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never easy to get him started, but once he was under way it was
almost impossible to stop him. The rest of the family had learned,
rather painfully, to occupy our thoughts with other things once he d
drifted into one of his rambling discussions, but Elise had the same
faculty so characteristic of Bernard: to listen to one in enthusiastic
attention, making you feel that whatever you were saying was the
most important thing in the world to her. And it was no mere
pretense. She really was enthralled by what Dad told her.
For the rest of the holiday I often had trouble tearing her away
from the study. Often, when one passed outside, one could hear them
laughing together. And when he finally got so far as to start putting
up new shelves a project he d been postponing for years Elise was
the one to encourage and actively assist him. She could saw a straighter
line than he could; and in her slender hands a plane worked miracles.
The first shelves he d made when he d moved into the study were
nothing to look at and one always expected them to come tumbling
down at any moment. But she made sure the new ones were properly
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joined and glued and screwed together; and between the two of them
they did a most respectable job. I d never seen him as relaxed and
happy as when Elise was on the farm.
I remember how surprised I was when, shortly after that first visit,
she spontaneously confided in me:  You know, your Dad is a real gem.
I grinned good-humoredly, like any other member of the fam-
ily when Dad was discussed, and said:  Oh he s a lovable old plod-
der. One gets quite fond of him.
She looked at me attentively for a long time, almost as if she felt
amazed and hurt by my reply; and then she said:  I don t think you
realize what you ve got in him. He s a very remarkable person.
After our children had been born, she succeeded in bringing to
light another concealed dimension in Dad because I m sure it was
mainly for her sake that he gave so much attention to the kids. He
would spend hours with them, telling them stories, carrying them
on his back, helping them to make things. In spite of the fact that
he d never in his life been able to drive two nails through a board
without hitting his thumb, he made them little cars from fish tins,
and minuscule tractors from cotton spools and candlewax, and
furniture from matchboxes; as well as exquisite clay cattle, which
Elise baked for them in her kiln. He was just as interested in all her
successive ventures and hobbies. In her weaving period he supplied
her with mohair during the brief spell he tried to farm with
angora goats, before they were all killed off by the cold one winter.
When the pottery bug bit her, he brought her loads of clay from the
farm on his little van, and helped her to sieve and clean and knead
it. Sometimes he would stay awake all night to feed and watch her
kiln, or spend days burning wood to collect ash for the glazes. In his
shy, retiring way he would try to devise new tools for her: a sifting
screen one could tread like a sewing machine, a clay mixer, and so
on. More often than not the implements were so clumsy or
cumbrous as to be practically useless. But she would always show
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the greatest enthusiasm for what he d done, and together they
would laugh about it and try to improve on it.
Small wonder his death was such a blow to her and that she was
in such a state when I came back too late to be in time to say good-
bye. I think something in our own relationship died with Dad: as if,
through him, she d been able to touch something indefinable in me
which couldn t be grasped in any other way. That something was
changed irredeemably. And it seems to me now it was one of the last
things which we d still had left to lose.
The store was an unattractive little building just off the dirt
road after one had passed the turnoff to the neighboring farm
of Mr. Lawrence; but if I shut my eyes in this splendid hotel
room, I can recall every detail of it. Against the side wall, the two
petrol pumps and the phone box with all its windows smashed. On
the roof covering the stoop, the big advertisement for Joko Tea.
Years ago the stoop itself, invariably swarming with idle Blacks,
was used as a stacking place for bags of flour and mealie meal, and
paraffin tins, and boxes of soap, but later, on account of theft,
everything had to be kept inside. Which wasn t easy by any means,
since the place was cramped to start with, and crammed to
capacity by wares illuminated by a single bare 25-watt bulb
suspended from the ceiling. Rolls of German chintz, bags of dried
beans, samp, rolled tobacco, bicycles, transistor radios, coffee,
Sunlight soap, velskoene, dip and dubbin and leather thongs, tea,
bottled sweets, snuff and cigarettes, medicine (Vicks and Aspro and
all the thin bottles familiar from Ma s dispensary: red and white
dulcis and Haarlem drops, chlorodyne, wonder essence, Jamaica
ginger, chest drops, cascara); a special section of ladies clothing,
with some old-fashioned pink XOS bloomers suspended from nails,
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a pile of old Viyella patterns, knitting wool and needles
disappearing into the deeper recesses of the fragrant dusk. In that
same darkness, behind bags of coffee beans and piles of blue soap,
I d petted in my boyhood days with the eager little Lawrence girl
while her father, oblivious of it all, stood reading his Dispatch at the
far end of the counter; and one day things became so hectic that
afterwards we weren t able to find her panties again among all the
tumbled goods; and self-consciously keeping her thighs close
together under the gay floral print of her crumpled dress, she
shuffled out while I stayed behind for a while to get my fiercely
fondled hard-on down. The urgent caresses in the half-dark, the
scuttling of mice behind shelves, the smell of groceries and shoe-
polish and hides, dust, her warm breath as she whispered wetly in
my ear, the scent of her sweat and more secret secretions: all that
returns to me now, over years and continents. Sweet, sweet Cathy!
Mrs. Lawrence was attending to a group of Black women in
frilled shawls, passing the material from hand to hand to feel and
loudly comment on before they removed their tall turbans and
unfolded them to produce small, crumpled bundles of notes; after
the transaction the change would be restored to the turban and the
latter tied round the head again, before the next purchase was
embarked on in the same tedious way.
I greeted her and we chatted for a while. She took the eggs from
me in some inscrutable way it would be entered into the compli-
cated bartering transactions between her and Ma and handed me
the mail: a few accounts, an announcement from Reader s Digest (Your
Sweepstake Numbers Inside!!!), a farming magazine, an airmail let-
ter from Pretoria, presumably from Theo s wife.
 And how are you keeping? I asked mechanically.
 Oh, I m not complaining. Mrs. Lawrence was a tiny, mousey
woman with the pointed nose of a shrew and the inquisitive eyes of
a meerkat; I d never been able to understand how she could have
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