Keepers of the House

by JH Fletcher

  The pale eyes glared; Riordan was half-choking but not ready to back off. ‘It’s the truth.’

  ‘You say that to me? After all we’ve been through together?’

  Deneys dropped him like a sack of offal and turned away.

  Behind him, Riordan said, ‘For some of us, the war will never be over.’ He sneered. ‘Fat Edward … I’d as soon swear allegiance to a pig. The oath means nothing, I tell you. Nothing.’

  ‘It means something to me.’

  Deneys did not turn and presently he heard the clip-clop of hooves as Dominic Riordan rode away.

  TEN

  Two days later the Wolmarans were having tea in the drawing room. It had been raining heavily again; now, at four o’clock in the afternoon, it was already dark and the servants were lighting the lamps.

  Christiaan and Sara sat close to the big fireplace, their bodies soaking up the heat. Deneys and Elizabeth had joined them for tea, as they did most afternoons, but sitting further from the fire. Deneys had taken over the running of the farm since he had come back from the war and this ritual of the tea was often inconvenient, but it meant so much to his parents that he kept to it whenever he could.

  A housemaid appeared in the doorway. ‘Madam …’

  On the vine terraces Deneys might be in charge, but in the house Sara was still queen and not about to let anyone forget it. She looked through her spectacles at the maid’s uncertainty. The girl hadn’t been with them long and was still not fully trained.

  ‘What is it, Hester?’

  ‘There is a madam to see you …’

  ‘What is her name?’

  The girl shook her head in confusion.

  Deneys stood up. ‘I’ll see to it.’

  By the front door, a woman like a bundle of sticks in a shabby black dress. A small cloth bag lay in a puddle of water at her feet. Everything about her — clothes, bag, the white hair, long and untended, that lay like rats’ tails about her face — was soaked by the rain that Deneys could hear drumming on the thatch.

  He walked forward. ‘Can I help you?’

  A hand, skeleton-thin, groped towards him. ‘Deneys …?’

  He stared, eyes wide. ‘My God!’

  Two strides. He folded her in his arms. She leant against him, sobbing. She was cold, so cold, and inside the wet clothes there seemed nothing to her at all.

  Anneliese van der Merwe had come home to Oudekraal in the rain.

  No wonder he had not recognised her; her appearance shocked them all. Her face was drawn and haggard, all grey skin and sunken temples. She was bone thin and her hair, which had been dark and lustrous, with chestnut fire in it, was white. Feverish eyes, too large for the face, burned in shadowed sockets.

  My sister, Deneys thought. Two years older than I am. She looks older than my mother.

  She told them she had caught a train to Worcester and thence to Stellenbosch.

  ‘How did you get here from Stellenbosch?’ Deneys asked.

  Her grin was ghastly. ‘I walked.’

  Fifteen miles through the mountains in the pouring rain.

  Overjoyed though they were to see her, there was awkwardness. She had been away so long and endured so many terrible experiences that she had become a stranger. Their minds were full of the concentration camp, of her dead husband and children, but she didn’t mention them and so, nervous of her and her grief, neither did they. Instead they prattled on about homely things: the problems of the house, the servants, the farm, prices, the latest fashions in Cape Town, the weather.

  They offered her food but she shook her head, saying she could eat nothing. She sat in their midst, perched on the edge of her chair, shoulders tense beneath the stained blouse. And all the time the huge eyes, too bright in the wasted face, prowled the corners of the room, the shadows, watching and watching.

  Until at last, none too soon, Elizabeth took her away in search of a bath and bed in the room she had not seen these many years. Later, back in the living room, Elizabeth reported that Anneliese was asleep.

  ‘Did she say anything?’

  A shake of the head. ‘Not a word.’

  Next day Deneys was in the office he had built at one end of the wine cellar, checking the paperwork for a shipment of wine that was scheduled to leave that afternoon.

