Nellie and I walk hand in hand along Muizenberg Beach, which stretches into the distance. Lucinda and Isaac are making a dam in the sand. As Nellie walks, she radiates contentment. Inevitably I compare her to Georgina, with her moods and resentments. Her every instinct was to be restless and discontent. There was no place or circumstance that did not agitate her, and often the implication was that I was somehow to blame for her agitation. I began to believe it myself.
Nellie is almost implausibly enthusiastic. She looks out to sea, where Bertil is learning to surf. I point her towards Seal Island, and she says it is beautiful. In the junction where the waves meet the mountain, they are regular and relatively easy to ride. Sometimes great white sharks are spotted cruising with menace in the surf. But today there is no shark warning outside the surf shop – a red flag bearing an outline of a shark – and I doubt if Bertil will anyway get far enough into the water to be at risk. When we left him with Vanessa and the coach, he was standing on a board in the shallows. The surfing coach is a former world champion, Vanessa says. The reverence for sporting success is strong here; it is a substitute for thinking the unthinkable about the future. The coach has a distinct paunch under his wetsuit.
The beach stretches for twenty miles towards the Hottentot Holland Mountains to the east. I see myself as holding stock in all this sky and beach and mountains. This endless beach has always been democratic, open to all, despite the efforts of the apartheid government to segregate it.
A fishing boat has come ashore and is being pulled up the sand; two of the crew are hauling in the nets. I wave to Lucinda and Isaac to come see. A small crowd of people wait to find out what is in the nets. The coloured women are ready with their enamel basins. Little Isaac is very excited. He laughs when the fish wriggle.
The fish are red roman, stumpnose, and some steenbras; they are all familiar to me. I buy a whole stumpnose for the barbecue. I exchange pleasantries with the fishermen, showing off a little, always keen to speak Afrikaans. There are nuances in Afrikaans, which I value. I tell Nellie that these coloured people are not happy with the advance of the Xhosa squatters from the Eastern Cape, who live along the edge of the coast road in shacks in the bush. I say that the coloured people believe they have been marginalised by the African government; nothing has changed for them.
An older fisherman addresses me as ‘Master’, which makes me uneasy. He asks for a cigarette, but I don’t smoke. He can hardly believe it. He shakes his head as if to say the world has gone to pot. His face has weathered so that every wrinkle seems to be neatly folded onto another, like linen panelling in a Tudor house. His few remaining teeth are yellow, and his eyes are watery and filmed over. Perhaps tens of years out in the glare on this bay have damaged his eyes. They appear to be weak and barely focused, like a kitten’s.
The fisherman says that white stumpnose are declining in numbers, and that is why my fish is expensive. He seems surprised that I should have been willing to spend so much money. The white stumpnose has a complacent demeanour, like a well-fed Greek Orthodox priest.
I am content, as if this landscape and these people are there for my happiness. Both speak to me. I take the fish back to the car and put it in a cool bag. I run rather clumsily over the deep sand, wishing I were bounding along, lithe and unbowed, as once I was. Further up the beach, in front of the surf shop, Vanessa is on her board and surfing with Bertil. They are both in very high spirits. Bertil gives us a wave, and they surf in for about twenty yards, before Bertil’s board dips down and he falls head first into a wave. Vanessa glides up to him and holds his board in line while he climbs on again.
‘They are having a great time,’ says Nellie. ‘It’s wonderful to see him so happy.’
‘It’s pretty difficult not to be happy here.’
‘I can see that.’
‘I just hope that Lucinda is going to be reasonable.’
‘Don’t worry. We will look after her. She’s been just fine so far.’
She doesn’t want to usurp my parental role, but actually I think she will be better for Lucinda than I will. There is a kind of obduracy in Lucinda that quickly upsets me. And she can be pointlessly insistent at times.
‘I am not sure if she will ever be right,’ I say.
‘Right?’
‘Right in the sense that she may never recover from what happened with Georgina and then the drugs. I was reading only the other day that marijuana, never mind the hard drugs, warps and changes your brain for ever. She was such a sweet child. Nellie, what we did to her was inexcusable.’
‘Don’t be pessimistic. We will do our best. Please don’t worry too much. She’s a lovely girl.’
There is no hint of a reproach. Nellie has a touching inclination to look for the best qualities in everyone. I am keen to acquire this talent; I have always been too ready to judge. I put my arm around her and we stroll along the beach.
‘What you did wrong,’ Nellie says, ‘is to marry the wrong person.’
‘How do I find the right person?’
‘Ah, that’s up to you. Of course. I could not possibly give you any clues.’
