“Well,” she said, shaking grit off a bunch of carrots and standing up to look Frances over, “you’re as pretty as he said you would be.”
“Thank you,” Frances said, cautious of this woman with her tanned skin, muddy hands, and piercing blue eyes.
“It’s not a question of thanking.” Mevrouw Reitz pushed the hair out of her eyes with the sweep of a forearm. “It’s obvious that he likes you. But I’ll be honest with you, Mrs. Matthews”—Frances was discomforted by the strangeness of her married name—“there are some of us here who said your husband was crazed bringing a woman all the way from England, who doesn’t know this country.”
Frances could feel herself wilting in the heat. How much longer would she have to stand out here under inspection? After a moment the woman asked, “How are your lungs?”
“My lungs?” Frances asked faintly.
“When I was a child, we had an English governess. She came to the Cape for the climate. I thought perhaps . . .”
“My lungs are perfectly healthy, thank you,” Frances replied, angered by the implication that she had married Edwin to escape England, though it wasn’t so far from the truth.
Mevrouw Reitz glanced at Frances’s delicate shoes, already caked in muck, at her long muslin sleeves covering her pale skin, at her pretty straw hat. “Of course, you shan’t want to be dressing like that every day. Don’t get me wrong. We all like a bit of finery from time to time”—Frances had the unpleasant sensation that the woman was fingering the material, calculating its worth—“but you’ll have to work hard, the two of you, and there’ll be no time for indulgences. You haven’t much to get you started in life, and goodness knows your husband works hard enough already. You don’t want to be a burden on him.”
Frances bit her lip. They had only just met and already the woman was patronizing her. How did she know they had so little to get them started? And why did she seem to think her husband needed defending? “I hope, Mevrouw Reitz, that I won’t be a burden on anyone.”
“I’m sure you won’t be.” She touched the back of Frances’s hand with her fingers. “I didn’t mean for you to take it the wrong way. If you need help with things, you must come and ask. You’ll get lonely in that cottage all by yourself every day. When that happens, you should come and see me. We’ll find something for you to do.”
Despite the apology, Frances bristled. “I can assure you I am quite used to being on my own.”
“I’m sure you are. But I expect it’s a different kind of loneliness to what you’re used to.”
They walked on in silence. After a few minutes, Mevrouw Reitz swept her hands proudly over her garden. “We missed the rains last year, but we’re not doing badly. Most of this relies on underground water.” She pointed to the wind pump turning a slow circle against an indigo sky. “Albert’s father struck water with the first hole he bored. He enlarged the dam, and we’ve never been without.”
“And the river?”
“It floods during the rains, but the rest of the year it’s as good as dry.” She clasped her hands together in front of her, as if in prayer. “We need the rains to fall this summer,” she said, “or the grazing will fail and the cattle will die.”
• • •
AFTER LUNCH, a colored nurse came in with the youngest boy, and Mevrouw Reitz made a big fuss over him.
“Family. That’s the most important thing,” she said, handing the boy to Frances. He was a boisterous baby with big fists and thrusting legs which pummeled against her thighs. When Frances glanced up she saw Edwin watching her with a hungry, alert expression on his face. Please God, she thought, don’t let me fall pregnant by Edwin, not in this place, not right away.
Mevrouw Reitz brought Frances through to her storeroom before they left. It was a cool, dark room smelling of damp paint. Shelves were stacked high with bottled jams, chutneys, peaches in syrup, dried figs, brandy apricots, wines, and pickles. Mevrouw Reitz pressed two jars of crimson mulberry jam into her hands, and Frances had felt overwhelmingly depressed by this show of generosity. She had nothing to give in return. She didn’t have the first idea about gardening or pickling, cleaning or sewing. God knows, she didn’t even know how to go about washing her own clothes. It gave her the unpleasant sensation that she existed here as a purely decorative object. She suspected there was a certain danger in this. These people would despise her, unless she could conjure value out of the soil.
