She talks easily about these matters. A frontier farmer of the new breed. In the old days, cattle and maize. Today, dogs and daffodils. The more things change the more they remain the same. History repeating itself, though in a more modest vein. Perhaps history has learned a lesson. They walk back along an irrigation furrow. Lucy's bare toes grip the red earth, leaving clear prints. A solid woman, embedded in her new life. Good! If this is to be what he leaves behind - this daughter, this woman - then he does not have to be ashamed.
'There's no need to entertain me,' he says, back in the house. 'I've brought my books. I just need a table and chair.'
'Are you working on something in particular?' she asks carefully. His work is not a subject they often talk about.
'I have plans. Something on the last years of Byron. Not a book, or not the kind of book I have written in the past. Something for the stage, rather. Words and music. Characters talking and singing.'
'I didn't know you still had ambitions in that direction.'
'I thought I would indulge myself. But there is more to it than that. One wants to leave something behind. Or at least a man wants to leave something behind. It's easier for a woman.'
'Why is it easier for a woman?'
'Easier, I mean, to produce something with a life of its own.'
'Doesn't being a father count?'
'Being a father . . . I can't help feeling that, by comparison with being a mother, being a father is a rather abstract business. But let us wait and see what comes. If something does come, you will be the first to hear. The first and probably the last.'
'Are you going to write the music yourself?'
'I'll borrow the music, for the most part. I have no qualms about borrowing. At the beginning I thought it was a subject that would call for quite lush orchestration. Like Strauss, say. Which would have been beyond my powers. Now I'm inclining the other way, toward a very meagre accompaniment - violin, cello, oboe or maybe bassoon. But it's all in the realm of ideas as yet. I haven't written a note - I've been distracted. You must have heard about my troubles.'
'Roz mentioned something on the telephone.'
'Well, we won't go into that now. Some other time.'
'Have you left the university for good?'
'I have resigned. I was asked to resign.'
'Will you miss it?'
'Will I miss it? I don't know. I was no great shakes as a teacher. I was having less and less rapport, I found, with my students. What I had to say they didn't care to hear. So perhaps I won't miss it. Perhaps I'll enjoy my release.'
A man is standing in the doorway, a tall man in blue overalls and rubber boots and a woollen cap. 'Petrus, come in, meet my father,' says Lucy. Petrus wipes his boots. They shake hands. A lined, weathered face; shrewd eyes. Forty? Forty-five?
Petrus turns to Lucy. 'The spray,' he says: 'I have come for the spray.'
It's in the kombi. Wait here, I'll fetch it.'
He is left with Petrus. 'You look after the dogs,' he says, to break the silence.
'I look after the dogs and I work in the garden. Yes.' Petrus gives a broad smile. 'I am the gardener and the dog-man.' He reflects for a moment. 'The dog-man,' he repeats, savouring the phrase.
'I have just travelled up from Cape Town. There are times when I feel anxious about my daughter all alone here. It is very isolated.'
'Yes,' says Petrus, 'it is dangerous.' He pauses. 'Everything is dangerous today. But here it is all right, I think.' And he gives another smile.
Lucy returns with a small bottle. 'You know the measurement: one teaspoon to ten litres of water.'
'Yes, I know.' And Petrus ducks out through the low doorway. 'Petrus seems a good man,' he remarks.
'He has his head screwed on right.'
'Does he live on the property?'
'He and his wife have the old stable. I've put in electricity. It's quite comfortable. He has another wife in Adelaide, and children, some of them grown up. He goes off and spends time there occasionally.'
He leaves Lucy to her tasks and takes a stroll as far as the Kenton road. A cool winter's day, the sun already dipping over red hills dotted with sparse, bleached grass. Poor land, poor soil, he thinks. Exhausted. Good only for goats. Does Lucy really intend to spend her life here? He hopes it is only a phase.
A group of children pass him on their way home from school. He greets them; they greet him back. Country ways. Already Cape Town is receding into the past.
Without warning a memory of the girl comes back: of her neat little breasts with their upstanding nipples, of her smooth flat belly. A ripple of desire passes through him. Evidently whatever it was is not over yet. He returns to the house and finishes unpacking. A long time since he last lived with a woman. He will have to mind his manners; he will have to be neat.
Ample is a kind word for Lucy. Soon she will be positively heavy. Letting herself go, as happens when one withdraws from the field of love. Qu'est devenu ce front poli, ces cheveux blonds, sourcils voхtйs?
