1972 - A Story Like the Wind (55 page)

He was obviously taken aback at being confronted so abruptly by two horsemen on the fringe of his camp for he stopped in his tracks. His first instinct had been to command them to halt, but François and Mopani were already dismounting, debarred by their own sense of fitness from going uninvited with their horses into the middle of somebody else’s camp, a rule of behaviour they would have rigidly observed in the humblest of camps or poorest of kraals. His first impulse proving unnecessary, Sir James just stared at them with a certain militant astonishment until he recognized François. His aggression vanished, but he observed rather flatly, as if this visitation were the last straw to other irritations of the morning, ‘Oh, it’s you young fellow, m’lad. A good day to you,’ before adding, quite unnecessarily, seeing that they had already done so, ‘Perhaps you’d like to get down.’

Sir James’s tone merely implied to François that as far as he was concerned Sir James was in business as usual. Neither he nor Mopani could know that the thought of François had singularly rankled with him on this particular morning, because of something his daughter had done. Neither did Mopani fail to notice something perfunctory in their greeting, nor be surprised by the extent to which it differed from what was customary among people, even utter strangers, when meeting in that lonely world of Africa. He exchanged a quick look with François which made no secret of his reaction.

François, however, forgetful of Sir James’s reservations about shaking hands, had already left his horse standing with the reins trailing in the dust at its feet and stepped forward with his hand outstretched, saying: ‘Good morning, sir. I’ve brought Uncle Mopani over to see you.’

As he said ‘Uncle Mopani’ he suddenly felt foolish, because obviously Sir James could not possibly know who Mopani was. Confused, as well as irritated by a fact that Sir James, just by what he was, could make him feel awkward, he blushed and forced himself to add, ‘Of course, I mean Uncle Mopani Theron.’

François, however, had underrated Sir James’s knowledge of Africa. The instant he heard the word Mopani, his governor’s memory had swung majestically into action and, by the time François had produced the relevant surname, it told him precisely who his other visitor was.

Full of delighted surprise he dropped François’s hand and held out his own to Mopani, clasping it warmly and exclaiming, ‘Not
the
Theron? Surely not Colonel H.H. Theron?’

François nodded emphatically on behalf of Mopani, who was too embarrassed by the unexpected note of appreciation and the raising from the dead of a military rank, long buried decently in the graveyard of his memory, to do more than mumble a sound which was an equivalent of ‘I suppose so’.

From there on there was nothing too much that Sir James could do to make Mopani welcome. His attentions seemed to by-pass François. His Royal Naval shout directed at the kitchen had produced a servant to open out some comfortable canvas chairs and a table, to set them up in the shade of his large dining-tent, to cover the table with porcelain cups of a white, blue and gold Foreign Office design, with hot milk in a jug and coffee in pot to match, and Huntley and Palmer biscuits in a tin covered with a delicate Victorian chintz material.

François, however, felt so out of place that he said, ‘If you don’t mind, Uncle, I think I’ll go and see to our horses before I have any coffee.’

Mopani, without knowing the reason, was already aware of François’s embarrassment and, accordingly, welcomed the suggestion, deliberately making much of François’s thoughtfulness so that Sir James could not fail to notice how high was his regard for the boy. Indeed, Mopani’s intention got through to Sir James immediately. He gave François a glance which showed a glimmering of forethought that he might have to re-appraise his attitude to the boy, not only in fairness, but also so as not to alienate someone whom he himself had always secretly hero-worshipped in an anachronistic Victorian fashion.

Leaving them deep in conversation, François remounted and led Noble slowly out of the camp, careful not to raise any dust, while the three dogs happily trotted and skirmished playfully round the horses. Once in the saddle, he remembered that he had as yet seen nothing of Amelia and her charge, and used his convenient vantage point to look all over camp and clearing. But he saw no sign of either. He wondered what could have become of them, for certainly they must be in or very near the camp. Disappointed, he walked the horses away from the camp, but he had hardly reached the edge of the wide clearing around the tents when a sudden spiral of wind, which the bushveld day raises when the black earth begins to go white with heat under the sun, carried a nutter of large sheets of white paper across the horses’ path.

