Justin Cartwright

Born in South Africa, Justin Cartwright lived in Britain after studying at Trinity College, Oxford. He worked in advertising and directed documentaries, films and television commercials, and wrote seventeen novels. They include the Booker-shortlisted In Every Face I Meet, the Whitbread Novel Award-winner Leading the Cheers and the acclaimed White Lightning, shortlisted for the 2002 Whitbread Novel Award. His novel Look At It This Way was made into a three-part drama by the BBC in 1992, and he also published three works of non-fiction. He died in December 2018.

Also by Justin Cartwright

Interior

Look At It This Way

Masai Dreaming

In Every Face I Meet

Leading the Cheers

Half in Love

White Lightning

Justin Cartwright

www.sceptrebooks.co.uk

First published in Great Britain in 2002 by Sceptre

An Imprint of Hodder & Stoughton

An Hachette UK company

Copyright © Justin Cartwright 2002

The right of Justin Cartwright to be identified as the Author of the

Work has been asserted by him in accordance with

the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any

means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be

otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that

in which it is published and without a similar condition being

imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance

to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

Paperback ISBN  9780340936368

eBook ISBN  9781529340341

Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

Carmelite House

50 Victoria Embankment

London EC4Y 0DZ

www.sceptrebooks.co.uk

For my dear boys

He knew what that jubilant crowd did not, but could have learned from books, that the plague bacillus never dies nor disappears for ever . . .

– Albert Camus, The Plague

Chapter 1

I was waiting for my mother to die. I wasn’t waiting with eagerness or curiosity or sadness – she was very old – but with a fullness of heart, as though into that tricky organ a lot of history and deception and regret had ﬂooded. My heart was pumped full with this accumulation of feeling. It wasn’t a sense of my own mortality, although you are said to feel you have shufﬂed up the line as your parents die, shufﬂed up the line towards the payout window. Or the pit. Or nothingness. A French acquaintance of mine had said to me of death, ‘C’est la vide’ and I had laughed in an inappropriate manner thinking he had said, ‘C’est la vie’, imagining a little Gallic jeu de mots, a bitter-sweet Frenchness, dark tobacco and paper tablecloths. No, I wasn’t thinking of my own end, although the arum lilies by the bedside breathed the heavy musk of death. Some ﬂowers are too nearly perfect for their own good, and arum lilies are avatars of perfection. They have veins on them like a man’s penis, and this is perhaps a warning of their duplicitousness.

And as I sat by the bedside next to the small shape that barely disturbed the covers I was wondering what had happened to my mother. Once she had been a large woman, with a noble head. Now the head, reddened eyes closed, mouth moving ﬁtfully, seemed to be attached to very little. Her body had dwindled; in the six months since I had seen her last, it had been spirited away. She was asleep so much that I wondered if there wasn’t simply a semantic distinction between this state – the little sighs, the leaf tremors, the (imagined) exhalations – and the more profound sleep to come.

Earlier in the day she said to me, ‘Don’t kiss me, I’m disgusting.’ My heart – my volatile heart – had broken. I kissed her forehead anyway, my tears unseen, feeling the skin so dry that it seemed to me that the life-giving cells had already died, leaving her covered in parchment. She believed that her breath smelled of death, I think, but I caught nothing of that, only the rushing scents of all those forces that were accumulating, the scents of regret and deception.

‘I’ll be back soon,’ I said. ‘I’m going for a walk.’

My words fell as softly and silently as petals. I wondered, as I walked out of the wide, linoleum-lined corridors, past the clanking implements and the toothless nurses, if I had really uttered them, or merely intended to say them. The business of death makes these distinctions unimportant.

There was a freshness outside the clinic, a pleasing turbulence in the clouds and agitation among the grasses. Even the arum lilies moved stifﬂy, like pallbearers. A stream ran through the estate, through a dinky golf course, trimmed down for the oldies, and here in the damp hollows arums stood. The mountains above the estate are known as the Helderberg, clear mountains, but today the mountain tops were intermittently hidden by fretful clouds and then suddenly revealed, with all the pointlessness of a magic show. I hate conjurors and magicians and jugglers.

And I ﬁnd mountains disturbing. I think of myself as a ﬂat-lander, a plains person, a man for the big vista, although I grew up in the shadow of a mountain. I have contradictory ideas. Women have pointed this out to me, which I have come to understand is the role of women: to locate the magnetic pole in any relationship and steer for it.

