by Guy Butler
But old Langjan had money in the bank. Lots of it. He understood money. And the third Mrs Loots looked grimly content in that knowledge as she stood in the sun, putting offal and addled ostrich eggs into a great kettle to render them down to soap. Into another, Langjan was ladling the lye – the caustic ash of the bushes he had burnt.
‘The old methods are still the best’, he’d say. ‘You now have to pay a ridiculous price for a cake of soap in the chemist shop, which doesn’t make you any cleaner, and makes your wife smell like a whore.’
How close to the earth can people live, and still be human? Soap, scented or unscented, was one of the great’ cultural divides, and Langjan defended the soap frontier. If only the Hottentots had known about soap, half the terrible things that were said about them would never have been said! But their culture had come from the desert, and they never wasted that sacred substance, water, on the useless condition of cleanliness; so, when moisture broke out from your own skin in sweat it was sacred too; and sweat-smell when dry was the blessed odour of sanctity. Old Hottentots were born, lived, and died without benefit of bath or soap. He remembered one old, old chap in his childhood who used to clean himself, annually, by rubbing himself down with fine grade A sandpaper.
When the Doctor rode up, the Lootses did not break into their soap-making routine to entertain him to a cup of coffee, or even of rooibos or buchu tea. When David explained that he’d come for Andries Vosloo’s horse, Loots had simply shouted to Draghoender to bring it. Once Vosloo’s horse, a big comfortable-looking mare, had been brought, Loots stopped talking about the civilisation he maintained by such economical means and turned to the horses.
‘That’s a fine stallion you’ve been riding’, he said, ladling in more lye.
‘Yes’, said the Doctor, transferring his saddle to the mare.
‘I’ll get him to serve my mares before he’s fetched’, said Loots.
The Doctor swung himself into the saddle of Vosloo’s horse, and said: ‘He’s not going to be fetched. I’m to let him loose here, to find his own way home.’
Loots stopped working the soap pot. ‘What? No you don’t! You don’t take Vosloo’s horse off this farm without leaving that one, here, in place of mine.’
Yours will be returned tomorrow, with Andries himself in the saddle.’
‘No you don’t. Draghoender, take his stallion to the stable.’
Acting with a decision which seemed to belong to someone else, David grabbed the stallion’s lead from the bemused groom, and dug his heels into his new mount and cantered off. Two hundred yards away he stopped, removed the halter, and sent the stallion galloping off with a sharp clout across the withers. He glanced back, to see Langjan and his wife dancing in a fury, waving their soap ladles under the clean, shining, bald skull of Blinkberg. From a row of huts between him and the soap-making couple, Hottentots of all shapes and sizes had tumbled out to laugh in amazement and admiration.
The Doctor decided it was time to remove himself. What would happen now? What could happen? Langjan could saddle another horse and try to catch the stallion. No, he’d not be fool enough to try that, tired as the stallion might be. He might try to follow him: but to what purpose? To repossess Vosloo’s horse? He’d only be allowed to do that at gunpoint. He looked mad and mean enough to attempt anything.
The furious Loots grabbed his rifle, flung a saddle on a horse and took a short cut across the veld. He was just in time to catch the Doctor as he emerged from the upper end of the poort. He shouted: ‘Stop! Stop!’
But the Doctor did not stop.
So he fired into the dirt of the road in front of him.
The Doctor had got the measure of his new mount, and, having decided in advance what he would do, dug his heels into the horse and yelled at it, his head low over its neck like a jockey. The terrain favoured him. The short-cut had placed Langjan perfectly for that one shot, but on an elevation too rough and steep to descend without dismounting.
The Doctor kept going at full speed until he reached the great plain which stretched, open and easy for miles, in the late afternoon sun; across which he trippled nervously.
