Nellie has decided that we are going to be married in Cape Town. Lucinda wants to be the chief bridesmaid, and little Isaac will be a page. His status is still unclear, and we don’t want to contemplate what might happen when he goes home. If he has a home. Now we can’t imagine being separated from him. We see him as our child too. He is standing beside the pool, armbands in place, ready to dive. In he goes. He paddles furiously and climbs out so that he can dive again. We watch him as he waves a salutation. He gives the impression that he feels he must humour and console older people.
‘I dived, Grandpa.’
‘You did, Isaac. A lovely dive.’
‘Yes, I did. I will do another one.’
‘Okay. One more.’
In he goes, paddling like an insect when he surfaces. I move to lie on a sunbed next to Lucinda.
‘Darling, we have to know about Isaac. Won’t you tell me the whole story? We are anxious.’
‘You don’t need to worry, Daddy. His parents are both happy that he is here. I have emailed them a few times. No complaints.’
‘Yes, but you are on a false passport.’
‘Daddy, I had to bring him. My boyfriend, actually he’s my ex-boyfriend, was doing a lot of drugs, he was mashed most of the time, and his ex, Isaac’s mother, is also a complete disaster. She’s even been an expensive hooker. I mean, that’s no life for Isaac. I should know. I am clean now, although they say after you have been clean for two years, only then can you begin to talk about a cure. Thanks to you I had proper treatment.’
‘Sure, sure. I can imagine that it’s no life for him. But how does this all end, Luce?’
‘It will be okay, Dad. I will look after him. I will get custody in the States.’
‘I was hoping you were coming home to London.’
‘I have some unfinished business in California. Then I’ll come.’
‘Will you still have Isaac?’
‘I hope so. Do you want him to come to England?’
‘Of course, if it’s legal.’
‘If I had a choice, I would stay right here. He loves it, I love it, but I must go back.’
She has always had an adamantine quality; I can’t ask her why she has to go back.
There’s a pause.
‘Dad, it’s fine. Honestly. Just trust me. And I will come to Sweden too. I love Nellie.’
‘Okay, but please, please tell me if things go wrong.’
‘I will, Dad. I’ve got the idea. Now for the wedding planning: I am looking forward to that. I’m like wildly excited in fact.’
Nellie and I have told our close friends that we are getting married, and Alec has decided to come immediately, because he can’t stand another minute of country life in winter. A surprising number are coming. The Swedish relatives have been soothed by knowing we are going to have a Swedish blessing as well, on the island of Grinda in the Stockholm Archipelago. The Wärdshus has already been booked.
Nellie and Lucinda take charge. They have met the young Anglican vicar who is going to take the service. His name is Tim Fetch. In his spare time he is a champion sea kayaker. He appears to belong to the Church of the Great Outdoors, Lucinda says.
‘He also wants some of your favourite poems to be read out. He thinks that would be nice. He’s quite happy-clappy. You might have to close your eyes and hug everybody.’
‘Fuck, wedding’s off.’
‘Grandpa, you sweared,’ says Isaac.
‘I swore. Yes.’
‘You did swear, yes, Grandpa.’
‘Sorry.’
Isaac does another of his dives.
‘What’s your favourite wedding poem, Daddy?’
‘Shakespeare, 110. You recite it, Luce. You know it.’
‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds/ Admit impediments …’
As she starts to recite, her voice goes right through me; I feel as if I had never heard it before. She stands with the sea behind her.
‘ … love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! It is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests, and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me prov’d,
I never writ, nor no man ever lov’d.’
Lucinda smiles as she finishes. I am stunned. Her voice is wonderfully and unexpectedly rich.
‘It is so beautiful it makes me cry,’ she says.
‘Crying is a family weakness. You spoke it beautifully, darling. Perfect.’
‘It is so beautiful. Will you explain some of the words to me?’ Nellie asks.
‘Of course, Nell.’
Nellie asks Lucinda the meaning of ‘bark’ and Lucinda tells her it means boat, as in ‘embark’. I watch them together, Lucinda translating cheerfully. I ask Lucinda if she will read the poem at the wedding.
‘Okay. I will. If you and Nellie really want me to.’
We do.
I drive out to the airport to get Alec. I see that one of the boxy little taxis has rolled off the road into a culvert. A police van is there and an ambulance arrives. Four feet poke out from underneath a grey blanket beside the road.
I drive cautiously to the airport. When he emerges from the sliding glass doors, it is immediately obvious to me that Alec is in poor shape. He sees me looking and tells me that he has had a minor stroke. He says it is only a transient ischaemic attack: ‘That means it has gone, as the name suggests. I will live. But I am not allowed to drive for six months, which is a bugger. And I am not really supposed to fly either, but luckily I have friends in high places.’
The stroke was brought on when he found that his girlfriend, the Latvian lap dancer and budding anthropologist, had stolen a large sum of money from him before leaving for the Baltic forests. He asks me not to tell anybody.
