Tales of the Metric System. Imraan Coovadia

for a particular piece of work. She was his item of business.

      —Mrs Rabie, if you ask for my own opinion, then, privately, yes, I will tell you that Paul is not being treated leniently. But then you must come so far as to comprehend our position.

      —I fail to understand how it serves Curzon College to push my son out.

      Lavigne bent down and took the gloves out of the car. He held them without putting them on, as if he were testing their weight. They must have been too hot from sitting on the dashboard to put straight on.

      —Let me offer you two insights into the thinking of the school board. It’s not merely a question of drinking. Paul circulated a petition against cadet training. He didn’t tell you? Mrs Rabie, political agitation is something we cannot have at our school. You may confer with your husband how far it is proper to impress his own ideas on the mind of your son. I can tell you that James Nicholson does not change his mind easily. He makes an assessment based on the relevant facts. Nevertheless, it is not impossible to change the facts. For example, Curzon College is currently raising money for a new music building.

      Ann’s family, on her mother’s side, had been bakers, ships’ chandlers, naval accountants, and clerks in Southampton before moving to what was then the South African Republic, a country without a port to call its own, in the second half of the nineteenth century.

      The Rabies, a family Ann hadn’t managed to leave despite the divorce, produced teachers, priests ministering to congregations in the Boland, a mining engineer who served in the command of Jan Smuts before being elected to parliament, and Gert Rabie, who ran a surgical practice between Dundee and Newcastle in the Natal interior, tending to agricultural towns and isolated households and farms in the high country. As a houseman, Gert was already noted for the delicacy of his hands. When a birth cord needed to be disentangled, or an infant heart needed its ventricle repaired, they summoned him. He was younger than her by a fortnight. When they met, at university, he had been interested only in rugby and medicine. They had been twenty on their wedding day. He talked about her as an old woman.

      Gert had a loner’s temperament and would book a trunk call with his son once a month. The other Rabies stayed in closer contact. They visited Paul at Curzon College, driving hours to watch Saturday rugby, to talk with the captains of the opposing teams, consider the performance of the fly half and the flanker, and unpack their hampers in the stands. Paul stayed with them during the July holidays. The Rabies continued to invite Ann along whenever they took Paul. She had the sense they didn’t see her as an individual, therefore didn’t hold her accountable for the separation. They didn’t seem to mind that she never accepted an invitation.

      Then there were the Hunters. They turned out redheads and great eccentrics. Neil’s mother ran the family farm for twenty years. His aunt had been the first anthropologist to live in a Fingoland village and record the traditions. Neil’s great-uncle played the piano on a cruise liner, wrote detective novels, had been a friend of Randolph Churchill, and disembarked in Durban from time to time to arrange séances.

      Neil himself was not entirely handsome. He had a flat face, bony arms, and legs that made him six feet and two inches. He always had a project. When they met, he had been constructing an alternative system of English spelling with the potential to reduce illiteracy. He was the only person who had prepared for the adoption of the metric system by trying to use metres and litres and kilograms in his head before the conversion started in the shops.

      Neil didn’t have to be the model for her son. Paul might never come to believe, like his stepfather, that the Bantu were wiser and more honest than Europeans. Paul was interested in school. He didn’t listen to any and every passing Indian like her husband did, sitting on the patio, his lovely leathery red-freckled hands spread out on his thighbones, attending to the wizened Tamil electrician Chunu’s small-minded opinions, his lectures on Ayurvedic diet, marvelling at the fenugreek seeds Chunu spread out on his palm. Neil admired Chris Padayachee, an advocate who associated himself with Gandhi’s remaining relatives in Natal and the cause of the Phoenix settlement he had founded. The very dark-eyed lawyer, with his detailed knowledge of Nehru and Jinnah, was as pompous as a professor. Neil wouldn’t have listened for a minute if he had been raised in the province.

      On Ann’s return Mackenzie and his man were in the yard, stringing chicken wire above the concrete fence. They communicated with grunts as they paid out the thin knotty wire from a spool. In front of them were the hadedahs tipping and rising, dredging the grass with intelligent beaks. They weren’t aggressive but neither did they move aside as Mackenzie’s assistant edged a wheelbarrow past loaded with scraps of wire and uprooted poles. He made no sign of noticing her.

      She came in through the kitchen. The radio was on in Neil’s study. She hadn’t expected him to be back. He often returned after dark with a stack of mimeographed articles that had to be read by the next morning. After years of marriage Ann still felt a tightening at the heart when she expected to see her husband. She went up to complain about Lavigne.

      Instead she discovered Nadia Paulson, one of her husband’s graduate students, sitting cross-legged in a short dress surrounded by books and open dictionaries and encyclopaedias. At first Nadia didn’t budge. She continued to take notes. Then she turned the radio down, and moved her dyed hair to the other side of her face. She still didn’t get up, but she smiled.

      Each time they met it took half a minute before Ann wanted to slap the girl. It wasn’t jealousy. The girl intended to cause aggravation.

      —I thought it was Neil here.

      —There was a demonstration. The police closed the library. Neil gave me the key so I could concentrate on checking the footnotes. We’re finishing that article for the Labour Bulletin, you know, the one about Pixley Seme, Clements Kadalie, and the difference between national rights and workers’ rights.

      —I’ll leave you to get on with it. I want to get something in the oven.

      The kitchen was Ann’s favourite room. Everything was useful. There were big windows and a Dutch half-door opening onto the yard, wooden shelves on which were set a bowl of glazed fruit and a stack of gold-rimmed plates. Pans hung on nails. In the glass-door cabinet, she kept an array of pewter mugs and spoons, and the collection of Paul’s engraved school trophies.

      In the lowest drawers, which she opened no more than once in a year, were streamers and box kites, thimbles, egg-timers, and other fossil footprints. They instructed Ann that life was in progress, distributing junk, and that any strange sensation in her heart today was inconsequential. It reassured her to run her hand along the chipped blue tiles on the kitchen counter and think that they were almost cold on the hottest day. She believed, as she did it, that her life with Neil was as solid as the tiles.

      Nadia was her husband’s most assiduous graduate student. She was from Cape Town, but had some family connection to Mauritius, where she had spent a year and picked up French. She did rough translations for Neil from Merleau-Ponty, Fanon, and Alexandre Kojève, and kept the minutes for the Free University, writing them in secretarial shorthand. Her looks impressed, her light-brown skin and her large, slow, and nearly stupid almond-shaped eyes. In Durban, where Group Areas kept people to their own locations and the buses and drive-ins and restaurants were segregated, Nadia had few options for adventure. Naturally she wanted to belong to Neil’s sphere. And it turned out you couldn’t keep somebody out when they wanted to come in.

      When Nadia came down, her satchel loaded with books, Ann found that she was pleased at the intrusion. After Lavigne, anybody was a relief.

      —You’re going?

      —I reckon the library must be open again. The police go in and find anybody who was protesting and then they leave.

      —I can drive you to the university once I manage to get this cake out of the oven. I am trying a recipe from Fair Lady. If it’s successful I’ll make it again for my son.

      Nadia put her satchel on the table.

      —Paul was in Neil’s office last term. He was waiting to go to a lecture in Botany. Something about ferns. He is the mirror image of you.

      Ann