Disgrace

A man who shares Lucy’s land, works in her garden, and helps with her kennel business by taking care of the dogs. Petrus—whose wife is pregnant—is interested in expanding his land, and while David stays with Lucy, he notices Petrus’s gradual detachment from duties on Lucy’s farm. Indeed, throughout the novel, Petrus becomes more and more interested in his own property, eventually putting up a fence between his house and Lucy’s, laying pipes in the ground, and beginning to build a new home. What David and Lucy don’t know at first is that Petrus is related to—or at least friends with—Pollux, one of the three men who rape Lucy and beat David. When they discover this, David confronts Petrus, telling him that he plans to report Pollux to the police, but Petrus tells him not to do this, insisting that the trouble is in the past. Shortly thereafter, Pollux comes to live with Petrus, putting him in close contact to Lucy. Because of these uncomfortable conditions, David tries to convince Petrus to watch over Lucy’s farm, saying that he wants to take his daughter away for a little while so that she can take a little vacation. However, Petrus refuses to do this because he doesn’t want to take on more labor, since he’s in the process of expanding his own assets. As something of a consolation, though, he offers to marry Lucy, though he already has two wives. This, he upholds, would at the very least keep Lucy safe, since nobody in the area would dare rob or rape her again if she were one of Petrus’s wives. Unsurprisingly, David finds this offer absurd, but Lucy doesn’t write it off, and though she doesn’t make a decision before the end of the novel, it seems likely that she will accept Petrus’s offer.