A Change of Climate: A Novel (25 page)

“I gave a skirt to Felicia—that one I made in Elim, out of the roll Mr. Ahmed gave me. That gray-green paisley skirt, do you remember?”

“Yes,” Ralph said, lying.

“I was pleased with that skirt, it was the nicest thing I’d ever made for myself. Now I’m an inch too big for it, so I thought I’d give it to Felicia, she’s so smart and neat.” Anna smiled. “She doesn’t like it much. She thinks it’s drab. Still, I like to see her wearing it. It hangs well.”

“So Salome is jealous?”

“More than that. Jealous and aggrieved.”

“Perhaps Mrs. Instow used to give her clothes. The best Paris labels.”

They laughed. In the back of a drawer, they had found a photograph of the Instows, the kind of fading snap that people describe as “taken with my old Box Brownie.” A little, huddled, sexless couple they were, false teeth bared in haunted smiles. Where were they now? The mission society’s pension arrangements were not generous. A bed-sitting room and kitchenette, Ralph thought, somewhere like Leamington Spa. God save us. Sometimes now his thoughts turned to what he would do when they left Mosadinyana. His father would be seventy in three years’ time, and his mother’s letters hinted that the work of the Trust was getting too much for him. The Trust had grown a good deal, from its original local foundation; and Uncle James, still toiling among the London derelicts, was approaching what would normally be thought of as retirement age. I should be putting my mind to taking over from them, Ralph thought, going home and finding us a house and beginning the next phase in life. I can face them now, he thought, my mother and father, because I have done and seen things they have never dreamed of. And I have children of my own, now.

Anna seemed disinclined to speculate about the future. She had too many petty day-to-day concerns. A kind of kitchen war had broken out. Someone had taken a whole sack of sugar, just brought in from the store; it must be Salome, Anna thought, because sugar was one of her perquisites, she took it for granted that no one would prevent her from carrying it away by the pound, under her apron. “But a whole sack, Salome,” Anna said, turning on her disappointed eyes. “So that I go to the pantry and there is none— none—not a spoonful for Felicia’s tea.”

Salome said nothing, but a peevish expression crossed her face. Later that day she began her ritual complaints about Enock. “He is not doing his work properly. Always at a beer-drink when he says he is going to a funeral.”

Beer-drink, Anna said under her breath; yes indeed, there are plenty of beer-drinks, with beer brewed by you, madam, brewed with my sugar. Later that day, Salome came back for another attack: “All my vegetables I have planted, they are dying and dead.”

Anna considered. There was some truth in this. What she did not like about Enock was his attitude to the poor things that tried to grow in the earth. It seemed to her that he had chosen his trade specially so that he could be destructive. When things grew, he cut them down. You might call it pruning, she supposed, but he liked to cut until you could see plant blood; she felt for the stunted, cropped-back plants, and remembered how when she had been a small child her mother had in the name of hygiene pared her nails to the quick; five years old, she saw her little fingers, sore and blunt and red, turning the pages of her first reading book. And again and again her mother had done it, and so did Enock, and you could not argue, for they thought it was a thing they were morally obliged to do. What flourished, Enock left unwatered. He killed with his sharp blades, and he killed by neglect.

“Ralph will take over looking after the vegetables,” Anna said. “And I will look after them too when the babies are bigger.”

Salome looked shocked. “No, madam,” she said. And for the first time referred to precedent: Mr. and Mrs. Instow would never have done such a thing.

Ralph said, “They’re against Enock because he is an outsider.”

“He is not an outsider,” Anna said. “He has plenty of friends.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know. Somewhere. On the railway line. He’s always sneaking off, you know that. Salome says we should give his job to one of the visitors.”

“Give him another chance,” Ralph said. “Please, Anna? There must be some story that he’s not telling us. There must be some reason he’s like he is.”

Must there? Anna had the feeling a row was building up.

The next thing to occur was the loss of most of Ralph’s clothes. Ralph had gone to Palapye for the day, and she must have been in the schoolroom when it happened; classes were over, but she was making a colored chart for the wall, a colored chart with the nine-times table. The babies had been put down for their afternoon sleep, and Felicia took her own siesta beside them. Anna finished her work, put away the scissors and the big paste-pot; closed the schoolroom door behind her, shutting in its heat; tailed into the house, washed her hands and face, and made for her own bedroom, hoping to rest for an hour. The wardrobe door gaped as usual, but the camphor-scented interior was nothing but an area of darkness.

