There were things she ought to have been doing to improve the house, but she couldn’t bring herself to embark on anything. She should have been altering her dresses to make them more practical. There was fabric to be ordered from Port Elizabeth and curtains to be made. Edwin had asked Mevrouw Reitz if they could borrow her sewing machine, but Frances didn’t want to admit to either of them that she had never used one, so she put it off.
In the evenings Edwin would come home, but he never asked Frances what she had been doing, never criticized her over the state of the house, and never probed to see whether she had looked through the catalogs he had ordered from Port Elizabeth. The piano sat untouched under its cloth. Edwin didn’t ask her to play it, and she didn’t volunteer. She was grateful to be left to her own devices. She wrote to Anne and Mariella, and received letters in response. They both seemed settled and happy. Anne had been given responsibility over the native ward at the new Kimberley Hospital—she wrote that the work was tiring but rewarding—and Mr. and Mrs. Fairley had made a good start in Stellenbosch. She was happy for her friends, but their letters made her feel her own discontent more keenly.
She missed England, and wrote to Lucille asking for news of the family. Her cousin wrote back, and her letter conjured the season perfectly. It had been one of the coldest winters on record: icy cheeks, frozen fingers stuffed into mittens, and an Oxford Street dusted with snow. She described the gaieties of house parties in the country, ice skating in Hyde Park, hunt balls, and shooting weekends. The letter had arrived with a copy of a London Society magazine. Lucille had circled an article that mentioned her attendance at a number of important events. The pages were full of advertisements for perfumes and dresses, and descriptions of operas, dances, and debutantes. It was strange to think that this was the life she might have had. It felt so far removed from Rietfontein that it was as if the magazine had been torn from the pages of a fairy tale.
Edwin only once asked her if she wasn’t going to paint in the afternoons, since she had a talent for it. He suggested she pick some of the plants from the veldt. It gave her an idea, and she asked him to order a volume of Sowerby’s English Botany from London. When it arrived she set up her easel on the stoep and began copying some of the delicate, hand-colored illustrations, compiling a whole series of flowers to remind her of home: roses, dandelions, crocuses, and daffodils.
Every evening they ate the same thing: mealy bread, a sort of steamed pudding made of ground corn, eggs, and spices, smeared with sheep’s fat, which took the place of butter. Frances grew sick of the taste of it, and in an attempt to vary their suppers she secured a leg of mutton from Mevrouw Reitz. Her aunt’s book on household management had a whole section dedicated to recipes. All morning Frances turned the pages, growing more and more agitated. It was like reading a different language. When did a gravy run? What was forcemeat? And what did the writer mean by “buttered paper”?
She inspected the kitchen and found almost none of the items listed as necessary for a family “in the middle class of life.” Where was the bread grater? And what did a bottle jack look like? Or a dripping pan? The recipes were problematic in different ways. Either they called for ingredients she didn’t have, or they asked you to do something tricky like cutting out the knuckle or sewing up the meat.
She chose a recipe for braised meat and tried her best, but the mutton was delivered to the table a shriveled, burnt crisp, with a greasy coating of flour across the top. Edwin didn’t say anything, and Frances cried out in frustration, embarrassed by her failure.
“Why didn’t you ask my help?” he asked.
“Because I should like to do something on my own for once!” Frances said, pushing her plate away and standing up so abruptly that her chair clattered onto the floor. He never mentioned the incident afterwards, but he borrowed a shotgun from Mijnheer Reitz and would walk home in the evenings with a brace of quail or partridge, or a korhaan—a type of bustard—and he taught Sarah how to cook them.
Once a week Edwin rolled on top of her in the dark and expended the passion which seemed to be so lacking from the rest of his life. It was a relief when she realized he wouldn’t ask for it more often, and she let him fondle her breasts, showing neither enthusiasm nor unwilling. When it was over he kissed her gratefully, almost apologetically, as if he had defiled her in some way. He seemed satisfied by the perfunctory nature of these performances. He was a neat, careful, tidy man, and she thought her lack of ardor might well have suited him.
