He has thought about Canning and Baby from time to time during the week, with both irritation and excitement. He’s aware, in almost a physical way, of the weekend coming closer, but he doesn’t like the pull that they exert on him, he fights against it, so that when he drives out to Gondwana in the late morning on Saturday, the journey happens almost vaguely, as if he’s actually headed somewhere else. It’s only when he turns in at the gate that a sense of inevitability closes around him, like a soft fist.
He is prepared for a long discussion with the guard. But the man – not the same one as before – grins and tells him, ‘Mr Canning, he say you are coming.’ Then there is the vast landscape opening around him, with its hot distances, its broken, abandoned farmsteads. And ahead of him, like something dark and secret and forbidden, that green fold in the mountains.
There is another car, a Mercedes, parked under the trees. A visitor. And when he has crossed to the lodge, Adam hears a strange voice speaking. He stops for a moment to listen – not eavesdropping exactly; just getting his bearings.
‘As it stands,’ the voice is saying, ‘the EIA can’t be passed. It’s too negative. We need a new report, with positive conclusions. Then he’ll pass it.’
Canning’s voice answers. ‘I’m working on it. I’ll have a new EIA in a couple of weeks. But I’m not convinced he’ll pass it, even then.’
‘He’s jumpy, it’s true. But if you make the donation we talked about, he’ll move on it.’
‘I’ll make the donation. I’ve got it ready. It’s all wrapped up, just waiting to be delivered.’
‘Go ahead and deliver it. Then when you submit the EIA, it’ll be passed smoothly. I’m guaranteeing it, I spoke to him this morning.’
Adam can’t place at first where this exchange is happening. He’s in that high, central space, where sounds break and echo. But when he walks a little further, in the big mirror above the reception desk he sees the two of them huddled in chairs in front of the fireplace. They seem knotted together in a parody of conspiracy, and their voices carry the low, private note of collusion.
‘I’m anxious,’ Canning is saying. ‘This is holding everything up. Mr Genov is very keen to move forward.’
‘So am I. You know that. I’ve also got a stake in this, remember.’
‘Yes, of course. I’m just saying.’
The visitor is a short, shiny black man, in his early thirties, wearing snappy casual clothes. Even in profile, at a distance, he looks familiar to Adam. He is leaning forward, towards Canning, but he senses the intruder and pulls quickly back.
‘Oh,’ Canning says, and jumps up. There is a minuscule beat in which he looks uncertain, but then his usual hearty demeanour takes over. ‘Come in, come in,’ he says. ‘This is Sipho Moloi, up from Cape Town for the day. Sipho, this is Nappy.’
Adam smarts under the nickname as they shake hands. But Sipho Moloi wears a gleaming grin. Yes, Adam has seen him before, maybe on television – and he has the eager vacancy of a continuity announcer as he says, with too much sincerity, ‘I am so very happy to meet you.’ An awkward pause follows on.
Canning says, ‘We’re just talking business for a second, Nappy. Could I give you to Baby for a while? She’s outside, at the room. Why don’t you go and chat to her?’
Adam’s eyes have adjusted to the dimmer light indoors; as he goes back out onto the lawn he is momentarily dazzled by the sun. He struggles to find the right one in the circle of identical rondawels and has to knock on three doors before Baby’s voice answers. He can hear at once that she is peevish and fretful.
‘Oh, I wasn’t expecting a visitor,’ she says. ‘I haven’t got any makeup on.’
Makeup seems to be the least of it: she’s still in bed in her nightclothes, her hair hanging loose around her shoulders. Around her, like space-debris encircling a planet, is a litter of old cups, mascara sticks, hair-brushes and dropped clothes. Spread out on the duvet is some kind of card game, apparently abandoned halfway through. All of the mess seems to emanate from Baby; there is no trace of Canning, except for a single jacket hung over a chair.
‘How are you?’ she says tonelessly. She doesn’t look at him as she speaks; her long nails continue to flick through the pages of a fashion magazine.
‘I’m fine.’ He has to raise his voice to be heard above the simultaneous clamour of the television and a radio blaring from the bathroom. ‘What about you? Are you ill?’
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I am ill – with boredom.’ She sweeps the cards onto the floor with a tiny, impatient hand.
‘You should come outside. It’s a gorgeous day.’
‘Outside? What would I do there?’
‘You could sit in the sun, or go for a walk.’
‘Come in,’ she says, by way of answer. ‘Sit down.’ And once he has entered the room and put himself down in an armchair, her mood seems to lift: she smiles radiantly at him and throws the magazine aside. ‘Would you like something to drink?’
