After the tumult of Christmas, the post-Christmas period was blessedly uneventful. Margaret assumed that her children were caught up in their respective festive activities, and even Frieda, though professing to have a Jewish disregard for Christmas, would not let the opportunity pass for a lavish meal or two, surrounded by children and grandchildren. Rebecca kept to her quarters, emerging from time to time to offer Margaret tea or coffee, which Margaret usually declined. Rebecca even consented not to vacuum the floor, though visibly unhappy with this failure of domestic discipline. Margaret did not ask her whether she had phoned Jimmy, and Rebecca did not volunteer any information. For herself, she thought she would for the time being simply refrain from making any decision. She had asked Jimmy not to come to the house again. If he complied, as he was likely to do, the decision would have taken itself.
Thus the ringing of the doorbell, late one afternoon a few days after Christmas, should have been an intrusion upon her freedom, and it was perhaps inconsistent on her part to feel a sudden stab of expectation. She did not, however, pause to reflect on this inconsistency, merely pressed the intercom button to switch on the camera. She saw, at first, a large square object, which resolved itself into a television set, being supported by an invisible bearer, presumably Jimmy.
‘Hey, please come and open for me.’ His voice came from behind the object. ‘It’s bloody heavy.’
‘Hold on, I’m coming,’ she said, hurrying downstairs, preceded by an excited Benjy, who’d recognised the voice.
She opened the door.
‘Gee, thanks,’ he said, panting exaggeratedly. ‘Where can I put it?’
‘Not anywhere in the house, please. Let’s go through to Rebecca’s room.’
Rebecca, presumably having heard Jimmy’s voice, appeared from her quarters and with good grace ushered Jimmy into her room, where the TV set, which was indeed of a monstrous size, was ceremonially placed on the desk, the chiming clock losing pride of place to it.
Rebecca looked with interest at the new addition to her rapidly filling-up quarters.
‘Does it work?’ she asked, and pressed a random button.
‘It works, sure,’ said Jimmy. ‘But you have to plug it in and connect it to an aerial and tune it in.’
‘When do you do that?’ she asked.
‘I can arrange for a technician to come, Rebecca,’ Margaret said. ‘We needn’t bother Jimmy any further.’
‘When does the technician come?’ Rebecca asked.
‘I don’t know, Rebecca. Perhaps today, if we’re lucky.’
‘Why lucky, Margaret? You phone the technician, he comes.’
Margaret sighed. ‘In a perfect universe, yes, Rebecca. But today is the twenty-eighth of December and you know as well as I do that between Christmas and New Year nothing gets done in this country except riots and braaivleis.’
‘There are riots and braaivleis today, Margaret?’
Jimmy intervened. ‘Never mind the riots and braaivleis, Rebecca. I’ll come with an aerial tomorrow and install your set.’
Margaret looked at him for the first time, as she’d not quite trusted herself to do up to now. He was sweating lightly from the exertion of carrying the set; he was dressed in a flimsy T-shirt and a pair of denim shorts and slip-slops. She looked away again.
‘That’s very kind of you,’ she said. ‘But really …’
He turned to face her. ‘But really what? You’ll do it yourself?’
‘I suppose I could …’
‘Bullshit. Yes, you could do it, but it’ll take you all day, whereas it’ll take me ten minutes.’
‘Thank you for your confidence.’
‘It’s not a matter of confidence or lack of confidence. I have experience in setting up TV sets, you don’t.’
Margaret wondered where he’d acquired this experience, but merely said, ‘Thank you, then. In the meantime, what do I owe you for the set and the installation?’
‘We can talk about that later. Right now I’d appreciate a cup of coffee, if you don’t mind.’
‘No, why should I mind? After all, you’ve set up the coffee machine to your own satisfaction.’
‘Good thing I did,’ he said, following her into the kitchen. ‘Otherwise you’d still be drinking Nescafé.’
‘Quite happily, as I’d been doing for years.’ She found she could still not quite turn to face him.
‘That wasn’t happiness, that was ignorance,’ he said, taking his usual seat at the kitchen counter.
‘If you say so,’ she said. ‘It felt like happiness to me.’
‘It felt like happiness to me,’ he repeated. ‘Shit, what a heartbreaking song that could be … It felt like happiness to me, But … but what I dared not see,’ he clicked his fingers to the rhythm, ‘was that what felt like happiness to me, Was … was just what I thought had to be. Hey, how’s that?’
‘Well, it sort of rhymes, I suppose. But Cole Porter it’s not. What will you call it? “No More Nescafé for Me”?’
He changed tone abruptly. ‘It’s not about Nescafé, and you know it.’
‘Oh? So what’s it about? Corn flakes?’
