I tried to doze in after that, but it wasn’t working. Maybe I should take Butch for a walk, as The Ex and I used to do, so I checked the time and saw that it was, in fact, late. Maybe I had slept a little, after all. But now I could feel guilty about Butch and arriving late at the old man’s, speeding along, trying to work with the scraps he’d given me. His father had hit him randomly, it seemed, but had then sensed something about his son and stopped hunting. Prod too much, however, and the old man clammed up. He wouldn’t say why he thought his father had acted thus, so he was also being a bit of a subeditor, perhaps even a censor. But where did that leave things as he stood at the gates, checking his watch at arm’s length?
“You’re late,” he said as I got out of the Civic at the back.
“Ja.”
“And you haven’t shaven.”
“I don’t need to shave, Dad. We don’t work with the public. And it’s Sunday.”
“I have shaved every day of my life, since I was seventeen.”
“Good for you,” I said.
“You’ll lose your job.”
“Well then I lose my job,” I snapped.
I could see a flash of the old Beethovian temper for an instant before he asked me whether I would like a cup of coffee and we went through the mugs-and-biscuits speeches. He became completely confused about me hauling out my own bottle of coffee and I explained to him that I’d brought it along the previous week.
“Oh,” he said. “Shall we go and sit outside?”
So we sat in silence out in the autumn sun and he juddered his left leg and used the corresponding index finger to click his right thumb nail by pulling it back and releasing it, a click which used to drive Ma nuts in church when we still did that sort of thing.
Then, in a moment of unusual selflessness, he asked me what the matter was. I wondered what his reaction would be if I told him that Diederick Johannes Reineke and I had become friends because a sweet dopehead I’d met on a film set had said we’d get on well. She’d been right and Dick and I had had much more than dagga in common. He was an anthroposophist, which meant he was an adherent of Rudolf Steiner’s way of thinking. He therefore painted and sculpted accordingly, which meant he never used straight lines because his subject matter was more spiritual and Blakean than jaggedly social or political.
Like most teachers, Dick was mildly in love with his own voice, but I only came to appreciate his skills in that profession when I tried to read Steiner. He may have been profound, but his writing style – or perhaps that of his genuflecting translators – was awful. Dick made that whole universe come alive.
He had given up on teaching and was now an actor, though he didn’t quite play the darling game, either, so his second wife basically kept home and hearth together as a legal secretary. They had had three children together and he had six in the Cape from his previous marriage. Dick and his new family were always broke and they always had just enough food – visitors included – and their children were extremely happy. It was another world from the strictly utilitarian and therefore tense one I had grown up in, and I was intrigued by this highly sophisticated form of Christianity, which was completely comfortable with the idea of reincarnation. No eternal life for you, old pal. You will work on yourself until you get it right.
Dick looked like a German poet of another era, quoted Goethe extensively and looked very tired, but happy, when he heard that his wife was pregnant again. They were anti-contraception and abortion and those spirits who asked to come into this world should be allowed to and he often spoke about how he’d delivered his own children and named them according to their arrival in this world. They all had names from Greek or Biblical mythology.
Dick was actually a lapsed anthropowhateverist and I picked up, through a fog of coffee and double smoke over the years, that he’d been a bit of a messianic character in earlier times and that he’d left behind the more intense types who were all reincarnations of great souls like Aristotle’s second adviser but never, say, a local barfly in Athens, circa 350BC. The point is he could spin an excellent yarn and recite long stretches of Hamlet and tell me everything about the man who had, like one of my youthful literary heroes, Hermann Hesse, seen straight through Adolf Hitler. Most importantly, he practised his faith in the sense that he was generous to the point of embarrassment. He literally would give you the clothes off his back and didn’t exhibit or sell his artworks, good or bad: he gave them away.
After 1999, Dick had first taken his family to Cape Town and then out of the country, arguing that there was an ugly sensibility afoot. South Africa lacked a unified folk spirit, he’d said, which I’d read as elitism. I had resented that, realising that he’d also been a kind of surrogate father to me, but they moved to Albion anyway and raved about how friendly the locals were. A few years later he got a brain tumour and not even the mistletoe could cure him.
“A friend of mine has just died of the same thing as Ma did,” I said, back in the present. “He was only sixty-three.”
“You know,” the old man annoyingly and predictably said, “we were playing rugby in another town and two men came walking towards me. I knew there and then that my father was dead.”
“How old were you?” I said, absently again.
“I was in my second matric year. I was seventeen.”
“How old was he?”
“Forty-eight,” the old man said. “He had never liked the idea of converting from horseback to motorbikes. But he’d been called out to a farm in the hills and drove up the dirt road, went round a corner, skidded, and a 1936 Ford Whitehound was coming from the front. His head hit the silver emblem on the bonnet and he died instantly.”
“Do you miss him?”
“I miss him every day of my life.”
“Did he leave you anything?” I said, feeling about as sympathetic as the Supreme Leader.
“Only a walking stick, which you’ll inherit. But do you know what?”
“No, Dad. What?”
“We were supposed to inherit a pen nib factory in Bonn. We’re supposed to be multimillionaires.”
“So why aren’t we?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Great.”
That was the end of that and we lapsed into a long, awkward silence in which he clicked his nail and juddered his foot before he said: “I wish I could win a hundred and … twenty-three million rands.”
“What would you do with it?”
“I’d give most of it to the poor and you, but I’d take the Valiant down to Elgin and fill it with apples.”
“What for?”
“So it can smell like apples, obviously.”
“Right.”
Another clicking silence. After an unbearable while I said I’d better go and he seemed almost relieved and walked to the front gates as I started up the Civic, reversed to between the wash line and fence, forward past the garage and onto the driveway, where the old man was standing at the open gates. As I got there I rolled down my window and was reminded of my mother as he squashed my hand.
“Bye, Dad.”
“Take care, my boy.”
“You too,” I said, and left, watching him close the gate in my rear-view mirror.
When I got to the traffic light it turned red, of course, and I wondered whether the old man’s father had sensed he was going to die (about which Steiner no doubt would have had something to say) and therefore became more lenient towards his son, or whether his son had felt he’d painted his father too negatively prior to that and wanted to now show him in a better light, for the sake of balance, or whether this was just a personal mythology. If not a completely distorted memory. If not downright fiction. I decided it was probably a little of everything. And that was fine, but we have to work with what is presented to us, which is no doubt influenced by what we ourselves present. When the lights changed I turned up towards the hospital and saw that the old man was still standing at the closed gates, as upright and silver-haired as ever.
I couldn’t wait to get out of his sight to light a smoke.