‘We don’t use this room much,’ a voice behind her said.
She spun round. Mr. Smuts had been standing in the doorway.
‘I’m sorry . . . I didn’t know where to go.’
‘It’s a lovely room, isn’t it? You could sit in that window and throw a stone into the sea. And in the evening, looking out onto the reef . . . I can tell you, my friend, I’ve never seen anything like it. Look around you. Ever seen such a mixture of things?’ He had touched a low teak chest, his fingers straying lovingly over the oiled surface. ‘Medicine chest, Clan MacGregor, 1902.’ On the far side of the room he had indicated a marble-topped table on which stood a vase of ostrich feathers. ‘Wash stand. Queen of the Thames, 1871. See that wine cabinet? Rose wood. That was off the Arniston in 1815. And those decanters. H.M.S. Greyhound.’
‘You mean all the furniture came from ships that went onto the reef?’
‘Only some of the pieces. And not all the ships went down on the India Reef. No, no. Some sank off Cape Infanta, some off Cape Agulhas. Quoin Point. Danger Point. This is what we call the wreck coast. There’s more than fifty gone down within a few miles of here. Started with the Dutch ship Zoetendal in 1673 and they’re still going down.’
‘But where did all this furniture come from? Was it washed ashore?’
‘Some of it. Most of it was bought at auctions by Mr. Preller’s family. Come and look at this.’ He had led the way into a room next door. It was a dining-room with a long refectory table. ‘Oak,’ he had said, smoothing its surface. ‘English oak. Came out of the Nicobar. English East Indiaman that went down just a few miles from here. They say the table floated to our beach. See those chandeliers? From the Saxenburg. She went down off Agulhas in 1729. That sideboard came out of her, too. So did the figurehead in the hall. Bought by Mr. Preller’s family at auction. That’s why they named this place Saxenburg House when they built it. Come and have some breakfast.’
They had taken their breakfast – as they still did – in a small room overlooking the cliffs.
‘You should have seen this place in the old days,’ he had said, pointing at her with a finger of toast. ‘Parties, balls. People came all the way from Cape Town. Swimming, tennis. We had an opera company here once. Mrs. Preller used to be fond of music. Something called a string quartet, too. Never heard such a terrible noise. Now . . . well, now it’s not the same.’ His voice had fallen and he seemed to be looking inward, as though sensing old age coming, and the change in himself. ‘Boss Charles always said the good times would come again. But I don’t know . . . Come on, I’ll show you round the place.’
Outside in the bright morning sunshine she had seen the house for the first time in some detail. It was three storeys and almost completely square, built of mountain stone with two curved Dutch gables facing the sea. Each window had a pair of teak shutters, most of which were closed. On the landward side of the house were sheds and out-buildings, which she had not seen the night before. Everywhere she had looked there were ostriches, some in pairs, some in flocks.
‘Feather dusters,’ Smuts had said. ‘That’s all they’re good for now.’
She had seen the sheds where the wagons were kept and the room where the feathers were packed; she saw the ‘plucking boxes,’ and the area where a few sheep were kept. Gradually, she had realised that everything was in a state of decay.
‘See those?’ Smuts had pointed to what looked like a series of dusty chests of drawers against the wall of one of the sheds. ‘Incubators. We used to incubate hundreds of eggs in the old days. Now what’s the point?’ She had recognised even then – and had heard it dozens of times afterwards – that the phrase ‘the good old days’ was a kind of litany.
‘Morning, Master.’
‘Morning, Jonas.’
This was the first time she had seen Jonas. He was a very dark-skinned Cape coloured in his late twenties, dressed in dusty khaki clothing and broken shoes. On his head he had worn an old felt hat from which rose a beautiful, pure white ostrich plume.
‘Have you finished that fencing?’
‘I got no more wire, Master.’
‘Is there no more in the shed?’
‘No, Master.’
As he spoke, Jonas had looked at Kate.
