Up Against the Night

by Justin Cartwright

  ‘We can handle it, I promise. She adores you and she knows what you have done for her. Now, are you hungry?’

  ‘Always. We had no food as children. Just a bowl of mealie-meal once a day.’

  ‘I feel so sorry for you. Poor you, it must have been terrible.’

  ‘It was.’

  ‘But you are not very thin now, are you?’

  Nellie and I went together to California to deliver Lucinda to the clinic, and she and Lucinda have become close. Nellie has written to her or emailed her virtually every week since. She sometimes sends Lucinda articles she has found in papers, not spiritual stuff, but serious pieces by scientists and writers. I am happy to believe that the two of them have secrets that they don’t share with me.

  Nellie lifts the heavy lid of the casserole and looks at the meatballs; her face is wreathed in steam for a moment.

  ‘Nearly ready. Frank, about Lucinda, you are her father. As I said, she adores you. But I will do my best.’

  ‘I am relying on you. I can’t do it alone, Nellie. I want to show you and Lucinda everything.’

  ‘I want to know about where you come from. It will tell me a lot about you.’

  She says ‘lot’ with a minor glottal explosion, which I find endearing.

  I am not thinking of the sights, spectacular though they are. I want her to see why, for all its violence and poverty and corruption, I still have a powerful connection to South Africa, an irrational connection to the mountains and the landscape and the language. I could tell her about my ambivalence towards Piet Retief. I could tell her about my father fetching me from Tannie Marie’s farm and how he and I wept in the Dodge, pulled over on the roadside. I could tell her that I left my tears in South Africa when my mother died and was buried in the churchyard of St Martin’s in the Veld. And I could tell her that, when my father died, exiting characteristically politely, his ashes were buried in a small niche in the wall surrounding the churchyard where my mother is buried. This was as close as they had been for some years – my father had never visited the grave. He said visiting the church would cause him distress. I wondered if it was because of some lingering resentment to do with her lover.

  I have been to the churchyard a few times. It is perfectly possible for an atheist to love churches and what they stand for, which is hope. I haven’t told Nellie that I feel increasingly alien every day. Now I feel an urge to go home, even if the home I have in mind is mostly imagined. I still think that my failed marriage is a disgrace, as if I were careless about these things. I am free now, but, like an escaped criminal, I often look behind me.

  Last December when we were staying at the inn on Grinda in the Stockholm Archipelago, to celebrate the festival of Sankta Lucia, I saw what it meant to Nellie. It was not simply a question of nostalgia, as she suggested. Sankta Lucia celebrates light in the long northern winter. Young girls in white with candles in circlets on their heads processed into the church and sang traditional songs. Light and dark are represented by elves, both of the benign and the malevolent persuasion. There are plenty of creatures in Norse mythology that live a liminal existence, hovering between the spirit and the flesh-and-blood world. I think my Cousin Jaco imagines himself in a liminal world; even now he is somewhere roaming the universe with his special Scientologist’s powers.

  We travelled to Kiruna to see the Northern Lights swoop down almost to the ground, whirling restlessly, as if desperate to make land, to achieve some stability and permanence. Nellie said that the Sami believed that the lights are the souls of the dead looking for release. Children are required to act with respect to the departed when the aurora borealis fires the sky. On Grinda I was keenly aware that I didn’t have a culture of my own and I was aware, too, that in South Africa people hold values and beliefs that are irreconcilable. Some whites have come to speak of themselves as ‘white Africans’ in an attempt to belong, but this is an affectation: very few of these people speak any African language or have any deep understanding of their black fellow countrymen and women.

  ‘I suppose there must be wonderful fish in Cape Town,’ Nellie says.

  She gives the word ‘suppose’ a Swedish twist, as if it contains an extra, slippery consonant, ending in a gentle plop, like a seal sliding into water.

  ‘Yes, there are fish, wonderful fish. We can go down to the harbour to buy tuna and lobster for nothing, straight off the boats.’

  I am happily animating the idyll to come. It isn’t the moment to tell her that, not too far from my house, my Cousin Jaco narrowly escaped being eaten by a great white shark.

