Summertime by J. M. Coetzee

arrival on the farm behind the wheel of this selfsame truck, he with his beard and his unkempt hair and his owl-glasses, his father beside him like a mummy, stiff and embarrassed. She wishes she had taken a photograph. She wishes, too, she could talk to John about his hair-style. But the ice is not yet broken, intimate talk will have to wait.
     
'Anyway,' she says, 'I've been instructed to call you for tea, tea and melktert that Aunt Joy has baked.'
     
'I'll come in a minute,' he says.
     
They speak Afrikaans together. His Afrikaans is halting; she suspects her English is better than his Afrikaans, though, living in the back country, the platteland , she seldom has call to speak English. But they have spoken Afrikaans together since they were children; she is not about to humiliate him by offering to switch.
     
She blames the deterioration in his Afrikaans on the move he made to Cape Town, to 'English' schools and an 'English' university, and then to the world abroad, where not a word of Afrikaans is to be heard. In 'n minuut , he says: in a minute. It is the kind of solecism that Carol will latch onto at once and parody. ' In 'n minuut sal meneer sy tee kom geniet ,' Carol will say: in a minute his lordship will come and partake of tea. She must protect him from Carol, or at least beg Carol to have mercy on him for the space of these few days.
     
At table that evening she makes sure she is seated beside him. On the farm the evening meal is simply a hotchpotch of leftovers from the midday meal, the main meal of the day: cold mutton, warmed-up rice, and what passes here for salad: green beans with vinegar.
     
She notices that he passes on the meat platter without helping himself.
     
'Aren't you having mutton, John?' calls out Carol from the other end of the table in a tone of sweet concern.
     
'Not tonight, thanks,' John replies. ' Ek het my vanmiddag dik gevreet ': I stuffed myself like a pig this afternoon.
     
'So you are not a vegetarian. You didn't become a vegetarian while you were overseas.'
     
'Not a strict vegetarian. Dis nie 'n woord waarvan ek hou nie. As 'n mens verkies om nie so veel vleis te eet nie . . .' It is not a word he is fond of. If one chooses not to eat so much meat . . .
     
' Ja? ' says Carol.' As 'n mens so verkies, dan . . . ? ' If that is what you choose, then – what?
     
Everyone is by now staring at him. He has begun to blush. Clearly he has no idea how to deflect the benign curiosity of the gathering. And if he is paler and scrawnier than a good South African ought to be, might the explanation indeed be, not that he has tarried too long amid the snows of North America, but that he has too long been starved of good Karoo mutton? As 'n mens verkies . . . – what is he going to say next?
     
His blush has grown desperate. A grown man, yet he blushes like a girl! Time to intervene. She lays a reassuring hand on his arm.' Jy wil seker sê, John, ons het almal ons voorkeure ,' we all have our preferences.
     
' Ons voorkeure ,' he says; ' ons fiemies .' Our preferences; our silly little whims. He spears a green bean and pops it into his mouth.
     
It is December, and in December it does not get dark until well after nine. Even then – so pristinely clear is the air on the high plateau – the moon and stars are bright enough to light one's footsteps. So after supper she and he go for a walk, making a wide loop to avoid the cluster of cabins that house the farm-workers.
     
'Thank you for saving me,' he says.
     
'You know Carol,' she says. 'She has always had a sharp eye. A sharp eye and a sharp tongue. How is your father?'
     
'Depressed. As you must know, he and my mother did not have a happy marriage. Even so, after her death he went into a decline – moped, didn't know what to do with himself. Men of his generation were brought up helpless. If there isn't some woman on hand to cook and care for them, they simply fade away. If I hadn't offered my father a home he would have starved to