Dear Daph, I wrote briefly on a postcard featuring a steam train against a lurid sunset.
I’m learning to love Julian. Time can help! I’ve met some people and I’m making friends. It’s hot and I miss you all, but our house is a good size and I’m starting to paint.
Can’t wait to come back for your wedding!
All my love
Fran
On Sunday mornings we attend the Dutch Reformed church. Julian wears a suit and I wear one of my trousseau dresses and heels that stick in the ruts of the gravel road as we walk. Julian feels it is important to show solidarity with the community even if we might not appreciate the more complex sermons. But, in fact, it turned out to be easy. The theme was consistent. I needed to consult a dictionary at first but after a few Sundays I understood.
‘Die hemel en die aarde,’ the dominee thundered from the pulpit, ‘behoort aan die Heer!’
The heaven and the earth, I translated to myself, belongs to the Lord.
‘Bekeer!’
Repent!
‘It’s so grim,’ I protested as we headed home, Julian nodding and raising a hand to other congregants as we passed. ‘Where is kindness and brotherly love?’
‘Rural people live at the whim of nature, my dear. Repentance is an appeal to God for mercy.’
‘For rain? But isn’t that a kind of bargaining? I will repent but then You must bring rain?’
‘Hush, Frances.’ Julian looked about. ‘Don’t talk like that in public.’
The following week I arrived at the school gate early with my basket of paper and pencils.
‘I hope some of your children will come to my art class today,’ I said brightly to the waiting mothers, many of whom I also recognised from church. I was dressed differently. No more low-waisted linen dresses and matching straws. I’d bought a set of khaki boy’s dungarees from Mr Fourie – there were no women’s and the men’s were designed for individuals the size of bears – and paired it with a plain white shirt. But my hair stayed loose. Susan, back in Embury, would approve.
‘The classes are free.’ I moved to a second group which included a Mrs Engelbrecht whom I’d met at the store and exchanged a few words with about the lack of rain. ‘We’ll be drawing outside.’
I didn’t wait for them to look away or for the school bell to ring, but smiled and marched confidently across the playground towards the classroom that had been set aside.
Let them gossip amongst themselves about this strange wife of the headmaster, I told myself. Let them giggle about how she didn’t speak their language … but let them also wonder if a child who held back from rowdy games might enjoy a gentler pursuit with pencil and paper.
I set up my easel and began to draw.
A pile of books stacked in a corner.
A world map unevenly tacked on a wooden board so that it looked as if the continents were drunk.
Ten minutes went by. The bell rang. Teachers shouted above the noise of slamming desks. Feet drummed along the corridors and I straightened up and faced the door with a smile.
The noise abated after five minutes and I got up and glanced through the classroom window. A ball was being kicked across the hard pitch by a group of boys in sports kit. The mothers at the gate were gone. The children who cycled to nearby farms were gone. Only a cloud of dust remained, churned up by their various wheels as they drove off.
‘Mevrou McDonald?’
I turned.
A young boy was hovering in the doorway. Behind him – and nudging him into the room – was the woman from the veld. She wore the same faded dress but this time she had shoes on her feet and she’d tied her white hair into a loose plait. I couldn’t remember seeing her on Sundays. Maybe, like me, the outdoors was her preferred church.
‘Hello,’ I said quietly to the boy, when I really wanted to embrace him. ‘I’ve been drawing. Would you like to see what I’ve done?’
I don’t know if he understood me, but he edged forward and I led him towards my easel and began to add the outline of a fish leaping out of the sea beside the continents.
The boy grinned.
I pulled up a chair for him, set out fresh sheets of paper and a box of coloured pencils.
‘If we make a circle,’ I drew one, ‘it can be the start.’
I added a second, smaller circle above the first, two tiny ones for eyes, a flick for ears …
‘Uil!’ The boy looked at me in amazement, seized a pencil and copied me.
‘Uil,’ I repeated, smiling. ‘Owl.’
We will teach each other, this child and me.
I glanced back at the doorway but his mother was gone.
