CHAPTER 8

THE HUMBLING

From the time Brink became a prominent and controversial public figure in the 1960s, he drew increasing attention from admiring women. However, in a key episode at the turn of the new century, he experienced a crushing reversal in a triangle involving a fellow South African writer and a UCT student, whose identities are both protected here. While Brink himself chose to refer to the writer as ‘X,’ on these pages he is called ‘Xavier’. The woman is called ‘Yvonne’. So detailed and expansive is the story Brink tells in his journal that the re-telling of it here has necessitated careful redaction. The real value of the story is in its impact on Brink, its inner, emotional effect – the humbling of a man whose life was dedicated to a seemingly limitless embrace of Eros, a compulsion that found expression in torrid encounters with actual women and their parallel literarisering in both his journals and his fiction. The episode described in this chapter is echoed in the story of 65-year-old Ruben Olivier in Brink’s The Rights of Desire (2000), published in the same year that Brink met Yvonne. In both, a younger woman shows a preference for a more youthful suitor, thereby quelling the older man’s sexual-romantic impulse.

Brink was more than thirty years Yvonne’s senior when he first met her in the second half of 2000.1 He was at a mature stage in his career as both an important novelist and an influential critic. It was during this period that Brink, along with his colleague and fellow novelist JM Coetzee, were raising sharp issues in their writing about older white South African men and their ‘rights of desire’. Indeed, the fact that the title of Brink’s novel, The Rights of Desire, is taken directly from Coetzee’s widely acknowledged masterpiece, Disgrace (1999), inevitably makes it enter into a fictional conversation with the work of the writer who had already won two Man Booker prizes (one for Disgrace) and who would go on to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003.2 In both Disgrace and The Rights of Desire, a senior white male, one a lecturer and the other a former university librarian, is forced to confront a decline in his sexual power over women at the precise moment that the professional authority conferred by his race and his gender is perilously slipping away. And in both novels, the male protagonist crashes to earth, emerging humbled and rueful. As in the 1960s, when Nicolette in The Ambassador almost perfectly prefigured Ingrid Jonker, 29-year-old Tessa Butler in The Rights of Desire is an uncannily close match with Yvonne. This was yet another moment in Brink’s life when his fiction anticipated, almost exactly, events that were about to unfold in his personal life, reinforcing the intermeshing of life and writing throughout his existence.3

Brink likens his real-life pursuit of Yvonne to the hopeless obsession of the ageing magistrate with the blind(ed) girl in another of Coetzee’s award-winning novels, Waiting for the Barbarians. In his increasingly self-flagellating journal writing, he not only describes his preoccupation with Yvonne as a ‘dotage’,4 but also quotes Coetzee’s magistrate, who declares: ‘There is no limit to the foolishness of men my age.’5

Brink has, by now, reached the mandatory retirement age of 65. After applying to the UCT authorities, he is permitted to continue with certain work, and in early 2001 he frequently meets with his new friend on campus. As they get to know each other, Brink feels he has reason to be hopeful about further developments as the young woman seems fascinated with writers and the world of books. Each time they meet, Brink writes, there is ‘a “feeling” like electricity that flickers between us’. He has ‘even wondered a few times what she would do if, the moment she comes into my office, I took her into my arms’.6 By now, after the de facto separation from Marianne the previous year, Brink is living alone in Banksia Road, and despite spending every Friday night at her house around the corner in Alma Road, he feels lonely and somewhat needy. Upon Brink’s urging, Yvonne begins to visit him at his home, too. Having dropped by twice before, she is persuaded one afternoon in early March to stay for tea and homemade scones – and is duly impressed, according to Brink. Saying farewell to her at the green garden door, he boldly takes her by the shoulders and kisses her. ‘She kissed me back, and pressed herself against me for a moment,’ he reports; they then discuss the Eldridge Cleaver epigraph in An Instant in the Wind – which reads, in part: ‘It is lonely out here. We recognise each other. And, having recognised each other, is it any wonder that our souls hold hands and cling together even while our minds equivocate, hesitate, vacillate, and tremble?’7

A week after the kiss at the gate, Yvonne visits him again. She seats herself on his lounge carpet as he sits facing her on a couch. They chat, exchanging ‘confidences’. At a certain point, she says to Brink: ‘I should warn you: I still have unfinished business. And it concerns someone you know….’ Then the shock: ‘Out of the blue, like a horse’s kick between the eyes, it comes: she’s been in a relationship for three years already with Xavier. Jesus Christ!!!’ He is clearly shocked – both outraged and threatened – to hear she is intimate with a writer he has known for a quite a while. Yvonne allegedly confides that the relationship has ‘unravelled’, and that ‘they had a big fight after she confronted him about his egoism, telling him there was no liberty or equality for her in the relationship’.8 Brink is given to understand that ‘the relationship is now close to an end – it must just be rounded off before she can feel free to enter a new “commitment”’.9 At least, that is how he reads what she says. And with his prospects looking excellent, Brink is full of hope.

In an instance of uncanny synchronicity, at the very moment that Yvonne tells Brink how close to collapse the affair with Xavier is, her cellphone rings. ‘Talk of the devil,’ she says, and switches off the device. Brink reports: ‘I asked her to come sit next to me on the couch. We kissed, with a strange combination of passion and desolation.’ Four days later, Yvonne visits again, with Brink subsequently reflecting on ‘a very pleasant, intimate evening’ enhanced by the fact that this time Yvonne ‘even allowed’ him to take off her bra. ‘Everything seemed wonderfully hopeful,’10 he writes, and so when he flies off to Europe the next day he is so buoyant that he calls her from Paris and arranges to see her on the Wednesday of his return. Once Brink is back in Cape Town, Yvonne pays him a visit, though this time he offers something far more exotic than scones, tempting her with foie gras and a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape red wine11 – but she is down with food poisoning, she tells him, and so she is forced to abstain. ‘Despite this, it was a close evening with endless conversation,’ Brink notes, having had his eager appetite for verbal intercourse slaked.12

Brink’s reporting is relentless, with exact dates and details, in this way reliving and reconstituting events – indeed, reassuring himself of their veracity – as was his wont when he was in a state of high desire, or peril. Now, with an old relationship dying and a new century unfurling, he resorted once more to writing as a kind of stay against uncertainty. Yvonne shifts from a presence on the pages of his journal to a material being as, on Sunday 25 March 2001, she joins him for the deferred pleasure of the foie gras and lush French wine. In the course of the evening, they become intimate with each other, the various stages of which Brink describes. ‘At last, all her clothes came off,’ he writes, giving further details. Yvonne reportedly ‘unzips his trousers’, only for Brink to reveal that he is not ready for sex: ‘And then the lame shock that I couldn’t achieve an erection, even though I took a Viagra just as I began French-kissing her. (Those goddamned pills for high blood pressure that have been hitting me with impotence for weeks, actually months now…).’ Sidestepping the bathos and potential humiliation of the moment – ‘thank God I was able to hide it from her’ – Brink suggests that they should rather ‘hold back’ because, ‘no matter how eager both of us are, there hasn’t yet been an unconditional Yes from [Yvonne], and she might regret it afterwards’. They should wait, he advises, until ‘she wants it 100%’, a gesture – and here Brink’s sigh is almost audible – that Yvonne tells him she ‘appreciated enormously, with great feeling’.13 Of course, this may well have been mere politeness on her part, wishing to spare him further embarrassment.