• • •
WHEN THEY GOT BACK to their house, it had seemed too quiet. They ate dinner in near silence, punctuated by the clatter of knives and forks, the lamps throwing their shadows in dark, flickering shapes across the stark, white wall. Conversation was stilted by the expectation of the night ahead, but there was also a sort of hesitating fear hanging over them. The Reitzes, with their righteous wholesomeness, had cast an inimitable light over the loneliness of their first day as husband and wife, and Frances felt that anyone looking in through the window would have seen that their marriage was a sham and would wonder how these two people, who had so little to say to each other, were going to survive living in such isolation.
Halfway through supper Frances thought she saw, in the candlelight, something flung across the table. It was an airy, whirring thing which went back and forth in front of her so quickly she couldn’t make it out. Then—bang!—Edwin brought a glass down on the wood. Her skin swarmed. A bright-orange spider was trapped inside. It reared up on its legs and put its fangs to the glass. She threw back the bench, sweeping up her skirts and checking the floor.
“Is it poisonous?” she asked, when she was sure there weren’t any more.
“Not deadly. It’s a red man. They come out at night to catch their prey. They use speed, not webs.” Edwin tapped the glass with a forefinger to make the spider dance. It was only later that she found out they were known as hair clippers because they liked to bury themselves in your hair at night and snip away at it.
• • •
FRANCES TURNED DOWN the lamp on the bureau and slipped into bed. Her hair, unpinned and unplaited, fanned out over the white pillowcases she had brought from England. They smelt of London rain and laundry starch. There was another scrape of metal from the nextdoor room, then the glug of liquid being poured from a bottle. Edwin must be dissecting the spider. She imagined him tweezering off its legs with the grip of his forceps. It was an odd fascination to want to take apart a creature until you had explored and categorized every part of it.
The window was open, and a jackal gave a rasping bark into the dark. The clock on the mantel ticked heavily, but eventually she heard the chair pull back next door and Edwin’s light tread along the corridor. She heard the careful removing of clothes as he undressed, and the creak of floorboards as he crossed to the lamp and put out the flame. The covers were pulled back and the mattress shifted against her skin as he got into bed beside her. He blew out the candle. They lay for a few minutes in silence, and Frances wondered whether he might not touch her if she stayed very still, but then he turned onto his side to face her. She felt his hand running over her hair, which lay across the pillow. She opened her eyes, but it was too dark to make him out.
He felt for her face, touched her nose first, then her lips, his hands moving down her neck. She stared into the blackness. Then he found her breast, and she felt his body shudder as he cupped it. He let his thumb brush over her nipple. He moved closer, and his breath was wet against her cheek. The darkness seemed to release something in him.
“Frances.” He breathed her name, and she braced herself against the weight of his body as he rolled on top of her. She smelt his nakedness, and felt his thigh shift against hers. “Frances Matthews.” There was a note of triumph in his voice. “You don’t know how I’ve wanted this.” He kissed her cheek, her lips, her eyes, but she couldn’t bring herself to kiss him back. He was still for a moment, as if bringing himself under control, smoothing the skin at her temples with one hand, running his fingers lightly over her face, feeling out its
crevices in the dark like a blind man. His touch was gentle, but his fingers trembled. He was breathing heavily, and she sensed the effort it cost him to slow down.
When he pushed his hand up under her nightdress, she drew in a shuddering breath. His fingers were cold and hard between her legs, and she gasped as he began to work himself inside her, the pain familiar but no less shocking.
“Is it all right?” he asked, his face hovering over hers, motionless now, with the weight of him resting inside her.
She put a hand on his shoulder, pulling him towards her. There was no part of her that wanted him, but she needed it over with as quickly as possible.
Afterwards, he curled himself against her body like a boy and gave her small, grateful kisses on her shoulder, murmuring his thanks into her neck. This soft vulnerability was a new side of him. He was usually too controlled to show real affection. She was faintly disgusted. Why was he thanking her? It had been a bloodless, empty act of love, and he was fantasizing if he felt she had been in any way complicit. There had been little choice on her part. Yet at least he had been satisfied. She knew, now, what he expected of her, and if he didn’t ask any more of her than this, then she could bear it.