She pronounces ‘clues’ as ‘cloos’.
‘No, I can see that would be wrong.’
‘Also, we skogsfru come from the forest. A skogsfru lures men down into endless caves. No man can resist her seductive powers.’
‘Goodness. Are you a fully paid-up skogsfru?’
‘I might be.’
‘Help, I may not be able to resist your charms.’
I start to run down the beach, bounding over kelp and streams. I slow down quite soon and in those few charged moments I see that we will be married. I have been rescued from bitterness and purged of resentment and I have found tranquillity with Nellie. I must marry her.
She is laughing when I come back at a gentle jog, panting.
‘You can’t run away from a skogsfru.’
‘I can see that. If that’s impossible, we might as well get married. Where would you like to be married?’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Of course. Where do you want to be married?’
‘If you are serious, maybe here, maybe Sweden. I’m easy.’
‘You know that “easy” also means promiscuous?’
‘We Swedish women are famous for being promiscuous. It’s not true, but the myth makes us seem more interesting than we really are.’
After a few minutes she says, ‘Can we have a party in Sweden also? For my friends and relatives?’
She leads me into the water. She puts her arms around me. We are standing waist deep in the water. A thick rope of kelp brushes against my leg and for a moment I think I have trodden on a sand shark. A wave knocks us over. We disappear for a few seconds under a wave.
Isaac is crying when we come out of the water. He is confused and upset, even though Lucinda has told him we were just swimming. I pick him up. His curly hair brushes my face as he hugs me. He puts his thumb in his mouth for a moment.
‘Did you swim, Grandpa? Can I swim, Grandpa?’
I take him waist deep and pretend to dunk him. He laughs wildly, as though it is the most wonderful thing he has ever known. Nellie towels him off. We go on to the ice-cream shop which sells rum-and-raisin and chocolate and tutti-frutti ice creams as well as plain vanilla. That’s their full range and I take pleasure in buying everyone an ice cream, especially one that evokes my childhood. Nellie suggests we stop at the sports shop to buy Isaac a small wetsuit. I buy one for Bertil too.
‘That’s, that’s so cool,’ he says.
The mountain behind is a deep, deep green, broken by the leaves of the silver trees, which are more gun-metal grey than silver. On a walk with school friends on this mountain – we were about thirteen – we were attacked by coloured boys, some of them possibly living on the mountain, bergies – who pelted us with large stones so that we had to run back to Boyes Drive. I was in fear of my life.
Now we take the high-level Boyes Drive and descend to a café further along the coast; it has fine coffee and a pleasantly louche atmosphere. The plates and teacups are all different as if acquired in house sales. It’s just the sort of place Georgina would have hated.
When we reach home the sun is going down directly off-shore. It moves fast; you can see it moving as it is pared away by the horizon and then quickly dragged into the sea. But the sky beyond is magnificent; from below the horizon, the sun is colouring listless clouds in pink and gold and Naples yellow.
I prepare the barbecue happily, using wood I bought from squatters along the road, neatly sawn and tied into bundles. They told me they were refugees from the Congo. I spoke to them in French.
‘C’est une vie dure,’ they said.
‘Oui, je le crois.’
And I can easily imagine that life is hard in the Congo; it is one of those countries we believe is always on the brink of anarchy. I blame Joseph Conrad.
The two men said that the locals hated them.
A whole stumpnose requires delicate treatment, wrapped in foil, before direct exposure to the wood embers. Nellie cleans and scales the fish; she says that Swedes know how to do this kind of thing; they are close to nature. She offers to make a salsa verde. Lindiwe wants to know how it is done. The barbecue is under a white milkwood tree, out of the wind, and I have a table fashioned from a long slab of Table Mountain granite. The massif of the mountain above and behind us is made of granite and sandstone.
‘Am I embarrassing you by saying I love you?’ Nellie asks.
‘Of course not. Say it as often as you can. I am amazed that you love me, but I can’t have enough of it.’
I hug her; she is richly perfumed by basil and mint and garlic.
‘You smell fragrant. That’s enough for me. I am marrying salsa verde. Nellie, honestly, I have never been so happy.’
And it’s true. I wonder why I have taken so long to acknowledge that I was deeply unhappy with Georgina.
The children appear from the beach. I guess that they have been kissing. They stop holding hands. Bertil looks a little flustered, in case we should see the rash of passion on their avid mouths. You don’t want to expose young love to your parents. Young love is anyway transient, a summer storm.
The stumpnose is wonderful. The salsa is perfect. The fire is glowing bright now, holding the darkness at bay.