Optimistic about the new love affair, Brink writes that ‘the understanding between us was that she would work to clear matters up with Xavier’.14 In the meantime, Brink goes to Johannesburg on business, and upon his return Yvonne pays him a visit. She is troubled after ‘an upsetting day when Xavier apparently pitched up very drunk and prickly for a coffee date in town’. Brink interprets this as Yvonne saying ‘she was certain the end was in sight’ for her and Xavier.15 His journalling is now almost a day-by-day report, so obsessed is he about the possibility of a genuine love affair with Yvonne.

Brink persists in his attentions, communicating with Yvonne by email and telephone. He tries to see her again, but the evening after telling him about Xavier’s poor behaviour, Yvonne declines, saying she needs to devote time to her studies. This fails to deter Brink, who writes: ‘When I tried to call her, the phone was engaged for a very long time, and I left a message.’ She eventually calls him back, and even though it is rather late he asks if he can come over for a short while. She is ‘hesitant’, and he learns that she has just had a fight with her ex-partner.16 ‘And on top of that,’ she tells Brink: ‘If I told you I also saw Xavier you might not want to come.’17 But still he goes. When he arrives, she tells him all about the argument with her former partner about her relationship with Xavier.

Then she says to Brink: ‘Xavier is still there, André.’ Yvonne and Xavier had apparently met up again and talked for a long while. In view of this, her feelings appear to have changed; now, she ‘knows she still loves [Xavier]’.18 A clearly shaken Brink records: ‘All I could say at that point was that I had no choice but to withdraw, at least until, one day, when she achieved clarity about [Xavier] or me.’ There is much pathos and a little despair in his words: ‘Sore. Sore. Sore. But what else was possible?’19

Brink does not, however, stick to his resolution. As always, he immediately second-guesses himself. In the very next paragraph, he reasons thus: ‘Perhaps we were both over-tired. Maybe it wasn’t necessary to be so drastic. I can still continue seeing her, be with her, as long as I’m not a “threat” to the two of them?’20 Adopting an uncharacteristically self-punishing position, he will stand by, satisfied with just ‘be[ing] with her’ while fellow-writer Xavier enjoys her bounty. The situation recalls the time in 1965, with his second wife Salomi’s possibly light-hearted threat to have affairs with other men, and his reaction: ‘Must I then be happy to be your second choice, and take the leftovers?’21 The earlier response was that of a competitive young man aged 30; now, at 65, the ageing lover cannot but doubt his powers.

A further complication arises the very next afternoon, as he records. Marianne, from whom he is partially estranged, catches him unawares, asking: ‘And how are things going with your new lover?’ Brink is taken aback, but also bemused. ‘God alone knows how she found out. (Unless it was a shot in the dark? Based on intuition? Because she clearly doesn’t know what Yvonne’s name is or any other details; doesn’t want to, either; and she doesn’t want to believe it all happened so quickly, and is over already…)’22 Evidently, Marianne knows Brink well, perhaps better than he knows himself in some respects. It is probable that she ‘read’ his demeanour, given that he wore his heart on his sleeve, especially when it came to women. Marianne was not taken in by his assurances that ‘it all happened so quickly’ and it was ‘over already’. In consequence, Brink writes, ‘[S]he didn’t want me to stay over with her on Friday night, as I usually did. And the following night I slept upstairs with Olga.’23

The entry suggests that the couple still had marital relations, even in 2001. Now, after she shows him the door (of her bedroom, at least) and after taking a polite shove from Yvonne, he somehow manages to convince himself that it is he who must choose between the two women:

Yesterday, Sunday, I had to make a ‘decision’. I know, still: my ‘gut’ tells me I want to stay with M. But I cannot push myself into that vacuum. For me, the turning point came in ’97 in Cognac. If I were to promise to try again…? But after last year’s ridiculous email-stories, she refuses to believe me. And how can I blame her? I myself cannot understand my actions. Perhaps sixteen years of monogamy did, after all, just become too much for me??? Maybe I do all these things, as M says, as a way of telling her I’ve had enough…? (And yesterday was the 16th anniversary of our first night, when, like a beautiful white moth, she flew up against the curtains…!)24

At the moment that everything has been put into doubt, Brink’s recourse is to romantic abstraction. It is almost a reflex. The image of Marianne fluttering against the curtains like a ‘beautiful white moth’ references the description of ‘their’ first night in States of Emergency: ‘She [Melissa] is standing with her back to the curtains, waiting for him, undressed, but with her white clothes and underclothes bundled against her, a scared beautiful white moth that has lost its way in the night.’25 The journal passage is peppered with obscure references, ‘’97 in Cognac’ and ‘ridiculous’ emails. Marianne’s current scepticism appears to be related to emails he had unwisely sent to three women in 2000, which, he admits, elsewhere in this journal, were ‘humiliating’ and ‘based on “situations” that should have remained fantasy’.26

It is not clear what these ‘situations’ and emails were about or exactly who the recipients were. They are identified only as ‘Nancy, “Charmaine”,27 and Arzen’, but from the context it appears that they were old flames he was trying to reconnect with. If Brink found these emails and their aftermath ‘humiliating’, it can only be because he was proposing something that the women either declined or ignored, probably because it was inappropriate. Brink himself comments that the emails were ‘a kind of search for “involvement” and/or recognition’.28 He was once again exposing his eagerness to achieve ‘approval’ from women, as he himself described this tendency.29 The passage suggests, too, that Marianne had somehow come to see these emails, and feels she can no longer believe Brink when he says he wants to ‘try again’. For her, the emails seemingly signified some level of betrayal, at least. And yet, despite the signs that his prospects with Marianne are all but doomed, he continues to see himself as needing to ‘make a decision’, having to choose between her and Yvonne. In so doing, Brink constructs an imaginary world filled with uncertainty, a drama of desire, with himself the agonised protagonist. It is as if he resurrects the existentialist self of 1965, who declared: ‘I die of pain, and, like a phoenix, arise again, purified.’30

By now, though, Brink had lost most of his 1960s brio, and his wife’s intuition regarding Yvonne is not the end of this particular bout of self-inflicted suffering. A punch-drunk Brink – forced to admit ‘I myself cannot understand my actions’ – now faces ‘the final (?!) blow: I had to communicate this development to Yvonne, too.’ He tells Yvonne about his conversation with Marianne, and then, in what reads like a classic case of projection, his latest love is said to feel ‘a tremendous anxiety that something which was so perfect [his marriage], might now be trivialised and polluted’.31 Whatever the case, Yvonne seems to withdraw herself.

