The Fever Tree
Page 19
She enjoyed using her muscles. Her legs firmed up, she thought about William less, and she found she had more energy. Soon it wasn’t enough to go out only on Sundays, and she began to get up with Edwin at dawn, pushing herself out of bed in the dark. They ate a quick, hushed breakfast by candlelight. When he left for the quarantine station, she would step out into the veldt. This was her favorite time of day. She reveled in the cool of early morning, the sky still cold and desaturated but the earth glowing orange as if bathed in fire.
She discovered that if you looked closely at the veldt it transformed itself into a living, breathing thing. The black, lichen-covered rock gleamed green and flickered out a tongue. Two small bushes, indistinguishable from the surrounding scrub, quivered then blew across the plain—ostrich chicks. A clump of brown and yellow soil stirred, thrust out a leathered neck, and ambled, undeniably tortoise-like, towards the dam. And the silence resolved itself into the checkered sound of insects, the beating of wings, and the wind feeling its way through the grasses. Once, a scorpion scuttled out from between the crack in a rock. She watched, fascinated, as ten miniature, translucent copies of the mother climbed off her back in military formation. If Edwin had been there, he would have scooped them into a tin and forced them into a bottle of alcohol, where, dangling lifelessly, they could be examined without risk.
They walked back one Sunday the two miles from the river past a termite mound which had been freshly raided. Soil had been turned over and flung about in rich, orange clumps. Edwin picked up something that looked like a rock and held it up for her to see. It was a perfectly preserved bulbous frog, mummified in a block of earth.
At home, Edwin filled a glass jug full of water and dropped the frog into it. Frances watched, interested but doubtful. The earth crumbled away to the bottom and the frog sank. Then, after a moment, a ripple. The water trembled, a leg paddled, and an eye blinked open. It was a miracle, and she laughed, delighted.
“It might have been there for years,” Edwin said. “Hibernating. Waiting for rain.”
“You mustn’t kill it,” she said, putting a hand on his arm. The thought of Edwin pickling this creature, after its long wait in the sand, seemed impossibly sad.
Edwin looked at her curiously.
“Let me paint it,” she said, “then we can let it go.”
The next day, Frances painted their bullfrog. It sat squat at the bottom of a glass bowl blinking at her through heavy-lidded eyes. Mangwa was dozing in the shade. The silence was punctuated by the whisking of his tail as it swept over his back.
It took time to capture him. She had never drawn an animal before, only plants, and he kept moving about, so she had to get a sense of the muscularity of his body imprinted in her mind before she could begin putting her impressions on paper. His body from nose to tip existed on one plane, except for the marbled eyes. His skin was gnarled and granular, like a barnacled rock. She fed him the flies which Sarah caught for her in a little jar. When they fell on the surface of the water he extended his legs in a fluid kick and slid them off the surface with a lick of his tongue. Finally, satisfied with her drawing, she poured him out into the dam and watched him paddle his way into the gloom.
Frances was unsure whether Edwin would like what she had done. She thought it would hardly please the eye of a naturalist.
“It’s very successful,” he said, holding it up to the light and smiling at her. She was pleased. Edwin wasn’t someone to give praise lightly. “But see the feet,” he said, pointing. “You need to be a little clearer. I can’t see here how many toes he had. And did you catch sight of the tongue?” She nodded. “Good. Well you should draw that on the side, as a separate detail.”
Edwin began to give her specimens to draw: beetles, lizards, and flying insects, and in return he let her set them free.
• • •
THE EWES WERE SHEARED at the beginning of April, before the lambing started, and on the Sunday Edwin was drafted in to help. Frances walked up to the farm in the late afternoon. She could hear the sheep from a long way off; a cacophony of bleating rising up into the still, hot air. The grasses on the veldt were so dry they turned to dust when she stepped on them, and the ground had begun to crack with thirst. Summer was all but over, and the rains still hadn’t come.
