What Poets Need. Finuala Dowling

I was preparing to swing around and face the sunlit Fish Hoek hillside again, this woman came towards me holding out a little wet white feather. Her first words were sucked out with the tide, but her speech ended: “… especially for you, because you are such a lovely man.” I didn’t like her, I mean her feyness – the slight tinkle of bells around her ankles – though “lovely” is better than “special”, and one needs all the affirmation one can get, even from people who burn incense. I told Sal and she said, “But how did the woman KNOW you were lovely?”

      Last week Beth asked if she could leave Sal in my care while she flies to Johannesburg about her big contract, the ersatz mansion for the super-rich businessman, which he now wants her to project-manage. She’s not keen but says she’ll stay the first ten days or two weeks then maybe fly up from time to time. My job as surrogate mother starts today.

      Sal and I will be fine. In pre-school Sal felt a lack of siblings to list to the inquisitive teacher, so she said that in fact, yes, she had a brother, John. She’s grown up with me in the house and certainly sees as much of me as she does of Beth, who’s always busy, always saying “Later” to Sal.

      It’s interesting because I think that’s what our mother did to Beth. Beth grew up with this very strong role model. Ma always had a seminar or lecture to prepare, usually on a topic related to the nascent discipline of gender studies. Ma loved Beth’s ambition and, in a funny sort of way, my lack of ambition. “You’ll be a writer.” She smiled indulgently, the way I imagine fathers once told their daughters they’d be wives and mothers. I was christened John Stuart Carson after the philosopher who supported women’s rights. Beth is really Elizabeth after any number of eponymous pioneers. It took me a long time to realise why my mother and Beth – both ardent feminists – served my father all his meals on a tray. It was to remind him that he was merely a passenger.

      Which reminds me that when Ma died and I inherited her Opel Kadett, I’d still sometimes go out with the keys and absent-mindedly get into the passenger seat. I’d sit there for a split second before I remembered that I was the driver. I don’t do that any more.

      I finished the book The Key which was rather weak at the end but otherwise very amusing, though I don’t think that was intentional. I bought it because someone in the Financial Times weekend supplement mentioned it as their all-time favourite novel. The idea of a demure Japanese wife who can only discover sexual pleasure when she is blind drunk on brandy and practically asleep, with her delighted husband taking Polaroid photographs of her never-before-witnessed naked body and indulging in his foot fetish, really just tweaked my funny bone.

      I’m glad I had the book with me yesterday morning in the Olympia café, where I’d stopped for coffee (and scrambled eggs and caramelised tomatoes) on the way back from the beach. There were a couple of guys there whom I vaguely know – I mean, they’ve grown up around here too, we’ve rubbed shoulders – and they were talking about their weekend plans. There were lots of women’s names being bandied about, some I thought I recognised, attached to pretty faces, and talk of yachts and champagne breakfasts. They were obviously going to have a good time. This strange feeling came over me, of being left out. I don’t know why, since they’re not my friends, only barest acquaintances; I’ve certainly never invited them anywhere and I wasn’t even sitting at their table. But their talk made me feel both bored and envious, tangled up together. I’d probably hate it on their yacht, and the sea and the champagne would combine to produce nausea. Still, it would be nice to be able to say, And this weekend I’ve been invited out for a champagne breakfast on a friend’s yacht. I could, for instance, say it to you, and you might feel a pang of jealousy, and briefly imagine me suntanned in my shirtsleeves, the wind blowing through my still thick curls while someone urges me to “Tack!”

      Laugh, Theresa. I like it when I make you laugh.

      What else to tell you of my Tuesday? Beth and I shared a bottle of Chateau Libertas, which is being sold at a bargain R19.99 at the Lakeside Spar. (I recovered so well from my hangover that I decided to start drinking again.) I made a coriander pesto which we ate with pasta. Tip: use sesame and sunflower seeds instead of macadamia nuts. We read Sal’s English composition, about “The Day I Flew a Hot Air Balloon”. It was a title the whole class had been given. Sal wrote (original spelling): “I fownd an old hot air balloon in the shed. I was so excited. I lit the fire and it inflated. When I was high up in the sky I looked down and saw Mommy scrubbing the front steps and my uncle John washing his car in the driveway. Then I went over the sea. A bird was flying next to me. It plummetted down to catch a fish.” Beth asked, “Why didn’t you say your mommy was drawing up house plans and your uncle was writing a poem? And where did we get this driveway from?” Sal said she just wanted her life to sound normal.

      “Plummeted” is good, I said.

      When I went to bed last night I stupidly ignored a slight itch at the back of my throat. But at night the pollen grains and mould flakes and whatever other allergens there are descend for the kill. After midnight, I found myself desperately sucking on the back of my own throat, trying to use my tongue to scratch this deep itch around my uvula. Eventually I got up, inhaled the nasal spray which I’m supposed to do three times a day but always forget, took two antihistamines and two extra-strength Disprins and fell into a heavy sleep. Today there is a kind of speed bump when I swallow, and I’m constipated.

      How close we are.

      Wednesday 14th August

      11.50 pm

      The headless nude is gone, sold, but the ghost of you remains. After dropping Sal at Holy Cross I stopped by the Empire café and remembered the day you met me there. You said, tilting towards the painting above us, “I wonder why artists sometimes leave the head off? Do they do that with male subjects too?”

      I looked at you and said, because the thought struck me then so forcefully, that you are not just pretty. You have the beauty of culmination, that comes from generation upon generation of fine noses marrying limpid eyes, of luminous skin marrying good cheekbones. You laughed and blushed and then you said, “Other men should come to you for lessons. You could teach other men how to woo.” Then you reached across and grasped my wrist, a rare public moment in an otherwise profoundly secret and often shamefully furtive archive.

      Now I have it! “Ways of Keeping” must have an ending that comes back to its beginning. Thus:

      Ways of Keeping

      I have kept my love for you

      like an unloved dog,

      chained up in the yard.

      You have kept your love for me

      pressed between

      pages of a well-loved book.

      Secretly, with a diamond,

      you have etched me into a glass pane,

      showing me my hiding place

      with a cupped hand.

      I could teach the world to woo

      but teach me to keep as you do.

      In those days, before Theo knew about me, you took more risks. For that hour in the Empire, and for the two hours after that here at the house, in my bed while Sal was at school and Beth on site somewhere, you had to lie. Tell him you were staying after the botanical society sale to have lunch with a schoolfriend who happened to be holidaying in Cape Town.

      I didn’t take you straight to my room. I crave romance; I want to seduce you with words first. I love to see your pupils dilate, take more and more of me in as I tell you what you already know. That there is nobody like you, never has been, that you are the revelation of my life, my consolation and respite. That I feel safer now about striking out because I know that if I falter, I only have to turn around to see your reassuring smile. That the year I met you was Year One. That moments before I met you for the first time, I knew I would fall in love with you, and consequently the slight creak of the floorboards as you approached sent me up into the high arc of a swing. I could have carried on, I did wax on, but then you reached across and said, “Could we go now, back to your room?”