Unlike Frances, for whom the hours of each day stretched endlessly ahead, Edwin was always busy. He spent the evenings either in his study sterilizing specimens or in the sitting room reading articles by eminent geologists, while she gazed into the flame of a candle or flicked halfheartedly through one of his newspapers. It was just like him, she realized, to want to preserve and categorize the things around him. Life, with its unreliable physicality and mutable emotions, was too messy for his ordered mind. His study was where the inexorable transformation of life into history took place. Putting himself at the point of this axis empowered him.
Twenty-Two
Edwin picked his way across the veldt towards the house. When he saw her he gave a half wave then dropped down onto his knees in the scrub. He must have found an insect or a lizard. Frances stifled a yawn, padded into the house, and poured herself a glass of water. She glanced in the shard of mirror which hung over the counter in the kitchen and wiped a smudge of dirt off her forehead. She had only been here a couple of months, and already she looked so different: younger and less sophisticated. Her nose and cheeks were brown with freckles. She had given up wearing powder—her face grew too damp in the heat, and besides, there were no visitors to impress—and she had taken to wearing her hair in a single plait, rolled and pinned at the nape of her neck, as she had done as a child.
When she came outside again he was still on all fours, searching in the grass. His canvas knapsack lay open, and a selection of jars stood ready. She sipped at the warm water and felt the sweat from the summer’s heat drying against her skin. After a few moments he pulled something from the ground and dropped it into a glass jar. She wandered over to see what he had caught. A beetle lay spinning on its back.
Edwin shook the jar until the beetle righted itself. She realized the hot climate suited him. His face had taken on color, his hair had grown out and turned blond, and his gray eyes, when he glanced up at her, were clear. Living on the veldt liberated something in him. He didn’t seem as guarded as he had in London.
“Why do you do it?” she asked.
He squatted back on his heels and looked at her, pushing the hair off his forehead. “Where I grew up, there wasn’t any nature. Perhaps I’m compensating.”
“Wouldn’t it be more rewarding to go hunting?”
“For sport?”
She thought about William. There was a certain nobility in hunting at least. “Why not?”
“I wouldn’t enjoy it.”
“Because it’s dangerous?”
“Because I hate to see such waste.”
“Isn’t that wasteful?” she asked, gesturing at the beetle, which was paddling at the sides of the glass.
“There are millions of these beetles. One will make no difference to the species.”
“But killing a kudu will?”
He buttoned his knapsack and stood up, holding the jar loosely in one hand. They began to walk towards the house. “I think so, yes. There are so few kudu left in South Africa it seems a crime to kill any for the sake of a trophy on a wall.”
She laughed. “But that’s ridiculous. There must be thousands of them.”
“That’s what they said about the quagga, before they declared it extinct. Look at America. Just fifty years ago the plains were heaving with buffalo. Now you’d be hard pushed to find one in a zoo.”
• • •
ONE EVENING, Edwin encouraged her to join him on a walk; there was something he wanted to show her, he said. She was restless, tired o
f being cooped up in the house every day by herself, so she agreed. They set out just after sunrise on Sunday to climb the kopje which swelled up out of the plains at the back of the house. She wore the leather walking boots he had told her to bring and a white cotton dress which Sarah had hemmed shorter the previous evening so it wouldn’t trail on the ground.
The kopje was a difficult cluster of rocks and shifting earth. After half an hour she could feel her feet beginning to blister in the new boots, and she had to pause to catch her breath. “It’s the altitude,” he said, stopping beside her. “We’re at four thousand feet here.” It was hard to remember, under the searing heat of the sun, that when darkness fell they would be lighting a fire for warmth. The nights were so cool that when Frances came to bed in the evenings, with the casement window thrown open, she fell almost instantly into a deep and dreamless sleep.
When they arrived at the top of the kopje she saw a small, hollow cave about as high as her waist. “This is what I wanted to show you,” Edwin said, stooping to peer inside. “It belonged to Bushmen.”
“It can’t have done,” she said, genuinely amazed. “It’s too small.”