The men were working under the full glare of the sun. Two of them managed the sheep in the kraals, filtering them into the hands of the others, who waited with shears, the blades huge in their hands and dull like zinc. She leant on the fence of the nearest kraal, watching. The men were so crusted with dirt, their hair caked to their heads with dust and sweat, that it took her a moment to make out which one was Edwin. He stood with a ewe thrust between his knees, one hand holding both her legs and the other sloughing the wool off her swollen belly. He was talking to her in a low voice, and she lay in a stupor, her eyes half shut, her breath coming in short pants. When he flipped her upright she darted forward, a white bundle of shorn, naked angles, to join the flock. The men at the gates fed another one through to him, and the process started again. He had a quiet confidence, she realized, not just in the way he handled the ewes but in every aspect of his life. He never seemed to doubt himself. It was as if he didn’t require anything, or anyone, to be complete. Frances blinked the dust out of her eyes and shifted her weight off the fence. He was whole and content as he was, and this was attractive but also faintly threatening.
On the far side of the kraal was a mountain of freshly shorn wool, black with flies and stinking of grease. A group of women with scarves wrapped around their heads were bagging the wool into large canvas sacks. Mevrouw Reitz was amongst them. Frances made her way over. “Can I help?”
“There’s not much in it for you but bread and cheese,” the woman said, but when Frances didn’t move away she motioned with her head to the pile of canvas sacks. Frances worked for two hours, her hands deep in the wool, her fingernails thick with grime. The fleece was coarse and matted, and it left red welts across the palms of her hands.
When the women were done, the sun was slipping below the horizon and the kraal floors were a pattern of long shadows. The men had finished shearing. They washed in the trough then stood stretching their backs, pushing the wet hair off their foreheads. Edwin caught Frances’s eye across the kraal and smiled, and she thought, We are almost friends. Then it was the women’s turn to wash, and one by one they dunked their faces in the trough, scrubbing at their hands, necks, and cheeks. The water was like balm against the heat of her face, and it ran needles of cold down her neck into her dress. Mevrouw Reitz passed around a basket of bread and cheese, and the saltiness was rich and thick on Frances’s tongue.
They walked back, just the two of them, past the empty kraals, the barns, and the farmhouse, under a gray sky emptied of light. A thread of cold air pushed over the earth. Edwin’s shirt was ripped and smeared with dirt and his trousers were caked in grease. There was a looseness about him. She could sense his tiredness, like hers, in the luxuriating slowness with which he walked and in the stretching out of his shoulders.
It was almost dark now. The night air held just a faint residue of light. “I didn’t know you could shear,” she said quietly.
“Why would you have known?” There was a squeak as he pulled the cork out of a small bottle and passed it to her.
“Where did you get it?” They had barely had any alcohol in the months Frances had been there.
“Mijnheer Reitz gave it to me.”
She took a sip. It was peach brandy, sweet and strong after the cheese, and it pulled on the corners of her mouth. He stopped and looked up. They stood under the canopy of the fever tree. It was darker here than the sky outside, and the birds flitted like bats between the branches. The bottle was sticky, and as she passed it back to him she saw that he had left a brown smear on the glass. She took hold of his hand and turned it over. His palm had been sliced open by a blade. The edges of the wound were clogged dry with dirt, but the center still glistened.
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��Does it hurt?” Her voice sounded loud in the gathering gloom.
“It’s not deep,” he said slowly, and although she looked at his palm she could sense the weight of his hand in hers, his gaze on her, and the taut closeness of his body. “The shears get blunt as you work.”
He took his hand from her and tipped the brandy bottle to his lips, and she imagined the dark, sweet liquid gliding over his tongue.
• • •
LATER, WHEN SHE SAT in the bedroom in her nightdress rubbing oil into her face, she felt a lump just below her earlobe. It moved backwards and forwards under her finger. She pulled a shawl from the bed and went through to Edwin’s study. He sat with a glass in a bandaged hand, the brandy bottle almost empty on his desk. His eyes were heavy with tiredness and drink.
