1972 - A Story Like the Wind (66 page)

With such a night behind him and such a long, depressing day drawing to an end, François viewed the coming night with growing dismay, until suddenly the five mongrel watch-dogs, coming on duty, started their tell-tale barking and, in between the barks, there became audible the sound of a truck approaching along the Punda-Ma-Tenka. At first François thought it was just another of those unwelcome trucks using the old Hunter’s Road, typically timed to arrive at the ford at dusk, but this truck, instead of making for the outspan by the ford, sounded as if it had left the main road and was making straight for the homestead, where the windows were already on fire with the sunset, and the white walls and eurhythmic gables stained with colour. ‘Thank God!’ he cried, ‘Nonnie.’

Hintza had reached the same conclusion and was already running as François had never seen him run before, his body elongated and glistening in a twist of evening light and speed, towards the truck labouring towards them.

He himself had just the presence of mind to put his head through the kitchen door and shout at Ousie-Johanna, ‘Little old Ousie—visitors…quick, tell Lammie. Visitors!’ Then, gun at the trail, he followed Hintza.

Of course it was Sir James’s truck, with Amelia, more monumental than ever, suitably enthroned on high beside the driver, and Nonnie; looking older but reassuringly dressed as she had been when he had last seen her, in bush jacket, slacks and calfskin boots. Only this time she wore a wide-brimmed khaki bush hat lined with a pillar-box red material, that brought out all the colour and light on her face. She was first out of the truck. The moment she landed on her feet in the grass Hintza threw himself into her arms, and at once both in his own right and in the role he played unknowingly as a proxy for François, he received a double ration of welcome.

While Sir James and Amelia were descending in dignified state from the truck and expecting to be received with due respect themselves, Nonnie instinctively found it safer to go on fondling and stroking Hintza as she knelt in the track, while looking up at François with expressive, dark Iberian eyes now shining with happiness. She managed to say at last, ‘Oh, it’s been such a long, long time.’

François, with the greatest difficulty, could only manage a mere, ‘It’s been no time at all.’

‘You haven’t changed a bit,’ Nonnie retorted gaily, far too happy to be critical. In any case she had gone away finally understanding François’s highly personal attitude to time. But she teased him instinctively as a way of by-passing the storm of emotion in herself. ‘I see. You still have that sublime indifference to time and age. So all these long months have been just no time at all to you, Master François?’

Thinking he had never been so misunderstood, François protested, ‘I don’t mean anything of the kind, Nonnie. I just meant, it was the kind of time I would have preferred not even to have existed.’

As he said it, there was a glimmer at the back of his mind of one of the basic realizations of the imagination brave enough to look into the mysterious role of time in the life of man: the fact that the very time which passes so slowly and reluctantly because of separation or unhappiness, seems, on looking back, to have vanished in a flash almost as if it had never been. Yet time which is charged with meaning and joy goes so swiftly that one longs to stop it. Once over, it has this paradoxical compensation that, in recollection, it seems to have lasted longer. The intimation made François repeat, ‘I promise you, Nonnie, it was just no time at all.’

Her eyes clearly showed that she understood. She may even have responded in a far from teasing way had not the voice of her father, perhaps even a little more official than before if that were possible, due to his recent voyage in enigmatic waters of state, broken in with an ‘Ah, we meet again, young fellow, m’lad. Good evening to you, and I hope not too inconvenient a moment to beg you and your mother hospitality for just one night?’

François, however awkwardly, managed to make it convincingly clear that everyone at Hunter’s Drift had been looking forward to just such a visit from them, and would have been most disappointed had they not come. He would have elaborated if he had not then been abruptly enclosed in Amelia’s arms and hugged and kissed ardently, and informed, over and over again, in a Portuguese he could not understand, how delighted she was and how much she thanked God and the saints in Heaven, to whom she had regularly prayed in their absence, that no one at Hunter’s Drift or in the vicinity had been massacred, yet. That
yet
was uttered in such a tone as to make it quite clear that in Amelia’s heart, Africa and the inevitability of the ultimate massacre of everyone not African in it were still a sombre unity.

