I have hired a lodge for a few days at a reserve on the sea near the Tsitsikamma Forest. It’s about three hours east from my house and we are heading there for a weekend so that Nellie can see something of the country and some wild animals; in fact, so that we can all see the wonders I have been talking up. I have planned the journey to include a detour through the wine lands. My grandfather owned one of the great estates many years ago. We plan to stop at Franschhoek, a beautiful small town where we will have lunch on the veranda – the stoep as we like to call it – of my favourite restaurant, Le Quartier Français.
As we descend from Hells Hoogte – Hell’s Heights – I feel as though we are crossing the border to a secret but familiar and blessed world, a series of valleys and steep passes to wild mountains which suggest all kinds of possibilities, which include small towns that have hardly changed in a hundred and fifty years. But I know that this intimacy with the landscape is self-serving, a pleasant delusion. We drive down through the valley with vines on both sides of a road that follows the valley floor to Franschhoek, where we have lunch on the stoep and set off again somewhat reluctantly to drive up and over the pass. The last elephant was seen leaving the valley in the nineteenth century on this pass, just about the same time my ancestor left a nearby valley for his own Eden, where he was killed. Bertil is a little quiet, perhaps wishing he could have stayed with Vanessa, but he has his new surfboard strapped to the roof. After all, Vanessa has said that he is a natural and there are plenty of beaches where we are headed. Also, there are deep forests, where one wild elephant cow lives on, all alone, the last survivor of a great herd that had been there long before the white people arrived with their guns. It’s a sad story. When I was young I knew a girl who went for a walk in the forest on her own and was never seen again. At that time there were thought to be thirteen elephants living in the forest, and they were known to be very aggressive.
You could see this country as a kind of tapestry, intimately woven of beautiful landscapes and violent death. Some of the whites say that it is stimulating. At least it’s never dull here, they say.
The drive into the reserve is beguiling. When we open the windows of the car we can hear the roaring of the sea in the distance. On the dirt road towards the lodges, we see three tortoises and two snakes. We slow to a halt so we can look at the snakes closely. One is unmistakably a puff adder and the other a grass snake, I think. It’s certainly green. Lucinda is frightened, but the snakes are inert although their ever-alert tongues are testing the air. Bertil wants to know if they are poisonous. I tell him that the puff adder kills more people than any other snake, because it does not move fast and strikes when anyone comes too close. It lies on the road, full of truculent menace. In the background male ostriches, in their dandyish fashion, are displaying – unleashing their wings and dancing with a vain dipping movement designed to impress a drab female ostrich. Further in the distance there are some Hartmann’s zebras, the mountain zebra that not long ago was almost extinct. We are against animals and plants becoming extinct. We have adopted these politically neutral causes because we lack a moral or political role.
Our lodge overlooks a lagoon at the point where a beer-coloured river runs into it. The sea is rushing urgently through a gap in the sand bar into the lagoon. The lagoon and the river are home to otters. The guide notes say these are the Cape clawless otter. The notes also promise fish eagles. As we approach our lodge, we see a group of antelope, bontebok. They are dark and brown-and-white in patches, each patch sharply differentiated, as if they are maps of contiguous countries. They have white faces and horns shaped like a lyre. Their tails switching, they glance at us without interest before going back to grazing. As we are unloading we hear the forlorn, haunting cry of the fish eagle. It rips violently and ecstatically through the more gentle background chorus of the cicadas and the small birds and the base of the distant pounding of the waves. Some African tribes believe the cry of the fish eagle is a protest of the dead from beyond the grave.
Isaac and Nellie and Bertil and I go for a walk. Lucinda says she is still jet-lagged and needs a short sleep. She says that when she wakes up she will cook the leg of lamb we brought for supper. It is news to me that she can cook. I offer her a cookbook. She strokes my cheek and it warms to her touch.
‘Are you enjoying yourself, Bertil?’ I ask.
‘It’s great. It’s really great.’
‘I am enjoying myself, Grandma,’ says Isaac.
I see that Nellie is moved: little, mysterious, affable Isaac is touching both of us. His presence confers undeserved credibility on us.
‘I am so glad you are happy, Isaac.’
Nellie holds Isaac’s hand, and he walks gamely on. After a while I offer to carry him on my shoulders, and he agrees, which pleases me. He says, ‘Go horsey.’
Nellie, like me, wonders what the full story of Isaac is. Has his mother abandoned him – along with her passport – or has Lucinda appropriated the child? And are we complicit in some way? I will have to talk to Lucinda eventually. But now I feel a familiar resentment. Why has Lucinda taken this child? We can’t spend weeks with an unknown child. We don’t even know how long Lucinda is proposing to stay. My questions are treated lightly.
‘Chill,’ she says when I ask, ‘let’s just chill.’
Of course it is not that simple. She has a tendency to gloss over detail. I am aware that my disappointment springs from unrequited love; somehow I am expecting the perfect resolution for my daughter and I would also welcome some gratitude for my steadfastness in support. But with Lucinda, there is still the fear of imminent betrayal lurking in her mind. It may be the effect of drugs, a sort of persistent paranoia.
Now Bertil is carrying Isaac, who is acting as a lookout. He laughs uproariously and points when he sees more ostriches; they are in a mating frenzy everywhere, rushing here and there distractedly. We stop at a pristine beach above the bay where, we have been told, whales calve at this time of year. Just below us we see a mother leading her white calf towards the open sea. The males are white at birth. They are half underwater, breaching and blowing every so often. It is a poignant sight, these huge mammals setting off to swim determinedly for thousands of miles back to their icy northern waters. I feel this migration is a test, as if the whales are in peril as they embark on their epic journey. Another whale follows, leading a calf to the turbulent ocean. Are the mothers nervous? Are they thinking about what could go wrong? I don’t believe they are. A friend of mine who makes documentaries believes that there is a connection between us and other species to be explored. Whales have been candidates for an exchange of ideas between the species for some time. But still, I think that the bumper sticker which reads What has a whale ever done for me? contains a certain cynical truth.
