Vulnerable in Hearts Read online

  David is busy with the champagne bottle and so it falls to me to answer. ‘You don’t want to know,’ I say.

  ‘Ah, come on,’ she replies, ‘don’t keep it to yourselves.’

  She’s maybe our age, maybe a little older, maybe quite a bit older, when I look too closely. I guess she’s fifty, which makes her ten years older than me, seven more than David. She’s not unattractive, here in the subdued light of a cool veranda in a quiet commuter suburb twenty miles inland from Durban. She’s wearing a loose terracotta skirt and a white blouse. Her eyes are blue and her hair – for today at least – is auburn. It’s not hard to imagine her story. The marriage, the kids, the divorce. No doubt the divorce was delayed long enough for the kids to grow up, go to university, leave home. Then came the settlement that meant she could buy the restaurant. Her finger has the shadow of a ring. Perhaps she took it off for us.

  She eyes us up and begins to flirt a little. I notice that she is even in her favours. Neither of us wears a ring. Perhaps she’s wondering which of us is older because, although I look it, David has a quiet authority about him. And anyway he’s better looking than me, despite the beard. Without it, he looks a lot like Dad. He has the same long, thin face and deep-set eyes, the same high cheekbones and caterpillar eyebrows. They’re both tall and thin, although David is not exceptionally so. Unlike Dad, he can stand against a window and still be seen. Light doesn’t refract around him.

  ‘You look a lot like him,’ I say.

  ‘It could be worse,’ he says. ‘I could sound like him.’

  ‘Like you,’ he adds, in case I’ve missed the point. The cork pops and David pours the champagne.

  ‘You’d better get yourself a glass,’ I say to the owner.

  At first she demurs. ‘It’s your party, gents. Enjoy.’ But under a little pressure she begins to relent. There’s some bargaining to be done first. ‘I need to know what I’m drinking to,’ she says, as she sends the waiter off to fetch another champagne flute and takes a seat at our table.

  David pours her champagne and we solemnly raise our glasses.

  ‘To Dad,’ I say.

  ‘Dad,’ David repeats.

  ‘It’s his birthday?’ she asks.

  I’m shaking my head as we drink. ‘Uh, uh. His funeral.’

  3. Voices

  DAD’S FUNERAL WAS a simple affair, just the close family and no priest. By the time we came to say goodbye to him, he had moved sufficiently far away from the Catholic Church for the service to be ignored altogether. No Mass. No last rites. No repentance. None of ‘that’, at Dad’s request and to our considerable relief, although in fact he put it more strongly. Instead, we make it up, not quite as we go along. David says a few words. Mum reads John Donne’s A Valediction Forbidding Mourning. She must have nerves of steel for there is not the hint of a quiver in her voice. My sister Jackie prefers to say nothing.

  We’re in the chapel of a cemetery on the outskirts of Durban. It’s a beautiful place, several acres of rolling hills surrounded by frangipani and jacaranda, erythrina and mango trees. While Mum speaks, I start to read the memorial plaques around the walls of the chapel. There are perhaps 200 of them. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Requiem is quoted no less than eight times, and I study the names on these plaques. MacLean, Borthwick, Lee. Scots, all of them, who had come this far and died here, 10,000 miles from ‘the auld country’, and I’m willing to bet every last one of them ‘wearied’, as Dad sometimes claimed to, ‘for the heather’ and the ‘green Highland hills of home’.

  Then it’s my turn and, while the others gaze silently at the coffin or the ceiling or their feet, I stumble through the Requiem:

  Under the wide and starry sky

  Dig the grave and let me lie:

  Glad did I live and gladly die,

  And I laid me down with a will.

  This be the verse you ’grave for me:

  It’s the sixth line that gets me. Up to that point, I just about manage to hold it together and to obey Donne’s injunction:

  ... let us melt, and make no noise,

  No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move ...

