IT’S THE END OF A LONG office-bound day, the minutes from the morning’s Africa Abroad crisis meeting already in my inbox, when I head upstairs to find Pebasco. The views of the city and its skyline are spectacular from the glass-walled lift. A red streak shimmers across the horizon, underlining the fact that the aperture between day and night is closing. It’s as if someone’s used a special paintbrush effect at the edge of the urban landscape.
I find her waiting on the covered balcony of the P&P bar, a half-moon shape that stretches out into the luminous undulations of blue air from the sea and sky. A dolphin pod is visible not far from the shore, the big, strong ones riding the front waves, the youngsters and stragglers following. I’m in classic monochrome and she’s in a tailored tan checked jacket with black pants. An observer would see us as similar: two female power movers planning tomorrow’s business against the backdrop of the blood-orange glow of the sinking sun, each with her own uniform to indicate her mind is on more important matters than sartorial trends. I don’t want to be seen as similar to Pebasco. Her straw blonde hair is long and thick and slightly coarse with big waves – it’s an unusual look for a female consultant in South Africa. I can’t think of a single female colleague with hair to the waist, and definitely no one in such a senior position, but she’s American and she has a strong jaw and likes to dress in mannish pant suits, so it softens the square edges a little, and maybe that’s what she’s going for.
She puts the hair on her left side behind an ear. I’m not sure if this is to see me better or to give her a casual, friendlier aspect, but I’ve never seen her do this before. Is she nervous? She looks nervous but I am not sure what she would be nervous about.
She remarks on how amazing it is to see dolphins leaping and cavorting right in front of us, and says the first time she saw whales was from a deckchair right here on Camps Bay beach. And then in Paris she saw a whale exhibition … Did I know there was a marvellous natural history museum in Paris with cetacean skeletons? It’s as if they’re all swimming together, these ancient whales and dolphins and porpoises. She’s never been much of a naturalist, she says, but after Paris she even visited the whales in her own backyard, on the St Lawrence River just an hour from Montreal.
She mentions the ‘Creation’ Pinot Noir she had with her supper last night. ‘You have some really great reds in South Africa,’ she drawls as a waiter makes his way towards us. ‘Do you have any white Zinfandel?’ I intercept the waiter. He stops next to me and points out the only white Zinfandel on the list, which is going for a princely sum, and I nod casually.
‘You prefer whites?’ she says a little coldly, her fingers tapping, as the waiter moves away.
‘White Zinfandel is actually a red in disguise. Most people don’t know that. My husband is something of a connoisseur.’
I watch her closely as I say it, and something flutters across her face, but it could as easily be annoyance at her mistake as any reaction to my mention of Daniel. Still, I feel more in control now. I ask where she’s staying − it’s a favourite subject for visiting consultants who are blown away by Cape Town’s beauty and are known to frequent establishments out of the price range of us locals − and she tells me about the luxury boutique hotel at the V&A Waterfront where she stays when she is in town.
I sip at my Zinfandel. She turns a long angular face towards me.
‘I’ve told Piet it’s pointless you going off to Italy for a year. We have to stay on target for the medium and long-term prospects.’
‘I think you might struggle to convince him,’ I say.
‘Leave it to me,’ she says dismissively. ‘What’s the status on the Black River proposal? When do they make a decision?’
She should be asking Emma this question. I’m the consulting lead; Emma is the account manager. But hey, Emma isn’t having a glass of wine with Pebasco, I am.
We speak about what it will take to roll out a tight security company network across nine African countries: we swing back and forth, feeling each other out, each with our own agenda. It’s easier when we are talking about the impersonal project stuff. She watches me coolly as I twiddle with my empty wine glass. I call a waiter over and order some tap water with ice and a slice of lemon.
Everything feels wrong about this meeting. I don’t want Pebasco to take Emma’s job away from her. The woman is a shark in a shark tank; if it suited her, she’d throw me overboard tomorrow to join Emma.
‘How would you feel about a more fluid position?’ Pebasco asks in her pointedly gracious voice, the voice that means you’d better not stand in her way.
I can feel her assessing gaze on me.
‘If we get Black River I’d like you to play a bigger role. We need someone who has more consulting experience to carry these Africa-wide projects to successful conclusion. Someone who understands deadlines and has crisis management skills.’
I watch as perfect scallops of water run up the shoreline, eating away precious sea frontage estate bite by bite. The nature of progress involves collateral damage. It is Simone or Emma.
