A Change of Climate: A Novel (26 page)

But as she touched him, the flow stopped. The feculent pool ceased to grow. With a final expulsive effort the dog heaved his body clear of the floor, like an animal galvanized in an experiment. He dropped back, thudding against the floorboards. He drew a great breath, shuddering as a human being might. His whole body twitched, and his lips curled back from his teeth. He closed his eyes.

But Potluck was not dead. When she put her hand on his head, his tail moved, once. It beat the floor, spreading the hideous efflux to her skirt. She looked up, saw Ralph in the doorway, staring down at them. “Poisoned?” he whispered.

They said nothing further. They were afraid to speak. They picked up the dog and carried him to the veranda next to their bedroom; they sponged the filth from his coat, wrapped him in blankets, and dabbed water on to his dry muzzle, hoping he would lick. Anna sat by him while Ralph dragged the ruined carpet into the air, and threw buckets of water and disinfectant onto the floor, and swept out the froth and scum.

When he finished, and returned to Anna, Potluck was licking water from her fingers. His eyes were still closed, and the orbs danced and jerked under his lids. “I think he’s saved himself,” Ralph said. “God knows what it was, but no doubt if it had been in his system another hour it would have killed him.”

Potluck is a big dog, Anna thought. The poison for a dog would kill a child, kill two babies. A horrible rush of fear swept over her, left her nauseous, weak, clinging to the windowsill. “What can it have been?” Her voice shook. “What can he have eaten?”

“Something left for him,” Ralph said. “Bait.” He dropped his head. “I’m sorry, Anna. Enock’s final act of spite, I think. He never liked Potluck and he knew that we loved him, I have seen his lip curl when he has heard me talk to him. You were quite right about the man, I should have listened, you were completely right and I was completely wrong.” He held out his hand. She took it. “Anyway, he’s failed.” He stooped, patted the animal’s side. He looked vindicated, as if good had won out. As if it had prevailed. As if it always would.

For the rest of the day Anna checked Potluck at intervals, first every ten minutes, then every half hour, then on the hour; keeping a fearful vigil, as she had for the twins in their first months. She would have brought him to a more convenient place, but he was an outdoor dog, and did not understand carpets and furniture; to lie on the stoep was as much as he could tolerate. By dusk he had heaved himself from his side into a more alert position, and his strange swivel-mounted ears had begun to move in accordance with the sounds of the household and the compound. But he was halfhearted about his vigilance, and when he tried a bark he had to ponder it; the sound was muffled, and afterwards he looked bemused and exhausted. “Never mind, Potluck,” Anna said, rubbing his head. “You’re off duty tonight.”

“He’ll be all right now, won’t he?” Ralph said. “I would have cried, I think, if we’d lost Potluck. I love him for his simple and greedy character.”

“He’s like the twins,” Anna said. “That is their character, exactly.”

He took Anna in his arms, pressing her head against his shoulder, feeling her shiver from the stresses of the day. He stroked her back, murmuring meaningless, reassuring words, pet names; but he was shot through by self-doubt, shaken inside by it. This business with the gardener, it had bothered him, disturbed him a good deal. Anna would say, oh, of course there are injustices, there are miscalculations: they all even out. But he did not believe that. He did not say so to his wife, but he thought her attitude faintly repulsive; it is fatalistic, he thought, it releases us from the responsibility which we should properly take. We should do our best, he felt, always our best—consult our consciences, consult our capabilities, then, whenever we can, push out against unjust circumstance.

Enock was a crook, a petty criminal, perhaps accused of the one crime he didn’t commit; all acts of injustice are magnified in the victim’s eyes. The error may be irretrievable, Ralph thought; we have made a choice about him, perhaps the wrong one, but what can we do now? The situation could not stand still. We had to choose.

