by Peter Rimmer
“What are we going to do?” asked Sebastian.
“Pray to God. Just pray to God.”
They had given him a writing table and chair and an oil lamp that spread the light over the pages. He was writing to his children. The journal was in Afrikaans, the new language that over two hundred years had grown out of Dutch. The rest of the room was comfortable and Tinus suspected the previous occupant had been a British officer. It was a room furnished for a male and everything was practical, nothing frivolous. The food was good and the mess steward apologetic when it was cold as the officers’ mess kitchen stood on the other side of the Castle. According to the steward, it would have been better in summer.
They had all come to see him including young Harry Brigandshaw, who he had carried so often on his shoulders through the bush. Captain Doyle had just visited and hinted Alison and the children would never be short of money, which was nice. The old English aristocrat, Sir Henry Manderville, had made his visit two days after seeing Gore-Bilham, and the children were right, the man was quite potty, delightfully potty, talking, very quietly, of digging a tunnel under the Castle wall. Alison had got over the loss of the baby and was back in control of her life. Mostly they had talked about the early days on the banks of the Zambezi River. She had refused to bring the children. Both of them knew he was going to hang which was why they talked about the old times. Life was indeed a mosaic and hanging by the neck from a rope was part of the pattern. He was forty-four and had had a good life and no one knew if the rest was going to be better than the past. Without the British rope who knew how long he was going to live? It had to end somewhere. The lawyer was a fool which somehow made it better.
Alone, day after day, he faced his own mortality and tried to think of God. If he was honest with himself, he could find nothing in a faith that would prove itself when he was dead. If there was a God, he was ready to face the jury inspecting his life. If there was no God, it would not matter. Religion, he rather thought, was for the living, not the dead. And so he had come to the journal.
The only thing Martinus Oosthuizen knew he would leave behind from his mortal life was his children. Maybe they were his only immortality and if so he wanted them to know as much about the people that had made them as possible: the seven generations of Oosthuizens in Africa which by some quirk of politics had turned him into an Englishman; the childhood he had spent in Graaff-Reinet helping to build the system of flood channels where water gurgled down the sides of the streets so that each garden could open a small floodgate to make the gardens green and beautiful. He could see them still as clear as thirty years ago. The years hunting alone in the bush. His regret at never seeing the Great Elephant, only the great pads in the dry dust. All he knew and understood he wrote down in the journal and the days went quickly towards his trial. Inside the locked and guarded room was the world he had seen.
“What a wonderful life,” he said out loud so many times. “How many people can be so lucky? If there isn’t something more after this mortal life, what was the point? There has to be a point.”
For hours, staring into nothing, he racked his brains, the trial far distant in his mind. If there was not a God, and all God promised, just what had been the point? Why had his life been so beautiful?
Then, lying back on the bed, he transported his mind back into the bush and ran again with the animals.
The Captain, Sir Archibald Brigandshaw, Baronet, sat alone at the end of the mahogany table in the dining room of Hastings Court. The polished surface shone from the energy of the servants. One place had been set on a table that seated thirty, the empty chairs and empty polished wood testimony to the greater potential. Sir Archibald, as befitted the first in what would become a line of hereditary knights of the realm, had dressed for dinner, the white starched front of his shirt studded with diamonds, glittering each on its own from the light of the chandeliers that hung over the table on chains thirty feet long, disappearing up into the dark of the vaulted ceiling. Up there, lost in the gloom, cherubs played the trumpets to the heavens, dulled by age and woodsmoke, and last seen with certainty by the human eye in the reign of Charles the First.
Long before, the dining room had been the Great Hall of the first Mandervilles. Still, and also long forgotten from lack of use, the small minstrel gallery looked down on the old man eating his supper alone, the only sound the clatter of silver on fine china. Somewhere in the vaulted wood of the ceiling were the lost notes of the minstrel lutes. Lower down, the walls draped with heavy tapestries to hide the moulds of age, the eyes of ancient Mandervilles looked with the fixed stares they had shown the long-dead painters. Some, the women mostly, faintly smiling, most staring at the certainty of their deaths. All but the very new had lost their names. One so high and dark had crashed to the old flagstones three nights before, sounding a long echo from the past and making The Captain jump from his chair with fright.
The soup went, followed by the fish, replaced by a small, plump fowl sitting at the centre of the plate. The Captain chewed portions of the bird, masticating the dry breast, his mouth as dry as the chicken’s bones. The swallowed food caught in his gullet and was followed by a gush of red wine from a crystal goblet, the Venetian blue of the glass delicate and beautiful in contrast to the gnarled hand of the old seaman missing its pinkie finger, frozen, lost long, long ago, turning the Horn.