Enock’s disappearance could not be entirely coincidental. Odd items had gone missing before; Ralph’s wardrobe was not so extensive that she did not notice the loss. She would not have minded so much if Enock himself had seemed to profit from either the theft or the sale. But he still wore the tight tan jacket, sweat stained; the same ragged shirts and broken shoes.

“This time he’s gone too far,” she said. What bothered her was the thought of Enock in the house, pawing their few possessions. She imagined herself confronting him, and could see already the arrogance of his expression, his superiority; at the back of her mind she heard Ralph saying, well, perhaps he is entitled to his expression, perhaps he is indeed superior to us, but she did not believe it, she thought Enock was just one of those people you find everywhere in the world and in all cultures, one of those people who spread disaffection and unease, who sneer at the best efforts of other people and who make them restless and unhappy and filled with self-doubt.

“Let it go,” Ralph said. “We’ve no proof it was him. Where was Potluck, anyway?”

“Asleep under a bush. Besides, he knows Enock, doesn’t he? I’ve had to teach him to leave Enock alone.”

“It could have been one of the visitors. Anyone could have come in.”

“Don’t be simpleminded,” she said. “It’s Enock, he has his trading routes, everybody tells me about it. He takes things and puts them on the train and his pals take them off in Francistown.”

Ralph looked miserable. “We’ll have to start locking the doors, I suppose.”

Anna thought of Elim: the great bunch of keys that Lucy Moyo had put into her hand on her first day at Flower Street.

“Yes, we will,” she said. “And I’ll have to start locking the larder and counting the supplies and giving things out only when they’re asked for. Goddammit, Ralph, are we going to let ourselves be robbed blind?”

“It hardly matters,” Ralph said. “My clothes weren’t that good.”

Then, two days later, Felicia came crying that her skirt had gone, her best skirt, the one that madam had given her. She looked dangerous; she wanted to make an issue out of it.

Anna thought: oh, the barefaced cheek of the man! She had done as Ralph told her, she had said nothing, but now she was not going to consult Ralph, she was going to sack Enock that afternoon and be done with him. Her patience was at an end. Felicia had been a good girl, she was careful with the babies, it was against their interests to have her upset.

She called to Enock from the back stoep. He sauntered toward her with his corner-boy’s gait. Salome stood by, swollen with self-righteousness.

Anna looked out over her parched, devastated garden: “Enock, what has happened to Felicia’s skirt?”

Enock’s lip curled. “Ask that woman,” he said, barely indicating Salome with his eyes.

“You skelm,” Salome said, furious. “God will strike you.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Anna said. “Salome does not steal.”

“Sugar,” Enock suggested.

Anna conceded it. “Maybe.” Her eyes traveled sideways to Salome. “I don’t mind sugar, or anything within reason. But it is you who steal clothes and sell them, Enock. It is a bad thing to steal from my husband, bad enough, but it is worse to steal a skirt from Felicia, who is poorer than you are.”

“I did not see this skirt,” Enock said.

“Rubbish,” Anna said. “That’s rubbish, Enock, and you know it.”

And into the sentence she put contempt; what she meant to say was, Enock, I don’t hate you, I just despise you, you’re in my way and I want to clear you out, and get something better.

The man looked straight at her, into her face. Their eyes locked. She tried to face him down, and was determined to do it. The moment drew itself out. A voice inside her said, it is ridiculous, that you should engage in a battle of wills—you who have everything, you who have an education, a husband, twin babies, you who have God’s love—with this poor wanderer, this gardener, this man with no home. A further voice said, it is ridiculous in itself, this battle of the gaze, perhaps it is some convention that we have in Europe, yet how does he know of it? Perhaps all people know it, perhaps animals even. And perhaps, thought Anna, it is one of the battles that I am equipped to fight..

So it proved. Enock, his mouth moving around words unspoken, dropped his gaze and turned, his head down, and moved hunch-shouldered toward his own quarters.

There was a silence. Anna looked down at her dusty sandals, as if her eyes were worn out from the effort. Salome spoke, taking her own time, and her voice had a sick gladness in it. “Oh, Mrs. Eldred, oh, madam. You know it is a thing you must not say, you must not say to a person, you are rubbish.”

“What?” Anna said. She looked up again. “I didn’t say that. I didn’t say he was rubbish. I said his excuses were rubbish.”

“It is the same,” Salome said complacently.

Anna felt a quiver of doubt inside. There were, she knew, these forbidden phrases in every language; phrases that seemed harmless in themselves, but contained some deadly insult. Uncertainly, she asked, “I’ve said something bad?”

