Summertime

  I have always regarded Sigmund Freud as, for the most part, bunk, starting with the Oedipus complex and proceeding to his refusal to see that children were being sexually abused in the homes of his middle-class clientele. Nevertheless I do agree that children, even very young ones, spend a lot of time trying to puzzle out their place in the family. In the case of Chrissie, the family had up to then been a simple affair: me, the sun at the centre of the universe, plus Mommy and Daddy, my attendant planets. I had put some effort into making it clear that Maria, who appeared at eight o'clock in the morning and disappeared at noon, was not part of the family setup. 'Maria must go home now,' I would say to her in front of Maria. 'Say ta-ta to Maria. Maria has her own little girl to feed and look after.' (I referred to Maria's one little girl in order not to complicate matters. I knew perfectly well that Maria had seven children to feed and clothe, five of her own and two passed on by a sister dead of tuberculosis.)

  As for Chrissie's wider family, her grandmother on my side had passed away before she was born and her grandfather was tucked away in a sanatorium, as I told you. Mark's parents lived in the rural Eastern Cape in a farmhouse ringed by a two-metre- high electrified fence. They never spent a night away from home for fear the farm would be plundered and the livestock driven off, so they might as well have been in jail. Mark's elder sister lived thousands of miles away in Seattle; my own brother never visited the Cape. So Chrissie had the most stripped-down version of a family possible. The sole complication was the uncle who sneaked in through the back door at midnight and into Mommy's bed. Who was the uncle: one of the family or on the contrary a worm eating away at the heart of the family?

  And Maria – how much did Maria know? I could never be sure. Migrant labour was the norm in South Africa in those days, so Maria must have been all too familiar with the phenomenon of the husband who says goodbye to his wife and children and goes off to the big city to find work. But whether Maria approved of wives fooling around in their husbands' absence was another matter. Maria never actually laid eyes on my night-time visitor, but it was hardly likely that she was deceived. Visitors leave too many traces behind.

  But what is this? Is it really six o'clock? I had no idea it was so late. We must stop for the day. Can you come back tomorrow?

  I'm afraid I head home tomorrow. I fly from here to Toronto, from Toronto to London. I'd hate it if . . .

  Very well, let's press on. There is not much more. I'll be quick.

  One night John arrived in an unusually excited state. He had with him a little cassette player, and put on a tape, the Schubert string quintet. It was not what I would call sexy music, nor was I particularly in the mood, but he wanted to make love, and specifically – excuse the explicitness – wanted us to co-ordinate our activities to the music, to the slow movement.

  Well, the slow movement in question may be very beautiful but I found it far from arousing. Added to which I could not shake off the image on the box containing the tape: Franz Schubert looking not like a god of music but like a harried Viennese clerk with a head-cold.

  I don't know if you remember the slow movement, but there is a long violin aria with the viola throbbing below, and I could feel John trying to keep time with it. The whole business struck me as forced, ridiculous. Somehow or other my remoteness communicated itself to John. 'Empty your mind!' he hissed at me. 'Feel through the music!'

  Well, there can be nothing more irritating than being told what you must feel. I turned away from him, and his little erotic experiment collapsed at once.

  Later on he tried to explain himself. He wanted to prove something to me about the history of feeling, he said. Feelings had natural histories of their own. They came into being within time, flourished for a while or failed to flourish, then died or died out. The kinds of feeling that had flourished in Schubert's day were by now, most of them, dead. The sole way left to us to re-experience them was via the music of the times. Because music was the trace, the inscription, of feeling.

  Okay, I said, but why do we have to fuck while we listen to the music?

  Because the slow movement of the quintet happens to be about fucking, he replied. If, instead of resisting, I had let the music flow into me and animate me, I would have experienced glimmerings of something quite unusual: what it had felt like to make love in post-Bonaparte Austria.

  'What it felt like for post-Bonaparte man or what it felt like for post-Bonaparte woman?' I said. 'For Mr Schubert or for Mrs Schubert?'

  That really annoyed him. He didn't like his pet theories to be made fun of.

  'Music isn't about fucking,' I went on. 'Music is about foreplay. It's about courtship. You sing to the maiden before you go to bed with her, not while you are in bed with her. You sing to her to woo her, to win her heart. You sing to her to get her into bed. If you aren't happy with me in bed, maybe it is because you haven't won my heart.'

  I should have called it a day at that point, but I didn't, I went further. 'The mistake the two of us made,' I said, 'was that we skimped the foreplay. I'm not blaming you, it was as much my fault as yours, but it was a fault nonetheless. Sex is better when it is preceded by a good, long courtship. More emotionally satisfying. More erotically satisfying too. If you are trying to improve our sex life, you won't achieve it by making me fuck in time to music.'

