The Fire Portrait

by Barbara Mutch

  ‘Shall I leave you to unpack?’ Julian hefted the last of my suitcases into the bedroom, where a bed with a brass heading faced a curtained window. ‘Use any of the drawers that are free. And the cupboard.’ He indicated a wardrobe against the wall.

  ‘Can I take one of the bedrooms for my painting?’

  ‘Of course. Will you be alright here? I’m going to check on the school.’

  He pecked me on the cheek.

  I listened to his footsteps echoing on the wooden floor and then a double click as the front door closed. Silence filled the house. The bed had a green quilt and I smoothed it. Julian’s new school term was starting in a few days’ time. He was the headmaster, it made sense for him to check. I waited for a few minutes – no dogs barking, no whistle as yet from a passing train, no children shouting – then ran into the lounge, flung open the curtains, unlatched one of the windows and pushed it wide.

  Cool evening air wafted into my face like an unexpected gift.

  I breathed deeply, unpinning my hair and shaking it out. The air smelt of dust overlaid with something faintly herbal that hadn’t been noticeable during the heat of the day. As I turned away, I caught sight of myself in an old-fashioned circular mirror on the opposite wall. A pale face stared back, dominated by wary eyes and a halo of un-marcelled hair. For a moment I was back in the hospital after my fall, looking at my bandaged head and torn clothing. I looked away quickly – was that really me? – and opened the front door, ran down the steps and circled round to the back of the house and into a barely grassed yard. Beyond the boundary fence the overhanging peak was turning a subtle shade of pink. I sat down on the step outside the kitchen door. The fragrance I’d detected seemed to be coming from the veld and I sniffed but it was elusive. Sage, or perhaps a wild rosemary … A heron flapped slowly overhead, its long neck tucked in, legs trailing neatly behind. I unbuttoned the top of my dress and spread my arms wide and closed my eyes and felt the air play over my skin. In my mind’s eye I saw, again, the reflection in the mirror. The woman staring back at me was a stranger.

  Julian said later that I must have fallen asleep because of the rigours of the journey and the accident with the buck. He suspected I’d gone outside – perhaps to inspect the washing line – and had become overwhelmed with exhaustion. He was initially worried that I’d fallen but he could find no obvious sign of injury. He claimed that he found me slumped on the ground by the kitchen steps, my dress half off, my hair undone and my head resting on my arms. I remember nothing.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  ‘Will you be alright on your own?’ Julian asked on the first day of the new term. He is always solicitous – although what he would do if I said I wasn’t, I have no idea. What would you do with a young wife, newly married, fresh from Cape Town, who is not alright?

  Send her back?

  ‘I’ll paint,’ I replied. ‘And rearrange the furniture.’

  And put up my pictures: Fernwood Buttress from Protea Rise, some disas in the waterfall gorge above Kirstenbosch, reminders of what I’ve left behind but also motivation for what I must create here. One day there should be paintings of Aloe Glen on the walls – the peak, the endless veld, the aloes those Scotsmen saw when designing the railway.

  ‘Yes, do,’ he said, leaning down to kiss me on the cheek.

  That roadside kiss has not been repeated. Perhaps it only happened in my accident-bruised imagination.

  I watched him walk down the drive. The school was only a few minutes away. In fact, everything in Aloe Glen was only a few minutes away. And Julian walked briskly, eager for the challenge of his pupils.

  The whistle of the morning train broke the silence.

  Even after a short time, I’ve learnt the timetable of the trains and how their passing divides up the day; and the symphony of creaks and groans in the night as the corrugated roof loses its heat.

  Julian sleeps untroubled, while I jerk awake and fall into a fitful doze.

  I went into the bedroom I’d set aside for my art and found a small square of stiff card and began to draw. The view through the window – I refuse to close any of the curtains save for our bedroom’s at night – happened to show the peak at a perfect angle to the morning light. My pencil moved quickly, finding the striations in the rock at its crest and the mounded scrub on its slopes. Draw, Frances! Paint!

  From the station came the sound of the engine building up steam for departure.

