Summary
Richard
Richard is wandering around near the dairy, which he likes because it is always noisy there. But everything is different and missing today, and he cannot figure out where the animals have gone. It must be “the old bitch” (44) who got rid of them.
He tries to figure out how the farm came to be in ruin and the animals gone. It took place in his absence or because of it, and it was Patricia’s fault.
He does not know what to do. He hears his own voice call out for Rachel. He wonders what age she is now and where she is. Sometimes she is older, but usually, she is the infant from the only day he saw her.
Looksmart does not know where the dogs are or the security lights; why do the Wileys not defend themselves better? He comes into the kitchen, which looks smaller and humbler than he remembers. He stands in the gloom, then hears the old woman call for Beauty. He cannot sense the old man, who always infected the air around him.
The corridor smells stuffy and dank, as it did when he was a boy. The sitting room seems to be the only place with light, which is where Patricia must be now and where she always loved to be. He remembers a photo of Richard with two leopards he’d shot and killed in Kenya.
When he comes into the room, his first reaction to Patricia sitting on the chair is physical—a lurch in his body. She is polite, curious. She does not seem to immediately recognize him, but she always used to look so delighted when she saw him.
He mentions the dog Chloe, but she says it died a while ago. She then asks if she knows him, and he steps further into the light.
Patricia
She had known at the sound of the footsteps that it was not someone she knew, and her cultivated readiness has prepared her for encounters without fear. She is not afraid of pain, as she is in constant pain these days.
When the man comes in, it takes her a moment but finally, she recognizes Looksmart. She knows that there is a lot between them and whatever they have to say to each other might be dangerous and difficult. Looksmart is wearing a nice suit, and she compliments him. He seems offended, and she can tell he is here to be rude. She thinks he wants her to see how he is these days. She smiles that times have changed, and he says scornfully that she is here where he left her, but is not as frightening now. She does not think of herself that way, and she feels misrepresented. She asks him to sit but he replies he’d rather stand.
Patricia remembers how the other day she found a fishing rod in a red cotton holder sticking out from the guest bedroom and did not know whose it was until she remembered it was the one she bought for Looksmart.
Patricia brings up the day Looksmart caught his first fish. He says he does not remember it, but the memory is vivid to her. Looksmart is sullen as he listens to her recount it. Yet she wonders if she has embellished the event. She tells him it was a beautiful fish and he wanted to throw it back, so he did. He replies that he would have wanted to eat it, and when she says he was a gentle child, always wanting to please, he says to please her.
Beauty
Beauty notices the car and does not recognize it. She is still in the dark, which smells like rain, looking for UBaas. He is nowhere to be found.
There have been houses built on the farm modeled on the first house; each seems to be “an effort not to forget the original house—or otherwise each was an attempt to refresh it” (61). Beauty sleeps in what she thinks of as UBaas’s room, the mirror of what was once UMesis’s father’s study.
There is no sign of Bheki. He has always been elusive, especially after the birth of his child. People say the child is cursed because of the boy’s mother, Phume, whose father is a nyanga and priest at Msinga Top. Beauty regards stories of that place with the same feelings as those that she hears in the local church. Phume makes her uncomfortable with her talk of ghosts and the women being visited by tokoloshes at night. When Bongani was born, he did not speak and still does not. Beauty wonders what the child means.
Beauty puts on a pair of overalls and a pink anorak. It is raining harder than ever. At the main house, she hears voices. It sounds like an argument but the man laughs. She knows it is not UBaas because he has never been able to laugh openly.
As she gets closer, she thinks the man has a voice that sounds like he is from TV, but then she realizes who it is. She enters and UMesis asks her about Richard. She tries to decipher what is happening through UMesis’s eyes, but UMesis is acting like she does not exist.
Looksmart stands, tall and imposing. He and his mother were never popular at the farm. She showed up pregnant with him, with rumors surrounding the father. Beauty has always felt he is a thing to be avoided, like the memory of Grace.
Neither Patricia nor Looksmart are looking at her anymore, but if they had, they would have seen “the knowledge inside her eyes, smoldering like a fire” (64).
Patricia
Patricia has always wondered when she would see Looksmart again; when he left the color faded from her life. It was a tumultuous time in South Africa, and she learned to shelve his disappearance with everything else she did not understand. When his mother vanished around 2000, she barely even noticed because she was trying to save the farm.
Looksmart is jumpy. She wants to know why he is here and why he is compelled to be so rude. It is hard to tell what he is thinking. She says he has caught her at an interesting moment, as they are leaving tomorrow. He replies that he knows, and it is his business to know.