He was good-looking, powerfully built, and she could see his dark skin under the open shirt. His look was aggressively sexual and she had turned away, uncomfortable.
‘All right, we’re going into town in a little while.’ Smuts had walked on. ‘That’s Jonas. We used to have twenty or thirty like him in the old days. Now he’s the only one left. Do you want to see the town in daylight?’
‘What about Mrs . . .?’
‘Mrs. Preller doesn’t want you this morning.’
‘Well, I need to go to the bank.’
‘We’ll take the lorry.’
This was a small truck and at first Kate had wondered how they would all fit on the front seat, but then Jonas had climbed into the open back.
They had bumped over the pot-holed road. The country in daylight had given her much the same impression as it had the night before: dry, sandy, with the dusty green carpet of fynbos stretching as far as the distant mountains. The lorry had clattered and banged with such violence that she’d had to hold onto the side of the seat to stop herself flying into the air. Dust had risen from the wooden floorboards.
Soon they had reached the outskirts of Helmsdale. They had approached it from the cliffs winding down to sea-level. ‘Look over there,’ Smuts had shouted as the road dipped down. They were passing a mock-Tudor mansion with fake beams, set against what had once been white walls. Through a pair of massive gates of iron lacework she had seen the jumble of an overgrown garden. The windows of the house were covered with rusty corrugated iron, gutterings hung from the roof, down-pipes stood askew, and a windmill, its blades rusted and broken, looked like a pterodactyl standing on its long thin legs.
‘That’s “De Rust,”’ Smuts had said. ‘Used to be the Van Staden place. And see that over there?’
A little farther along, on the opposite side of the road, there was another vast house, this time in the Scottish baronial style, built of stone with a round tower. Here the gates hung brokenly from their posts, windows were smashed and again the garden was wild and overgrown. ‘That’s the old Richardson place.’
They had passed three more such houses with towers, wrought-iron balconies, leaded windows, doors of heavy teak, bleached and cracked by the sun and the wind.
‘Ostrich houses, that’s what they were called. Built in the old days when things were good. You know how much they cost? Twenty thousand, thirty thousand pounds! They had to quarry the stone up in the mountains. Brought in architects from Paris and London. Stone-masons from Cornwall. All paid for with feathers, my friend. They reckon between 1910 and 1914 nearly fifteen million pounds came into Helmsdale.’
‘What happened in 1914?’ Kate had said, bumping up and down and clinging onto her hat.
‘The war, my friend, that’s what happened. You don’t wear ostrich feathers in wartime. At first these people had farms back there.’ He had waved at the hazy mountains in the interior. ‘Lived like poor whites. They couldn’t read or write, some of them. Didn’t know how to hold a cup and saucer. But they had ostriches, and when the boom started, they became rich overnight. You should have seen what they bought: marble from Italy, porcelain from France; they had sunken baths and furniture from England; ty bought their table silver in Sheffield and their linen from Ireland. They couldn’t spend it all. Feathers were selling for two hundred pounds a pound. There was one chap who bought a whole library from Germany. Couldn’t read German. Couldn’t even read English, but he wanted a library, so he bought one. And they built their houses here, their ostrich houses, by the sea.’
‘Where are they now?’
‘Gone. Sold up for what they could get.’
The centre of the town was a grid of half a dozen wide streets. She had noticed one or two bullock wa
gons with spans of twelve or fourteen oxen being driven up the unmade main street, a few Cape carts, some riders on horse-back, horses tethered to the hitching-rails along the street and a sprinkling of cars and trucks. No building was more than two storeys; most were one.
Smuts had parked at the dusty sidewalk and Jonas had jumped down from the back.
‘You go and get the wire,’ Smuts had told him. ‘And come back to the lorry, d’you hear?’
‘Yes, Master.’
‘I don’t want you buggering off like last time, you understand?’
‘Yes, Master.’