Chapter Thirty
Beloved Fran, Father wrote after their first visit to Aloe Glen. Your mother and I are so pleased you’ve settled happily into your new home.
Sadly, your mother has been unwell since we returned. A chill, that has taken a while to shake off.
As soon as she’s fit, we’ll come and see you again.
There’s a new president in America who says he has a New Deal to overcome financial woes. Look out for an article in the latest Argus. Certainly, that would be better than the kind of National Socialism that’s being peddled in Germany.
On a local note, I can understand how you fell in love with the Cape, my dear.
I took a walk to Protea Rise yesterday. I happened to see a brown man working there called Alfius who asked to be remembered to Miss Frances. He said the proteas miss you, which is a preposterous thought, but rather charming.
Your ever loving
Father
The leaves on our centrally located tree hung their heads. Sometimes I tugged them slightly to see if they were still attached, fearing that they may only be held on by the memory of sap.
As soon as I collected my new velskoens from Mr Fourie, I headed back into the veld. The vegetation surrounding Aloe Glen seemed designed by God or evolution somehow to survive minimal rain and violent temperatures. Plants had the option of going dormant for a season but most animals interested in self-preservation could only venture out once the heat had abated. So I waited until the sun was striking the mountains at a low angle, bringing out the relief in the topmost rocks and throwing the lower reaches into shadow. If I sat quietly on my folding stool I could disappear into the landscape, become part of the scrub, and wait for it to give up its secrets.
No chattering sugarbirds here. No busy white-eyes. But perhaps, if I was patient …
I smoothed my shirt. What would my friends, English or Cape, think if they saw me now? Sitting in the middle of the bundu in a slouch hat, drill trousers and one of Julian’s old shirts?
Poor thing … what a comedown.
Yet who were they to criticise, I could hear Aunt Mary retort – or, for that matter, Mr Cadwaller. Who among them had the wits to seize such an alien life?
The sun edged further towards the horizon. A whistle and a series of puffs announced the passing of the evening goods train. Soon, if there was no action, I’d need to get back and start cooking. Sipata peeled the vegetables before she left but the main course was my responsibility. Julian’s routine was strict: dinner at 7 p.m., two hours of marking, bed by ten. The call, when it came, was quiet, no more than a peep. I strained through the undergrowth. A dun-coloured bird hopped along a track, stopped, and looked at me. Its feathers were the colour of the earth and if it had been motionless I might have missed it entirely except for one, outstanding, feature: a blazing orange throat.
We watched each other, equally astonished I believe, before it flitted off.
‘I saw a new bird!’ I burst into the lounge. ‘With an orange throat!’
‘Oh yes?’ said Julian, not looking up from his exercise book. ‘I hope you didn’t go too far.’
‘It was such a surprise, that colour amidst the brown—’
‘I’m sorry, my dear, I’m rather busy. Don’t you need to make dinner?’
I pulled off my hat and hung it on the stand by the fro
nt door and waited for a moment.
The eagle on the telephone post on my first trip into town.
The narrow stalk above a shrivelled bulb. A small brown bird with a blazing orange throat.
I’d have to look hard. My subjects would no longer be easy to see or available in great numbers. Colours would be mostly dun, rarely dramatic—
I ran into the bedroom that was my studio, grabbed a pencil and began to draw.
Dinner was late that night.
The woman from the veld was named Truda Louw. Her son, Deon, was my only pupil for a year. I met Sannie Metz and Aletta Erasmus regularly at the school gate or in church but it was only Truda who showed any curiosity about me. Newcomers, Mother had warned me in a moment of insight, hold no interest for incumbents. The Louws lived in a simple cottage close to the railway line and Truda’s husband was a wheel-tapper. I knew she could never be a friend in the way that Daph was, but she was willing to speak to me even though we couldn’t manage each other’s languages particularly well. Yet I’ve discovered that when there is need on both sides, words matter less than you think.
‘Were you born here, Truda? In Aloe Glen?’
‘Ja,’ she said, picking at her nails which were bitten to the quick.
‘Look, I brought a flask. Will you have some tea while Deon is drawing?’
‘Dankie. Thank you. There is enough?’