‘And Emma?’
The grey eyes blink once. ‘I’ll take care of Emma.’
A dolphin leaps higher than all the others, having harmless fun. I tell myself that if Emma were in my position she’d do the same thing.
‘The Africa Today Conference in Kenya is in June. You can do it over three days – that means just two nights away. Can you manage that?’
Why does it feel like now we are finally getting to the point?
‘Yes, that should be fine. I can organise that.’
‘It’ll be a good run-up to the big one in Amsterdam in August. We need to show that real progress is happening on the ground at project level, in spite of the problems. Will your family let you go?’
‘I have a good friend that my daughter usually stays with.’
She nods and looks thoughtful. ‘You’re fortunate that the adoption worked out. How old is she?’
‘She’s fourteen.’
‘It must be difficult to adjust, having a child to consider all of a sudden.’
‘Yes, it is.’ She looks at me enquiringly but I feel no obligation to explain. What should I say: that given the choice I’d do it again; that I can’t imagine my life without my daughter any more; that she fills up something that was empty before?
I used to be similar to Nancy Pebasco, now I am different.
Silence falls between us. Why all this talk about Simone? The conversation is taking an unexpected turn.
‘What about your husband?’ she asks, and her voice is suddenly high-pitched, like the shriek of a distant water bird taking to the sky. ‘He doesn’t mind?’
‘It’s not an issue.’
All these months I’ve thought she has no idea I am married to the man she used to see when she was in town. After all, Daniel uses the name ‘Gabriel Montaigne’ for his RMI work − a combination of the Christian name he was baptised with and his mother’s maiden name − and she’s never been here for the annual P&P social event that usually happens just before everybody goes off for the festive Christmas period.
The thought strikes me for the first time that perhaps she had not known at an earlier time, but now she does. This is what ‘our conversation’ is actually about.
‘Do you have children?’ I ask, feeling my way warily around this surreally personal conversation.
‘None of our own − my husband has a much older daughter from his first marriage − but we’re planning to change that,’ Pebasco says lightly. I can see she is pleased with me. I have asked the right question. We are heading in the right direction. This meeting will not be a complete waste of her time after all.
‘I see,’ I say slowly. ‘Are you going to adopt?’ My mouth is as dry as the Namib desert. All the oxygen has been sucked out of the world.
‘We want to try for our own. My biological clock is ticking.’ Her voice has a peculiar out-of-kilter ring to it, and her angular face is contorted as if some powerful emotion threatens to overwhelm her. When you know people well you can put a name to their emotions but with someone like Nancy Pebasco it is hard to tell if it is embarrassment or excitement, or both, or some entirely different, less cautious emotion, like triumph. The faraway ocean with its tiny leaping silvery dolphin figurines falls silent. I cannot hear her words but I can see her with total clarity: the smudged plum lipstick line, the discreet gold wedding band and matching diamond ring on her long thin finger, the last shaft of the day’s sunshine that cuts her face diagonally in half.
She is waiting for something from me. She cannot know that I have uncovered her secret, that I know she hired Daniel through the organisation known as Real Man Inc. when she came here for work. For months I watched her when she was in Cape Town to see if there was any sign that she had fallen pregnant, but eventually I decided that either she could not take the risk because her husband was suspicious, or her reproductive system was faulty.
But what if her affair with Daniel quickly moved to another level, away from the ambit of RMI? Did they have sex in other foreign cities while I worked late, waiting for him to return from his latest research expedition? Was that why she mentioned Paris? And now that he was based in Canada, did they meet regularly in a hotel room in Montreal, the city where she lived and worked?
Women like Nancy Pebasco have trained themselves out of blushing so long ago that they no longer remember how to do it.
I am certain that she has somehow found out I am Daniel’s wife. Perhaps she pried into his wallet in the early days and saw a photo he carried around of us. Perhaps she’s known all along and it hasn’t mattered until now. Maniacal laughter rises in my gorge. Pebasco must have realised I would legally be the Pebasco baby’s stepmother! And that I was the stepmother of many others besides! She must be asking herself if there is a risk that I will blab. All the same, she cannot stop herself wanting to talk to me about him, trying to read me. I do not know if I will be able to control myself, stop myself strangling her.
Breathe, Paola, breathe.
