A Change of Climate: A Novel (23 page)

They found inside the house the sticks of furniture left behind by their predecessors, Mr. and Mrs. Instow. There were dusty, sagging armchairs, the upholstery worn by long use to an indeterminate shiny gray. There were some scarred tables, a couple of bookcases, indecently empty: a solitary picture on the wall, of Highland cattle splashing through a stream. Their bedroom was furnished with a bulky dressing table with a spotted mirror, and with wardrobes whose doors creaked and swung open when anyone entered the room, disclosing their dark interiors. Their ancient mothball reek lay on the air.

At once, their new routine began. There were new problems, new dilemmas, both human and ethical. There was no time for reflection, no period of induction. It was a month before a letter from Clerkenwell came. It was not an accusing letter, but it was huffy and vague. It wished them success in their new post. “Cooper said it would be temporary,” Ralph said. “But here they say nothing about moving us on. Still—” His eyes rested on his wife. Her pregnancy showed now more evident because she was thin.

“Better the devil you know,” Anna said. “The thought of packing my bags again—it’s too much.” She came over to him and put her hand on his head, stroked his curly hair. “It’s all right. We’ll get used to it.” And that would not be difficult, she thought. There were routine panics: a scorpion in the kitchen, a thorn under a nail. Otherwise, every day was the same.

Enock, a man with no family, dug the garden and raked it: he was aimless, erratic, prone to disappearances. Salome, in the kitchen, presided over their monotonous diet: stringy meat and mealie-pap, small bitter oranges from their own trees. After breakfast each day she washed the clothes and polished the red cement floors. Salome was shapeless, like most of the women who had passed their youth. She wore a lilac overall which she had been given by Mr. and Mrs. Instow: of whom she seldom spoke. She wore gaping bedroom slippers and a woolen hat; each morning by six o’clock she was in the kitchen, stoking up the cooking range, putting the kettle on the hob.

A second month passed, and already their memories were fading. Their time in Flower Street seemed to be an episode in other people’s lives. What has happened to Koos, Anna sometimes wondered, did the police take him? What has happened to Dearie and Rosinah? Was there an informer? If so, who was it? Her mind recoiled from this topic. Even the better memories were soured. She could not think of Flower Street without knowing that they had been betrayed.

Each morning by eight Anna was in the little schoolroom. She had a floating and variable number of pupils: some tots who could barely grip a pencil, some big bold girls who sat knitting and gossiping at the back. Anna did not try to stop them; she had no doubt they needed whatever it was they were knitting. The boys would go off for weeks at a time, herding cattle. Months on the battered schoolroom benches; then months on the trail.

Her aim was not high: just that they should be able to count, add up, subtract, and not be cheated when they went to the store with small coins. They should be able to write their names and read from primers meant for children in English suburbs: children with lawns to play on, and pet dogs, and strawberry jam for tea. There were no lawns here, for each blade of vegetation had to pit itself against God to survive. There was mealie-porridge for tea, and for breakfast and dinner too. And if they saw a dog, her pupils threw stones at it.

They were incurious, apathetic children; impossible to know whether or not they took in what she was trying to teach them. They were, she guessed, often hungry: not with the sharp hunger that goads the mind and makes the hand shake, but with a chronic hunger, grumbling and unappeasable. There was no starvation at this date: not in the village, not in the country. There was, rather, a malnourishment which bred lethargy, which bred an unfitness for any effort beyond the minimum. The Afrikaner farmers had the best land; they sweated it and made it pay. The desert produced thorn bushes and scrub, and in spring, after rain had fallen, a sudden, shocking carpet of strange flowers.

By eleven each day, the sun high in the sky, her pupils slept, nodding and slumping at their benches. Her voice dried in her throat. By one o’clock school was over. The children pressed around her. “Goodbye, and go well,” she would say, in her awkward, minimal Setswana.

“Stay well, madam,” they would say. And enclose her. Their hot bodies to hers. Hands patting. She felt herself shrink inside.

