‘You need to take off your dirty clothes,’ he said, squatting down in front of me. ‘People will wonder. And then you must rest for a bit.’
‘I don’t want to be alone,’ I said.
David didn’t want his daughter to be alone, either. It was her or me.
‘I’ll stay with you.’ Piet handed me my dressing gown from a hook on the back of the door.
I took off my uniform in front of him, wrapped the gown around me and lay down on the bed. He bent over and stroked my hair like Ma often did. Then he lay down beside me. I was grateful for his kindness, his warmth.
I closed my eyes and thought of David with his daughter. He might describe Simon’s Town to her, conjuring up yellow proteas, turquoise water, red-beaked oystercatchers strutting across the sand.
‘Don’t cry for some foreigner,’ Piet said, burying his face in my hair.
Would David tell her, one day, about me?
I turned my head and let Piet kiss my lips. It didn’t matter any more who kissed me.
I felt his breathing quicken.
‘Lou?’ he said thickly, ‘do you want this?’
I kept my eyes closed. I could imagine it was David, tender David, who’d come back for me after all.
I felt Piet’s hand on my thigh.
I let him kiss my lips more feverishly.
Perhaps this was my punishment.
He got up and closed my bedroom door. Fumbled with his clothes.
I didn’t stop him.
I let him have me.
It was the only option I had.
I have always kept secret what I most want – until I could savour its arrival. Now I must conceal how close I came, and how much I’ve lost.
Ma never asked me about the contents of David’s letter. But when Piet described how he’d found me, dishevelled and incoherent, close to the fire line, I’m sure she knew. Perhaps Ma knew everything – even what happened afterwards.
Neither Piet nor I ever spoke of it.
When viewed against the demands of cleaning the hospital, which narrowly escaped destruction, and digging out Mr Gamiel and his cottage from the landslide that buried them both, my stumble on the mountainside was insignificant. I’d been overcome by smoke. I’d taken a wrong turning. I was spotted by Piet who brought me home.
And there was a happy ending – especially after the sad end to one of our neighbours.
Piet and I were married quietly at St Francis Church.
My parents, Amos and Den Philander and our closest friends attended. Pa gave me away in his pre-war suit. Ma wept the whole way through. With joy, she told anyone who tried to comfort her.
‘God, Lou!’ giggled Vera, now engaged to Abie. ‘You’re a dark horse!’
Mrs Hewson made my wedding dress of white cotton with an empire line that concealed my four months’ pregnancy. I’d love this child, it was all I had left.
I kept my view of the sea, because I got Piet to agree that we’d live with my parents at Ricketts Terrace. After all, it made sense with Ma looking after the baby once I returned to work.
‘We don’t keep posts open as a rule,’ Matron frowned, ‘but perhaps in this case we can make an exception.’
‘I’m grateful, Matron. I will be the breadwinner in my family.’
Piet, these days, seemed more keen on drinking with his friends than fishing.
I didn’t expect any more letters from David, and none arrived.
Chapter Forty-Eight
Republic of South Africa, 1967
‘Sam! Sam!’
Sam Philander poked his head out of the front of the cottage. Solly, his grandfather, lurched across the stream from next door.
‘I heard from the church! They want you to carve the new lectern!’
Sam grinned and clapped the old man on his shoulder. Not too hard, for Grandpa was getting on, even though his enthusiasm for life was as keen as ever. He spent most of his waking moments as Sam’s promoter-in-chief.
‘Thanks, Grandpa. How did you persuade the minister?’
‘I told him it was his responsibility.’ Solly drew himself up. ‘Your grandma and I were married there, we’ve sung in the St Francis choir for forty years, so the least he can do is give my grandson work.’
‘And Ma and Pa were married there,’ reminded Sam. Grandpa threw up his hands and shot Sam an apologetic look. That marriage, Sam reflected, was never celebrated.
‘What work?’ Sam’s mother stepped through the doorway in her uniform.
