reading

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Simon Prosser for believing in this book from the beginning, and to Hermione Thompson, Anna Ridley, Hannah Ludbrook and Ellie Smith at Penguin Random House.

My deepest thanks to Sarah Chalfant, Charles Buchan and Jackie Ko at the Wylie Agency, and to Ben Ball and Meredith Rose for being by my side every step of the way through the hall of mirrors.

For friendship and moral support over the years, thank you to Jessica Berenbeim, Alex Massouras, Joanna Jeffery, Adrienne Minster, Hisham Matar, Diana Matar, Owen Sheers, Peter Hobbs, Sarah Hall, Gayle Rutherfoord, Sally Munro, Monalisa Sam, Catherine Black, Brenda Parker, Mike Swanson, Felicity Swanson, Mary Haw, Nadia Davids and Loula van der Westhuizen. Special thanks to Stephen Watson and Alison Lowry for setting me on this path.

My love and thanks to the Munting family and the Witthuhn family.

Thank you to Ken and Teresa Dovey, Lindiwe Dovey, Robert Mayes and Chiara Dovey-Mayes for unwavering support. For the joy they bring to my life, I thank my husband, Blake Munting, and our boys, Gethin and Arlen.

Sources

I have used artistic licence and taken many liberties with historical facts, details and geographies in my invented narrative. Aspects of the research done in Pompeii and Herculaneum by fictional characters in this book were inspired by the work of three extraordinary women: Wilhelmina Mary Feemster Jashemski, Sara C. Bisel and Estelle Lazer (who continues to do pioneering work on the human remains of Pompeii). I drew extensively on their articles and books in researching those sections of the novel, in particular: Sara C. Bisel, Jane Bisel, Shelley Tanaka, Paul Dennis, The Secrets of Vesuvius (1990); Wilhelmina F. Jashemski, The Gardens of Pompeii: Herculaneum and the Villas Destroyed by Vesuvius (1979); Wilhelmina F. Jashemski, A Pompeian Herbal: Ancient and Modern Medicinal Plants (1999); Wilhelmina F. Jashemski & Frederick G. Meyer (eds.), The Natural History of Pompeii (2002); Estelle Lazer, Resurrecting Pompeii (2009).

I also drew on the following books about Pompeii for historical background and details: Joanne Berry, The Complete Pompeii (2007); Jean-Paul Descoeudres (ed.), Pompeii Revisited: The Life and Death of a Roman Town (1994); Matt Donovan, A Cloud of Unusual Size and Shape: Meditations on Ruin and Redemption (2016); Charles Pellegrino, Ghosts of Vesuvius (2004); Ingrid D. Rowland, From Pompeii: The Afterlife of a Roman Town (2014).

The sections on German vocabularies of guilt are drawn from aspects of the work of psychotherapists Helmut Radebold, Margarete Mitscherlich and Alexander Mitscherlich.

A number of sources provided me with food for thought in the process of creating my characters, though I do not necessarily endorse all viewpoints expressed in these works. I have occasionally alluded to, paraphrased or made mention of specific terms used by certain of these authors: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah (2013); Elif Batuman, The Idiot (2017); Burkhard Bilger, ‘Ghost Stories’, The New Yorker (12 September 2016); Brené Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection (2010); Pascal Bruckner (trans. Steven Rendall), The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism (2010); Inga Clendinnen, ‘The History Question: Who Owns the Past?’, Quarterly Essay (Issue 23: September 2006); Patricia Ticineto Clough & Jean Halley (eds.), The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (2007); J.M. Coetzee & Arabella Kurtz, The Good Story: Exchanges on Truth, Fiction and Psychotherapy (2015); Vincent Crapanzano, Waiting: The Whites of South Africa (1985); Richard Delgado & Jean Stefancic (eds.), Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge (1995); The Economist, ‘What the Führer Means for Germans Today’ (19 December 2015); Sigmund Freud, Delusion and Dream (trans. Helen Downey 1921); Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (2008); Elizabeth Gumport, ‘Female Trouble’, n+1 (Issue 13: Winter 2012); Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2014); Hugh Haughton, ‘Introduction’, Sigmund Freud’s The Uncanny (2003); Celia Hunt, Therapeutic Dimensions of Autobiography in Creative Writing (2000); Jeanne-Marie Jackson, ‘The South African Novel of Ideas’, n+1 online (5 October 2015); David Lester & Rina Terry, ‘The Use of Poetry Therapy’, The Arts in Psychotherapy (Vol. 19, 1992); Hélène Opperman Lewis, Apartheid: Britain’s Bastard Child (2016); Kim Mahood, ‘Kartiya are Like Toyotas’, The Griffith Review (Edition 36: April 2012); Kim Mahood, ‘White Stigma’, The Monthly (August 2015); Amedeo Maiuri, ‘Last Moments of the Pompeians’, National Geographic (November 1961); Ewald Mengel & Michela Borzaga (eds.), Trauma, Memory, and Narrative in the Contemporary South African Novel: Essays (2012); Claudia Roth Pierpont, ‘Bombshells’, The New Yorker (19 October 2015); Victoria Princewill, ‘Hear Our Voice: Zadie Smith and the Problem of Her Single Story’, n+1 online (29 June 2017); Zadie Smith, ‘Getting In and Out: Who Owns Black Pain?’, Harper’s Magazine (July 2017); Shelby Steele, ‘The Age of White Guilt: And the Disappearance of the Black Individual’, Harper’s Magazine (November 2002); Chanoch Ze’evi (director), Hitler’s Children (film, 2011).