  Once the sketch was finished, I turned the paper over and wrote on the reverse:

  With best wishes,

  Frances McDonald.

  I put on a dress of blue linen with elbow-length sleeves, squeezed my feet into Aunt’s lace-ups, grabbed a basket and matching blue straw hat and set off. It was still early, so the heat had yet to build to the crescendo I now recognised every day until the light faded and the veld exhaled its herby sigh of relief.

  I walked up the gravel road – Marico Road – towards the van Deventer house. Their lawn was marginally better than ours, and there was a narrow band of shrubs below the front window where the plants gained some shade when the sun swung behind the house.

  What was the etiquette? A rusty postbox hung off the wire gate. I dug into my basket but before I could post my sketch through its opening, the front door opened and Mrs van Deventer waddled laboriously down the steps.

  ‘Good morning!’ I called. ‘I was going by—’

  Did she spend all her time staring out of the window in case of passing traffic?

  ‘Come in,’ she shouted. ‘What’s that you have?’

  I unlatched the gate and walked towards her and handed over the sketch. Today she was covered in a voluminous apron that stood out from her frame like a tent and her hair was bound in a scarf. Perhaps I was being unfair; perhaps she’d been in the middle of housework and just happened to glance outside.

  She stared at the card, at me, at my hat, and then at the peak. She turned it over to see the message.

  ‘Why? Why have you brought this?’

  Have I blundered? Are small notes of appreciation not welcome here? I felt a blush rise into my face.

  ‘I wanted to say thank you. Thank you for calling after we arrived.’

  I’d hardly been out, what with unpacking, and no one else had called on us. Julian said folk kept themselves to themselves – and most of the population lived on farms anyway, not in the town – and that I’d meet people in due course and I should not try to push too hard in the early days. But I still felt I might have offended Mrs van Deventer by shooing her out that first day.

  ‘You did this?’ She tapped a broad finger on my drawing.

  ‘Yes, I did. I – I hope you like it.’

  ‘Ja. It looks like that.’ She squinted up at the mountain. ‘But you don’t have to give me anything.’

  She handed the card back to me.

  ‘Oh, but I did it for you,’ I said, not taking it back. ‘As a gift. Please keep it.’

  She hesitated, shrugged and pushed it into the pocket of her apron. ‘Do you want to come in?’

  ‘That’s very kind, but I can see you’re busy. I’m on my way to the store. Perhaps another time?’

  ‘Julian said you painted. There’s no one here that paints. No time for it.’

  I forced a smile and replied with what I hoped was an appropriate mix of confidence and modesty. ‘I’m an artist, Mrs van Deventer. It’s what I love to do.’

  ‘It’s different here.’ She looked me over as she’d done that first time, as if my appearance could give some clue as to why I was the way that I was. ‘You’ll find out. Tell Mr Fourie at the store I’ll be in later.’

  ‘Of course. Goodbye, Mrs van Deventer.’

  I held my head high as I walked to the gate.

  When I turned and lifted my hand in farewell, she’d already gone inside.

  Aloe Glen’s main thoroughfare was quiet. I passed the white-painted Dutch Reformed church, set back from the road in a rectangle of dry grass with a faded board o
ut front announcing the name of the dominee and the times for Sunday service. I looked one way, then the other. Not a soul or a vehicle stirred. The houses were as closed up as when we first arrived. A little way out of town, a windmill stood motionless.

  I straightened my shoulders.

  The town store sat between the cafe – no men lounging outside today – and the petrol station. It was a long, thin shape, with goods packed onto shelves that stretched from floor to ceiling.

  I pushed open the door and was relieved to find human life.

  ‘Morning, Mrs McDonald,’ said a ferrety man with a moustache. How did he know who I was? Were my looks so clearly urban and my arrival so comprehensively flagged that I could be no one else?

  ‘I’m Mr Fourie. Your husband has an account with me,’ he went on, inflating his chest and giving my linen dress a sideways glance, ‘so he charges his goods and pays at the end of every month. Choose whatever you wish. Do you have enough sausages? Mr McDonald is always after sausages.’

