1999 - Ladysmith (25 page)

“What are you doing?” she said, her eyes trying to make out the legend incorporated in the tattoo.

“You will see,” he replied, and dug down further into the soil of the bank.

She watched him bend over the spade. When he levered up clods of earth, the muscles of his back stood out sharply.

“Come on,” she said, a little coquettishly. “Tell me.”

He threw down the spade and, crouching by the hole, reached into it. “It’s gardening, Ladysmith style.” Pushing and pulling at something in the ground, he eventually tugged out a large fragment of shell, a great chunk of blackened iron.

“Oh, I see,” said Bella. She had heard that soldiers and people in the town were gathering up these things as mementoes. The poor drummer boy of the Hussars had been blinded when he tried to knock the fuse out of one of these treasures with a hammer. He was an awfully stupid and awfully unmilitary drummer boy, Major Mott had said; and a lucky one too—if the main charge had not been defective, the Major said, the boy would have been atomized.

“Be careful,” she said, recalling the incident, and taking a step back.

“Don’t be afraid. It is only a broken-off piece. All the detonation is gone.”

“Still…”

“It fell only this morning, Miss Kiernan,” said the barber, as if that were any guarantee of safety. Then, bowing, he presented it to her. “I would like you to accept it as a trophy, with my compliments.”

Bella reached out and took the piece of metal. It was so heavy it made her hand drop with the weight.

“I can’t carry it,” she said. “You’ll have to get me a lighter one.”

Torres picked up his spade and, crooking his elbow, leant his tattooed arm on the handle. “I will get you a complete shell instead. A little one. What do they say? Pom-pom?”

“That would be nice. Though I don’t know where I would put it.”

She moved closer to him. “What’s that design on your arm?”

He held it out. “My Ladysmith tattoo.”

She took his arm and read
Siege of Ladysmith, 1899
, beneath a picture of a wheeled gun.

“Who did it?”

“I did it myself. It is one of the things we barbers know. I have been doing it for many people in the tunnels. To pass the time. I will do you one, if you like.”

“I couldn’t,” said Bella, abashed.

“It would be a pleasure,” Torres countered. “I…”

He was interrupted by the whirr of a shell. Quickly taking her hand, he ran down with her to the men’s shelter. As the guns began to roar once more, Bella found herself amongst a crowd of staring menfolk. Apart from smelling strongly of sweat and tobacco, and showing more evidence of card and chess playing, the men’s gallery was much the same as her own: a cellar-like place with chairs and mattresses laid out on a tarpaulin for comfortable lounging. In the back, near the entrances to the individual tunnels, a smoky hurricane lamp gave out a sparse light. She crouched down between the barber and a wooden pillar, trying to make herself unobtrusive. But still they all just stared at her, the light from the lamp making the eyes of those in the rear shine eerily. They reminded her of the jackals and servals whose eyes could sometimes be seen at night on the edges of the town.

“Well,” said a rough voice, “the dago has got himself a ride.”

In a second Torres had the man by the throat and was grappling him to the ground. Other men in the gallery cheered and a space cleared around the wrestling men. A chair was tipped up, and as the two bodies turned over and over on the tarpaulin, she caught glimpses of Torres’s brown face and of the unshaven one of the other man, whose lips were drawn back over his teeth like those of a cornered animal. Bella was frightened, and shocked by how quickly it had all happened. She thought of running away, but felt she could not leave Torres, who now seemed to be getting the worst of the fight. The other man had him pinned down. He was raising his fist. She knew she must do something.

So she cried out, as loud as she was able. The shrillness of it caught them unawares. The gallery fell suddenly silent, and the man on top of Torres—she did not recognize him, but from his heavy canvas clothes and steel helmet thought he must be one of the rough uitlander miners who had come down from Johannesburg—lowered his fist. At that instant another man in a helmet came over and pulled him off Torres, who got to his feet and dusted himself down.

All that could be heard was the booming of the guns outside.

Full of inquisitive silence, the men crowded round Bella, Torres and his antagonist. In closer proximity, she was again aware of how badly they all smelled.

“Apologize to Miss Kiernan,” said Torres, his eyes blazing.

“It’s all right,” said Bella. “Please. Just stop fighting.”