  I’m reciting the Requiem from memory and, as line follows line, I realise that Dad must have taught us the words before my memories begin. Not once have I lain beneath the wide and starry sky anywhere in the world but that the lines have come back to me. The hunter is home, he would announce, coming in from the office. I gladly die, he would say at the bridge table before making a sacrifice bid of 5 and thereby robbing our opponents of their rightful game in 4 . And sometimes, apropos nothing in particular, he would recite the poem in its entirety and his voice would take on a slightly stronger brogue while his grey eyes misted over. And it wasn’t just the Requiem, but the entire Stevenson canon. In the restless forests of his life, A Child’s Garden of Verses was a constant and we might at any moment expect to hear a favourite line or stanza or entire poem quoted without context, except that the context was his life, and who he was. He liked the rhythm of Stevenson’s poetry and the journeys. He was much more interested in the journey than in arriving, though it is only now that I see it in the poems he used to recite from A Child’s Garden of Verses.

  Dark brown is the river

  Golden is the sand.

  It flows along forever,

  With trees on either hand ...

  In the poem, the child narrating it builds boats and sets them afloat on the river, and watches them go out of sight, ‘away past the mill’. And my father’s eyes would cloud a little at the concluding line:

  Other little children

  Shall bring my boards ashore.

  He also loved the rhythms of ‘From a Railway Carriage’ with its

  ... child who clambers and scrambles,

  All by himself and gathering brambles;

  Here is a tramp who stands and gazes;

  And here is the green for stringing the daisies!

  Here is a cart runaway in the road

  Lumping along with man and load;

  And here is a mill, and there is a river:

  Each a glimpse and gone forever!

  Dad’s life has been full of such glimpses.

  When it came to the funeral, I knew there was only one tribute I could pay. The Requiem continues,

  Here he lies where he long’d to be ...

  But, at the thought of Dad’s longing, my voice breaks. Tears well up and I lose it completely. I stand, unable to speak or move, wracked by wave after wave of sobbing. I have one hand on the coffin. I’m sure that if I lift it I will fall over. I wonder what one does when one can’t speak, and can’t move and everybody’s watching. Does it stay like this forever?

  It doesn’t. The spell breaks and I manage to blunder my way through the last three lines, thinking all the while that it was perfectly possible that none of them was true:

  Here he lies where he long’d to be;

  Home is the sailor, home from the sea,

  And the hunter home from the hill.

  And then it is time for the coffin to be taken through the doors at the back of the chapel to the crematorium. To the funeral director’s surprise, we have said we will carry the coffin to the furnace ourselves. I don’t know why; perhaps we wanted to prolong the moment of parting. Perhaps we are just being Balfours, which is to say we are copying Dad’s perennial insistence on doing every last bloody thing ourselves. He was the declarer and he played the hand. The rest could do as they wished.

  David, Jackie and I push the trolley through. Mum follows behind, as we go through some heavy curtains, not knowing quite what to expect. We enter a room the size of a squash court. In the middle is a large oven. There are no windows and only a pale neon light illuminates the room. Around the side are a few bare tables and chairs. And in the corner a shovel. The pillars near the door are marked with handprints of grey ash. And seated at the table are the men whose job it is normally to take the coffin and shove it into the oven. They’re leafing through Scope and Hustler and they
have put up centrefolds on the walls, silent witnesses no doubt to their daily rota of cremations. They stand up when we come in, but the funeral director motions to them to stand back and they let us do it ourselves. One of them picks up his magazine from where he dropped it on the floor and resumes his reading, if reading is what he was doing.

  It is only later that we find this funny. For the moment, we concentrate on the furnace. It is big and dark and has a little glass panel through which one can see whatever goes on inside. A small blue pilot light hisses softly. David and I heave the coffin in. We close the door with a bright metallic clang and look to the funeral director. He indicates a dial on one side of the oven.

  ‘All the way?’ David asks.

  He nods. ‘You want it good and hot.’

  While I wonder what it is, exactly, that I want, David turns the dial. Through the glass panel on the door we watch the blue flames begin to lap the sides of Dad’s coffin. And even in that broad daylight on a summer’s day in Durban, I feel the sky growing darker yet and the sea ever higher.

  As we turn to leave, I feel the eyes of naked women follow me across the room.