Even though she was almost fifty, Ma’s beauty still caused the chattering crowds on St George’s Street stop in their tracks and stare. His pa was a fool. And the government was an even bigger fool to overlook her for Matron at the False Bay. However bright you were, Sam gritted his teeth beneath his welcoming grin, they made you sweat in the shadows when you deserved the chance to be recognised for what you did and be properly paid for it. Like Grandpa used to be, when the Royal Navy was in charge of the dockyard before it was handed over to South Africa in the fifties.
The only answer was to work for yourself.
Sam knew, without being boastful, that he could restore an antique wardrobe better than anyone else, or work a fresh block of timber into curves and angles that regular workmen never tried. He’d taught himself from books out of the library, with pictures of British church carvings and Polynesian canoes. If you were good enough, customers ran after you and the government left you alone, especially in a small place like Simon’s Town.
His friend Benji Olifant, son of Pa’s old fishing friend from the war, said Communism was the only solution, and he dragged Sam along to well-funded, secret meetings where people waved their fists for equality and sang ‘The Internationale’.
Sam didn’t want to be equal, he didn’t want to be like everyone else.
He wanted the chance to stand out.
‘Sam’s going to carve the new lectern at the church. Fancy that!’
Ma’s weary eyes sparkled and she came over to hug him.
‘I’ll get on, now,’ Solly said. ‘We’ll see you later for supper.’
‘Thanks, Grandpa. You’re the best.’ The old man winked and stumped off.
Sam turned to his mother.
‘Ma? Is everything alright?’
She put down the bag of vegetables she’d picked up from Runciman’s on the way home. Her hair, pulled back under her cap, had traces of grey over the ears. She sat down at the table and rested her chin in her hands.
‘Ma?’ Sam put an arm across her shoulders.
She looked up at him. Her eyes were that amazing shade of almond that he loved when he found it in wood. Not as bright as podocarpus – yellow-wood – but not as deep as mahogany. And with flecks, like the grain that ran through oak.
‘I’ve received a letter,’ Ma said.
She shifted her gaze from his and looked out of the door towards the sea, roughened with white horses from the north wind. Sam knew that meant rain tomorrow, sweeping from the Muizenberg Mountain. Up there, in the ravines, were extraordinary patches of forest, packed with indigenous beauties whose trunks he loved to stroke, imagining the glow of the wood within …
‘We’re being evicted.’
‘What?’
‘Simon’s Town is to be declared a white area.’
Chapter Forty-Nine
I’ve never been afraid of going against the tide. After all, I challenged – and bent – unwritten laws of gender and colour and pyramids.
I won those battles, didn’t I?
Of course I was younger, then, and this was something different; something that couldn’t be fought, or moulded to my will. This was an attack on colour by means of geography.
The letter was perfectly clear.
And its power lay in the fact that it was also perfectly, brazenly, legal.
Under the terms of the Group Areas Act, passed by the white parliament of South Africa in 1950 and now being enforced some fifteen years later, all coloureds living south of the line
between Chapman’s Peak and Kalk Bay were to be expelled to a new place called Ocean View. If you didn’t want to go to Ocean View, you must leave the area entirely and fend for yourself in a coloured township further away. They even specified the contour line below which you would be forcibly removed. Presumably, if you were brave enough to live on the mountain summits amongst the baboons and the odd elusive leopard, you could stay put until you were thinned out by natural selection.
The process was given a fresh name. It wasn’t called eviction, it was called resettlement – supposedly a kinder form of expulsion.
It was the law.
I touched my brown skin, then took out the letter and read it again, between the lines.
Simon’s Town, named by the Dutch, built up by the British, and defended by a rich palette of black, white, Hottentot, Malay, Indian and every shade in between, was no longer to be shared. It was to be the sole preserve of white people.
