The Fever Tree (33 page)

“Did you never care about me?”

“Yes,” he said, “I cared about you. I even thought I loved you.”

“Because of the way I looked?” Her eyes stung, and she bit her bottom lip to hold back the tears.

“Because there seemed to be something raw and untouched in you. I thought South Africa would set you free.”

“And now?”

“And now I think it is time for you to go back home. To England. You have suffered enough here.”

“I don’t want to go back,” she said, her voice catching on a sob. She was aware that she was covering the same ground. That there was nothing left for her to say. “Edwin—” she began, but he interrupted her.

“Frances, don’t do this to yourself. We wouldn’t be happy, either of us. There isn’t enough respect on either side. It wouldn’t be good for you or for me.”

“But if you loved me once . . .”

“Perhaps my love was no different than yours for Westbrook.” It hurt to hear him say the name so casually. The thought of William clearly didn’t affect him at all. “We were both of us caught up in a fantasy. I thought I saw something in you which I wanted, but in the end I couldn’t find it.”

He stood up, signaling an end to the meeting, and she realized that this would be the last time she would see him. Time was running out. She stood up herself, wringing her hands. “Can you blame me for not understanding?” She took a deep breath. “Nothing was ever explained to me. You talked to me once, a long time ago, about my father’s roses. Domesticated plants—‘monstrosities,’ you called them. They grew in a controlled environment, protected, mollycoddled, grafted onto the stronger roots of other plants so they could survive; deviations from their true form in nature. They might be highly decorative, you said, bred for dazzling colors, but essentially they were monstrosities.” She was speaking faster now, the logic of her words gathering force as she spoke. “I asked you—do you remember—what would happen to them if they were left to grow wild? Whether they could survive?”

He stood with one hand resting on his desk, looking steadily at her. “And I said they would die.”

“No. You said either they would die or they would be forced to change. They would revert back to their aboriginal stock.” She stepped forward, her heart pounding, her palms sweating. “Don’t you see? I am just the same.” The truth of her words was overtaking her. “I am a monstrosity. I can pin my hair in five different styles; I can paint, embroider, and play the piano; but what else can I do? What merit do I have outside in the real world where people live and die? Where there is disease and corruption? What purpose do I have? You offered me a world of truth. Can you blame me if I shrank from it? I had no familiarity with the truth. It terrified me. I thought it would destroy everything that I was.” Her cheeks were wet with tears, and her mouth was full of the taste of salt. “You are the only person who ever thought I could be something different. Who thought I could change. I have felt like a weightless, hopeless thing my whole life, except when I have been with you.”

He stood watching her, not saying anything. She might have seen a sadness in his eyes, but nothing that suggested he would change his mind. She knew she had lost, and she brushed at her tears, composed herself for a second, and walked out into the bright sunlight.

S
he traveled in a mule cart. Blackened earth, a road of dust and bones bleached to perfect ivory. This was the drought which they had talked about in Kimberley. It was spring now, the days were warmer, and farmers were said to wake weeping in the night at the thought of another summer without rain.

It wasn’t the drought that woke Frances up, weeping in the night, but the thought of England. It took on the quality of a nightmare. Her aunt had written to her saying she would take her in as a nurse, but the damp, cramped house with its tiny attic room shared with two children filled her with bleak despair. She hadn’t forgotten the gray skies and the ugly, sprawling city with its vast factories pumping smoke into a charcoal sky. The poverty, the pain, and the grime, and a crippling morality that kept each person fixed in his place. Her every second would be a lesson in humiliation. There would be no one who saw her as anything other than a burden; someone who should give affection without expecting to receive it; a woman who had failed, with not a thing in the world to call her own. And she knew she would torture herself with regret, and the certain knowledge that while each day increased her longing for Edwin, it would bring him closer to forgetting her.

So she went instead to Rietfontein. It was her only chance. The cart dropped her outside the house, almost a year after she had first arrived, and she stood for a moment in the yard with the chickens pecking at her feet, breathing heavily. The farm looked desolate in the midst of the barren plain. The fever tree no longer cast its shade over the house. It had been sapped of life, its branches withered so that it looked like a spiny skeleton of its former self.

