1999 - Ladysmith (19 page)

But all that had run out now. Bella felt hungry nearly all of the time. She wanted nothing so much as a bit of meat—a slice of ham, or some brawn. But all there was to have was boiled trek ox, which didn’t seem to yield any sustenance at all. Now that food was being distributed by the military, and soldiers stood behind the counters at the shops, every item had to be accounted for—even clothing.

How many shells had fallen during the first month? She didn’t know, she knew only that the Town Hall was full of wounded soldiers and civilians. Anyone who had been bombed out—like Torres—had gone down to the Klip and dug himself a hole there for protection. The soft ground of the riverbank helped absorb the shell blast and shrapnel.

She thought some more about Torres, how she had accidentally tasted him when she had lifted her hand to her face after touching his perspiring arm at the diggings. How slippery his arm had been. Like a fish.

Then another shell went off and she considered them, the Boers, and another man the siege had brought into her orbit. They were cunning as well as patient, the Dutch. For it was from Tom Barnes, who in spite of being warned off by Father, had taken to dropping into the hotel frequently, that she had learned how the Boers had hoisted a white flag so they could repair one of their guns.

And I too, she thought, have hoisted a white flag. For over the first month of investment, love—so Bella fancied—had worked its artful process on her and Tom. Their subtle manoeuvres of attack and counter-attack, as they glimpsed each other round the town and over tea at the hotel, had become plain to each; and yet there had been just as much complicated deployment of gesture and look and tone of voice to ward each other off.

So there was defence as well as attack. The generals, White and Joubert, were children by comparison, in the ways they disposed their forces. Yet in the manner of these things, the ebb and flow of hot looks and cold looks, compliment and mild disparagement, had become one and the same. Yes, Tom Barnes and Bella Kiernan could fairly be said to be courting. Although only that one kiss had passed between them, her sister had taken to referring to him as ‘Long Tom’, and complaining that her own suitor, the bluejacket Foster, was thereby bound to play the part of ‘Puffing Billy’, as one of the smaller Boer guns was known.

These were sisters’ secrets, but even so Bella burned at the thought of them…it was Jane’s fault; if she didn’t talk like that, such thoughts wouldn’t be entertained. And yet they came all the same, persistent as Boer shellfire from somewhere deep inside. She’d need—what did they call those protective forts?—a sangar to stop them. Without it, as she rubbed and dusted and thought about these things, every circular movement now seemed to describe some other story: its ending, the furthest ripple of its pebble in a pond, being that life with Tom—Durban maybe, the Cape, England! And a house, a garden, children…some place where the rippling stopped and all was a quiet peace that went on for ever.

Bella picked up the buckets and walked towards the door. It was time she went to join Jane behind the bar. The intrusion of humdrum duty upon her dreaminess made her cynical where, seconds before, she had been rhapsodic; maybe the whole thing was a silly notion, a function of siege time. For when it ended, however it ended, Tom would be gone; and anyway, in spite of her picket-fence dreams, she was clever enough—indeed I am, she thought—to see faults in him, a clumsy, impetuous quality among them, faults that gave her pause, faults that with every step she took downstairs, a bucket in each hand, made her reconsider the matter of romance, faults that by the time she got to the bottom of the stairs (these, of course, were the back stairs, not the grander ones upon which Tom had encountered her father), yes, by the time she had got to the bottom of the back stairs and opened the door to the scullery, had decided her that she would take it slowly, this half considered, evanescent thing she thought of as love.

On coming from the scullery into the bar, she found Major Mott on the point of launching into a discussion with her father, who was busy drying a row of glasses.

“Mr Kiernan,” the Major said. “I have a proposal for you.”

“What’s that then?”

“Well, as you know, the various military contingents in the town have been finding themselves healthy leisure activities with which to while away the time when they are not on duty. You know, whist drives, mule gymkhanas, football…”

“I do,” said her father. He pushed his cloth inside a glass. “So?”

“Well, General White has asked me to devise some sport which would involve the townsfolk in conjunction with the soldiery, as a boost to morale.”

“How do you reckon I can help you, Major?”

“I thought perhaps we’d have a game of cricket. Colonial Born versus the Mother Country? How does that sound?”

“I don’t know much about cricket, Major. As an Irishman, you understand. Now hurling, I’d be on for that. The fastest game on grass.”

“Well…it is a little specialized. Seriously, though, what do you think?”

The conversation between the two men had created some interest, and a small group had gathered around them.

“It seems a slightly arbitrary division,” said Kiernan. “Considering we are all in the same boat.” He looked round the room. “Wouldn’t Bearded versus Beardless be a better bet? Or Smokers versus Non-Smokers? Or what about Handsomes versus Uglies?”

Bella smiled as she watched him tease the Major. She loved him dearly when the playful side of his nature came to the surface. Unbidden, the picture came into her head of something turned up in the diggings at the Klip: a clay pot or bone-handled tool, or some other artefact from long ago. A time when her father was happy—that seemed just as distant.

