The Dragon Lady

by Louisa Treger

  ‘She didn’t make a sound, she just stared at me as the life drained out of her. I’ll never forget her face. . . And that is the story of how I was promoted to major and got my Military Cross. They decorated me for going in after the Germans without cover, you see.’

  He stopped and spat. Ginie’s eyes had been steady on him the whole time and for the last part, she had been weeping quietly. His head was turned away, as if he was afraid to look at her. She wrapped him in her arms and tears that had been locked inside him for decades began to run down his cheeks. Ginie knew that he was weeping for the girl, for Will, Edward and for himself – for what had broken in him forever on that far-off day. Their picnic was long forgotten.

  When he had no tears left, they sat in silence, watching a golden eagle floating less than a hundred feet above them. It came speeding down quite suddenly, mistaking the dog for a lamb. Solfo started barking and the eagle swerved up and away. They packed up and began to make their way down Ben Cruachan, fused by the secrets they had shared and forgiven.

  Stephen was happy in Scotland and would have stayed, but the cold and rain wore Ginie down. She lost her appetite and grew gaunt, moving as though she were under water. She had neuralgia, sleepless nights and a cupboard full of medicines. Stephen watched in dismay. The war had ended at last and they saw what horrific destruction had been wrought. They listened to the news from the Continent: concentration camps, war crimes, refugees and orphaned children. This added to Ginie’s longing to get away from the graceless, grey, dreadfulness of Britain. Both Ginie and Stephen needed to distance themselves from the suffering and waste.

  They didn’t want to live in Europe. They wanted a warm climate and a new patch of earth; a place where they could start again. Their thoughts turned to Africa, which Ginie had loved since her Egyptian honeymoon with Paulo. Stephen hired a pilot and a plane and they travelled south, looking for somewhere to settle. They flew over the ochre of Egypt and the sands of the Sudan, over the forests of the Congo, the mountainous and arid terrain of Basutoland and eventually over the Victoria Falls; tumbling, smoking sheets of water that tossed rainbow arcs into the sun.

  They looked all over and didn’t find anything they liked. They were about to give up and try South America when an acquaintance of theirs who farmed in the low veld, Barney Howard, suggested that they look at the Imbeza Valley in the east of Rhodesia, near a little town called Umtali.

  PART FIVE

  24

  The Courtaulds, Rhodesia, 1950s

  It rained heavily for several days without stopping. Ginie lay in bed, curled in on herself, face to the wall. The blinds were drawn, leaving the room in a muggy, yellowish gloom. She held Jongy’s collar in her hand, slept with it, would not be parted from it. It was as if all the trials she had suffered in her life had been rolled up into the single blow of his death and it devastated her.

  Hour after hour, she lay there, inert but for the tears that wouldn’t stop. Pain consumed her. It came in waves, burrowing into her, hollowing her out. There were brief times of respite, when her mind shut down and feeling gave way to numbness. But then, the pain started up again.

  In her mind’s eye, she kept seeing the jerking, nightmarish figure of the lemur. The smell of his flesh was in her nostrils; she could hear his tortured, breathless screams as the ants tore through tissue and muscle and organs, mouthful by mouthful. No one knew what to do for her. Gideon and Dixon left useless offerings of soup, tea and cake outside her room. The dogs scratched at her closed door, whining pitifully. Stephen came in and sat down on the edge of her bed.

  ‘I don’t suppose you want to talk about it.’

  She shook her head and closed her eyes, listening to the blood pushing and throbbing through her body. Hot tears welled under her eyelids. She couldn’t talk about how she felt to anyone, because there were no words for it. Her mind was trapped in a black place and she couldn’t pull herself back.

  Stephen patted her cheek uncomfortably. The air was musty, he longed to crack the windows wide open. He thought about all the times he’d walked into her room in the morning and found her and Jongy asleep, Jongy’s head on her shoulder, their arms wrapped around one another. There was nothing he could say or do. She was shut away in her misery.