The blacks must leave their mountain shacks and go to Nyanga, miles away on the Cape Flats, the coloureds to Ocean View and the Indians to a suburb that hadn’t yet been specified. Sam and I in the late Mrs Hewson’s cottage, Ma and Pa in our original family home, the Phillipses down the way, old Gamiel’s grandchildren in the rebuilt cottage – we’d all have to leave. Even Piet, living a shrunken life in the Philander cottage, would be scooped up and deposited far from the sea he loved and which I hoped might yet save him.
Piet …
I suppose I could have tried harder and for longer, but there was Sam to consider. When unfair laws can trap you in their web, you need a steady family if you want to teach your child the difference between right and wrong.
I touched the ring that still encircled my finger.
Vera says that I’ve grown more impatient as I’ve grown older. It’s true: I’ve no time for silly rules and lost causes. To me they’re beached seaweed, the flotsam of others trying to tell me what I must or mustn’t do, or who I should or shouldn’t save. I’ve learnt to skip over their strands, or toss them aside more quickly than I did as a young woman. I’m not proud of what happened with Piet, and I take most of the blame, but there’s no point in indulging a mistake once it’s been made.
‘But I rescued you!’ Piet shouted more than once, coming closer, the brandy sloshing in his glass. ‘If it wasn’t for me you’d still be disgraced and weeping for that Pommy!’
Piet realised my secret, of course, soon after we married and my pregnancy began to show too quickly for him to have been the father.
‘The fancy British officer,’ he said bitterly, ‘you slept with him in secret. I saw you, once,’ he leapt to his feet and began to pace around the kitchen, ‘on the mountain. So where is he now you need him? Why did he leave you high and dry?’
‘I’m grateful to you, Piet,’ I said, meeting his eyes. ‘I’ll be a good wife if you take the child as your own. Say that we anticipated our wedding by a few months.’
He stared at me, his hands flexing. I remembered Amos slapping Piet across the face, and Piet’s coiled fists when I refused to marry him. I waited. This time, I was too heavy with child to sprint away. But he didn’t hit me. And in a month or so, he started to enjoy the back slaps and the winks of his mates as they noticed my growing belly. Even Ma and Pa and Vera accepted the lie that, in a moment of weakness, I’d allowed Piet too much freedom with my body. ‘I warned you,’ said Ma, taking refuge in bent morals and avoiding the trickier question of who the father was, ‘you should have known better, being a Sister and all.’
‘Why didn’t you say you and Piet were back together?’ Vera giggled, ‘Sneaking around, too!’
To my work colleagues and our Terrace neighbours, my indiscretion was, briefly, a scandal. Matron frowned when I updated her on my due date, and certain folk took it as another example of my talent for stepping out of line. But there seemed to be no dispute that marriage and a family was the sensible outcome for two people who’d known each other all their lives and turned to one another as the war faded. The usual order of events had simply been reversed.
‘That Piet’s a lucky skelm!’ Mrs Hewson shook her head. ‘And a child’s a blessing, even if you weren’t wearing a ring.’
But I know it’s more complicated. I have the broken heart and the later wounds to show for it. David shouldn’t have married Elizabeth without loving her completely, and I shouldn’t have married Piet when I was carrying
David’s child. Both of us have had to make hard choices as a result.
David stayed with Elizabeth to raise Ella.
I cast out Piet so Sam might become a better man than his stepfather.
And now the life I’d reforged was about to splinter in a way that none of us had ever imagined. With the arrival of the eviction notices, our tight Terrace watched over so democratically by Jesus and Allah was to be scattered like the stones that slid down the Simonsberg on the night Piet found me. Once we were gone – discarded – the cottages we’d shored up against the slippery mountain for so long would be demolished.
I felt a chill on the back of my neck that wasn’t the wind.
But I try not to take heed of signs any more, or potential tipping points. They’re too fickle to be trusted. Like the worst – and best – of lovers? I’m grateful for what I have, I hold Ma and Pa and Sam close and only let my mind drift with the tide at Seaforth.