Bewildered, Brink now has no choice but to face the fact that both women have, in effect, sent him away: ‘Because of the relationship with Yvonne, I now have to give M up; because of the possible divorce from M, Yvonne is now lost to me. A double loss.’ From here on, Brink’s all-too-familiar narrative of thwarted desire gathers momentum: ‘I don’t quite know how it all came about. Unbelievable how, in such a short time, something so rare, so nearly perfect could have come into existence. And incredible that it can be over already.’32

It is hard not to notice how, by writing, or literarisering, Brink is able to transform a fairly messy situation into ‘something so rare, so nearly perfect’ – an immaculate love that is at once ephemeral and frozen in time, like the lovers on Keats’s Grecian urn.33 Here, however, it would turn out that Brink was overhasty. Far from being ‘over’, more was to come. Yvonne changes her mind, and after ‘days of volatility’, she visits him in his office, leaving some work for his comment.34

Because of the formality of the office environment, Brink finds the experience ‘very painful’ – a situation exacerbated by a ‘busybody’ friend who pops in during the visit. Nonetheless, he and Yvonne have ‘a moment of holding on to each other’ behind his closed office door just before she leaves.35 That same evening, Brink reads Yvonne’s work, immediately penning some helpful comments. He then goes to her nearby house, places the work with his written advice at her door, rings the doorbell, and leaves. He does this because it is what he has promised to do, noting that she had previously told him that she would not open the door for anyone unless she had prearranged a visit.36

Brink has no sooner arrived back at his empty Rosebank house, however, than Yvonne phones him. Why didn’t he come in? Her voice, Brink writes, was ‘rich and full of invitation’, her mood ‘languid and lovely’. She tells him she has been with a friend, and that she is ‘dangerously drunk’.37 Brink proposes that he come over for a visit and she agrees. ‘I happily went along, barefoot,’ he comments. Once there, he sees that ‘she was just as relaxed’ as he had expected, and a ‘long evening’ of conversation follows in which ‘everything that had been held back was opened up’.38

The conversation takes a happy turn, he records, when she tells him how she had once asked Xavier: ‘Tell me about André Brink.’ Before responding, Xavier apparently sat back, hands behind his head, and reflected for a second or two. Then, leaning forward again, he said: ‘André is South Africa’s best export product and he doesn’t know it.’ And: ‘A[ndré] is a real writer. Not like you and me.’ Putting paid to fears that his rival scorns his writing, this information is, Brink notes, like a ‘flash of new light upon him and me’, although it is not impossible that Xavier made his comments with a soupçon of sarcasm. For Brink, however, the reported remarks are most welcome. He no longer perceives his writer-friend as ‘a threatening figure’, feeling instead that he cannot but continue to ‘respect and love Xavier’.

Brink’s striking out of the words ‘and love’ (whether immediately or upon rereading his entry later cannot be established) perhaps points to his sense – whether justified or not – that he cannot take Xavier at face value or trust him unreservedly. The comments attributed to Xavier nevertheless ‘shifted something regarding his position in our triangle’. Brink understands that, ‘undoubtedly, this might complicate everything ahead, but in a rich manner’.39 Soon after the disclosure, he and Yvonne find themselves ‘entangled in each other on her (uncomfortable) red couch’, overcome by ‘repaired – and new – intimacy’.40 There is much caressing, but no more than that. It was ‘an occasion for new certainties and possibilities, not for haste’. He could have stayed over, he assures himself – ‘she showed no resistance, but it was necessary to hold something back’ – adding, in parenthesis: ‘I also – purposely – didn’t take a pill beforehand.’ When he left, the feeling in the air was one of hartseer, but apart from the heartsore he felt ‘relieved and clean’.41

Brink then goes away for a few days, to Grahamstown and Oudtshoorn on a round of writing business and public appearances. After he returns to Cape Town on 10 April, he calls Yvonne on her cellphone at the earliest opportunity. ‘Immediately we were on the same page,’ he reports. The future once more seems filled with promise: ‘Missed me terribly, she says. Had a lovely weekend of reading and sleeping and resting. For the first time in weeks, she feels “together”. And she immediately said “yes” when I suggested coming over that evening.’42 This time, he notes, he does take a blue pill, doing so ‘in good time!’43 – given the fact that it takes an hour or so to take proper effect. At first, they talk openly and freely with each other: ‘Once again the unstoppable back and forth of telling stories and talking. And we were able to converse without any hesitation about X and M, because they exist, they are real in the situation.’44 Brink goes on to record the sex that follows in fine detail – both anatomical and emotional45 – demonstrating his deep insecurity and fear of the fleeting nature of such experiences. His lively description (redacted here) is, as before, his stay against the loss that he knows is imminent.

Very soon after their lovemaking, which Brink memorialises as the ‘night of 10 April’, Yvonne leaves Cape Town for a short visit to her home city. Brink, in turn, endures a ‘lonely weekend, but good for cherishing, for memory’, writing that he ‘knows all too well that their night [of lovemaking] was exceptional and special’,46 thereby intimating that he cannot be certain of it happening again. Moreover, he will be leaving for the USA soon after Yvonne returns, and in just a few days, Xavier will be returning to Cape Town from abroad. Brink ruefully predicts that Xavier ‘will probably want an “innings”’ with Yvonne even before he himself leaves for the US, with Yvonne experiencing ‘guilt feelings and fears’ – but even so, ‘once I’m away, he’ll “consolidate” again’.47 Xavier will stay for at least three weeks, ‘and both of them will in all likelihood be caught up in a certain desperation before Xavier leaves: to hold on, to grab hold of something’. Knowing that he himself will return ‘with a need to confirm’ his affair with Yvonne, Brink admonishes himself: ‘Patience. Patience. And mercy, too, probably.’ There is pathos and desperation too in his memory of ‘that night’, which for him was ‘immeasurably precious’ in a world of fluidity, the reason being that ‘time was so suspended. Because our little paradise was so intact.’ More than ever before, Brink’s world is one of uncertainty, of flux, of failing powers, and so he resorts to re-collection, re-membering, as he travels back in time to ‘paradise’: ‘Memory, oh beautiful ship.’ The cri de coeur continues, as he roughly quotes French poet Paul Éluard: ‘I love you so much that I don’t know / which of us is absent.’48 He recalls Yvonne getting up to make tea after their lovemaking, and ends on a lyrical note, remarking on her beauty as he describes ‘the slow opening up of trust, being allowed to show the body, being allowed to share it.’49

Brink’s emphasis on being permitted to enter what is implicitly a forbidden zone may be traced to his conflicted relationship with his mother, who was at once a hard taskmaster and deeply loving. Even as a grown-up – indeed elderly – man, Brink needs to be ‘allowed’ – in what is tantamount to a benediction: to enter the golden space of a woman’s approval. This need is intensified by his abiding sense of solitariness, and the concomitant fear of isolation, which may itself be rooted in his experience of a remote, judgemental father and an authoritarian, patriarchal culture.50 His craving for the validation implicit in such female permission, its balm of loving acceptance, is acute, though it is a need that must also be endlessly met. Brink is perpetually caught in the in-between space of not having what he desires and simultaneously desiring it with a desperation to which, experience shows, he is somehow inured.

