The Fever Tree (14 page)

She imagined the darkness outside and the expanse of veldt that stretched out from the farm for so many miles. She felt she was losing substance, as though she were no bigger and had no greater weight than a speck of dust. She was already so far from everything she had been just a few months ago, when her father had been alive and she had been under his protection. What would he think if he could see her now? No doubt he would be ashamed. She was living evidence of his failed ambitions.

Was it too late to call off the wedding? She could leave in the morning and go back to Cape Town. But with what money? And to what purpose? Would Mrs. Nettleton help her find a position? She had no qualifications, and there could be no guarantee of security. Her finger looped through the gold chain at her neck, and she was filled with a sudden, gut-tearing hunger for William that ripped her open from the inside and left her with a simple, brutal desire to touch him. She clenched her teeth and buried her face in the pillow so Edwin wouldn’t hear her sobs.

I
t was done and there was no going back. Frances hung the white muslin dress in the wardrobe, unpinning the creamy ostrich feather—a gift from Edwin. He was in his study working, giving her time to undress, and periodically she would hear the tapping of a metal instrument against the side of a glass jar. She slipped a nightgown over her head then lay down on the bed, turning the gold band on her finger, unused to its weight. Sarah, it turned out, was maid, cook, and scullery girl rolled into one. There would be no Dutch maid, as she had thought there might be, who spoke English, and who would pin her hair in the mornings and help her dress. Edwin must have been disingenuous with her uncle. Surely he would have expected more for her than this.

The Reitzes had invited them to lunch after the ceremony, and Frances had been glad to go, not because she had any particular desire to make friends with their Boer landlords, but because it would give her a few hours when Edwin was occupied with something other than her. William had branded her—lips, shoulders, breasts—she could feel the trail of his fingers across every part of her body. She was waiting for Edwin to notice that she had changed.

They had driven a trap across the veldt straight from the church to the main farm, which sat close to a large dam. White birds fluttered like flags over the water. The farmhouse had been built in the Cape Dutch style, with a handsome gable and a broad
stoep
. A huge acacia spread its shade over one side of the house.

“The fever tree,” Edwin said, following her gaze. “The farm is famous for it.”

“Why should a tree make it famous?”

“You don’t normally see them on the Karoo. It’s too dry. Someone must have planted it years ago and made sure it had water.”

She had to admit that it was magnificent. The smooth, dusky yellow limbs supported a series of wide, dense platforms of foliage which cast a dappled shade over the earth below. A herd of goats nibbled at the short grasses around its trunk under the sleeping gaze of a native boy. The lower branches of the tree grazed the wall of the house, and, looking up, Frances saw a tiny attic window, its dark panes almost hidden behind a network of thorns.

“It’s a good place to build a nest,” Edwin was saying, pointing to the tiny birds who darted through the greenery to the domed structures which rested like beehives between the branches. “The snakes can’t get at them because of the thorns.”

Mijnheer Reitz showed them around the cluster of outbuildings. He was a tall, serious man with a roughened face and purpling pouches under his eyes. He wore his long, thinning gray hair in a neat parting, slicked down to one side. His jacket and trousers were black, and he held on to a black hat in one strong, wizened hand. He stank of sheep and strong tobacco, and a dirty pipe stuck out of his breast pocket. Globules of saliva flew from his mouth into the dust with such frequency that she wondered how he kept producing them.

They were shown around a group of grubby, whitewashed outbuildings with thatched roofs. Frances tried to keep her shoes from slipping into the pools of muck and the flies from crawling into her mouth. The yard reeked of cattle and manure. There was an incubator for young ostrich chicks, a feather bank, a dairy, a smithy, and stables. Cattle knocked against empty feed bins, and ostrich strutted noisily behind dusty, wired enclosures. Children ran in laughing circles around the cook, who heaved huge batches of dough into the bread ovens, and two mongrels chased chickens squawking into the air.

The Reitzes had a large family—six boys: four at home, two at the diamond fields. Hendrik and Hermanus were the eldest boys still on the farm. They were twins; blond, big-boned, and rudely healthy. Then there was Piet, a dark, solemn-looking child who peered down at them from the dairy loft. Edwin told her afterwards that there had been an accident on the farm when he was little, and he had lost three of his fingers. The youngest was still only a baby. It was hard to believe that so much exuberant life had been drawn from such a seemingly barren land. But there they were, thriving, scrubbed clean, with large smiles and strong bodies. Not the dour, squalid farmers with their brood of uneducated children which William had led her to expect.