‘Don’t play dumb with me,’ he said, forcing her by the insistence of his tone to look at him. He had always had something challenging in his manner, but this was more than that: it was overtly confrontational, entirely lacking in the irony that normally veiled his comments. It left her breathless, at a loss as to how to respond. She sought refuge in the coffee machine again, rearranging the cup that was now filling up with the thick brown liquid. She took the cup and placed it in front of him. He reached out and seized her wrist.
‘I said don’t play dumb with me,’ he said.
‘I heard you. Now let go of my wrist. You’re hurting me.’
‘As you wish,’ he said, and dropped her wrist abruptly. ‘I don’t want to hurt you, I’ll never hurt you. Only …’ he paused.
‘Only what?’ she asked, rubbing her wrist, which was in truth smarting from his grip, and turning her back on him.
‘Only don’t play games with me. I’m trying to have a serious conversation here.’
‘What about?’
‘In the first place, about your telling me you never wanted to see me again.’
‘What is there to discuss about that?’
‘I want to know whether that really is what you want. Because if it is, I’ll bugger off right now, without even having this excellent cup of coffee.’
She turned to face him, and saw that he was serious. She also saw that he was challenging her, daring her to send him away in the full knowledge that this time he would not return. And by taking the initiative, Jimmy was forcing her hand, and he was doing so because he knew his strength; and his strength was based on the fact that at bottom he did not care. If she told him she did not want to see him, he would accept it without demur, possibly with a certain sense of losing a potentially useful contact, but with no searing regrets or self-recrimination. He had always sufficed to himself, he could suffice to himself again. Her pride and her common sense alike counselled her that the only real option for a woman of her age and in her situation was to send him away, never seeing him again and returning to the life of self-sufficiency she had elected in coming here. He could offer her nothing but uncertainty and worse, if she allowed him free access to her house and her emotions. There was really only one answer she could give him.
And yet she said, ‘No, don’t go. Not just yet.’
He seemed neither surprised nor elated at her capitulation. ‘When then?’ he asked, as if the answer did not matter a great deal.
‘When I say,’ she said, hoping to salvage some illusion of control.
But he would not allow her even that. ‘No,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘This time it’s when I say.’
She didn’t say anything, merely refilled the coffee machine. But she knew that her silence would be taken as consent. So she said, carefully refitting the water tank to the machine, ‘Does that mean giving you free access to my house until you decide it’s time to move on?’
He took a sip of coffee; there was something studied in the care with which he replaced the cup in its saucer. ‘Isn’t that the understanding you have with all your friends, only not spelled out so clearly?’
She considered. ‘I think it’s the spelling out that scares me. It’s too much like a contract.’
‘I’m not the one who spelled it out,’ he pointed out.
‘No,’ she conceded, ‘but you …’ She paused, trying to find a way of saying that there was an element of coercion, even of emotional blackmail in his ultimatum: because wasn’t that what it was, an ultimatum? And for her to agree to it was to cede the upper hand to him.
‘I?’ he asked, evidently amused at her floundering.
‘Look,’ she said, ‘I take your point that one assumes one’s friends are free to come and go as they please, but, let’s face it, that’s because we know they won’t in fact do so. There are certain unwritten … not rules, but understandings in even the best friendships. And you …’
‘And I?’ he asked again.
‘Well, I don’t think you buy into that kind of understanding.’
‘In short, you think I’ll abuse the freedom.’
She turned and faced him. ‘Yes, I think that’s possible. I don’t know you well, but forgive me if I say that you strike me as somewhat … unrooted.’
‘And you’re scared that I’ll put down roots in your weed-free garden.’
‘Not scared. Just … cautious.’
‘Caution is just a scared person’s precaution. But okay, so what you’re saying is that you don’t object to me coming here, as long as I respect your space and your time. Right?’
She sensed that he was shifting the ground of the argument – the negotiation – subtly, that what had been presented as an ultimatum was now being couched as an accord, a compromise. He was offering her an opportunity to salvage some of her pride, while still getting what he wanted.
‘I think that’s reasonable, don’t you?’ he asked, as she still hesitated.
‘It’s reasonable …’ she said, and yes, it was, if you ignored the fact that it was in effect a rescinding of her decision not to allow him into her house.
‘So?’
‘Only, I’m not sure that reason helps us here.’
‘Then what?’ he asked, as if he were really interested in the answer. ‘Passion? Irrationality?’
She shook her head. ‘I should know better than to argue with you.’
‘You should indeed. So why argue?’
She couldn’t tell him that her argument was as much with herself as with him: it was her sole defence against the inclination simply to let go, to see where this route she’d embarked on without intending to would lead her. But even here she was at a disadvantage: he was as agile and sure-footed in reasoning as he was in rock-climbing, leaving her a gormless spectator.
So she said, ‘Let’s not argue, then.’
Again he registered no unseemly satisfaction at what they both knew was his victory. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘So I’ll come to fix Rebecca’s TV tomorrow morning.’
‘Rebecca will be pleased,’ she said.
‘So will you, in the long run,’ he said, and left.