Paradoxically, though, when Brink is ‘allowed’ in, he is all too often incapable of maintaining the status quo: he is, somehow, addicted to the act, the process of seeking, desiring, and capturing the very thing he seems fated to reject. Accordingly, he is enslaved to an insatiable hunger for sexual love, to a perpetual desire for conquest, one that can seemingly never be fulfilled. As his psychoanalyst reportedly told him at the time: ‘You are in love with love. Not with [“Yvonne”]’;51 or, as Yolande Breytenbach presciently put it in Paris in 1968: ‘You can only be happy when you’re unhappy.’ This view was echoed by that of another friend at the time – a view Brink himself endorses: when he wants a woman, he needs to possess her, jealously and entirely, but the moment she gives herself over to him, he feels trapped and loses interest.52

Brink fetches Yvonne from the airport upon her return to Cape Town, though in the interim they have had several telephone conversations, he writes, which evinced a ‘gladness and longing and clarity that led me happily to assume that we would now simply go on. For example, about lovemaking: not if, but when, and how much.’ Yvonne offers no objection to going to Brink’s home from the airport, as her domestic worker is busy at her own house. At Banksia Road, they have tea together and ‘tumble into one of our long conversations’.53 During the course of this, Brink begins to unbutton her blouse, with Yvonne reportedly saying: ‘I’m not going to sit here topless.’ Brink smartly replies, ‘Fine, in that case let’s go to my bedroom.’ It is here that the trouble begins: ‘And right then: the utterly unpredictable. She leans back and looks me straight in the eyes in that frank manner of hers: “I have to tell you. After what happened last Tuesday I felt terrible. Terrible. It was awful. Guilt, confusion, everything. It just wasn’t right.”’54 Brink then reports that she feels ‘guilt with regard to M’ and that she refuses to be ‘the other woman’, describing the situation as ‘sordid’. But her guilt also extends to Xavier, whose love she feels she has ‘betrayed’.55

They manage, Brink writes, to ‘talk it all through’, with Yvonne ‘candid – in her burning manner – even about what was illogical and inexplicable’. In an attempt to explain this to himself, Brink analyses the situation. Yvonne feels guilt in relation to Marianne, but none at all regarding Xavier’s own wife. He wrestles with her logic: how can the mere fact of Marianne’s awareness of their affair make Yvonne feel guilty, while the apparent lack of awareness on the part of Xavier’s wife somehow frees Yvonne from guilt? Regardless, Yvonne seems to have made up her mind. They can work on ‘damage control’, she says, but that’s about all. Her ‘betrayal’ of Xavier cannot be undone, she tells Brink.56

After their conversation, Yvonne gets up and takes a bath, ‘leaving two perfect little footprints on the black bath-mat’ (which he wistfully notices the next morning). He takes her to Observatory, just a few kilometres from Rosebank, to fetch her car from a panel beater. The banal detail in this tale of thwarted desire is striking. That night, he visits Yvonne, but he leaves feeling heartsore, because ‘her connection with Xavier is very clearly incalculably more intense than I ever deduced’.57 Two nights later, he visits her again after attending a ‘fairly boring’58 discussion group hosted by Njabulo Ndebele, who was at the time UCT’s Vice-Chancellor. Once again, Brink reports, he and Yvonne surrender themselves completely to conversation. This time, though, he feels sadness, even a kind of hopelessness, because ‘Xavier is all she talks about’.59

Despite the bleak outlook, Brink persists, refusing to accept the inevitable – as many might, backing off to save their pride. Yvonne’s earlier declarations that the affair with Xavier was about to end were evidently a misreading of her own feelings; that is the only charitable way of interpreting the sudden reversal. Alternatively, Brink misheard her. He is nevertheless unwilling to see any wrong in her, as becomes clear later when he defends her against Marianne’s sceptical view of her motives. However, when Yvonne visits his house the next morning to help him with a setting on his email, she stays ‘a little too long’; about this overstaying of her welcome, Brink notes: ‘For the first time I felt it [the relationship] was beginning to bore me.’60 Both his later defence of Yvonne against Marianne’s criticisms and his momentary sense of boredom with the young student just as she settles into ordinariness around him, are vintage Brink. He seems most engaged when there is adversity, or the angoisse of looming loss. Inevitably, it seems, he quickly finds pedestrian time with a woman boring – here, even with the hard-to-get Yvonne. However, Brink’s ennui soon switches back to a conflicted sense of loss when, on the same day, Yvonne cancels a restaurant date he had set up for that evening. Xavier had been at her house earlier that Friday and, as often happens, the visit has left her distressed.61 Would he not rather come for a meal at her place, she suggests, and they have a ‘lovely evening, once again on the bed’. But there is ‘an almost bizarre back and forth of emotions’ – making him ‘want to leave twice’. He even says to Yvonne: ‘What the hell am I doing here? I have no place in this.’62

At one point during their conversation, Brink continues, he ‘felt his hackles rise’ at the way Xavier could seemingly come and go, ‘and assume that she will always happily be there, waiting for him, her whole life ancillary to his…!’ Then, slowly, after ‘puzzling it out endlessly’ with her, Brink began to realise, with a kind of ‘awe’, that Yvonne is no ‘mere little lady waiting for her lord-and-master’. No, this connection between Xavier and Yvonne points to ‘love of a depth and intensity that is in fact heroic’. Brink faces the inescapable reality: ‘It’s a choice.’ Seemingly defeated, he adds: ‘This is how she wants it to be. Not because she “hopes” something might come of it, ever, that’s exactly what she doesn’t want.’63 Rather, the ‘terrible intensity’ of the love between her and Xavier comes from the fact that it ‘erases past and future – there is ONLY the present: clean and purified, like a flame.’64

Showing a remarkable capacity for empathetic listening, even when everything he hears works against his own desires and makes him ‘heartsore’, Brink comes to realise that he is in the presence of the form of love that he himself has always longed for and pursued. Yvonne ‘doesn’t even think of next week, because it makes no sense’, Brink writes; without Xavier there, she has no expectations – ‘when he is away, he is away’ – and ‘she knows there may be other women and relationships while he is not with her’. Almost enviously, Brink observes of the relationship: ‘It’s not that Yvonne sits and waits for Xavier, because waiting is based on something.’ As Brink recognises, this ‘existence’, namely, her time with Xavier, ‘is only when he is present’ – the only time it has any reality for her. At the same time, though, Brink fully appreciates the extent of Yvonne’s pain: ‘Last year Xavier was away for eight months and it almost drove Yvonne mad. The price is almost too high, but she wants it – and not like a victim or a masochist – it’s more an act of will.’65

In the drama he now reconstructs in the process of writing it all up, Brink redefines his own role. No longer a major actor, he accepts a supporting role, with the bonus of being a spectator to a sublime passion:

In a way, this is where I come in. She had almost reached her limit when she met me. She says she could only continue because I loved her, and she me. It’s paradoxical: without Xavier in the picture she would never have come to me, but because he is there, it’s as if there’s a sword between us in our mythological bed…There were moments when I became angry, or despondent. But in the final analysis, I think, I was overwhelmed by the realisation of how much intimacy, passion, focus can settle in so diminutive an individual. As I’ve already said, ‘awe’. It’s a love of mythical proportions. I think I am already privileged just to be able, from the edges of such a love, to observe some of it, share in some of it.66

Given Brink’s penchant for romanticisation, what he describes here may have little basis in reality. Indeed, his awe before this ‘love of mythical proportions’ will evaporate soon enough, when Yvonne’s subsequent reports cause him to rewrite the narrative, casting her as the abused woman and Xavier as the abuser. For now, though, the idea of a ‘flame-purified’ love – sans all constraints – presents itself as the passion he himself has always wished for, and tried to will into being, especially with Ingrid Jonker. All those decades ago, he had refused to accept that time, space, contingency or obligation might in any way limit love’s flame, or restrict its purifying effect. With Estelle and Ingrid, and later with Alta and Marianne, he was the flame around whom the other two circled. Now, however, he occupies a peripheral position, on the outer edge of the Xavier and Yvonne drama. And yet he remains consistent – in theory, at least – in holding to his philosophy that there should be no need to choose between one sexual partner and another. However, in practice he will suffer terrible jealousy, as in similar situations in the past, but this time it relates to a fellow-writer whom he respects.

