The House Called Green Bays

by Jan Andersen

  He looked down at her very bleakly. “Don’t play the innocent with me, Miss Jamieson. I can see you are a very determined young woman. You’ll get what you want in the end.”

  She almost recoiled from him. “Please stop talking in riddles, Mr. Louw. You seem to be accusing me of some nameless crime. I’m my father’s daughter—that’s all that’s wrong with me.”

  He turned away from her and looked towards the jagged ridge of mountains. “You are also owner of Green Bays, Miss Jamieson,” he said calmly.

  She looked at him, stunned. Perhaps it might have been a reasonable thing to expect, but her father’s death and then the sight of the farm had been such a shock that she had not thought beyond it.

  Before she could say anything he added, “At least you are part owner.”

  “You mean I share with my mother?” she said quickly.

  “No, with your uncle. Your father’s brother. But I understand it’s many years since he was heard of, and no one knows whether he’s alive or dead. Certainly no one knows if he is in the country still.”

  Her Uncle George—strange how she could have forgotten all about him. Her memory was very dim—a big, brown-haired man who was always laughing, who visited them often when she was small, then suddenly stopped. He used to make her mother laugh too—that came in a sudden shaft of memory.

  “Then we, or the solicitors, must try to trace him,” she said, adding sharply, “It seems a callous trick you tried to play on me, Mr. Louw. What did you hope to gain by stopping me visiting my own farm?”

  “I would gain nothing, but I should have thought there was little here to interest a young girl like you.” She took a deep breath. “Well, you’re wrong—quite wrong. Now is there someone who could drive back to the station to pick up my luggage?”

  For the first time since they met she had the advantage. He stared at her, the dismay in his face almost comical. “You mean you’re going to stay here?”

  “Well, you’ve just told me it’s my home. Did you honestly expect me to go back to Johannesburg, get a room there and wait patiently for the next flight?”

  Keeping his voice in tight control, he evaded an answer.

  “I’ll go back to the station myself. Please go into the house and ask Noni the housekeeper for some fruit and salad. That’s what we usually have at lunch time.” And he strode off in the direction of the car.

  Tracy almost ran after him. She was feeling just as upset as he was, but for different reasons. That he should behave so utterly unreasonably bewildered her. Then she decided it was best to leave him. He had an hour and half to simmer down. Better still, she had an hour and a half alone in her father’s house, a chance to find out a little about him.

  Inside the house was cool and high-ceilinged. It smelt of fruit and polish. She made her way across the broad hall towards the high sound of singing, a soulful African tune with a melody that brought back her childhood.

  The woman scrubbing the already white deal table looked up with a shy smile. She was light-coloured and would have been beautiful except for a scar that left a searing mark across her cheek and neck.

  “Are you Noni?” Tracy asked hesitantly.

  She nodded, frowned anxiously, but suddenly her face lit up into an almost dazzling smile. “You ... you are the master’s daughter?”

  “That’s right, I’m Tracy Jamieson.”

  “I knew it, missie, you stand straight and upright just like he did, yet you look not really like him.” Tracy smiled. “No, I look more like my mother.” Suddenly the other woman’s eyes filled with tears. “Oh, master was a fine man, such a fine man. Then to leave us all like that.”

  Tracy swallowed. “I know ... and I never saw him.”

  “Oh, he talked about you, about the great city you lived in, and he told me that one day you would come to visit him and that I must look after you just like I looked after him.” She added hopefully, “You will not go again now that you have come?”

  If there had been any doubts in Tracy’s mind then this woman had quelled them. She was going to stay, at least for a little while, until she knew exactly how her father’s affairs were going to work out. By then she would be able to send for her mother.

  “No,” said Tracy, “I’m going to stay for a while.”

  “Then you will be wanting lunch, missie. I’ve got Mr. Louw’s all ready here ... you shall have that.” She paused. “Shall I bring it to you in the master’s little room where he used to sit?”

  Tracy nodded. “Yes, please, I should like that.”

  A tray was set before her in a little room that faced the orchards and the distant mountains. There was a plate of cold meats and a delicious salad, cheese and peaches and grapes. Noni waited to see her start, hovering happily round the door, then said, “Now I will leave you and bring you coffee in half an hour.” Tracy ate her lunch because she knew it would please Noni, but her whole attention was on the room filled with her father’s possessions. On the shabby little desk stood his pipe and leather tobacco pouch; the worn leather armchair was piled with farming papers. On the wall was a photograph of her mother and herself taken about ten years ago. A gun stood propped in the corner and on a hook hung a wide-brimmed bush hat—just as if he had come in from work and slung it there. There was also a shelf of books, mostly old, about the early diamond days of South Africa, or the newer ones about fruit farming methods. She made a mental reservation to read those, soon.

  It was some time before she opened the desk, feeling a natural reserve about rummaging through other people’s property. Then the thought struck her that Roger Louw had probably been troubled by no such feelings of guilt.

