permitted?
On Saturday mornings, by agreement, he goes to Donkin Square to help Lucy at the market stall. Afterwards he takes her out to lunch.
Lucy is slowing down in her movements. She has begun to wear a self-absorbed, placid look. She is not obviously pregnant; but if he is picking up signs, how much longer before the eagle-eyed daughters of Grahamstown pick them up too?
'How is Petrus getting on?' he asks.
'The house is finished, all but the ceilings and the plumbing. They are in the process of moving in.'
'And their child? Isn't the child just about due?'
'Next week. All very nicely timed.'
'Has Petrus dropped any more hints?'
'Hints?'
'About you. About your place in the scheme.'
'No.'
'Perhaps it will be different once the child' - he makes the faintest of gestures toward his daughter, toward her body - 'is born. It will be, after all, a child of this earth. They will not be able to deny that.'
There is a long silence between them.
'Do you love him yet?'
Though the words are his, from his mouth, they startle him.
'The child? No. How could I? But I will. Love will grow - one can trust Mother Nature for that. I am determined to be a good mother, David. A good mother and a good person. You should try to be a good person too.'
'I suspect it is too late for me. I'm just an old lag serving out my sentence. But you go ahead. You are well on the way.'
A good person. Not a bad resolution to make, in dark times.
By unspoken agreement, he does not, for the time being, come to his daughter's farm. Nonetheless, one weekday he takes a drive along the Kenton road, leaves the truck at the turnoff, and walks the rest of the way, not following the track but striking out over the veld.
From the last hillcrest the farm opens out before him: the old house, solid as ever, the stables, Petrus's new house, the old dam on which he can make out specks that must be the ducks and larger specks that must be the wild geese, Lucy's visitors from afar.
At this distance the flowerbeds are solid blocks of colour: magenta, carnelian, ash-blue. A season of blooming. The bees must be in their seventh heaven.
Of Petrus there is no sign, nor of his wile or tile jackal boy who runs with them. But Lucy is at work among the flowers; and, as he picks his way down the hillside, he can see the bulldog too, a patch of fawn on the path beside her.
He reaches the fence and stops. Lucy, with her back to him, has not yet noticed him. She is wearing a pale summer dress, boots, and a wide straw hat. As she bends over, clipping or pruning or tying, he can see the milky, blue-veined skin and broad, vulnerable tendons of the backs of her knees: the least beautiful part of a woman's body, the least expressive, and therefore perhaps the most endearing. Lucy straightens up, stretches, bends down again. Field-labour; peasant tasks, immemorial. His daughter is becoming a peasant.
Still she is not aware of him. As for the watchdog, the watchdog appears to be snoozing. So: once she was only a little tadpole in her mother's body, and now here she is, solid in her existence, more solid than he has ever been. With luck she will last a long time, long beyond him. When he is dead she will, with luck, still be here doing her ordinary tasks among the flowerbeds. And from within her will have issued another existence, that with luck will be just as solid, just as long-lasting. So it will go on, a line of existences in which his share, his gift, will grow inexorably less and less, till it may as well be forgotten.
A grandfather. A Joseph. Who would have thought it! What pretty girl can he expect to be wooed into bed with a grandfather? Softly he speaks her name. 'Lucy!'
She does not hear him.
What will it entail, being a grandfather? As a father he has not been much of a success, despite trying harder than most. As a grandfather he will probably score lower than average too. He lacks the virtues of the old: equanimity, kindliness, patience. But perhaps those virtues will come as other virtues go: the virtue of passion, for instance. He must have a look again at Victor Hugo, poet of grandfatherhood. There may be things to learn. The wind drops. There is a moment of utter stillness which he would wish prolonged for ever: the gentle sun, the stillness of midafternoon, bees busy in a field of flowers; and at the centre of the picture a young woman, das ewig Weibliche, lightly pregnant, in a straw sunhat. A scene ready-made for a Sargent or a Bonnard. City boys like him; but even city boys can recognize beauty when they see it, can have their breath taken away.
The truth is, he has never had much of an eye for rural life, despite all his reading in Wordsworth. Not much of an eye for anything, except pretty girls; and where has that got him? Is it too late to educate the eye?
He clears his throat. 'Lucy,' he says, more loudly.
The spell is broken. Lucy comes erect, half-turns, smiles. 'Hello,' she says. 'I didn't hear you.'
Katy raises her head and stares shortsightedly in his direction. He clambers through the fence. Katy lumbers up to him, sniffs his shoes.
'Where is the truck?' asks Lucy. She is flushed from her labours and perhaps a little sunburnt. She looks, suddenly, the picture of health.
'I parked and took a walk.'
