Summary
Patricia
Patricia looks out her window at the mist that pervades everything. She wonders why the bloodwoods were planted, but it does not matter now: she is leaving. The developers are already here, turning stables and farm buildings to rubble. All she has told Richard, her husband, is that they are going to the sea.
She hears Beauty, her housemaid and Richard’s nurse, walking down the hallway and calls her in. She thinks Beauty has her whole life ahead of her and she will need to find something else when Patricia and Richard are gone.
Patricia asks Beauty for them to have breakfast together today and to bring Richard in, and then tells her she will be visiting Mr. Ford today. Beauty says she will tell Bheki, who drives the car. She fetches Patricia’s walker.
At breakfast, Patricia automatically listens for the dogs, but she just had the two Alsatians put down. Now there is just the Rottweiler, Ethunzini, but she has not had the heart to put her down yet. She has been surrounded by dogs her whole life. She often had Chihuahuas, and when the last one died eighteen months ago, Patricia knew it was time to sell the farm.
They are moving to the Durban house, which is 150 years old and creaks like a ship. It is where Patricia grew up and she has dreamt about it her whole life. She wants to spend her last days there, staring at the sea.
Richard walks into the kitchen. He says he wants to take the dogs to his father’s house, but the dogs are gone and his father died twenty years ago. He asks where the TV is and Patricia replies it is packed. He asks if they are dead, and says he was dreaming and they were dead. He says seriously that the ambulance is coming for the two dead children, and that she may think he’s here but he is not. These are typical Richard ramblings these days; he has needed care for a while now.
Patricia has had the same Mercedes for twenty-five years. It is more run-down now and seems to fit in less and less as the neighborhood becomes chicer. Bheki is waiting to drive her. He has agreed to stay on as their chauffeur and driver. He always loved the car when he was young. Patricia doesn't know what he feels about the move, whether it is dread or excitement, because Bheki is hard to read and speaks only of what is practical.
On the drive out, Patricia observes how the road is worse than ever, with corrugated tire tracks and half-finished houses; it seems like a war zone. Bheki drives carefully out of the area.
Patricia inherited the farm from her father when she and Richard “made their mismatch” (11) and it never made much profit, being too wet and rocky. In the seventies, Patricia decided to breed Welsh ponies and took over management of the farm from Richard. It started to do better, but only slightly and only because of her—Richard had “given up any pretence of being any good at anything after her father died” (11).
On the drive Patricia talks about her father and about Durban, telling Bheki he will like it. He responds by saying he does not like to look at the sea.
Beauty
Beauty has always been frightened of UBaas (Richard), but it is just a thought in the back of her mind now. As his nurse, she knows his body better than anyone. She knows there is little left of the man. He cries randomly, sometimes calls her Mother, and wanders around the house looking for the dogs. Yet they both know that even though he is completely dependent on her, he has all the power.
When Patricia and Bheki are gone she sits and drinks from the teacup she likes, the one with the faded picture of the Queen of England on it.
Even before UBaas was mad he was mad, but she thinks that there is a bit of good in everyone. When she is alone with him she speaks isiZulu, which she knows he understands.
He comes in and is no longer wearing pants, which is not unusual. She helps him get dressed.
Patricia
She and John Ford have been lovers for thirty years, though they stopped sleeping together fifteen years ago and only see each other every other month. He looks like an aged dog now, but he was once ruggedly handsome. He was first an English teacher and then the headmaster at the school. His wife Anna died of bone cancer a few years after he took that position. He is everything Richard is not, which is why Patricia thinks she loved him.
John greets her wearing his golf attire, meaning they do not have long, but they have already said their goodbyes. Patricia notices the roses need tending, but will not mention it because they were his wife’s, and any mention of Anna, however oblique, brings trouble; the afterglow of her has only grown.
They speak politely of her imminent departure, and she wonders if he will be sad to see her go. He has been very melancholy lately. In fact, he has always been a difficult man, prone to withholding, even from Anna.