  In his incoherent emails, Jaco has taken to addressing me as ‘Oom Frank’, which I find intensely irritating from a man who is my remote cousin. He is in California, and has been designated a ‘Clear’, and now he is perfecting the skills that will allow him to visit Mars, propelled there only by mental forces – his. He says he has acquired the traffic-light skills already, so that he is able to change the traffic lights in his favour. No waiting for Jaco. I wonder if it isn’t dangerous to have Jaco loose on Rodeo Drive – or on any other highway. All this he has told me in his confused and illiterate emails.

  There are also intimations that his tales of shark encounters are beginning to lose traction; no television company or radio station has called him for months, despite the fact that quite a number of surfers have been attacked recently. Some of the survivors are willing to talk. Even a man with only one remaining leg is happy to tell the world about his experience. After the attack, his leg floated to the surface, and was seized by a second shark, never to be seen again.

  Jaco emails to say that he is deep within the organisation, hush-hush, doing something important to secure his special powers and his immortality. And, although he is not supposed to speak to him, Jaco tells me that he has met Tom Cruise, who is not as short as people say, and is a very nice person, more than willing to swap a few words with a fellow Scientologist. As Jaco puts it, Tom is his bru.

  Outside it is dark. This is the primitive, rural version of dark, quite different from the fractured dark of the city. In the middle of the forest the darkness is intense; it has a texture that I imagine I can feel. The light spilling from the house is powerless up against the overwhelming night. The deer creep closer, in a nervous game of grandmother’s footsteps. In the light spilled from a window, I can now see the white of their muzzles, as they come to the garden fence to graze. The bottom third of their muzzles is white as if they had drunk from a pail of milk. Their eyes glow. In the morning a few ponies will be waiting at the front door; against all advice I give them carrots. As soon as they see the house is occupied, they come for a hand-out. I own a few of the ponies on the forest, a right only a commoner can exercise. When I bought the house it included the right to run my own animals – excluding pigs – on the forest. I also have the right to gather and chop firewood; this is known as estovers. I have no plans to do anything with the ponies, but the knowledge that out there my four ponies are roaming happily, bearing my unique tail mark, gives me secret pleasure. The rights and duties are medieval in their origin. When I arrived in England I was eager to belong and that urge hasn’t gone; I was happy to be away from turmoil and strife and from the endless, never-to-be-resolved, argument.

  Nellie loves the trees and forest around us, possibly because so many Swedish myths have their origins in the forest. The Old Norse word, myrkviðr, means murky or dark wood. It is deep in the Swedish psyche. Nellie is strangely pleased that we have the right of estovers, and that the wood scenting the house is our own. Here I sleep well: my dreams of drowning never assail me. I don’t believe that dreams contain urgent messages or tidbits of wisdom or appraisals of the unconscious, but I wonder why my dreams are so vivid when I am in London.

  Nellie and I sleep in sheets scented by lavender. We are cosseted by scents and freshness. I tell her that, years ago, the black women washed and dried our sheets on rocks in the Mooi River. I can’t stop; I tell her that the women carried the bundles of clean
clothes from the river, bound up in the sheets, balanced on their heads. I tell her I can see them now, walking in single file back from the river, singing in harmony. Nellie says she wishes she could see that; it would be a window on my childhood. She wants to know about me and the life I have lived.

  She never passes judgement on Georgina, however vindictive she becomes. Nellie believes, and I agree with her, that no one ever really knows what happens within another’s marriage. Her own marriage was happy; when Lars turned out to be a serious alcoholic she was devastated. She was angry when he said he had given up drinking. It was as though, Nellie told me, he no longer knew when he was lying: he mistook the intention for the action. He would arrive home at four in the morning, smiling pointlessly, ready to be forgiven, and she would have to drag him to bed after removing his urine- and drink-sodden clothes. Then he denied that he had been fired from his job as an engineer. Although she knew he was unable to quit drinking, she tried to persuade him to sign up for AA, but he never attended. They separated, reluctantly, and six months later they were divorced. He has terminal liver failure now and is often on dialysis. Everyone knows, says Nellie, that he will die soon. His face is yellow, signalling his death like a plague flag. I have seen pictures of Lars in his prime; Nellie’s son, Bertil, is very like him – unmistakably a man of the far north. I ask questions about Lars sometimes but I avoid any hint of jealousy and I don’t make comparisons.