‘Of course.’
We drank in silence. Deon drew, his tongue sticking out in concentration.
‘Your hair is pragtig,’ Truda said, pointing to my combs.
I’m flattered she noticed for I have the sense, when I look in the mirror at home, that I’m becoming just another anonymous Karoo wife in dungarees and velskoens.
My choice of friend did not go unnoticed.
‘You want to watch that Truda Louw,’ sniffed Mrs van Deventer.
‘Why, Mrs van Deventer?’
‘They say she’s not right.’ She motioned to her forehead. ‘In the head.’
‘She’s been kind to me,’ I said, lifting my chin. And I may not be right in the head, either.
‘Mrs van Deventer says Truda is deficient in some way,’ I said to Julian over breakfast. I’d persuaded him to put a small table on the verandah. Sometimes sparrows hopped towards us, eager for crumbs.
‘She’s had a hard life. Her husband is a mean fellow. Young Deon doesn’t say much in class.’
But he must have talked for, at the start of the next year, eight children turned up to my art class.
‘Welcome,’ I said, speaking in English though by now I could manage simple Afrikaans. ‘What’s your favourite colour?’
‘Rooi,’ piped up a girl in pigtails.
‘Here’s a red crayon. Draw me a flag with stripes and spots! Anyone else?’ I held up a fistful of crayons.
‘Me! Me!’
‘Thank you, Mevrou McDonald,’ said Sannie Metz later at the school gate.
There was a stir of wind. She glanced up. ‘Maybe rain, mevrou?’
‘I hope so.’ I’d already gathered that the Metz farm was in trouble.
‘My Toby,’ ventured Mrs Engelbrecht from the fringes, miming a child stumbling.
‘Clumsy? Drawing would help, mevrou. Let him give it a try.’
‘You’ve done well,’ said Laetitia Snyman with a grin. ‘You hung on till they came.’
There is a further, unexpected benefit: the mothers speak broken English to me because they don’t believe I understand any Afrikaans, so each conversation becomes a stealth lesson in literacy.
I’m aiding Julian’s quiet radicalism.
While the children drew flags and mountains with the sun setting garishly behind them, I focussed on the dry veld at the end of Marico Road. I’d always identified my Cape Town plants – Protea repens, Lampranthus vygies, disa orchids – but my bush selections were a mystery. So I drew them the way I saw them: low, small-leaved plants that grew slowly and bloomed sparingly. I waited to capture flowers that appeared on fleshy stems for a few weeks and then died of heat; I waited until the bulb I’d first seen as a shrivelled stem flowered in the spring.
It took a year.
A year of broiling heat, biting cold, dust-laden wind – and an unsuccessful attempt to grow vegetables that succumbed to either thirst or insects. A year when milky springbok with teetering fawns stepped across the veld, caught my scent even though I held my breath, flicked their ears and leapt away. A year during which I travelled back to Cape Town to Daph’s wedding and wore my sea-green chiffon and laughed with friends and said how happy I was and stayed away from Protea Rise lest it undo me.
Three veld sketches, with each unnamed specimen drawn in leaf, in flower, and dormant. Examples of each stage, dried and pressed between the pages of my heaviest book.
I put on my linen dress. It still fitted me; there was no baby yet.
A year’s careful work deserved a formal send-off.
‘Mr Fourie, I have a parcel for Cape Town that I want to protect from getting bent.’
‘Pictures?’ He darted a look at me. The fact that I sat in the veld for hours was well known around town.
‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘I’m sending them to the director at Kirstenbosch.’
Mr Fourie rooted beneath the counter and found a set of cardboard inners that he placed around the parcel, then put the whole thing into an oversized envelope, and I paid him for the stamps.
‘Thank you, Mr Fourie.’
‘Take it yourself, ma’am.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Train’s due in thirty minutes.’
I crossed over the empty main road. Dust devils, those fleeting whirlwinds that rise up in a vortex and die away almost as quickly as they appear, barrelled across the veld beyond the railway line.
I waited for an hour, on a bench on the platform.
