1972 - A Story Like the Wind (45 page)

Used as he was to arriving at Hunter’s Drift after long and exhausting journeys at all hours, François himself had never quite lost the sense of wonder evoked by the sight of his own home. It always looked to him beautiful, welcoming and infinitely reassuring, considering how profoundly it was contained in the wildest, loneliest and widest bushveld in Africa. If it always looked like a thing of wonder to him, one can readily imagine how it must have appeared to the tired members of the Monckton party, seeing it for the first time after their long journey.

Luciana bounded from the truck to cry out with excitement and delight: ‘D’you really live here? Do you? Oh, how gorgeous.’

The great Amelia, who had to be helped down from her itinerant throne, did her best to look as if she had seen better things, but to anyone who knew her as Luciana did it was clear that her pose of dignified silence was due to the fact that she was speechless with astonishment. Even Sir James, whose career had not unnaturally inclined him to a certain love of pomp and display was sufficiently impressed to lose some of his reserve, and as a result became more friendly to François than he had yet been, saying sincerely that in spite of all he had heard of the wonders his father had performed in carving Hunter’s Drift out of the bush, he had never expected anything quite as beautiful and impressive as this.

As a result, the evening that followed was a happy one. So happy that François had at the end of it, with his Calvinist background, a feeling of self-condemnation that his remorse over Ouwa’s death had been temporarily forgotten.

There was only one awkward or, perhaps, funny moment, depending on whose point of view one favours. François had made Sir James sit in the place of honour at the bottom of the table which he had turned into its head for that evening, and asked him to say grace before they started on their cold melons, which lay like half harvest moons on Lammie’s best Delft china plates in front of them. François did this because the concept of good manners of his own people demanded that the senior stranger at table should always be invited to say grace. Sir James obviously was not accustomed to saying grace either at his own or any other person’s table. François could tell that instantly not only by his evident embarrassment but by the quick look which the girl gave her father out of those large eyes of hers, blacker and more shining than ever under the yellow light of the brass oil lamp suspended in that biblical way over the great dining-room table. It was not at all a reverent look and he was not at all certain that he ought to approve of looks like that in a young girl, or for that matter from anyone else on such an occasion. Whether he approved or not, however, it made no difference to the fact that it was a look of the most sacrilegious merriment suppressed with great effort.

What was worse, it was followed by one of the subtlest and almost imperceptible winks that François had ever seen in the eyes of any living person, a wink so deft, artful and quick that François somehow knew it was the product of long practice. Not the least disconcerting thing for him about both expression and wink was the assumption they seemed to convey that François would be sharing their meaning and that this matter of saying grace by one so awkward at it as Sir James, was an unnecessary and absurd impediment to the important business of eating. François’s deduction was confirmed by the fact that Sir James, drawing desperately on remote memories of his past, realizing that the last time he had been called upon to do anything of the sort was perhaps as a pimpled prefect at Rugby, had hardly mumbled an embarrassed ‘For what we are about to receive’ etc., when the girl had her spoon in her hand, dug it into the melon and almost at once, with a full mouth, exclaimed, ‘Oh, how scrumptious!’

Her father, his duty done and for the moment comfortable in the knowledge that a whole meal lay between him and that other embarrassing terminal when no doubt he would be called upon to say thanks as well, found the melon so good that he asked François almost with unbelief, ‘And do you really grow melons like these yourself?’

On the foundation of several glasses of the cool dry sherry made by François’s cousins in the south, as well as a hock of amber, a purple-red wine and some of the oldest of old Cape brandy that followed, Sir James from then on took charge of the conversation. In the process he became so mellow in thought and speech that all abrasion from their earlier encounters vanished from François’s emotions. He listened intently to Sir James’s eloquent and detailed account of how he had first visited the area as a young District Officer some twenty-five years ago, how even then he had thought it would be the one place in Africa where he would like to spend the days of his retirement. It seemed to him then to offer many precious natural things that were either vanishing or becoming so rare and expensive in Britain and Europe that he was certain they would be out of his reach when retirement came. It was not just the shooting and fishing, and a life of ease with servants who loved serving. It was far more that the people he had met as a District Officer there had made him feel as if his life had meaning because they seemed so grateful for what he could give them of his inheritance of justice, law, order, decency and self-respect. Such a life and such an access to a feeling of purpose and meaning in himself, he had thought, would be available there on the Amanzim-tetse for an indefinite period.