After he had his knife and fork together, the fowl was taken away, the Venetian goblet was filled by the second servant, the first waiting for The Captain to stand, turn to the long sideboard and carve the sirloin of beef. No one spoke a word, and The Captain kept his seat, stroking what was left of the pinkie finger of his left hand. The servants waited, the only sound the soft purr of the methylated spirit lamp under the silver dish, covered by a silver dome, in which the beef awaited the carving-knife. Again the goblet was filled and still The Captain kept his seat. He was thinking. Suddenly and horribly, into the empty hall, he gave a laugh. The wine servant behind his chair took a pace back.
The Captain, deep in his memory, was running with full canvas towards the American port of Mobile, the coxswain holding the spokes of the ship’s wheel rock solid to catch the wind. They were both smiling, the hold full of English guns made in Sheffield, the Yankee navy nowhere to be seen, the cotton waiting on the wharf, the blood of youth pumping through their veins. He could still see Eddie Doyle grinning with excitement, all the crew willing the ship faster for port and safety and the bonus of their lives.
Again he laughed, remembering.
Slowly, far away in his mind, he rose to carve the roast beef. At sixty-five he should not have tottered. The servants, afraid of the old man’s backhander, had turned away. With a look of bewildered surprise, The Captain fell down on the stone floor and died as the methylated spirit gave out and the faint sound of hissing stopped.
In the end, the butler had to bury him.
The pain had gone from the hip to the right shoulder where the bullet had torn through the ligaments and the laudanum, given to Sebastian by the male nurse, had just begun to float his mind out of his body. Somewhere in the picture he saw his mother and smiled, the primal instinct from birth sending the feeling of safety. When his mother spoke he knew he was hallucinating on the opium.
“You look absolutely awful,” said Tilda Brigandshaw, looking down on her son. “They don’t look after you. Anyway, it’s good you’re alive as it would have been a lot of bother coming all this way and finding you dead. People always exaggerate. Even when people are meant to be dying. How many times have I heard in my life someone say, ‘look at him, ’e’s half dead.’ Now, sit up, talk to your mother and stop grinning like a Cheshire cat. Daft, I say. Never saw a cat in Cheshire grin once in my life and I grew up in Cheshire. Same as your father and now ’e’s dead so they say but I’ll believe that proper when I get back home. The office here says he died of a heart attack while he was having ’is supper. Anyway, you’re alive which is something. And where’s Emily? And all these childre
n I’ve heard rumours about when I’ve only seen Harry?”
“He’s sedated,” said the male nurse who had walked into the ward to stop the woman talking so loud. “The opium makes them conscious of their surroundings but a strong dose makes it difficult for them to join in, Lady Brigandshaw.”
“Is he dying?”
“Without any new infection, there will just be a lot of pain while the wounds heal. The shoulder where the bullet shattered the ligaments is the problem. My job is to keep the wound clean and even if I have to say so myself, I’m good at my job. Your son will recover fully. A famous white hunter, I’m sure he’s had far worse than this in his life many times.”
“No,” said Sebastian, trying to bring his mind back into the body. “Is that really you, Mother?”
“You’ll be quite all right now your mother’s here.”
“I’m glad.” Without being able to control them, his eyelids closed and Sebastian went to sleep.
“You can sit with him as long as you like. Mothers have a healing power with their children even when they are grown men with children of their own. Talk gently. There are other patients in the ward. He’ll wake in an hour or so and be able to talk.”
Eddie Doyle had gone to the Tulbagh Tavern more out of boredom than a need to get drunk. After a week he was certain there was nothing more he could do to save Tinus but, he did not want to go back to England until after the trial that was scheduled for the following Wednesday. It would be all over by the end of next week, and time hung heavy on a man alone with no work to do to cover over his loneliness.
The Tulbagh Tavern was inside an old stone building with a clock tower on top; the windows were small to keep out the storms that raged around the Cape in the winter; in the summer, they sat outside on wooden benches and watched the seals playing in the water between the ships. The winter fire at the base of the big chimney was cheerful and Eddie Doyle drank his beer for something better to do. The tavern was full and the smoke from many pipes blued the air. He had found a small table at the back and sat alone, the barmaid vigilant enough to bring him a second beer when he had slowly finished the first. No one had taken any notice of the old seaman from the time he had come into the bar. His ship that had brought him as a passenger from London had unloaded and gone on up the east coast to pick up a cargo of cloves at Zanzibar.
The second and third drink came as he enjoyed the fire and his memories. Only intermittently did the thought of Tinus Oosthuizen hanging by his broken neck bring him back to the present. People, mostly from the ships in the harbour, came and went. Mingling with the seamen were whores of every age, shape and colour but they left the old man alone in the corner.
When he was thinking of the past, the table next to him could shout but he did not hear. Then suddenly he was jerked back to reality becoming aware that two men were familiar and one of them was getting up and coming to his table.
“Captain Tucker of the Mathilda, Captain Doyle. A long time. Mind if I sit down? Just ’cause Colonial Shipping fight tooth and nail for cargo with African Shipping, don’t mean the captains can’t talk. Fact is, there’s somethin’ you should know.”
“Please. Sit down. I am here on non-shipping business.”