  A few months before I met Nellie, I had a brief relationship with a young woman, Imogen Cross, who was barely thirty.

  We were sitting in a café. She asked me, ‘Can we talk?’

  ‘Of course.’

  I sensed it would be one of those questions you know in advance is going to be painfully unanswerable.

  She composed herself with difficulty. She said, ‘Do we have a future?’

  I was silenced for a moment; it had never occurred to me that we might have a future together. She seemed to be asking if we could spend the rest of our lives together and she suggested that I owed her something. I had treated sex with her as a kind of harmless entertainment and now I saw not a wonderful future so much as a middle-aged man parading a young wife and opening himself to all kinds of ridicule.

  I wondered, for a start, how I would be able to introduce her to my friends. And it might have appeared to be lending credence to Georgina’s widely advertised views of my lack of sensitivity, which she attributed to an early diet of biltong. In her view a meat diet is synonymous with brutish masculinity. She favours foodstuffs that have symbolic and spiritual qualities, so that quinoa is, in some unspecified way, good for you and soya milk contains a kind of innocence and salads are major cultural indicators. Many men don’t take this seriously, in that way opening themselves to charges of wilfully inviting heart attacks and courting early senility. A friend said that, when he asked his wife what the point of salad was, she accused him of passive aggression. Salad as weapon.

  As it happens, I have never liked biltong, although it has symbolic qualities for my countrymen. On the farm strips of meat, beef or game were soaked in brine for days before they were hung from a camel thorn tree in a small cage behind my Tannie Marie’s house. The cage was like something you might use to house a canary, with smaller mesh. Flies had to be kept out, but circulating warm, dry air was required to dry the strips of meat. Hungry flies were always crawling over the mesh eyeing what was within. It put me off for ever.

  I am thinking about all this as I walk across the forest before breakfast. It’s another clear, cold day; in my mind my new happiness has made me a far more sensitive person. I worry that I may have been too harsh with Imogen. I told her we had no future at all, not because she wasn’t a wonderful person et cetera, et cetera, but because I didn’t want to ruin her life. I said I had far too much baggage, including a daughter who needed me. Imogen made some cutting remarks about using her. I assured her that it was not the case. She was married soon after to a man of her age who works in the City, and her tone has changed; she seems to be content. She has introduced me to her husband, perhaps as a kind of exorcism. His hair is gelled upwards at the front, in miniature stooks, a fashionable look for young men in retail banking.

  Ahead of me is the little golf course. Ponies graze on the greens. The locals say you should try to land your ball right on the ponies’ rumps; the ponies don’t feel it, and the ball drops dead. One of the members claims to have had a hole in one after his ball bounced off a pony and into the cup. This may be a local myth. From here the course runs down to a point where the course drops away and emerges again at the other side of a clear stream.

  Before I enter the house I can smell Swedish coffee – mörkrost, dark roast. Nellie hands me a cup.

  ‘How was your walk?’

  ‘Great. This is a wonderful time of the year. Actually I like the forest all year round.’

  ‘Frank, good news, I just had a text from Bertil. He would love to come to Cape Town.’

  ‘That’s terrific, what a good idea. I am so glad. I have lots of space and he could learn to surf and all that stuff. It would get him out of himself a little. It could also be good for Lucinda to get to know him.’

  ‘I am not sure he needs to get out of himself, but, yes, a happy holiday would be great.’

  ‘Sorry. That’s really what I was thinking about, his happiness. I think he has been a little down at times.’

  ‘He takes Lars’s problems to heart. He loves Lars, but seeing Lars is very difficult for him. It still makes me angry, as though he wanted to throw his life away. But I can’t say that. In fact you are the only person I have ever told.’