The situation thus results in a kind of abnegation, where Brink inevitably ends up feeling excluded. As earlier relationships demonstrated, the experience of being shut out of a love drama was one of Brink’s deepest, most enduring psychic hurts; and now, it was a painfully familiar situation. In his present role of outsider, all that is left to him is to describe Yvonne’s distress at Xavier being subjected to attack in the media: ‘The way she sat with her arms around her upraised knees, tears in her eyes, completely distressed that Xavier felt so hurt: an intensity that completely excludes me.’67

His romantic instincts remain intact, however, and Brink sails forth: as long as there is love (on his side, at least), there is hope, despite the barometer indicating storms ahead. As always, he bolsters his courage by writing: he recalls the post-coital tea conversation with Yvonne, but this time he assumes her point of view. Her memory of the occasion is how comfortable it all was, as if they had been together ‘for a lifetime’ and had ‘always known each other, but were now living ever deeper into each other’. Brink seems conveniently to forget that she also described the aftermath of their sex as ‘awful’, including the guilt she felt about Xavier.68 Now, he has her saying that ‘[i]f you hadn’t been there I don’t know what would have happened to me. I think I would have gone mad.’69 In this way, he not only quotes her selectively but also writes himself back into a state of emotional equilibrium.

Now, having at least defined some role for himself in the situation, Brink flies off to Madison in the USA, where he will address an audience on the topic of ‘Fact and Fiction in Post-authoritarian Societies’.70 While he’s away, Yvonne writes to inform him of Guy Butler’s death at the age of 83;71 Brink had enjoyed cordial relations with the grand old man of letters, who had been a colleague and friend at Rhodes.

Despite being drawn into discussions at Madison on topics such as ‘the role of stories – telling and writing’,72 Brink is preoccupied with his personal life. He cannot help but dwell on the thought that he is caught in a ‘fatal circle’: ‘For as long as Yvonne is there, I will not be able to make any attempt to go back to Marianne; at the same time, I know Yvonne will never be available to me for as long as Xavier is present.’73 This is an all-too-familiar refrain by now, a replay of previous triangles. Seemingly oblivious of the repetitive pattern, he replays the drama. This time, cocooned by his international fame as he performs his wisdom before a global audience in the American midwest, and in the privacy of his journalling, he consoles himself as follows: ‘And yet: inside that circle we love each other. It’s not just that I love her. She loves me, too. About that she leaves little doubt.’74 Just two days later, Brink will repeat, in his journal, his wording about being trapped in a ‘fatal circle’, though this time he ends on a less optimistic note: ‘Have I, therefore, already lost out in both respects?75 The reality of his situation seems finally to have hit home – though past experience suggests that he will weather this gale too.

From Madison, Brink goes to New York, where he drops in at Harcourt Brace & Company, his American publisher. While there, he checks his email, only to find a message from Yvonne that he later describes as an ‘afsêbrief’ – a letter of rejection. In the email, she tells him plainly that she ‘is simply not able to love him in the way she should’.76 Upon digesting this, he feels ‘a kind of emptiness’. He acknowledges: ‘It is final’ – and though this is ‘exactly where we were’ earlier that year, it is ‘worse now after everything that has happened in the meantime’.77 Ever the romantic, he adopts a lyrical, elegiac tone, writing that the relationship is now ‘more tender, more precious, because there was so much’. He acknowledges that he is feeling ‘empty, empty’, but boosts his morale by writing that he ‘feels a kind of perverse liberation’ from what he calls ‘a dotage’; choosing to use the English word – something that could ‘only have brought about disastrous consequences’ – Brink also conjures up an image of looming old age.78

Irredeemably optimistic, Brink reads Yvonne’s words in a hopeful light, interpreting them as saying she was ‘not able to’ love him soos dit moet, or as she ‘ought’. Such an interpretation gives him the space to regard Yvonne as an unwilling victim who is ensnared in Xavier’s all-consuming net. Seventeen years later, though, she stated unambiguously: ‘I just wasn’t in love with him, even though I sometimes wished I were – had I been, many parts of my life would have been rich.’79 Brink would later refuse to acknowledge that, although Yvonne ‘loved’ him in the way one might love one’s family, she was not in love with him. Now, in his journalled ‘present tense incomplete’, he manages to salvage hope, though acknowledging that his love will never be fully reciprocated: ‘Something else I now know: even if things went wrong between her and Xavier, it would still not open the door for me – and perhaps this is the most difficult thing to accept, and the most necessary?’80

A day or two later, he goes to a bookshop where he emails Yvonne, suggesting that they continue their discussions about literature and her studies, merely as friends. He is left, for the moment, ‘with a feeling that the matter is now settled’ – they can continue discussing books and ideas, and maintain their ‘strong, lovely friendship’, as long as it does not interfere with what he now envisages as a ‘really thorough attempt to bridge the chasm with M’.81 He manages to mask his hurt by putting forward a plan that accommodates his ever-present need – hopeful prospects with a woman, even if she happens to be his estranged wife.

No sooner has Brink settled down with this plan than he allows his world to be turned upside down again. A day or so later he checks his email, only to find another message from Yvonne: she is ready, in fact ‘eager’, to ‘reinvent’, she tells him in response to his earlier letter. In all likelihood, Yvonne means to suggest that they should now recreate their relationship in such a way that they can continue to be good friends, as Brink himself had suggested. Brink, however, interprets the term ‘reinvent’ as a hopeful signal of fresh possibilities: ‘And suddenly everything is in a vortex again.’ In frustration, he writes: ‘All the good intentions with M suspended. God in heaven! Can I not, just for once, gain control over my life? Must I sacrifice myself so to others? To women?’ The ink is hardly dry before he reevaluates the value of such ‘sacrifice’: instead of always trying ‘to organise and monitor’ everything, he should rather surrender to the ‘Dionysian’ forces of disorder that he has been ‘forced throughout his life to inhibit’. In what amounts to an internal dialogue, he then ponders whether the ‘Dionysian’ is not simply a ‘sad rationalisation’, ‘ordinary naivety’, or ‘even self-deception’.82

Part of Brink’s undoing in such situations is his Hamlet-like questioning of every conclusion he reaches, often as a way of dealing with difficult feelings. While it is in many respects an admirable quality to doubt one’s own impulses, this tendency does not serve Brink well when he forgets about, or simply does not hear, what the other party is trying to communicate to him. Yvonne, for example, has told him in a kind and gentle way what her feelings are: she is not in love with him. Clearly, the affection she has for Brink is nothing like, and nowhere near as intense as, her love for Xavier. There is pathos in Brink’s attempts to quell feelings of loss by resorting to circuitous reasoning, but this cannot stave off the inevitable.