She turned away from him, onto her side. What would it have felt like to have had William’s hands trailing over her skin? She gave in to imagining him, and her thighs began to prickle and burn with slow pleasure.
Twenty-One
They spent little time together, and this suited Frances. Edwin worked six days a week, leaving before dawn each morning and returning just before nightfall. Frances would curl deeper into the bedsheets when he had gone, drinking in the solitude. Sometimes she would imagine his walks across the veldt in the cool dark of early morning, under a sky dripping with stars. What did he think about? Whether smallpox could be stopped from reaching Kimberley? Whether his wife was content? He was full of contradictions: hardworking and meticulous in everything he did, yet oddly dispassionate; ambitious enough to want a woman of distinction, and yet content to live on the veldt like a savage; a brutal realist, and yet at the same time whimsical enough to have brought her here.
Edwin subscribed to the Graaff-Reinet newspaper. It was written in English, and Frances scoured its pages, searching for news of William’s marriage, but there was no mention of him. Instead she read about the arrest of Johannes Swanepoel, a Boer farmer living alone on thirty thousand acres. He had kidnapped the daughter of a neighboring farmer and kept her for five years in a thornbush stockade. When her father finally found her, she had lost the power of speech. The story was creepy, and it caught her imagination. Swanepoel had kept the girl in complete isolation, not wanting to share her with anyone. Edwin was no criminal, and yet there was something strange about the way he had coerced her into marriage and brought her to Rietfontein. Why weren’t they living in Kimberley? Or Cape Town? Or Port Elizabeth? Why had he taken this position, miles from anywhere?
At seven o’clock each morning Frances had to get up and make way for Sarah, who tidied the bed, closed the shutters against the sun, and set a dampened sheet across the door to cool the room and keep out flies. She ate the breakfast laid out for her, then spent the rest of the day sitting in a chair on the stoep, summoning William out of the plains. Kimberley was only a day’s ride away, and every dust devil in the distance could have been him. He emerged from the horizon, riding across the veldt, his hair a swath of black against the bleached sky and his eyes squinting into the white-hot sun. She could almost hear the gravel grinding beneath his boots as he dismounted. He would kneel down beside her, bury his face in her hair, and tell her that he was taking her to Kimberley. Every day she sat and waited for him to come, until her eyes stung from staring, but she couldn’t tear herself away.
The landscape mesmerized her. She had arrived at the beginning of summer, when the sun breathed like an oven over the desiccated plains. It was a brutal, pitiless heat. The earth was too warm to touch, and when she picked up an ironstone boulder the skin on her palm blistered. Even the horses had their hooves greased and bound in hide to stop them from burning.
She stared for hours at the stunted grasses, like parched heather, turning from gold to silver in the breeze. Edwin had nailed a plank of wood beneath their roof, and swallows used it for their nests, swirling and dipping out of sight to the small, round dam which lay behind the house. There was a patch of green here, by the dam: a few square yards of scrubby grass watered by the overspill and a peach tree which stood in the center of it. A few weeks after she arrived it erupted in a profusion of hard, golden fruits. They turned pink as the summer went on, until they were soft enough to be picked, and she would bite through the fuzz of skin into the warm flesh, amazed that such sweetness could come from such desolate ground.
On a clear day you could see the ghost of mountains banking like clouds on the horizon. The rains didn’t come, and as the summer went on the grim, parched veldt began to look like nothing more than a tangle of dusty prickles. She couldn’t believe a landscape could be so endlessly barren. It was the very opposite of the lush, green fields around London with their neat hedges teeming with busy, noisy life. The only sound you were likely to hear on the veldt was the occasional belching of a lizard. Her father couldn’t have imagined this place on his maps of Africa. He would have hated the dust and the heat. She felt a desperate loneliness, having to live without him, and she struggled against a yearning for everything to have been different. His death felt like abandonment. It had uprooted her, and she had been flung out here to this wilderness, where she didn’t belong.