She made a silent prayer before knocking on the door. Everything depended on Mevrouw Reitz. She could have written, but she suspected the woman would have turned down her appeal. There was little reason for her to like Frances. She had been churlish and spoilt when she had lived here before, refusing her offer of help and holding herself apart. Now she had to convince her that she could be useful.

Frances waited for Mevrouw Reitz in the sitting room. When the woman walked in she stopped and stared. Frances had been expecting it, but it hurt nonetheless, and she had to stop herself from bringing a hand to her face to feel out the scars with her fingertips.

“Where is Dr. Matthews?” Mevrouw Reitz asked. Frances had anticipated the question, but still it made her flush, and she hesitated.

“You’ve had a disagreement?”

“He wants me to return to England.”

“But instead you came here.”

“Yes.” Frances paused, realizing the ridiculousness of what she was asking. Why would this woman want to help her?

“I thought . . . or at least I was hoping that you might take me on as a governess.”

“A governess?” Mevrouw Reitz asked, as if she didn’t understand the word.

“I could teach your boys English, French, and drawing.”

The woman stood up, brushing down her skirts. “I’m sorry, but I cannot help you.”

“Please, if you would take a moment to consider.”

“Mrs. Matthews, I cannot—”

“He needn’t know that I am here,” she said desperately.

Mevrouw Reitz stopped abruptly and looked at her. “Madam, you are missing the point. Have you no sense? This is a drought. The cattle are dying. There is no water for the sheep. And you come here offering to be a governess?”

“But you have the dam. You said it had never failed.”

“The dam?” Mevrouw Reitz laughed faintly, and Frances remembered the landscape she had driven through, scorched as if by fire, scrub receding from the earth like the shriveling hair on an old man, and the dead bushes, uprooted, blowing over the parched ground. “It has been over two years since the last rains. My Jan has never seen them.”

“You needn’t pay me,” Frances said, fear knocking at her ribs. She could feel her future slipping through her fingers. “Is there nothing I can do here?”

The woman gazed at her, and Frances felt the weight of her reproach. They both knew she was of little use.

“Can you cook?”

“I can learn.”

“Have you had any experience with laundry work? Keeping poultry? Can you make dresses?”

Frances shook her head in dismay.

“Why here? Why don’t you go home?”

What could she say? That there was no home. Not anymore. She could see the confusion on the woman’s face. She didn’t understand why a girl who was clearly so out of place on the veldt would want to stay. She didn’t understand that she wanted to learn to love this place because Edwin had loved it.

Mevrouw Reitz stepped away from her and went to stand by the window. “You must have done something terrible for him to have left you. I never knew a man more honest.”

“Yes,” Frances said. “But look at me now. Is this not punishment enough?”

There was a long pause. She looked at the woman’s strong, broad back, at her graying hair, pulled into a tight bun. Somewhere in the house a child began crying. After a moment the woman spoke. “Where would you sleep?” she asked, more to herself than to Frances.

“In the cottage,” Frances said quietly, her heart swelling with hope.

“On your own? Don’t be ridiculous.” The woman gave a bark of laughter. “And we can’t have you out with the native servants either. You would have to sleep in the house.”

She turned at the window and looked at Frances. “And you are happy to work?”

Frances nodded. “Of course.”

“Well, it seems you have luck on your side. Our Dutch maid left us a week ago. Scared we won’t feed her and the baby if the drought doesn’t break. And she’s probably right. We can scarce feed ourselves. But as I said, we’re short of a maid. There won’t be much in the way of wages. You’ll help with the children and you’ll work in the kitchen. You’ll sleep in the house, but don’t expect anything else that’s any different from the other servants.”

“Mevrouw Reitz, thank you.”

“You should call me Mevrouw, not Mevrouw Reitz,” the older woman said, efficiently establishing the new terms of their relationship. “And you’ll have to learn to speak Dutch.”