As Jonas turned away, Smuts had said to Kate, ‘If he gets his hands on a bottle, the women have to look out.’ He had pointed to a single-storey building on the far side of the street that looked like a private house. ‘That’s the bank. I have business to do. I’ll be back in a couple of hours. If you want a cup of tea, there’s the Evergreen Café. They should have the Cape Town papers by now, they come in on the early train.’
She had watched him go off up the sidewalk with his bandy-legged strut and then she crossed the road. A bullock wagon was being turned. Its rear was at one sidewalk, the front bullocks at the other. She had realised then why the streets were so wide.
There had been no customers in the bank and she had quickly made arrangements to transfer money she received in Helmsdale to her mother’s account in Cape Town. On the street again, she had decided to have a look around. What there was of the centre was quickly seen. She had walked down the main street and along one or two of the side streets. It was the first small South African town she had ever been in, but it was not long before she had realised that something was desperately wrong with it.
She had been born in a city and had emigrated to another, she was used to people and bustle, here there was neither. The sidewalks had been almost empty. She had walked slowly down the main street. Each building was a replica of its neighbour. Most were white, with small pointed gables and corrugated-iron verandah roofs to enable shoppers to stroll in the shade. But there had not been any shoppers, in fact, there were few shops. Every third one had been closed, dark blue blinds covering the windows. Some had had ‘For Sale’ notices in them, some ‘To Rent’.
The town’s commercial centre became residential without any dividing line and many of the small bungalows were closed up and for sale. It was as though a plague had come to Helmsdale. She had turned down another street and seen a sign which said Preller Motors. A mechanic was working on a car, but the showroom where the new models should have stood was empty. Coming back into the main street, she had seen Preller’s Hotel. And down at the little fishing harbour a sign on a corrugated iron building read, ‘Preller Fertilizers’. She had paused to watch the fish market. A crowd of Cape coloured folk had gathered. The fish were being sold in bunches, tied together by strips of cane passed through the gills. They had all looked so different from the plaice and the cod and the haddock of Edinburgh. There had been red fish and silvery-yellow fish and copper-coloured fish and some with sharp, spike-like jaws and some with flattened noses. As she turned away she had seen on a slope of rising ground above the beach, what seemed to be a separate village, a kind of suburb of small, pretty white-washed cottages with dark thatch above. They looked like the bothies she had seen in the Central Highlands.
She had walked through the village, followed by a group of noisy coloured children, and soon realised that it was a coloured area. She was the only white person in it. She turned and began to retrace her steps. As she did so, something white flashed in one of the doorways. It was the ostrich plume on Jonas’s hat. He was drinking from a bottle of wine. He had wiped the neck of the bottle and handed it to someone inside the house. As Kate saw him, he had glanced in her direction and with one fluid movement regained the interior of the cottage. It all happened so quickly that she had wondered whether, in fact, it had been Jonas. She had walked slowly down to the beach and turned up the main street.
She and Smuts had reached the lorry simultaneously. Jonas had been lying in the back, his white-plumed hat covering his face, a roll of barbed wire at his feet.
‘They sleep any bloody where, these people,’ Smuts had said. ‘Climb in.’ She had decided that it could not have been Jonas she had seen in the fishing village.
They had driven back along the road above the cliff, passing the empty ‘ostrich’ houses, and Kate had been struck by the eeriness of recent decay. She had noticed other things about the gardens: the broken bottles near the gates, but also the remnants of cultivation, plumbago and agapanthus pushing their way through the weeds at the side of the overgrown carriage drives. She remembered thinking how splendid it must once have been: the music and picnics and tennis parties. It was the kind of society she had read about in Britain, but of which she had never even touched the fringe. Yet it had thrived in this remote and inhospitable place.
Betty had come from the house to fetch Smuts’s parcels. Jonas had jumped down from the back and was lifting out the barbed wire. Kate remembered vividly how the girl had walked out with a swing to her hips, the wind pressing her thin dress to her body, outlining her sharp young breasts and her rounded thighs. Jonas had watched as she bent to pick up the parcels from the front seat. Then he had leaned towards her and said something which Kate could not catch but which Smuts, coming round the front of the lorry, had heard. Betty had straightened and looked at Jonas with a glance that was at once angry and inviting.
