Kitchen Boy

by Jenny Hobbs

  But to continue being a winner required effort and sometimes short cuts. Shirley knows his wartime secret and has witnessed minor ethical lapses; she wonders now what she’s missed. During the last dreadful weeks sitting by his bedside watching him gasp for air, jealous thoughts snaked through her distress. He was always so popular in public, but cagey about what he called his own business. What hadn’t he told her? Were there other secrets? Other women? It was now too late to ask. As his life slipped away, she was only too well aware of what she hadn’t told him.

  From the pew behind her, Theodora’s resonant alto voice sings, ‘Let him in constancy follow the Master –’

  Barbara had said the day before the service, ‘Has anyone notified Theodora? She’ll expect to be there.’

  ‘I did, as soon as we knew the date.’ Lin was the one who compiled lists and phoned people to let them know that several front pews would be reserved for family and friends. There are few old colleagues and business acquaintances left: generous entertainment allowances have taken their toll on corporate hearts and livers.

  ‘Did she say she’d come?’

  ‘Of course. To pay her lasting respects, she told me.’

  ‘It’s not necessary,’ Shirley insisted. ‘She visited a few months ago when she heard Dad was so ill. Brought him madumbes and morogo from her garden, saying they’d make his blood strong. They talked for ages.’

  The former maid had settled into the armchair by John’s bed like all the other visitors, then put out her hand and stroked his arm as she had done when the children were sick. She wouldn’t have dared when she was a servant in a floral uniform, white doek and apron. That day she’d worn a lace blouse under a mauve two-piece that Shirley was sure she had seen in Stuttafords. With her beautiful leather shoes and matching handbag, Theodora looked as stylish as she had on her days off when she wore clothes from the OK Bazaars.

  Shirley has never been stylish. She wears drip-dry Delswa, priding herself on not spending too much money. John always called her a good-looking woman, and she believed she was a natural beauty who didn’t need props such as smart clothes and makeup and hairdos. Now she feels like a bag lady next to her former maid and realises she should have paid more attention to skin care, as Penny Coelen urges in the cosmetic advertisements. The former Miss World doesn’t look a day over forty, yet she and Shirley are the same age.

  She’d asked Lin to tell Theodora that she needn’t come all the way into town again for the funeral, adding, ‘Those taxis they travel in are death-traps.’

  ‘Oh, she’ll be there. She respected Dad because he spoke Zulu to her.’ Lin remembered Theodora’s reply when she’d asked her why she never taught Hugh and her to speak Zulu when they were young: ‘The money was too small, and I wanted to learn your English for my kids.’

  Until then, Lin had assumed that Theodora loved them like her own children, skating over the fact that she was a full-time paid worker who had to live apart from her children. She’d been there from early morning orange juice to bath time, when Shirley and J J sat out on the veranda having their evening spot, then helped Charlie afterwards with the supper dishes before going to her khaya in the backyard.

  All four of Theodora’s children went to college and became teachers, and the eldest was now a professor senior to Hugh at the university. Their first priority as wage-earners was to build their mother a substantial brick house on the family homestead near Inanda. Shirley was extremely put out when she gave notice, saying it was her turn to sit with her feet up. Finding a new maid even halfway as good wasn’t easy.

  Shirley had gone on yesterday in a wobbly voice, ‘So many outsiders are insisting on coming. I still think we should have had a quiet funeral. John would have hated all this fuss.’

  ‘You can hardly call her an outsider. And the Moths will enjoy the flutter.’ Whenever she can, Barbara works at raising a laugh.

  ‘There are only three 1945 veterans left in his Shellhole now.’ Shirley began to weep again, and for the thousandth time Barbara wondered why her handsome hero brother had chosen such an ordinary woman for a wife.

  The reason will die with Shirley, who has never told anyone about the crisis she nursed John through when he lay in hospital with a fever and septicaemia from a burst appendix. It was early 1952, and the Springboks had arrived in Cape Town on the Carnarvon Castle after the victorious Springbok tour of Britain and France. The crowds waiting for the mail-boat went wild. Hennie Muller – the captain who had trained on mine dumps to keep fit – was chaired shoulder-high along the quayside to a flag-bedecked bus.