Lying awake sometimes, listening to the sounds of the bush, he brooded on the larger thoughts that routine keeps at bay. This I could do, or that … Each action contains its opposite. Each action contains the shadow-trace of the choice not made, the seeds of infinite variation. Each choice, once made, trips contingencies, alternatives; each choice breeds its own universe. If in the course of his life he had done one thing differently, one tiny thing, perhaps he would not be where he is now; his frail wife in his arms, his twins on the knee of their dark nanny, his convalescent dog at his feet, ribs heaving with delight at mere survival. Everything in the universe declines to chaos and waste; he knows this, he is not so poor a scientist. But he believes that his choices have been the right ones, that this is where he wishes to be; believes it simply, as he believed in Bible stories when he was a child. If his choices have led to this, have brought him to this moment, they have an intrinsic rightness; as for those other worlds, the alternative universes, he will not inquire. And surely, in the end, he says, my will is free? The world is not as Anna says. There is no dispensation that guarantees or provides for an evening-up of the score. If we are not to be mere animals, or babies, we must always choose, and choose to do good.

In choosing evil we collude with the principle of decay, we become mere vehicles of chaos, we become subject to the laws of a universe which tends back toward dissolution, the universe the Devil owns. In choosing to do good we show we have free will, that we are God-designed creatures who stand against all such laws.

So I will be good, Ralph thought. That is all I have to do.

The storm broke that night, around nine o’clock. Ralph and Anna had lit a fire in the twins’ room, and left them, warm and drowsy, under Felicia’s eye. The twins did not wake much at night now, and Anna was happy to attend to them when they did; so usually the nanny would have been back in her own quarters. But the rain was heavy, unrelenting, cold like frozen metal and falling like metal rods. On her haunches before the fire, Felicia rubbed her shins and indicated that she would stay; and her own bedstead, with its two plump pillows and crocheted blanket, was more inviting than the battering wind outside.

The world was full of noise, you had to raise your voice against it; the metal rain drummed the roof, and the wind moaned. Anna stood at the window, watching sheet lightning illuminate the garden, the fig tree, the mutilated fig tree that was part of Enock’s legacy. It lit up the straggling boundary fence of the mission compound, the shacks of their visitors—lighting them as they had never been lit before, because there were people in those shacks who could not afford candles. The inhabitants would be awash in brown water and mud, their roofs carried off perhaps, their cooking fires dowsed, their cardboard suitcases spoiled and their bundles and blankets and Sunday clothes now sodden. Tomorrow, she thought, we will tackle everything. Nothing can be done tonight, nothing can be done while this rain is still falling. She shivered. Ralph put into her hand a glass half full of Cape brandy. She stood sipping it, still at the window; behind her the paraffin lamp guttered and flared. The coarse spirit warmed her. “Fetch Potluck,” she said to Ralph. “Carry him in. We could put him by the fire, it would do him good. I know he doesn’t like to be inside but he might like the fire. Besides, if the wind veers round, that stoep will be awash within a minute.”

Ralph went out, a torch in his hand, down the passage to the back of the house. No respite; still the wind howled, the rain slashed in its rhythm against roof and wall and window. He heard the dog lift his head and whimper. Ralph clicked his tongue at him. “Come on, Potluck.”

Potluck tried to get to his feet, his paws scraping on the polished floor. But the effort was beyond him; he fell back and lay miserably on his side. Ralph put down his torch, squatted by him, heaved him into his arms; his legs thrust out stiffly, Potluck grunted, half in indignation and half in relief.

It was dark in the house’s central corridor, and Ralph guided himself by letting his shoulder brush the wall; he was on his way back to the sitting room, to Anna standing by the fire with her brandy. Now Potluck kicked his legs, as if he would like to make efforts for himself—so outside the kitchen Ralph lowered him gently onto his feet. Wagging his tail feebly, the dog crawled away under the kitchen table. “Come to the fire,” Ralph said to him. “Come on with me, Potluck.”

From outside the back door, Ralph heard a little noise, a scrape, a cry. It was a woman’s voice, very small:
Baas, let us in.
He thought, it is our visitors, the poor people in their shacks; they are panic-stricken, their houses are carried off, they want shelter. The thought crossed his mind: your dog has been poisoned today, there is a man with a grudge against you, you are not entirely safe. Then he heard the voice again, little and pleading:
Baas, we are washed away, we are frightened, let us in.

And so, without more thought, he made his choice; he turned the key, stepped back, and drew the stiff bolt. As he swung open the broad, heavy back door, he felt it pushed, smashed back into his face; and he was not then surprised that Enock stood there, his face mild, curious, composed. Enock reached inside his jacket. As calmly as a man takes out his wallet—as calmly as a man in a grocer’s shop, offering to pay—Enock took from inside his coat a small hatchet.