  There are matters to be attended to for the memorial event that afternoon. Catering must be arranged, phone calls made. Mum and Jackie will head home. David and I have to fetch a few things from Hillcrest. We’re on the way there when we decide to stop for breakfast.

  ‘Thank God it’s over,’ I say, but David’s not sure it ever will be.

  That evening, Mum is on the phone for the umpteenth time talking to another friend. I listen to her side of the conversation.

  ‘Yes, on Tuesday ... Yes, I’m sure ... Oh, no, I’ll be fine ... Yes, Jackie’s here, and the boys too ...’

  I’ve flown in from London, Jackie from Brussels. David lives and works in a game reserve three hours’ drive away. At the memorial event that afternoon, friends of my parents whom I haven’t seen for twenty or thirty years peer myopically at me.

  ‘Now which one are you, dear?’ they ask.

  ‘I’m Sandy.’

  ‘My, haven’t you grown ...’

  But their voices invariably trail off and I never know how the sentence will end. Bald? Fat? Just like your father, who was neither of those things?

  And Mum’s holding it together pretty well, quietly answering the same questions over and over. ‘No, there was some pain ... Yes, the drugs helped ... Yes, completely, ’til the very end.’

  This last comment refers to Dad’s mind, which, unlike his body, was in pretty good shape when he died.

  In the early afternoon, I head back to the crematorium to pick up Dad’s ashes. The funeral director is expecting me. He has a cardboard box on his desk. It’s labelled neatly ‘Mr Balfour’.

  ‘It doesn’t look like me,’ I say.

  ‘Sign here,’ says the director.

  I sign and then pick up the box. It’s still warm.

  ‘Busy day?’ I ask.

  The director chooses not to reply. I can tell from his face that he has learned under these circumstances that it is better to say nothing.

  ‘Thank you,’ I say.

  My parents live in a house on a hill in a suburb near Durban. On clear days, it is possible to see the Indian Ocean to the east. To the west lie rolling hills covered with well-tended trees and large houses on acre and half-acre plots. The garden at our house slopes away to either side. In the front is a main lawn, a vast expanse of grass, the centrepiece of which is an old flat crown tree. It is very big, the biggest I’ve ever seen. We spread Dad’s ashes there just as dark falls.

  Dad loved the tree and it reminds me of him. Its branches spread out above the lawn reaching from one side of the garden to the other. In full leaf it provides perhaps half an acre of shade. It takes in the lawn and the strawberry beds, the banks above what used to be the tennis court and the flowerbeds. It has a huge, thick, smooth grey trunk and flat overarching branches, which stretch out magnificently like some kind of Angel of the South. Below it other plants flourish. This is high summer and the garden looks particularly good. The lawn is green and the azalea is in bloom. The avocado tree is laden with fruit. And the tree has other uses. For as long as I can remember, the monkeys that live in our part of South Africa have used it as a highway from one side of our property to the other. We used to shoot them with the pellet gun in the vain hope that they would eat the neighbours’ fruit instead of ours. The bark of the trunk is pockmarked with pellet scars from where we used to do target practice as kids. Near the base around the back, I find my name half-scratched in the bark. I must have been twelve when I found a sharp knife and started to carve, but I never got beyond the ‘A’. Dad stopped me with a shake of his head. ‘There are better ways to make your mark,’ he said. ‘Let the tree grow.’

  As darkness falls, the last guests leave and the telephone stops ringing. Quiet settles on the old house. The four of us gather in the sitting room, unsure what to do or say. Instead, we listen to the sounds of the suburbs. Dogs bark. From across the valley the sounds of a party are carried on the night breeze. A thousand frogs croak. I am struck, and not for the first time, by how comically precarious the suburbs appear to be. For all their appearance of solidity, one has only to witness the extraordinary scale of work that is required to keep ‘the bush’ at bay, the gardeners and lawn-mowers, chemicals, irrigation systems, planting, pruning, hoeing and weeding, to know that should the people disappear it would take only a few years, months even, for the bush to reclaim these immaculate lawns with their swimming pools and herbaceous borders, their tennis courts and arbours. Our property is large and the house too far from the roads for us to hear the traffic, but we can hear the trees creak in the breeze. Every now and then, the old house seems to sigh.