My last voluntary contact with you, seventeen years ago – you could not have forgotten – was a letter saying I never wanted to hear from you again. A request you chose to ignore. I could not afford to vanish entirely, and risk losing those bonus cheques with your spidery signature that arrived every two years like clockwork. So there was never a clean break, you always knew where to find me. Once the cheques stopped arriving, exactly ten years after my graduation, the birthday cards continued, asking if I was flourishing.

You’re not of a generation to have these reminders automated. I imagine you still keep a paper diary, ordered from the alumni association of our alma mater, with a dark maroon cover and the crest discreetly embossed on the top right corner. Only those in the know would recognise it: three open books, the Latin for ‘truth’ split into syllables across their pages.

These things mattered to you a great deal, I mean the signifiers of a person’s educational lineage. I recall your college class ring – class of ’71? ’72? – most clearly. I’d seen those clunky gold rings on the pinkies of my male classmates, markers of East Coast boarding schools, modern-day royal seals. They were useful as beacons of what kind of boy to avoid. On your hand the sight of the ring filled me with pity. Those boys were parading their power in the present, but you were still clinging to old symbols, old associations, to tell you who you were.

I understand what you’re asking of me. Mutual confession, the inside view.

I’m open to the idea, but for reasons of my own.

Vita

How wonderful to get you in stereo again, Vita. Rudely, I’ve not asked the basics. Are you well? Are your parents well? Are you still living in Mudgee, on the olive farm?

I write this from a very humid Boston. I have hardly left my air-conditioned townhouse this summer. Usually I escape to the house in Vermont, but the various commitments of dying—of what it does not matter—have kept me sweating it out here instead.

The only respite from the heat outside comes late in the evening. If my energy permits I go walking on the Common, past the illuminated softball fields, all the way up to the spray pool at Frog Pond. A breeze comes off the river, or from the sea, it’s hard to tell. Almost every night there’s music drifting across the grass from the Bandstand.

Yesterday evening I felt so revived by my walk that I decided to treat myself to a late restaurant dinner. Since it’s rare for me to have an appetite these days, I no longer mind dining out alone. The waitstaff were extra attentive. The sommelier spent time taking me through the cellar offerings. I couldn’t manage dessert but I did have a glass of Sauternes, my favorite, as you know.

It made me think of our very first dinner together. Do you remember? I had ordered a bottle of Château d’Yquem to go with the warm pear sabayon. It was produced on Montaigne’s family estate in Bordeaux, though in his day they amassed their fortune not from sweet wine but from salted fish, similar to the local delicacy Kitty and I used to eat in new Pompei.

You mentioned that you happened to be reading Montaigne’s ‘On Cannibals’ in your social theory class, his reflections on a long-ago tribe’s tradition of roasting and eating their enemies, even sending portions of the meal to absent friends and family members.

‘Jungle takeout!’ I laughed, and you looked uncomfortable. Montaigne, you told me, was the father of cultural relativism and recommended we suspend judgment of those cannibals. You paraphrased him: while we quite rightly judge their faults we are blind to our own.