  He began to stroke her hair. Over the bones of her skull, the skin looked pale and dry. Her face had changed. It was pinched and shrunken, with violet shadows around the eyes. He could see a vein throbbing in her neck. The unthinkable was happening; Ginie was getting old. He cleared his throat.

  ‘I’ve spoken to the police. Told them everything we know. They took the bullet to see what they can do to identify it.’

  Something like a sob ran through her, but she didn’t speak.

  He had never seen her like this. The Ginie he knew was always excitable and bubbly, sometimes maddening, sometimes wise, unpredictable and oozing with charm. He did not recognise the subdued, broken woman in front of him. He’d had an extra lock and chain added to the front door and bars put on every window of the house. To look at his beautiful garden through bars took all pleasure from the sight – it was like living in a cage, but his nerves were on edge. He reproached himself bitterly for refusing to take the letters seriously. Someone out there meant them real harm.

  Ever since he had found Ginie covered in soil, ants and vomit, shaking and crying so hard she couldn’t speak, he felt as if the two of them were in darkness, groping towards something terrifying and horrible; something he could not name, but which waited for them implacably; impossible to avoid.

  The only person Ginie could bear to have near her was Mary, Eliot’s widow, who had an unobtrusive way of tending to her that Ginie found soothing. Mary did her hair and toilette with gentle hands and even managed to coax a few spoonfuls of soup into her at mealtimes. Mary was looking better than she had when she arrived at La Rochelle; her face was filling out, the lines around her eyes and mouth seemed less deep.

  ‘My Missus has a bad spirit eating her from inside,’ Mary observed one day, as she straightened Ginie’s bedcovers and plumped up her pillows. A stranded bee was flying about, knocking into the windows. It fell to the floor, buzzing angrily. Mary opened the door to the veranda and guided it out. They watched it fly away in great looping movements, drunk with relief.

  ‘The spirit has nothing to feed on,’ she added. ‘In time, he will get weak.’

  Just as Mary predicted, raw pain eventually gave way to dull misery. The rain stopped and Ginie allowed herself to be persuaded out of bed. She and Mary went to the veranda to breathe the fresh air.

  As they made their way slowly outside, Ginie couldn’t help but listen for the patter of Jongy’s feet. Though Max and Sandra came to greet her with yelps of joy, she was struck by the lemur’s absence all over again. Her limbs had grown stiff and weak so she leaned heavily on Mary’s arm. She had always considered herself energetic – invincible even – physical frailty was a new state of being. Suddenly, she felt mortal. One day, they would put her in a box and bury her in the ground like Jongy. All the little lights and circuits that made up her consciousness, snuffed out.

  It was a still, sombre morning, the sky was full of dull cloud. Not a leaf moved, even the birds did not sing. Mary draped a blanket over Ginie’s knees, as though she were an invalid. A feeling of not being herself, of having lost control came over Ginie. Her head felt thick and muffled. She looked at her garden with resentment. It was nothing but a tame piece of jungle in a dark continent that could do terrible things with no warning. During the weeks she spent in bed, the vast age and size of Africa had taken shape in Ginie’s mind. A monkey cried out and Ginie snapped to attention. She looked around watchfully, as though searching for some eerie, brooding spirit that meant to harm her. Her gaze fell on the trees in the Dell and she tried to picture the evil that had prowled there – that might still be prowling.

  She turned around to check there was nothing behind her, looking toward the hills beyond the garden which seemed pulled subtl
y awry. Familiar markers like the stream that signalled the boundary of their property appeared to have changed course and acquired a strange tributary. She did not know where she was. She felt helpless, rudderless, afraid.

  Stephen was in his study. With Ginie in this state, he too had lost his way. It is virtually impossible, he thought, to retain one’s reason and sanity while living among people who think differently. We are oddballs, outlaws, sympathisers.

  Sighing, he picked up his pen and tried to anchor himself in the best way he knew – by writing. But he couldn’t concentrate on his history of the Courtaulds. He found himself writing another letter to his brother:

  Sam,

  Ginie and I regret that you haven’t felt you could visit Rhodesia yet. Do come or we shall soon forget what you look like. We’ve had a bad time recently, and living (as they say) far beyond the Mountains of the Moon, it has made us miss our family and friends more than ever. It’s sad that there is such distance between us. . .