A bird of prey circled, joined by another. A carcass nearby, perhaps.
Every death serves a purpose in Africa, Julian had said.
‘Mevrou?’ A man was walking along the railway track. He wore blue dungarees and carried a box of tools. He had a beard that straggled down his chest.
‘Good day!’ I jumped up. ‘How long till the train comes?’
‘Amper. Soon,’ he said, dumping his toolbox on the ground.
I sat down and looked along the tracks but there was no telltale smoke denoting an imminent arrival.
‘What do you teach my son, mevrou?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘You teach my son.’ His words came out resentfully, as if they cost him.
‘I’m not a teacher, Mr— I’m sorry, I don’t know your name.’
‘You are. He stays after school.’
‘Ah.’ I forced a smile. ‘Does he come to my art class?’
The man nodded, coming closer, his hands on his hips, his face scowling up at me.
This must be Deon Louw’s father, the wheel-tapper, the man whom Julian described as mean, who perhaps accounted for the way Truda bit her nails and looked over her shoulder even when there was no one there.
‘I teach the children how to draw. How to shade. Are you Deon’s father, sir?’
He leapt up onto the platform. It was too late to run. I could scream but no one else was about.
‘Don’t teach my son Engelse kak,’ he spat, looming over me. ‘My boy’s an Afrikaner!’
There was still no whistle, no singing from the rails to signal the arrival of the train.
‘Of course,’ I said, staring at him. ‘We draw sunsets and flowers, Meneer Louw.’
‘That’s what you say,’ he snorted. ‘It’s a trick. Like before, when they took our women and children and put them in camps! Burnt our farms!’
‘Come, sir.’ I forced a laugh. ‘I’m just teaching children to draw. That’s all.’
Yet what if he was right? What if my classes – and Julian’s – were leading the children into deep water, towards a wave they might not be able to crest? Yet surely they deserved their chance to try.
‘Goeie middag, Meneer Louw,’ I said, standing up. ‘Good afternoon.’
‘What about that?’ He gestured at my package. His eyes were inflamed. He might grab my paintings, toss them to the ground, stamp on them and destroy what has taken me so long to achieve.
‘I’ll come another day. When I hear the train.’
The package could wait for one more day. It had taken a year, after all, to get this far.
I turned and walked away slowly to avoid enraging him further. For Wynand Louw, every interfering Engelse was a fresh assault in a war that still raged, thirty years on. Yet with anyone else I might have been prepared to admit that the classes benefitted me, too. The learning achieved by the others – whether of art or language – builds me, helps me through each dry week.
Dear Director Compton
I hope that you are well. I have no reference book for Karoo flora, therefore I am unable to identify the plants I have drawn. They are different from anything I have ever seen before. Their lives are ruled by a lack of water so the leaves are small to prevent evaporation, or fleshy to enable them to store whatever moisture they manage to find.
I would be grateful if you could write back and tell me the names of what I have drawn. And if Kirstenbosch is able to pay me a small sum for my work, then I could save up to buy a reference book. I could seek out unusual specimens at your request. The aloes, higher up the mountain, are specific to this area, I believe.
Thank you for your previous encouragement and support, sir.
Yours sincerely
Frances McDonald
Chapter Thirty-One
Imagine, if you can, a landscape of pitiless thirst: roots scrabbling through dust, rocks cracking, a sense of unforgiveness. Perhaps this is what the dominee plays on when he exhorts us to repent: our tears, to part-quench the thirst beneath our feet. I’ve begun to walk further. Not just into the veld but to the northern edge of town where coloured folk like Sipata and an increasing number of poor whites live in simple shacks. They nod to me and I nod back to them. The men from this community work on the farms or maintain the railway line, and the women work for white people who can afford to pay them. No one makes much money these days, and even white skin doesn’t exclude you from poverty. I don’t come here to stare at the community, although I often bring clothes to donate to the dispossessed families or a pumpkin that we’ve been given that is too big for us to eat once I’ve given Sipata a share. I come here to see Aloe Glen’s thirst, from a unique vantage point. And to try to understand.
The Fire Portrait Page 14