In the morning I get up early to go to the airport to fetch Lucinda. Nellie offered to come with me but I thought it might be better to go alone because I could not be sure what state of mind Lucinda would be in. I am apprehensive.
The airport has a down-home quality: rugby shirts, biltong, popular novels and crude souvenirs are on sale beside Xhosa beads and bracelets, knock-off Dogon figures, zebra-skin rugs, and diamonds. I once bought a diamond here as a last-minute offering for Georgina as I waited for a plane. She wore it attached to a thin gold chain. After a row she put it away, and I never saw it again.
African women in a uniform, which looks like a housecoat, walk about in small, sociable knots, their feet scraping the floor, as if indicating that they are not in a hurry. I have never understood what this foot-dragging signals –perhaps it’s a kind of insouciant sexiness – but I remember it clearly from Tannie Marie’s farm, all those years ago. All those years ago, when I was innocent.
In the hall I wait anxiously for the plane from San Francisco via Johannesburg to land. I can see the glassed-in passage in which Lucinda will appear. The plane is delayed. I call Nellie.
‘We are quite happy, darling. Bertil and Vanessa are surfing, and kissing.’
‘They can’t stop. It’s so sweet. Adorable.’
‘The plane is late. That’s why I rang.’
‘Okay, don’t stress, we are very happy. I went in the sea. In a wetsuit, but still it was cold. My head was aching. In the Baltic the water is warm.’
‘I know, it’s all my fault. Also, allow me to take this opportunity to apologise that we don’t have wild strawberries and lingonberries and trolls. And by the way, the Baltic is mostly fresh water. This water here comes all the way down from the northern Atlantic in deep currents and wells up just about in front of the house. Not like your little softy inland sea. Oh, okay, I hear now that the flight has landed and is taxiing to its berth. We should be home at about one for lunch. What is Lindi making?’
‘She has made pickled fish. Is that nice?’
‘Nice? Nice? It’s epic. It’s the finest thing you will ever eat, and it is totally delicious, and compulsory. It’s Malay, very traditional. Not only that, but Lindi makes the best pickled fish in the whole of Cape Town – and suburbs. Jag älskar dig, Nellie.’
‘I love you too. Keep working on the Swedish. You have a limited vocabulary, but a sexy accent.’
It takes some time for the first passengers to appear in knots, looking like a defeated army coming home exhausted and beaten. Even their luggage seems to have taken a battering. I see a small beagle checking baggage for drugs as the doors to customs open. I hope Lucinda isn’t foolish enough to have brought drugs with her. The beagle looks diligent, and in love with its work. It wears a tabard just so we know what its vocation is: Drug enforcement.
I wait patiently; what’s a few more minutes when you haven’t seen your only child for so long? Before she went to California, she seemed to believe that taking drugs was a higher calling, something like the beagle’s. She once went into a reception at the US Ambassador’s house in Regent’s Park with cocaine in a bag. An electronic sensor ran over her clutch bag; it signalled her guilt and she was taken to a small room, smiling vacantly and shrugging her shoulders to suggest that officious and unenlightened nobodies were making trouble at the behest of the ruling classes.
‘It’s a fit-up, people,’ she said to innocent guests. I was mortified.
My connections to the Ambassador eventually prevailed over the law, and Lucinda was released. Her defence was infuriating: she said the rules were absurd and fascist. If she needed a little coke in the ladies’ powder room, who was being harmed? I long ago discovered that taking drugs leads to a kind of irritating obduracy, as though the user is somehow blameless, and the rest of the world is blinkered. And yet my love for her is unconditional. Even in the course of our worst times, my frustration with her was inseparable from love. And even now my instinct is to console her at all times, whatever pain she has caused me.