  But she found in fact that there was little to give the nature of her father’s character in recent years. His personal possessions seemed few and had only sentimental value. She found a few souvenirs and all her letters to him neatly tied in a bundle. There were also letters from her mother, but these she destroyed immediately without reading them.

  Most of the papers in the desk concerned the running of the farm. As far as she could discover her father had no life beyond Green Bays. If he had friends, there were no personal letters from them, nor was there any kind of address book. But she did find some correspondence from his solicitor in Johannesburg. She would telephone him this very afternoon and get a few things straight—mainly if the farm really was hers and exactly where Roger Louw stood.

  She sat for a moment, sad that her journey should have ended like this, but unable to cry for the father who had not been a part of her life for so long. Then Noni brought her coffee in, asking eagerly if she enjoyed the salad.

  The coffee was hot and strong, and she was about to carry it out on to the shaded terrace when on a big shelf piled with farming papers she caught sight of a leather-bound album—the family photograph album whose loss her mother had often mourned. She opened it and within a few seconds became absorbed with the past.

  There was a snap of her parents’ wedding day, her own christening and many of her early childhood. Then there was a whole group of her Uncle George, alone, with his brother Jack, and several of her mother. He was just as she had recalled him, huge and smiling.

  She turned the pages, coffee forgotten, as memories of the flat in Cape Town came back to her, the old Victorian house in Kimberley in her father’s mining days, and finally their last home just outside Johannesburg. The Jamieson history then came to an abrupt halt until a few pages later when there were some more recent photographs of herself that she had sent. As she flicked over the following page an envelope fell out. Curiously she picked it up. It was addressed to Miss Tracy Jamieson in her father’s handwriting.

  CHAPTER TWO

  IT must have been two or three minutes before she brought herself to slit open the envelope, and then the first thing that struck her was the date—just about a fortnight before he died. She studied the calendar on the wall. That meant that he had written this well after he should have received her letter telling him she was
coming. So he did reply after all, but for some reason the letter had never been posted.

  Yet, as she read on, it became clear that he had never received her letter.

  “My dear Tracy,

  How I wish you could hop on a plane and come and visit me, but I realise that for a busy young person like yourself living in a city and having many friends, that is not an easy thing to do. It is certainly not an easy thing to ask of a daughter one hardly knows. I have been under the weather lately and therefore growing nostalgic for old times. Above all things I wish that your Uncle George could see

  Green Bays as it is today and see that I have justified the faith he had in me. Both you and he will one day be joint owners, but since I have no knowledge of his whereabouts the burden of responsibility will probably fall on you. Or does it seem too much to ask a twenty-one-year-old girl to make a major decision about a property like this? However, two things make me certain that Green Bays will flourish—first I feel it in my bones that when you see the place you will love it just as much as I did, and second you will have Roger Louw to manage it for you. You two will like each other, of that I am certain. He is an able farmer and a brilliant young man. I wish I had known him for longer than I did. For my sake, Tracy, make friends with him and also try to find your uncle if I do not get an opportunity to do so. Tell him when you see him that the real past is forgotten...”

  After that the letter drifted a little, about Noni and about her own childhood, but every word in it spoke of his forthcoming death. But had she received it she could still have reached here in time and given him the pleasure of seeing her just once more. It angered her to think that this had happened.

  Outside a car door slammed and from her window she saw Roger Louw pull her cases from the boot and stride across the drive.

  For some unknown reason he made her feel vaguely uneasy as if she were a trespasser, not he. But surely he could not carry his resentment of her presence any further, especially when he knew that he was still to remain manager of the farm. Her father liked and admired him, she decided resolutely, that should be good enough for her.

  So she waited, determined to be friendly, for him to come back to the study and talk to her.

  Half an hour later she might still have believed him to be coming when from the window she caught sight of him walking down through the orchard, and anger spurted through her. So he was going to ignore her! She would just see about that.

  In a high-ceilinged room overlooking the back she found her suitcases and pulled out some cotton slacks and a cool shirt. She fumbled with the buckles of her sandals as she tried to jab them into the holes. For the first time she was feeling ridiculously near to tears, which were caused as much by Roger Louw’s deliberate unfriendliness as by her father’s letter. Her father was gone. Nothing could bring him back. But there was a future to be faced, something he wanted done, something for which she needed Roger Louw badly. Whatever it cost, she was going to see that Green Bays lived and flourished.

  She walked across the terrace and down into the paddock towards the neat rows of orange trees, where she found him studying a tree that looked smaller and less healthy than the others.

  He barely looked up as she approached him. “Did you find your cases?”

  “I did.” He must have sensed the controlled anger in her voice, for he actually stopped what he was doing and gave her his full attention. “I also found an unposted letter from my father.”

  That surprised him. “You mean an old letter?”

  “No, it would have been the last one he wrote to me. It was a pity I never received it, I could have caught the next plane here.”

  “I’m sorry about that.” But his sorrow was a perfunctory thing. “I imagine he must have been pretty ill when he wrote it.”