And yet this removal …
I reached across to the bookcase and fingered my shells. The apple-green urchins. The toothed cowries. The Pink Lady. In the future, where would we go to swim if the beach was closed to coloureds?
The shell’s ridges pressed into my hand.
Sometimes David surprises me … in the passing slide of blue eyes, the timbre of a man’s voice, the line of a warship slicing across the bay.
Or the expression on the face of his son.
I can almost believe he is here.
Should I contact him? A secret letter, via the Admiralty, so there was no chance of it falling into the wrong hands?
Not for myself – there would be no point – but for Sam.
Thirty years ago, Matron at the Victoria took a risk and gave me a chance. I was lucky. These days, youngsters like Sam were actively barred from decent work, discouraged from shining in even the smallest way. And soon we were to be removed to a place far from potential employment. There was no future, there, for a young man with talent.
But what would I say?
Dear David,
You can’t have me, but here is our son …
Chapter Fifty
My darling,
I have written so many letters to you …
They sit locked away in my desk, a diary of my life since the end of the war and a reflection on the loss we’ve shared for over twenty years. I realise it’s selfish of me to use you as my longed-for correspondent like this, without your knowing, but it’s the only way I can keep you alive. I don’t expect you to have forgiven me – I’ve never forgiven myself. And so I’ve never posted the letters.
However, this is one that I shall send.
I can’t sit by any longer, watching images of apartheid brutality on television, and not worry about you. The papers are full of the deliberate ill-treatment of anyone who isn’t white. The Cape landmarks, the beaches – even Seaforth with its lively waves that I remember so well – may now be out of bounds to you. How is it possible that the country I grew to love can have descended into such madness?
My beloved L, please let me help.
If you want to get out of South Africa and start afresh, I’ll pay for you to leave. If you have children, I’ll help them find their feet somewhere new.
This is about more than you and me. It’s about human decency, and the irrelevance of colour.
I hope I’m not too late. I hope you’re still on Ricketts Terrace.
Write to me. Please.
My love,
David
Chapter Fifty-One
The eviction notices were served at Seafort
h too. Piet didn’t get much post so he was surprised to see the letter pushed under his door.
And it occurred to him that he’d be able to concentrate on an official piece of paper far better if he had a full stomach. But he hadn’t been out in the boat for a while so there was no fresh fish or the money to buy anything as a substitute.
He could go up to Lou’s and beg some grub. See the boy – handsome fellow, looked more like Piet with his black hair than the foreigner – but then he’d have to clean himself up. Lou wouldn’t allow him in if he hadn’t bathed recently. Piet couldn’t remember when he last took a bath, actually. Or when he last shaved.
It was her fault, of course.
She’d driven him to it. Actually, she’d calculated every move.
Letting him have his way with her, asking him to marry her and take over the child, but then telling him to leave a few years later when he had some temporary problems. Told him he was a bad example for the child. Told him if he cleaned himself up and worked proper hours and contributed instead of leaving it all to her, then he could come back and they could be a family again.
But, Piet scratched himself and yawned, he couldn’t be bothered.
It was all too much trouble, especially for a boy who wasn’t his and a wife who didn’t love him. After all, there were no more children. No Philander to call his own. It wasn’t for want of trying, at least Lou had lived up to that side of the bargain, allowing him access to her body whenever he chose. But her heart wasn’t in it, and maybe the flesh knows and won’t play along.
He once said he wouldn’t let her go without a fight, that she was his, but having her second-hand turned out to be not worth fighting for. She still carried a candle for the British officer. Much good that had done her. Or him, for that matter. If she’d stuck with her own and not had fancy ideas, they’d both have been better off. Why, just look at Abie and Vera! She’d opened a beauty parlour and was rubbing cream into the faces of women searching for eternal youth, while Abie sat on his backside and counted the money!
The Girl from Simon's Bay Page 21