Mevrouw Reitz was a stout Dutchwoman with braided hair, thick forearms, and a good grasp of English. She took Frances off to her garden and showed her how it had been irrigated with water from the dam. She had planted the peach trees herself, and there were figs, apricots, sugar peas, lettuces, radishes, cabbages, and potatoes. White jasmine flowers gave off a heady, sweet perfume, and bees droned heavily from flower to flower. Mevrouw Reitz bent down occasionally as they walked to wrench weeds from the beds, and Frances saw that her nails were caked with the sandy red soil.

“Well,” she said, shaking grit off a bunch of carrots and standing up to look Frances over, “you’re as pretty as he said you would be.”

“Thank you,” Frances said, cautious of this woman with her tanned skin, muddy hands, and piercing blue eyes.

“It’s not a question of thanking.” Mevrouw Reitz pushed the hair out of her eyes with the sweep of a forearm. “It’s obvious that he likes you. But I’ll be honest with you, Mrs. Matthews”—Frances was discomforted by the strangeness of her married name—“there are some of us here who said your husband was crazed bringing a woman all the way from England, who doesn’t know this country.”

Frances could feel herself wilting in the heat. How much longer would she have to stand out here under inspection? After a moment the woman asked, “How are your lungs?”

“My lungs?” Frances asked faintly.

“When I was a child, we had an English governess. She came to the Cape for the climate. I thought perhaps . . .”

“My lungs are perfectly healthy, thank you,” Frances replied, angered by the implication that she had married Edwin to escape England, though it wasn’t so far from the truth.

Mevrouw Reitz glanced at Frances’s delicate shoes, already caked in muck, at her long muslin sleeves covering her pale skin, at her pretty straw hat. “Of course, you shan’t want to be dressing like that every day. Don’t get me wrong. We all like a bit of finery from time to time”—Frances had the unpleasant sensation that the woman was fingering the material, calculating its worth—“but you’ll have to work hard, the two of you, and there’ll be no time for indulgences. You haven’t much to get you started in life, and goodness knows your husband works hard enough already. You don’t want to be a burden on him.”

Frances bit her lip. They had only just met and already the woman was patronizing her. How did she know they had so little to get them started? And why did she seem to think her husband needed defending? “I hope, Mevrouw Reitz, that I won’t be a burden on anyone.”

“I’m sure you won’t be.” She touched the back of Frances’s hand with her fingers. “I didn’t mean for you to take it the wrong way. If you need help with things, you must come and ask. You’ll get lonely in that cottage all by yourself every day. When that happens, you should come and see me. We’ll find something for you to do.”

Despite the apology, Frances bristled. “I can assure you I am quite used to being on my own.”

“I’m sure you are. But I expect it’s a different kind of loneliness to what you’re used to.”

They walked on in silence. After a few minutes, Mevrouw Reitz swept her hands proudly over her garden. “We missed the rains last year, but we’re not doing badly. Most of this relies on underground water.” She pointed to the wind pump turning a slow circle against an indigo sky. “Albert’s father struck water with the first hole he bored. He enlarged the dam, and we’ve never been without.”

“And the river?”

“It floods during the rains, but the rest of the year it’s as good as dry.” She clasped her hands together in front of her, as if in prayer. “We need the rains to fall this summer,” she said, “or the grazing will fail and the cattle will die.”

•   •   •

A
FTER
LUNCH
, a colored nurse came in with the youngest boy, and Mevrouw Reitz made a big fuss over him.

“Family. That’s the most important thing,” she said, handing the boy to Frances. He was a boisterous baby with big fists and thrusting legs which pummeled against her thighs. When Frances glanced up she saw Edwin watching her with a hungry, alert expression on his face. Please God, she thought, don’t let me fall pregnant by Edwin, not in this place, not right away.

Mevrouw Reitz brought Frances through to her storeroom before they left. It was a cool, dark room smelling of damp paint. Shelves were stacked high with bottled jams, chutneys, peaches in syrup, dried figs, brandy apricots, wines, and pickles. Mevrouw Reitz pressed two jars of crimson mulberry jam into her hands, and Frances had felt overwhelmingly depressed by this show of generosity. She had nothing to give in return. She didn’t have the first idea about gardening or pickling, cleaning or sewing. God knows, she didn’t even know how to go about washing her own clothes. It gave her the unpleasant sensation that she existed here as a purely decorative object. She suspected there was a certain danger in this. These people would despise her, unless she could conjure value out of the soil.