It was a wonderful evening in the homestead that followed. François rejoiced, not only that Nonnie was back but also that Lammie had not for many years been so gay, or looked so beautiful. Sir James, too, having been prepared by the many things he had heard about Lammie to find her not only extreme beautiful but also possessing so lively a mind, imagination and a great range of interests in regions in which he himself was at home, was at his most gracious best. He revealed aspects of himself which did something to soften the impact of François’s previous experience of him.

François and Nonnie faced each other across the table, set with the old Joubert family silver, their best plate and old wine glasses from France, decanters full of Ouwa’s best wine and bowls of fresh fruit glowing like jewels under the light of the great oil lamps. They were content to communicate with each other with looks rather than words and wisely to leave the conversation to the capable tongues of their highly articulate parents.

Nonnie indeed had a private inducement of her own to keep silent and listen carefully so as not to miss a nuance of voice or expression as she saw her father and Lammie getting on so well together. Nor was she travelling alone in this wide dimension of anticipation. Whenever the door at the far end of the dining-room was opened she could just make out two vast ladies in the dim light beyond, one Portuguese, one African, their arms round each other, heads close together discreetly observing the table, their eyes moving from one expression on Lammie’s face to the corresponding one on Sir James’s.

One cannot describe what Nonnie would have said, might she have seen through the walls to the kitchen when the door shut between courses, for in the intervals those two ladies were busy using that Esperanto of signs and sounds they had evolved at their first meeting, to make it quite clear to each other that they had not only indubitably reached the same conclusion but approved in equal measure and with a rapidly accelerating degree of warmth. They celebrated the various degrees of their conclusion with more embraces and expressions of joy at the vast prospect of accord opened up in their imagination. And on each occasion Ousie-Johanna, when she reluctantly withdrew from Amelia’s arms, filled a glass to the brim for her with the good red wine which, for all her opinion of it-as a brew of the devil, she felt free to offer to Amelia as Lammie had specially ordained it for that very purpose. As the wine warmed blood and hope within Amelia, and the communion of hope and warmth created an excuse for more wine, it soon became perhaps the one moment in years in which even her bruised mind was free of any thought of disaster and massacre.

The evening ended somewhat abruptly for Nonnie. Sir James suddenly broke off in his conversation with Lammie, during coffee in the drawing-room, and ordered his daughter in his best quarter-deck manner, ‘Bedtime, Chisai. Off you go below deck, at the double!’

Although the command was not without some camouflage of playfulness, Luciana knew her father had never been more in earnest. The woman in her was already old enough to suspect that this display of discipline and firmness on his part may well have been put on for Lammie’s benefit, since women perhaps tend to be impressed by a man’s capacity for being firm with all members of their sex except themselves. ‘Why Fa,’ she thought to herself, ‘I never knew you could be so cunning.’

However she was ready to do anything just then to serve her father’s cause of impressing Lammie. Also, she had her own reasons for instant compliance. She had already arranged with François that she would accompany him on a dawn patrol to the place where they had had their first complete experience in the bush together, watching the baboons. So an early night suited her secret purpose admirably.

Accordingly, she immediately left her chair, curtsied gracefully to Lammie, waved her hand lightly to François, touched an imaginary able-seaman’s hat to her father and with an ‘Aye-aye sir and a good night to all’, she vanished from the room.

Although it took François a long time to go to sleep, once asleep he slept soundly, until he found himself suddenly sitting up in his bed, reaching for his rifle and listening to the sound of first one long night-plover call like that on a bosun’s pipe, followed immediately by the mournful bark of a jackal—all emitted so faultlessly that only François could have known that they were human. Dear God, he thought, it was the prearranged call sign. Xhabbo had come. Xhabbo at last was out there in the bush and the dark.

