Three Stories (3 page)

They leave Cape Town late in the day,
spend the first night in Matjiesfontein at
the Lord Milner Hotel, where they are served dinner by waitresses in floral dresses
and frilled Victorian caps. He and his wife sleep in the Olive Schreiner Room, their
friends in the Baden Powell Room. On the walls of the Olive Schreiner room are watercolours
of Karoo scenes (“Crossing the Drift”, “Karoo Sunset”), photographs of cricketers:
the Royal Fusiliers team of 1899, burly, moustachioed young Englishmen, come to die
for their queen in a faroff land, some of them buried not far away.

The next morning they leave early. For hours they drive through empty scrubland ringed
by flat-topped hills. Outside Richmond they stop for gas. Jane picks up a pamphlet.
“N
IETVERLOREN
,” it says. “Visit an old-style Karoo farm, experience old-style grace
and simplicity. Only 15 km from Richmond on
the Graaff–Reinet road. Luncheons 12–2.”

They follow the signs to Nietverloren. At the turnoff a young man in a beret and
khaki shirt scrambles to open the gate for them, stands to attention and salutes
as they drive through.

The farmhouse, gabled in Cape Dutch style, brilliantly whitewashed, stands on an
outcrop of rock overlooking fields and orchards. They are greeted at the door by
a smiling young woman. “I'm Velma, I'm your hostess,” she says, with a light, pleasing
Afrikaans accent. They are the only guests thus far.

For lunch they are served leg of lamb and roast potatoes, braised baby carrots with
raisins, roast pumpkin with cinnamon, followed by custard pie,
melktert
. “It's what
we call
boerekos
,” explains Velma, their hostess: “farm cuisine. Everything grown
on the farm.”

“And the bread?” he asks. “Do you grow your own wheat, and thresh it and all the
rest?

Velma laughs lightly. “Good heavens no, we don't go as far back as that. But our
bread is baked here in our kitchen, in our wood-fired oven, just like in the old
days, as you will see on the tour.”

They exchange glances. “I'm not sure we have time for a tour,” he says. “How long
does it take?”

“The tour is in two parts. First my husband takes you around the farm in the four-wheel
drive. You see sheep-shearing, you see wool-sorting; if there are children they get
to play with the lambs—the lambs are very cute. Then we've got a little museum, you
can see all the grades of wool and the sheep-shearing instruments from the old days
and the clothes people wore. Then I take you on a tour of the house, you see everything—the
kitchen, which we have restored just as it used to be, and the bathroom, the old
bathroom with the hip bath and the furnace, all just like in the old days, and everything
else. Then you can relax, and at four o'clock we offer you tea.”

“And how much is that?”

“For the tour and the tea together it is seventy-five rands per person.”

He glances at Bill, at Jane. They are the guests, they must decide. Bill shakes his
head. “It sounds fascinating, but I just don't think we have the time. Thank you,
Velma.”

They drive back through the orchard—grapevines, oranges, apricots heavy on the bough—past
a pair of languid-eyed Jersey cows with calves by their side.

“Remarkable what they grow, considering how dry it is,” says Jane.

“The soil is surprisingly fertile,” he says.
“With enough water you could grow anything
here. It could be a paradise.”

“But—?”

“But it makes no economic sense. The only crop it makes sense to farm nowadays is
people. The tourist crop. Places like Nietverloren are the only farms, if you can
call them that, left in the Karoo: time-bubble, theme-park farms. The rest are just
sheep ranches. There is no reason for the owners to live on them. They might as well
be managed out of the cockpit of a helicopter. As in some cases they are. More enterprising
landowners have gone back even further in time. They have got rid of the sheep and
restocked their farms with game—antelope, zebra—and brought in hunters from overseas,
from Germany and the US. A thousand rand for an eland, two thousand for a kudu. You
shoot the animal, they mount the horns for you, you take them
home with you on the
plane. Trophies. The whole thing is called the safari experience, or sometimes just
the African experience.”

“You sound bitter.”