“No, he insulted you,” exclaimed Torres. “He must apologize.”

“Yes, tell the lady you are sorry,” said someone else, and then suddenly everyone in the cave seemed to be on Torres’s side. But the other man just spat on the ground, and retreated into the darkness.

Once the brouhaha had died down, the men spoiled Bella terribly, bringing her bits and pieces of food, as if to atone for the behaviour of their fellow. A tall man in an overcoat made a cup of tea and carried it over to her, taking great care not to spill it. One even fried up some slices of eel, but the greasy look of them turned her stomach and she had to refuse. Outside, all the while, Long Tom rattled and roared.

It was nearly four o’clock before there was a lull in the shelling and Torres was able to escort her back to the women’s shelter.

“I am sorry about all that,” he said, taking her arm casually and naturally. “I am afraid that some of these men are very uncouth.”

“You shouldn’t have tried to fight him. I think perhaps you are not so tough as some of those people.”

“No doubt. But it was the honourable thing to do,” said Torres. “You would not have respected me if I had not done so.” They had reached the edge of the women’s shelter. “Well,” he said. “Here we are. I hope your next visit will be more pleasant.”

He took her hand and kissed it in courtly fashion, before turning on his heel and heading back. Bella couldn’t help smiling, and stood for a little while watching him as he strode in his tall boots across the broken earth.

When, that evening, Bella told Mrs Frinton about the incident, the widow cluck-clucked and shook her head.

“Well, you shouldn’t have gone there. You might have been…might have had advantage taken of you!”

“I had no choice—the shells.”

“Well,” said Mrs Frinton. “Men are men, you know, just as shells are shells.”

Bella could not agree. At no point in the encounter had she felt that her virtue was in danger.

“They are just like us, really,” she ventured. “Only most of the time we don’t realize it.”

“That’s a very newfangled view,” said the widow. “It’s not one I hold with myself. You or I wouldn’t fight—not just brawling, I mean, we wouldn’t be fighting this war. This—it’s all men, just men. Believe you me, when we get to the Good Place, we will find many more women there than men.”

Bella smiled to herself, and said nothing. Everyone else had gone to bed, and she and the widow were sitting up in the mouth of the cave, watching the night shelling. The town was now completely surrounded by Boer guns, but at night the shells seemed to be mostly pitched from behind them. Most of them were off target, and hit the rock ridge on the opposite side of the river, shattering into a thousand fiery splinters. In the darkness the curving sweep of these glowing fragments was a sight to see.

Eventually it grew too cold to sit up, and they retired. Wrapped up on her pallet, Bella felt sad and lonely. She could not sleep, and wasted the candle, letting it burn to no purpose. The closeness of the little cell bred anxiety. Her heart and lungs felt tight. She wanted to see her father. She wondered what had happened to Tom: she had not seen him since their intimate encounter, and was beginning to experience uncertainty about the vision of love—slow, spacious, unfolding—which she had attached to him. She thought about the barber, too, and other things. Disappointments…hopes…responsibilities. She realized, for instance, that she had left the new servants at the hotel without any instructions, and hoped Father was taking care of them. All these thoughts jumped around in her head, impish as the shadows cast by the candle.

Every now and then a shell fell near the shelter with a dull thud, making it vibrate, and she would pull her bedding more closely about her. All through the tunnels could be heard the gasps and murmurs of others who also were awake and fearful. The candle diminished. She kept thinking she should blow it out, but was unable to summon up the energy. Then it went out of its own accord.

Still she could not sleep. For one thing, it was freezing cold. Ladysmith above ground could get very nippy at night, in spite of scorching heat during the day. Down in the caves, the cold seemed to be powerfully amplified. The chill of the earthy air, the dampness coming up from the floor, seemed to seep not only into her bones but also into her mind, where she began to equate it with all the unsatisfactory elements of her world, both before and since the siege: Father’s rigidity and moodiness, his deep inconsolability; Jane, ill and on her own at Intombi; Tom, once more; the loss of the hotel…She pressed her face into the pillow. Why would it all not go away? Why could she herself not go away—ship abroad under splendid purple clouds, leaving Father, even Jane, everyone, shaking handkerchiefs on a jetty?