“Their women were only four feet tall, often smaller.” His voice echoed off the wall of the cave as he crawled inside. He lit a candle, and she scrambled in after him, over the old remains of a fire. He showed her the walls on which the Bushmen had painted subtle, faded pictures of men holding spears, dancing around fires, disguised as ostrich, lions, impala, and elephant. She thought how empty the veldt looked now, and how sad it was that the Bushmen’s world had changed so utterly. Edwin read her thoughts. “Not so long ago the plains were full of these animals—eland, gemsbok, blesbok, ostrich, wildebeest, even elephants.”
“What happened to them all?”
“The Boers and game hunters shot most of them into extinction.”
“For trophies?”
“In some cases. But, for the Boers, it was really about resources. They needed the grazing for themselves.”
“I can’t believe anyone would want this land. It’s little more than a desert.”
“That’s what they thought at first, but they couldn’t have been more wrong. These Karoo bushes are more nutritious than they look.” He picked the leaves of a few shrubs that grew at the entrance to the cave and handed them to her. They were short, tough, and sapless.
“When Reitz’s grandfather first grazed flocks here, there was no dam. His sheep survived for months without ever drinking. They drew their moisture entirely from the succulents and grasses. Virgin grazing. Now, of course, the soil is too dry. They couldn’t survive a week without water from the dam.”
The cave was eerie. It was full of ghosts, and a desperate sadness. The Bushmen must have seen the arrival of the Boers and the slaughtering of animals and known that they were being hunted to extinction just as surely as the quagga.
They emerged blinking into the light. The plain stretched out below them to the far horizon, its undulating smoothness broken only by the occasional swelling of kopjes. All the moisture had been burnt up out of the earth. The grasses, scorched, had turned the color of parchment. The light was so clear that you could see for what seemed like thousands of miles.
“Millions of years ago, the whole plateau—three hundred miles from end to end—was a vast lake.”
“Were there ever lions here?”
“Reitz’s father shot the last one thirty years ago. There are still leopard in the mountains, and the odd hyena is lurking about.”
“Hyena?” Frances wasn’t sure. “Is that what I’ve heard at night?” She was thinking of the spine-tingling wails which sounded like lunatics calling to each other across the plains.
“I saw one the other morning, near the river.” He bent down to pick up a fist-sized rock and turned it over in his hand. His shirtsleeves were rolled up, and the tendons tightened on his forearm as he moved the weight of it around his palm. “It ran off when it saw me.”
“Aren’t they dangerous?” She was amazed that he hadn’t told her.
He gave her a slow smile. “You think it would have eaten me?”
“I don’t know.” She laughed. “Haven’t they been known to attack people?”
“Perhaps. But I shouldn’t think they would unless they were provoked.”
He handed her the rock, and she saw the white, fossilized skeleton of a reptile frozen into its surface. It occurred to her that permanence was an illusion; everything on earth was in a state of change. Flesh to soil, skeleton to stone; transformation was a fact of life. Even her cousins, who seemed so secure in London, wouldn’t escape the force of it, and she suddenly felt less desperate being out here, so far from home. She handed the rock back to Edwin, and he said, “Frances, you’re very welcome to visit the quarantine station.” She didn’t answer immediately, trying to make out what he meant, and he said, “I thought you might be interested to see what I do.”
“Of course,” she said, thinking that she should have been the one to ask, but it hadn’t occurred to her. He nodded, pleased.
That evening, Edwin showed her the two tiny arrowheads which he had found in the Bushmen’s cave. They didn’t need to be large, he said, because the Bushmen were expert toxicologists. They tipped their arrows with poison taken from the venom of a cobra and ground it down with poisonous bulbs.
Twenty-Three
The Reitzes had a driver called Jantjie, who took Frances in a mule cart through Jacobsdal to the junction between the Modder and Riet Rivers, where the main transport roads from the Cape converged. He was an ancient man with a face whose skin had crumpled into the deepest shade of brown. A fuzz of white hair was cropped close to his head, and his eyes were milky with cataracts, but his body was tough, wiry, and immensely strong. Once, when they were reinforcing the dam at the farm, she saw him carrying a steel as long as his body across his back to the water’s edge.