They had met when Patricia brought a very clever boy from the farm to meet him for an interview. John looked more interested in her, but he helped arrange a scholarship for the boy, Looksmart. They kept meeting after that, ostensibly about the boy, and it developed into a relationship.
John tells her he has a letter for her to read, but only when she gets to Durban. She thinks he suddenly looks sweet and bashful. She agrees.
Outside in the car, she wonders why he summoned her here—to give her the letter? To apologize for himself? To say why he never loved her as much as Anna? She decides she probably won’t read it, as she is tired of his complacency.
Beauty
There is still a lot to do before they go away tomorrow. There are boxes everywhere, and the moving company is supposed to come later and bring them to Durban. Beauty has been packing, making decisions herself on what does and what does not. UMesis (how Beauty refers to and thinks of Patricia) told Beauty she can bring one suitcase for the journey tomorrow, but Beauty had trouble even filling that. Her most prized possession is a small painting UMesis gave her of an English country lane leading to a church. She does not know why the watercolor pleases her so much, but it does. She also takes the teacup, the first thing she has ever deliberately stolen, though she knows she can rightfully claim it has been forgotten about.
Beauty has lived her whole life in one of the rondavels down near the dam, and her life’s goal is to have a place of her own there. She wants the same view of the Drakensberg but it will be an even closer view. She will never have a man in her house unless that man is Bheki, whom she loves but does not love her back. Beauty has known Bheki her whole life. He is older than her, slow and gruff. The only person he seems to care about is his four-year-old son Bongani, who was born without hearing.
Patricia
Richard has been angling to dig up Rachel, their newborn daughter, for some time now. She has a simple grave down by the bloodwoods. There is a view of the whole valley from there, and Patricia loves it so much that she would have built the house there if it wasn’t already built. Instead, they live in the first house, a European-style edifice with a large veranda and that always seems dark inside.
Patricia remembers connecting with Richard over how their mothers died young. She remembers swimming in the ocean and making love with him, a perfect, paradisaical day that was never replicated.
It is the time of the day when Patricia would have inspected the horses, but now there are no more animals. Richard is putting on his decrepit old boots which he loves and will not get rid of. She asks where he is going but he does not reply, so she tells Beauty to tell Bheki to go with Richard.
She hopes for a dramatic storm tonight, her last night. Lightning is common in the area and even struck the farmhouse once. They also have rain often, so everything seems clammy and sodden.
Patricia rarely tidies up, so the house has cobwebs and looks just as it did when her father left it.
Patricia suggests to Richard that he take the boots off and go take a bath. Normally she tries to ignore him as much as possible, which is her survival technique. He picks up the spade, ignoring her, and lurches out. She calls for Beauty, but Beauty is gone too.
Looksmart
Everything at the Dwaleni farm looks exactly as he did when he left it. He smells wet earth and rot outside the car window. It has been a six-hour drive and he only stopped once as he drove across the vast, sprawling country. He is ashamed that he still is not used to being able to drive wherever he likes, expecting someone to ask him to leave. He may always feel like an intruder, “condemned to arriving at places where he will never quite belong” (34).
As he comes closer, he looks for signs of the development project he has been managing (from afar) for a year. It is messy, looking like it started and was abandoned.
He told himself he was coming here out of hate, a feeling that has been his most reliable companion for a long time. The hate has lessened a bit, and sometimes he even recollects it with fondness and some regret. As he parks in front of the Wiley house, he feels a surge of something like grief. It is not too late to turn around, he thinks. He wonders if he came here because of the Wileys or because of Grace, whom he has spent most of his life avoiding. Even in death, she is powerful. But he tells himself this is Patricia’s last night and though he is softer now due to life in the city and his wife and daughters, he has to do what he came here to do.
Patricia
Patricia hears the sound of a car. Everything around her in the house seems muted. She thinks once more about burning down the house.