When we get back to the lodge, Lucinda is roasting the promised leg of lamb on the barbecue, cookbook open. She seems to be very calm. Her smile reminds me of the happy child she once was. She hugs Isaac. She hugs me. She hugs Bertil and Nellie. She is wearing very short shorts, with a green T-shirt embossed with the words Oakland Athletics. Now that her face is no longer painfully ravaged and furtive, she’s beautiful, like her mother.
‘You seem to be happy, darling. How’s it going?’
‘Admit it, you’re thinking “unnaturally wired”, aren’t you? No, I haven’t taken anything is the answer. What’s not to like here? By the way, a huge antelope came wandering by. Humungous animal with curly antlers and a bit of a straggly beard on its neck, like the Amish.’
‘That’s a kudu, for sure.’
‘Are they dangerous?’
‘Only in the mating season.’
‘Oh, watch out, everybody, Daddy’s getting a little risqué.’
And now we are settling down, each happy to play the role we have been given. I am especially happy to be teased by my daughter.
After supper, in the last of the light, Lucinda and I walk the short distance down to the lagoon.
‘We must be back before it gets too dark.’
‘Okay.’
‘The lamb was wonderful, sweet pea. Perfect.’
‘Thank you. I am not completely useless.’
She takes my hand.
‘How is Mum?’ she asks. ‘Have you spoken to her recently?’
‘Only when she calls about something she thinks is important. You know that the baby is due any day?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you okay with that?’
‘No, I am not okay with it at all. I find it disgusting. It’s like it’s all about her. It always was. She doesn’t give a rat’s arse about the baby. And this baby will be my sister, or brother, of a sort.’
She is suddenly upset. I hold her close.
‘We’ll be fine, sweetheart.’
‘Sorry, Daddy, I just remember how she ignored me and put me down all the time so that I was scared to speak and how she hated children and then left us, and now she’s having a baby at the age of forty-six. It’s sick. And the whole business is aimed at us.’
‘I am not sure that’s totally true.’
I could add to her litany with my own grievances, but I restrain myself.
‘It is true. Absolutely. And tacky.’
‘Maybe. More at me than you.’
The sea in the mouth of the lagoon is moaning as the tide storms out. The sea itself is calm in the last of the light. The late glimmers of the sun create a symmetrical pattern on the water, a web of fish-scale reflections.
‘You wouldn’t be surprised if a mermaid surfaced,’ I say.
‘You old softie.’
Lucinda kisses me; she knows the reference, a mermaid book I had given her when she was six. She loved and cherished it. I ordered the essential prop, the detachable mermaid tail, but it was difficult to attach and seemed likely to lead to a drowning in our pool.
‘Daddy, I am so glad you have hooked up with Nellie. She is good for you. Actually, she’s good for all of us.’
In the night I wake to the sound of the waves in the mouth of the lagoon. Their mood has changed: they boom like distant canon fire.
‘You are awake,’ Nellie says.
‘Yes. I can’t help noticing that you are too.’
‘Are you okay? You were sighing in your sleep.’
‘I’m fine. I have disturbing dreams these days.’
‘I know you do, älskling. But are you happy?’
Her face is lit by the moonlight coming through the window. Her cheekbones are high and her forehead is shiny, almost nacreous, as though she is the Lucia Queen of the island of Grinda and the light from the candles in her crown is falling exclusively on her.
‘Nellie, I am fantastically happy. It’s wonderful to have us all together. The best thing I can think of.’
‘Lucinda told me that she hasn’t felt this happy for two years.’
As she turns to me, her large eyes are caught for a moment by the light.
‘Did she really say that? That’s great. She looks so much better.’
What Lucinda says to Nellie is not always the same as what she says to me. She is more straightforward with Nellie, so I am encouraged.
Nellie hugs me, her body fitting with mine neatly like the Matisse cut-outs we saw in the exhibition at the Tate Modern. There are certain things middle-class people are obliged to do, and seeing the Matisse was one of them that year. Nellie, typically, was entranced by the accompanying film of the old man’s unerring dexterity. There are a few people in this world at any one time who can do wonderful, even miraculous, things. I see these people as the shamans or prophets of our times. They are attuned to other modes and other concerns; in our restrained and circumscribed lives we look to them for the deeper truths. Not the advertised truths of religions or crackpot sects, but the works and the ideas that singular people produce, which enable a kind of transcendence to exist on this earth.
Near the most southerly tip of Africa, and encouraged by a restless lagoon, I think we are close to transcendence. I feel a distinct current running in Nellie’s body. I remember the telegraph poles and the thrumming of the attached wires on the road that led to the old farm. I wondered then how these wires carried messages. Even now I don’t really know. The messages, however terse, always contained something of importance, something urgent or tragic or congratulatory. After my mother died, my father never failed to send me a birthday telegram and a postal order to my boarding school. All gone.
Nellie holds on to me; her hold is light, ethereal. I am charged with a sense of the possible. Outside we hear briefly the night warning of a leopard – the sound of linen being torn – but we are safe in our lodge. Safe and content.
Et in Arcadia ego.
We know its secondary meaning and its terrible ambiguity: death is present in Arcadia. Some art historians say that all art derives ultimately from the appalling awareness of mortality. I believe that all religions are a response to mortality.
Nellie is asleep. I find myself worrying about Jaco and his troubles. I am searching my mind to see if there is some nuance I have missed. I will speak to Jaco tomorrow. If he goes public on the Scientologists he is opening himself to a fresh kind of hell.