Of course, this was all implied rather than stated literally. Equally, he implied in what he said an extreme distaste of the present and the direction that life seemed to be taking him. He seemed by no means old (even in François’s reckoning of age), yet his whole imagination, in the best and most honourable way, was still enclosed in the values of the past. It was clear that he had been led to select this remote and isolated part of Africa as a kind of fortress to defend a vanishing way of life against the impetuous future tightening its forces of siege around him.

There even came a moment in the conversation when François had a glimpse of how shocked Sir James had been when rumours reached him that someone else also had taken a liking to his part of Africa and started developing it in a contemporary manner. The shock had been softened only by reports of Ouwa’s unusual personality and of his love of the aboriginal life of Africa. Not that he had approved even then of everything that he heard of Ouwa’s doings. Sir James’s deepest conviction, honourably and truthfully held, was that the sort of Britain he represented had everything to give, and nothing to learn or receive, from the man of Africa except grateful recognition. All these things, however, were conveyed at this most enjoyable of dinners, more by atmosphere than by statement.

In any case, imposing as François found Sir James to be, his own imagination was stimulated far more by the presence of Luciana, who was nearer to his own age. He realized with a shock that never before had he had anybody that was at all sympathetic and close to his own age staying at his home. That it should turn out to be a girl was an event of some significance. It seemed like something straight out of the fairy-tales that he had ceased reading only a year or two before.

One says someone of his own age, because that is what François assumed. Yet one must underline that it had not occurred to him, as it had occurred to the girl at the very first encounter, that he might, if not ought, to ask her age. Thereby, as one will presently see, hangs something not unimportant to this tale.

All one needs to complete the account of the evening is to say that the girl in question, despite the curiosity, excitement, chatter and the bewildering range of expressions on her young renaissance face and in her wide Mediterranean eyes, at which François marvelled continuously, once her meal had ended with a deep, unashamed sigh of contentment, was so worn out that Sir James politely asked François to summon Amelia.

Initially a place had been laid for Amelia on the dining-room table, but she had elected to join Ousie-Johanna in the kitchen. Before François even opened the kitchen door he could tell from the kind of noises coming from behind it that a cordial celebration was in process. He entered to find Ousie-Johanna in the process of filling Amelia’s glass from a bottle of red wine, although he knew that Ousie-Johanna never drank at all, and regarded it, as she was fond of saying, as ‘a liquid invented by Mephistopheles’. While she was doing this, though she and Amelia did not know a single word of a common language, they were making noises, faces and elaborate gestures with their hands at each other which demonstrated a complete community of spirit as well as great and growing affections.

Pleased as François was at seeing two such monumental ladies of such different backgrounds on such excellent terms, he could not help being astonished. No half-caste person that he had ever known in Africa, least of all members of the Cape-coloured people such as those who were at that moment in their camp above the pan on Hunter’s Road, would have dreamed of sitting down at a common table with a black person. It was his first glimpse of how utterly free of colour prejudice were the Portuguese of Africa. Sympathetic as he had been from the start towards Amelia, his heart now warmed to her all the more for taking so immediately to his own beloved Ousie-Johanna, and he hated to interrupt them. However, the moment he indicated that she was needed in the dining-room, Amelia swallowed the rest of her wine in one long gulp, in such a hurry that she sneezed and evoked, to François’s amazement, the polite Mata-bele response from Ousie-Johanna of ‘
Tutuka!
’ that is, Grow!