Even then it gave me a little chill of recognition.

The sommelier arrived at our table, and poured a neat spiral of wine for you to taste. I must have bored you to tears, going on about the two types of Botrytis cinerea infection in the grapes of the Bordeaux region. Gray rot, which ruins the grapes, and noble rot, which partially raisins the grapes and gives the dessert wine its concentrated flavor. Yet you made me feel as if it were the most interesting thing you’d ever heard.

Partially raisined is an apt description of my own appearance these days. I would like to think that, as with all humans who have not been blessed with good looks, my own rot is noble rather than gray. I have had less to lose to old age.

I am indeed still in Mudgee. My parents have passed away (cancer, heartbreak). I see your old habits of surveillance die hard, but I am almost flattered by such conscientious snooping, for who else would care?

Our first dinner in old Boston. You ordered me the halibut, made a fuss of telling me that its name derived from being eaten on ancient holy days, and it arrived before me glistening with tarragon beurre blanc. I had to disguise how little I liked it.

You were bald, or at least balding, or maybe only going grey. Tall. A mild squint. Or am I remembering you as uglier than is reasonable? Back then I saw you as nothing but middle-aged: I was looking at the world as a 21-year-old does, in thrall to my own immortality.

Near the end of the meal, you recounted the story of your last visit to your father in Vermont before his death, when you were still at college yourself. How you’d known that he loved you because he left a glass of milk in the fridge for your midnight snack, as he had when you were younger.

I’d wondered why you couldn’t pour it yourself, whether this was a tic peculiar to your relationship with him or some important clue to the entire culture. America and its traditions still mystified me, even in the fall of my senior year, when I could no longer claim to be a fresh transplant from other parts of the New World.

‘Why do adults drink so much milk here?’ I asked. In my dining hall, I’d watched grown men drink glass after glass of milk at dinner to wash down heaped plates of fried food.

But it was the wrong question, a rare slip-up for me. I was the queen of questions, unfailingly pitching them at the proper emotional register. Questions as presents to be opened.

You stirred in your seat, and a waiter appeared like a wraith to replace the linen napkin that had dropped to the floor. You would have preferred that I ask about your father. So I did.

I didn’t have to fake my interest – I was interested, in your father, in you, in everything and everyone around me. Anything you can say about America is true, someone once said. You can never get to the bottom of the place, you can never pin the people down. Whatever it is you’re up to here, Royce, you are still true to type in that regard. And so am I – an ever curious observer.

A touching detail, the glass of milk my father used to pour for me. I had forgotten it. There, you see, we can fill in each other’s gaps and somewhere between us may lie the truth of ourselves.

Our memories are always imperfect, Kitty used to say. We have to leave ourselves clues—photos, scrapbooks, journals—or our very own pasts become inaccessible, though we lived through every moment. What hope, then, of deciphering somebody else’s past, let alone the history of an ancient civilization? She didn’t mean by this that we shouldn’t try, but she did understand that in her work she would always be on the losing side of the battle against oblivion.

In the mail today was a save-the-date for my college class’s fiftieth reunion next year. Fifty years. The received wisdom is that you should only attend a reunion if you’ve been a spectacular success or a spectacular failure, these being the states most attractive to others. The worst is to get stuck in the middling no-man’s-land. That wisdom has held true in my experience, at least until my forty-fifth reunion a few years ago, when people seemed to have come full circle. They no longer cared what they had or hadn’t made of their lives. Wealth was hardly mentioned—the sheen of it had worn off. Conversations were open, honest. Even those who had previously turned their backs on their college experience now felt wistful about those years.

At the Friday night barbecue several classmates, newly bereaved, asked my advice on how to live alone. We were being served lamb koftas by undergraduates working the reunions, just as you once did. In the courtyard lit with lanterns, I yearned for Kitty. Each time somebody tapped me on the shoulder I held my breath and hoped it might be her forever youthful ghost.

All I could recommend to my classmates as a tonic for loneliness was travel, but if you’re not used to it, the vertigo of being in a strange place can make you feel as if you’ve paid for a seat in the boat on the River Styx and are heading toward the underworld’s marshlands. Journeys need a point, a narrative arc. I was always traveling to be near Kitty, or to catch a glimpse of you.