I walked out of the gates of the estate and down a farm track that seemed to be heading for the mountains. I strode out, hoping in the turbulence of the air to harness the turbulence of feeling within me. It’s a hopeless task, this obligation to try to proﬁt from experience, to make some personal capital out of adversity. Sometimes I think, like Sartre, that I am superﬂuous. Sometimes I laugh bitterly at the pretensions we nurse, the idea that our lives have meaning and value. But like Sartre, like everybody else, I am trapped within this conundrum: on the one hand I know it’s all meaningless, on the other I cannot avoid the consequences of being alive. Only death will dissolve the contradiction, as it is about to for my mother.

I looked back at the estate: touted to the elderly as an exclusive retirement village, it had been so oversold that from here it was higgledy-piggledy, the houses jostling each other for space around the central greensward of the miniaturised golf course.

Now as I walked down the farm road, I entered the past, without seeing the portals. The vines were nearly bare: some wrinkled-scrotum grapes still clung on among the spectacularly lurid but increasingly isolated leaves. I wondered if these were the same vine leaves that the Greeks ate. My mind, overburdened with the onrushing event, was erratic. Every detail of the landscape was familiar to me, and these details seemed to be calling to me on private frequencies although the gist of their message was unclear. I stopped by the track to look at a small colony of ants, busily fetching dried grass which they took below; other ants were excavating to make room for the grass, so producing a pyramid of sand, and I remembered the hours I had spent in the company of ants.

Although I was aware of their diligent, steady natures I sometimes threw them into the pits made by the ant-lion, a creature which operated with loathsome guile. The ants could not escape from these pits and down, just below the sand, the ant-lion waited to seize them with its outsize claws. After a brief struggle, the ant was dragged below. Goodbye ant, steady little fellow with social instincts. The science of studying ants is know as myrmecology, and the father of this science is René-Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur. And as I looked at the ants – old chums – I remembered that Eugène Marais – a local boy – asked of ants, What purpose have they served? And answered himself: What purpose do you think we have served? None. We are ants. As a boy I read Sartre and I saw that Sartre and Eugène Marais experienced the same vibe. (Ambivalent word, vibe: post-modern in some mouths, embarrassing in others.)

Down this track I saw some whitewashed cottages, with outside ovens built on to the sturdy chimneys, and children – anonymous children – playing with tyres and bits of wire. A clump of canna lilies blazed orange, like a ﬁre in an amateur dramatic production, and turtle doves burbled in their liquid, foolish-virgin, fashion. The children laughed – they jeered – the guinea fowl screamed and the crickets joined in. This pastorale was as familiar to me as the turbine sounds of London where I have lived for so long; where I have expended my essence. Standing at night in my small garden in the great city, I listened to the rumbling, the moaning, the soughing, cut by the sharp notes of police sirens and the vibrato of trains not far away, imagining myself at the centre of the great human enterprise. I saw the city as an accumulation of folly and wisdom and striving and failure; I saw it as art and squalor and nobility and venality. These noises which reached me in my garden were a hymn produced by machinery standing in for humanity. The instruments of human endeavour. I hummed along with the Fanfare for the Common Man. I applauded those who placed every weeping brick in place to make the city, and I extended my arms in communion like the early Christian praying ﬁgures, the Orantes, in the British Museum.

But now I realised that while I was away, the ants had been busy. This should have come as no surprise. Ants have been at it for aeons. But they have not evolved. They are found trapped in two-million-year-old Baltic amber, exactly the same ants as scuttle the earth today. Ants have a peculiar, purposeful way of walking, something like traditional Japanese women, humble and conscious of their pressing duty. My thoughts were disordered. But on that particular day I made allowances for myself because death was creating advance eddies.

I remembered as a child laying my head on the ground to hear warning of enemies approaching, as Aboriginals were able to do. Then I heard nothing, although I tried to tune up my senses so that I could detect footfalls, even from a mile or so away, and in a related exercise I tried to speak to horses. There was no manual to learn either talent, and willing it did not make it happen. But now I heard clearly the not-so-stealthy approach of death. It sounded to my over-receptive ear like the beating wings of a ﬂock of birds – approaching, naturally.

At the end of the farm track was a gate ﬂanked by white pillars. On one of the pillars was inscribed ‘Nooitgedacht’ which in my excited state I took to be more than a coincidence because it means ‘unexpected’ in Dutch. Old Dutch.