  The war had spawned a gigantic bureaucracy whose sole purpose seemed to be to create work by increasing tenfold the pieces of paper that had to be filled in and sent to Cape Town. These forms covered every aspect of the farm’s existence. Returns of this. Records of that. Acres under which cultivars. Numbers of workers, condition of housing, medical records … Inspectors, too, who descended without notice to check who knew what. No end to it.

  ‘Tell them to go to hell,’ Christiaan growled, but Deneys never forgot that the authorities knew he had fought against them. He had taken the Peace Oath and meant every word of it, but could not be sure that they believed him. He hoped that dutifully completing their idiot forms might be one way to convince them of his sincerity. Whatever the Dominic Riordans of the world might think, Deneys Wolmarans wanted no trouble.

  The office’s stone-flagged floor was bare. There was a plain wooden desk, a couple of upright chairs, shelves crammed with papers. A plan of the farm hung on one wall, showing the areas under cultivation and the types of grape produced in each. There were timetables for spraying and weeding, and over everything hung the sour thin smell of the wine.

  ‘This is new.’

  Anneliese stood in the doorway.

  ‘I had it put in. There’s too much paperwork to keep everything up at the house.’

  ‘Keeping our masters happy,’ she said.

  She moved restlessly, picking up this, inspecting that. Eventually she turned and smiled without humour, eyes as hectic as ever in the wasted face.

  ‘Well …’

  He couldn’t bear the way they were all ignoring the one thing that above all others they had in their minds. He went to her and took her hands in his, feeling her fingers like sticks between his own.

  ‘I’m so sorry …’

  Her eyes scoured his face. ‘Sorry?’

  He gestured helplessly. ‘About everything.’

  She freed her hands and took a couple of steps away from the desk, the heels of her boots going click clack on the stone flags. Restless fingers picked at pieces of paper, put them back. ‘Everyone’s sorry.’ She moved again. Click clack. In the lamplight, her shadow reared against the whitewashed wall. ‘You’re sorry.’ Click clack. ‘Father and mother are sorry, even though they can’t bring themselves to say so.’ Click clack. ‘Even the damned English are sorry.’ She turned to him, mouth tight, eyes violent. ‘You know what happened at the end, before they let us out? This senior officer addressed us. There were about six hundred of us by then, where before there’d been over a thousand. They’d killed the rest. And this man with a moustache like a paintbrush standing up and telling us he was sorry. He said these things happen in war and we must all put it behind us. Start again, he said. From now on we shall be friends.’ The dark eyes flamed. ‘Look at me,’ Anneliese said. ‘I’m twenty-eight years old and I look sixty. My husband is dead. My children are dead. They burnt my home. Everything I care about is gone. I have no life in front of me, nothing at all. And that man says he’s sorry.’ Her dry eyes glittered in the lamplight. ‘Well, I’m sorry, too. But it won’t bring them back. Nothing on God’s earth will do that.’

  Deneys watched her helplessly, his heart bleeding as hers was bleeding. But could do nothing.

  ‘I’ll tell you something,’ Anneliese said, lips ferocious. ‘Something this war has taught us. Never again shall we permit anyone to stand over us. Never! Anyone tries, we shall cut them down. There will be no more dead children in our story.’

  Deneys watched his sister, the lamp casting flickering shadows across her face. Darkness on darkness, he thought.

  ‘What will you do?’

  ‘Stay here, I suppose. If you permit,’ she challeng
ed him.

  Patience, he told himself. ‘This is your home. Where else would you go?’

  She lifted her hands, dropped them helplessly at her side. ‘I went back to Uitkyk. There was nothing there.’ Now the blackness shadowed voice as well as face. ‘Natives live there now. You people,’ she accused him, as though everything that had happened had been his fault, ‘you don’t know what it was like.’

  He was indignant. ‘I was in the war, first to last. No one ever saw me with my hands in the air.’

  ‘The war …’

  She dismissed it.

  He was annoyed. ‘We lost a lot of men, too.’

  She smiled unpleasantly, letting her eyes trail around the sturdy cellar, the racked bottles of wine. ‘You seem to have done all right. No fires here.’

  ‘I’m sorry if it disappoints you.’ Stiff with sarcasm.

