The Sea Cave

by Alan Scholefield

  ‘Drink.’

  She drank.

  It was brandy. Half a tumblerful. It burned her throat and stomach. It seemed to burn deep down . . . deep down . . .

  She had no idea how long she lay on the bed for she fainted then and when she came to she was alone. The pain was bad. She put her hand down and felt the towelling. One square was put on as on a baby, with safety pins. The other had been used as a pad underneath it. She tried to move her legs and pain shot through her.

  Rosie stood in the doorway. ‘Is madam all right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I call Sarah.’

  The fat woman stood in the door, completely blocking it. ‘You going to be all right,’ she said. ‘There’s some blood. It will stop tomorrow. You can sleep there.’

  ‘I want to go.’

  ‘You going to walk?’

  ‘No. I want a taxi.’

  Twenty minutes later she was at the hotel. It was not quite eleven o’clock and she ordered two double brandies to be sent to her room. She took off her dress and knickers and soaked them in the basin. Then she put a towel down on the bed and eased herself gently onto it. She drank both the brandies quickly, ignoring the burning. Then she lay back and for the first time in many years, she cried. She cried partly because of the pain and the squalor and the humiliation but also partly because she felt a sense of loss, almost a bereavement.

  She was still sore the following day and spent it in the hotel, sending down at noon for a plate of sandwiches. She could have telephoned Tom, or her parents, or even Charles, if he hadn’t gone to Saxenburg for the week-end. But she did none of these things. Instead, she sat in the window overlooking the Grand Parade and watched the flower-sellers and the fruit-sellers. She sat there for most of the day thinking about Tom and about Charles and about herself. Towards evening she went out and walked a little. She bought a cup of coffee and a polony sandwich at a stall on the Parade, then returned to the hotel, ordered more brandies and went to bed. The following day, Sunday, she took the afternoon train to Saxenburg. No one had seen her; no one knew.

  Chapter Six

  The death of Miriam – and her life – became the sole topic of conversation in Helmsdale for some weeks after the inquest but even that faded as a new interest arose; specially so at Saxenburg. The feather boom predicted by Sachs began to accelerate and the estate, like some creature brought to life after a long sleep, began to function again.

  Mrs. Preller began ordering fashion magazines and kept, as best she could from her home on the southern tip of Africa, her eye on the fashions of New York, London and Paris. From the text and pictures in the magazines it was apparent that the feminine appetite for luxury was growing; its most obvious symbol was the ostrich feather. Queen Mary was one of the leaders in the ostrich feather revival; she wore plumes in her hats and was often seen to be carrying them as fans. ‘We should give her a commission,’ Smuts said to Mrs. Preller. ‘She’s doing our business for us.’

  ‘Talking of commissions. I hear from Dr. du Toit that Sachs is out of hospital. Have you seen him?’

  ‘Not yet. But he’ll be around, Miss Augusta. If there’s money to be made he’ll come, even if it’s on a stretcher.’

  Then Mrs. Preller received a letter from Mendel in London. Kate read it. The demand for feathers was increasing. Mendel was certain that it was not simply a flash in the pan. ‘The court is leading the revival,’ he said. ‘The Prince of Wales’s symbol is being copied all over the country wherever fashionable people gather.’ At the end he said he was planning a trip to South Africa and would visit Helmsdale.

  Kate found herself pitched into the feather industry. At first the additional work was burdensome and she was quickly exhausted. She explained this to herself as an effect of the abortion. She had healed quickly, but for some time felt weak and depressed. Slowly she reclaimed her strength and as she improved physically, so the depression seemed to leave her. She viewed what had happened in the apartment in Hanover Street as part of a nightmare. Now she had woken up.

  She applied herself to learning about ostrich-farming. Saxenburg had been allowed to fall into decay, the ostriches to run wild. Fences had to be replaced, gates rehung and the birds driven into ‘camps’ or paddocks; lucerne had to be planted as foodstuff.

  She began to study the birds themselves. One of the most infuriating characteristics was their habit of making hysterical dashes, sometimes throwing themselves at a fence in order to get to the other side. Often this would result in one of the long legs snapping and then the bird would have to be destroyed.