The doors open and I catch sight of Lucinda. My heart is pounding and tumbling within my chest. She emerges with a mountain of luggage. She is holding the hand of a small child. A black child. How kind of her. She waves. She skips, and points at me for the benefit of the child. Why would you point out a stranger? And then I realise what is going on: this child is with Lucinda. Lucinda waves again and hurries to the barrier. I kiss her and she hugs me. The little boy holds on to her hand and retreats behind this laager of grown-ups.
‘Daddy, how wonderful. It’s so great to see you. It’s like it’s been years. Like for ever.’
She looks very good; her eyes are no longer scrunched up defensively and her face has filled out a little, so that I see once more my girl. My treacherous tears react. The memories of the struggle we have had, and the hell she has been through, well up inside me. I am only just suppressing my tears, which have a sort of autonomy, an independence from my rational self.
‘Don’t cry, Daddy. Look, this is Isaac, and he is coming along.’
‘Is he yours, darling?’
I ask it as evenly as I can manage.
‘He’s the son of my boyfriend, Emerante, who is a musician from Haiti. His ex-partner decided she wasn’t going to look after him while Emerante went to WOMAD. What could I do?’
I hardly understand what she is saying.
‘Are you allowed to take this child with you?’
‘No problem. He has a child passport and I used his mother’s passport. I am more or less his mother anyway. She’s white in case you were wondering.’
I take little Isaac up in my arms.
‘Hello, little Isaac, my name is Frank.’
‘Hello, Grandpa,’ he says. ‘Why are you crying?’
‘Grandpa is pleased to see you, Isaac,’ says Lucinda.
‘Did you talk to him about me? How old is he?’
‘He’s two and six months. Yes, I told him all about you and what a wonderful father you have been and I told him you are his grandfather. I showed him pictures of you.’
I am a little disturbed by Lucinda’s legerdemain with passports and grandfathers and genealogy.
Isaac is now holding my hand confidently. ‘Hello, Grandpa,’ he says.
‘Hello, little Isaac.’
A porter loads up the mountains of luggage and wheels us to the parking garage. If you saw the luggage you might imagine that Marie Antoinette was travelling incognito. I wonder if I can call Nellie to tell her that Isaac is coming. I decide against it. We drive out of the airport and onto the main highway; I am once again ashamed of the shacks that line the road and the plastic bags which my mother so loathed flying across the highway in the wind, and I note the cattle and goats grazing on the verge – more like foraging hopefully for anything edible – and I note the small dead animals beside the road, cats and feral dogs. I feel as if I am personally required to explain these shacks and animal corpses to Lucinda and to put them into context – e.g., the exit from the rural areas, which leads me to a brief detour on the effects of liberation, and includes a short talk on the role our ancestor had in this history, a history which has led by winding and unpredictable routes to this misery and squalor.
We rush towards Table Mountain, holding the astounding, improbable mountain in our gaze through the windscreen so that the squalor on either side of the road is quickly forgotten. The mountain is misted in blue, like cigarette smoke. In some weathers it looks like a huge liner, moored to the flatlands we are now crossing. I say that it is a World Heritage Site and how as a boy at school we walked the paths and climbed up the gorges on Sundays. Sunday was the only day we were allowed out of school and for me it was an escape to the heights and the deep shade and the streams of brownish water coursing down through the forests, and the ropes of climbing plants that reminded me so vividly of the Tarzan films I had seen. There were places up there where we would swim. I tell Lucinda about Jan Smuts, one-time Prime Minister, who loved the mountain and ensured that it would never be built on above a certain level, so that wherever you are in Cape Town you see the massive green and blue and purple mountain looming above. It is, I say, my cathedral.
‘God, it is so beautiful,’ says Lucinda. ‘It’s awesome.’
‘It’s awesome,’ says Isaac cheerfully.
‘Don’t worry, he repeats everything.’