  J J Kitching had an excruciating gut-ache that day, but he refused to miss the moment. He took a handful of aspirins for the pain and followed his teammates down the gangplank into the back-slapping mob. The aspirins wore off at the welcome-home reception, where he collapsed and was rushed by ambulance to Groote Schuur and an emergency operation. Shirley was the night nurse on his ward. His tormented whimpering kept the other patients awake and he was moved to a private room where she sat with him, calmly soothing as he raved on about his guilt and betrayal and dead friends who hadn’t come home. She bent to kiss his forehead one night as he sank into an exhausted sleep and he mumbled, ‘I love you, Shirl.’ After his striving mother, the chaos of war and the physical hammering of international rugby, Shirley was like home-made vanilla ice cream.

  When the penicillin had begun to work and he was well enough to sit up, Hennie Muller and his wife came to visit one evening. ‘Meet my guardian angel, Sister Shirley Barnes,’ John said, introducing her. ‘She got me through all this. I’m lucky to be alive and I’m going to marry her.’

  ‘Veels geluk, J J. A man needs a good wife.’ Hennie shook his hand, and then the blushing Shirley’s. ‘Florrie and I wish you both every happiness.’

  Before leaving the hospital, John begged Shirley never to tell anyone about what he’d done and witnessed, and she kept her word. He had been through hell and didn’t need to deal with public shame as well.

  ‘There’s no discouragement – shall make him once relent – his first avowed intent – to be a pilgrim.’

  Theodora Ngcobo does not need to look at the Order of Service because she knows the words. Instead, as she watches the pepper-and-salt perm of her former employer bobbing in front of her, she thinks, Poor Madam, she’s hating this big service and the crowds. And that black dress doesn’t suit her. She should have worn the cream linen.

  Theodora can feel sorry for Shirley now that she is no longer in bondage to the big house which needed so much dusting and cleaning. Shirley wasn’t a bad madam; didn’t shout or demand or create a scene over a mistake. It was just that the hours were long and the pay was never enough to meet the needs of the children living at home in Babanango with their grandmother.

  If it hadn’t been for the pillowcases Theodora embroidered in her khaya every night, working at the fine stitching she’d learnt from the nuns at mission school, her children would never have made it past primary school. The 60-watt bulb hanging from the ceiling was dim and embroidery silks were expensive.

  Theodora’s designs were the pictures her mother had drawn in smoothed clay on the river bank when she was small: cattle and goats and clusters of huts, women hoeing in the fields, rocky crags with aloes, the sun and the moon and the stars. All the things country people missed when they lived in poky backyard rooms in cities. She embroidered her pillowcases for women who asked for names and birth dates to be woven into the borders of vines and flowers: children, sisters, mothers, gogos, friends – but seldom their men, whom they may not have seen for months or years. Theodora’s husband had deserted her when their youngest child was in her belly, saying that he was going to Joburg to look for work and would return for sure. Hayi-bo, that one!

  As she grew older she realised that it had been for the best, but she cried into her own embroidered pillow for years because she had loved him and life was hard. Now she thinks, I’m still here and Master has gone. My children are success
ful. I have grandchildren. I have a vote. I have a decent house and a good life. I want for nothing. Who is the madam now?

  She smiles as the organ pauses before launching into the next verse, and looks around with a proudly lifted head.

  ‘Who so beset him round with dismal stories – do but themselves confound – his strength the more is.’

  Nelisiwe has an Apostolic pastor grandfather and was brought up singing in the choir of the church where he preached fire and brimstone, though she is no longer terrified by his visions of hell. At twenty-eight she is a partner in a leading Durban firm of architects specialising in sustainable communities: an accomplished career woman with an MA in town planning.

  She’s also the main breadwinner in her marriage. Hugh’s academic salary doesn’t go far, but it’s okay. He’s sensitive to her feelings and aspirations, unlike the hip self-centred boyfriends who preceded him. A bit old, maybe, though it makes for a peaceful home life. She knows the marriage won’t last, but it suits her at the moment. He does most of the cooking and treats women with respect, even his former wife who left him and his dreadful old aunt.