Why? Her own reaction disgusted her. The village men were meager, spiritless and skinny. The women were great tubes of fat, blown out with carbohydrates. They carried vacant-faced infants, strapped tightly to their backs. Too many babies died. The clinic nurse, Mrs. Pilane, could not cure measles. When the women spoke, they seemed to shout and sneer. Their voices were harsh, monotonous, somehow triumphal. God help me, Anna thought: but I don’t like them, perhaps I fear them. These feelings were a violation of everything she expected from herself, of all her principles and habits of mind.

News came patchily from the outside world; the mail arrived twice a week, and a newspaper sometimes. Bechuanaland, the obscure protectorate, was making news itself. Seretse Khama had returned home, the young tribal leader with his white wife; ten years earlier, a bar student alone in London, he had chosen for himself this trim ladylike blond, to the fury and dismay of his relatives and of the South African government, “MARRIAGE THAT ROCKS AFRICA” the
Daily Mail
had bellowed. For a few weeks the world had turned its eyes on the protectorate. Frozen out, banned by the British from his own country, the chief had now returned, to the ululations of tribeswomen and the pop of flashbulbs. Ralph said, “In the news again, think of it. James and Emma and our parents, reading about us in Norwich. It makes you feel we live in a real place, after all.”

They had been in the newspapers themselves, of course. Emma had sent the cuttings. Their story had run for a day or two, then been dropped as soon as they were let out of jail. The papers had used photographs from their wedding; it seemed no one had been able to find any other pictures of them. In their strange ritual garments they stared into the lens, startled and shy; they looked like children, playing at weddings to pass a rainy day.

News came from Cape Town, too. The archbishop was dead. It was the government that had killed him in the end, Ralph believed. Another apartheid measure had been proposed, with a clause giving the government the power to exclude Africans from churches in white areas; and this brought the old man to his sticking point.

The archbishop drafted a letter: if this becomes law, his letter said, the church and its clergy and its people will be unable to obey it.

The battle lines were drawn at last. Late at night, the archbishop’s secretary came into his study, bringing the final version of the letter for his signature. The old man lay on the carpet. He had fallen by his desk, and his heart had stopped.

Receiving this news, Ralph felt more alone.

Within a week or two of their arrival it became clear that the mission did not provide a job for two people. And Mosadinyana would never grow, as Cooper had purported. The mission was a fossil, a relic; its time was past, and the focus of effort and activity had moved elsewhere. Ralph imagined their lives and careers filed away, in Clerkenwell’s dustiest, lowest drawer.

He was angry. “It is so stupid. They are treating us as if we have committed some horrible crime, as if we are disgraced. But the truth is that there are people in England who would not only sympathize with us but applaud us.”

“We’re not heroes,” Anna said. “We didn’t do anything really. We just got in the way. We were an inconvenience.”

“At least that’s something to be.”

Clerkenwell sent their small salary every month. There was nothing to spend it on.

“There’s one thing to be grateful for,” Ralph said. “When the baby’s born, I can take over the teaching and you need do nothing. We can get a nurse from the village, Salome will find someone for us. Then if we have broken nights, you can get some rest during the day.”

The thought of the baby made him proud, worried, indefinably sad. That it would be born here, in Mosadinyana, in the heart of Africa. Anna’s body was swollen, but her face was gaunt, and her arms were stick-thin. In those few days in prison the flesh had simply peeled away from her frame; her bones seemed larger now, and her wide-open eyes made her look sad and frail.

When they stepped out of their front door, in the morning or at evening, the go-away birds wheeled overhead, mocking and barracking, swooping and squawking their single, unvaried message; the only words which nature had given them. They were insistent companions, like someone you pick up with on a journey: someone who claims better knowledge of the terrain, who tries to persuade you to vary your planned route.

Ralph drove Anna to the Lutheran mission hospital, over roads that shook the bones and viscera. The doctor was an elderly Dutchman, worn and faded by the sun; he received her with kindly concern. All would be well, he assured her, passing his hand over the mound of her belly. There was no need for her to think of traveling down the railway line when her time came; he had delivered a hundred babies, and he had plenty of experience if anything, God forbid, should go wrong. He saw, he said, that she was a sensible young woman, stronger than she looked; and after the event, all she would need would be the most simple precautions of hygiene, the common-sense measures any mother would take. “Think what your baby will have,” he said. “God’s blessed sun, almost every day of the year. Quiet nights under the stars and moon.”

