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A Literary Affair

A Literary Affair

Author: By Jo Rushby
Date: 2025-05-28

I often get requests to look at the libraries of people who have died. It is with dread that I knock on the door. There are no handbooks on assuaging a person's grief. But then I start on my work. To catalogue and package. Just as often, I begin living through the covers, the life of another human being. What were their interests? Why did they collect books on shipwrecks or cricket? I will never know the interior of their lives. But occasionally one gets lucky. An inscription, a birthday wish, a date gives you a clue.

'To Margaret. Foreword into the Middle ages. Love R'. So subtle. I did not get it at first. Middle age is not a time to settle. To love with greater intensity, for time does not stand still. But still love is about what once was, as much as what it still can be.

I have been going through a collection of books. Margaret Daymond. Professor of English at UKZN. She was passionate about Bessie Head, Miriam Tlali, Lauretta Ngcobo as much as she was about Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot and Shakespeare.

I had met her before she moved to an old-age home (how horrible that sounds). Her love was Ronald Albino, an artist and psychologist. 37 years Ronald and Magaret shared a Life. How do I know this? For as I opened another book, so the pages of a love story began to take shape. My heart thumped as I thumbed through the words written in India ink, a sharp nibbed pen, a leaky ballpoint. Notes between them. The sheer depth of feeling made my head spin. And then this sense of oneness was brought together by friends who sent notes to them both.

And then I was travelling with them; Tunisia, Morocco, India, Nepal, Syria, Malta. Through the tumultuous 1980s, they found a way to beautifully show that 'love is not time's fool'...In 'Montaillou' is inscribed 'To Ronald from Margaret. To Margaret from Ronald. July 1980.' Folding into each other, separate, together, forever.

Ronald died in 2009. Magaret in 2021. In talking to her, in the memories shared, I knew that "love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, but bears it out to the edge of doom'.

Magaret's collection leaves the shelves at Ike's for other homes. Her name carefully inscribed. Somewhere just off the coast of Malta, her heart and Ronald's art are holding hands.