I won’t make it to my reunion next year. I’ve been agonizing over what to write as my personal entry for the yearbook. It will be my last message to my peers, yet when I think of what to say I keep lapsing into cliché. If I submit anything at all, perhaps it should be a sketch I once made of a mosaic skeleton on the wall of a villa outside Pompeii. The skeleton is reclining with a lurid, toothy grin as if at a feast, cup full. The Latin inscription reads Enjoy your life. Which made Kitty and me laugh at the time. How self-evident! But it is the only good advice the old have to give.

You’ve been waiting for me to respond to your prompt, haven’t you? The bottle of Sauternes. The first of your unwanted gifts to me. It set off warning bells that the time I’d been spending with you was not quite kosher, not within the realm of normal interaction between an applicant to the Lushington Foundation and its founder.

It arrived near the end of my second-last semester of college. I’d cycled back from my final class of the week, following the salt trail along the path to avoid slick ice. The campus bus passed me and I glanced up at the resigned faces of my fellow Plaza residents, condemned to live in the ugly buildings far from the action of the main campus and the desirable dormitories along the river.

It was already dark, a December gloom, but as I flew along, the streetlights came on in unison and the snowbanks began to sparkle. Even on a bad day, in that world, at that age, everything meant something. I was at the centre of things.

I had been thinking about my seminar on narrative nonfiction cinema. Most of the other students wanted to be auteur filmmakers, inserting themselves into their documentaries as subject, character or guide, sometimes faux-heroic, sometimes as cheeky trickster figures. A confessional style of filmmaking was ascendant. It was the dawn of the age of baring it all.

I liked my classmates’ work but I felt an ethical obligation to leave myself out of my films. No voice-over, no narration, no intrusion. Just observational footage. Film as an impersonal research instrument or an artist’s scalpel making shapes from the world’s putty.

‘What about adding in some music?’ someone in the class had suggested after I screened a montage of the wine farm footage I’d filmed the past summer in Paarl, near Cape Town. Close-ups of the vine stokkies in buckets of water, medium shots of them newly planted in the soil, wider panning shots of the vineyard landscape. I had held these shots for a very long time. The class had practically fallen asleep. The professor praised the attentiveness of the footage, though he too seemed puzzled by my refusal to include any scrap of my own positioning. During the break, he asked me kindly, ‘Are you getting what you hoped you would out of this class?’

The bottle was waiting for me at the front desk of my dormitory building. The store had sent it wrapped in clear cellophane. An ex-boyfriend with whom I remained friends was at the desk, examining the label with interest.

‘From a secret admirer,’ he said, handing it over.

I was aware that my eyes were watering from the cold. My mind was elsewhere, my stomach was empty, and there I was holding a thirty-year-old bottle of wine.

I knew immediately it was from you.

Did I take some pleasure in seeing that my ex-boyfriend was intimidated by this expensive gift, that it made him wonder if there were things about me he’d overlooked? I had broken up with him because he said I wasn’t adventurous enough in bed. He kept asking me to kiss with my mouth open wider, which frankly was exhausting. You kiss how you kiss.

My two roommates and I drank the wine with a reckless abandon that I encouraged. One of them, who knew something about the vintage, suggested I save it for a special occasion. But my mood had turned savage. Was this gift meant to be a tribute to my fieldwork on the wine farm the previous summer, a taste of the high life to take the edge off spending time around the poor? Or a reminder that I was on campus by invitation only, my financial aid package made possible by donations from committed alumni like you?

I needed you to give me a Lushington fellowship. At the information evening earlier in the semester, the room packed with girls like me with hungry eyes, I watched you closely. The eunuch wizard in a coven of clever witches. I could live for two years off the initial grant, buy a video camera of my own. And, we were told, if Fellows kept delivering according to certain metrics of performance, they would keep being rewarded, every two years for a decade – bonuses for proven career gains, pure and simple.

Yet I wasn’t always going to play Eliza to your Henry, hoping one day to pass as a proper lady. So in the living room of our coveted senior suite (our own bedrooms around a communal area, the recompense for enduring years of bunk beds and room-shares), we drank the Sauternes straight from the bottle, passing it around like the end of a keg hose.

It was a Friday evening. The wine was too rich. It began to snow again, and instead of going out we ended up going to bed early. In the morning we stumbled sleepy-eyed downstairs to the dining hall to fill our trays with bagels and pink grapefruits sliced in half, taking our everyday abundance for granted.

