Mayenga Farm (3 page)

The morning waxed into a cruel, glaring noon. Rennie sat beneath a mango tree to eat her tomato sandwiches and drink her coffee. Everything shimmered before her vision till her lids drooped, protectively. Her temples buzzed and her shirt clung where it touched. Her hands still trembled from the concentrated effort of driving and covering the largest possible area of ground, and little pulses jerked all over her body. An itching beneath her belt bade her beware of prickly heat rash. This was certainly no work for a white woman.

At one-thirty she started again, but all her speed and energy were used up. The boy took the wheel completely and she scarcely bothered to direct him. At four she stopped for camp-brewed tea and, after a further hour’s supervising, she slipped from the tractor almost too fatigued to move. But she was pleased with the result of her day’s toil. Tomorrow, the Basuto would carry on without her, at least until the afternoon.

Somehow, she crawled on to Paddy’s back, her immediate needs a cool bath and a well-cushioned divan in a dim room. The hat swung on her arm and a light evening wind dried her hair into flat little curls over her forehead. Inevitably, she sagged in the saddle, hardly aware of the bumps.

The quickest way home took her to the front gate of the farmhouse, where she could call a boy to take the horse. But the gate stood wide and, to save herself even the briefest excursion on foot, she turned Paddy through to the path.

A car stood on the drive hiding the stoep; a long, maroon, shining thing, far too opulent for the usual seed salesman. No doubt someone had lost his way and Adrian had invited him to take a sundowner.

Then Rennie saw her father at the foot of the steps, and he was talking to the owner of the car. Her fingers contracted on the rein; her shoulders went back . . . just in time, for the men saw her and came over to where Paddy had halted.

"Rennie!" exclaimed her father. "I was just beginning to fret about you — you’ve been away so long. Mr. Bradfield tells me you and he have already met."

Rennie gave Kent a small distant nod. "Good evening. Kind of you to honor us."

"I was at the bookshop in town this afternoon," he explained, bluntly ignoring her tone, "when a parcel for your father arrived. As I live this way I relieved the bookseller of the trouble of sending it."

"Which pleased me mightily, I can tell you," put in Adrian.

She could not help but accept the helping hand which Kent extended. Walking between the two men to the car, she saw that empty tumblers, a jug of water and a whisky bottle adorned the steep wall.

Masking her weariness with a conventional smile, she said to Kent: "So you were just leaving?"

"I was." To Adrian he added: "I’ll send over those saplings and a man to plant them."

Rennie turned and faced them both. "What saplings?"

"Oaks," he answered briefly.

"Kent has generously offered to let us have his surplus trees to set as windbreaks," said Adrian.

"I don’t care for African oaks. Besides, they lose their leaves in winter."

"They make good timber," said Kent quietly. "Also they will grow well in any soil without harming the crops." Which is more than you can say for blue gums, added his tone.

"This isn’t the tree-planting season," she persisted, hoping for

Adrian's support. But her father had gone indoors, to his precious new books.

"These saplings are in palm-fibre pots." Kent returned crisply. "They merely have to be set in watered hollows, as they are. The fibre disintegrates and the roots spread, undisturbed. My man has handled thousands without a failure." Perhaps he noticed the convulsive swallow, the faint quiver of her lips, for his eyes — as blue as her guess — sharpened and flickered over her. "Do you often spend the whole day in the fields?"

"Only when it's necessary."

"Fourier left you, hasn't he? What are you going to do for a foreman?"

"Eventually, we shall employ another."

"Eventually? Meanwhile you fight a losing battle with lazy boys, and the weeds thrive and choke your fields. That sounds a pleasant outlook for a girl of twenty. Does your father ever emerge from the world of literature to enquire how things are going?"

One way or another, Rennie had borne a great deal today; the faint criticism of Adrian hurt abnormally, perhaps because it was based on a tiny germ of fact. Adrian never shirked the farm work, though he was certainly apt to forget it for hours together. But Mayenga was not Kent Bradfield's concern, and she intended to make him realize it.

She was standing at Kent's left side, her glance upon the hard brown chin. A thin line, only a shade or two paler than the rest of his skin, began just under his jaw and trailed backwards for about four inches. With a sense of shock it dawned on her that it was a scar, made practically invisible by a miracle of modern surgery. Swiftly, as though he were aware of her scrutiny, his head turned, presenting to her the reverse and flawless side of his features.

