We are driving home after three days. Alec had to go early for a check-up in Cape Town. The wedding has had an adverse effect on him. He says he feels even more isolated and lonely as though it has become difficult for others to see him. As though he is a fading fresco, he says. He tells me he has given us a painting as a wedding gift; it can be collected from Sotheby’s whenever we are home. He won’t tell us whose work it is. It’s a surprise, he says.
We see a sign to a crocodile farm and turn off. The reality is not so much a farm as a series of pens with cement pools, a gulag, containing hundreds of crocodiles, many of them destined to be shoes. You are not supposed to loathe whole species, but it is difficult to like crocodiles. They are designed entirely to kill. Every so often something alarms the crocodiles and there is an awful chaotic scramble for the water. I remember my school friend who was taken by a crocodile; I can’t imagine a worse way of dying.
Also, Nellie says that we should go: ‘This is really horrible, Frank.’
‘We’re out of here. I am so sorry.’
Isaac says, ‘Goodbye, crocs.’
As we drive down the corrugated dirt road, I ask Nellie if she thinks I have been insensitive.
‘How could you know what it would be like, Frank?’
I had assumed there would be a few crocodiles taking their ease in bluish, natural and clean ponds – very different from the frightful, nightmarish, mêlée which took place below us in the filthy water. I am glad that Lucinda went ahead with Vanessa and Bertil and Vanessa’s parents.
As we come down the pass we see Table Mountain in the distance.
As always, I feel myself subject to the attraction of mountains: We read landscapes, we interpret their forms, in the light of our own experience and memory, and that of our shared cultural memory.
We are all pleased to be going home. Our mountain, our sea, our house, all are waiting. We have another two weeks before we go back to England. Bertil can’t wait to surf with Vanessa, and Lucinda has an appointment to go to see the Hand Spring Puppet Company in Cape Town. She would love to learn how to make giant puppets. Maybe she could get an internship there. Putting behind me memories of her false starts, I encourage her. Sometime soon we have to discuss Isaac’s future with her. The strange thing is that Isaac has dropped into the world from nowhere: he appears to have no memory of his mother or father, and never mentions his home. But he is only two years and a few months old, if Lucinda is giving us the true facts.
We decide to have tuna grilled on the fire tonight. Lindiwe wants to help but I tell her to rest. She seems to be disappointed, so I ask her to make one of her potato salads and Nellie will make her famous mayonnaise. Lindiwe dons her housecoat.
I arrange the wood and light the fire. Bertil has gone off with Vanessa and now he calls to ask if Vanessa can come for supper. Of course, if her mom doesn’t mind.
I understand. As a boy I was susceptible to the superior attraction of my friends’ houses and even of their parents. When my mother died, the house died with her. Disloyally I thought that our house was dreary by comparison with others’. So I am pleased that Vanessa wants to come to Menemsha. I have seen that there is something about Nellie that children find very attractive. They understand immediately that she is always interested in them and does not have to feign interest, as so many adults do. Like Georgina, who saw Lucinda only as a prop in her glamorous social life of buying hotels and losing money. God, what a weight has been lifted from my shoulders.