Edwin went walking every Sunday, starting out early. He always asked her if she wanted to join him, but she declined. It seemed lunatic to go traipsing around in the heat, and besides, everything on the Karoo looked the same. There were barely any trees, no shade, not a thing for miles around that wasn’t covered in a fine red dust. You could set off in a certain direction and be certain to die before you met another soul. There were snakes and spiders and a constant invasion of flies. She couldn’t work out why anyone in their right mind would choose to live here. It was a hostile place, barely clinging to life, with no pretensions of prettiness, utterly devoid of romance, and yet despite, or because of all these things, she found a perverse comfort in it. She saw herself reflected in its bleak, stark surfaces. She admired its resilience and found it reassuring.
Frances learnt to be wary of the snakes. There were cobras, puff adders, skaapstekers, whipsnakes, coral snakes, horned adders, and boomslangs. Reptiles, Edwin said, couldn’t regulate their body temperature. They needed shade, or their blood would boil in their skins. The house, with its dark, shuttered rooms, was a perfect haven. Once, in the cool of early morning, she opened the kitchen door and a cobra glided out, straight over her feet into the dust.
Of all the insects, it was only the spiders she dreaded. The red men at night, and during the day the hunting spiders. They raced over the soil, looking for grasshoppers, crickets, and beetles. At first, Frances mistook them for balls of grass blowing over the veldt, the long hairs on their legs working as a disguise, but once Edwin had pointed them out she realized they were everywhere.
It was the spiders that endeared Nanny to Frances. She had tried to ban the meerkat from the house but soon gave in. She had never imagined they were living with so many bugs until she saw Nanny pulling them out from between the floorboards—termites, cicadas, and burrowing spiders with thick, bristling legs; even scorpions, which she managed to disarm with a quick paw before crunching delightedly at their still-squirming legs.
The problem was that ever since Frances had locked her in the study, the meerkat had treated her with deep suspicion. She couldn’t be convinced that Frances was anything other than dangerous. If Frances walked into a room, Nanny left whatever she was eating, stood up on her hind legs, and edged her way along the sides of the room with her back to the wall in a curious sidestep, as if she didn’t want to offend Frances but needed rather urgently to excuse herself.<
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One morning Frances positioned herself at the door and waited. Nanny approached and looked indecisively between Frances and the house, as if trying to decide whether she could make a dash for it. Ignoring Edwin’s instructions not to feed her, Frances held out a biscuit, and Nanny, who had obviously tasted the delights of baking before and recognized it as something altogether more delicious than a termite, shuffled up to her. When she got close, she stood politely on two legs and reached out for the biscuit with one paw. She stayed in that position, swaying and eyeing Frances beadily while she crunched away in a shower of crumbs. From then on, they were friends. The creature had little black patches round her eyes which made her look very earnest, and long whiskers, and when you stroked her belly she made a wonderful throaty purr.
Nanny sat with Frances in the afternoons on the stoep, her paws crossed over her chest, looking out over the plain like a sentry. Occasionally she fell asleep so that the slight weight of her body rested against Frances’s leg. When she woke up it was with a jolt, her nose wrinkling almost as if in embarrassment. When Edwin was home, Nanny would delicately deposit specimens at his feet for pickling, and in return he scratched her gratefully behind her ears.
The Reitzes owned all the land around, which came to about a hundred thousand acres. The farmhouse and outbuildings were so sprawling and numerous that they could almost be called a village. According to Edwin, there were over sixty people, white and black, working on the farm, about ten thousand sheep, as many goats, and a fair number of ostrich and cattle. There was only one dam on the farm, and in the late afternoon herds could be seen from the house picking their way over the plains, kicking up in their wake a fiery, billowing cloud of dust. The scene was biblical in its simplicity, and she was reminded of the Israelites leaving Egypt for the Promised Land.
The Fever Tree Page 16