I meant to say in my last note how sorry I was to hear about your parents. Enough time has gone by since my own parents’ dramatic deaths for me to be able to think of them only as having passed, without the precise pain of my loss. No matter how it happens, for only children like you and me it’s more than usually destabilizing.

I have just returned from my final meeting as a board member of the Herreford Natural History Museum. I thought of you on the car journey to Salem. It was sleeting, I think, when we drove there during your winter break, near the start of your last semester at college. You had your glasses on, your first pair, and I sensed you still felt not quite yourself in them.

We stopped for a quick lunch in that coffeehouse where people looked askance at us. The way we spoke to each other must have seemed too intense for us to be related. I felt them wondering what about me was so fascinating that a young woman could listen so carefully, maintain eye contact for so long. In my work with the Foundation, I had always been surrounded by interesting young women, but most of them didn’t ask much about my life beyond the bare outlines. Our conversations, though, yours and mine, felt like a dance, a fertile loop I had only previously experienced with Kitty. Like her, you hated to speak of things that were inessential.

Did you notice, at the museum, that things became awkward? The board’s chairman had forgotten I’d asked him to set up a meeting for you with one of the curators. The secretary went searching for somebody to deal with us.

I knew you’d made applications for a postgraduation summer internship elsewhere, to a television production company most recently, and nothing had come of them. My suggestion that you apply for one at the museum was motivated not just by my connection there, but by Salem’s proximity, only a forty-minute drive north of Boston. I would be able to visit often, take you to the Cabot Street Cinema, the lighthouse on Winter Island.

Eventually an assistant curator came out. She gave me a look of such contempt I thought it best to stay where I was. I knew you would win her over on the brief tour she gave you of the Native American potsherd collection.

I hoped the reason you were upbeat in the car on the way home was because you’d been stimulated by seeing the artifacts in storage, uninterpreted, rather than in an exhibition. But then you said they were remnants of a cultural tradition to which you felt no valid connection, and that you needed some personal history with a culture if you were going to engage with it, make films about it; it didn’t feel right to pick a subject as if you were picking a book to read for your own diversion.

I dropped you outside your dormitory. In my rearview mirror, I saw an expression of weariness cross your face as I drove away. It had been an ordeal for you, not only the scene at the museum, the whole thing. The fellowships had not yet been announced—my power to change your life hung in the balance and you knew it, but you’d had to summon the courage to say no to something I wanted for you.

I drove from the farm into town this morning for my aerobics class, and became one among a legion of middle-aged women reflected in the mirror behind the instructor. The communal high hits halfway through and even the shy become uninhibited, counting down the kicks as we run towards our doppelgangers in the glass. We are proud of ourselves for still being so limber.

Something weird happens when a bunch of people come together to perform any kind of ritual, whether it’s dancing, singing, painting one another’s bodies or just jumping around. The participants begin to feel an ineffable energy hovering above them, separate from their own selves yet fed by their hearts and minds – and so religious feeling is born, then transferred to a totem or person, a god or gods. Collective effervescence, Durkheim called it. Don’t you love that? All of us just bubbles caught up in the liquid flow of togetherness.

Yep, I’ve just used Durkheim to describe an aerobics class. (I had a lot of wine before starting this. My cottage on the farm is cold in winter, and alcohol is cheaper than electricity in Australia these days.)

In the gym, we are no doubt objects of ridicule to anybody looking through the partition. We are worshipping nothing more than ourselves, so it has no lasting meaning. The euphoria wears off fast. Afterwards we avoid eye contact, slink off to our cars. And yet going to the gym is one of the few ritualised experiences left in my life. That probably applies to many people. The good rituals are stacked towards true youth. It’s all downhill after the teary high school farewells, the university orientations, the sports team initiations, the endless graduation liturgies. For the lucky, the weddings, the christenings.

This might be why I take some trouble over hosting the oil tastings on the olive farm, though it is difficult to get the tourists to look up from their phones, attached like biolimbs. The farm has long been owned by a family who made most of their money harvesting pearls up north, so they insist on displaying pearl jewellery in the tasting room. Visitors do a double take, the old purity and danger confusion, like being sold seafood in the desert. Diamonds would be a better fit than pearls; at least they’ve come from deep in the earth. But this family do not have stakes in a diamond mine. And so, pearls beside olives.