  ‘There’s no way we can help it,’ Smuts said, looking down at an injured male. He shook his head angrily at the waste. ‘A bird like this cost four hundred pounds in the old days, and maybe we’ll have to pay those prices again if the rise goes on. Look at it! Just wanted to get into the other camp. No bloody different from the place it’s in, but it must get over the fence.’

  The ostrich lay on its belly with one leg twisted behind it. Its feathers – Kate had learned that the males produced both black and white feathers, which were the most valuable – were covered in dust from its fall.

  ‘Jonas!’ Smuts called. ‘Get the gun.’

  ‘I’m off!’ Kate said.

  Smuts shrugged. ‘Shooting’s the kindest thing we can do. We can’t set the leg.’

  She was beyond the incubator shed when she heard the shots. Smuts seemed unaffected by the killing when he joined her. She was never to get wholly used to it, even when she had to order it herself.

  On another occasion she discovered how dangerous the birds could be. She was crossing a camp with Smuts one morning when a big male began to ‘broom.’ This was a noise she had, in earlier days, associated with the waves on the rocks. Now she found that when the birds began nest-building, the males turned savage and began to roar. They would give three deep roars in succession, two staccato, the third long. They reminded her of roaring lions in Edinburgh Zoo.

  ‘Get behind me,’ Smuts shouted.

  The male was flapping its broad black wings on the ground, inflating its neck, throwing its head back and striking it against its bony body with sharp, resounding blows.

  ‘Hurry!’

  Suddenly, the bird came at them. Smuts had a branch in his hand. The ostrich raced forward. He waited until it was almost on top of him, pounding at him with its clawed feet, then thrust the branch towards its head. The bird attacked three times before it broke away and returned to the nest.

  ‘They’ll rip you apart with those bloody feet,’ Smuts said. ‘Never cross a camp without a “tackey.”’ He held out the branch and showed Kate the long white thorns on the end.

  But there were gentler aspects of the ostriches’ life. Male ostriches remained bachelors for eighteen years, courted a female for two and, when they mated, they stayed together for the rest of their lives – and they lived to twenty and sometimes thirty years old. She learned that they had an ability to cool themselves in the hot desert winds that blew in from the west by standing with their mouths open, a ludicrous sight. When she began to deal with their eggs, she found that the birds had an uncanny knack of knowing when to move from the nest for a few minutes so that the eggs’ temperatures did not rise too high.

  As the days passed, she began to feel part of this world. She identified with the excitement of the feather boom, she became used to the strange house and the even stranger ways of its inhabitants. She also became more sensitive to its subtleties. It was riven by undercurrents and tensions, of half-seen looks and gestures, of facts buried somewhere in the past, upon which present actions and attitudes seemed to be predicated. Because it was so cut off in place and time from the rest of the world, Saxenburg was like a hot-house where strange plants grew unchecked. And deep inside the hot-house, like some tropical creature, sat Mrs. Preller. Little happened in the house that she did not know about. Her intelligence system seemed to Kate to embrace most things, even to her knowledge, that first night, of Kate’s
reluctance to eat pickled fish. She knew, within a matter of hours, that Kate had moved a chest of drawers in her room. ‘Everything has its place in the nursery,’ she had said. ‘I have told Lena to move it back.’

  Clearly Betty or Lena had reported the movement of the chest. Why? What was important about it? Or about the pickled fish, or a dozen other small incidents that had come to Mrs. Preller’s notice. She supposed that Smuts also reported to her, telling her how Kate ate, perhaps informing on Lena and Betty as well. Perhaps they all reported on each other.

  She had to remember that Mrs. Preller was Viennese and probably had the sophisticated European woman’s penchant for gossip, no matter how trivial. Or was it something else: was this how a tribal queen ruled her little kingdom? Kate had already thought of Smuts as one of her subjects. Lena and Betty, too, were members of the tribe. She supposed that if she stayed long enough she would become a member as well.