‘I don’t want to look like a silly old fool. Which of course I am.’
‘Have you been in touch with her?’
‘No, I have not. What a stupid question. My lawyer has put the Latvian police on to her. But it’s not really about the money, Frank, it’s more about my naïveté in convincing myself that she liked me. It’s horrible to think that all that sex was a ploy to steal my money.’
‘Did she take a lot?’
‘Five hundred grand.’
‘Jesus, that is a lot. Still, you’ve got plenty.’
‘As I said, it’s not about the money. Listen, I envy you marrying someone like Nellie. There is something wholesome about her.’
‘You always say that.’
‘Yes I do, because I mean it.’
‘That she is wholesome? Is that a compliment?’
‘Absolutely, in my book it is, and by the way I am not convinced that you deserve her.’
‘She doesn’t do lap dancing.’
‘Thank God for small mercies.’
He idealises Nellie because he can’t really get on with women and their more complex feelings. So he has created his own image of Nellie, the perfect woman, wholesome and fragrant. Upper-class Englishmen of a certain age are often awkward and dismissive of their wives. This may be a phenomenon that is passing, but Alec is beached, a right whale on the strand. I imagine his ex-girlfriend is even now planning to build her family a lovely home in the deep forest, impressing them all with her London sophistication. Despite his many millions and many wives and many girlfriends, Alec has never understood women because at a certain level he is frightened of them.
He is not staying with us because all beds are taken, but has booked himself into an expensive hotel looking across the Atlantic to Robben Island. He would like to come to the house later, perhaps for supper. He looks a little confused. I drop him off; he is walking more carefully than I remember, as if he isn’t certain of where his feet will fall at any moment. But he is already instructing the porters and greeters vigorously as he heads for the lobby. I feel the urge to hug him, and he looks a little reluctant, but soon relents and I hold him close for a minute at least.
‘You’ve always been a friend, Alec.’
‘I love you, Frank. Before you get nervous, I love you in a manly way.’
I drive back along the coast road. I take note of the sea conditions and the wind and the mountain, with its blankets of cloud pouring over the flat table like dry ice before evaporating. I stop to watch seals – the active branch of the seal colony – driving an unseen shoal of fish into a small bay. The sardines have arrived. The seals are corralling them, working like sheepdogs. Now they have the fish trapped; they dart about, diving and leaping at high speed, to keep the fish in a compact group. They emerge from the depths, swallowing and leaping, bright silver fish in their mouths. Their indolent colleagues at the harbour should see this and learn.
When I am living here beneath the mountain and close to the sea, I feel alive. I have read that mountains were revered in prehistory because they were believed to be the gathering point of all sacred knowledge. And this mountain above us, always in view, always changing with the wind and cloud, has a similar effect on me. It is probably no different from the consolation believers who live near huge cathedrals, like Rouen or Ely, enjoy; it was the same urgent need to be fixed in the universe that caused palaeolithic man to assemble rock cairns and standing stones in Cornwall.
Osip Mandelstam wrote, ‘I have cultivated in myself a sixth sense, an Ararat sense: the sense of attraction to a mountain.’
Me too.
When I am comfortably tucked up in Notting Hill, I dream of this mountain and its attendant, and often unruly, sea. I also marvel at the small daily natural dramas all around, like the seals rounding up fish.
The preparations for the wedding have been under way all day. Nellie and Lucinda are firmly in charge of the arrangements. There will be twenty-five people at the lunch. There will be simple posies of local flowers for the bridesmaids and something more elaborate for Nellie. The vicar, Tim Fetch, says that some of his customers – his word – opt for a bower of roses in the garden. If he’s honest, he thinks it is just a little kitsch. He is wearing pink-and-black Lycra cycling shorts. He has come by bicycle for the consultation.
Later Nellie and I walk on the beach, each of us holding one of little Isaac’s hands and swinging him with every second stride. He says, ‘More, more.’ Bertil waves from the life-savers’ hut, where he is now a regular. We wave in return, and we feel honoured. Isaac deserts us and runs, in his own unstable fashion, along the sand towards the young lovers. They don’t seem to mind his presence. They promise to bring Isaac home for the barbecue. As we look back he is chattering away.
The last surfers are far out there on huge waves. They bob like corks on the mountains of water, disappearing from sight for long seconds as they wait for the ideal wave. Behind them the cormorants are heading home to roost, flying in anxious, determined formations. They overnight on a huge block of flat stone, almost as big as an aircraft carrier, which can only have fallen from the mountain into the sea many thousands of years ago.
‘It frightens me just to see these kids out there,’ says Nellie.
‘Me too. Even when I was young I was often frightened.’
‘Is that the point? To conquer your fear?’
‘Partly. Also to have friends. But it is the simple fact that this is something that doesn’t demand money or dictate what you do or how you do it. In my day, free spirits were called “soul surfers”.’