In the name of Heaven, what the hell do you think you’re doing? Getting yourself shot at on your first call to a dying patient. Fighting over a borrowed horse. You must never tell Janet of this. She’ll never trust your judgement again. But what the hell, I couldn’t have continued on Lategan’s stallion all the rest of the way to Arries Graf. It would have broken the beautiful beast’s wind. And I couldn’t have left him there, against instructions, to serve old Langjan’s mares for nothing. And I had to consider my duty to my patient. Of course Langjan’s shot had only been a warning shot to make him stop, but he hadn’t stopped, had he? If the lie of the land had been different, what then?
The shadows of the hills stretched long and mauve, and then purple, and then blue-black. Only a few miles to go; but the experience of being shot at, and the sinking sun, and the jumble of strange stories about the Vosloos made him feel more uneasy than he’d ever felt in his life. In that vast, still plain he seemed to be the only moving thing, mile after mile, moving alone among millions of silent stones and still bushes. There is a silence that can sink like music on the heart, but not this silence. He’d always laughed at the Karoo place name Skrik-in-die-rondte – ‘Dread all around’, but not now.
Now he knew what it meant.
The sun had set, and the orange sky behind the sharp mountain shapes ahead was still bright enough to blur his vision a little of what was close at hand.
Suddenly a clod of earth, thrown with enormous force, struck the right side of the pommel of his saddle and shattered into a little puff of dirt and was gone, leaving a dust-stain on the leather. The horse jerked in surprise. He could see nothing, no possible source for the projectile. He reined the steed in. It was quivering. So was he.
And then, in the early dusk, ahead and to the right, he saw a small squatting figure beside the pile of stones; but certainly well beyond the distance from which a normal being could hurl a clod; particularly as the figure was that of an adolescent girl, with her face cupped in her hands, composed and relaxed, as if she’d been like that a long time. He looked carefully beyond her, where the track disappeared over the crest of the ridge, also to the left, and to the right. To the right and below the ridge, there was a smudge of smoke with the round shapes of mat shelters, and lighter patches, which might be goats. Nothing else, not in front at any rate. And the clod could not have come from anywhere else. A poltergeist?
As he approached her, the girl rose to her feet, and deferentially bobbed as if curtseying, as any well-trained young person might do in Victorian times; particularly a Hottentot young person. There were no signs of guilt or fear. They looked at each other quite a long time. The initiative was clearly his.
‘Where is Arries Graf?’ he asked.
With a gesture she said: ‘This is Arries Graf.’
Whether she was referring to the adjacent heap of stones or the general locality, or both, he could not say.
‘Where is the house?’
She pointed to the mat shelters and smoke. Was she being insolent? What white man ever asked for the huts?
‘And the big house?’
‘Over the ridge’, she said, gesturing with a beautiful small hand.
Wearily he heaved himself back into the saddle. Then on impulse, he asked: ‘What is your name?’
‘Namies.’
‘You work at the big house?’ he asked.
She nodded.
‘And your name at the big house is Griet?’
She nodded.
‘And you sit up with the old lady all night?’
‘Yes.’
‘So you will have to be there soon?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m the new Doctor. Do you want a ride?’
‘Yes.’
So he reached down and helped her up. It was clear that Griet was used to riding on the cruppers of horses.
> Whoever had chosen the site for the homestead of Arries Graf had a good eye. It sat white and grand and splendid against the buttress of the mountain, glowing in the mat grey dusk. In the window of the great gable over the front door a light was burning. Petronella Vosloo’s light. What a commanding view she must have!
He put the girl down at the great white gateway to the yard, and rode up, slowly, to the wide flight of steps that led to the broad stoep below the front door. And as he dismounted two quotations from his school days came into his mind: ‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here’ and ‘The Childe Roland to the dark Tower Came’. And he laughed silently at himself.
The door opened as he was about to knock, and there stood – Andries Vosloo himself! Of course he corrected himself at once. This must be his identical twin, Stoffel.
‘The Doctor?’ Stoffel asked with the same voice as Andries.
‘Yes – Dr David Martyn.’
‘Come in.’