“The bitterness of defeated love. I used to love this land. Then it fell into the
hands of the entrepreneurs, and they gave it a makeover and a face-lift and put it
on the market. This is the only future you have in South Africa, they told us: to
be waiters and whores to the rest of the world. I want nothing to do with it.”

A look passes between Bill and Jane. “I'm sorry,” murmurs Jane.

Jane is sorry. He is sorry. All of them are a bit sorry, and not only for his outburst.
Even Velma back on Nietverloren must be sorry for the charade she has to go through
day after day, and the girls in their Victorian getup back in the hotel in Matjiesfontein:
sorry and
ashamed. A light grade of sorriness sits over the whole country, like cloud,
like mist. But there is nothing to be done about it, nothing he can think of.

III
HE AND HIS MAN

BOSTON
,
ON
THE
COAST
of Lincolnshire, is a handsome town, writes his man. The tallest
church steeple in all of England is to be found there; sea-pilots use it to navigate
by. Around Boston is fen country. Bitterns abound, ominous birds who give a heavy,
groaning call loud enough to be heard two miles away, like the report of a gun.

The fens are home to many other kinds of birds too, writes his man, duck and mallard,
teal and widgeon, to capture which the men of the fens, the fen-men, raise tame ducks,
which they call decoy ducks or duckoys.

Fens are tracts of wetland. There are tracts of wetland all over Europe, all over
the world, but they are not named fens,
fen
is an English word, it will not migrate.

These Lincolnshire duckoys, writes his man, are bred up in decoy ponds, and kept
tame by being fed by hand. Then when the season comes they are sent abroad to Holland
and Germany. In Holland and Germany they meet with others of their kind, and, seeing
how miserably these Dutch and German ducks live, how their rivers freeze in winter
and their lands are covered in snow, fail not to let them know, in a form of language
which they make them understand, that in England
from where they come the case is
quite otherwise: English ducks have seashores full of nourishing food, tides that
flow freely up the creeks; they have lakes, springs, open ponds and sheltered ponds;
also lands full of corn left behind by the gleaners; and no frost or snow, or very
light.

By these representations, he writes, which are made all in duck language, they, the
decoy ducks or duckoys, draw together vast numbers of fowl and, so to say, kidnap
them. They guide them back across the seas from Holland and Germany and settle them
down in their decoy ponds on the fens of Lincolnshire, chattering and gabbling to
them all the time in their own language, telling them these are the ponds they told
them of, where they shall live safely and securely.

And while they are so occupied the decoy men, the masters of the decoy ducks,
creep
into covers or coverts they have built of reeds upon the fens, and all unseen toss
handfuls of corn upon the water; and the decoy ducks or duckoys follow them, bringing
their foreign guests behind. And so over two or three days they lead their guests
up narrower and narrower waterways, calling to them all the time to see how well
we live in England, to a place where nets have been spanned.

Then the decoy men send out their decoy dog, which has been perfectly trained to
swim after fowl, barking as he swims. Being alarmed to the last degree by this terrible
creature, the ducks take to the wing, but are forced down again into the water by
the arched nets above, and so must swim or perish, under the net. But the net grows
narrower and narrower, like a purse, and at the end stand the decoy men, who take
their captives out one by one. The decoy ducks are stroked and
made much of, but
as for their guests, these are clubbed on the spot and plucked and sold by the hundred
and by the thousand.

All of this news of Lincolnshire his man writes in a neat, quick hand, with quills
that he sharpens with his little penknife each day before a new bout with the page.

In Halifax, writes his man, there stood, until it was removed in the reign of King
James I, an engine of execution, which worked thus. The condemned man was laid with
his head on the cross-base or cup of the scaffold; then the executioner knocked out
a pin which held up the heavy blade. The blade descended down a frame as tall as
a church door and beheaded the man as clean as a butcher's knife.

Custom had it in Halifax, though, that if between the knocking out of the pin and
the descent of the blade the condemned man
could leap to his feet, run down the hill,
and swim across the river without being seized again by the executioner, he would
be let free. But in all the years the engine stood in Halifax this never happened.