  She discovered that there were tensions within tensions, currents that ran into and over each other like the rip-tides of the India Reef. The most obvious hostility, because it was played out in the open, was between Betty and Lena. They always seemed to be on the edge of a battle. Lena watched her daughter with remorseless suspicion. At times it seemed to Kate that she could do no right. Lena would criticise her for not laying the table correctly or not dusting thoroughly, she would hiss at her for being too slow and, a few minutes later, for hurrying and being careless. Every afternoon after clearing away the lunch and washing the dishes the two of them would disappear in the direction of a group of small dwellings on the far side of the sheds. Kate had been there once, looking for Betty, and had entered their house. It was a single room with smoke-blackened walls from the open cooking fire at one end. It had no bathroom or sink, no lavatory (she was to discover that for most of the coloureds in the area the only lavatory was the wide open veld) and one small window covered in sacking. In this one room they lived and slept. And this was luxury, for Lena only had the one child. In some of the hovels Kate saw later whole families of seven or eight lived out their crowded lives.

  Sometimes Betty chose not to go back to the room with her mother but would walk down to the little beach below the cliffs. Kate saw her several times on the far side of the cove near the rock pools.

  Once she found her huddled in the small dining-room. She had been crying and her light brown cheeks were stained by tears.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Kate said.

  ‘It’s nothing, Madam.’

  ‘Why are you crying if it’s nothing?’

  ‘I don’t know, Madam. I just crying.’

  ‘Can’t you tell me?’

  But she shook her head and left the room. As she did so, Kate noticed several weals on the upper part of her right arm. She knew what had caused them, because her own mother had sometimes used a strap on her when she was little. But Lena’s behaviour seemed the more savage in view of her religious leanings. On her Sundays off she would walk into Helmsdale and attend the service at the Risen Christ Mission on the slope above the fishing-village.

  ‘Betty used to go with her when she was smaller,’ Smuts told Kate. ‘But now she won’t. That’s half the battle between them.’

  ‘Why won’t she go?’

  ‘Because, my friend, she’s got other fish to fry. Pardon my language, but they get on my bloody wick sometimes.’

  After that, Kate saw her through new eyes. Other fish? Jonas? She ruled that out almost at once, for neither seemed to have the time to conduct a liaison. Betty worked hard, and so did he. When he wasn’t working, he was fishing, and this seemed to dominate his life, to the extent that he even fished at night. Kate soon had become accustomed to seeing his big fishing pole when she looked down towards the rocks near the pools. Sometimes, when she walked on the beach, she would see him surf-casting. He would be stripped to the waist and would move in such a way as to display his body to its best advantage. Sometimes he would be fishing from the rocks, etched against the sky like a statue, at others all she would see would be the black silhouette of the rod emerging from the rocks and she would imagine Jonas sitting in some sheltered crevice. He was a good fisherman and supplied the house.

  She found that her attitude to him had changed from one of slight apprehension when she first came to Saxenburg, through irritation, to dislike. She did not care for his knowing air. When he greeted her, it was with a mixture of subservience and sexual arrogance. Sometimes she thought she saw a frank invitation in his eyes. At first she had been able to avoid him, but now that she was involved in the refurbishing of the farm she was in daily contact with him.

  *

  One afternoon, Sachs arrived. He was driven out by the attorney, Arnold Leibowitz. He was pale and had lost weight. The face which had once been full of humour and excitement was now permanently sad.

  ‘I’ll go and tell Mrs. Preller you’re here,’ Kate said.

  ‘We’ve come to see you,’ Leibowitz said, uncoiling his thin, angular frame from the front seat.

  ‘Me?’

  ‘If you would be so kind, Miss Buchanan,’ Sachs said, getting slowly out of the car. ‘A few questions.’

  ‘Of course. Mr. Sachs, I want you to know how sad I am. How sad we all are. It was a terrible tragedy.’

  ‘Yes, yes, my dear, thank you.’

  ‘Mr. Sachs would like to visit the place.’

  ‘It’s a bit steep.’

  ‘I’m all right if I take it slowly. And if I don’t, who cares?’