‘Were you a soul surfer, Frank?’
‘I tried. But it was a little too precious for the local boys.’
On the way up the path through the bushes we kiss. The air is fragrant. We are free in our own way.
‘My soul surfer,’ she says, still amused.
Alec arrives just after I have lit the fire. He has commandeered a huge car and a driver.
‘Good God, something is on fire,’ he says.
I tell him that it is a form of heresy to cook indoors when the weather is good. The wind is quickly dying as the sun sets and the smoke is rising straight up in a regular column, like the smoke from fires in Cowboy and Indian movies.
Alec is gazing down towards the beach.
‘Beautiful. You are a jammy sort of fellow, aren’t you, Frankie? Bum firmly in the butter.’
Alec’s slang is about thirty years out of date, but strangely endearing. He is wearing a panama.
As she brings the plates and the salads and makes sure everyone has a drink, I feel guilty about Lindiwe. She looks happy, as though this is her life’s work. Less than eight miles away, her husband was clubbed to death with a Coca-Cola bottle. Her own young children live in rural nullity with her mother. I have given Lindiwe money, which has enabled her to build a house in her mother’s village. I have paid for schoolbooks and clothes. I adore Lindiwe, yet our relationship is fatally unbalanced: she depends completely on my good will and maybe, I sometimes think, she is obliged to pretend to be fond of me. At the same time I want her affection; it is important to me. At times I think that we are very close, but I know that in reality we are separated by our different lives.
Now, in this smoke-scented, gentle hubbub, I see Lucinda handing around grilled oysters on Melba toast – a Lindiwe special – and in the very familiarity of it I find hope: the hope that Lucinda is with us for ever, free from the hell she has been through. This evening she is so beautiful, so composed and gentle and warm, that I am convinced she is, as she said, over it. Now I induct Alec into the ritual of the braai, sacred in these parts. Lucinda appears and puts an arm gently around my waist. The children have gathered and some neighbours have arrived; one of them, Neil Battersby, was at school with me years ago. Neil is spattered with sunspots now, so that he has a snow-leopard appearance. He wants to lend his unique skills to the barbecuing. He believes you should never start cooking until the embers are white. He also recommends damping the fire with beer from a can when it is too fierce. His wife, Eleanor, raises her eyebrows eloquently. Alec is staring at the fire as if mesmerised. He moves off cautiously, to talk to Nellie who is talking to Marlene Cook, the wife of Barry. When she discovers that Nellie is Swedish, Marlene says she longs to go to Sweden. She wants to see the Northern Lights and deep, deep snow. She thinks her northern European ancestors are calling to her, reminding her of who she is. It’s a race memory. Or a phyletic memory, the memory we don’t even know we have. It’s nonsense, but it is one of the theories that distract South Africans from looking too closely at what’s around them.
Still, I think Marlene would find a trip in the Arctic north rewarding, even fascinating. A few years ago Nellie and I flew to Kiruna, inside the Arctic Circle, where the plane landed on skis, and we travelled onwards by dog sled to the Ice Hotel. We were wrapped in reindeer-skin rugs. The huskies were heart-breakingly eager. It was our first escape together from London and toxic memories. We both felt a little jittery, as if we were impostors. The sun, which barely rose above the horizon, produced an unstable and magical half-light that suggested the twilight of the gods. For miles the huskies bounded along, yelping in their ecstasy. It was impossible to resist the feeling that we had arrived in a mystical and myth-laden landscape.
The Ice Globe Theatre, a replica of Shakespeare’s Globe on the South Bank, made entirely of ice, stood on the bank of the frozen Torne River. The next night we watched a performance of Hamlet in Sami. Hamlet entered on a sledge drawn by reindeer. We sat on reindeer skins, in temperatures of minus 30 degrees Celsius. It was one of those moments you know you will never forget: as we left the Ice Globe, the Northern Lights descended from the heavens and performed their mysterious, swirling rites.
Little Isaac is once again stealing the limelight. He is enchanting. He asks ‘How are you?’ of everyone. Lindiwe is still trying to teach him to speak Xhosa, as if that is his inalienable heritage, and he can now say a few words, for instance, ‘yebo’, yes, and ‘molo’, hello. He said goodnight to me yesterday, ‘Ulani kahle’ – and ‘Molo, Grandpa’, good morning. I adore his eager, questing conversation. And I am happy because I know that I am free at last of my foreboding about Lucinda, which has never left me for a single day in five years. Every day I would wake up calm and be struck immediately with the knowledge that my daughter was a junkie. She is reassuring me now by putting her arm around me. She squeezes my waist: ‘Are we getting just a little chubby, Daddy?’
‘Have you been talking to Nellie?’
‘Yours to guess and mine to know.’
She slips away to help Lindiwe. Not too far out to sea a huge tanker passes very slowly; its lights are blazing and twinkling so that it looks as if an exotic travelling circus has arrived.