He (not his man now but he) sits in his room by the waterside in Bristol and reads
this. He is getting on in years, almost it might be said he is an old man by now.
The skin of his face, that had been almost blackened by the tropic sun before he
made a parasol out of palm or palmetto leaves to shade himself, is paler now, but
still leathery like parchment; on his nose is a sore from the sun that will not heal.

The parasol he has still with him in his room, standing in a corner, but the parrot
that came back with him has passed away.
Poor Robin!
the parrot would squawk from
its perch on his shoulder,
Poor Robin Crusoe! Who shall
save poor Robin?
His wife
could not abide the lamenting of the parrot,
Poor Robin
day in, day out.
I shall
wring its neck
, said she, but she had not the courage to do so.

When he came back to England from his island with his parrot and his parasol and
his chest full of treasure, he lived for a while tranquilly enough with his old wife
on the estate he bought in Huntingdon, for he had become a wealthy man, and wealthier
still after the printing of the book of his adventures. But the years on the island,
and then the years travelling with his serving-man Friday (poor Friday, he laments
to himself, squawk-squawk, for the parrot would never speak Friday's name, only his),
had made the life of a landed gentleman dull for him. And, if the truth be told,
married life was a sore disappointment too. He found himself retreating more and
more to the stables, to his horses,
which blessedly did not chatter, but whinnied
softly when he came, to show that they knew who he was, and then held their peace.

It seemed to him, coming from his island, where until Friday arrived he lived a silent
life, that there was too much speech in the world. In bed beside his wife he felt
as if a shower of pebbles were being poured upon his head, in an unending rustle
and clatter, when all he desired was to sleep.

So when his old wife gave up the ghost he mourned but was not sorry. He buried her
and after a decent while took this room in the
Jolly Tar
on the Bristol waterfront,
leaving the direction of the estate in Huntingdon to his son, bringing with him only
the parasol from the island that made him famous and the dead parrot fixed to its
perch and a few necessaries, and has lived here alone ever since, strolling by day
about the wharves and quays, staring
out west over the sea, for his sight is still
keen, smoking his pipes. As to his meals, he has these brought up to his room; for
he finds no joy in society, having grown used to solitude on the island.

He does not read, he has lost the taste for it; but the writing of his adventures
has put him in the habit of writing, it is a pleasant enough recreation. In the evening
by candlelight he will take out his papers and sharpen his quills and write a page
or two of his man, the man who sends report of the duckoys of Lincolnshire, and of
the great engine of death in Halifax, that one can escape if before the awful blade
can descend one can leap to one's feet and dash down the hill, and of numbers of
other things. Every place he goes he sends report of, that is his first business,
this busy man of his.

Strolling along the harbour wall,
reflecting upon the engine from Halifax, he, Robin,
whom the parrot used to call poor Robin, drops a pebble and listens. A second, less
than a second, before it strikes the water. God's grace is swift, but might not the
great blade of tempered steel, being heavier than a pebble and being greased with
tallow, be swifter? How will we ever escape it? And what species of man can it be
who will dash so busily hither and thither across the kingdom, from one spectacle
of death to another (clubbings, beheadings), sending in report after report?

A man of business, he thinks to himself. Let him be a man of business, a grain merchant
or a leather merchant, let us say; or a manufacturer and purveyor of roof tiles
somewhere where clay is plentiful, Wapping let us say, who must travel much in the
interest of his trade. Make him prosperous, give him a wife who loves him and does
not chatter too much
and bears him children, daughters mainly; give him a reasonable
happiness; then bring his happiness suddenly to an end. The Thames rises one winter,
the kilns in which the tiles are baked are washed away, or the grain stores, or the
leather works; he is ruined, this man of his, debtors descend upon him like flies
or like crows, he has to flee his home, his wife, his children, and seek hiding in
the most wretched of quarters in Beggars Lane under a false name and in disguise.
And all of this—the wave of water, the ruin, the flight, the pennilessness, the tatters,
the solitude—let all of this be a figure of the shipwreck and the island where he,
poor Robin, was secluded from the world for twenty-six years, till he almost went
mad (and indeed, who is to say he did not, in some measure?).