Mrs Stoffel Vosloo was the size of a small elephant, and had the same small cunning eyes. Her welcome was formal. Another of these doctors’ visits. As for Andries’ wife, she was the same, only bigger. They were in fact sisters, but not twins. For this they seemed to apologise.
He was shown to an enormous, comfortless room, where he washed in an old hip bath in generous quantities of hot water brought in by an old male retainer. The man looked nervous. Who wouldn’t be, working under Mrs Vosloo? Or even two Mrs Vosloos. The idea was nightmarish.
Refreshed, he went downstairs. Stoffel poured him a brandy in an old-fashioned tumbler of heavy cut glass which felt good in his grip.
‘How has your mother been?’
‘Quiet. Very quiet. I’ve been up twice during the afternoon. She was in a deep sleep, but one could hardly hear her breathing.’
‘Can I see Magda, the day nurse?’
Magda was a petite Khoi woman who knew she had both personality and looks. She knew how to get on to joking terms with white people without for a moment suggesting presumption, or claims to equality, or familiarity – what is known as ‘cheek’. Cheeky she must certainly have felt at times, among these heavy, huge Vosloos. Like an impala among rhinoes. She answered his questions frankly and quickly. Did the patient eat the food sent, or did she secretly slip it to her dogs? Or to Magda? What did she drink? How much? And the more Magda spoke, the more the Doctor suspected that his patient was perfectly sound in wind and limb.
Then Stoffel, lantern in hand, escorted him outside, along the flagged stoep and up the stone staircase into the long loft. They were followed by the two Mrs Vosloo and their ten children, five a side. A strip of coir mat had been laid across the mud of the brandsolder, on either side of which was stored the abundant furniture and junk of two or three generations of Vosloos: the sort of unregarded riches from which he, David Martyn, could happily have picked several items to grace the vacant interior of his new home in Ladycole.
Petronella’s boudoir was at the centre, above the hall, behind the gable. She was in a large handsome canopied bed, with the curtains pulled back in swags; illuminated by four seven-branched candle sticks, so that the first impression was of a Popish shrine or image of the Virgin in front of which these votive candles were burning. But the face was not that of a madonna. A Lady of Sorrows perhaps, but not our Lady. The face was still beautiful. Years of selfishness could dictate the lines and creases, the downturn at the ends of the mouth, the heavy scowl between the eyes, but could not destroy the fine bone structure which God in his goodness had given Petronella. God, and Africa. With something of a delightful shock the doctor recognised a signature he was coming to accept as authentic, not a forgery.
She’d got her daughters-in-law to help her into her lace nightdress, and to do her hair, and to bring her lorgnette. The new Doctor was to be given a decent reception. As he drew near the side of her bed, she looked at him and then for closer inspection, raised the lorgnette in a delicate hand, the lace sleeve falling back from a fine-boned wrist, the skin of which, alas, was no longer milky white, but freckled like a bird’s egg.
‘Martyn?’ she whispered hoarsely. ‘Not the son of Dominee Martyn?’
‘Yes’, he said smiling. To himself he said: ‘I might have known it. These Cape families all know each other, or pretend to.’
‘He married a De Villiers from Franschhoek.’
‘That is so’, he said.
‘How comforting to be attended on our deathbed by the son of old friends from our youth.’
The royal plural came easily to Petronella. The two daughters-in-law exchanged looks, as much as to say ‘Here we go again’. And Stoffel, in the absence of Andries, was obliged to take the rafters into his confidence. But the children, who’d been allowed as a special treat to come and say goodnight to Grandma, were solemn and wide-eyed. The Vosloo love of symmetry applied to them too. Andries had twin girls, Stoffel twin boys, all about fifteen and all startlingly alike. There were three younger children on each side, but symmetry had gone to pot amongst them. The chaos of the random gene had returned.
