My Life as a Man (16 page)

‘The two of them swimming together,’ she said.

‘Just him. She doesn’t want to in case someone sees her.’

I wondered if she had the same image of the two of them swimming naked under the trees.

‘Hansel and Gretel,’ she said.

‘A kids’ story,’ I said, to let her know I’d heard of it.

‘The two of them in that pool.’

‘Deeper than it looked.’ It didn’t seem worth telling her again that he was the one who swam.

She went on, not talking to me, talking to herself, ‘The pool under the trees in Gibbet Wood.’

It was possible the woman Beate had told her the name of the wood, or maybe it was a name out of another kids’ fairy story that had come into her mind because she was unwell. Her cheeks
were very red and when she lay back after handing me the glass her forehead was shiny with sweat. Even though I badly needed to, I knew it would be wrong to tell her about the money in the case
while she was ill. Until we were away from this place, I had to keep it to myself. When I did tell her, what would she make of it? The strength of wanting to know that was unexpected, but then who
else had I to ask?

‘You should try to sleep,’ I said.

I thought at first she hadn’t heard, but after a while she said, ‘Poor things,’ which I suppose made a kind of sense.

It would have been inappropriate to call my ‘mother’ Mrs Morton; and since I could not bring myself to call her ‘Mother’, even to keep up the pretence, I finished by
having no way at all of addressing her. For compensation, from then on I thought of her as Eileen.

One morning when we were alone, I asked her, ‘What do you and Beate find to talk about?’

‘For one thing, South Africa. It turns out they aren’t German or Dutch, they’re South African. She was brought up on a farm out on the veldt.’

That seemed an enormous distance to travel, a world away. ‘How on earth did they get here?’

Eileen shrugged. ‘The war I suppose – it shook up everything like a kaleidoscope for so many people.’

‘Did it do that for you? Was your husband in the army?’

She shook her head. ‘No. Bernard’s factory made things for the war. He was more useful there than in uniform. Maybe things would have been different if he’d gone to
war.’

‘Why?’

‘I’m not sure I understand the why of it myself. I think a bit of him regretted not being a hero. I said as much to him once. I didn’t mean any harm by it. No, more than that,
I was trying to say in some muddled way that was how I saw him, as someone who could have been a hero. It was almost the first time I saw that special face of his – the one he made just for
me, the one that said I was a fool. He used it more and more often and it took me to the end of my tether. Maybe having the baby was about ending that look. But it was no use. She died.
There’s no sense in things.’

There was a silence I didn’t know how to fill. She blinked and stretched her jaws as if yawning out of a sleep. ‘How did I get started on that? I’ve been talking too much.
That’s what happens when you aren’t well. And Beate’s a good listener.’

And where was I during these days they passed in talking together? Whenever I had the chance, I walked to get away from August’s oppressive presence. The weather was unusually good: blue
skies, often striped with white cloud, and the sun shone from early in the morning till dusk. The first two days I took the path through the woods to the pool. It wasn’t a long way, but I
didn’t want to be far from the house and so I would stroll, stopping to look at the shapes the water made as it ran round rocks and over shallows.

At one point, a tree had come down across the stream and, caught in its branches, plants and grass like straggling hair had tangled into a barrier throwing back a pool of brown scum. The barrier
wasn’t complete, however, for near where I stood on the bank the stream jostled through a gap and even before it rounded the next curve had doubled in size, pushing out a space against the
other bank. The second or third time I went by, I caught a splash out of the corner of my eye and then I saw the surface opposite was covered with circles. I decided there must be fish there in the
darker water and that they were rising to eat, little flies, maybe, or insects too small for me to see from the bank. I don’t know how long it took me to work that out, but when I started
walking again I felt relaxed and pleased with myself. QED, like one of the demonstrations in White and Morrison’s
Geometry
.

The path, as far as I was concerned, ended just beyond the pool. Another fallen tree, held up by its broken stump, lay like a bridge across the track. Peeping under it, I was discouraged by a
view of bushes. The nearest one had branches of small, tight-packed leaves and dark thorns long as fingers, which put me off the idea of trying to push through. And after all, what would be on the
other side? More of the same – the countryside was like that. I went back and lay down to doze by the pool.

One of the afternoons I was doing that, I sensed a shadow and felt a little wind on my cheek. A cloud had slipped over the sun. The instant I opened my eyes, I knew I was being watched. Instead
of sitting up, I raised my head very slowly: a red deer was drinking from the stream. It was the first wild animal I’d ever seen and I had the illusion that, though it stood on a patch of
sand under the opposite bank, if I stretched out my hand I could touch it. In a moment, it looked up, flared its nostrils, and didn’t so much bound as float to the top of the bank. Then it
was gone.

No one was in sight among the shadows under the trees behind me.

Whatever they were like when they were alone, Eileen and Beate were quiet at the dinner table. Beate got up to serve, and when she put down our plates the four of us ate with
our eyes on the food. August had that effect. Rebelling against it, I cast around for something to say and finally came up with ‘This must seem very different from South Africa.’

‘South Africa?’ August raised his eyebrows and glanced at Beate. He smiled as if something amused him.

I looked at her, too. She stared back at me.

Eileen said, ‘Beate’s been telling me about the farm where she grew up, the farm on the veldt.’

‘Did you enjoy it?’ he wondered.

‘Sorry?’ Eileen looked puzzled.

‘I expect you did. Beate tells a good story.’

‘I see. Yes, I enjoyed listening to her.’