  She nodded. “He certainly knew he was going to die. But he set out his plans for Green Bays in general terms. He badly wanted you to stay on here as manager. His opinion of you was very ... glowing. Are you going to stay, Mr. Louw?”

  She waited, patient, this time, while he appeared to re-examine the trees. He touched the glossy leaves with surprising tenderness, then turned to her again.

  “I would be dishonest with you, Miss Jamieson, if I said I wanted to leave. I’ve grown very attached to Green Bays, but obviously things are rather different from what I expected...”

  “You mean I’ve come?” she said bluntly.

  “Put it that way if you like. Your father—who was a very knowledgeable man—and I developed a fine working relationship. It’s always difficult to work with—for—someone new.”

  She shook her head, frowning. “You make it sound as if I’ve come here to tell you what to do. How could I do that when I don’t know what to do myself? All I want is to see Green Bays continue as my father hoped. And I’d liked to live here for a while, and perhaps learn about fruit farming. From you, if you’ll teach me, Mr. Louw.” She threw it out like a challenge.

  He shrugged. “All right. I suppose you’ll have to see the solicitor first, but we’ll give it a run. It’s your property after all.”

  “And my uncle’s,” she corrected. So he was not climbing down completely, but she would have to be content with his grudging acceptance of her for the time being.

  She walked down the grove, savouring the cool touch of the leaves and the scent of the ripening fruit, trying to remember all that she had read about fruit growing. Well, perhaps it was better not to know too much. She asked a question to which she perfectly well knew the answer.

  “When will the fruit ripen?”

  “A couple of months.” He paused. “These lemons may be a bit longer.”

  She slipped straight back into anger. What did he take her for, an idiot child? Keeping her voice cool, she said, as sweetly as she could, “Funny, I could have sworn they were oranges, but of course you know best, Mr. Louw.” And she walked swiftly back to the house.

  It did not take more than a few minutes to get through to the solicitor, Mr. Rens. He had a strong Afrikaans accent, but sounded cautious and friendly and very surprised that she was in the country. He had written to her in England, explaining the position. When she suggested coming to Pretoria to see him he sounded relieved, adding, “It’s so difficult to deal with this kind of thing by letter. Apart from that I knew your father well and it would give me great pleasure to meet his daughter.”

  He gave her a warm invitation to come to his office the following afternoon, then return home to meet his wife and family and spend the night with them.

  Tracy spent the next morning’s journey to Pretoria reading her father’s books about fruit farming, trying to absorb as much as possible. At home her reading had all been vague and theoretical, but now she had seen the farm for herself, or at least a corner of it, everything seemed so much more real.

  When she had told Roger Louw that she could drive, he had shown her the farm’s second car, a small rather battered runabout which was used mostly for travelling back and fore to the station. She could leave it there overnight, he explained. And after that he had given the first friendly words of warning.

  “Don’t think because there aren’t many cars on the road that driving is a lot safer than in England. We South Africans are bitterly ashamed that our accident rate—for the numbers on the road—is the highest in the world. Beware of a long straight stretch. An elderly farmer is quite likely to come pottering off his property without even looking to see if anything’s coming. I don’t want to get rid of you that way.” And he gave her a sudden, quick grin which removed all the hard lines of his face.

  So the trip was easy and her heart much lighter as the train slid into Pretoria.

  There were a couple of hours before her appointment with Mr. Rens, so instead of giving in to the temptation to sit and wait in an air-conditioned cafe, she took a bus up to the famous Voortrekker Monument towering bleak and strong, high above the city. As she wandered round the huge inner hall whose wall was a continuous marble frieze depicting all
the famous incidents in Boer history, a tragic and impressive story, she found herself caught up in the particular spell that South Africa throws over people, the spell that had caught her father and about which he had written to her. The vastness of the country was quite terrifying and there was much of it still to be tamed, so a man could still call himself an explorer. She thought of Green Bays, her father’s little paradise where a man could count himself king, and once again grew a little nearer to understanding Roger Louw’s bitterness that he was merely a servant to that kingdom.

  Thoughtfully, she made her way back into the city, through avenues of misty purple jacaranda to the office of Mr. Rens.

  He was a big, fatherly South African with a booming laugh and he spoke with affection of his friend and client, Jack Jamieson.

  “Tell me something of my Uncle George,” Tracy asked.

  He shook his head. “I know very Me. I personally never met him. Your father had always felt deeply about him, but I always suspected there was some rift between them.”

  “Then you’ve no idea where he is?”

  “Or where to start looking for him, Miss Jamieson. Something tells me he is no longer in this country, but of course I could be quite wrong. I shall make a great effort through all the channels to find him, and in the meantime I’m afraid it’s up to you to keep Green Bays on its feet. Naturally half of any profits there are must be put aside for Mr. George Jamieson. But until recently I know your father ploughed everything back into the farm to keep it in tip-top condition. There won’t be any profits for some time yet.” He smiled benignly down at her. “This sounds an enormous task for one so young and inexperienced as yourself.”