  She looks sideways at Barbara whose bright red mouth opens and closes, only pretending to sing. Needs a cigarette, Nelisiwe guesses. I wonder why she never married? Too stuck up. Or maybe tries too hard. Dresses like a parrot and tries to cover her wrinkles with too much makeup. Smoking is even worse for the skin than lightening creams; just look at those fissures round her lips.

  With a shiver, Nelisiwe tugs her designer jacket into place and goes on singing, ‘No foe shall stay his might – though he with giants fight –’

  Barbara is thinking, This hymn again. They sang it when they went off to war and whistled it when they came home. Johnny was so different. Tougher. More cynical. Ruthless in a way he had never been as a boy, though even then he liked to win. Bowling hard green monkey oranges with Bobby Brewitt down the dirt track to the sawmill, one boy on either side of the middelmannetjie, each desperate for his to go furthest. Firing pellet guns at upside-down tins on the fence posts, yelling ‘Gotcha!’ when they hit one and it spun around.

  Bobby never had a chance against him. Not when they were chasing the mongoose round the grain sacks in the storeroom to see who could grab and hold it without getting bitten, or hitting ripe naartjies in the orchard with long sticks to see how many they could knock down, or even climbing the iron ladders of the railway trucks, Bobby’s playground. Johnny always held the mongoose longer and tallied more naartjies and was first to reach the top of the ladder. And when he told Ma afterwards, she’d clap and say he was her champion – casting sideways looks at his father that went unnoticed. That’s why Johnny rushed off to war the moment he finished school, she realises: to be a real champion. And he’d come home a hero, with medals.

  But she’d noticed the spectres in his eyes and the times when no one could reach him. He refused to talk about what happened when his plane was hit or in the prison camps, though once he’d let slip that he’d seen things so terrible he couldn’t think of them without vomiting. Barbara suspected that he had told Shirley some of it, having seen her sometimes drop the placid cow act and look at him with speculating nurse’s eyes, as though trying to gauge his temperature or whether he’d had a bowel movement.

  An old memory slips into her head, as it has been doing more often these days. What would her life have been like if Maurice had come back? She remembers that night on the screened sleeping veranda where a bed had been made up for him. Johnny was packing his kitbag next door, and their parents were asleep on the far side of the house. Maurice’s pleading hissed in her ear. ‘Please, Barbs. You’ve got to let me do it. I might be killed and I’ve never done it. Please, Barbs. You’re the only girl I can ask.’

  ‘Do you love me?’ The age-old bleat of a cajoled woman. She was fifteen and he was leaving for war in the morning.

  ‘Of course. Yes. I love you. Come on, please, just let me –’ Beseeching as his hands burrowed into her bra and slid up her thighs. ‘Please, Barbs. I love you. My folks love you. I’ll marry you when I get back. Please. Now. Now.’

  Maurice was a sugar farmer’s son; he and Johnny had gone to boarding school together, so she’d known him for years. Of course she’d let him do it: a furtive coupling that was over in minutes and left her feeling sticky and used. Barbara Kitching, ex-virgin, sucker for sweet talk. If he’d come home, she could have been a sugar farmer’s wife living in luxury, instead of a lonely old elocution teacher with nothing but vivid memories. As she mouths the words of the hymn, she is dying for a cigarette.

  ‘He will make good his right – to be a pilgrim.’ The organ and the voices pause again, then forge on, ‘Since, Lord, thou dost defend – us with thy spirit –’

  On the other side of Barbara, Dr Bridget Kitching listens to her breathing. There’s a noticeable buzz of emphysema, not surprising after all those years of smoking. It’s crazy the way people persist with dangerous habits.

  Bridget has her own demons to deal with today. J J gave her hell about abandoning Hugh and Sam when she went back to medicine and joined a team researching multi-drug-resistant TB at King George V Hospital.

  ‘I didn’t abandon them. Don’t you remember that Hugh divorced me? And of course Sam stayed.’

  ‘You started the rot by leaving them in the lurch. Damn poor show.’ And he’d refused to have anything more to do with her.

  She looks at her son, scowling as he walks up the aisle next to his grandfather’s coffin. He used to see a lot of the old man. He must be feeling bereft and he’s only twelve. She decides that she and Hugh have to make plans. His marriage to Neli won’t last, and where will Sam be then? Doubly divorced.