Supper is simple: soup and bread, then sweet potatoes. Usually he does not like sweet potatoes, but Lucy does something with lemon peel and butter and allspice that makes them palatable, more than palatable.
'Will you be staying a while?' she asks.
'A week? Shall we say a week? Will you be able to bear me that long?'
'You can stay as long as you like. I'm just afraid you'll get bored.'
'I won't be bored.'
'And after the week, where will you go?'
'I don't know yet. Perhaps I'll just go on a ramble, a long ramble.'
'Well, you're welcome to stay.'
'It's nice of you to say so, my dear, but I'd like to keep your friendship. Long visits don't make for good friends.'
`What if we don't call it a visit? What if we call it refuge? Would you accept refuge on an indefinite basis?'
'You mean asylum? It's not as bad as that, Lucy. I'm not a fugitive.'
'Roz said the atmosphere was nasty.'
'I brought it on myself. I was offered a compromise, which I wouldn't accept.'
'What kind of compromise?'
'Re-education. Reformation of the character. The code-word was counselling.'
'And are you so perfect that you can't do with a little counselling?'
'It reminds me too much of Mao's China. Recantation, self-criticism, public apology. I'm old-fashioned, I would prefer simply to be put against a wall and shot. Have done with it.'
`Shot? For having an affair with a student? A bit extreme, don't you think, David? It must go on all the time. It certainly went on when I was a student. If they prosecuted every case the profession would be decimated.'
He shrugs. 'These are puritanical times. Private life is public business. Prurience is respectable, prurience and sentiment. They wanted a spectacle: breast-beating, remorse, tears if possible. A TV show, in fact. I wouldn't oblige.'
He was going to add, The truth is, they wanted me castrated,' but he cannot say the words, not to his daughter. In fact, now that he hears it through another's ears, his whole tirade sounds melodramatic, excessive.
'So you stood your ground and they stood theirs. Is that how it was?'
'More or less.'
'You shouldn't be so unbending, David. It isn't heroic to be unbending. Is there still time to reconsider?'
'No, the sentence is final.'
'No appeal?'
'No appeal. I am not complaining. One can't plead guilty to charges of turpitude and expect a flood of sympathy in return. Not after a certain age. After a certain age one is simply no longer appealing, and that's that. One just has to buckle down and live out the rest of one's life. Serve one's time.'
'Well, that's a pity. Stay here as long as you like. On whatever grounds.'
He goes to bed early. In the middle of the night he is woken by a flurry of barking. One dog mechanically, without cease; the loth to admit defeat, join in again.
'Does that go on every night?'
'One gets used to it. I'm sorry.'
He shakes his head.
EIGHT
HE HAS FORGOTTEN how cold winter mornings can be in the uplands of the Eastern Cape. He has not brought the right clothes: he has to borrow a sweater from Lucy.
Hands in pockets, he wanders among the flowerbeds. Out of sight on the Kenton road a car roars past, the sound lingering on the still air. Geese fly in echelon high overhead. What is he going to do with his time?
'Would you like to go for a walk?' says Lucy behind him.
They take three of the dogs along: two young Dobermanns, whom Lucy keeps on a leash, and the bulldog bitch, the abandoned one.
Pinning her ears back, the bitch tries to defecate. Nothing comes.
'She is having problems,' says Lucy. 'I'll have to dose her.'
The bitch continues to strain, hanging her tongue out, glancing around shiftily as if ashamed to be watched.
They leave the road, walk through scrubland, then through sparse pine forest.
'The girl you were involved with,' says Lucy - 'was it serious?'
'Didn't Rosalind tell you the story?'
'Not in any detail.'
'She came from this part of the world. From George. She was in one of my classes. Only middling as a student, but very attractive. Was it serious? I don't know. It certainly had serious consequences.'
'But it's over with now? You're not still hankering after her?' Is it over with? Does he hanker yet? 'Our contact has ceased,' he says.
'Why did she denounce you?'
'She didn't say; I didn't have a chance to ask. She was in a difficult position. There was a young man, a lover or ex-lover, bullying her. There were the strains of the classroom. And then her parents got to hear and descended on Cape Town. The pressure became too much, I suppose.'
'And there was you.'
'Yes, there was me. I don't suppose I was easy.'