  She gave nothing. ‘You men went off to the war like it was a game. No woman wanted it. We got it, though. And it was our children who died.’

  ‘Not just your children. Stoffel and Amalie were Dirk’s children, too. And he also died.’

  ‘He wanted to go.’ As though that cancelled all the later suffering. ‘We didn’t.’

  Who had suffered most — a futile argument.

  ‘They even took their bodies from me,’ Anneliese said.

  Deneys frowned. ‘How?’

  ‘I don’t know where Dirk is buried. I never saw him dead. They could have lied to me. Maybe he never died at all. Maybe he just ran away.’

  ‘Why should he do that?’

  ‘To get away from me?’ She laughed, something like a chuckle bubbling wildly beneath the laugh. ‘Could you blame him?’

  His heart turned, choking in his throat. ‘God, Anneliese —’

  ‘I saw the children die, though. Oh yes. I closed their eyes.’She rounded on him. ‘You are so proud you fought in the war. What do you know about that?’

  There was nothing he could say. He eyed her helplessly, in silence.

  ‘They put them in one grave. All. There are hundreds there.’ She stood in a shadowed corner of the room, the lamplight just touching the wet of her eyes and mouth. ‘Tell me, soldier,’ she whispered from the dark corner. ‘You who fought so bravely in the war. Tell me what I have to do to bring my children back to Oudekraal?’ She raised her voice. ‘Dig them up? Is that what I do? Dig them up and work out which ones are mine?’

  He had no words. He stood and opened his arms. She hesitated, swaying, then the black hatred faded from her face and she ran to him. He held her close. Then, at last, she wept.

  ‘Even dead they have taken them from me,’ she whispered. ‘Even dead.’

  Pain shuddered in her voice. She clung to him, tears streaming down her face. Then, suddenly, still clasped in his arms, she sighed and was at once asleep, her head on his shoulder.

  Gently, Deneys laid her down on the scrap of carpet before his desk. He placed his woollen coat over her. She did not stir but lay like one dead, the breath sighing in her breast.

  He looked down at her. What she had said was true. He had fought all through the war. He had known death and suffering; through the long years had inflicted both. He had listened to the woman of Lydenburg, seen the stark and blackened skeletons of the torched farms. He had known nothing.

  He went and sat again at his desk. He stared at the papers arranged so neatly on its surface, at the darkness puddling the corners of the cellar. His sister’s chuckling laughter filled his ears.

  Later that evening, after Anneliese had gone like one drugged to her bed, his mother, drawn with worry, found him.

  ‘How is she?’

  He shook his head. ‘I wonder if she will ever be whole again.’

  Daggers in his mother’s eyes. ‘She is tired, that is all! With rest, with love, she will recover.’

  ‘I hope so. Perhaps.’

  He did not say what he was thinking: that from some forms of tiredness no recovery is possible. Yet his mother seemed to read the thought through his silence.

  ‘Those damned people …’ It was the first time he had ever known her to swear. She stared into the guttering candle flame and he saw the light dancing red and golden in her eyes. ‘They had half a million men. Guns, too. They could have taken the Republics a dozen times, but that was too easy. They had to kill the women and children too.’

  Groping, Deneys sought words of consolation. ‘It was the war.’

  ‘War?’ Sara laughed without smiling, eyes on the flame. ‘They have taken everything from her. Her husband, her home, her children. All she has left is her hate. Well, I will join her in that, I believe.’

  His mother, who had never hated a soul in her life.

  ‘Kitchener and Milner are to blame,’ Deneys said. ‘They will burn in hell for it. God will see to that.’

  ‘If there is a hell,’ Sara said, ‘Apart from here. If there is a God.’ She clenched her fists and raised them in the wine-scented air. ‘My own grandchildren. Whom I shall never see. I curse the English for what they have done to this family, this land. I curse them from my heart.’

  ‘It is a strange business,’ Pieter said.