  I’d already discovered that Julian’s diet as a bachelor left much to be desired. The kitchen cupboards contained rows of tins and little else.

  ‘Do you have fresh vegetables?’

  Mr Fourie looked at me with a mixture of surprise that I didn’t know, and defensiveness that I might find his answer disappointing. ‘Once a week on Wednesdays. The drought, you know. Or you could grow your own, ma’am. That’s the best way, then you can give them the water they need. Hang on.’ He grabbed a small ladder and set it against the shelves and climbed up. ‘Ah, here they are. Tomatoes. Beets. Lettuce.’ He brandished packets of seeds.

  ‘Why not? Thank you, I’ll take them. And do you have chicken?’

  In the harried run-up to the wedding, Violet had given me cooking lessons and chicken was a dish I’d mastered. ‘One chicken like this, Miss Fran,’ she advised over a hot roasted bird, its skin enticingly crisp, ‘between two people can last way more than one meal, Miss Fran, if you store it in a cold place.’

  Mr Fourie reversed himself down the ladder. ‘You’ll need to speak to Meneer Erasmus. He keeps chickens. His son goes to Mr McDonald’s school.’ The ferrety face crinkled into a conspiratorial grin. ‘He’ll be sure to oblige.’

  ‘I see. What fresh food do you carry, Mr Fourie?’

  ‘I’m short right now, ma’am. It sells out quick. Vegetables on Wednesdays like I said, mealies in season, potatoes on Saturdays when old man Viljoen comes to town, and you can order steak or lamb chops. There’s more animals being slaughtered right now.’

  ‘Fruit?’

  I thought back to the luscious peaches and pears that Aunt’s travelling grocer used to deliver to the door of Protea Rise. I’d imagined they came from places like this, beyond the mountains, but maybe those places had more water than here. Maybe their farmers didn’t have to kill their animals because they couldn’t afford to feed or water them.

  ‘All depends on the season and the harvest. Parsons’ farm, down Worcester way, has apples right now.’

  Keeping us fed was clearly going to involve time and multiple vendors.

  In the end I settled on tinned beef and ham, some potatoes that Mr Fourie found at the back, bread from the previous day, sugar and tea and a bag of dried fruit. In addition, I found out that the doctor visited once a week, the nearest dentist was in Worcester and if my stomach began to trouble me, I should boil our water twice before drinking it.

  ‘Thank you, Mr Fourie,’ I said. ‘I’ll come in first thing on Wednesday for vegetables.’

  I left the store with my laden basket and looked up and down the road again.

  Still no one.

  But there was a brown bird, a very large one, sitting on a telephone pole opposite, its yellow talons curling over its perch. I stepped onto the road and waited. The sun was beating through my inadequate straw hat. I took one more step. I should get a bush hat if I wanted to spend more time outdoors. The bird swivelled its head and stared straight at me. I caught my breath. Its beak was shiny, deeply curved, and its chest was striped in ribbons of cream and brown. I took another careful step forward. The piercing eyes examined me. I’d need to use the thinnest of my sable brushes to capture those stripes, a thicker one for the muscular talons flexing themselves even as I watched. And the eyes—

  A blaring horn made me step back in fright.

  A car raced past and I caught sight of shocked faces at the window as they shot by. The bird spread vast wings and took off with effortless power.

  I watched until it was a speck against the sky.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  I have been here for ten days.

  Everyone talks about the drought.

  It’s as if it is a living thing, squeezing the life out of the locals and turning their land to dust and their animals to skeletons or slaughter.

  I’ve never had to worry about water before.

  And I’ve never seen people spend so much of their time looking upwards for the possibility of clouds.

  I’ve written to Mother and Father and Daph, with the cheery phrases I rehearsed while wandering through the peach orchards in Wellington. I’d be more honest if I was writing to Aunt.

  I asked Mr Fourie to arrange for a Cape Argus newspaper to be delivered to us once a week.

  I am lonely.