A
ladder led up to the attic. Untreated wooden floors which creaked and splintered on bare feet. Dried hams hung from the ceiling, and the room smelt of animal hides and old paper. The floor was taken up with crates of peach brandy and boxes of kitchen instruments. Suitcases of shredded clothes were stacked up beside piles of old newspapers. The mattress had to be rolled out, and she shifted the crates back against the wall to create space, working carefully, wary of scorpions. Her mind kept touching on a great sadness, like a finger pricking on a pin. Edwin had cut his ties with her. No one knew she was at Rietfontein, and there was no one to tell.

She shook out a sheet over the bed and began tucking in the corners. It was made of coarse cotton, rough against her fingers. Mevrouw Reitz had given her a hessian sack for a pillow, which she stuffed now with handfuls of shredded clothes. She had imagined herself sleeping in the cottage. It would have afforded her a degree of independence. Instead she was a maid of all work, and her time would not be her own. She would have to swallow what was left of her pride, and work hard and learn quickly if she was going to survive.

A window looked out over the veldt towards the dam and the setting sun, and the leafless branches of the fever tree shivered over the pane. The thorny tangle of stems looked all but dead now, and she wondered if the tree still offered the birds its protection. When she had rolled out the mattress and made the bed, she stood and watched the sky turning from pale gold to deep yellow like the spilled yolk of an egg. The tall stump of a quiver tree, black against the fading light, stood alone on the veldt as if it were the cloaked outline of a figure watching the house. In a drought they self-amputated, Edwin had told her, constricting their branches until they became so dry they dropped off. Then they drew water down into the depths of their trunk and waited for the rains.

The light seeped from the horizon, leaving thin strips of color. She had no candle up here—that was another thing to ask for. Bats flickered through the darkening sky like pieces of charred paper turning in the wind. She felt as if she were seeing everything through his eyes. She breathed deeply. It wouldn’t be easy, but she was content to be here.

•   •   •

F
RANCES
WAS
WORN
-
OUT
by the disease, drained of energy both emotionally and physically, and the work she was given at Rietfontein exhausted her. It was hard to believe that scarcely a year ago she had had the temerity to complain to Edwin about Sarah. The woman had single-handedly put every meal on the table, washed every article of clothing, mended and darned, and still managed to keep their house immaculate. It was no wonder she had napped in the heat of the afternoons.

At five, Frances brought tea to the Reitzes in bed, dressed the younger children, served the family breakfast, cleared the table, and washed the dishes, but not the pots and pans—the boy did those. There was lunch to be prepared, and more washing of dishes afterwards, then tea and dinner in the evening. When she wasn’t helping in the kitchen, or watching the children, she was with Maria, the Xhosa maid, making soap and candles, stuffing mattresses, and polishing the brass. There were the chickens to be fed, the butter to be churned, and the lamps to be filled and trimmed. At first she was clumsy and slow at everything, and her fingers blistered with all the burning and chafing, but she soon learnt.

On Mondays she helped Maria with the washing. They boiled hot water in the tall copper, plunging their hands in until they scalded and turned purple in the heat, kneading the fabrics and beating out the dirt. The drought meant that washing was kept to a minimum, but even though there was so much less than there might have been, she dreaded it. The linen had to be boiled, bleached, scrubbed, rinsed, and wrung into buckets which they carried out to the garden and tipped over the vegetables. Her shoulders would stiffen up the following day so that it hurt when she dressed, and her hands turned soft and flaky then hardened into bony scales.

There were four boys still at home. The twins were identical, large-boned and athletic with white-blond hair, broad thighs, and pure blue eyes which gazed skeptically at Frances as if she were a strange new species. They were old enough to help on the farm, and they spent most days ranging over the veldt with their father, shearing, dipping, and herding the vast flocks of sheep. They rarely returned of their own accord, and in the evenings Frances would be sent out to bring them in. More often than not, she would find them squatting in the yard torturing something. They baited spiders out of holes with long twigs and plucked the wings off hornets. Once, they dropped two scorpions into a bowl and laughed as they danced around each other, stings poised in a deadly duel. Frances watched over their shoulders, fascinated by the creatures’ brilliant ferocity. Another time she found them poking sticks into a box full of fawn-colored worms—except they weren’t worms, she discovered later, but miniature cobras which drew back their heads, tails flickering, and darted at the sticks with lethal precision. When Mijnheer Reitz discovered them, he threw the snakes, box and all, into the furnace. Frances, standing by, thought she could hear them screeching as they fell into the white-hot flames.