He asks for a coffee; there is a coffee machine on the kitchen counter, along with sugar and Cremora. But she doesn’t move from the bed; she picks up a telephone next to her and speaks tersely to somebody. While they wait she takes a hand-mirror and various bits of makeup that are scattered around and starts unselfconsciously to paint her face. In a few minutes the old black woman he’d seen last week comes in with a cup. In her age and her air of tattered futility, she is everything Baby is not. But no glance, no acknowledgement, passes between the two women, except in the form of command.
‘The coffee is for the master, Grace. Put it down there.’
Adam takes it from her. There is a tiny, involuntary contact between their hands, and he wonders, abstractedly, what it feels like for somebody like Grace to be taking orders from Baby. Just a few years ago they would’ve both been in the same position: exiled from power, with no prospects, no future. Now everything has changed for Baby, while for Grace it has all stayed the same. He glances at the old lady, but she shows nothing in her face; she doesn’t even raise her eyes as she goes out.
With remarkable swiftness, Baby has filled in the blank oval of her face – her lips, eyebrows, cheekbones, have all taken on form. As he watches her daub a lurid green shadow onto her eyelids, Adam has a flash of the same obscure anger she’d stirred up in him last week. Who is she, this vain, vacuous, lovely little doll, to whom all the lush beauty outside is just torment and boredom? Yet his irritation is inseparable from desire, and with a mixture of both he finds himself asking her, ‘Where did you guys meet?’
‘Me and Kenneth?’
It’s part of the strangeness of this whole setup that he doesn’t know who she means. Then he realizes: Canning has a first name. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘You and Kenneth.’
‘It was in Johannesburg. A mutual friend introduced us. At a party.’
‘And was it love at first sight?’
‘Something like that.’
She has finished with her face; she examines the final effect in the mirror before setting it aside. Without pausing, she takes up a vial of nail polish and starts working on the spread fingers of her left hand. She seems not to notice that he’s there. His longing and anger more intense, Adam says, ‘What’re they talking about in there?’
‘Kenneth and Sipho? Just business.’
‘Well, I’m sorry that I’ve been forced on you.’
‘No, I’m happy to see you.’
But she doesn’t look happy; she looks indifferent. He has finished the coffee and is about to make an excuse and leave when she looks directly at him with her brilliant green gaze and says, ‘Could you help me for a minute?’
‘What do you want me to do?’
‘Could you do the nails on my right hand? Do you mind? I always mess it up.’
He crosses uncertainly to the bed. She is holding the hand out to him, coolly. He sits down on the edge of the mattress and goes to work with the brush. The lacquer is green, the same shade as her eyes, and the artificial smell of it stings his nose. At the same time he’s conscious of her long, slender fingers in his palm, and the nearness of her breasts under their filmy white cloth. He can feel that she’s looking at him, but he doesn’t return the gaze.
‘You’re spilling,’ she murmurs. ‘
Sorry.’
‘Your hand is shaking.’
‘No, it’s not,’ he says, but he can feel the tremor himself. He tries to keep his attention on the task. ‘I’m interested in your name,’ he says fiercely. ‘Where does it come from?’
‘Baby? It’s just a name.’
‘Yes, but it’s unusual. Who chose it, your mother or your father?’
‘I don’t know,’ she says crossly. ‘I wasn’t there.’ She pulls her hand away sharply. ‘Never mind,’ she tells him. ‘You’re messing it up. I’ll finish it myself.’
He’s about to answer her when he hears Canning’s voice outside. In a moment he’s on his feet and has moved several steps from the bed. The movement is involuntary; his nearness to Baby feels illicit and dangerous, something he must conceal. But she is calm, blowing on her nails, as her husband blusters in, full of effusion and apology.
‘Sorry about that, Nappy, just had to take care of a few things. I hope Baby has looked after you?’
‘I’ve looked after him very well,’ she says. Her voice and her eyes are steady. She picks up the brush and starts to paint the last fingernail, carefully and exactly.
*
Adam and Canning and Sipho Moloi sit in the cavernous restaurant of the lodge, the only customers in a thicket of tables and chairs. They are waited on by the old black couple, who lurch in and out through a pair of swinging doors that lead to the unseen kitchen beyond. Adam watches them come and go, but he can’t work them out. He says to Canning. ‘It’s quite unusual, isn’t it, to see...’
He becomes aware of Sipho, and doesn’t finish.