For a moment Patricia wonders if she ought to be afraid of him, but she does not think there is anything of value here or in her anymore. Spilling her blood would be spilling yesterday’s blood.
He asks what her plans are. She explains she is going to her father’s old home in Durban. As she talks about the house, it seems like he is enjoying listening to her talk. After a few minutes, he inquires if Richard will miss this place, and she says Richard is not well. Looksmart looks delighted. She explains Richard is literally losing his mind. Looksmart states that they will probably be rich now that they’ve sold the farm, and she shrugs that they’ve been buried in debt for a long time.
She asks why he is concerned with her and Richard—that they are nothing, practically antique. He wonders if the past is unimportant to her, sounding offended. She remembers how easily offended he always was. She sighs and says she does not know but it does not amount to much in the end.
Richard
Richard espies a woman, wondering if it is Mother and wanting to cry out and ask her where everything went. The woman calls for him. He hides, and she veers in another direction. There is too much to think about; the farm is in ruins, and maybe it is actually his fault.
He starts to dig up Rachel. He does not even need a spade because the earth is so soft.
Beauty
Beauty finds Bheki in one of the half-built houses. There is a large bonfire in the sitting room, and Beauty wonders if it is some symbolic burning of UMesis, or the idea of UMesis. Many men are gathered there. Beauty knows Bheki actually cares for UMesis; he does not fit in with the other men, which is one of the things she loves about him.
She approaches Bheki and asks about UBaas, even though she knows he does not want to be found right now. It is an embarrassing question for him, as if he were UBaas’s keeper, and he is curt to her. She thinks about how men always treat women differently in front of other men. But she needs Bheki tonight now that Looksmart is here; she feels like “some dark event is hurtling towards them, like a train coming through the night, aimed straight for the house” (76).
Beauty tells Bheki Looksmart is here, and they need to find UBaas. She does not say it, but UBaas must be kept away from the house.
Looksmart
Looksmart thinks wryly that all this was easier to think about when he was not here in front of Patricia. He finds himself wishing for some of his old hate, but now he will be trying a different, subtler, more effective path.
He needles Patricia on her comment that the past is unimportant, that there are no consequences to people’s auctions. She responds by saying that is not what she said. He asks if she has a clear conscience about the past. She looks at him with incomprehension. In his memories, her head was always buried in the sand while the rest of the country burned.
All Patricia says is that few people have a conscience about the past. This is all very clever; she was always cleverer than him, the cleverest boy in the school. But he knows he has a better memory than her. Of course, he remembers the fishing day. Back then he had always wanted to impress her, make her think he wasn’t like the other “natives.” He tells her she gave him a rock to kill the fish.
He takes out a knife to pare an apple. When he adds he is a more effective fisherman now, she comments that it sounds like a threat. He raises his eyebrows and says it would not be in his best interest to threaten her; after all, he has a wife and children and a lucrative job.
As he talks, he is tearing down any affection that might stand between them. He brags about his suit and his car.
Patricia asks what has come over him, and what he wants. He replies patience. He notices his speech is becoming less precise, filling up with old errors. This makes him glad, as it shows indifference to her.
She says her husband will soon be back, looking a little frightened. As he talks he is trying to think about where this is all going. He cannot help but remember UBaas’s gun collection.
She looks at him and avers that he changed. Shrugging, he says people change. She replies that everything has, including the country. He asks if she is pleased about that, and she replies that her opinion does not matter.
Looksmart then asks if she is afraid, and she asks if that is what he is after. He realizes it is. She asks what she should be afraid of, and he says the truth.
Patricia
Patricia knows there are things to be afraid of. Last week she heard of a woman being raped and murdered in her farmhouse.
She tells Looksmart he is a shadow of the little boy she knew. He says he was a man—nineteen—when he left. His English is not good, she thinks; he spoke better as a child.
Looksmart
He fingers his knife. It is a strange, alluring thought that a man in his position could decide to kill her. He asks her if she remembers the clay menagerie he made her as a boy. At first, he can tell she does not, but as he talks of them, she remembers. She tells him he had talent and asks if he is doing art now. When she adds that he had a magical touch, it seems like “a declaration of love, unexpected and almost embarrassing” (87).
After a moment she wonders where Richard is and he says he might have bumped into him. He then asks why she chose Richard, but she does not reply. He asks if she will offer him tea, and even though it is late, she accedes and says she will get some biscuits too.
