'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.'
They have arrived at a gate with a sign that says 'SAPPI Industries - Trespassers will be Prosecuted'. They turn.