  I was quite prepared for him to fight back, to argue the case for musical sex. But he did not rise to the bait. Instead he put on a sullen, defeated look and turned his back on me.

  I know I am contradicting what I said earlier on, about him being a good sport and a good loser, but this time I really seemed to have touched a sore spot.

  Anyway, there we were. I had gone on the offensive, I couldn't turn back. 'Go home and practise your wooing,' I said. 'Go on. Go away. Take your Schubert with you. Come again when you can do better.'

  It was cruel; but he deserved it for not fighting back.

  'Right – I'll go,' he said in a sulky voice. 'I have things to do anyway.' And he began to put on his clothes.

  Things to do! I picked up the nearest object to hand, which happened to be a quite nice little baked-clay plate, brown with a painted yellow border, one of a set of six that Mark and I had bought in Swaziland. For an instant I could still see the comic side of it: the dark-tressed, bare-breasted mistress exhibiting her stormy central-European temperament by shouting abuse and throwing crockery. Then I hurled the plate.

  It hit him on the neck and bounced to the floor without breaking. He hunched his shoulders and turned to me with a puzzled stare. Never before in his life, I am sure, had he had a plate thrown at him. 'Go!' I shouted or perhaps even screamed, and waved him away. Chrissie woke up and began crying.

  Strange to say, I felt no regret afterwards. On the contrary, I was aroused and excited and proud of myself. Straight from the heart! I said to myself. My first plate!

  [Silence]

  Have there been others?

  Other plates? Plenty.

  [Silence]

  Was that how it ended, then, between you and him?

  Not quite. There was a coda. I'll tell you the coda, then that will be that.

  It was a condom that spelled the real end, a condom tied at the neck, full of dead sperm. Mark fished it out from under the bed. I was flabbergasted. How could I have missed it? It was as if I wanted it to be found, wanted to shout my infidelity from the rooftops.

  Mark and I never used condoms, so there was no point in lying. 'How long has this been going on?' he demanded. 'Since last December,' I said. 'You bitch,' he said, 'you filthy, lying bitch! And I trusted you!'

  He was about to storm out of the room, but then as if on an afterthought he turned and – I am sorry, I am going to draw a veil over what happened next, it is too shameful to repeat, too shaming. I will simply say it left me surprised, shocked, but above all furious. 'For that, Mark, I will never forgive you,' I said when I recovered myself. 'There is a line, and you've just crossed it. I'm going. You look after Chrissie for a change.'
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  At the moment I uttered the words I'm going, you look after Chrissie, I swear I meant no more than that I was going out and he could look after the child for the afternoon. But in the five paces it took to reach the front door it came to me in a blinding flash that this could actually be the moment of liberation, the moment when I walked out of an unfulfilling marriage and never came back. The clouds over my head, the clouds in my head, lightened, evaporated. Don't think, I told myself, just do it! Without missing a step I turned, strode upstairs, stuffed some underwear into a carry-bag, and raced downstairs again.

  Mark was barring the way. 'Where do you think you are going?' he demanded. 'Are you going to him?'

  'Go to hell,' I said. I tried to push past, but he grabbed my arm.

  'Let me go!' I said.

  No screams, no snarls, just a simple, curt command. Without a word he let go. It was as though out of the skies a crown and regal robes had descended upon me. When I drove off he was still standing in the doorway, dumbstruck.

  So easy! I exulted. So easy! Why didn't I do it before?

  What puzzles me about that moment – which was in fact a key moment in my life – what puzzled me then and continues to puzzle me to the present day is the following. Even if some force within me – let us call it the unconscious, to make things easier, though I have my reservations about the classical unconscious – had held me back from checking under the bed – had held me back precisely in order to precipitate this marital crisis – why on earth did Maria leave the incriminating item lying there – Maria who was definitely not part of my unconscious, Maria whose job it was to clean, to clean up, to clean things away? Did Maria deliberately overlook the condom? Did she draw herself up, when she saw it, and say to herself, This is going too far! Either I defend the sanctity of the marriage bed or I become complicit in an outrageous affair!

  Sometimes I imagine flying back to South Africa, the new, longed-for, democratic South Africa, with the sole purpose of seeking out Maria, if she is still alive, and having it out with her, getting an answer to that vexing question.

  Well, I was certainly not running off to join the him of Mark's jealous rage, but where exactly was I heading? For I had no friends in Cape Town, none who were not Mark's in the first place and mine only in the second.

  There was an establishment I had spotted while driving through Wynberg, a rambling old mansion with a sign outside: Canterbury Hotel / Residential / Full or part board / Weekly and monthly rates. I decided to try the Canterbury.

  Yes, said the woman at the desk, there happened to be a room available, would I want it for a week or for a longer term? A week, I said, in the first place.