  He stopped and put down his fountain pen before scrunching up the piece of paper and lobbing it into the wastepaper basket. He could hear the whine and drone of a mosquito close to his ear. He felt it bite and slapped at his cheek a few times, but missed. The mosquito danced to the window, its buzzing making his head spin. He rested his head in his hands. I need a whisky, he thought.

  It wasn’t just the senseless slaughter of Jongy and the damage it did Ginie that hurt. He had reaped such satisfaction from creating a place that was free from fear and discontent, politics and strife. It was his painter’s canvas, his sculptor’s block of stone and now, it was nothing but ruins.

  Ginie watched Mary fold a pile of sheets. Her hands, with their slim well-shaped fingers, smoothed and stroked the linen as she worked. Ginie was conscious of depths in Mary; troubled and patient.

  ‘You must miss Eliot,’ she said, abruptly.

  Mary drew in her bottom lip with her front teeth and kept it tucked in like that for so long that Ginie began to regret asking.

  At last, Mary said, ‘My people don’t think that a man and a woman are married just because they have had a wedding ceremony. It sometimes takes years for a couple to be really joined.’

  She paused. Ginie gazed at a silver chain around Mary’s neck. The links were snug and graceful against her skin.

  ‘It took ten years for me and Eliot to be really married,’ said Mary, eventually. ‘Things were very bad at first.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Oh, the usual story of life in Sakubva,’ Mary said, bitterly. She stared ahead. ‘There was no work. Too many babies came in a short time. Most nights, Eliot went to the shebeen to drink and he came home full of anger. I wanted to leave, but there was nowhere to go.’

  Her mouth trembled for a moment. Ginie offered her handkerchief, but Mary shook her head and pulled herself together. ‘But then, nkosi Thompson gave Eliot a job. He stopped drinking and we began to cleave together, like the Bible says. It wasn’t always easy. He had to be careful of the Thompsons, they could lash out like puff adders.’

  ‘Oh, I can imagine.’

  Mary frowned. ‘That is not a good kind of settler, but it was the only kind I knew. When I first met you and Mr Stephen, I didn’t know what to make of you.’

  Ginie gave her a thoughtful look.

  ‘Anyway,’ Mary continued, ‘Eliot learned to use his head. When they said something to make him angry so that he wanted to answer back, he just shut his ears. It worked, until the end. . . We were happy.’ Mary hesitated and sat back on her heels. Her eyes were bewildered and tired. ‘After all that, I lost him. And now. . .’ her voice trailed away. Mary let out a short sigh that sounded like a sob. ‘Now, it feels like one of my arms is missing.’

  Mary insisted that Ginie begin to walk in the garden in the mornings, to build up her strength. ‘We’re all animals,’ she said. ‘We need food, water, sleep and exercise to live.’

  The rains were over, the humidity of the jungle had disappeared and the grass was drying out. The skies were deep and clear and the days were warm, but the air in the early mornings and evenings held a chill edge, signalling the approach of winter.

  Ginie felt like she was recovering from a long illness. She still weak, she held Mary’s arm as they walked. But it wasn’t a physical illness she had suffered; it was an illness of the mind. She was going through an inner adjustment, letting go of what she’d believed she must have in order to live.

  Her recovery was marked by the return of the pleasure she took in her garden. It looked established now: the trees growing, shrubs blooming, and flowers in profusion. Despite the changing weather, she and Mary still saw butterflies, birds and the odd buck. Ginie was especially fond of the monkeys who gathered in the trees, waiting to raid the oyster nut vines, or chased each other over the grass. There was one who always walked on his hands, his tail in the air exposing startling turquoise balls. He probably had something wrong with his hips, but Ginie loved him for being different.

