The Late Bourgeois World Read Free Page A

gestured hard, with it in mine, once or twice, to call us to attention, and said, ‘We’ve got to talk, Bo. Something about Max, your father.’
    At once he caught me out, as if he were the adult and I the child. He understood that I never referred to Max as anyone but ‘Max’. He was little when Max was on trial and in prison, but I have told him all about it since he’s been older. He nodded his head with a curious kind of acceptance. He knows there is always the possibility of trouble.
    We sat down together on the awful little settee, like lovers facing each other for a declaration in a Victorian illustration. He dragged at his collapsed socks – ‘Pull your socks up, your mother’s here, Jelly said.’
    â€˜He died, Bobo. They sent me a telegram this morning. It’ll be in the papers, so I must tell you – he killed himself.’
    Bobo said, ‘You mean he committed suicide?’
    Amazement smoothed and widened his face, the flush left it except for two ragged patches, like the scratches of some animal, on the lower cheeks.What came to him in that moment must have been the reality of all the things he had read about, happening to other people, the X showing where on the pavement the body fell, the arrow pointing at the blurred figure on the parapet.
    I said, ‘Yes’ and to blot it all out, once and for all, to confine it, ‘He must have driven his car into the sea. He was never afraid of the sea, he was at home in it.’
    He nodded, but he kept his eyes wide open on me, the brows, over their prominent frontal ridge, scrolled together in concentration. What was he facing? The fact of his own death? Mine? Bobo and I didn’t have to pretend to each other that we were grieving over Max in a personal way. If you haven’t had a father, can you lose him? Bobo hardly knew him; and although I hadn’t, couldn’t explain all that to him, he knows that I had come to the end of knowing Max.
    Bobo said, ‘I somehow just can’t see his face.’
    â€˜But it’s not so long since you saw him. Eighteen months, not more.’
    â€˜I know, but then I hardly remembered what he looked like at all, and I was looking at him all the time the way you do with a new person. Then afterwards you can’t see their face.’
    â€˜You’ve got a photograph, though.’ There on his locker, the upright leather folder with mother on one side, father on the other, just as all the other boys have.
    â€˜Oh yes.’
    There didn’t seem to be anything else to say; at least, not all at once, and not in that room.
    â€˜I brought you some nartjies. I forgot to get anything in town.’
    He said absently, making the show of pleasure that is his form of loving politeness, ‘Mmm … thanks. But I won’t take them now … just before you go, so’s when I’ve seen you off I can stick them in my desk before anyone sees.’
    Then he said, ‘Let’s go outside for a bit,’ and when I said, ‘But are we allowed to? I wanted to ask Mr Jellings –’ ‘Really, Mummy, what’s there to be so chicken about? I don’t know how you’d manage in this joint!’ As we closed the door of the visitors’ room behind us, I said, ‘We’ve never been in there, before.’ ‘It’s for long-distance parents, really, though I don’t know what it’s
for
– you can tell from the pong no one ever goes in there.’ I smiled at the jargon. Bobo has mastered everything; that place has no terrors for him.
    We kept to the formal, deserted front garden, away from the other boys. We walked up and down, talking trivialities, like people in hospital grounds who are relieved to have left the patient behind for a while. Bo told me he had written to me asking for new soccer boots, and whether it would be all right if Lopert came home with him next Sunday. I’d had a circular from