  The room in question – be patient, this is not irrelevant – was on the ground floor. It was spacious, with a neat little bathroom en suite and a compact refrigerator and French doors giving onto a shady, vine-covered veranda. 'Very nice,' I said. 'I'll take it.'

  'And your baggage?' said the woman.

  'My baggage will be coming,' I said, and she understood. I am sure I was not the first runaway wife to pitch up on the doorstep of the Canterbury. I am sure they enjoyed quite a traffic in pissed-off spouses. And a nice little bonus to be made from the ones who paid for a week, spent a night, then, repentant or exhausted or homesick, checked out the next morning.

  Well, I was not repentant and I was certainly not homesick. I was quite ready to make the Canterbury my home until the burden of childcare led Mark to sue for peace.

  There was a rigmarole about security that I barely followed – keys for doors, keys for gates – plus rules for parking, rules for visitors, rules for this, rules for that. I would not be having visitors, I informed the woman.

  That evening I dined in the lugubrious salle à manger of the Canterbury and had a first glimpse of my fellow residents, who came straight out of William Trevor or Muriel Spark. But no doubt I appeared much the same to them: another flushed escapee from a sour marriage. I went to bed early and slept well.

  I had thought I would enjoy the solitude. I drove in to the city, did some shopping, saw an exhibition at the National Gallery, had lunch in the Gardens. But the second evening, alone in my room after a wretched meal of wilted salad and poached sole with béchamel sauce, I was suddenly overcome with loneliness and, worse than loneliness, self-pity. From the public telephone in the lobby I called John and, in murmurs (the receptionist was eavesdropping), told him of my situation.

  'Would you like me to come by?' he said. 'We could go to a late movie.'

  'Yes,' I said; 'yes, yes, yes.'

  I repeat as emphatically as I can, I did not run away from my husband and child in order to be with John. It was not that kind of affair. In fact, it was hardly an affair at all, more of a friendship, an extramarital friendship with a sexual component whose importance, at least on my side, was symbolic rather than substantial. Sleeping with John was my way of retaining my self-respect. I hope you understand that.

  Nevertheless, nevertheless, within minutes of his arrival at the Canterbury he and I were in bed, and – what is more – our lovemaking was, for once, something truly to write home about. I even shed tears at its conclusion. 'I don't know why I am crying,' I sobbed, 'I am so happy.'

  'It is because you didn't get any sleep last night,' he said, thinking he needed to console me. 'It is because you are overwrought.'

  I stared at him. Because you are overwrought: he really seemed to believe that. It quite took my breath away, how stupid he could be, how insensitive. Yet in his wrongheaded way perhaps he was right. For my day of freedom had been coloured by a memory that kept creeping back, the memory of that humiliating face-off with Mark, which had left me feeling more like a spanked child than an erring spouse. But for that, I would probably not have telephoned John, and would therefore not be in bed with him. So yes: I was upset, and why not? My world had been turned upside down.

  There was another source too for my uneasiness, even harder to confront: shame at having been found out. Because really, if you regarded the situation with a cold eye, I, with my sordid little tit-for-tat affair in Constantiaberg, was behaving no better than Mark, with his sordid little liaison in Durban.

  The fact was, I had reached some kind of moral limit. The fit of euphoria at leaving home had evaporated; my sense of outrage was seeping away; as for the solitary life, its allure was fading fast. Yet how could I repair the damage other than by returning to Mark with my tail between my legs, suing for peace, and resuming my duties as chastened wife and mother? And in the midst of all that confusion of spirit, this piercingly sweet lovemaking! What was my body trying to tell me? That when one's defences are down the gateways to pleasure open up? That the marital bed is a bad place to commit adultery, hotels are better? What John felt I had no idea, he was never a forthcoming person; but for myself I knew without a doubt that the half hour I had just been through would endure as a landmark in my erotic life. Which it has. To this day. Why else would I still be talking about it?

  [Silence.]

  I'm glad I told you that story. Now I feel less guilty about the Schubert business.

  [Silence.]

  Anyway, I fell asleep in John's arms. When I awoke it was dark and I hadn't the faintest idea where I was. Chrissie, I thought – I have completely forgotten to feed Chrissie! I even groped in the wrong place for the light switch before it all came back to me. I was alone (no trace of John); it was six in the morning.

  From the lobby I called Mark. 'Hello, it's me,' I said in my most neutral, most pacific voice. 'Sorry to call so early, but how is Chrissie?'

  For his part, however, Mark was in no mood for conciliation. 'Where are you?' he demanded.

  'I'm phoning from Wynberg,' I said. 'I have moved into a hotel. I thought we should take a break from each other until things cool down. How is Chrissie? What are your plans for the week? Are you going to be in Durban?'

  'What I do is none of your business,' he said. 'If you want to stay away, stay away.'