I can’t call Nellie. But I am pretty sure she will rise to the occasion. She is Swedish for a purpose, to advance the cause of tolerance. We plunge down towards the Atlantic and my house, and Lucinda is again struck by the view, as though it were arranged just for her; she is a little proprietorial, as if all these natural wonders are the better for being viewed by her. When I point out some whales hugging the shore – the whales are busily heading north in numbers – she asks me to pull over so that she can study them, or perhaps so that she can share their insights. Whales are held in high esteem in California.
They are soon gone.
‘The whales have gone, little Isaac.’
‘Whales have gone,’ says Isaac.
‘They are going home.’
‘Going home,’ says Isaac.
We pull up at the house. Lindiwe is waiting for us, and Bertil emerges from his tower in his new life-saver’s shorts, looking like a surf dude already; his shoulders and nose are a little burnt and his hair seems to have been bleached. Vanessa and he have been listening to music. Nellie hugs Lucinda. Lindiwe hugs her too.
‘Who is this lovely little person?’ Nellie asks.
Lindiwe, trying to be helpful, speaks to the little boy in Xhosa.
‘He is the son of Lucinda’s boyfriend,’ I say. ‘He is American.’
‘His name is Isaac. His father is away at WOMAD,’ says Lucinda, as if rock music has an indisputable precedence over all other forms of human endeavour.
‘How gorgeous you are, Isaac,’ says Nellie, picking him up. He puts his thumb in his mouth and strokes his own hair. His eyes seem to glaze over with contentment.
I wonder, as parents do, how my daughter could have neglected to give me such important news.
‘When he has his thumb in his mouth, that means he is happy,’ says Lucinda. Her smile is wonderful to me.
She turns to Bertil: ‘I have heard so much about you from my father, Bertil. It’s like great you could be here too.’
I am pleasantly surprised that Lucinda should be so tactful and sociable. Until recently there was only one topic of interest and that was her relationship to her karma; her karma, she said, was fragile as a result of her actions in previous states of existence. This was the sort of wisdom that she has picked up on the journey.
‘Right, let’s unpack and we will have lunch.’
Nellie shows them to their bedrooms; she decides that Isaac should sleep in Lucinda’s room and she says we should hire a cot for him. Also, Nellie finds that Lucinda has not brought many baby clothes, so I offer to take a trip to Woolworths after lunch if she gives me a list. I also ask Lindiwe if she knows someone who could do some child-minding. Yes, she does. Her cousin will come any time she is required.
Bertil and Vanessa are sitting on the swing chair together.
‘Are you staying for lunch, Vanessa? There is plenty.’
‘Thanks, Mr McAllister, that would be great. I will just call my mom to tell her.’
She glances at Bertil. He looks down, smiling ambiguously, perhaps to mask a little discomfort.
Rock pigeons are calling and sunbirds are busy probing for nectar in the protea flowers. A chanting goshawk whistles somewhere up above and the neurotic guinea fowl are protesting; they have a restless mentality, a crowd mentality, always rushing, and suddenly stopping, and then milling about as if they are waiting for the next rabble-rouser to speak and sometimes they take flight, screaming without reason. All these calls are familiar and reassuring to me.
Over lunch Nellie sits with Lucinda; little Isaac is wedged between them. Nellie is enchanted by Isaac; he has a quality of warmth I have never before encountered in a very small child, a precocious empathy. He is the centre of attention, not because he is so young, not because he is being promoted in the self-serving way that parents affect, but because he is an innocent.
‘Hello, Grandpa,’ he says to me.
‘I told him Dad was his grandpa,’ Lucinda says to Nellie.
‘Hello, to you, Isaac. What do you want to eat?’
‘Cookies. And ice cream, Grandpa.’
‘Is that okay, Lucinda?’
‘Oh. Sure. He had a huge breakfast on the plane.’
I can’t quite see the connection between breakfast and ice cream. Lindiwe brings a cone of vanilla ice cream. Isaac licks it carefully.
‘Very cold,’ he says.
We wait expectantly to hear his next judgement. And here we are, sitting in the shade, overlooking the sea, a very modern family, lulled by warmth and affection.