  ‘I think it could be good for Bertil and Lucinda to be thrown together. I hate to say it, but both of them are wounded and they need to be carefree.’

  ‘It will be fine,’ Nellie says reassuringly. ‘They have a lot going for them.’

  I am not sure just what it is that is going for them, but I have learned to trust Nellie’s judgement in these matters. Still, I wonder if Bertil will accept that his mother is sleeping with me, although of course he knows already:

  In the rank sweat of an unseamed bed,

  Stewed in corruption, honeying and making love

  Over the nasty sty.

  There is something of the Hamlet about Bertil. He has been in my house in Notting Hill from his boarding school in Kent a few times and in his sullen withdrawal I saw a kind of passive resistance – perhaps not directed to me as a person, but to me as a substitute for Lars. There can be disgust and resentment in children whose parent has taken up with another.

  For breakfast we have blueberry buttermilk pancakes and freshly gathered mushrooms on toast. We are going riding. I had my own horse, stabled near by, but he died of colitis last year. He was a lovely seven-year-old gelding – a bay – honest, even charming, and always eager. It was this eagerness that endeared him to me. His name was Bismarck when I bought him; I changed that to Rocket because I had read My Friend Flicka so avidly. I wanted to live in Wyoming.

  As a boy in Johannesburg I used to ride during the school holidays; the high point of my holidays was always the Pony Club camp. About twenty children went to spend a week on a farm, riding our own ponies. The attraction was meeting girls, some of whom I later had sex with. As you get older your relationships with people you have slept with take on the aspect of something warm and innocent, something to be cherished, even if in reality the sex back then was casual and had some of the qualities of a treasure hunt.

  Even now I can remember little details – the fine hairs on Jeanne Gallo’s arms, Fran Cheesman’s erotic teeth, Deborah Nutting’s freckled nose and cheeks, with their endearing natural rain spots. Last year a friend emailed me to tell me that Deborah Nutting’s first husband beat her up and she married again, to Dougie Nash, and he had a heart attack and died. Deborah emailed me: she has come through it all a stronger person. And she wants to meet up with me again.

  Email has freed many people to rewrite their partial ve
rsions of their lives. Many of the emails sent to me are concerned with their highly successful children, who have emigrated from South Africa to Canada and Australia; they also tell of the struggles with life which have fortuitously revealed undiscovered artistic talent and self-sufficiency.

  Nellie rides as she does everything – she is neat, uncomplicated and eager. In a way I am dreaming myself back into my Retief heritage: I ride like a Boer on commando, my feet thrust defiantly forwards. The horses are from our local stable. The stable girls looked after Rocket, and they were as upset as I was when he died. They still seem to think I need condolence. They talk to me in a solicitous whisper; they believe in the grieving process. I admire horsey people for their dedication, for embracing a world of mucking-out, tack cleaning, picking hooves, summoning vets, feeding and schooling the horses. In their minds I think the girls have the model of a kind of equine heaven. At the same time I feel that we patronise them as we sweep into the run-down and make-do yard in my Mercedes, where the horses are already saddled, waiting, resigned.

  I once gave the owners a thousand pounds when they couldn’t pay the feed bill. A truck was parked in the yard; the driver, who had long Victorian sideboards, said that the suppliers were not able to unload without payment. I took the company’s details and made a payment by phone. The driver ordered his assistant, who was drinking a Lucozade, to unload. The driver said he was very sorry he had to put us in this position, but the high-ups in the firm insisted: since 2008 many people had been selling their horses or even giving them away. First thing to go in a recession, he said. Some of these horses ended up in curries or meat for hospitals, he said. He spoke with an almost lost accent, the Hampshire dialect, which was almost driven out by the Cockney influx to the new towns which were built forty years ago.

  ‘We’re ’anging on bouy the skin of’ve ow-er teeth,’ he said.

  It was beautiful to hear all those extra vowels. Like so many aspects of English life, they will be missed when they are gone for ever. I have a private sense of the country’s increasing coarseness.