To me this gives the oil-tasting ceremony a touch of the votive: the long strings of pearls look like rosary beads to be counted off in prayer. I slow things down, ask visitors to hold their palms over the plastic cups to heat the oil to room temperature before swirling it around in their mouths, and tell them that an oil’s pungency is measured according to how many times it makes you cough (a two-cough is medium-bodied, a three-cough more robust). I start with the grassier oils, move on to the infused ones – chilli, lemon – hand out half-moons of apple to cleanse the palate, end with a sip of verjuice. I like to hold up a ripe olive and say that each cell of the fruit contains a single droplet of oil.

Sometimes I think my four years of communal living at college set me up wrongly for adult life. I loved being part of a single listening organism in a hushed lecture hall, and feeling the body heat and breath of other students packed into the library in the middle of the night, and never having to eat a single meal on my own, not even breakfast. Nothing that comes afterwards ever fully reproduces that sense of belonging, of effortless community.

My present solitude is confusing. It makes me long for things I didn’t properly value when I had them. When I first met you, I thought the fact that you’d never married could only have been a choice, especially for a man of your means, your background. Now I see that sometimes we have no say in the matter. If the person you want to be with can never be yours, what else is there to do but learn to be alone?

That dismal interview at the television production company, the one you mentioned – it felt like a warning that my years at college were a fairytale, a dream from which I would soon have to wake. I had cycled across the river, past the football stadium and soccer fields and into a place of blockish, Soviet-looking buildings. It was as if I’d crossed a line. One last turn of my pedals and I was beyond the university’s magical reach.

The producer had rather generously suggested I show him a rough cut of my documentary about the wine farm. His caustic comment afterwards was that it was a film one had to commit to watching, that it didn’t have enough narrative hooks to draw people along. Was this a failure on my part? Or were narrative hooks exactly what I wanted to avoid? I got defensive, told myself I didn’t want the internship anyway.

Back in the hallowed safety of my room, I paged forward in my diary, picked a day at random in November, a date in my unimaginable post-college future, and wrote: Are you happy?

That young girl leaving questions for her future self was less self-assured than I was aware of at the time. She already had a premonition of what she would become, of what I am now. A person living out her life, no longer trying to do anything with it. A person who has accepted her insignificance.

Did you consciously model the Lushington’s ethos on our university’s rhetoric of individual excellence, of exceptionalism, etc.? It’s meant to guarantee success, yet I wonder if it in fact nudges people towards failure, by planting the idea that you can maximise yourself outside of relation to others. Not one of the wise elders whose paths I was privileged to cross in my years there ever said to me: No human being should have to go through life alone; do everything you can to find your person, the one who makes it bearable, the one who will love you back. Or everything else will be for naught anyway.

At the coffee shop in town there’s a blackboard where somebody writes pithy sayings. Animals that lay eggs don’t have bellybuttons. This logic did my head in. I’m not sure why.

And yesterday: Many animals cry. Only humans weep.

I have been dwelling further on my parents since I last wrote. My mother, in particular. I would not have mentioned her to you in the times we spent together. You must have picked up on this, Vita, that it was a no-go area even for you.

It is hard to find the right words, the ones that won’t reduce her to a tragic outlier. She died while trying to become the first woman to scale the Eiger. My father was so traumatized by her death that as a child I was forbidden to utter her name. I created a secret shrine to her memory, hiding the few items of hers I’d salvaged in a box under my bed. I used to kneel beside it at night. Worshipping her. She was the original idol for me.

I came to understand later why my father behaved as he did and I do not hold it against him. In my teens, I found news reports of the incident. One said my father, with his young son beside him, had watched helplessly through a window cut into the rock at the railway station on the Kleine Scheidegg as his wife froze on the rope on the face of the mountain, within sight but out of his reach. I must have repressed the memory (a small mercy).

Do not pity me. I have had other advantages, I am well aware. My family’s great wealth, the power that comes with being of the establishment. My father made sure I had the best of everything, told me the night before I left for college that it was my birthright to be on that campus. I thought I knew exactly what to expect. But for the first time in my life, money could not buy me what I wanted, which was to belong. I made no friends, had no purpose. Until I met Kitty.