  ‘We know we at the end – shall life inherit. Then fancies flee away – I’ll fear not what men say –’

  You can tell who among the congregation were at English-speaking schools: they emphasise the t’s in ‘not what’ to make it sound like a staccato ‘pot-shot’. It was something you did to irritate the teaching staff who stood glaring round the edges of school assemblies.

  Lin wonders whether kids are still doing it and reminds herself to ask Sam later. The pall-bearers have come to a standstill, with the coffin in place below the steps leading up to the high altar. Sam stands in front of Herbie, his boy’s hair sticking up and his neck straining out of a grey blazer that he has outgrown. This walk next to his dead Grampa must have been a tough ordeal for him.

  She moves forward and reaches for his hand as the organ swells and the voices of the congregation rise to the rafters in a triumphal ‘I’ll labour night and day – to be a pilgrim.’

  Sam lets his aunt squeeze and then hang on to his hand, thinking that she needs the reassurance after the grim walk up the aisle. There aren’t any boys watching to mock him later. The congregation is mostly old, except for the rugby guys. His eyes have strayed sideways from Grampa’s coffin to the Springboks and Sharks players whose autographs would give him major cred at school. If they stand around outside after the service, maybe he can ask them to sign something. But what? He’s not carrying any paper. He decides to use an Order of Service with Grampa’s photo on the front. That’d be cool.

  ‘– im – im – imm – imm –’ The echoes die away to silence in the cavernous space bounded by columns and stained-glass windows.

  Today’s outjies want petrol money and say it is too far to come to practice. In my day I used to ploeg all day on Fridays and then drive my John Deere 25 miles to practice.

  – A Schweizer-Reneke farmer, in GRAHAM JOOSTE’S Rugby Stories from the Platteland

  J J had been a good rugby player at school and in the prison camp matches, and, after a season of playing with the combat-savvy Survivors B Team, he was damn good. He could run on the wing like a springhare, jinking and stiff-arming tacklers as he hurtled for the try line. He was chosen for the university A Team, the Lily-Whites, then for Pietermaritzburg, and in his third year for Natal.

  When the All Blacks ca
me on tour in 1949, he was among the hundred and twenty players chosen to attend the Pretoria trials organised by a national selection panel that included Danie Craven. There were doubts about the choice of players. There hadn’t been any tests since the beginning of the war, and the provincial games were patchy.

  J J’s luck held. He’d gone home after the trials and was sitting next to the wireless in the lounge with Dot and Barbara on the Saturday evening when the team was announced, starting with ‘Die Springbokspan is soos volg –’ The second-to-last name was J J Kitching.

  Victor had been pacing up and down with the dregs of his fourth gin and tonic. He stopped and let out a ‘Fucking marvellous!’ before stumbling to the drinks trolley again.

  Dot embraced her son, murmuring, ‘My champion. Well done.’

  Barbara, home for the weekend, clutched her throat and made gagging gestures behind her mother’s back. But he could see she was pleased. She’d grown into a young woman in New Look frocks and nylons, with an actor boyfriend who talked like Noël Coward and wore a white silk scarf with his tux. There were moments when J J had to restrain himself from punching the man’s smug civilian face.

  ‘Shot, Johnny,’ she said later, when they’d escaped Victor’s usual evening rant and were sitting on the veranda steps watching fireflies flit among the aloes in the rockery. She’d thought they were fairies until the night he and Bobby caught some in a jar and showed her the unremarkable little winged insects, their abdomens tipped with an eerie pulsing green. ‘See? Just goggas with tiny little torches going on and off in their bums.’

  ‘But where do the batteries go?’ she’d asked, mystified.

  J J and Bobby fell about laughing and she’d felt stupid and gullible.

  He was no longer the impatient boy who had rushed off to war, but a driven man who trained obsessively and basked in the roar of a rugby crowd. Hands-off with women, though. ‘They just want to trap you,’ he’d say. Men gathered around him at parties, ignoring the hopeful girls. Barbara had wanted to introduce him to her friends – he was a real catch – but he said he didn’t have time for complications.