She looked away and spoke quickly.

"You needn't be sarcastic at my father’s expense. We’re far too happy to be objects of pity, and if we do end the season with a deficit we shall have had our money's worth in enjoyment"

"Trust a woman," he said with a hint of anger, "to translate neighborly intention into crude charity. Very well, then. The trees will be available if you want them, and you may borrow my tackle for uprooting trees if you decide to get rid of those kapoks." A brittle pause. "Afraid I can't recommend a foreman — there aren't many farming men who'll give in to the whims of a woman — but I'll willingly lend my own superintendent for a few days, if you'd prefer his advice to mine. Goodbye."

The car door thudded and he purred away. Rennie went inside, threw her hat down on to the chesterfield and slumped beside it. So much for Kent Bradfield.

He was too dark, too good-looking, too imperious, too free with his lordly generosity, too frank in his contempt for women . . . and too dangerously masculine. Let him stay on his own side of the Lamu. She and Adrian must get along without his assistance.

The first harrowing was finished and the maize looked pest-free and luxuriant, many acres of shimmering green African corn. Round the native huts Kaffir corn grew in great flowering bushes, and bronze-skinned Sophie tended a patch of beans and sweet potatoes.

Spring merged almost overnight into high summer, the evenings electric with dry, violet-hued lightning. Singing beetles became clamorous in the garden and every lamp was besieged by moths and hard-backs. At dusk the scissor-wings changed quarters, rising from the veld in glimmering, transparent clouds.

Last year Christmas had slipped over Rennie and Adrian almost unnoticed. They had been only a few weeks at Mayenga, and new sights and experiences had awakened new perceptions, to the exclusion of the customary perennial type of enjoyment.

Adrian had said, "Next year we’ll have some friends out for the day and make a real festival of it. We'll know lots of people by then."

He hadn't reckoned with the huge distances between farms, the practical impossibility of acquiring close friends in Gravenburg. For though the town was only twelve miles away, to enter one its social clubs required money and more time than either of them could spare. One had to be on hand for bridge, evening parties, polo matches, swimming and tennis, and one had to dress to line up, if not compete, with townspeople who possessed unlimited leisure and enough money to make the best of themselves. They hadn't made any close friends, after all.

Her first six months at Mayenga taught Rennie many things, beside a little about farming. By town standards, she learned with dismay, the Gaynors were poor, and only to be cultivated if they pushed into a certain circle. The farming folk in the district were different; they had all had their struggles and setbacks, but they were Afrikaners, sturdy people of the earth; kindly, cautiously hospitable, but with hardly a word of English between them.

Whereas with natives the lack of a common language could be entertainingly overcome by signs and emphasizing the more potent words in a sentence, or even the substitution of a few syllables of kitchen Kaffir culled from a dictionary, ignorance of the Afrikaans language was a definite barrier to communication with its people. Here, even in town where everyone was bilingual, the English speaking South African was one of a minority.

So it looked as though the festive season would again bring only the small excitements they created for each other. Rennie didn’t mind. There was nothing at Mayenga to remind one of the orthodox English Christmas.

About the middle of December, Rennie managed some mincemeat, a rich fruit cake and a pudding, and she hid in her room a book of essays she had bought for Adrian, a slim volume bound in grey suede, with an illustrious name in gilt script upon the cover.

It was from Mr. Morgan the bookseller, Adrian’s good friend and crony, that she heard of her father's hankering for those particular essays, and it was also he who imparted a few details about Kent Bradfield.

"Now that he’s taken Elands Ridge he’s your neighbor, of course," the old man gossiped, ruminatively raising his bristling white brows. "I’ve known Kent for about fifteen years. He must be thirty-two now. His father was a lawyer here in Gravenburg, and everyone thought Kent would follow the same profession. He seemed to have the makings of a first-class legal man. He went to Rhodes University

for several years, and had hardly got back here when the war started, and before you could say cook-book, he'd joined the South African Air Force and was stunting all along the North African coast. I believe he enjoyed it, too. After that he went to Italy, where he collected a wound in an air battle. Just as the war ended his father died — his mother had passed away a couple of years before. Kent came home, tied up his father's affairs, and bought a partnership in an aviation company on the Rand."