Patricia calls for Beauty. He can tell she purposefully tried sounding like she was calling Beauty as a friend, a sister. He tells her to try again; Beauty won’t come unless she is summoned like a dog. He tells her to try it again, and she refuses.
Patricia
She gives in and calls Beauty.
Beauty
Beauty enters the room, and without looking at her, UMesis asks about Richard. She tries to respond in her usual way, to encourage UMesis that UBaas will be back. She says Bheki will find him.
UMesis asks her to prepare tea and biscuits.
Looksmart
Looksmart thinks that Beauty and her tribe are not so different from the “numberless dispossessed” (93) in Johannesburg these days. He used to give them money as he was coming up, but he is now too preoccupied to see them outside his car.
Looksmart asks about Beauty. He learns she is uninterested in men and has no children. He feels a bit of anger growing. Why did Beauty stay here after what happened to Grace? It is like condoning what happened.
Patricia says Beauty and Bheki are coming to Durban. Keeping his voice level, he asks if she remembers Beauty’s older sister Grace. Something has changed in him, which she notices. She says yes, Grace was the girl from the dairy who died. He says it was actually murder.
Patricia seems exasperated. He thinks it is an act for her to buy time. She sighs and says she doesn't know why he is here and speaking to her like this. When she uses his name, he says angrily that she does not even know his name. She says she was there when he was born and heard his mother name him Looksmart.
Analysis
The second part of the novel continues to develop some of the themes introduced in the first section—the idea of house and home, memory—and introduces a new character that threatens to upend everything Patricia in particular has believed about herself and her life.
To begin, the house remains a fraught symbol within the text. Patricia is indelibly associated with it, and since it is old, crumbling, and redolent with the past, the suggestion is clear that Patricia is also old, crumbling, and consumed by the past. Richard is also associated with the house, but his presence is a negative one. The photo of him with the leopards, in which he gleefully stands over his prey, symbolizes his colonial mindset, his arrogant (and correct) assumption of complete authority and power. Patricia hopes that moving out of this house to the one at Durban, which is associated with her benevolent and loving father, will change things: “The thought of the house in Durban always made her blood sing, and she hopes the house will make it sing again. She may even be able to take up where she left off the day Richard arrived, and repair something, restore a vital ingredient, before she went away for good” (69).
Looksmart’s return to the house is understandably complicated for him. He notes how it smells the same as before, and that Patricia sits where she always sat. But the kitchen is “smaller than he envisaged, and humbler” (47), and the house is dark “like parts of the brain that have shut down” (48). The house now feels like a “not unpleasant—peasant’s house” (47); Looksmart is different now, thus the house is different.
The farmhouse is not the only house on the property. Over the years more edifices were built, and “It didn’t take long to see that the new houses that were being built across the farm were much the same as the first house” (60). Each of them was “an effort not to forget the original house—or otherwise an attempt to refresh it” (61). Higginson explains, “Each character is dreaming of a house where they will one day live. No one is happy with the house they are in now. It feels false to them and inadequate… Patricia dreams about the house in which she grew up in Durban and she thinks she can return to the person she once was, before she moved to the farm with Richard. Beauty dreams about the house she will build when she retires, with its view of the Drakensberg, and she has already secured a piece of land from the Chief. Looksmart, of course, returns to the nightmare house that he wants to transform and make ‘open plan’, with a ‘better view’ because he’ll cut down all the trees around it. He also wants to reproduce this new house throughout the valley – to try and stamp out that old house. But, of course, this dream house will only ever be the original house, reproduced with slight variations. Looksmart is still too attached to his wound, his sense of grievance, and is not free from it. He is creating a ‘gated community’ for people fleeing the crime in the cities. He is not creating a place beyond fear and hate, but reproducing it, albeit unconsciously.” The desire for a “dream house” can also be extended to black South Africans as a whole, because for so long apartheid denied them houses and land and roots of their own.
In terms of memory, Higginson suggests that how, what, and why we remember the past is not as straightforward as we might assume. The story with the fish that Looksmart and Patricia recall is mostly the same but differs; each thinks they are remembering it correctly, but eventually, Patricia is open to wondering if perhaps she got it wrong: “she wonders if she might have imagined it—or at least embellished the event with other events” (57). Beauty flat-out does not want to remember the past, thinking of how Looksmart and the memory of Grace were things to be avoided. As the novel proceeds, it is clear that other memories are being repressed, shunned because they are too painful. The ubiquitous mist in the novel symbolizes the murkiness of the past, obfuscating the land in the same way that characters’ minds obfuscate the truth of the past.