•   •   •

W
HEN
THEY
GOT
BACK
to their house, it had seemed too quiet. They ate dinner in near silence, punctuated by the clatter of knives and forks, the lamps throwing their shadows in dark, flickering shapes across the stark, white wall. Conversation was stilted by the expectation of the night ahead, but there was also a sort of hesitating fear hanging over them. The Reitzes, with their righteous wholesomeness, had cast an inimitable light over the loneliness of their first day as husband and wife, and Frances felt that anyone looking in through the window would have seen that their marriage was a sham and would wonder how these two people, who had so little to say to each other, were going to survive living in such isolation.

Halfway through supper Frances thought she saw, in the candlelight, something flung across the table. It was an airy, whirring thing which went back and forth in front of her so quickly she couldn’t make it out. Then—
bang!
—Edwin brought a glass down on the wood. Her skin swarmed. A bright-orange spider was trapped inside. It reared up on its legs and put its fangs to the glass. She threw back the bench, sweeping up her skirts and checking the floor.

“Is it poisonous?” she asked, when she was sure there weren’t any more.

“Not deadly. It’s a red man. They come out at night to catch their prey. They use speed, not webs.” Edwin tapped the glass with a forefinger to make the spider dance. It was only later that she found out they were known as hair clippers because they liked to bury themselves in your hair at night and snip away at it.

•   •   •

F
RANCES
TURNED
DOWN
the lamp on the bureau and slipped into bed. Her hair, unpinned and unplaited, fanned out over the white pillowcases she had brought from England. They smelt of London rain and laundry starch. There was another scrape of metal from the nextdoor room, then the glug of liquid being poured from a bottle. Edwin must be dissecting the spider. She imagined him tweezering off its legs with the grip of his forceps. It was an odd fascination to want to take apart a creature until you had explored and categorized every part of it.

The window was open, and a jackal gave a rasping bark into the dark. The clock on the mantel ticked heavily, but eventually she heard the chair pull back next door and Edwin’s light tread along the corridor. She heard the careful removing of clothes as he undressed, and the creak of floorboards as he crossed to the lamp and put out the flame. The covers were pulled back and the mattress shifted against her skin as he got into bed beside her. He blew out the candle. They lay for a few minutes in silence, and Frances wondered whether he might not touch her if she stayed very still, but then he turned onto his side to face her. She felt his hand running over her hair, which lay across the pillow. She opened her eyes, but it was too dark to make him out.

He felt for her face, touched her nose first, then her lips, his hands moving down her neck. She stared into the blackness. Then he found her breast, and she felt his body shudder as he cupped it. He let his thumb brush over her nipple. He moved closer, and his breath was wet against her cheek. The darkness seemed to release something in him.

“Frances.” He breathed her name, and she braced herself against the weight of his body as he rolled on top of her. She smelt his nakedness, and felt his thigh shift against hers. “Frances Matthews.” There was a note of triumph in his voice. “You don’t know how I’ve wanted this.” He kissed her cheek, her lips, her eyes, but she couldn’t bring herself to kiss him back. He was still for a moment, as if bringing himself under control, smoothing the skin at her temples with one hand, running his fingers lightly over her face, feeling out its crevices in the dark like a blind man. His touch was gentle, but his fingers trembled. He was breathing heavily, and she sensed the effort it cost him to slow down.

When he pushed his hand up under her nightdress, she drew in a shuddering breath. His fingers were cold and hard between her legs, and she gasped as he began to work himself inside her, the pain familiar but no less shocking.

“Is it all right?” he asked, his face hovering over hers, motionless now, with the weight of him resting inside her.

She put a hand on his shoulder, pulling him towards her. There was no part of her that wanted him, but she needed it over with as quickly as possible.

Afterwards, he curled himself against her body like a boy and gave her small, grateful kisses on her shoulder, murmuring his thanks into her neck. This soft vulnerability was a new side of him. He was usually too controlled to show real affection. She was faintly disgusted. Why was he thanking her? It had been a bloodless, empty act of love, and he was fantasizing if he felt she had been in any way complicit. There had been little choice on her part. Yet at least he had been satisfied. She knew, now, what he expected of her, and if he didn’t ask any more of her than this, then she could bear it.