A smaller sign, painted on a piece of hardboard and attached to a post, read ‘Children’s playground and tea’. I walked up the track towards the house which was mostly hidden behind oak trees and an overgrown hedge, except for a glimpse of a tin roof and a modest gable. On the left was the children’s playground, some painted seesaws and swings, and a thick knotted rope attached to a huge oak. Some ducks were conﬁned around a small pond, which was crudely made of cement. A peacock, with a grey, colourless tail, stood listlessly near a model locomotive, made of breeze blocks. The mountains behind were suddenly clear, their slopes a green and grey and silver needlepoint, and the crags above were summery, looking like Cézanne’s ‘Mont Sainte-Victoire’, although higher. I have been to Cézanne’s house, Le Jas de Bouffan in Aix, and swum in his bassin, which is just as it was when he painted it. The painting hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. When I saw it – I wasn’t looking for it – it was so recognisable that I expected to see myself in the middle of the bassin, striking boldly for the far end, where a romanesque lion stood, guarding a fountain. Beside me, swimming with a sort of frantic small-boy eagerness, would have been my son Matt, seven. He was swimming like an insect, with jerky movements, aware that he was only marginally buoyant. In fact he would have sunk without my occasionally outstretched hand holding his small biceps.

I approached the house through the overgrown hedge. Just as suddenly as they had cleared, the mountains were now disappearing again behind a foaming torrent of cloud, which poured over from the far side, but vanished at a certain altitude, just below the level of the brown cliffs which moments before had set me thinking of Aix-en-Provence. The house was probably once completely thatched; now it had a makeshift tin roof ﬂecked and faded red, the precise colour and texture of certain sea anemones. Only one slope of the roof of an outbuilding was still of thatch, wet and rotten. The steps up were cement, painted red and polished, gleaming in contrast to the mottled roof. The café was in the front room, the voorkamer, and two young women stood ready, wearing aprons. The cakes were laid out on a table and each cake was covered with cling ﬁlm. The tea was poured from a large brown enamel pot into a green cup. Invited to choose a cake – Wanna naas hoemade kek? – I pointed at a coffee-coloured cake covered with hundreds and thousands – which, for all I knew, had ceased to exist about the time of the Cuban missile crisis – tiny, multi-coloured balls of something – perhaps sugar or marzipan – which were scattered on the icing.

As I picked up the teacup I dropped it and it broke, neatly into three pieces. I insisted on paying for it as they brought me some more tea, smiling, and wiped the pale, sherry-cask ﬂoorboards. They retreated behind the trestle table that held the cakes and a large urn, and whispered. The hundreds and thousands crunched alarmingly under my cosseted but fragile teeth. I wondered if the noise of minute fragmentation was reaching them. They were young, but farm girls still bearing the imprint of the lost peoples. It was a watermark, in their cheeks and eyes, as though their ancestors were giving me a timely lesson in immortality: look, nothing dies for ever.

The room was long, with two huge, ﬂoor-length windows, each with thirty-six panes. Apart from the tables and the kitchen chairs there was no furniture, but I knew that in this room there had once been a riemepiebank, a sort of settee made of yellow-wood with strips of untreated leather to sit on, and perhaps a large bridal chest and over there a ﬁreplace for the chilly nights of winter, when – like today – the clouds were low and the air was turbulent. I sat there for a while, drinking my tea, crunching the little, lurid pellets, and listening to the whispers, which reached me only as a susurration without words. Above the mountains there was thunder. One of the girls giggled.

I walked back down the track away from the house. I adopted a half run and half walk in the hopes of beating the oncoming rain, but it caught me, icy cold as though it had come from far-off and indifferent regions. The clouds darkened and there was lightning above the mountains, sheet lightning, like the ﬂash of artillery in war movies. The track, which had been so dry, was now awash. The children were huddled in the doorway of a cottage. They waved and jeered as I passed. Whitey is wet. I wondered if the ants had a way of stopping their nests against the water.

I showered in my mother’s cottage and hurried to the clinic. She lay there, diminished in the hour or so I had been away.

‘I’m here, Ma,’ I said.

I held her hand which was as light as a leaf. The back of her hand and her arm which lay exposed were covered in brown and purple patches because of the Warfarin.

‘I’m here.’

I felt or imagined a faint response in her hand. It was no more than a tremor. Perhaps the advancing Aboriginals would have given themselves away in this fashion, with a barely perceptible vibration. It would be difﬁcult, I could see, for the untrained ear to catch it.

Some moments later she sighed. I can’t say it was a sigh of contentment. In fact it was fetched up from the void, a bucket thrown down to unknown depths and ﬁlled with an unknown substance, a portion of what was to come. She had had a preview of it, and it ﬁlled her with terror. I guessed that what she glimpsed was unknowable and utterly blank, bearing no meaning at all, and that was the horror.