I used to wonder what it felt like for you, arriving on campus sight unseen, having never set foot in America before. It meant you could experience the place as possibility, perhaps, rather than pressure?

It interested me how unburdened you seemed by where you were. I don’t mean you were naïve. Maybe I do.

Naïveté is a dying female art, I feel. In the half century since I established the Lushington Foundation, its reputation for jump-starting successful lives for women has grown. The young women who apply get younger every year—a trick of my own aging—and also more aggressively accomplished. Many of them, I have to admit, leave me cold. A breed of type-A automaton, claytronic creatures who know how to shape themselves into whatever is expected of them in any situation. They are nothing like Kitty was at twenty-one, like you were at twenty-one. There’s no curiosity in their eyes, just knowledge that can be transacted for a reward.

But among them there will always be a few whom I think of as keepers of the light. These women have something burning in them, a zealotry. It doesn’t matter exactly what they’re zealous about. As you know, we do not categorize our Fellows according to their fields of inquiry. The project is all, the personal mission.

The announcement of the new batch of Fellows is slipped under each recipient’s door early on the morning of March first, as it always was. I still insist on ceremonial paper, rather than the impersonal form of an email. Welcome to the Fellowship of Extraordinary Women on the envelope, and inside, their names on a dappled cream card, with the date, time, and venue for the banquet.

And I still do the maildrop myself, using the all-access card the alumni association has given me in recognition of the Lushington Foundation’s services to the community—the digital key to the castle. I like the quietness of the lobbies and entryways, and knowing that upon waking, these young women will rejoice.

For this year’s spring banquet I took a risk. I invited the first ever fellowship recipient, Rebecca Sogliano, to give the keynote address. She and her husband, Ettore, flew over from Italy for the occasion.

I had not seen them since the day before Kitty and Ettore were to be married, all those decades ago. Rebecca is now in her eighties, her youthful red-haired prettiness transformed by the lines on her face into dramatic gravitas, even beauty. Her mind is as sharp and clear as ever. She is one of the fortunate ones. As I leaned forward to kiss her cheek, she instead offered her hand. A note of caution.

For his part, Ettore, who had seemed ageless when I knew him in his mid-forties, is, in his nineties, the shell of a man. He seemed weighed down, his spine curled into a question mark. I could hardly believe he’d survived the plane trip over, let alone made it up the steps into the venue. I felt great satisfaction in being almost twice his height. My back is straight as a rod.

He shouldn’t have been at the banquet, of course, and not only because of his advanced age. Perhaps I hadn’t made the unspoken custom clear enough to Rebecca, that this is a night for women to come together in solidarity, leaving spouses and partners at home. It was her first banquet, after all. I only started the tradition several years after she was granted a fellowship, once I decided to award more than one a year, and she’d never attended any of the other gatherings.

A bizarre feeling came over me while I was listening to Rebecca’s speech about her life’s work, the study of skeletons in Pompeii and Herculaneum. I looked out from the podium at the rapt faces of the women before me in the audience, and instead of my usual pride in them, I had the sense of something fading.

This shift in my mood was not only due to the shadow cast by illness. I was rattled by the brief confrontation I’d had with Ettore, my old nemesis, just before his wife took the stage. He was still fueled by a desire for revenge that would never be satisfied, still wanting to accost me with the same delusional rant. I had thought enough time might have passed that we could meet, if not in friendship, then at least in mutual recognition of what we had lost. I was wrong.

I had brushed him off, but later felt growing anger at his comminations. It struck me with renewed force that I have no heir, nobody to speak for me when I am gone, no one to whom I can make good on a promise that they will inherit the earth. The Foundation will outlive me, of course, with its bountiful endowment, but within a few years of my passing nobody will remember I was its founder.

That was when I made up my mind to write you again, though it took a few months to decide exactly what to say. For while I was sitting up there, with Ettore’s accusations about Kitty going through my head, I found myself casting my thoughts back to my first meeting with you. To my uncertainty about what happened between us. Meditation of a kind.

You wouldn’t have known, but you were the last applicant the panel interviewed for that year’s intake. I was tired, ready to go home, when you walked into the room.

Like Kitty, you were tall and slim but your face—unlike hers, which was strikingly beautiful—was so very plain that it had almost the same effect on me as extreme loveliness. Your dark hair in an untidy bun, dark eyes. Pale, unblemished skin, no makeup. You were in generic college uniform: jeans, sweater, sneakers. You had made no effort with your appearance. You were not ugly, far from it. Plainness like yours has its own appeal, as you must know.