"He calls himself a forestry man," inserted Rennie with a suspicion of terseness.

"So he is. He's studied trees for years, and used to spend his long leaves in the West African forests, just for the pleasure of living among them." Mr. Morgan tapped at the book on the counter. "Maybe, after flying, he couldn’t settle to planting right away, so he tried civil aviation to . . . well, break him in. Kent is a very sane man."

"I’ve noticed it. He attempts to be sane for other people, too."

The pale eyes twinkled. "Has he been telling you how to run Mayenga?"

"He has! According to him we do nothing right, and we can’t hope to succeed in anything we’ve undertaken because I happen to be a woman."

Smiling, Mr. Morgan shook his head. "Get to know him, Rennie, and you’ll like him better. He can be charming when he tries — even to women! There’s only one thing wrong with Kent; he's too much of a man's man. He ought to have married."

Privately, Rennie wondered if it were not just as well that he had remained a bachelor. A man so self-assured and impregnable would be terribly difficult for any woman to get on with, quite apart from the fact of his having so much affection for his trees.

"Now that he's settled in these parts for good, he’s going to be one of my best customers," went on Mr. Morgan. "You might not guess it, but Kent is quite a reader."

Rennie grimaced. "Books on farming and forestry, I suppose?"

"Not always. His last order included a treatise on social economics, a thriller, two classic reprints and a best-selling novel. His taste in literature is as catholic as his view is broad."

A paragon, in fact, thought Rennie; an annoying example of what a man might become if he had everything his own way. What a mercy that his type was rare in this world.

The following week, only six days before Christmas, Rennie received a letter which put all else out of her mind. She read it twice, standing on the path in the hot sun, and was back at Castledene, in Surrey, packing her trunk in the dormitory and assuring Jacqueline Caton that she mustn't cry; although she was leaving school a whole term before Jackie they would be friends for ever. Jackie had burst into a fresh crescendo of sobs and flung her arms about Rennie.

"Dearest, sweetest Rennie, life will be appalling without you. I shall die, I know I shall, without my Ren to banish my blues."

Five minutes later the girl had collapsed with helpless merriment over a pink pantie leg peeping from the strapped trunk. Jackie, heartbreak or no, had ever an eye for the ludicrous.

Rennie and the vivacious little dark girl had been friends from the age of twelve, when Rennie, after her mother’s first breakdown in health, had gone as a boarder to Castledene. Jackie, installed at the school since she was seven, owned no real home; her father's business took him abroad much of the time, and mostly his wife accompanied him. Till Rennie came to Castledene Jackie had passed the vacations in a Mayfair flat. Then everything changed. Each holiday she travelled to St. John's Wood with her darling Ren, and slept in one of the white twin beds in the room that looked out over a lawn with a flowering cherry in the middle. She danced about the Gaynor villa in delightful silk wraps and pyjamas. She bought foolish, expensive gifts for Rennie and her parents, hugged them impartially and declared them the "loveliest family ever." When she talked at school about "home" she meant the house in St. John’s Wood and Rennie’s delightful parents.

But between the ages of seventeen and nineteen, Rennie and Jacqueline Caton had met only rarely, and each time the volatile Jackie had been poised on the crest of a wave of girlish passion for some young man she hardly knew. The Kensington grandparents with whom she now lived for three parts of the year had strict ideas regarding a girl’s upbringing. To be honest, as Jackie was when it suited her, none of her "affairs" could ever have blossomed into a satisfying kind of love, but they helped to mitigate the boredom of existence with a starchy old couple who spelled danger into the most conventional situation which their effervescent grand-daughter might share with a man. So Jackie's affairs were, perforce, based almost entirely on her too-vivid imagination.

A week after Mrs. Gaynor’s death, Jackie had come to St. John's Wood. By then, Rennie had reached a dry, dumb state of grief, and the other girl’s tears had grated unbearably. Jackie had so much; she could afford to cry for others. Later, Rennie had purposely withheld news of their departure from England till it was too late to arrange a meeting for goodbyes — Jackie was apt to wallow in emotional scenes — but since their arrival in the Transvaal several letters had passed between Mayenga and Kensington.