The afternoon is becoming hotter. The wind off the sea has died. We walk down to the beach and I dive in and body-surf on a few modest waves. Nellie walks with Isaac and Lucinda towards the huge rocks to the north where the boy was drowned some years ago. I run rather stiffly along the beach to catch up with them.
‘Not bad, Dad,’ says Lucinda. ‘You look good. For ninety-seven, that is.’
‘Ho, ho. Don’t give up the day job.’
‘Not bad, Grandpa,’ says Isaac.
‘Want a swim in the sea, big boy?’
‘Yes please, Grandpa.’
We walk down to the water. I pick him up and we move slowly until his little feet are in the water. I lower him carefully so that he is lying in the water.
‘Brrr … cold,’ he says, wriggling.
His hair is quite bushy, something like the coiffeur of the early Jackson Five. He is shivering as I dry him.
‘I love you, Grandpa,’ he says.
There are tears in my eyes again, fortunately indistinguishable from seawater.
As I set off for the Woolworths in the nearby fishing village, a kind of joy comes over me. For the moment I cannot remember the rest of the quote, hard as I try.
I love the drive down to the harbour and the village and the perfect bay beyond. It’s a makeshift little town with a fish-processing factory near the harbour; the harbour is home to indolent breakaways from the seal colony about half a mile out to sea; the refusenik seals lie luxuriously on pontoons and on the harbour wall. Having forsaken the traditionally active life of the seal, which demands some vigorous swimming, they have opted for hand-outs. Occasionally they will bark; this bark lacks conviction.
A sprawl of suburban houses is gathered around the port and is climbing up the hills. Some of these houses are Spanish in their inspiration, others are thatched in rondavel style, others have cheap modernist leanings. All of them have elaborate electrified fences.
The main road to the harbour is sometimes covered with sand driven in by the wind. A huge sand hill has appeared where once there was a car park. Up on the hills some way from the port, a squatter camp has appeared in the last twenty years. The residents come from all over Africa. It is a violent place, known to the white locals as Mandela Park.
Woolworths has everything I can think of for little Isaac. I buy a collapsible cot, shorts, small sneakers, swimming trunks and a hat; also socks, underpants, a mound of nappies, a drinking beaker and a sou’wester, in case it should rain. I find some small denim dungarees, and I buy these too. The butcher has some of the finest boerewors, he says, and I take a few kilos to freeze. I buy a bunch of dill for Nellie. At the harbour shop I buy six live lobsters from a tank and some tuna steaks. The ready-cooked lobsters, lying on ice, have a deep red colour, the colour of arterial blood. I am in a frenzy of buying and providing as if I am expecting a long siege.
Back at the house Nellie and Lindiwe come out to help unload all I have bought.
‘Where’s Lucinda, darling?’
‘Oh, she’s a little tired, and so is Isaac. They are both soundly asleep. Do you say soundly asleep?’
‘Sound. Sound asleep. But soundly is good.’
‘Okay, sound. And Bertil and Vanessa are down on the beach.’
‘I’ll light the fire. I think I may have bought too much. I went slightly mad.’
‘I see. But the more the better.’
‘You know that a braai is a sacred rite here. It’s like Sankta Lucia, with fire and meat. We take it very seriously. It makes us what we are.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Candidates for a coronary. But we are having lobsters and tuna. I found some dill as you asked.’
‘Great, I will make Swedish mayonnaise.’
Nellie chops dill to stir into her mayonnaise and Lindiwe, as usual, has anticipated what I want and she has stacked the wood neatly beside the braai. I feel uneasy about her devotion to me and my comforts, but it is hard to resist. I light the fire – men’s work. In Africa some tribes still keep the sacred fire going at all times and I understand why: the smoke is a message to heaven, a reminder that we exist. Nobody wants to believe that they are adrift in an uncaring universe.