  There had been other journals that Deneys had written during the years after the war. Anna had not been aware of their existence but Pieter had produced them, a conjurer opening the magic box of history or at least one man’s version of it. He had read sections aloud, articulating each word with care, his sense of language and of the events that the journal described combining to bring the past shining into the present.

  ‘These books have lain here all my life. I read them long ago but for years I have never looked at them. It never occurred to me there was any need. I took it for granted that everything in them was set fast in my brain. In my heart, too, perhaps. Yet talking about it with you now, reading bits and pieces, has made me realise how much I had forgotten. Not the facts — they are nothing — but the feelings behind the facts, the knowledge that the story of Christiaan and Deneys and Anneliese, everything that happened to them, forms a tapestry of my family’s life that leads right here. To me.’ His clenched fist smote himself softly on the chest and his face was full of wonder. ‘It reminds me of what I am, a part of everything that has gone before.’

  ‘Not only that,’ Anna said. ‘Those things are part of you, as well.’

  ‘That is true. I have to thank you,’ he said. ‘If you had not come here with all your questions, I might have died not knowing how much of myself I had forgotten.’

  ‘Why did he write in English?’ Anna wondered.

  ‘I asked him that, once. He said because English was the language of the future. It may have been partly that, but he loved the English language for its own sake, I think. There are shelves of books in his study, all of them well used, most of them in English. To speak English in those days was not an easy thing, even here in the Cape. The war was over but for some people, and Anneliese was one of them, it would never be over. To this day there are those, particularly in the north, who will not speak English if they can avoid it.’ He sighed. ‘I think sometimes that there are people who will go on waging war in their hearts forever. Because they have forgotten or maybe never knew there is an alternative.’

  ‘The first day I came here,’ Anna said, ‘I wondered whether you might be one of them.’

  He laughed. ‘Lucky for you I’m not.’

  She shared the laugh. ‘I can look after myself.’

  ‘Good. I am glad to hear you say it. This is a land where one needs to be able to do that.’

  Inside the house the phone rang. Pieter went to answer it, in a minute returned. ‘For you …’

  She walked, frowning, to the phone. Picked it up. ‘Hullo?’

  Mark’s voice, very formal, mindful of ears that might be listening. ‘I’ve heard from our friend. He wants to see you.’

  Her heart bumped. ‘When?’

  ‘Tonight.’

  ‘I’ll come straightaway.’

  She walked
back outside. Pieter was sitting in his chair, one of Deneys’s journals in his hand. He was not reading but looking up past the rows of vines at the mountains, and she thought he was once again tying his present to his past, renewing the unity of everything that had happened in this place.

  He turned his eyes towards her as she walked along the stoep to join him.

  ‘Something’s come up. I have to go, I’m afraid.’

  ‘You will come again?’

  ‘Tomorrow. If you’ll have me.’

  The blue eyes watched her keenly. ‘Perhaps you, too, are getting something out of our talks,’ he suggested.

  She was, more than she would have thought possible, but was shy of admitting it. ‘It’s just that I’m running out of time. I have to be back in Australia very soon.’

  From his expression she knew he believed there was more to it than that. ‘Oudekraal has become part of your life,’ he said.

  Driving back to the city, Anna wondered if that were true. Coming here had certainly brought her a new sense of unity, an extra dimension that until now she had not even realised she was missing, but whether it would survive her return to Australia was another matter.

  Time enough to find that out, later. In the meantime, there was Shongwe.

  They met the contact shortly after dark, as arranged. They had been warned the security arrangements would be elaborate and so they were.

  They were searched, not roughly but thoroughly.

  ‘What are they looking for?’

  ‘Guns. Radio transmitters. Who knows?’

  They switched cars. A black man at the wheel, another between them, and they drove through the darkness. No one spoke. Another car joined them as they entered the township. The headlights kindled ghostly images: broken-down cars, iron fences, a succession of box-like dwellings.

  At length they stopped outside one of the houses. The car door opened. A black face looked in at them.

  ‘Please get out of the car.’

  Anna stepped out into the alien night. A second later Mark joined her and they were escorted swiftly up a narrow concrete path and into the house.