Piet had grown into a shy, slight, solitary boy with a wad of dark hair, pale skin, and large brown eyes. He was the very opposite of his brothers’ brutality, and he brought home a slew of wounded animals. There was an elephant shrew mauled by an eagle, and a baby bird dropped from its nest, throat transparent and taut, which he carried home cupped between his hands with an expression of profound concern. Inevitably they died, in the night, and he would show himself the next morning, stoic in the face of tragedy. His father was often angry with him. When he caught him playing with his lead soldiers or scratching out letters in the flour dust outside the bread oven, he would cuff him round the head for idleness and say, “There’s a drought on,” as if the boy were somehow culpable. Frances thought he probably blamed himself for the boy losing his fingers. Then there was Jan, the youngest, who spent most of the day sitting in the cool corners of the house with a colored nurse who plaited a kind of willow for the backs of the chairs.

The drought was one of the worst in living memory. The men, armed with rifles, guarded the dam day and night to stop the game from drinking. Every day the water receded further from its banks, like a puddle drying in the sun. The ground blistered and dried in the heat, its surface cracking, so that it looked like the gnarled, leathered skin of a crocodile. She had always considered the Reitzes to be wealthy—their land stretched as far as the mountains in the distance—but she hadn’t understood that the veldt was so poor that when the drought came and their herds began to die their wealth would fall away from them like coins poured down a drain.

Mevrouw Reitz kept water turtles in a glass bowl in the kitchen and said that when they rose to the surface it would rain. A dog went missing on the farm, and they found the carcass behind the native huts. The natives had no crops, and Maria said that they were so hungry they were grinding down the bones of dead animals to survive. The water they drank in the house was dank and brackish and always warm. Spring rolled into summer, and everyone waited. The veldt turned from dun to brown, and began to blacken in the sun as if it had been singed by fire. Frances walked down to the river with Piet one afternoon, and they dug their feet into the deep, heavy sand in the riverbed. It was hard to imagine water had ever flowed here. There were no insects or birds. Only the cicadas still grated out their song. Even the mimosa bushes had dried up and lost their green. A few goats were nibbling at their lower branches. She had been told that the leaves would turn their milk sour and the kids would stop suckling, but when she tried to shoo them away they butted at her legs and kept on eating.

Her great struggle was learning to speak Dutch. Mevrouw Reitz was the only person who spoke English, but she refused to speak it to Frances now that she was a servant. Frustrations were quick to show when she didn’t understand. The difficulty was finding someone to teach her the vocabulary. But here she found a friend in Piet, who loved to explain the meaning of words, never losing patience, perhaps understanding with a child’s intuition that her position in the house rested on her ability to grasp the language.

There were two other servants who worked in the house. The cook—a small, silent man with two missing front teeth and sad eyes—and Maria, the maid. She was the daughter of Jantjie, the Reitzes’ driver, who had been born on the farm over eighty years before. Maria had high cheekbones and a brush of hair cut close to her scalp like a man. A stream of children would come to see her at the back door of the kitchen, and Frances never worked out how many of them were her own. She was straight-backed and strong, with capable hands, and she took control of Frances as if she were a child, not necessarily because she liked her, but because someone had to assume responsibility. It was Maria who showed her how to polish the brass, how to make coffee—grinding down the beans with dried figs—how to gut a fish without slicing open her palm, and how to mix bleach into the water without burning her hands.