As she turned from side to side and the night wore on, she tried to clear her mind of these foolish, troublesome images by building in it a wall; a wall around some empty space, her own to inhabit. She imagined this construction as something like a tower, at the top of which was a white-painted room with long, open views from its windows. As she eventually began to drift off, that was the picture she tried to keep in her head. Then, to her intense irritation, she found herself growing unsure whether the tower was not a troublesome picture in itself. The mental dwelling on it all made her yet more anxious, fearfully tightening lungs and heart once again, fending off sleep once more. But sleep she did, finally.

And so other nights and other mornings came. Life in the tunnels developed into a routine. Like everything else, it was governed by shellfire. The ear was deafened, then came a sinister silence. This would be the pattern of Bella’s days and nights until Christmas. Explosion. Silence. Explosion. Silence. Explosion…It was hardly bearable. When the tunnel-dwellers had to come inside, the booms were quieter, and all around the catacomb could be heard the sound of plaintive murmuring:

“When will it end?”

“I never thought I would see myself like this.”

“Mummy!”

“My God, I have no hope left in me.”

Then the silence again. Outside for a breath of fresh air, or a drink of water, the only thing that would quell the hunger. And then only for a short while. As Mrs Frinton had said, it was not a good idea to drink the tainted stuff without boiling it first: those who had been careless about this were going down with dysentery. Whenever she felt a twinge in her stomach, Bella dreaded that she was going down with it.

Mostly, this morbid fear of illness came at night, riding on the chill air she had grown to hate so much. She tried to steel herself into recognizing that all her feelings of dread, and the upset stomachs that went with them, were nothing but the expression of extreme discomfort—not the first signs of enteric fever, nor the early symptoms of an hysteric madness. But as she lay on her pallet the image of the tower kept coming back to her, so much so that she began to wonder if what she was imagining was not a tower at all, but a vastly magnified shell. She tried to understand her feelings, though with little success. One thing she knew, however. There was this wanting that persisted: a terrible emptiness of soul and heart, as she described it to herself. That sounded too grand. She didn’t have the words. Yet it was how she felt.

So what did she want, exactly? She didn’t know, though she had asked herself that question every one of those cold nights. Tom? Tom as her husband? Any husband? To be sure, the tunk-tunk of the banjo and the drone of the accordion from the men’s tunnels sang that tune, or the possibility of it, each night. As indeed, in more raucous fashion, did the shouts accompanying a favourite card game, the roars of “Top of the house! Top of the house!” But she hadn’t spoken to a man since the business with Torres, and the most she saw of the male sex was the flicker of a match as one of them lit his pipe or, from time to time, a great-coated sentry lumbering past, rigid with cold and drenched with wet.

Her frets and fancies seemed to come from so deep within that they frightened her, and some nights she thought she might be losing her mind. And then, one night, she realized. The tower was a prison, not a haven or somewhere from which to view her prospects of future happiness. Yes, the tower and the wanting were one and the same. It was just like the inside and outside of the siege. Accepting this, she said to herself: no more. Even as she said it, she was not convinced of the efficacy of this self-instruction—but it did give her a certain amount of satisfaction to be back in authority over her thoughts and feelings…

Nobody in true authority was taking much notice of the troglodytes. One afternoon, General White did come by with his staff, and leaned into the Bella’s tunnel.

“It’s a fine tunnel, ladies,” he said, taking off his hat. “But you won’t need it long—there are three brigades coming.”

And then continued down the line of catacombs, like an Egyptologist inspecting a row of mummies.

Buller won’t bring my home back, Bella thought, as she watched the old man limp along the bank. Nor will his three brigades. All her stuff, all the bits and pieces in her room: she must go back and retrieve them. But Father had said she should remain in the tunnels. She felt naked without her things; the barriers between her and the world were gone. All she had was a suitcase full of clothes covered in masonry dust. A woman in the tunnel next door was wearing some of them; everything was exchangeable for food now, and this woman had offered a tomato for a pair of woollen stockings of Bella’s. She had not wanted to give them up, but the idea of a fresh vegetable had been too attractive to resist. There were almost none left in the town now, the Royal’s and other vegetable gardens having been either shelled or simply stripped of everything edible.