Smuts had smiled. ‘Jonas, you bugger, I don’t want to hear you say things like that.’
The two men had laughed.
‘Betty!’
Lena had been on the front steps, her face angry. Betty had hurried up the steps and her mother had hissed at her and pushed her into the house. Then she turned and screeched at Jonas. Kate had not understood what she said, but her meaning was clear enough.
‘Lena will fix you, Jonas,’ Smuts had said, laughing. ‘Look out for her.’
*
‘What time is the funeral?’ Mrs. Preller said as they arrived back at Saxenburg after the inquest.
‘Three o’clock,’ Smuts said.
‘We will leave at twenty to. Lena as well.’
‘Yes, Miss Augusta.’
‘Have they got a rabbi?’
‘I don’t know.’
Kate took the old woman’s arm and helped her up the steps. She was as thin as a rail. ‘I have some letters,’ she said.
‘Now?’
‘No, no, the usual time.’
After seeing her to her door, Kate went up to her room. A breeze had begun to blow from the sea and she opened her windows gratefully. It was a lovely, brilliant day and she should have been feeling part of it, instead Miriam’s tragedy loomed over her. And yet she knew this was not the only reason for her depression.
Ever since she had sailed with her family from Southampton she had kept a diary. It was a simple affair with just enough information to remind her of a day or a week. Then, after she had begun the affair with Tom, she had kept her entries in shorthand. She took it from the drawer of the bedside table and sat down on her bed. She paged back until she came to a small cross above an entry just over two months earlier. It was the last time she and Tom had made love. She counted forward. She had done this several times in the past two days, hoping that somehow the numbers would come out differently. But there was no mistake: her period was two months overdue. She closed the diary and sat staring at the wall. If only Tom was free. If only he had told her on the ship that he was married. If only . . .
She felt as an animal must feel driven into a corner by dogs. She had two alternatives: the first, to have the baby, was unthinkable. Mrs. Preller would never keep her on and, anyway, who was to maintain the family and herself and a baby? The other alternative was to have it removed. But how could that be done? She had known a secretary in Edinburgh who’d had an abortion in Leith. She had returned to the office as pale as death and it had taken her weeks to recover fully. But Leith was six t
housand miles away. After the last row with Tom and the break between them, she would not go to him for help. In any case, what could he do? He was as much a stranger in Africa as she. She had no friends; not even an acquaintance she could approach. She knew that Mrs. Preller liked her, but asking her advice was out of the question. That left only Lena. She and Lena had become friends, but there was a strong bond between Lena and Mrs. Preller. Would she not be likely to pass on confidences to her employer? Lena’s religious views could also inhibit any understanding. Kate knew she had very little time in which to decide what to do; as each day passed, an abortion became more difficult and more dangerous.
She put the diary away as she heard the gong announcing lunch. She and Smuts ate together. He tended to gobble his food, without talking much and she enjoyed her meals more when Charles spent week-ends at the house. He had described Smuts as a ‘coarse feeder’, and she agreed with him. Normally she got on well enough with Smuts, but meal-times were a trial. A small handbell stood at his right hand and he rang it constantly, summoning Betty for the most trivial things. He smoked a brand of cigarette called Commando and a box of fifty was kept on the windowsill. At the end of each meal he would ring the bell, Betty would appear and pass them to him.
Once Kate had remonstrated with him, saying she could easily pass them. He had said, ‘What do you think servants are for, my friend?’
He had a strange relationship with them: one minute he seemed friendly and on their own level, joking and teasing. But at the slightest hint that anyone had overstepped the mark and threatened his dignity he could come down harshly on the offender. Kate decided that, like the relationship between Lena and Betty, the one between Smuts and the servants was none of her business.
The Sea Cave Page 4