Eventually, he is forced to acknowledge reality. After returning from New York on Friday 11 May 2001, he phones Yvonne and they agree to meet that Sunday. When Sunday comes, however, she phones to say she ‘is not free inside’, and they should rather wait because ‘everything is too complicated’. She then arranges to drop in at his office during the week, but again she cancels, this time emailing to tell him she is ‘too busy’.83 It is all too much, and Brink breaks down: ‘By then I was so worked up that I was out of my mind.… And I snapped. Listened to Françoise Hardy and Nana Mouskouri and, as in the past with Esther, when Christie [Roode] played Chopin’s Ballade No 3 for me, I began to weep. Which was ultimately a necessary catharsis. That night, for the first time, I managed to sleep for a few hours.’84

Though he gives no indication as to how long he has had sleep problems, it is possible that his disquietude began with Yvonne’s New York email. Whatever the case, he has hopes of seeing her at university the next day, but again he suffers disappointment. The next morning, she phones to tell him that they ‘need to talk’.85 Feeling momentarily ‘elated’, he goes to her house, but he soon comes down to earth. Yvonne informs him that, while he was in the USA, she felt ‘unable to live a lie’, and told Xavier that she and Brink had become ‘close to each other’, with everything having become ‘very complex’.86 The situation is now even more entangled, with Xavier angry and jealous, and both men needing to negotiate their way in this complicated affair.

Brink reports that Xavier was apparently furious when Yvonne told him about her relationship with the novelist. She described the way Xavier immediately called for the bill at the restaurant, getting up and leaving the moment the account was settled. Ever since, she and Xavier had only had ‘testy, hurt exchanges’, despite the fact that Yvonne had not gone into any detail about her relationship with Brink. Keeping Brink at a distance sexually, she nevertheless makes him an unwitting accomplice by telling him: ‘I shudder to think what he would have done if he knew.’87

Brink, in turn, interprets Xavier’s reaction as the motivation for her email, explaining ‘what lay behind her “rejection” letter’88 – a strategy that enables him to forget that she had written to tell him she was not ‘in love’ with him. Playing into the role of villain, Xavier reportedly made it clear to Yvonne that if she continued seeing Brink, he would leave her. In choosing to regard this as unreasonable, Brink conveniently holds the moral high ground while dealing with the humiliation of having ceded territory to Xavier with his superior sexual status. Caught in a drama that is largely not of his own making, Brink casts Yvonne as an exalted though put-upon heroine and Xavier as the unworthy object of her loyalty and love. So profound is this love, Yvonne tells Brink, that Xavier ‘doesn’t have the faintest understanding of it’.89

Thus it is that Brink is drawn into a deeper, treacherous complicity with the woman who is the elusive object of his own thwarted desire. While claiming to be his friend, he and Yvonne strongly censure Xavier. In twisting the knife, they seem also to betray themselves: Brink by colluding in his own ultimate undoing, and Yvonne by abusing Xavier’s gift of confidentiality, although some might argue that Xavier got his just deserts.90

The role that Brink now assumes in this complicated narrative is that of an understanding, emotionally attuned confidant, while Xavier must play the ungrateful wretch. Brink slips easily into the role of charming, gracious gentleman, and when he is not baking scones, he is making pancakes to soothe the injured woman’s feelings. A year later, Brink’s narrative of abuse will become explicit, as he attempts to open Yvonne’s eyes to the fact that she is participating in a ‘battered woman’ cycle with Xavier,91 the fellow writer whom he – perhaps enviously – will begin to regard as something of a Dionysian beast, given his own unsatisfied longings in this regard. For now, though, Brink plays a waiting game, biding his time until Xavier once again leaves Cape Town, and he can step in to restore Yvonne to her rightful position – to be admired, if not worshipped. To avoid Xavier’s outbursts of anger, they agree to cut down on their one-on-one meetings.92

It is at this juncture that Brink reports on a separate disappointment in his life. In New York, he had met up with a woman from his past, whom he identifies simply as ‘J’. While he apparently had high hopes of rekindling the flame during his stay, she resisted his advances in subtle though obvious ways. Though he was excited to find her wearing a white nightgown and apparently little else when he arrived at her New York apartment late one morning, the moment he excused himself to go to the bathroom, she ‘very quickly’ got dressed, thus sending him a clear message that he failed to read.93 He persisted, and although she allowed Brink ‘to unbutton her blouse and kiss her breasts’, she then told him ‘very firmly’ that he could go ‘no further’. At this, he wilted: ‘This time I didn’t lose my cool. I was too tired for that. The futility of everything simply depressed me.’94

In a continuation of the Yvonne narrative, Brink casts himself in the role of Cyrano de Bergerac, the character with the big, ugly nose who never declared his love for Roxane for fear of rejection, condemned to wait and watch from the sidelines: ‘With regard to Xavier and Yvonne: must I now be something of a Cyrano?’95 A few days later, still smarting from Yvonne’s rejection, he quotes the elderly magistrate in JM Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians: ‘There is no limit to the foolishness of men my age. Our only excuse is that we leave no mark of our own on the girls who pass through our hands … Our loving leaves no mark.’ About the author, his colleague, Brink admiringly notes: ‘John was 40 at that stage! He knew then already!’96

Brink himself is undergoing the humbling that inevitably comes with age, now that he has passed the 65-year mark. In his own mind, he seems to have morphed into Coetzee’s suffering, self-divided magistrate, plagued by a need for connection with and recognition by younger women.

The looming despair of finding himself at this juncture fuels Brink’s frustrated feelings, and he digs himself ever deeper into the trenches of a losing battle despite several moments of clarity acknowledging the hopelessness of his predicament. As much as he tells himself that the ‘beautiful’ friendship with Yvonne is all there is left now, he continues to struggle with feelings of jealousy about Xavier. At the same time, Yvonne feeds him ‘shocking revelations’ about Xavier’s jealousy of Brink. This comes after she confronts Brink about the ethics of using people one knows in writing fiction, accusing him of a willingness to ‘betray’ her in this manner, and that she is just a ‘coincidental factor’ in his relationship with Xavier.97

Brink reports that he and Yvonne ‘clear it all up’ over the phone, ‘in a beautiful opening-up from both sides’.98 After watching Saturday-afternoon rugby with his neighbours, Brink visits Yvonne. She cooks dinner for him – ‘it was much like the very early days of complete confidentiality between us’ – and then proceeds to provide the revelations about Xavier’s allegedly unreasonable feelings of jealous resentment. Xavier had, she said, initially forbidden her from seeing him at all, suggesting they communicate solely by correspondence. And so, when she told Xavier that Brink’s new novel – The Other Side of Silence – was done, he reportedly shot back: ‘How do you know?’ And more recently, when she had phoned to tell him she was at UCT, Xavier apparently sneered: ‘You can’t stay away, can you?’99

To Brink’s mind, so corrosive is Xavier’s jealousy that Yvonne cannot even have tea with him without her feeling guilty about it. So invasive is Xavier’s presence, according to Brink, that Yvonne has told him she needs to ‘withdraw for a while to get her head clear’.100 It may well be, however, that she needs to withdraw as much from Brink as from Xavier, though this would probably not suit Brink’s current narrative. He then has her saying – the first reference in four months to their single act of lovemaking – that she fears that ‘the situation will get out of control’. As if to authenticate her alleged words to him, he quotes her in English:

‘[Our lovemaking] was so completely natural. It just happened. It had to happen. And I know if I go to your house again, or you come here, it will happen again. That is why I have to get it clear in my mind. I want to feel free, if that is what I want, to tell you: “Come here. Take off your gear.!!”’101

From what transpires later, this was meant hypothetically, as indicated by the conditional in Yvonne’s ‘if that is what I want’; but Brink preferred to read it as a hint, if not a clear invitation, to future sex. This emerges four months later, early in 2002, when he reminds Yvonne of her words, repeating them almost verbatim. A ‘shocked’ Yvonne replies that her actual intention was to avoid sending ‘mixed signals’.102 Still, Brink can hardly be blamed for misconstruing her words, especially as an outsider wanting badly to get back in.