  They walked down to the beach in silence and then Sachs said, ‘This is where . . .?’

  ‘Over there. In the rock pools.’

  ‘Miriam learned to swim here. She knew those pools better than anyone. Let me ask you something: have you swum in them?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Would you swim now?’

  She looked at the swells surging into the farthest pool. ‘No. The tide’s high. I like to be able to see the bottom.’

  ‘Exactly. It is what Miriam always said. You must see the bottom. There are sea-urchins. If you stand on one, it gives blood poisoning.’

  He turned to Leibowitz. ‘I tell you this, Arnold, Miriam would not have put her toe into that water that night. The tide was high. I tell you, it’s impossible. Never, never, never. Not a toe.’

  ‘Gently, Morris.’

  ‘To hell with gently. They say Miriam slipped and hit her head. I say rubbish. Miriam knew these rocks like her own hands.’

  ‘You don’t know, Morris.’

  ‘I know. I know my daughter. Who better?’

  ‘Parents often don’t really know their children.’

  ‘You are saying that to me, Arnold? Me? Morris Sachs, who brought up Miriam since a little girl after her mother died. Of course I knew her, and I know she was not the sort of person who would –’ He choked, and gasped for breath.

  ‘Morris, you’ll get sick again!’

  ‘I don’t care.’ But he lowered his voice. ‘Listen to me, Arnold. They said bad things about my girl at the inquest. I read what they said. People are still saying it. They say Miriam Sachs was the sort of girl who would go swimming naked at night. They say she was the sort of girl . . .’

  ‘Mr. Sachs, please don’t distress yourself . . .’

  Unable to speak, he waved his hand from side to side. Slowly he gathered himself and in a soft, husky voice, he said, “You are a lawyer, you think by logic. Think, then. A girl of Miriam’s age and experience walks two miles along a lonely road in the middle of the night. She takes off her clothes a hundred yards from the pool and walks naked across the beach to swim when the tide is high.’

  Leibowitz nodded. ‘You may be right, you may be wrong.’

  ‘I tell you, Arnold, there’s no maybe wrong. And I’m going to find out. They did that inquest too quickly.’

  ‘I told you, they had to get her body out of the ice-factory. The manager was complaining.’

  But Sachs was not listening. ‘And that old fool of a doctor.
The District Surgeon. She slipped and fell. She hit her head. Where was he? Watching? And the things they said, maybe not in plain words, but I know what they mean. Miriam was not like that.’

  But Kate was remembering. Miriam was like that.

  *

  She could not get the sight of Sachs crying from her mind. He had seemed so old, so pathetic. And he had been so loyal. What did he really know of his daughter? What did her parents know of Kate? What did Mrs. Preller know of her beloved Charles? The situation went round and round in her mind as she lay in bed.

  Charles had arrived at her house in his red roadster the day after she had met him at the Del Monico. She had come home from work at five o’clock and found him with Duggie in the front room, a bottle of brandy on the table between them. Her father, who had a temporary job laying floor-tiles, had been out and her mother was fussing over Charles as though he were royalty. Duggie was already partly drunk and the two of them seemed to be getting along like old chums.

  He had taken her out to dinner. ‘How did you know where to find me?’ she had asked.

  ‘I followed you last night from the Del Monico. Do you mind?’

  ‘No, I don’t mind.’

  ‘I thought you might, because of Tom Austen.’

  ‘What has he to do with me minding?’ she had said angrily.

  That had been the first of many meetings in the next few weeks. Charles worked in a broker’s office in town and seemed to have money and time to spare. She liked his car and she liked being taken out and she liked being seen with him, for he dressed well – she especially admired the long leather driving-coat and the tweed cap he wore in the car. But of Charles himself she was not so sure. He was very different from Tom. There were obvious physical differences: where Tom was large and powerful, Charles was medium-sized and sleek; where Tom gave an impression of strength and straightforwardness, Charles seemed softer, more pliable. But the main difference was that Tom had a sense of humour that matched her own and she was less in tune with Charles.