Long ago, before the strangeness of my marital life became evident to me, I’d have excused myself and walked hurriedly to the ladies room, the narrow walls somehow containing any unruly emotions that threatened to overwhelm me. Now I appear to be watching myself from afar as I sip at a glass of water with lemon and ice; I don’t believe my violent emotions are visible to her.
Think of her as a client of the family business. And somehow the little joke at everybody’s expense makes me feel better.
Perhaps she notices something because, after a quick look at me, she hurtles on as if to pre-empt any objection on my part. ‘I’ve set this year aside to fall pregnant –’ She enunciates this as if it’s been carefully rehearsed so that there is be no possibility of misunderstanding (or so I imagine) before completing her sentence, ‘– and I want you to stand in for me.’ She swishes the last bit of her second G&T round in her glass and takes a big final sip.
‘Congratulations. That’s a big step.’ Relief washes over me. We are not going to talk about Daniel. The waves crash onto shore again.
She mistakes my flat, relieved tone for a lack of enthusiasm.
‘It’s mainly for the Africa projects, for business meetings and conferences, so you won’t be away long periods. I can handle the American side of things but the doctors want me to cut back on the cross-continent travelling. You don’t need to worry about the remuneration side of things − I’ll make sure the travel time gets worked into your quarterly bonus as well so that it’s worth your while.’
No. I cannot keep avoiding the reality of Nancy Pebasco. I want to retch. I am to be her surrogate in the real world of dollars and Hilton hotel rooms, and she is going to use my husband as a breeding partner. I’ve had it all wrong: there is no issue with her husband wanting to see his own features reflected back at him from the kiddies’ faces at his breakfast table, nor is there a problem with her fallopian tubes. It is merely a question of forward planning. How to start a family and remain on the list of 100 Most Powerful Women in the World. The decision is made; she must have a child before time runs out. She has no intention of telling her husband what the baby’s provenance is.
Perhaps it was when she made the judgement call to have her own child that it suddenly struck her that Gabriel Montaigne was indeed the perfect candidate, except for one small inconvenient detail: he already had a wife. Even this would not have unduly concerned her – what must have caused a ripple of concern was my proximity. We were at two degrees of separation.
‘Do you think it will work for you?’ she asks. I am to facilitate Pebasco’s concerted attempt to bring progeny onto a planet that is already over capacity.
‘Yes, I’m sure it will work out fine. Are we done? I need to get home.’ I am almost rude but she is too pleased with herself to notice. She has achieved what she hoped to achieve.
She is certain I won’t be any trouble at all.
I’d often wondered about how many times Pebasco had gone with Daniel. RMI discouraged repeat bookings if no pregnancy occurred. Without progeny, they had less hold on the client and that put the organisation’s existence at risk. So how had she done it? When I thought about Daniel in these compromising scenarios, it was as if this other Daniel who existed in the twilight world of Real Man Inc. as Gabriel Montaigne became a cardboard figure in one of their files, a healthy penis in the foreground and a red target circle on his chest marking him as an optimum specimen with a highly classified clientele. And my Daniel, the Daniel de Luc I knew, the one they couldn’t touch, the one they couldn’t entrap, receded out of view into the shadows and shades where he’d lived for so long.
The conversation with Pebasco had parted the red mist that shrouded Daniel’s women. Now I believed I knew the truth. The women in the Limbo Files were all women with whom Daniel had long-term sexual relationships; they had all started out as clients through RMI, but then become something else, making their own private transactions with the man they knew as Gabriel Montaigne. It was not easy for RMI or anyone else to keep tabs on men like ‘Jack’ and Manolo and Daniel, who earned a living by hiring themselves out as sexual partners.
I couldn’t even be sure any more why I hadn’t wanted to have Daniel’s child. It had something to do with our twisted threesome, the way we’d met when I was going out with his best friend Nicky. Nicky had realised something was going on between Daniel and me, and it had driven him insane with jealousy. But I couldn’t really blame the violence of one horrific incident, Nicky’s sexual assault and the subsequent abortion, for my refusal to have Daniel’s children. It had happened so long before it no longer had anything to do with us, the Paola and Daniel in the wedding photograph who’d exchanged thin gold bands and old-fashioned marriage vows − ‘for better or for worse, until death us do part …’ − under a bamboo structure, a dhow with full white sails in the background, on a Zanzibar beach.
Would things have been different if I’d said to Daniel, ‘Let’s make babies until we’re too old’?