He had hardly admitted the conclusion and lit the candle, when Hintza set his paws on the bed, almost uncontrollable with excitement and eagerness to be off. ‘Shush, I know, he’s back. I know. Quiet, please keep quiet.’ François calmed Hintza and started dressing as fast as he could. However he had not even got his trousers on properly when again there came exactly the same series of calls, this time closer and even more urgent than before. The urgency was immediately stressed because, after hardly a minute’s pause, the second call was followed by a third reiteration at a faster and even more imperative pitch.

‘Something’s wrong, something’s terribly wrong. Dear God, we must hurry. But please Hin, quiet! We
must
be quiet.’ He told himself and Hintza this in Bushman, as Hintza seemed beyond himself with his own reading of the need to haste towards the call. He was now scratching fiercely at the door in a manner which could wake up the whole household.

Completing his dressing in record time and quickly blowing out the candle, François opened the door quietly, exhorting Hintza to greater calm, and tiptoed along the passage towards the nearest outside door.

But he had not gone far when suddenly a torch flashed in his face and a voice whispered, ‘It’s you, François. I didn’t realize we were going to set out quite so early. What a good thing… I was so excited that I woke up early and couldn’t resist getting ready. I seem to have been waiting here for hours not daring to breathe.’

It was Nonnie of course and a complication that François would have given anything to avoid. He could not tell what Xhabbo would think of him if he came with another person to their meeting after so long. Nor could be explain to Nonnie why he could not allow her to come.

As he stood there hesitating what to do, the call sign was repeated for a fourth time. François knew then that he had no option.

He said to Nonnie rather fiercely, ‘Come quickly then. But for Heaven’s sake come quietly. There’s something very strange going on outside. You must promise to be silent…not to speak unless spoken to and not ever to tell anyone about what happens.’

Without waiting for Nonnie’s answer he made immediately for the door, opened it soundlessly and led the way on to the broad stoep. From there he saw that the morning star, Xhabbo’s Dawn Heart, was already risen, the dawn obviously not far behind and the bush for the first time that he could remember, was completely and most ominously silent. All is well, Xhabbo has come, one half of his heart called out to him. The other called out as loudly, all is not well.

François thought Xhabbo’s call had come roughly from the direction of the place where he and Hintza had originally found him caught in the Ijon-trap some eighteen months before. But he was not certain. He would have liked another call from Xhabbo just then to help him get his bearings more precisely. But another call in so short a space of time might alert even the experienced Matabele senses, however sleepy. So he whispered to Hintza to take the lead, knowing that his sensitive nose would be even better than a compass for the shortest way through the dark to Xhabbo.

It was just as well that he handed over command to Hintza. To his astonishment, Hintza led off on a different path through the garden which led to a track bearing away between the Matabele kraals and the river, to a point where the crescent of hills behind his home met the river, almost immediately underneath the place of Mantis’s cave. Hintza, despite François’s efforts to restrain him, for once appeared to find it necessary to match their pace to his own reading of the urgency of the situation. He went ahead in the darkness so fast that François had to break into a quick trot to keep close to him. François feared the pace might be too fast either for observing the necessary silence or for a city-bred person like Nonnie. But every time he looked round he was impressed to find her close behind him.

They went on like this for close on a mile, leaving the Mata-bele kraals well behind, without attracting any attention. Then François thought he saw at an acute angle to their direction, half-left behind them, not far from where the Punda-Ma-Tenka road reached the ford on the river, a blur of some dark mass which he could not explain, moving silently but fast across the starlit clearing towards his home. Indeed Hintza must have recognized the same unusual phenomenon because François nearly bumped into him, halted in the track, his head turned sideways in its direction and an ominous sort of murmur in his throat.

François may well have stopped too and turned round to investigate that dark blur of movement if, almost directly ahead of him and now very close indeed, Xhabbo’s call sign had not gone up in the silence. Not only the pitch and the speed at which it was uttered but just the fact that it had been emitted at all, implied an extreme sort of desperation in Xhabbo.

The need for the greatest silence as well as haste made François go down on his knees in the track and command Hintza: ‘No Hin, no looking back, that’s Xhabbo calling. Forget everything else…find Xhabbo, quick. Search and find. You must be quick as never before.’