Anna looked up at his outbreak of lyricism, half raising herself on the examination couch. Had he been drinking? He laid a hand on her forehead, easing her back. “Mrs. Eldred,” he said, “I have heard of your troubles in the Republic. You and your husband, you are young people who deserve the happiness that will come to you. It will be a pleasure and an honor to me to put your first child safe in your arms.”

Each night, by the light of lamps and candles, they sat over their Setswana grammars. Outside, the darkness rustled and croaked; inside, the only sound was a moth’s wingbeat. And yet they were not alone; there was a settlement out there, lightless, invisible, ragged night-breathing its only sound. In the first week, a parade of blanket-wrapped men and women had come to the door, asking for work. Anna was bewildered. She did not know how to turn them away, and it seemed there was no end to them. Ralph and Anna had made little progress in the language; when they tried to speak, people grinned at them. “You may take on anyone you need to help you,” Anna told Salome. “But not people we don’t need, not people who will just sit around doing nothing. Because it is not fair to choose some and not the others, to pay some and not the others. But Salome, listen, anyone who is hungry, you never, never turn them away.”

Did she turn them away? Anna was afraid that she did—on a whim, or according to the dictates of her own judgment. They had to acknowledge that her judgment might be sounder than theirs. She was their mediatrix, their mainstay. Her English was hybrid, sometimes sliding into Afrikaans. Once she did speak memorably, her hands folded together, her eyes resting unseeingly on something through the window, in the dusty yard: spoke with rhythm and fluency, with perfect confidence that she would be understood. “In the days of our grandmothers, madam, there were many women to divide the task of carrying the water and grinding the millet and sweeping the house. Now there is only one woman. She must work all day in the heat of the sun until she drops.”

“An exaggeration,” Anna said, “but, you see, she was speaking of the advantages of polygamy.”

“What will you think of next?” Ralph said.

“I think we have denatured these people,” Anna said. “Everything old is condemned, everything of their own. Everything new and imported is held up to them as better.”

“Soap and civilization,” Ralph said. “That was the idea. Oh, and God.”

“Oh, and God,” Anna said. “I begin to wonder what Christianity has to offer to women. Besides a series of insults, that is.”

There were quarters on the mission compound for three servants. Two of these whitewashed rooms were already claimed, one by Salome, one by the gardener Enock. But the people Anna could not employ did not go away. The other hut was soon taken by a large family of mother and children whose origin no one knew; other families camped out in the vicinity, built themselves lean-tos even frailer than the shacks on the outskirts of Elim. They were hanging around, it seemed, in expectation; you could not say in hope, for nothing so lively as hope could ever be discerned in the expressions of these visitors of theirs. That was what Ralph called them: our visitors. Their faces showed, rather, an awesome patience, a faith; a faith that one day the beatitudes would be fulfilled, and the meek and the poor in spirit would come into their kingdom. Or into a job, at least. One day Anna would wake up, and find her ambitions quite different; she would need as many servants as Blenheim, or Buckingham Palace on a garden-party day.

Anna wrote home, in cautious terms, about her condition. Her mother’s reply came, two months on: “Last week you were in the minds of our whole congregation. Everyone keeps you in their prayers and thoughts. The people around you, though primitive, are no doubt very kind.”

The cooler weather brought relief. She breathed more easily then, above the arch of her ribs. Only one thing had sickened her, and its season had been brief: the guava tree, riotously fertile, diffusing through the air the scent of eau-de-cologne slapped onto decaying flesh.

Anna said, “Ralph, in my grandmother’s generation …” Her voice tailed off. She hadn’t meant to sound so biblical; she must be catching it from Salome. She began again. “In our family, some years back … there were twins.” She waited. He looked up. She glanced away from the shock on his face. “The doctor can’t be sure, of course, but he says to keep the possibility in mind. He thinks it will be all right.”

“Thinking’s not enough,” Ralph said. He put his head in his hands. “Oh God, if we were in Elim now … If you could get to Jo’burg or Pretoria there would be no problems, every facility would be there for us. We should go south, Anna. Surely they wouldn’t refuse us? It’s your first child, you’ve not been well … Surely they’d make a gesture, a humanitarian gesture?”