  Not even my brother comes to me in my dreams.

  Aloe Glen woke in the afternoons despite the pressing heat. The cafe was busy, Mr Fourie’s store did a steady trade and the petrol attendant at the garage – a large black man called Tifo – ushered farm lorries to the pumps with a flourish. This increased traffic coincided with the end of the school day and the arrival of the afternoon train. I walked along the road, nodding to several pedestrians. I make a point of nodding to everyone. Julian’s school occupied the former mission station originally set up as an alternative to the Dutch Reformed Church that held sway in most rural parts. When the missionaries left, their mission either accomplished or their donors fatigued, the church closed but the accompanying school remained open.

  A small group of women was clustered beneath a lone tree at the school gate.

  A horse was tied up against a post, its head deep in a nosebag.

  As the women turned to look at me, I realised that I was utterly wrongly dressed. They wore neutral-coloured frocks and velskoens, or shirts with drill trousers that may have belonged to their husbands. All wore bush hats. My pale blue linen and matching straw, while valiantly tempering the heat, stood out like a delphinium in a rockery.

  ‘Good afternoon.’ I smiled and went forward with an outstretched hand. ‘My name is Frances McDonald. I’ve recently moved here.’

  They stared and I wondered if they only spoke Afrikaans and therefore couldn’t understand me.

  After a few moments, a tall woman in dungarees came over and grasped my hand. The others followed, and then averted their eyes or stared at me and my outfit with curiosity. No one spoke. I racked my brain for something else to say – what a beautiful day, I promise to wear something less frivolous next time – when a bell rang. Children of assorted ages raced across the playground as if issuing from a burst pipe. The horse looked up from its nosebag. The youngsters flung themselves against the women, who greeted them in a mixture of Afrikaans and English and then marched them down the road or into farm lorries that drove off in clouds of dust. Older children slung their satchels over their shoulders, clambered onto bicycles and pedalled away. I watched everyone leave, raising my hand in farewell, and turned towards the school. It was a plain, single-storey building of dressed stone with classrooms down its length, their sash windows set wide open to catch any breeze. When I asked Julian about the age range, he said they took pupils up to fifteen. Older children went to boarding school in Worcester. From one of the classrooms came the faint tinkle of a piano in the rhythm of a waltz and my mind shot back to the Kelvin Grove, my expectations as the orchestra slipped into ‘Wiener Blut’ …

  There was a net at one end of the concre
te playground and two netball hoops at the other, separated by the white lines of a court. Pigeons rooted at the foot of the boundary fence. Two rugby posts marked out a bare pitch beyond the playground. There was no grass. Anywhere.

  I crunched my way across patchy gravel and through a door.

  ‘Frances? What are you doing here?’ Julian hurried towards me.

  His tie was loose and he looked flustered.

  ‘I came to see where you work.’ I reached up and kissed him. ‘And to meet some of the mothers.’

  He took my arm and steered me down a corridor lined with framed class photographs, and then into an office. His jacket was slung on the back of a chair behind a desk laden with neatly piled papers. A window gave a view onto the empty playground. There was another chair by the wall and he guided me to it before closing the door and taking his own seat behind the desk.

  ‘Is something wrong, Julian?’

  He passed a hand across his hair.

  I’m getting to know my husband’s mannerisms. When he’s agitated, he touches his face or his hair.

  ‘You can’t arrive without telling me,’ he said. ‘I’d have met you and introduced you properly.’

  ‘But I did introduce myself,’ I said, with a short laugh. ‘They shook my hand.’ Reluctantly, in some cases, but nevertheless they did – though they didn’t notice my farewell wave.

  He looked at me for a moment, confused. Julian doesn’t yet realise that I’m not like him. I may be lonely, but I refuse to be deferential. If I don’t take the initiative, I fear I will expire of heat and boredom in a place like this. Daphne would say I’m being brave. Or maybe I’m just not ready to conform.

  You can still be the person you want to be, Father had said at the church door. Marriage will not change that.

  ‘You don’t need to protect me, Julian. I can take care of myself.’