'Well,' says Lucy, 'you have paid your price. Perhaps, looking back, she won't think too harshly of you. Women can be surprisingly forgiving.'
There is silence. Is Lucy, his child, presuming to tell him about women?
'Have you thought of getting married again?' asks Lucy.
'To someone of my own generation, do you mean? I wasn't made for marriage, Lucy. You have seen that for yourself '
'Yes. But - '
'But what? But it is unseemly to go on preying on children?'
'I didn't mean that. Just that you are going to find it more difficult, not easier, as time passes.'
Never before have he and Lucy spoken about his intimate life. It is not proving easy. But if not to her, then to whom can he speak?
'Do you remember Blake?' he says. 'Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires'?
'Why do you quote that to me?'
'Unacted desires can turn as ugly in the old as in the young.' Therefore?'
'Every woman I have been close to has taught me something about myself. To that extent they have made me a better person.'
'I hope you are not claiming the reverse as well. That knowing you has turned your women into better people.'
He looks at her sharply. She smiles. 'Just joking,' she says.
They return along the tar road. At the turnoff to the smallholding there is a painted sign he has not noticed before: 'CUT FLOWERS. CYCADS,' with an arrow:
'Cycads?' he says. 'I thought cycads were illegal.'
'It's illegal to dig them up in the wild. I grow them from seed. I'll show you.'
They walk on, the young dogs tugging to be free, the bitch padding behind, panting.
'And you? Is this what you want in life?' He waves a hand toward the garden, toward the house with sunlight glinting from its roof.
'It will do,' replies Lucy quietly.
It is Saturday, market day. Lucy wakes him at five, as arranged, with coffee. Swaddled against the cold, they join Petrus in the garden, where by the light of a halogen lamp he is already cutting flowers. He offers to take over from Petrus, but his fingers are soon so cold that he cannot tie the bunches. He passes the twine back to Petrus and instead wraps and packs.
By seven, with dawn touching the hills and the dogs beginning to stir, the job is done. The kombi is loaded with boxes of flowers, pockets of potatoes, onions, cabbage. Lucy drives, Petrus stays behind. The heater does not work; peering through the mistedwindscreen, she takes the Grahamstown road. He sits beside her, eating the sandwiches she has made. His nose drips; he hopes she does not notice. So: a new adventure. His daughter, whom once upon a time he used to drive to school and ballet class, to the circus and the skating rink, is taking him on an outing, showing him life, showing him this other, unfamiliar world.
On Donkin Square stallholders are already setting up trestle tables and laying out their wares. There is a smell of burning meat. A cold mist hangs over the town; people rub their hands, stamp their feet, curse. There is a show of bonhomie from which Lucy, to his relief, holds herself apart. They are in what appears to be the produce quarter. On their left are three African women with milk, masa, butter to sell; also, from a bucket with a wet cloth over it, soup-bones. On their right are an old Afrikaner couple whom Lucy greets as Tante Miems and Oom Koos, and a little assistant in a balaclava cap who cannot be more than ten. Like Lucy, they have potatoes and onions to sell, but also bottled jams, preserves, dried fruit, packets of buchu tea, honeybush tea, herbs.
Lucy has brought two canvas stools. They drink coffee from a thermos flask, waiting for the first customers.
Two weeks ago he was in a classroom explaining to the bored youth of the country the distinction between drink and drink up, burned and burnt. The perfective, signifying an action carried through to its conclusion. How far away it all seems! I live, I have lived, I lived.
Lucy's potatoes, tumbled out into a bushel basket, have been washed clean. Koos and Miems's are still speckled with earth. In the course of the morning Lucy takes in nearly five hundred rand. Her flowers sell steadily; at eleven o'clock she drops her prices and the last of the produce goes. There is plenty of trade too at the milk- and-meat stall; but the old couple, seated side by side wooden and unsmiling, do less well. Many of Lucy's customers know her by name: middle-aged women, most of them, with a touch of the proprietary in their attitude to her, as though her success were theirs too. Each time she introduces him: 'Meet my father, David Lurie, on a visit from Cape Town.'
'You must be proud of your daughter, Mr Lurie,' they say. 'Yes, very proud,' he replies.
'Bev runs the animal refuge,' says Lucy, after one of the introductions. 'I give her a hand sometimes. We'll drop in at her place on the way back, if that is all right with you.'
He has not taken to Bev Shaw, a dumpy, bustling little woman with black freckles, close-cropped, wiry hair, and no neck. He does not like women who make no effort to be attractive. It is a resistance he has had to Lucy's friends before. Nothing to be proud of: a prejudice that has settled in his mind, settled down. His mind has become a refuge for old thoughts, idle, indigent, with nowhere else to go. He ought to chase them out, sweep the premises clean. But he does not care to do so, or does not care enough.
The Animal Welfare League, once an active charity in Grahamstown, has had to close down its operation. However, a handful of volunteers led by Bev Shaw still runs a clinic from the old premises. He has nothing against the animal lovers with whom Lucy has been mixed up as long as he can remember. The world would no doubt be a worse place without them. So when Bev Shaw opens her front door he puts on a good face, though in fact he is repelled by the odours of cat urine and dog mange and Jeyes Fluid that greet them.