  Each day, they visited a different section of the land. Some days, they went to Ginie’s beloved roses, which bloomed all year round. On other days, they took empty baskets to the vegetable garden and walked up and down the neat beds, picking salad or vegetables for lunch. Ginie refused to set foot in the Dell and Mary did not try to persuade her. They spoke the entire time they walked.

  Mary confided in Ginie that she had wanted to be a teacher, but her family didn’t have enough money for her to train.

  ‘Anyway,’ she added, ‘my father thought it a waste to school his daughters beyond grade six. Girl children would get only get married and enrich another family. He used to say, “You can’t cook books and serve them to your husband for supper.”’

  When she met Eliot he was so handsome, so full of life, all thoughts of a career disappeared. Before she knew it, she had young children who needed to be fed, clothed and given a roof over their heads. She spoke of how hard life was in the township.

  ‘I didn’t work and I didn’t think my children would find work. There isn’t any, you see.’ She paused, chewing her bottom lip. ‘We’ve no healthcare. We want education, we want books; we thirst for them. You don’t know what it’s like to feel that way, to be so desperate for knowledge. But there aren’t enough places in schools for the children. We can’t carry on like this.’

  ‘I think we should stop trying to help all the time. It’s become too risky,’ Stephen said that evening on the veranda, watching the sun sink below the hills.

  The sky was awash with pink and gold and the dogs snoozed peacefully at their feet.

  ‘Let’s close down the home crafts club and put a halt on our other plans. We’ll keep a lower profile.’ He leaned forward and squeezed Ginie’s hand. ‘I don’t care so much for my own safety, but I couldn’t bear it if anything happened to you.’

  Ginie drew her shawl around her shoulders and turned the dark beacon of her stare on him.

  ‘Just supposing we did all of that,’ she said. ‘Would we really be left in peace? We’ve earned a reputation now. Whoever shot Jongy might carry on tormenting us anyway.’

  Stephen didn’t answer, he was looking at the horizon, lost in thought. He had always felt at home in this valley. For years he had sat here, watching the vast skies change above the hills, seeing them disappear into a haze of mist when it rained or stand clear in sunlight. In his favourite chair, he had seemed to absorb the hills’ strength. They were an antidote to the landscape that was still imprinted on his inner eye: the slime and rubble, the blasted trees, a snarl of wire that bore shreds of khaki and flesh, horses flailing as they drowned in shell-craters. . . These sights were still with him and always would be, but they were distant now.

  Jongy’s death had shattered his peace. It was as if his familiar and beloved hills had retreated from him. He was now just a stranger in unfamiliar territory, observing but not part of it.

  ‘Perhaps we should leave Rhodesia,’ he said, at last. ‘Let go of La Rochelle and make a fresh
start, somewhere without this terrible race hatred.’

  ‘Mmm. I’ve thought about it too.’

  ‘We could always go home, there’s no shame in it, you know.’

  Longing to see old friends and family was growing in him. He and Ginie couldn’t be an island forever. He was homesick for England, the long twilights and muted green fields, draught Guinness and Stilton cheese.

  ‘I don’t think I could face the climate again,’ said Ginie.

  ‘Could we try? Please, Ginie. We could pack up and leave whenever we liked.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  They paused, listening to baboons barking somewhere in the hills. Ginie took a cigarette from her case and put it between her lips. Stephen struck a match and lit it for her, the end glowing red in the thickening dusk. Leaning back in her chair, Ginie took a deep drag and exhaled.

  ‘Oh well,’ she said, flatly. ‘What does it matter where we live? Nothing we do makes any difference.’

  25

  Ginie, Rhodesia, 1950s

  Mary took Ginie for a longer walk than usual. It was cold and crisp, with a wind that smelled of grass and drying leaves. The sky was clear, cloudless. Frost filmed the lawn like a giant spider’s web, which crackled and crunched underfoot.

  ‘A bad thing happened last night,’ said Mary.

  Ginie turned to look at her. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘I was walking to my house and I smelled roses, but I was upwind from the rose garden.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ Ginie replied with a sigh. She was tired of these ghost stories, of the staff working each other up over nothing. She had enough real problems to deal with.