In another episode demonstrating miscommunication – especially ironic given that both parties are experts in language use – Brink visits Yvonne just days after reporting that she had ‘passionately tongue-kissed’ him for the first time in more than a year.103 He notes that, over the phone, Yvonne was in a ‘beautiful mood’. However, when he gets to her house, everything has changed. Just before his arrival, Yvonne tells him, Xavier phoned. He had apparently mentioned, rather nonchalantly, that he had been in Cape Town for a few days – but he had failed to let her know in advance, and had not even made an effort to get in touch with her. Now he was leaving again, though he reportedly ‘consoled’ Yvonne by saying that he would be returning soon. A clearly upset Yvonne confides all this to Brink, telling him that this is the first time Xavier has not tried to see her during his Cape Town stays. A ‘furious’ Yvonne complains that ‘the only thing he is interested in is himself and all the wonderful things that have been happening in his life’. Brink records that his erstwhile young lover was ‘more raw and naked’ than he had ever seen her before,104 as she lets out an agonised: ‘He’s a sick fuck!’ In view of their recent kiss, this is music to Brink’s ears, and he urges her to leave Xavier ‘before he, in his urge to self-destruction … destroys her too’.105 After all this, seemingly anxious about her spending the night alone, Brink invites Yvonne to stay over at his house.

Three hours later, she is with him in Banksia Road, lying in the crook of his arm on the couch and watching TV. In an almost parental manner, he makes pancakes for her. However, Yvonne regains control – of the situation as well as herself – and as they discuss Xavier, she begins to find excuses for his recent treatment of her, including the possibility that his wife had been with him in Cape Town, and he had therefore been unable to phone. After Yvonne leaves, Brink is unable to sleep for worry about Yvonne. So concerned is he that he writes her an email the very next day: he was more concerned about the way she managed to bring her feelings ‘under control’ than he was about the original cause of her upset. This is because, for him, ‘it revealed the “battered woman” syndrome, the one who “takes it all” and then finds reasons to protect the torturer, making it possible for him to get at her again and again and again’. Brink issues a deceptive caveat: ‘You’re aiding and abetting his battering, you’re helping him destroy himself, and you.’106

Apparently heeding his warning, Yvonne tells Brink she will be visiting a psychotherapist friend of hers, and initially agrees to take with her his email about the ‘battered woman’ syndrome. Later, however, she backtracks. She insists that Brink destroy the email: what if something should happen to him, and someone were to come across his papers after his death? That person might then see that she called Xavier a ‘sick fuck’. Ironically, given the fact that he is in the process of recording it in writing, Brink notes that she has also asked him to ‘forget everything she said that afternoon because it was a temporary aberration’. He counters that it is precisely this kind of request that is symptomatic of the syndrome. In fact, Xavier’s alleged ‘gentleness and loveliness’ is an essential aspect, Brink contends, for that is how the torturer disarms his victim. Unconvinced, Yvonne again insists that he destroy the email – and he does, but he remains ‘pissed off’ about what he calls her ‘cover-up mechanism to forget what happened’.107 Later, he will agree also to black out all references to ‘Xavier’ in email printouts as well as in his journal – ‘to prove to you that I won’t ever betray you, even after my death’; he does the blacking out roughly, with a thick black felt-tipped pen, replacing ‘Xavier’s’ real name and initial with the letter ‘X’, though he misses a couple of instances and, in the process, fails to keep Yvonne’s secrets.108 Brink’s privacy concerns are, however, fully adhered to in these pages – the slips in his journal are duly corrected here, in line with his intentions, though ‘X’ has been amended to ‘Xavier’ for ease of reading.

At one point during this fraught period, Brink recalls something that Xavier had once said to him during a conversation about writers suffering disappointed love: ‘That is a problem I will never have, because when I fuck a woman she stays fucked.’ The statement clearly made an indelible impression on Brink, whose vulnerability is emphasised by the fact that he repeats it no fewer than three times in that same journal, including his reported relaying of it to Yvonne.109 Brink tells her that he put these very words into the mouth of a male character who is an out-and-out sexist and abuser of women – Hauptmann Böhlke – in his novel The Other Side of Silence. Brink reveals that Xavier’s crass statement in fact lies at the heart of the novel, and that, for him, ‘the whole book was a cri de coeur – a passionate appeal – to Yvonne: “Please, please, don’t allow yourself to be fucked for life.” ’110 It is in this period, too, that Yvonne reportedly tells Xavier: ‘I’m tired of being the southernmost stop on your caravan of love. A convenient port of call.’111

As contact between Brink and Yvonne increases, so his hopes rise too. At the same time, he is drawn into a bond that involves seemingly endless discussion of the terminal relationship between Yvonne and Xavier, with neither able to ‘write a final chapter’.112 One cannot but detect an element of glee in Brink’s reportage concerning the crumbling relationship, recording Yvonne’s image of herself ‘sitting here laughing at’ Xavier when he calls her, or scornfully telling him she has ‘nothing to say’ to him.113 There is a certain frisson, surely, in all this collusion and betrayal, and so it comes as little surprise that he tries to make another sexual move. One day, while Yvonne is visiting him, Brink bluntly states: ‘I have such a deep, deep need to make love to you.’ In response to her bland ‘Why?’ Brink ‘tries to explain’ – and he does so in English:

We have these incredible conversations which never seem to end. But words can only ever go so far. Then there are barriers which only the body can cross. Bodies have their own language which go [sic] beyond words. And when you make love, you open new spaces in that beyondness, which make it possible for words to go further than they could reach before…114

Brink’s words only went ‘so far’, though, failing to persuade Yvonne: his disappointment is registered in the defeated tone of his ‘No go.’115 He was there with her, on the barricades, protecting her against Xavier, but he was also not with her, at least not in the way he wanted and needed to be.

