forty-three,’ he said in a slightly patronising tone.

  ‘Rule Forty-three,’ she echoed humbly.

  Figures had never been her strong point. And her divorce was rapidly degenerating into a nightmare of figures: sums of money and important dates, how much she earned, when they’d been married, when they’d opened a joint bank account, how much they’d contributed to the house together, when she’d left the house. A year ago, Griet thought nostalgically, everything had been so simple. She’d had a house and a husband, and a baby in her womb. And neither a lawyer nor a therapist. She got up to go to the door with Hilton Dennis. She dared not waste any more of his valuable time. Lawyers were even more expensive than therapists.