‘If you like stories, I’ll tell you a story. When I was a lot younger than your son,’ he said, ‘I’d regularly come home in the dark or first light. My father got
pretty mad. He beat me for years and then I got too big. I knew he did it for my own good, and I didn’t mind. But I got too big. All my family were like that, grew big and tall, the women as
much as the men. I come from good stock, I tell you. Trekkers. When Piet Retief and Gert Maritz came up from the Cape Colony, our family was with them – 1838 that was. The Zulus killed Retief
and Maritz. That’s how our town got its name, Pietermaritzburg.’

‘I don’t think it was 1838,’ Beate said. For some reason, she had become sullen.

‘Wouldn’t a good Boer know a thing like that? Believe me. In here is full of dates and facts.’ He tapped a finger on his forehead. ‘Don’t try to tell me about South
Africa. Anyway, I was a wild boy, but at a certain point of the night I’d turn my back on them all and head for home. Wasn’t anything going on I wanted more than what I’d find at
home.’ He smiled, his gaze lingering on each of us. ‘Going back, early in the morning, the streets would be quiet – as quiet as this.’ He gestured at the night outside the
little windows. ‘Trees both sides at the edges of the pavements. But I walked in the middle of the road. You know why? Because it was a kaffir trick to hide among the leaves and drop down on
you. A cart went round in the morning and you’d see dogs on it, a pile of them with their throats cut. Every house had its guard dogs.’ Startlingly, he gulped at the air and swung his
head from side to side. ‘So you’d go along like this, keeping a sharp watch, and listening, and sniffing the air. Because you could smell them: they don’t smell like white
men.’ He fixed his eyes on me. ‘Maybe you are one of those people who don’t like that said?’

The lamp on the shelf threw his shadow across the table. I didn’t feel like arguing, but although I didn’t look at her I could feel that Eileen was watching me. ‘There was a
teacher at school,’ I said. ‘He told us they didn’t let Jews into his golf club. He told us they’d blown up a friend of his in a hotel in Jerusalem. I asked him, what about
Germans? Did they get into his golf club?’

‘He must have loved you,’ he said.

It wasn’t all that hard, in fact. He gave me a scythe and taught me how to use it, and I spent the day after he’d talked about Pietermaritzburg cutting overgrown grass and clearing
stones off a patch of ground at the side of the house until I could smell my own sweat. The day after, I helped him to rehang a gate in a fence which made a narrow yard in front of the pen where he
kept three pigs. As we worked, one of them lay on her side, watching with small, intent eyes, while a line of young fastened themselves on the teats along her belly.

We planted potatoes, too, digging the furrows and dropping them in about a foot apart and then pulling the soil across the rows. That was done on another bit of ground, between the end of the
house and where the line of trees began. It was a fair size, but more like an oversized plot in a garden than what I would have thought of as a field. On the other side of the barn and sheds, there
was a pasture, still not all that big, in which a solitary cow, brown and shaggy with curved horns, grazed forlornly.

The strange thing is that I slept well. Hard work in the open air meant there were no bad dreams. It disturbed me, though, how little he spoke when we were alone. Even when we had a break at
midday, for a thick ham sandwich and a glass of milk, he chewed with his head over a book. While we worked, if I looked up and found his eye on me, it was only for an instant, then he glanced away.
His instructions were clear and he seemed content with how I followed them. All the time, I was aware of the raw power of him, the wads of muscle at the sides of his neck, the hands like shovels;
yet to admit to finding that menacing would have been shameful, or so it seemed to me.

I disliked the scythe in those big hands and was glad when, after a few long, slow sweeps to show me how, he passed it over to me. ‘It’s sharp,’ he said. ‘Mind you
don’t cut off your feet.’

The day after we put in the potatoes I overslept and opened my eyes to see Beate wiping dishes and stacking them at the side of the sink. I slipped out of the couch bed while she had her back to
me; but she turned while I was balanced on one leg to get into my trousers.

‘Is it all right if I take a piece of bread?’ I asked, turning away from her to pull up the zip.

‘No, it isn’t,’ she said. ‘What kind of breakfast would that be? I’ll make you porridge.’

I sat at the table and watched as she put a handful of meal in a pot with water. She stirred the pot on the stove and I looked at the length of her back and her legs under the dress. The dress
was grey and that was the impression she’d made on me, quiet and grey. The material of it was thin, however, and when she bent the cloth settled round her hips so that I could see the shape
of her bottom under it. After all, she wasn’t that much older than me, a handful of years, not more than ten, surely? Even her face, which had seemed so dull before, had a kind of sparkle
when she turned unexpectedly from the stove and caught my eye on her.

‘How much do you want in the bowl? My husband takes it full.’

‘Plenty of room for the milk would be fine, thanks.’

When she put the bowl in front of me, I expected her to get on with her work. Instead, she sat down across the table and watched me as I ate, the first spoonful the cream of the milk and then
the porridge itself with an aftertaste of salt.

‘Where does August want me this morning?’ I asked.

‘He’s not here. Did he not say yesterday?’

I shook my head. ‘No.’

‘He’s away to town for some shopping.’

‘Oh.’

‘So you can take it easy.’

‘I don’t mind working.’

‘It’s done you good. You’re not so pale as you were.’

I didn’t know what to say to that. She studied me while I ate. Embarrassed, I said, ‘I’ll take some breakfast up.’

‘For your mother? But she’s away, too.’

‘Where?’ I was on the point of starting up and running out to see if the car was gone.

‘She was down by the time he was getting ready, and he asked if she wanted to go with him.’

‘And she just went?’ I heard the break in my voice and cleared my throat.

She looked at me. Her eyes were the same green as the eyes of a redheaded girl who’d sat across the aisle in the French class in my last year at school; the special hard, flat green that
goes with red hair, though Beate’s was brown. Until that morning when we were alone, it was as if I hadn’t really seen her at all.