“I can feel something. On my neck,” she said, standing in the doorway.
He pulled a chair over for her to sit. She let her shawl slip down her back, swept her hair to one side, and tilted her head so he could see it.
“It’s a tick,” he said, drawing back and looking at her with a half smile. “From the sheep.”
“Will you be able to get it out?” she asked.
“Can you keep still?”
She nodded, and he lit a match, letting it burn for a few seconds before blowing it out. Then he pulled his chair close to her and pushed one hand into her hair to hold her still. With the other he used the hot end of the match to burn the tick. She flinched when she felt the heat of the match against her skin, but the grasp of his other hand held her steady. She could smell the warmth rising from his body, the dried sweat, and the brandy on his breath. His shirtsleeve, rolled up, brushed against her mouth. For a second she wanted him to kiss her, wanted to feel him lean forward and cover her mouth with his, but he was already withdrawing his hand from her hair. He put the match down and took up a pair of tweezers, and she felt a tugging against her skin. After a moment he tapped the tick into a bottle; a swollen brown sac with orange legs.
His gray eyes settled on hers. He had consumed almost the whole bottle of brandy, but there was nothing drunk about him. He was as contained and watchful as ever. The only change was a kind of tiredness, a letting go, which manifested itself in a languorous ease. The lamp guttered, hissed, and revived. She registered as a prickling on her scalp the place where his hand had held her and her want for him to reach out and touch it again, in the same place as he had before.
“It was good of you to help Mevrouw Reitz,” he said, after a moment.
“I’m not sure she noticed. Sometimes I feel she can barely bring herself to look at me.”
Edwin gave a low laugh. “She told me she thought you were coming along well.”
“Did she?” Frances smiled, easily able to imagine the Boer woman casting judgment. There was a small silence. She thought she ought to stand up and leave, but there was something in Edwin’s stillness which made her feel obliged to offer something more. As if he were waiting for her.
“Do you ever think about England?” she asked.
“Not as much as I should.” He rubbed a hand over his face. “I think about my family. I worry that they don’t have enough to live on, and that I send them too little. But I don’t miss living there.”
“Your brothers have work, don’t they?”
“In factories, yes.” He leant back in his chair. “Not much of a life.”
“It’s been a cold winter.”
“Yes.”
The frozen rivers, the pinched, frostbitten faces, the gray cities teeming with people—it seemed worlds away from the hot, quiet closeness of the room in which they sat and the miles of empty veldt outside.
She spoke into the silence, needing to unburden herself. “I dreamt last night that I was in London, in my uncle’s house.” The dream had disturbed her, though she wasn’t sure why. “I had a plant with me, a cutting from a tree which I had taken from Rietfontein. I wanted to show it to my cousins, but when I took it out of my pocket I realized it was dead. It had shriveled up into a spiny knot of thorns.”
“Were you upset?”
“I was devastated. I cried like a child.”
His eyes were clear as he looked at her. “Because you wanted them to see it, or because it had died?”
“That’s just it.” He had identified the thing which was bothering her. “It wasn’t just because I wanted them to see it. I was upset because it was no longer alive and somehow it was my fault.”
He didn’t say anything, and she felt a wave of sadness come over her. She bit her lip to hold back the tears, and after a moment stood up and moved out of the room.
Twenty-Four
Frances sat on the stoep watching the two men walk out of the veldt towards her. They were still far off, their figures no more than dark silhouettes against the sinking sun. Mangwa was crunching the balustrade between his teeth, occasionally curling his upper lip in distaste. She ought to have stopped him an hour ago—already there was a pile of wood chippings and paint on the floor—but it seemed pointless. The little house was crumbling into the veldt, with or without his help.