The idea is to boil the lobsters for a few minutes and then to grill them in the shell and to put the tuna on a lower heat to the side. I have no qualms about boiling lobsters and watching their last quadrille as their carapaces change from Byzantine blue to haematite, a mineral red. That is the moment when you take them out of the water.
Nellie and I sit down with a glass of sparkling wine as the fire comes to life.
‘Did Lucinda give you any more explanation?’
‘Of Isaac? Not really, she says she had no choice.’
‘Do you mind having him?’
‘Of course not. I am already in love with little Isaac.’
‘You are right on trend. It’s become fashionable among the whites here to adopt orphan children, often because the mother has died of AIDS.’
‘Frank, it worries me, how did she manage to bring the child in?’
‘Don’t tell anybody, but she said that she borrowed her boyfriend’s ex-partner’s passport. I just hope there isn’t some sort of hoopla when she goes. Here come the young lovers.’
We smile at Bertil and Vanessa encouragingly, as though they would benefit from our approval. The fact is, I am eager for their approval and affection. I have accepted that Nellie speaks to them more naturally than I do. She has a quality which young people quickly recognise: she is genuinely interested in them.
Bertil and Vanessa approach the fire, staring at the flames as though drawn, like moths. The wood is burning bright and giving off the scent of eucalyptus.
‘How’s the surfing going?’ Nellie asks.
‘We went to Muizenberg with Vanessa’s brother, and we surfed there.’
‘How did that go?’
Vanessa points at Bertil as though we need to locate him.
‘Bertil can stand up on his board already. It’s like amazing. Awesome. Natural talent.’
She makes a fist and bumps it against Bertil’s knuckles. He laughs rather desperately and rolls his eyes.
Vanessa says, ‘Respect, bru,’ to Bertil, before giving him another fist bump.
I wonder if I should speak to Vanessa’s mother about drugs. She paints the harbour and the mountains in acrylic and sells the pictures at the weekly market. Sometimes she paints pictures of the squatter camps, the corrugated-iron walls, the buckets of water carried by children, the blue doors and window frames on the shacks, children playing with old inner tubes and tyres, the occasional donkey pulling a cart, which has the axle and tyres of a small car. All these scenes are in demand from tourists. Vanessa’s mother, Selina, wears wispy, trailing clothes, as if she is a postulant fairy; on reflection I don’t think news of marijuana in Kent is going to worry her. As boys we used to smoke Swazi Gold or Durban Gold, the best in the world, we believed. We were always inclined to believe that South Africa was, in some way, world class. The best stuff grew wild in the mountains of Swaziland, a kind of Valhalla for hippies.
I wake Lucinda but leave little Isaac asleep. She groans and stretches and turns over.
‘Food’s up.’
‘I am not hungry.’
‘The lobsters are ready.’
‘Oh, okay, give me a few minutes while I shower.’
‘Okay.’
I see her mother’s almond eyes as she appraises me for a moment.
I sit next to little Isaac, watching him breathe. I am hoping he will wake up soon, but he’s out for the count. I am waiting eagerly for his levée. My mind is a little volatile. It ranges over Piet Retief’s death to the sardine run which is due to arrive in the bay any day now. I have never seen it, but the locals say you can catch your supper in a hat. If you want to catch your supper in a hat. I wonder, too, if Cousin Jaco is safely back in the bosom of his church; I have a feeling I haven’t seen the last of him.
I hear a muffled childish cry. Little Isaac is awake.
‘Hello, Grandpa,’ he says. His face appears to be soft and vulnerable, as though sleep has made it malleable.
‘Hello, Isaac. Are you hungry?’
‘I am, Grandpa.’
‘Okay, I will just change your nappy.’
I feel blessed as I clean him up. He lies amongst the mess amiably.
‘You have big ears, Grandpa.’
‘Yes, I suppose I do. Compared with yours anyway.’
My ears do appear to be getting bigger; perhaps they are trying to keep pace with my face.