Harry was dusting off a couple of bottles of his precious Meerlust Rubicon. This choice was a kind of vinic semaphore – it was his way of saying how special this meal was going to be. Every year an old friend in Johannesburg, Marney van Rensburg, would send a case of Rubicon. It was a private joke. Back in the old days, when Harry worked for Marney on the Rand Daily Mail’s special investigations team, a particularly incisive piece of journalism was always celebrated with a bottle of the Meerlust vineyard’s finest. Never mind that it cost a hefty portion of their joint pay-packets – though mostly they found a way of hiding it in their expense claims.
As he brought the first glass to his lips the older man would always lean back in his chair and say, ‘One day, when the revolution comes, Harry, we’ll all be drinking this stuff. But till that day – we mustn’t let the bastards have it all to themselves. Drink up, man.’
The memory always brought a smile to Harry’s lips.
He emerged from the cellar, saw Lindi, and put his arm around her. They stood in silence together, staring at the collection of memories on the wall. He glanced from a childhood photo of Lindi to the woman beside him now. A flick of the eye but a journey across time. Not for the first time he marvelled at the change. When had it happened? He’d seen it all and yet he’d seen nothing. It occurred to him that the change was less to do with individual features and more to do with the way they had accommodated each other. He could remember how, as a child, her ears, her lips, her eyes had all seemed to compete with each other. The ears stood out too much, the lips were too full and the eyes too big. Each seemed to make a claim to be the defining feature. He thought back to the way Lindi used to fold her lips inwards in a self-conscious attempt to hide them. And how those big, staring eyes made her look as if she were in a constant state of shock. Now her features had settled into happy coexistence in a face that had once been round but now resembled a heart. Those large green eyes – ‘At least one of my genes survived,’ Helen would say – were no longer out of proportion; instead they lit her face. And her ears, well, you couldn’t even see them now, buried under a tumbling wave of thick brown hair.
He could never look at her without being overcome with a powerful protective urge. There was something vulnerable about her. In truth, he’d always known what it was. Lindi needed protecting from herself, her self-imposed need to be conscientious, to be productive.