The heat made Frances lethargic, but she stood up as the men drew closer and pushed the zebra’s muzzle away. She couldn’t help admiring him. His brown fur was beginning to give way to the rippling, glossy coat of an adult zebra, and his body had the compact strength of a wild animal. He butted her with his nose, nibbling at her clothes with his lips, which tickled her skin and made her laugh. It was her husband, she realized, taking in the knapsack slung over his shoulders, walking with a man she didn’t recognize. Frances had been sure that she would know Joseph Baier in an instant—that the influence he had exerted over her life would single him out for her—but in fact she looked at him blankly until Edwin introduced them.
He was a small man who carried too much weight, and he arrived on their doorstep panting in the heat. His eyes, sunken into folds of pink flesh, darted about with surprising speed, disconcertingly at odds with the heavy softness of his body. He must have been in his fifties, but his bulk gave him a false youthfulness. An infant’s chubbiness smoothed out the lines on his face.
“So, Mrs. Matthews,” he said, eyeing up the cracked plaster and warped floorboards. His voice was a nasal whine. “This is quite a change, isn’t it?” He paused on the word “change,” giving it an unquestionable emphasis of disdain, while at the same time smiling quickly as if he were turning a knife in a pig, hoping it would squeal.
“From London? Yes. I can’t get used to the heat.”
“No more gilt taps and lace curtains.” He moved as he talked, thrusting his hands in and out of his pockets, adjusting his necktie and looking around the room like a prospecting landlord. He had a restless, unsettled manner. “Aren’t you Sir John Hamilton’s niece?” he asked.
Frances knew a little about Joseph Baier from listening to William. He was a Jew from the East End who had been one of the first to the diamond fields and made a vast fortune. She imagined he enjoyed parading William around the fields: the educated, cultured boy whom he held in check with his vast reserves of money.
“He dropped in at the quarantine station,” Edwin said quietly, when Baier was washing in the trough outside. “We’ll have to put him up for the night.”
“What do you do, Edwin, with such a delicate wife?” Baier asked over supper. “Keep her caged up here like a bird while you go around saving lives?” Frances supposed the power Baier wielded at the Cape allowed him to say anything he liked. It occurred to her that he might allude to her relationship with William. He looked like the kind of man who might do it just for his own amusement.
“She keeps herself very well without my help.”
“I’ve always thought women aren’t so different from your beloved kaffirs. Loath to work and with a strong sense of their own entitlement.” Baier laughed, nudging the mealies around on his plate. “And, of course, they can’t always be trusted.”
Frances watched him, transfixed, her heart thudding.
There was a pause where no one said anything. Edwin’s face was rigid. Something was going on between the two men which she didn’t understand.
“It’s not a question of currency. I wouldn’t do something that made me ashamed.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that! I think you would do a fair amount to keep your wife in comfort.” There was another brittle silence. “And I thought you were a man of pride!” Baier pushed his plate away carelessly, knocking it into the candlestick. Wax spilled over the table. He produced a toothpick from his pocket and began poking it between his teeth as he talked. She could see the end was wet and bloody. “The elusive man of principle turns out to be human after all. Who would have guessed you had a weakness for the finer things in life?” He smiled at Frances. “You know, Mrs. Matthews, we thought he was terribly serious. You could never get him to laugh. He was always on some campaign or other.” He paused, thoughtful, his fingers still stabbing at his gums.
“Are you still intent on saving niggers?” he asked Edwin.
“As many as I can.”
“He got quite upset in Kimberley,” Baier said, looking at Frances. “Took a shine to a kaffir girl. A nice piece of nigger flesh, but she wasn’t quite honest. We had to take her away. Got himself into quite a state about it. And there’s some in Kimberley who won’t stand for that sort of thing.”
Frances couldn’t work out why Edwin didn’t say anything. He ought to be defending himself. The man was clearly a brute, but Edwin was a coward for not standing up to him.
“And there was me thinking you had settled down, after that little debacle with the articles—”