moments like that will not come unless the eye is half turned toward the great archetypes of the imagination we carry within us.'
Enough! He is sick of the sound of his own voice, and sorry for her too, having to listen to these covert intimacies. He dismisses the class, then lingers, hoping for a word with her. But she slips away in the throng.
A week ago she was just another pretty face in the class. Now she is a presence in his life, a breathing presence.
The auditorium of the student union is in darkness. Unnoticed, he takes a seat in the back row. Save for a balding man in a janitor's uniform a few rows in front of him, he is the only spectator. Sunset at the Globe Salon is the name of the play they are rehearsing: a comedy of the new South Africa set in a hairdressing salon in Hillbrow, Johannesburg. On stage a hairdresser, flamboyantly gay, attends to two clients, one black, one white. Patter passes among the three of them: jokes, insults. Catharsis seems to be the presiding principle: all the coarse old prejudices brought into the light of day and washed away in gales of laughter.
A fourth figure comes onstage, a girl in high platform shoes with her hair done in a cascade of ringlets.
'Take a seat, dearie, I'll attend to you in a mo,' says the hairdresser. 'I've come for the job,' she replies - 'the one you advertised.' Her accent is glaringly Kaaps; it is Melanie. Ag, pick up a broom and make yourself useful,' says the hairdresser.
She picks up a broom, totters around the set pushing it before her. The broom gets tangled in an electric cord. There is supposed to be a flash, followed by a screaming and a scurrying around, but something goes wrong with the synchronization. The director comes striding onstage, and behind her a young man in black leather who begins to fiddle with the wall-socket. 'It's got to be snappier,' says the director. 'A more Marx Brothers atmosphere.' She turns to Melanie. 'OK?' Melanie nods.
Ahead of him the janitor stands up and with a heavy sigh leaves the auditorium. He ought to be gone too. An unseemly business, sitting in the dark spying on a girl (unbidden the word letching comes to him). Yet the old men whose company he seems to be on the point of joining, the tramps and drifters with their stained raincoats and cracked false teeth and hairy earholes - all of them were once upon a time children of God, with straight limbs and clear eyes. Can they be blamed for clinging to the last to their place at the sweet banquet of the senses?
Onstage the action resumes. Melanie pushes her broom. A bang, a flash, screams of alarm. 'It's not my fault,' squawks Melanie. `My gats, why must everything always be my fault?' Quietly he gets up, follows the janitor into the darkness outside.
At four o'clock the next afternoon he is at her flat. She opens the door wearing a crumpled T-shirt, cycling shorts, slippers in the shape of comic-book gophers which he finds silly, tasteless. He has given her no warning; she is too surprised to resist the intruder who thrusts himself upon her. When he takes her in his arms, her limbs crumple like a marionette's. Words heavy as clubs thud into the delicate whorl of her ear. 'No, not now!' she says, struggling. 'My cousin will be back!'
But nothing will stop him. He carries her to the bedroom, brushes off the absurd slippers, kisses her feet, astonished by the feeling she evokes. Something to do with the apparition on the stage: the wig, the wiggling bottom, the crude talk. Strange love! Yet from the quiver of Aphrodite, goddess of the foaming waves, no doubt about that.
She does not resist. All she does is avert herself avert her lips, avert her eyes. She lets him lay her out on the bed and undress her: she even helps him, raising her arms and then her hips. Little shivers of cold run through her; as soon as she is bare, she slips under the quilted counterpane like a mole burrowing, and turns her back on him.
Not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core. As though she had decided to go slack, die within herself for the duration, like a rabbit when the jaws of the fox close on its neck. So that everything done to her might be done, as it were, far away.
`Pauline will be back any minute,' she says when it is over. `Please. You must go.'
He obeys, but then, when he reaches his car, is overtaken with such dejection, such dullness, that he sits slumped at the wheel unable to move.
A mistake, a huge mistake. At this moment, he has no doubt, she, Melanie, is trying to cleanse herself of it, of him. He sees her running a bath, stepping into the water, eyes closed like a sleepwalker's. He would like to slide into a bath of his own.
A woman with chunky legs and a no-nonsense business suit passes by and enters the apartment block. Is this cousin Pauline the flatmate, the one whose disapproval Melanie is so afraid of? He rouses himself, drives off.
The next day she is not in class. An unfortunate absence, since it is the day of the mid-term test. When he fills in the register afterwards, he ticks her off as present and enters a mark of seventy. At the foot of the page he pencils a note to himself 'Provisional'. Seventy: a vacillator's mark, neither good nor bad. She stays away the whole of the next week. Time after time he telephones, without reply. Then at midnight on Sunday the doorbell rings. It is Melanie, dressed from top to toe in black, with a little black woollen cap. Her face is strained; he steels himself for angry words, for a scene. The scene does not come. In fact, she is the one who is embarrassed. 'Can I sleep here tonight?' she whispers, avoiding his eye.
‘Of course, of course.' His heart is flooded with relief. He reaches out, embraces her, pressing her against him stiff and cold. `Come, I'll make you some tea.'
`No, no tea, nothing, I'm exhausted, I just need to crash.'
He makes up a bed for her in his daughter's old room, kisses her good night, leaves her to herself. When he returns half an hour later she is in a dead sleep, fully clothed. He eases off her shoes, covers her. At seven in the morning, as the first birds are beginning to chirrup, he knocks at her door. She is awake, lying with the sheet drawn up to her chin, looking haggard.
`How are you feeling?' he asks.
She shrugs.
Is something the matter? Do you want to talk?'
She shakes her head mutely.
He sits down on the bed, draws her to him. In his arms she begins to sob miserably. Despite all, he feels a tingling of desire. `There, there,' he whispers, trying to comfort her. 'Tell me what is wrong.' Almost he says, 'Tell Daddy what is wrong.'
