Disgrace Read Online Free Page B

Wordsworth, but at least it wakes them up. Archetypes? they are saying to themselves. Goddesses? What is he talking about? What does this old man know about love?
    A memory floods back: the moment on the floor when he forced the sweater up and exposed her neat, perfect little breasts. For the first time she looks up; her eyes meet his and in a flash see all. Confused, she drops her glance.
    â€˜Wordsworth is writing about the Alps,’ he says. ‘We don’t have Alps in this country, but we have the Drakensberg, or on a smaller scale Table Mountain, which we climb in the wake of the poets, hoping for one of those revelatory, Wordsworthian moments we have all heard about.’ Now he is just talking, covering up. ‘But moments like that will not come unless the eye is half turned toward the great archetypes of the imagination we carry within us.’
    Enough! He is sick of the sound of his own voice, and sorry for her too, having to listen to these covert intimacies. He dismisses the class, then lingers, hoping for a word with her. But she slips away in the throng.
    A week ago she was just another pretty face in the class. Now she is a presence in his life, a breathing presence.
    The auditorium of the student union is in darkness. Unnoticed, he takes a seat in the back row. Save for a balding man in a janitor’s uniform a few rows in front of him, he is the only spectator.
    Sunset at the Globe Salon is the name of the play they are rehearsing: a comedy of the new South Africa set in a hairdressing salon in Hillbrow, Johannesburg. On stage a hairdresser, flamboyantly gay, attends to two clients, one black, one white. Patter passes among the three of them: jokes, insults. Catharsis seems to be the presiding principle: all the coarse old prejudices brought into the light of day and washed away in gales of laughter.
    A fourth figure comes onstage, a girl in high platform shoes with her hair done in a cascade of ringlets. ‘Take a seat, dearie, I’ll attend to you in a mo,’ says the hairdresser. ‘I’ve come for the job,’ she replies – ‘the one you advertised.’ Her accent is glaringly Kaaps ; it is Melanie. ‘ Ag , pick up a broom and make yourself useful,’ says the hairdresser.
    She picks up a broom, totters around the set pushing it before her. The broom gets tangled in an electric cord. There is supposed to be a flash, followed by a screaming and a scurrying around, but something goes wrong with the synchronization. The director comes striding onstage, and behind her a young man in black leather who begins to fiddle with the wall-socket. ‘It’s got to be snappier,’ says the director. ‘A more Marx Brothers atmosphere.’ She turns to Melanie. ‘OK?’ Melanie nods.
    Ahead of him the janitor stands up and with a heavy sigh leaves the auditorium. He ought to be gone too. An unseemly business, sitting in the dark spying on a girl (unbidden the word letching comes to him). Yet the old men whose company he seems to be on the point of joining, the tramps and drifters with their stained raincoats and cracked false teeth and hairy earholes – all of them were once upon a time children of God, with straight limbs and clear eyes. Can they be blamed for clinging to the last to their place at the sweet banquet of the senses?
    Onstage the action resumes. Melanie pushes her broom. A bang, a flash, screams of alarm. ‘It’s not my fault,’ squawks Melanie. ‘ My gats , why must everything always be my fault?’ Quietly he gets up, follows the janitor into the darkness outside.
    At four o’clock the next afternoon he is at her flat. She opens the door wearing a crumpled T-shirt, cycling shorts, slippers in the shape of comic-book gophers which he finds silly, tasteless.
    He has given her no warning; she is too surprised to resist the intruder who thrusts himself upon her. When he takes her in his arms, her limbs crumple