The veldt around the quarantine station had been worn to dust under the tramp of so many feet, and there was now just a flat area of sand and gravel, with no vegetation, over which men and women of all classes were milling. A stench of rotten eggs permeated the whole place. Two large canvas tents had been set up beside an old wattle-and-daub barn, and men in uniform carrying rifles strolled between them. A queue of people snaked out of one of the tents, shielding their faces with hats and shawls against the sun. They had the same resigned look as Mijnheer Reitz’s sheep, waiting their turn to be watered at the dam. Along the side of the road was a motley collection of wagons and carts and a carriage, the sun glinting off fresh paint. A team of oxen had been outspanned, and a few horses, unharnessed, cropped at the parched shrubs. Their coats had hardened into dry, chalky reefs of sweat, and they shook their heads periodically to keep off flies.
It was a huge operation stopping everyone from the Cape, and Frances thought Edwin must have enjoyed the responsibility of being the man in charge. She asked an officer in khaki where she might find him, and was pointed in the direction of one of the large tents. As she approached, she saw Edwin emerging, walking quickly. He was followed by an older, stout-looking gentleman who was shouting at him. A lady ran behind them, clutching at her bonnet and tripping over her dress. She looked like a rare butterfly blown across the veldt in her fine yellow silks.
“God damn you, Sir, you’ll look at me when I talk to you.” The man was hot and angry, and squeezed both his fists as if he was itching to use them. The people in the queue turned to watch.
Edwin stopped and faced him. They were only a couple of yards from Frances.
“You will forgive me, my Lord.” His voice was perfectly contained. “I understand your delicacy in this matter, but I cannot sympathize with it. You and your wife must be vaccinated.”
The man’s voice broke into a scream, and a fine spray of spittle shot over Edwin. “And I tell you we will not.” He shouted to his coachman. “Harness the horses. We’re leaving.”
“Sir, what is it you are afraid of?” Edwin asked. “P
erhaps I can reassure you.”
“I’ll not be called a coward!”
Edwin looked fixedly at him, and the man seemed compelled to justify himself. He lowered his voice. “I have it from a good source that vaccines carry certain diseases.”
“You mean syphilis?” Edwin gave a bark of laughter. The lady put a hand to her mouth, and the man’s face turned purple. Frances had heard this rumor. “If you break out in the pox, Sir, I can assure you it won’t be from my vaccine.”
“But it is unnatural!” the man cried out. “It is utterly contrary to nature. It’s an abhorrence on the human body.”
“So is wearing clothes, and yet none of us choose to go around naked.”
The man took his wife’s hand. “Come, Elizabeth!” He marched her past Edwin, towards his carriage.
“Sir,” Edwin called after him, “the choice is yours. Either you and your wife must be vaccinated, or you will remain with us for six weeks’ quarantine.”
The man turned and, walking quickly back to Edwin, swung at him with his fist. Edwin sidestepped and the man’s knuckles glanced across his cheek. When he swung again Edwin caught his wrist and held it, and Frances was surprised at the ease with which he held the other man back.
“Cullen! Tom!” he shouted. Two men came running forward. “Please see that Lord Rothermere is shown to the vaccination tent.”
“On whose authority, you trumped-up jackass?” the man called over his shoulder at Edwin, trying to throw off the arms of the men who were leading him away. “How dare you put your hands on me. I’ll see to it you appear in court!”
Edwin looked after him, seemingly unmoved, only the toe of his boot digging into the sand. Then he turned and glanced at Frances with a tight, tired smile. He had known she was there all along. This was a dirty job, she realized, and she pitied him. He might be in charge of a dozen or so men armed with guns, but he was a social pariah, disliked by the people who rode through on their way to Kimberley. It was lonely, isolated work, and she suspected that most doctors would have turned it down. She wondered again why he had agreed to come here.
The Fever Tree Page 17