You began to speak, telling us about your studies, your desire to be a filmmaker, your fascination with the country of your birth and early upbringing. You sounded just like Kitty. The details and accent were different but you had the same gentle conviction, the same steady voice. I was more than willing to overlook the fact that sincerity is another device for getting what you want.

Afraid to break the spell, I let the others ask you questions, and kept my shaking hands clasped beneath the table. All I could think about was the last time I had seen Kitty alive.

And now her spirit had found its way back to me, through you.

To my own banquet I wore a long-sleeved velvet dress, borrowed from one of my roommates, that made me feel like a character in an Austen novel. For the first time in my life, I had my hair done at a salon, in a loose chignon. Another roommate put make-up on me, eyeshadow and bronzer from her apothecary in our shared bathroom cabinet. They stood around smiling radiantly at me as I gathered my handbag to go, happy to see me putting my best foot forwards for once.

They didn’t know there was a secret society out there of men like you. Men who congratulated themselves on seeing something in me that they believed nobody else could. My appearance unsettled them, or rather, my quiet confidence in spite of it. These men became fascinated by the disjuncture between my outward and inward worlds. They saw my face as a blankness onto which they could project whatever they wanted. They thought they alone had solved the enigma of it, that it was a disguise for something else, the more valuable for being hidden from view. They wanted to rip it off like a mask, make me show them who I really was. I used to let this happen, even encourage it.

The banquet that year was held in a meeting hall in the Masonic Grand Lodge, at the edge of the Common. There was still ice in the cracks of the cobbles outside the entrance, the sick joke of a Boston spring. In the hall, there were glass bowls filled with glass pebbles reflecting the light from the chandeliers. The dead masons must have been revolving in their graves, for there were women everywhere, hardly a man in sight. Women of all ages, shapes, sizes, colours. Women in evening gowns and cocktail dresses, shiny pantsuits and long skirts. Years and years worth of Fellows, all there to celebrate the newest members of the cult.

I spotted you across the room. It was the first time I’d seen you since the night I spent in your townhouse. You were walking towards the bar like a king with a hundred daughters, but you were searching for somebody – Cordelia, the one who has not salted the meat. You stopped in your tracks, excused yourself from the little retinue around you, and made your way to me.

Your face fell as you studied mine. Wordlessly you handed me your handkerchief.

In the bathroom, I looked at my reflection. I considered wiping off the make-up and giving you back your handkerchief folded in half, the inside of it all black and blue – the spoils of war. Instead I binned it and went back out in my garish, made-up glory.

I told my backstory over and over that evening, as did the other new Fellows. Women kept stopping by our table to congratulate us. At a certain point, we had to get up onstage and describe the project we planned to work on during the following year. We were the usual suspects. A world-class ski jumper; a theologian studying the positive health effects of prayer; a musician who had invented a new instrument rapidly gaining in popularity somewhere in India; a social entrepreneur who planned to deliver free childcare in Detroit. And me. The ethnographic filmmaker about to return to my beloved homeland of South Africa (it was easier to leave out the Australian part of my history entirely) and give voice to the grateful voiceless, make documentaries of such emotional and artistic power they would change the world!

Am I ruining this with my cynicism? On that night, I meant every earnest word I said, regardless of my misgivings about you.

It has not escaped my notice, I should say, that the women you’ve cared most deeply about in your life – your mother, Kitty – were long dead by my age. No wonder you see it as your duty to remind your Fellows that the decade of our twenties is more precious than we know, that those years should never be wasted. And yet I ended up wasting them.

You say you have been writing about Kitty, whose beauty you do not need to describe to me. Thanks to you, I still receive the Foundation gazette each year, announcing yet another new batch of extraordinary Fellows about to be let loose upon the world, with Kitty gazing out from the cover. Her face is burned into my retina. Those piercing blue eyes offset by her black hair.

Have you been waiting all this time for me to ask? Tell me about the Kitty Lushington you knew.

ALSO BY CERIDWEN DOVEY

Ceridwen Dovey

IN THE GARDEN OF THE FUGITIVES

HAMISH HAMILTON

Acknowledgements

Sources