“Mercia Murray is a woman of fifty-two years who has been left. There is the ready-made condition of having been left and that, as we know, as she knows, involves a death of sorts. But that is a less-than-helpful metaphor. For all the emptiness, there is her broken heart and an unthinkable amount of tears. As a thinking woman, Mercia goes over every gesture, every word that was uttered at the time, in search perhaps of ambiguity, but reflection reveals no hidden meanings. She has been left, and that is the banal truth.”
Mercia's break-up with Craig is absolutely heart-breaking. Her heartbreak is analogous to emotional death. She feels emotionally hollow after Craig's exit from her life. Going through Craig's words which marked the break-up is a mode of regression that convinces her about the actuality of their break up. Tears indicate that she loved him; otherwise they would be non-existent. The term ‘left’ implies that the break-up was instigated by Craig and not Mercia.
“Not that he’d had much to do with women. With the help of God, Nicholas had found a wife whose price was above rubies, a good woman who produced two healthy children, but who died all too early at the age of thirty-nine. Yes, he had been tested by God, but that premature death had not encouraged desire for another marriage. He was perfectly capable of boiling himself, of raising his two children, and the good people of Kliprand helped out from time to time, for Meester was a good man.”
Nicholas respects his wife although she is dead. Putting her value 'above rubies' is an affirmation of her credibility as a spouse and a mother. Psychoanalytically, Nicholas’ resolution not to remarry means that he is certain that he would not find a woman who would match his deceased wife's attributes. He elects to live with her memories instead of searching for her in another wife.
"South Africans , having inherited the language from the Scots, speak of staying in a place when they mean living there. Which is to say that natives are not expected to move away from what is called home. Except, of course, in the case of the old apartheid policy for Africans, the natives who were given citizenship of new Homelands where they were to live. But they were required after all to work and therefore to stay in the white cities from which they had been ejected. Come stay with me and be my slave…”
Mercia does not regard Kliprand her home for she neither lives nor stays there. Deconstruction of the terms ‘live and stay’ depict Mercia’s difficulty in acknowledging Kliprand as her home. Alluding to the apartheid policy demonstrates how discrimination hindered the Africans from ‘being at home’ in their native country. For a place to be one’s home, the place should offer satisfaction and a feeling of belonging.