‘Blacks in this part of the world, you mean?’ Canning is gnawing on a drumstick, pulling off pieces with his fingers. ‘They were my father’s most devoted servants, actually. They followed him around from farm to farm, all over the country. They started out in the Orange Free State, went all the way up north, almost to the Limpopo, and ended up here. I remember them from when I was a small boy. Ezekiel must’ve been a young man then, in his early twenties.’ The thought makes him glance reflectively at the old man, who thinks he’s being summoned, and comes forward.
‘Ja, my Kleinbaas...?’
‘No, no, I’m not calling you, Ezekiel. But tell Mr Adam, did you like the Oubaas?’
Ezekiel bares his two worn fangs in a smile. ‘Ja, ja, die Oubaas, hy was baie goed vir ons...’
‘And for how many years did you work for him, Ezekiel?’
‘Meer as veertig jaar, Kleinbaas.’
‘And were you happy, Ezekiel?’
‘Ja, hy was goed vir ons, die Oubaas...’
‘Thank you, Ezekiel. You can bring me some toothpicks, please.’
Through this whole exchange, Sipho Moloi has kept his eyes demurely down, while he chews fastidiously. Adam has another moment like the one in the rondawel, where he wonders at what wordless perceptions might be passing between this young, well-heeled black yuppie, and the poor old family retainer. But perhaps he is the only one who notices: the two of them are so far from one another, sitting at such divergent points of history, that they might be in different worlds. Instead it’s Adam who’s left with an acute awareness of the life that Canning’s thoughtless cross-questioning has evoked: the blind economic dependence, the drifting around from one place to another in the wake of the Oubaas, the indeterminate destiny ahead...
‘He doesn’t like me much, actually,’ Canning says, as Ezekiel goes to the kitchen. ‘He much preferred my father. The old man could speak his language, at least.’
For the first time, Sipho glances up with a flash of genuine interest. ‘Really?’ he says. ‘Your father spoke isiXhosa?’
‘Oh, yes. And Zulu too, as a matter of fact. He was the old-style feudal overlord, you know. Could give orders to the serfs in their own language.’
‘You didn’t ever want to learn yourself?’
‘Never thought about it, actually. And now it’s too late. The brain has hardened.’ He’s finished with the chicken bone; his mouth is shiny with grease. ‘Don’t know what to do about Ezekiel and Grace,’ he adds musingly. ‘They’re pretty useless these days. Not much future there. I’ll have to make a plan.’
Sipho has finished his meal; he lays down his knife and fork, wipes his fingers on his napkin. ‘I’m going to leave you in a minute, Kenneth,’ he says. ‘There’s a long road in front of me.’
‘That’s a shame, Sipho. Can’t I persuade you to stay the night?’
‘No, I’ve got things to do. But I’ll be back soon enough.’
‘All right. I’ll walk you out, but just wait for me for a minute, I have to go and pee.’ When Adam and Sipho are alone, they smile at each other self-consciously, looking for something to say. The buzzing of a fly at the window next to them sounds uncomfortably loud.
‘And where do you fit into the picture?’ Sipho says at last.
‘Me? I, uh, I know Canning from school.’
‘Ah. So you know each other very well.’
‘You could say so. What about you? Where did you two meet?’
‘Nicolai introduced us.’ He glances at Adam. ‘Mr Genov, I mean. Do you know Mr Genov?’
‘I’ve heard his name. But I don’t know him. He doesn’t sound... local.’
‘Well, he lives here now, of course. But he comes from somewhere else. Russia, I think. Or maybe Bulgaria...? Anyway, it doesn’t matter, Eastern Europe somewhere. He’s moved around a lot. He’s a man of the world. Are you sure you’ve never met him?’
‘No. I mean, yes.’
‘So you’re not part of the deal.’
‘What deal is that?’
He looks away. ‘Well, I mean... you and Kenneth aren’t in business together.’
‘No, no. I’m not a businessman.’ Another pause, then Adam says, ‘What about you? You’re in television, right?’
‘Television?’ His friendly face looks puzzled. ‘I don’t follow you.’
Coming up behind Adam, Canning says, ‘Where do you get that from? Sipho’s involved in government.’
‘The government...? Oh, I beg your pardon, I thought...’
‘I really have to leave now, Kenneth. It’s late already.’
Adam trails behind them to the car. He feels embarrassed by his gaffe, but he has placed Sipho by now: his name, his face appear occasionally in the media. He is a mid-ranking politician, one of the new, young crowd, both known and unknown, in the way of nebulous officials. At least it explains the cheap celebrity veneer. But that’s about all it explains.