Dear God, François reflected, if the wish implied in the
tutuka
were granted, it could only be followed by such an explosion that Ousie-Johanna’s kitchen would be shattered, because it was quite inconceivable that anybody could ever grow bigger than either Amelia or Ousie-Johanna without imperilling, between them, the laws of safety prescribed by Providence and biology for the legitimate expansion of the human body.

Amelia had hardly gone through the door when Ousie-Johanna, her face shining and eyes beaming, remarked to François, ‘What a real lady. A real, stately lady of taste and fashion. Have you ever seen anyone so well dressed in this heathen place? Do you know, her dress shines so beautifully that I could see my own face in the lamplight on her bosom. Do you think our Lammie would let me have a nice, shining dress like that too? We can’t have neighbours giving themselves airs and dressing better than we do, can we now? And don’t you think my hair would look fine with combs and lace just like that? And do you know, Little Feather, I don’t think our Lammie herself, now that she has to go into mourning, could do better than to wear a black dress exactly like that.’

François did not have the heart to tell Ousie-Johanna what he thought about clothes so inappropriate for travelling through the bush as Amelia’s, and he skilfully avoided all effort at coming to terms with Ousie-Johanna’s highly suggestive praise of Amelia and her appearance, by telling her how much her dinner had been enjoyed and how grateful he would be if they could all be called half-an-hour earlier next morning with coffee and rusks, because the Moncktons were anxious to get to their own place on the river as soon as possible. But Ousie-Johanna was not to be side-tracked. She gave him only a perfunctory word of agreement before she was back on the subject of Amelia.

‘And, Little Feather,’ she said with such innocent naivete that François did not know whether to laugh, cry or just hug his own unrivalled Princess of the Pots as !#grave;Bamuthi called her, ‘you know she is not only in the mode [South Africans still use in their language the French word for fashion] but she is so well-educated too. She speaks a language even I cannot understand.’

‘Why, dear little old Ousie,’ François tried to comfort her, ‘nor do I understand it.’

‘Don’t you, Little Feather?’ she exclaimed, amazed, before adding after a deep, long pause, ‘Dear little Lord in the Heaven, she is better educated than even I thought, ignorant creature that I am.’

François fully expected to find that the great Amelia had whisked the girl off to bed in his absence, but to his astonishment she was still there in her chair, her fatigue forgotten in an argument with her nurse in Portuguese, which appeared based on the simple fact that she just refused to go to bed until she had said good night to her host. She did this, François thought, quite charmingly, in a way he had never seen and yet, as often before with other actions, done with a disconcerting suggestion that the gesture could be both pretended and genuine at the same time.

As he entered the room she broke off arguing, pushed her chair back and jumped lightly to her feet, as if François were not a boy but some dignitary to whom she was compelled to curtsy, as all well brought-up young Portuguese girls are still taught to do before their elders. The curtsy was elegant enough but he did not quite know what to make of her ‘Good night sir, thank you for a most wonderful evening.’

Indeed François was so confused by it all that he could only take refuge in the most conventional of all responses, ‘Nothing at all to be thanked for, thank you very much indeed,’ while inwardly he was irritated with himself for not being more graceful and original in his reply.

The girl swished about like a dancer and was following Amelia dutifully to the door leading into the corridor, when she overheard the conversation starting between François and her father, and stopped.

François was politely suggesting to Sir James that since he had to get up early in the morning, probably he, too, would like an early night. Then, if he would excuse him, François would immediately set about the last of his duties so that the house could be shut up for the night. This was a duty that always fell to him in Ouwa’s absence. It was what he called the ‘night patrol’, a final round of all the buildings, stables and outhouses to see that all were secure against the night, and the Matabele watchman at his post to guard the homestead and the domestic animals it sheltered, against possible marauders.

Sir James readily accepted the suggestion, but explained that he himself always liked a turn about outside before going to his ‘bunk’, and he announced that he would accompany François.