turning back, feeling the cold, but my mother remained standing at the gate till the children had stopped waving and the car had turned the corner into Mill Street.
He constantly urged me: Remember what the Greeks said: Follow the golden mean. But I couldn’t. I saw the words chiselled in marble at the ruins of the temple at Delphi, above an entrance now lying flat among the stones. I tried, Pappa, but I couldn’t.
My mother used to walk down the steps, and for short distances down the street with friends who lived nearby, then turn back home. Waited until I too was inside before slamming the gate shut.
How ironic, I came to the Berghof retirement home to be safer than in the big family home above the Molteno reservoir, and regardless of how often it was predicted that I was looking for trouble walking around the reservoir on my own, in thirty-five years it never happened. And now, here in this ‘safe haven’, it happens. Security is an illusion.
* * *
The old man in the corner room on our floor seldom ventures out. They say he takes his midday meal at the Mount Nelson, or sometimes in the cafeteria of the Mediclinic. We thought at first that it was an affectation, that we oldies in the dining room were not good enough for him. But we were wrong. It’s because he’s as deaf as a post. He stops me with thin, trembling arms outstretched. ‘My twin,’ he says cheerily. Crooked as he is, he tries to press me to him. The twin story owes its origin to the fact that I own the two apartments opposite each other at the end of the corridor. He has seen me emerge from one, then the other. Now he stops me. ‘My twin,’ he says. I try to avoid him, take a detour if he’s sitting on the balcony.
‘Come chat a bit to the old man,’ the nurse says. ‘He took a heavy knock today.’
I take a chair next to his, in front of the big-screen TV jabbering on soundlessly, as in most of the rooms.
He has finely chiselled features and a ruddy-skinned complexion, like the other Englishmen living here, who devoted their lives to the smooth running of the British Empire: civil servants, defence force, commerce, you name it, they converge here in our retirement home. They are sensitive to the fluctuating rand–sterling exchange rate, they complain readily about the meagre pension, have neither kith nor kin in the country. I pity them, the disillusioned remnants of the once great Empire.
He drove to the Gardens Shopping Centre that morning with Mr David Klein, the taxi driver whose dark-blue Cressida, with the yellow light on the roof and the fare written on the side, is regularly parked at our gate. Mr Klein has a knack with old people; he can drive into the centre for free to drop us off, provided that he’s out of there in under ten minutes. He can also drive into the centre to pick us up again. He bolsters our jittery hearts when we’ve got out of the taxi and see the neon lights of the centre flashing back and forth, making our eyes see twin lights that we know are not there, we are at the point of getting dizzy. He takes us by the elbow, accompanies us a few steps into the centre, squeezes our arm and says: ‘So, just wait here for me on this bench, don’t try to come outside on your own. In about an hour, right?’ Then we have the courage to venture into the milling crowd. When my mother was my age, she wouldn’t put a foot on an escalator, but I ride the escalator hands-free.
It transpires that the Englishman went to the bank, and then to Pick n Pay to buy his few provisions. Tins of coffee tumbled down on him when his hands missed their mark, but he bent down, picked them up, and managed to wheel his trolley to one of the tills. He clung to the trolley and, just before his turn came, everything went dark before him, and he fell down, gently, without ado. When he came to, he was lying on a single bed in a room, and a woman in a white coat had hold of his arm, while another was taking his pulse. He sat up and asked to be taken to the bench where Mr Klein would pick him up.
One of the women took him, slowly, shuffling, and wouldn’t let go of him until she saw Mr Klein approaching – by now they knew him at the centre, with his old people – Mr Klein led him out of the centre, with the bags in one hand and his other hand under the old man’s arm.
Mr Klein unloaded him carefully at the home and took him to the lift with his shopping bags. ‘I’ll be fine, Mr Klein, no, really, I’m fine,’ he said, and pressed the button for his floor. And just there, he passed out again. He fell against the lift door so it couldn’t close and the lift couldn’t go up. The nurse found him lying there.
‘Come chat a bit,’ says the nurse, ‘just so he can get his confidence back … a bit of a chat will help him.’ I know that there are only two souls in the whole wide world that he has any connection with: his brother in Australia, too old to brave the plane trip to him, just as he is too old himself to visit his brother. And his daughter in Wales. ‘She begs me to come home, she says there’s a place for me at a retirement home close to her. And my medical costs will be free. Here I have no medical aid.’
‘That’s a wonderful solution,’ I tell him. He has a coughing fit, he has severe emphysema, he sips a bit of water that I hold to his mouth while supporting his wobbling head. The lines on his red-flecked forehead run deep and his greyish old-person’s eyes are two narrowed slits from which all colour has gone. In the angle of the head, in its delicate vacillation, I read more clearly than in words: he can’t decide.
At the age of ninety-five my mother said: Decisions, decisions, decisions. Why must I make decisions? She was a headstrong old lady.
Because you don’t trust my decisions, I tell her.
Because you’re a mere child, she says.
If you can’t decide whether to send Hettie chocolates or flowers for her birthday, I say, send both.
She is pleased as Punch: Proves my point, you’ve got no logic.
It’s a lifetime later. I’m sitting with the sick, scrawny Englishman in his elegantly furnished room, in front of a big-screen TV with the sound off. I’ve made him tea and the warmth soothes his throat, the cup warms his fingers.
His breath is now a mite calmer. ‘Wales is beautiful, but the climate … is damp.’
‘Your daughter will be nearby.’
‘I don’t much like her husband.’
He is very deaf. I try to keep my sentences short so that I don’t have to shout, my head aches with shouting, he’d better decide now, for heaven’s sake.
I think it’s the flight to England that he doesn’t feel up to. Can I hold it against him? I don’t even fly to Gauteng any more.
My last plane trip, at eighty-six, was to Johannesburg for the wedding of my eldest granddaughter and namesake. I’d hardly sat down, my blue cushions arranged just right underneath me, when the engines of the plane were switched on; the whole tin carcass started shuddering. The other passengers sit back and open newspapers, rummage in the pocket in front of them for the in-flight magazine, but I can’t ward off the juddering from my body. It feels as if every joint is being violated, my whole skeleton shaking in unison with the plane. Flying is no longer for us, for you and me, I hear my body reluctantly telling me.
The body can endure less, is no longer adaptable. Even the canals in my ears object. A few hours after we’ve landed, I still feel as if I’m flying, terra firma is no longer firma, there are still waves of howling about my head. Thank heaven for the airport’s wheelchair.
* * *
On the way back to Cape Town from Wellington, where we’ve been celebrating my sister-in-law Jeanne’s birthday at Freddie and Katrien’s, my children want to surprise me. We turn into Nantes Street, because they want to show my grandchildren where they used to spend holidays with their grandfather and grandmother in Paarl.
The street no longer appeals to me. It’s been built up: The plots with the large gardens, as I knew them, have been subdivided, the gardens have been sold and on each new plot another, more modern, house has been built. The new, ugly houses, purple, yellow and dark maroon, vanish from my sight, I push them away. I reject them. It was never like this, I tell my grandchildren. Only later does my dismay subside.
As in water settling into