In 2002, Yvonne’s relationship with Xavier finally seems to draw to a close after his alleged fling with another woman,116 which he reportedly lied about.117 When Brink enquires about the episode, she replies: ‘No, he didn’t end it, he just didn’t continue.’118

Yvonne says this during an evening they spend together, from 10 pm to 1 am, sharing ‘intimate confessions’ on various matters, including their own relationship. ‘On that score,’ Brink reports, ‘I fear there is no movement. She doesn’t want to lose the friendship, but remains worried that I will continue to expect more, and she doesn’t want to hurt me or mess everything up.’119 Then, a few weeks later, Brink learns that Yvonne is being pursued by an ‘annoying, arrogant’ Canadian and an ‘apparently “sweet” German, who is just as much in love and just as persistent’. Typically, he dismisses these opponents, finding them coarse and lacking in the finesse of his own approach – quaintly described as that of a ‘troubadour’ some thirty years before.120 Brink has jealous thoughts about these suitors, and there is more than a hint of irony in the ‘irritation’ he expresses about Yvonne: she ‘won’t ever have the courage just to say, “fuck off”!’ to men who pursue her. He recalls an occasion when she was pestered at a Kalk Bay restaurant by two men – ‘one with short pants and a pot-belly’ – forcing her to flee; she was in such a state of terror that she phoned Brink and asked him to ‘navigate’ her home. Brink closes with the line: ‘Oh God, if only I could be cured of her!’121

His ‘cure’ would yet be a while in coming, though, and some weeks later, Brink pens an entry in a noticeably shaky hand. It is late in 2002, a year and a half after his first and only lovemaking event with Yvonne, and still he is in the grip of a painful jealousy. This time it is triggered by Yvonne having gone to the cinema the previous evening with another man, and today – at the moment of writing – she is still not home. He has not been able to reach her on the phone, and he is ridden with anxiety that she may have decided to stay over and could still be there. Brink himself has an arrangement to see her that night, but he is suddenly afraid that she might phone to make an excuse: ‘If only I could know!’ he writes, and what is he to do if she phones and says, ‘so sorry, but I can’t make it’? There is much pathos in this journal entry’s parenthesised closing sentence: ‘(God, my hand is shaking so much, I can’t even write!)’122

Throughout Brink’s nearly two years of hoping against hope that his sexual relationship with Yvonne might develop beyond their single lovemaking episode on 10 April 2001, his relationship with Marianne steadily deteriorates. All the while, though – and especially when things seem to have reached a nadir with Yvonne – he continues to hold out hope for reconciliation with his alienated wife.

It seems fair to suggest that Brink resorts to lying only in extreme circumstances – although, like his mother, he was prone to exaggeration – and it would appear that Marianne regularly talks to him about his relationship with Yvonne, asking pointed questions and offering commentary on his generally candid replies. As Marianne appears to view the situation, Yvonne is flattered by the attention of two well-known writers, and she is using Brink, in particular, to advance her own interests, but will dump him the moment he has outlived his usefulness.123 Ironically, Alta came up with a similar interpretation in the 1980s during Brink’s affair with Marianne. And as before, Brink stoutly defends the younger woman in his journal against his wife’s sceptical commentary; attempting to be impeccably fair – though at the same time exonerating himself – Brink would have none of it.

On one such occasion when Marianne tells him how Yvonne is ‘using’ him, he writes: ‘Marianne just doesn’t know, and won’t believe, how Yvonne has consistently made it clear to me that I should suffer no illusions – no matter how desperately I continue to hope and try – about there ever being love between us.’ He adds that Marianne simply does not understand ‘what a complete and beautiful and compassionate person Yvonne is, and how much we have experienced together’.124

On another occasion, Brink’s gardener finds a woman’s watch near the swimming pool in Brink’s Banksia Road garden. He assumes it belongs to Marianne, and takes it to her. In fact, it was Yvonne who had left it there after cooling down in the pool while Brink was away at Marianne’s family holiday home in Kleinmond. A few days later, Marianne confronts Brink about the watch. At first, Brink concocts a story about giving the house key to a friend called Emma and her husband so they could use the pool, in which case it has to be Emma’s watch, he says. Marianne refuses to believe him, and Brink is forced to confess to the truth. He then tries to argue his way out of the situation: it was only possible to give Yvonne the key to his house ‘because we are very good friends and nothing more’, he lamely says, with Marianne reportedly replying: ‘Take the watch and fuck off.’125

In the middle of 2002, Marianne fetches Brink from the airport after a trip to France. On the trip back to Cape Town, Brink reports, ‘a bomb goes off’ in the car: Marianne ‘must have read my file with the UCT emails, because she knows everything about my continuing contact with Yvonne and H[ermione], and, in addition, completely out of touch with the facts, with Nancy, Jeanine …!’ Now, Brink reports, a clearly furious Marianne has firmly decided they must get divorced; she has already informed several people, and all that remains is to see to practical arrangements. Yvonne knows all about it too, since Marianne has allegedly sent a group email to several of the women in his life – which Brink, with bitter amusement, quotes verbatim: ‘Dear [Yvonne], Hermione, Jeanine, Nancy and all the other women my husband is in love with – please forgive me if I have left out any names…’126 The fact that Marianne had access to Brink’s house, and that she was able to locate the file, is an indication that their living apart-but-together was not working out as well as anticipated, with mistrust and suspicion ruling the day – and also the night.

Throughout this distressing period, Brink remained in awe of Marianne, often rhapsodising about what a wonderful woman she was and how all his current troubles would fall away if only they could patch things up. Directly after recording his ‘no go’ disappointment at the failed seduction attempt with Yvonne, Brink goes on to write that he ‘repeatedly discovers how lovely M is’, emphasising that this is true ‘in every aspect and sense of the word’. Clearly rapt, he elaborates: ‘I remain surprised at the extent and depth of her maturity, her insight and understanding, her humour, and her level-headedness. It’s difficult to comprehend how privileged I am to be with someone like her.’127 Hopeful thoughts about Marianne are especially prevalent when the fading prospects with Yvonne worsen, and he is forced to look into the abyss of his remaining years without the intimate presence of a woman he deeply relates to.

Not long after Marianne’s discovery of his file containing the UCT email printouts, Brink reaches another low point in relation to Yvonne, and he immediately turns to thoughts of reconciliation with his wife:

Also – AND ESPECIALLY – because through all of this I have come to see M in a new light: I don’t know if it is too late to rescue anything with her. (And if it is over, then I will be the guilty party, and also the loser, getting my just deserts.) But if a reconciliation is possible, then, God knows, I’ll know, maybe for the first time, how incalculably much she actually means to me.128

Brink and Marianne’s divorce went through in 2003, so his hopes, as expressed here, were in vain. In addition, Brink would have felt responsible for the marriage’s failure, as he himself suggests in the passage above. In such matters, there is seldom a clear-cut division of guilt and innocence: Brink was certainly a major contributor to the marriage’s collapse, making any easy claim concerning Marianne’s culpability an oversimplification.

In the course of 2004, Brink formed a friendship with a young South African journalist, but this relationship was complicated by the fact that the woman in question did not envisage a long-term arrangement with him. ‘It was a deep and complex relationship in which André was a father-figure and mentor to me,’ says the journalist, who wishes to remain anonymous. It was clear from early on that Brink was hoping that the relationship might develop, she adds, and apart from one encounter towards the end, she steered him away from sex.129 One can only imagine Brink’s persistence, and his longing for something to hold on to, given the fact that, for him, the absence of a woman to whom he could relate deeply, including on a sexual level, was an especially great privation.

It is all too clear how vulnerable and wounded Brink was by now, and what a tumble his pride as a virile and competitive man had taken in the early 2000s, particularly vis-à-vis the episode involving Xavier and Yvonne. It is as if he was subjected to an extended, slow-motion replay of his terror of being shut out by a male adversary, while the desired female figure from whom he urgently required validation, was now there, now not – perpetually just out of reach. When, afterwards, Brink tried again to reach out to a beautiful young woman, she deftly sidestepped the charming, though ageing, suitor. In Brink’s storying of himself, it was beginning to look like the troubador-writer had run out of road.