Paying scant attention to the parents, the dying grandmother had a word or a question for each of them, calling this one ‘my skat’ (my treasure) and that one ‘my liefling’ (my darling) and the other ‘my lammetjie’ (my lamb) or ‘my bokkie’ (my little kid). There was a genuine flow of affection across the generation gap, the old lady’s eyes so far forgetting their death-bed gloom as to sparkle with interest at the answer from an unaffected child. Then she lay back among the pillows and seemed to fall asleep.
The wives and children having filed out amid whisperings, David said to Stoffel: ‘I would now like to examine her. Send Magda up, with a jug of hot water.’
‘Magda has gone home. There’s her daughter, Griet, a useless child.’
Send her.’ The son nodded towards the door.
‘But isn’t she asleep? You will wake her?’
The examination revealed exactly what he had expected. There was nothing wrong with her ears or throat, nothing wrong with her lungs; her food intake was normal, occasionally affected by a crisis over the condiments, the flavour, the temperature or the appointments on the tray. No cancer of the breast or uterus. Kidneys without stones. This left her mind and her muscles. How mad was she, if at all? How bad was her rheumatism? Was her inability to walk due to some failure of the musculature, what her sons called her rheumatism? Certainly her limbs seemed wasted but that was perhaps natural enough in someone who had not left her bed for the better part of a year. He felt pretty sure that local gossip was correct. His visit was quite unnecessary. He looked at the labels on the bottles prescribed by the other doctors whose time she had wasted. What could he say? What could he do?
There had been one odd flash during the examination. The girl Griet did everything she was asked to perfectly, but with an inattentive take-it-or-leave-it air; not deliberately insolent, but as though her mind was occupied elsewhere.
David was leaning over his patient, applying the stethoscope to her heart. That old pump was still in perfect order.
‘Griet, stop it!’ cried Petronella suddenly in a sharp strong voice. He turned his head sideways, and saw the girl raising with extraordinary ease, like a ballet dancer, to catch a slender gueridon which was in process of falling towards the bed. What had upset it? His own foot rucking the carpet? A gust of wind?
‘Good’, said the patient. ‘And where is your grandfather?’
‘I don’t know, Madam.’
‘Find out for me.’
The girl’s eyes had lost their abstraction, and shone with a clear recognition. Nothing of the servant-to-mistress look this, but person to person. Petronella explained to the Doctor.
‘Her grandfather and my father – they all knew old Arrie.’
She then spoke to Griet.
‘I want to speak to your father about old Arrie.’
The Doctor thought he caught a trace of a smile on Griet’s face, but whether of mischief or pleasure he could not say.
Besides, his irritation with the whole charade was getting the better of him.
‘Arrie’, continued Petronella, ‘was a great Hottentot doctor. He knew all the healing herbs. His son is also a great herbalist. You know they are great doctors? Long before you people came with your useless medicines from Europe.’
The newly qualified young white doctor from Europe was hurt by this: before he had even given his diagnosis or attempted a prescription, his supposedly dying patient was calling in a Hottentot doctor.
‘Mrs Vosloo’, he said, ‘I do know a little about herbs; but if your local doctor, Arrie, has medicine more to your taste, why did you send your son all the way to Ladycole for me?’
‘Because I’m dying. Didn’t they tell you?’
‘There is nothing wrong with you that I can see.’
‘Nothing?’
‘Not with your body.’
‘You mean I’m mad?’
‘You need to get out of this loft, on to the ground floor. You’re nowhere near death, just bored to death with your own company, perhaps.’
Petronella started weeping, looking more like a failed Lady of Sorrows than ever. Unrelenting, the young man continued.
‘Your son was thrown twice from his horse in his haste to get a doctor for you; he could have been killed. And I have been shot at by your neighbour.’ He paused and pointed to the rows of bottles. ‘All the medicines I could prescribe my predecessors have tried already. Maybe you are right. You’ve lost faith in white medicine. Perhaps Arrie’s herbs will help you. Call Arrie.’ Then on impulse: ‘Would you like to see me before I leave in the morning?