“Fact is, Captain Doyle, The Captain’s dead. You two built the company, so to speak. Thought you might like to know. I won’t sit down. Just thought you ought to know like I said. Many times I ’eard about that trip round the Horn and never once did he not mention your name.”
“Dead, you say?”
“Yes, he’s dead. Company office ’ad a wire. Heart attack.”
When Captain Tucker turned his back small tears began to flow freely down the old, weathered face.
Shortly after the twins, Klara and Griet turned seven, a new strain of flu rampaged through their concentration camp killing a quarter of the young children and old people. For the first time, they recognised fear in the eyes of their mother. The old woman in the corner of hut twenty-two had withdrawn so far into herself she might have been dead and would have died without being spoon-fed by Sarie Mostert. Sarie, never afraid for herself, worried about everyone else. When the flu struck with terrible repetition, she forbade anyone in hut twenty-two to leave the small shack and stopped the British coming through the door. All the food and water she collected herself. Every time the night-bucket was used she took it out and brought it back washed clean, day and night. The fight to make everyone in hut twenty-two survive had become personal. From her experience in the slums of Pretoria, the dog-lady knew quite well that once a disease crept into the sanctuary of their hut, all the weak and all the children would probably die.
Only when the situation was out of control did the British face the problem, and with the doctors and nurses came the press followed by an international howl of disgust.
The highveld camp was one of the smallest. The first to get sick had been a British soldier who caught a bad cold on the boat out from England. He had gone about his duties coughing. The germ he had picked up in England was common enough in the back streets of Manchester but had never before been seen in Africa. What was a nuisance for Private Higgenbottom was deadly for the Boers.
By the time Billy Clifford arrived to continue his series on the concentration camps, eighty-three children and seven grown-ups had been buried in the earth next to the camp. Billy wrote back for the Irish Times, that ‘the problem of life was life itself. That man in war, in his quest for dominance, created misery for everyone, including children.’ Later, Billy’s article went on: ‘From the first recorded history man has fought wars and what we so blithely call our civilisation is a sham. The fault lies in the very nature of man, the meaning of his survival, the evolution of the strong over the weak. It is to ourselves, each one of us, we must turn to give the blame, as in each of us, through our ancestry, given the right call, the right reward, women pushing forward men, men singing with excitement, is the seed of war. To blame others is only the second nature of man.’
More out of wild hope than expectation (it had been Billy Clifford’s habit to check the list of Boers in the camps for one Sarie Mostert) he asked for the list of prisoners. When the name sprang from the page in the British guardroom, his blood went cold and his hands began to shake.
“Is this person still alive?” He pointed at the name.
“She’ll be alive,” said the duty corporal. “She’s the dog-lady. Shuts everyone in the hut. Only clean hut, I reckon. Lots of the others kind of give up, you see. Not nice being locked up. That Sarie made us teach her English. Before the flu, we were teaching her twins English. She told us back ’ome in the slums of Pretoria they called her the dog-lady. Lots of dogs… You think this war’ll be over soon? Can’t stand the flies. And I don’t like this place neither. Poor buggers all dying like that. Not right is it?… What you want with Sarie?”
“We were separated. Seven, nearly eight years ago.”
“Come on, mate! You speak this Afrikaans then?”
“Not really.”
“How did you talk?”
“We were in love. It didn’t matter. How old are the twins?”
“That’s easy. It was their seventh birthday just before the flu.”
“If I marry her, can I take her out of the camp?”
“Ask the colonel. You being British don’t seem a problem. What about her kids?”
“I rather think they are mine.”
The door opened and the voice he recognised so well spoke through the crack between the jamb and the door. He could just see the tip of a pink nose.
“You no come in,” she said in English. “I come out, see.”
She came out backwards to close the door and Billy caught a glance of two small people catching a glimpse of the outside world. One of the children stuck her tongue out before the door slammed shut and Sarie turned round. First, she saw the corporal from the guardroom and was about to say something when she took in the man standing next to the soldier, squeaked and jumped clean off the g
round into his arms, knocking Billy flat on his back where they lay hugging each other, tears mingling with tears.
When they disentangled to look at each other, the corporal had left them and gone back to the guardroom.
Five minutes later, Billy Clifford was introduced to his children.
Nothing, as Billy was to find in the coming weeks and months was as simple as it seemed. The colonel, a dried-up bachelor of sixty, had not a romantic bone in his body. But even had he agreed, Billy knew it would have made no difference. Not until the war was over, and the Boer women and children were allowed to go back to what was left of their homes, would Sarie Mostert leave the old woman who sat in the corner of the hut with her eyes permanently shut.
“If I don’t spoonfeed her she dies. Not good way to start happy, see. She, like children, my responsible. I stay for war. Then go Ireland. Long time I look after that old lady, I want her go home to her sons. I go now, it bad rest of time for us. When old lady back at Majuba farm we make family… How you like my English? Not bad, hey?”