  Ours is the kind of household in which a pack of cards is always near to hand. I find myself staring blankly at one such pack on the table in front of me.

  ‘We could always play bridge?’ I say. But no one takes me up on the offer. They don’t think it’s true any more.

  PART II

  WHEN MY WORLD WAS YOUNG

  4. Walking on the moon

  LET ME TAKE you back.

  It is the South African winter of 1969. I am seven years old and I do not yet know that I like bridge. In other areas, I have learned to discriminate, which means that, while some things impress me, others do not. I do not, for example, think much of the neighbour’s dog, which barks and dribbles. But I am impressed that every morning the postman cycles up the hill to deliver our letters. He wears a grey uniform and has a drooping moustache. One side is slightly longer than the other. At the back door, my mother offers him a glass of orange squash, which he drinks gratefully.

  ‘Thank you,’ he says. Beads of sweat form on his brow. He wipes them aside and replaces his cap. I run to the garden gate to watch him cycle away. As he starts to descend the hill, he lets go of the handlebars. I envy the way the wind lifts his shirt.

  ‘When I’m big,’ I say, ‘I’m going to be a postman.’

  My mother smiles indulgently. ‘I don’t think you can,’ she says absently. ‘It’s a job for Indians.’

  It is many years before I work out what this means. But in 1969 the realities of apartheid do not impinge on my life. Following the massacre at Sharpeville and the banning of the African National Congress, the Communist Party and other organisations, the apartheid state appears to be all-powerful. Some have referred to this period (with appropriate irony) as ‘the golden age of apartheid’. The economy is booming and South Africa’s white population is its beneficiary. Those who resisted white rule have been banned, killed or imprisoned. The Black Consciousness Movement has not yet taken shape. Organised labour is anything but and the African National Congress is underground or in exile. It is down but not out. Nelson Mandela and his colleagues are six or seven years into their long prison sentences on Robben Island. While they are on the island, several of them spend many hours playing bridge. So does the man who will one day set them fr
ee. South Africa’s future president and Nobel Peace Laureate F.W. de Klerk is also an avid bridge player and has been since he was a child.

  We live in a modest house with a large garden in a suburb of Pietermaritzburg, a small market town sometimes known as ‘sleepy hollow’. It developed delusions of grandeur once it, and not Durban, was made the capital of what was then Natal Province in the newly reconstituted Union of South Africa. The author Tom Sharpe lived there for a time until he was deported for sins against the apartheid government. Back in England he went on to write his bawdy satires of life in ‘Piemburg’. He called them Riotous Assembly and Indecent Exposure, both of which were considered crimes by the humourless autocrats in Pretoria. In Sharpe’s books, the wealthy English-speaking class of Pietermaritzburg are lampooned with a variable degree of accuracy as subsisting on a diet of murder, alcohol and sex. The town itself was ‘built in the heyday of the British Empire’ and the ‘tiny metropolis still possessed an air of seedy grandeur. The City Hall, redbrick Gothic, loomed above the market square while, opposite, the Supreme Court maintained a classical formal air.’ Ripley’s Believe it or Not!, which adorns the back of the wrappers of a popular brand of chewing gum, tells me that Pietermaritzburg City Hall is the largest redbrick building in the southern hemisphere. Of such modest claims is Pietermaritzburg made. It is here that my father works as a chemical engineer, while my mother raises the children and gives French lessons to private pupils.

  In the evenings we read books or listen to the radio. I remember, for example, the day Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. South Africa would not have a television service for another seven years and my father was listening to it on the radio, brought to us by ‘the BBC in London’, wherever that might be. The radio sat in the corner of the sitting room. It was an old ‘valve’ wireless that hissed and spat as it warmed up. In the gathering gloom of winter evenings, my father would turn it on to listen on weekdays to what he called ‘his sums’, which was actually the stock market report, and on weekends to ‘Music in the Blue of Eve’, a classics compilation brought to us by the ‘English’ Service of Radio South Africa. This was his staple fare, but from time to time we would tune in to the World Service of the BBC. It was on the World Service that we listened to the first moon landings.