It was Frances’s duty to darn and mend. The only sewing she had ever done was embroidery, and during her first week in the house she looked with mounting panic at the linen piling up in the workbasket. Maria taught her how to darn socks, fix the seam of a dress, and put a new collar on a shirt. She would place her hands, dry and warm like leather, over Frances’s own, the fabric jammed between her fingers, molding itself into the neat folds which always evaded Frances when she tried by herself. If Frances slipped a stitch or knotted the thread, Maria would admonish her in her own language, a tumbling flow of clicks and vowels.

Frances ate in the kitchen—mealies, which stuck in her teeth, smeared with gravy from dinner. Occasionally, in the evenings, Jantjie would come and stand just outside the open door of the kitchen, packing his pipe and talking to Maria, and he would nod at her politely.

For a few hours every afternoon, it was her responsibility to look after Piet. She walked with him to the dam most days. It was a ritual for all members of the household, master and servant, to see how far the water had fallen. Some days the twins would come with them. They wrestled on the muddy banks, bodies jammed against each other, rolling over and over in the earth until one had pinned the other to the ground, knees on elbows, jaw open in triumph. Piet avoided them, content to be on his own, and this reminded her of herself as a child. He would squat down on the mud, watching the natives beating the sheep away from the water’s edge, or stretch out on the burning earth, tempting birds to come closer with specks of bread. His brothers treated him as a curiosity. When bored, they loved to taunt him, and occasionally their bullying turned to violence. He would scramble out from under them with a nose trickling blood or a bruised eye purpling as it swelled shut.

In the afternoons, wisps of clouds would gather, forming tumbling mountains in the sky with the sugary whiteness of meringues, and the household would look up, daring to hope for rain when they had promised themselves not to. The sun would slip momentarily into shade, and the earth would exhale in gratitude. A moment later the plains would be cast again into a blaze of heat, and they would watch despairingly as the clouds dissolved into a hazy sunset.

Frances’s fate was inextricably bound up with that of the whole household. If the rains failed, they would all fail, and she would have to go back to England. But she found to her surprise that she wanted the rains to come not just because her survival depended on it but because she was beginning to respect the life at Rietfontein. Mevrouw Reitz was brittle and coarse, but she had purpose. She was never still, with Jan on one arm, pulling weeds out of the garden, or in the kitchen, bottling and preserving and pounding down herbs into medicines for her children. And out of her labor came this extraordinary family, thriving in this hostile place.

Frances wondered at the single-mindedness, at the passion and the pleasure to be had from such an existence. Life had been so different in England. She and her cousins had prided themselves on being idle, boasting about not having to lift a finger all through the long summer afternoons. But in the Karoo, merit rested on one’s ability to be useful: to cook, to clean, to sew, to mend. Everyone was hard at work, and they seemed happier because of it. They treated Frances for the most part well. She fell into bed every night beyond any exhaustion she had ever known, and found to her surprise that she was, if not content, then satisfied. Her muscles ached in the mornings, and there was pleasure in being busy. More than that, she was learning: about how to create things; how to transform this barren, desolate place, through human endeavor, into a thing of beauty.

A few trees had been watered through the summer, and they yielded fruit. Frances helped Mevrouw Reitz in the kitchen making jam. She reveled in the process, carving out the peach stones and boiling up the soft chunks of wet yellow flesh in a huge copper with sugar and water until the room throbbed with an aching, bodily sweetness. She loved to watch it thicken, eventually letting a drop fall from the spoon onto the slab of cool marble, where it proved it would set. It was her job to spoon the oozing amber jam into jars, and when it was done she licked the sticky residue from her burnt fingers with satisfaction.

Her Dutch improved until she was able to understand the Reitzes and hold a conversation with the other servants. She particularly enjoyed talking to Jantjie. His quiet strength and fascination with nature reminded her of Edwin. He would tell her stories about the veldt, bringing it teeming into life. He talked about the droughts which had lasted years and left the land a desert, of the floods which followed when the water ran off the plains and burst the dam, and the swarms of locusts which arrived in the wake of the rains. He told stories of hailstorms which struck in midsummer with stones as large as fists, and the snow which fell one winter three feet deep. Lightning stories weren’t unusual, but Jantjie’s was the best. He had seen a team of oxen all struck dead by one bolt which hit the metal harness.