Patricia calls out for Beauty again. When she appears, Patricia tells her Richard has gone off with the spade, and she should get him or tell Bheki to. She tells her to check Rachel first, then the stables and other places where the animals would have been.
Out front, the dog is finally barking. Beauty looks outside and sees there is a large silver car. Patricia suggests it is one of the builders and states she is more concerned about Richard right now. Beauty leaves. The dog sounds uncomfortable. Patricia calls for Beauty twice more, and the flyscreen at the back of the house creaks open, then snaps shut.
Analysis
The Dream House begins with a house—actually, two houses. Patricia Wiley and her husband Richard are leaving their one house in Dwaleni and moving the next day to another house in Durban. The novel delves into why Patricia in particular wants to leave this house and move to the other and also brings in other characters’ perspectives on the Dwaleni house and their history within it.
Patricia is the main character, and we spend comparably the most time in her narrative presence. She is an old woman, though in the text she often remembers past stages of her life, and seems tired of the vicissitudes of life. Her husband Richard, with whom she has a checkered relationship, is suffering from dementia, and her lover, John Ford, does not seem all that upset to see her leave. She has sold the property (which is hers, as it came from her beloved father) to developers and wants to spend her last days last Durban by the sea.
Critic Jane Rosenthal writes that “Patricia is central to the farm and the novel. Similarly disintegrating, she is only now, at this last minute, beginning to realize how blind and inadequate she has been for decades.” Both she and Richard are “unaware they are specimens of a past era.” We can see Patricia’s old age is mirrored in the car she drives and the condition of the house itself. First, her car is twenty-five years old and both she and it “have started to appear out of place. What was once a working farmers’ village…has become more upmarket” (9). As an old white woman in the post-apartheid era of South Africa, she has seen much of her social power change and ultimately diminish. In an interview with English Experience, Higginson describes this situation: “The landscape in transition was also something that became more prominent in the novel. On one level, the houses rising up out of the mud are structures for a brand-new future. On another level, the houses are like ruined buildings in a battle zone. The landscape of the novel is in transition and in a middle space between ruin and regeneration, which seemed to me a fitting image for contemporary South Africa.”
Thus, the property is now ravaged by developers’ earth-movers and tools and looks like “a war zone” (10), and the house has always been “covered in lichen…[and] inside it had always been as dark and dank as any cave” (28). There are “cobwebs in the corners of the ceilings, and visitors—in the days they still had visitors—complained of fleas and airlessness, as several of the windows had warped shut. Except for the occasional lick of paint, which is presently falling back into the garden in uneven, plate-sized chunks, she has kept the house exactly as her father let it” (31). Overall, the impression is that the house is old and decaying, and is a relic of an earlier age. Patricia too is old and near the end of her life, and has spent her life surrounded by a past that she finds comfortable for herself but that has obfuscated the true nature of what went on around her (Looksmart’s arrival will, of course, change all that).
Higginson also describes the condition of the house in terms of its messiness: the accouterments, accumulations, and detritus of life that are unearthed in the process of the Wileys moving. Beauty remarks that “in every room the floor is filled with boxes, boxes spilling objects from the past whose meaning remains unclear to [her]” (22). This reflects the coming events of the novel, in which Patricia and Richard’s pasts are metaphorically pulled out of the boxes they were hidden in and thrown out into the world for all to see. While this happens in a micro way in the novel, it is also reflective of the wider world of South Africa. Higginson explains, “The novel is about postapartheid South Africa more than it is about apartheid, but apartheid casts its shadow over the present, whether we like it or not. It seems that little has changed since 1994 for Beauty or Bheki, but much has changed for Looksmart. Quite a bit has also changed for Richard and Patricia, who have been left behind by the progress of history. As the novel shows, there has been more transformation in the urban than the rural areas, but the changes are finally beginning to reach the rural areas too…”