At once, Ralph smashed it from his hand. He had time to think, and he thought at once of his superior strength; so many years of full-cream milk, of lean beef, of muscle-building protein, and beneath his hand this poor felon, whose cloth jacket tore under his hand, ripping at the seam. Enock slid along the wall, his hands thrown up in front of his face.

Ralph smashed his fist into the man’s jaw. He felt the intricate resistance of tooth and bone, felt pain in his own hand; and as he closed in on the man to throttle him he felt the slithering resistance of his sinews, of his stringy muscles and green bones. He had ripped away not just the jacket but the familiar sweat-soaked, third-hand shirt, and he pushed against the wall clammy hairless flesh, pounding his fist above the man’s heart as if that would stop it, adding this rhythm, thump, thump, to the drumming of the rain. He wanted nothing but death, nothing but to feel Enock wilt and stagger, droop, retch, fall, and then his feet would do the rest; and already in a kind of red-out of thought, a bloody dream, he saw his booted foot kicking in the delicate skull, splintering bone, scattering teeth, thudding and rebounding, thudding and rebounding like a machine, until the creature was dead.

He saw this in his mind; yet at the same time sensed movement in the darkness behind him. He heard the dog stir, try to get to his feet, fall back. Then a dull blow, very hard, between his shoulder blades. He believed he had been hit with some huge, blunt object, like a fence pole. His mind filled with a picture of damage, of a huge bruise like a black sun. He turned around on this presence behind him, moving more slowly than before, and put the palm of his hand against a looming face, and shoved it away. It was a stranger’s face, and though later he would think and think about it he would never be able to identify it. He also wondered, later, at how long it had taken him to realize that he was bleeding. The dull blow was a knife wound, a wound between his ribs; and as his blood began to flow, he fell against the kitchen wall.

The next moments were lost, would always be lost. He had a vague consciousness of his own heart, an organ he had given no thought before. Unregarded, unpraised, heart beats and beats: but heart jibs now.

He lay down, passively, curiously tired. He was waiting to die. Let me die, his mind said, dying is not too bad. It is too much trouble to stay alive. I am warm now. This easy emission of blood is to be desired; flow on, and on. I am warm now, and soon I will be safe.

When the stranger entered the room where she stood by the fireplace, her drink in her hand, Anna did not scream, because she found she had no voice; she knew the essence of fear, which is like a kind of orgasm, and she was numb and white and still as she listened to the man’s demand for money, as she took the keys from the top drawer of the sideboard, opened up the mission cashbox and gave him what was inside. Without looking at them, the man thrust the notes into his pockets with his free hand. He spilled some coins; he did not seem to care about them, and yet those coins too were money, a lot of money. She watched them roll away, under the furniture. The man kept his eyes on her face. So, she thought, have they come here to kill us?

She saw a torn shape creep into the room. “Enock!” she said. The strange man closed in on her, took her by the arm. But rage made her strong enough to tear her arm from his grip—to pick up the bottle of brandy from which Ralph had poured her drink, to smash it against the sideboard, that ghastly piece of furniture the Instows had so loved. Let them turn it on me, she thought, let them take it out of my hand, let them blind me, but let me blind them first.

A moment later she was alone. They had gone. The alcohol fumes rose into the room. Shattered glass lay about her feet. The neck of the bottle was sealed in her palm, as if it were fused to the bone. She was alone, the storm still battering the house; within her was a small dangerous silence, like a chip of ice in her heart.

She must move from the spot, and find out what hideous thing had occurred; the splintered bottle in one hand, the lamp held high in the other. She must walk from the room to the kitchen, see her husband slumped in death’s narcotic embrace; she must walk from the kitchen to the room where her children were left sleeping. In that room she will receive her own deathblow; the one that will leave no mark on her skin, but will peel and scalp her, part the flesh of joy from the bone of grief. Let her move from this room, and she will be impaled to suffer slowly, to suffer as much when she is a woman of eighty as she will suffer now—a little pale English girl with black hair, footsteps pattering down a black corridor, running into an abandoned, empty room.