Salome nodded. “Enock will go away now,” she said.

“Good,” Anna said. “That is what I want. I don’t like to sack him, you understand? But if he goes because I have spoken the truth, I can hardly be responsible for that. We can have another gardener now. One of the people who lives in the huts may come.” She heard her strange, stilted speech, but didn’t regard it. That was how she talked these days.

That morning would always stay in her mind. It was many months since rain had fallen. There were bush fires on the hills, ringing the village and the settlements near by. They smouldered, sometimes flared: at night you could see them moving slowly, like an affliction in the blood.

It was just as Salome had predicted; Enock was gone by nightfall. His room had been cleared, and there was nothing left of him but his distinctive footprints dragged through the dust. Anna found them next morning on the cement steps of the back stoep, outside the kitchen. Perhaps he had come to make amends, to plead his case? If so he had thought better of it, and turned away, and vanished into the bush. By afternoon they had engaged another gardener from among the visitors, and the whitewashed room was occupied. Enock had taken the curtains with him, and Anna sat down at her sewing machine to make another pair.

She brooded while she worked: so much unpleasantness, over so little. She was reluctant to have perpetrated even the smallest injustice, though she tended to be practical in these matters; to be brisk about other people’s squabbles, as schoolteachers are. Nothing would ever be taught or learned, if you stopped the lesson every two minutes, to hold a court of inquiry:
Madam, madam, Moses is stealing my pencil, Tebogo is sitting in my chair, Effat is hitting me and calling me a cat.
It seemed to her that this was a case of the schoolroom kind. Perhaps Salome had taken the skirt, out of spite. It was possible. And Salome herself had been claiming for the past month or more that she had seen the gardener leaving Felicia’s room in the early morning. Would Enock steal from his mistress?

Yes, quite likely, Ralph said, when she put it to him. He seemed to have grown tired suddenly. Or tired of this situation, anyway. “You were right,” he said. “We should have sacked Enock long ago. Anyway, he’s out of our hair now. Not that you have much,” he said to his son. He lifted Matthew above his head. “Up to the roof,” he said. “Up to the roof and up to the moon. What a big strong boy! But when will you get a head of hair like your sister?” Kit watched from her cot, a finger in her mouth, her face dubious. “Up to the moon,” Ralph said. “Up to the moon, baby. And down again.”

Next day Salome said, “Storms tonight, madam. The weather is corning up.”

It was August now, and not warm; there were clouds blowing over the hills. “Good,” Anna said. “We need the rain.”

Let it be a good storm, she thought, one that fills the water tanks. I don’t mind tomorrow’s cold and the damp, even tomorrow’s snakes, as long as we have water to see us through the winter.

Early in the afternoon, just after school was over, Potluck came in from the garden—plodding, poor dog, as if his feet were lead. It was not like him; usually he bounded and bounced. “What is it, Potluck?” He staggered toward Anna, falling against her legs. “What’s the matter, chicken?” His great butter-colored head drooped, nuzzling her shin. Then suddenly his body contorted. He seemed to shiver all over, in a violent spasm or fit; then his ribs arched, and he began to vomit.

Anna watched him, stepping back in shock, calling out to Ralph to come and see; but Ralph was not in the house. Potluck’s body seemed to shrink, as if his bones were contracted by his efforts. And yet there was no effort, because a stinking liquid seemed to flow from him as if a tap had been turned on inside. Yellow-green, viscous, the fluid pooled about his feet, washed across the carpet, widened about the room. Its stench rose up; it hit Anna like a fist. She herself gagged; it was like nothing she had smelled before, a hellish compound of rotting plant life and burnt rubber, a smell of panic and morbidity and flesh revolted against itself. On and on it went, a ceaseless flow. She had heard of cancers, of malignities that are so foul that even the most Christian of nurses must enter the rooms with masks. Was that what she was inhaling now? She wanted to turn and run, skitter down the steps of the front stoep and out into the air. But pity for the creature gripped her; it held her to the spot. She saw the dog’s ribs heave, saw his eyes turn up into his skull; hand over her mouth, she saw his whipped crouch, his buckling joints. Potluck fell, lurching stiffly onto his side; but still that revolting fluid pumped on, and on. How could his body contain so much? She moaned his name; oh, Potluck, my little dog, what has happened to you? She crouched beside him and put her hands on him. His fur was wet, and a thousand pulses seemed to jump at her through his side.