*
Canning takes him for a drive. They head out of the kloof, across the dry plain. There are dirt tracks looping and meandering out there, made for the purpose of game viewing. Their drive consequently has an aimless quality to it, exacerbated by Canning’s tendency to speed up or slow down without apparent reason. Along the way they pass more shattered homesteads and Canning explains that his father had had to dynamite any habitable buildings on the various farms he’d bought, so that squatters could not move in. It’s as if the land has been emptied out by war.
‘I’m sorry if I offended your friend just now,’ Adam says, after a silence sets in.
‘What? Oh, you mean Sipho...? He’s not my friend. He’s a wanker.’
Adam is startled. The cosy camaraderie he’d seen in the dining room an hour before seemed natural, unforced. Now Canning dismisses it with a casual wave of his hand.
Not long afterwards, at an arbitrary place in the middle of a flat stretch, Canning pulls over. ‘There’s something I want to show you,’ he says.
Adam follows him out, into heat and white light. A little way off the road, next to a dry watercourse, is a little cave. It’s a tiny, dark grotto, nothing special, but he points to a series of paintings along the rock wall.
Adam crouches down. ‘Bushman art?’ he says. ‘Is it real?’ The figures in the paintings are stick-like but expressive, the colours still bright. It appears to be a hunting scene: people with bows and arrows, pursuing animals.
‘Yes, of course they’re real,’ Canning says impatiently. ‘But forget them, I’m showing you something else.’
It takes Adam a while to make out another engraving altogether. This is a set of intertwined names cut into the rock. Kenneth/Lindile. There’s a blurred date underneath.
‘I don’t understand,’ Adam says, puzzled.
‘My first playmate,’ Canning tells him, ‘was a little black boy, Lindile. He was the son of Ezekiel and Grace – you know, the old couple at the lodge.’
‘You did this?’
‘Me and him, yes. Long ago, when we were very young. Before we grew up and realized how complicated the world was. It was an innocent time.’ Canning’s eyes have actually filmed over with moisture. ‘I often think about back then, Nappy. What I wouldn’t give to rewind to that time.’
‘Where is Lindile now?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. He’s around. But we’re not friends any more. Like I said, the world got complicated. My father paid for him to study in Cape Town, but he got all political and turned angry. So my father stopped paying and he disappeared. I haven’t seen him in years.’ He continues to gaze at the piece of juvenile graffiti, his face softened by sentiment.
There are contradictions in Canning’s story that Adam can’t work out. On the one hand, he refers to his childhood in slighting, bitter terms; on the other, he lapses into moments like these, where he becomes whimsical and nostalgic. He speaks about his father as a hard, angry man, an old-style feudal overlord, but then mentions casually that he could speak two black languages and paid for the education of his loyal servants’ child. It’s hard sometimes to know where one’s sympathies should lie.
And the contradiction extends to other aspects of Canning too. He speaks about Adam as some kind of childhood hero, but except for a general air of reverence he shows no genuine interest in him. Aside from a few perfunctory questions, he hasn’t tried to find out anything about Adam’s life in town, or what circumstances had led to him moving up here, or even what he’s done the past week since they met. In Canning’s company, Adam doesn’t feel like a real person so much as a symbol from long ago, whose full significance he doesn’t understand.
But then again, unexpectedly, Canning is capable of human, solicitous gestures. On the drive back to the lodge, he suddenly says, ‘You know, Nappy, I wanted to say...’ He hesitates, looking embarrassed, then goes on: ‘It’s just that I noticed... you don’t seem to have a lot of money at the moment. Your car, I mean, your clothes... what I’m trying to say is, if you ever need money, you just have to drop the word.’
Adam is taken by surprise. ‘Well, that’s very kind of you, Canning.’
‘Not at all. It’s just,’ he says forcefully, ‘I know what it’s like to be poor. I battled for a long time myself, in my early years. The whole chemical business, you know. But things are all right now. That’s my good luck! But I’d like to share my luck with you, Nappy.’
‘Thank you, Canning.’
‘Now we won’t mention it again, unless you need to.’
They drive on in silence, while Adam struggles with himself. Canning’s basic contradiction seems to have infected him too. It’s hard not to be touched by the offer of money, however fumblingly it was made. But at the same time his pride bristles: the two of them hardly know each other, after all, and there is something presumptuous and invasive in even discussing it. And what does he mean about his car and his clothes?
Back at the lodge, the evening is a repeat of last week: the fire under the tree, the endless blue cocktails, the drunken talk around the coals. Baby doesn’t emerge from the rondawel to join them, and neither man mentions her, but for both of them her absence is like a kind of presence.