Helen asked him how old his love child would be by now. Generous of her to use the word, and he kissed her for it, before telling her the exact age: years, months, days, Helen had had no cause until now for so much as a moment’s doubt: this was her first shock and it was a bad one. She had touched something deep and dangerous, and she knew it: this was like one of those doors you carelessly open in a dream and find a house, a world, a landscape, wider, larger, brighter or darker than the one you know. Almost, she broke off the engagement then and there. His face as he told her was one she had not seen before, set, inward-looking, into a world she was not going to share. This moment put in high relief other feelings she had bad about James, not easily articulated. She did not try now. She thought, But I’ve got him, haven’t I? She hasn’t. He says he loves me. And she certainly was very fond of him. She had had her adventures too. Wartime is productive of ‘flings’, not to mention broken hearts. Her heart had not been broken, or anything like it, but one of the men she had loved, if briefly, had been killed in Normandy She knew she had got over it, but while she confessed to James, she broke down, much to her surprise, and wept, finding herself enclosed in his arms. She was weeping not so much for a man but for lost men, her lover, her brother (lost at sea), a cousin (at Tobruk), and then there was a friend, a fireman, killed in the Blitz - unlived lives.
He comforted her, she him, but she knew that something was biting at his heart she was not going to know about. How old? ‘Nearly six - five years, eleven months, ten days.’
A wedding, restricted by post-war shortages.
They did everything right. Every Sunday they went to lunch with James’s parents, and they visited her parents, who lived far away, in Scotland, for holidays. They had a child, a girl, named Deirdre, because of James Stephens’ poem about the Irish queen. Helen liked this poem but joked that it was asking a lot for their little girl to be as beautiful as that. But Deirdre was pretty enough.
Eight years after the war ended James told Helen he was going to South Africa, He could have gone before, but that would have meant a ship, and he would never set foot on a ship again - never. It had to be the air, and when they could afford it. She knew there was no point in minding. He never mentioned Ins other child unless she asked, but then he promptly told her, ‘He is seven years, three months, ten days,’ or whatever it was. Sometimes she checked just to see if that invisible calendar was still running there, in him, marking . , . but she did not know what. This was not merely a question of a child’s exact age.
James’s plane descended at Khartoum, Lake Victoria, Johannesburg, with leisurely time at each for refuelling, restocking. This cumbersome trip seemed to him miraculous, when he remembered that other voyage. Then Cape Town, spread out over its hills, surrounded by sea. He found a modest hotel from where he could look down at the sea, the now innocent sea, full of ships, one being a passenger liner sparkling with new paint. Then he put a thick paper parcel under his arm and walked up through streets he remembered not at all to what he did remember, the two ample houses side by side in a street of gardened houses. On the gate where there should have been the name Wright, was the unknown Williams. The gate post for next door was still Stubbs. I le retreated across the street to stand under an oak, and he looked for a long time at Daphne’s house, which in his memory lived as zones of intensity, the little room he had been given, Daphne’s bedroom, and the stoep, all else being dark. On to the verandah - the stoep - came an old woman, with a book. She sat in a grass chair, put on dark glasses, and gazed down at the sea. There was no sign of other life. Then he as carefully examined Betty’s house, of which he remembered only the garden. He could see movement through the windows that opened off the verandah. A maid? A black woman with a white headscarf. But he couldn’t see her properly He moved across the street, cautiously pushed open the gate, and stood under the tree which he remembered spreading over trestles, full of food and drink, and a crush of people - soldiers. The companion tree in the other garden would live in his mind for ever because of the two beautiful young women, one dark, one fair, standing in grass, under it, wearing flowery wrappers.
Someone had come on to the Stubbs’s verandah. A tall woman. She shaded her eyes to peer at him and came slowly down the steps towards him. He did not know her. She stopped a few paces off, let her hand fall, and looked forward to have a good look. Then she straightened and stood, arms loose by her side, in a pose it did seem he remembered. A tall thin woman. She wore a short well-fitting blue and yellow dress in small geometrical patterns, with a narrow gold-edged belt, and some little gold beads. Her face was thin and sunburned and her dark hair was waved in neat ridges. On one thin wrist hung a gold bangle. Yes, now he knew - it was the bangle -this was Betty. She spoke: ‘What are you doing here?’
This question seemed to him so absurd he only smiled. He thought that the stern face - she was like a headmistress, or the manager of something - almost smiled in response, but then she frowned.
‘James - it is James? - then you must go away.’
‘Where is Daphne?’
At this there was a pause, and then a quick expulsion of breath - the sigh of someone who has been holding it. ‘She’s not here.’
‘Where is she?’
She came a step closer. He was thinking, already afflicted with anguish, that this tall dry uncharming woman had been that lovely creature he remembered as all dark flowing hair and loose soft gowns.
‘I must see Daphne.’
‘I told you, she’s not here.’
‘Where is she?’
‘She doesn’t live here now.’
‘I can see that. It’s on the gate. Is she in Cape Town?’
A tiny hesitation. ‘No.’
So, she was lying. ‘I could find out where she lives/This was not a threat, but a reminder to himself that he was not dependent on her for information.
She was agitated now, she actually raised those brown thin forearms, pressing the long dry hands to her chest. ‘James,’ she said, urgent, appealing, afraid. ‘You mustn’t do this. Why are you doing this? Do you want to ruin her life? Do you want to break up her marriage? She has three children now.’
‘One of them is mine.’
She did not seem inclined to dispute it. ‘You just turn up like this, turn up, as if it’s nothing, you just arrive and …’
‘I want to see my son. He’s going to have a birthday, his twelfth birthday’ And he recited his son’s exact age, years, months, days.