Both Noble and François’s own horse, trained to be on the watch for signs of anything strange, halted immediately. Their nostrils widened and quivered and their skin under the saddles shuddered under the strange flutterings of sheet upon sheet of paper blowing round them. Thinking that they could well be some of Sir James’s official documents, François swung out of the saddle and proceeded with difficulty to collect the sheets one by one until he had about twenty in his hand. He then found himself looking, not at documents of state, but a series of drawings.

He did not know which aspect of these drawings amazed him most, their abundance or their unity of subject matter. Sheet after sheet was covered with nothing but drawings of the same horse in various aspects, cantering, standing still and even bucking. Only in three or four drawings was there a suggestion that the horse had a rider on its back, but the figure was very vaguely sketched in. It was the discovery of these drawings, although François, of course, could not know it, that had irritated Sir James just before his and Mopani’s arrival. He had called them ‘idiotic doodling’, and ordered Amelia to take his daughter out of the camp before it was too hot and walk some sense into her.

Thoughtfully rolling the sheets of paper into a neat scroll, François slipped them into one of his two saddle-bags, remounted and walked the horses on slowly towards the river, where he sat, preoccupied, in the saddle. It was not until all three dogs came running back fast through the grass ahead of him, and all three began leaping up and down in excitement at his horse’s head, that he was forced out of his preoccupation.

He looked sharply around him and saw a wide-brimmed khaki hat waving wildly above the silver-tipped grass, and heard a faint but clear young voice trying to attract his attention. The moment the dogs observed that their mission had been successfully accomplished they swished about and, with Hintza in the lead, made straight for the owner of the hat, while François put his horses into a canter. He perceived at once that the owner of the hat was racing towards them, while the dark, satin figure of Amelia followed slowly some fifty yards behind, wobbling in the sea of grass like a cumbersome barge caught in a speedboat’s wake.

François’s surprise and delight gave way almost immediately to acute concern that these two should be wandering so far from the safety of their camp without protection of any kind. Much as he loved and trusted the Africa in which he lived, he had been taught that the trust was only justified if matched by an equal respect for danger to which the normal and natural life of the bush was also subject. He had never forgotten how angry Mopani had been when he found him without a gun only a short distance away from his own home. Yet here, in a totally untamed part of the bushveld, a young girl and a fat old lady had been allowed to wander about as if they were in one of Sir James’s mild ancestral meadows. His concern flared into bright anger.

While he was dismounting from his horse to greet Luciana, the three dogs had already reached her. Dressed now in suede ankle-boots, khaki slacks, bush jacket and khaki hat like his own, the chin straps of her hat let out to their full length so that it could hang suspended round her neck and behind her shoulders, she sank to her knees, her arms stretched out to Hintza who was first to greet her. After a long, warm hug Hintza became the automatic medium for presenting Nandi and !#grave;Swayo to Luciana.

Luciana’s exclamations of pleasure and affection made Hintza retreat. Nandi was the first, sniffing, to move forward. But there was nothing effusive about her advances to Luciana. Despite the fact that Luciana looked like a young boy, Nandi had at once recognized her as a girl, and was obviously submitting her to a thorough examination. !#grave;Swayo, however, with no such inhibitions, pushed Nandi aside and threw himself at Luciana in order not to be outdone by Hintza in his zeal for welcome and in-gratiation. But he was not allowed to succeed, for both to his and François’s amazement, a strange, deep growl of warning, which none of them had ever heard before, rumbled deep down in Hintza’s throat, while he bared his teeth between stretched and quivering lips, jealous of his own father.

At any other time and place François would have been amused by Hintza’s behaviour, but today he was not his usual, composed self. Luciana rose to her feet, smiling and delighted to see him again but she noticed, to her utter bewilderment, that there was not the slightest indication in François’s manner that he was pleased to see her. His set young face was old with anger and the strange, hard look in his eyes dismayed her.

She had no time to question him for François had taken her roughly by the arm, asking, ‘What d’you think you’re doing here like this out on your own?’

There is something so authoritative about pure anger that for the moment Luciana was overawed. She answered defensively: ‘Why, I’ve just been for a stroll with Amelia.’

‘For a stroll with Amelia!’ The
naivete
of it made François pompous with fury as he swept on. ‘Don’t you know that one as sulphur, ‘Dear Mother of Christ, Good blood of the wood, why must it always be like this? I know they all have to grow up, but why should they always begin by falling in love with horses? Her sainted mother was exactly the same…first just horses in general, any old horse…cart-horse, milkmen’s ponies, cavalry gigs, any old broken down nag sends them off besotted and starry-eyed. Then suddenly, there’s one particular horse. You can manage them for a while because that one horse and no other one will do and you think the search is over and peace has come. But one underrates the cunning of the creatures! For you wake up, one fine morning, and you find even
that
horse is not enough. It suddenly has to have a rider; all sorts of riders to start with and the search is on again until the rider, like the horse, becomes a particular one, not just any old boy; then they are all utterly unmanageable and the child you have known and nursed is gone for ever, less than this terrible dust to which we are told we must return.’

Here some tears had rolled down her sallow cheeks and she crossed herself before sighing, ‘If only we were in some civilized place and one could have the Mother Superior of a good convent and all her nuns to help one, the problem would not be so bad. But, dear Mother in Heaven, what is one to do in such a place, with such a father? Great gentleman that he is, he’s only a man and like all men knows little enough about women, let alone young girls. And he has set us all down here where, Heaven knows, at any moment we will either be eaten up by lions or massacred! I ask, dear Heaven, whether it is not as sinful as it is mad, and what is to become of us?’

However, the picture of the two of them looked, at that moment, so innocent that her carefully prepared contribution lost all its impetus.

She might have been able to resist the appeal of Luciana because, devoted as she was to her, she did, after all, see more than enough of her. But there was something about François which from the moment she had first seen him, produced a quite unexpected fellow-feeling within her. Seeing him looking at her in a rather serious, almost solemn way, out of wide, calm blue eyes (an attribute of which she felt Providence had unfairly deprived her Iberian race), she was possessed by powerful emotions. For all his obvious self-reliance and appearance of being well able to take care of himself, she felt that underneath there was a person almost as deprived as she, unmarried, and with her memories of disasters and massacres, felt herself to be.

So she now found herself sailing down, her front billowing above the sea of grass, towards François, clasping him in her arms and hugging him. Embarrassed as he was, he knew he could not disengage himself abruptly without hurting the feelings of so warm-hearted a person, and so in measure returned her welcome in kind.

Fortunately Luciana put an end to it by saying something to Amelia in rapid Portuguese. Then, by way of explanation, she said to François, ‘You mustn’t mind her. She thinks you look unhappy sometimes and just wants to comfort you.’

The idea that he looked unhappy had never occurred to François. Until Ouwa’s death it had never seemed to him that he had ever had cause to be unhappy. Amazed and rather upset he just gaped at the pair of them.

Luciana continued, ‘You look surprised, but you must admit you don’t laugh much, do you?’

It was again news to François that he did not laugh much. Yet, as the remark went home with far more point than Luciana intended, his natural sense of fairness suggested some reason for it. He knew it was not that he wasn’t as full of laughter and fun as other people, but he had to admit that, leading a life so much on his own, he perhaps was compelled to experience laughter and fun in other ways.

Indeed one has to support him in this by pointing out that laughing aloud is very largely a social phenomenon and that, unless one has others to share it with, it loses much of its point. The result was that, had one experienced the impulse to laugh in François’s circumstances, one would have probably done what he did and laugh, as it were, inwardly. Besides, what could have been more disastrous, François asked himself, than to laugh out loud when one was watching close by a whole tribe of baboons playing the craftiest and subtlest of jokes on one another? He had been filled with laughter to bursting point on countless occasions but never given way, since the first sound would have brought the joyful scene to an abrupt end and sent the baboons scampering away into the bush. He might, it is true, have laughed with Lammie and Ouwa, but there was a snag to that too. In spite of a great deal of amusement experienced in their company, it was amusement of a kind that did not produce sheer animal laughter so much as a smile, often the strange Mona Lisa sort of smile which is the unique expression of intellectual superiority, occasioned as a rule by wit or irony. His home, much as he loved it, had not been a school for laughter. That, perhaps, was why he had been so envious of the way Xhabbo had laughed the first time in the cave, and why he had been so impressed by the way this girl, apparently so devastatingly critical of him just then, had laughed at their first meeting. Somewhat subdued by this reflection he heard himself saying, ‘You’re wrong, I laugh a great deal, inwardly.’