“Really, Mr Kiernan, I think the original distinction was more suitable. Will you captain?”

“I can hardly play the game, Major. Besides, isn’t there someone else more suitable?”

“I think not,” said a voice. It was a frail one, rather high, certainly not the Major’s. The two men turned round, and saw the stiff figure of General White, together with Colonel Hamilton and one or two others of the senior staff.

“Yes,” said the General. “I think you’d be just the chap to lead a team, Mr Kiernan. After all, the Royal is the centre of the community in Ladysmith, the very hub.”

“But I’m no good, sir,” said the Irishman, suddenly hapless.

“Nonsense, man, you’ll acquit yourself well, of that I am sure. As will all involved. Just what we need to perk things up round here—a manly impulse towards recreation. Courage, patience, endurance, courtesy, control…these are the virtues of cricket and these are the virtues of the Empire too. So, go to it. Mott, arrange the match for a Sunday.”

“Very well, sir,” said the Major, as White and his entourage swept to a table in the dining room.

“Looks like you’re landed with it, Father,” said Bella, smiling.

“Indeed it does.”

N
evinson was sitting on Steevens’s sickbed, telling him the story of his day. He was trying to take his friend’s mind off the fever which, in the last four weeks, had grasped and released him like an uncertain lover.

“Two pieces of good fortune came to me today, almost at an instant. The first concerned my own life. I had gone down to the river with Willie Maud, aiming to show him a quiet place for sketching the whole view of the town in peace. He had taken his sketchbook out and I was standing there watching some Zulus bathing—soaping themselves white, they were—when a shell whiffled over us. We didn’t take much notice at first, and neither did the horses: they stood there drinking like the orphan lamb. Then suddenly the water was alive with shreds of iron. My hat was knocked off, and the horses were jumping around like hell’s imps. Maud shouted: “Are you killed?” I said: “I don’t think so. Are you?” It was a near thing, George, I can tell you.”

Wearing pyjamas, Steevens was sat up in the bed, packing his pipe. A notebook lay on the sheet over his lap.

“Mmm. And what was the other?”

“Well, once I had lashed my horse back—there is nothing like shellfire for giving lessons in horsemanship—and retrieved my broken hat, my eye fell upon the Zulus. They were mostly women.”

“Steamy,” interrupted Steevens, and chuckled.

“One of them—she skivvies at the Royal, I think—is, or was as I thought, the mother of my latest runner. I had given him up for dead, on account of the return of the bloodstained packet—I told you about it—but then I see this round black head surfacing from the water. And by Jove it’s him, it’s my dead runner taking a wash after his exertions. So I leave Maud to his sketchbook and go over to ask the lad what he’s about. He tells me the Boers let him go on Joubert’s orders; the old fox had ordered him to bring the letters back into town, to put the wind up us and show us we’ve no chance. But the poor boy was so scared of getting into trouble with our lot—the Dutchmen roughed him up—that he just slung it over the edge of a sangar. His mama is very happy to have him back, but they’re both a bit glum because it turns out the father is in the Boer camp.”

“There must be a lot of them,” said Steevens, putting aside his pipe. “Damn thing won’t draw.”

“What?”

“There must be a lot of African families split on either side.”

“Yes, and many a European one, too. I went into the Dopper Church today, where they’ve got the prisoners, to talk to a Jew called Blok. He had a farm up by the border of Portuguese East Africa, but the Boers pressganged him to join their army, so he had to leave his wife behind. But it turned out he couldn’t really ride or shoot or live on biltong, and could only talk Russian, which is a useless accomplishment in a Boer commando, so they sent him into our camp.”

“Joubert’s still up to that trick, is he? Dumping them on us to eat our rations? I remember, at the start, seeing all the Indians he sent us as a present.”

“Yes, the same old line,” said Nevinson. “There’s something a little medieval about it, in my opinion—sending a crowd of hungry non-combatants into an invested town. Our lot have sentenced one poor coolie to death, just for stealing a goat.”

“Medieval? It’s more ancient than that, even. Sieges are out of date. In the days of Troy, to be besieged or besieger was the natural lot of man; to give ten years at a stretch to it, why, it was all in a life’s work; there was nothing else to do.”

Nevinson laughed, even though he suspected his friend’s fever was taking hold of him again.

“In the old days,” continued Steevens, “when a great victory was gained one year, and a fast frigate arrived with news the next, a man still had leisure in his life for a year’s siege now and again.”

The other correspondent laughed again, but he could see the sheen of sweat gathering on Steevens’s brow as he grew more excitable.

“But to the man of 1899—excuse me, inclining to 1900—with five editions of the evening papers every day, a siege is a thousandfold a hardship. We make it a grievance nowadays if we are a day behind the news—news that concerns us not at all!”

“Oh, that reminds me,” said Nevinson. “I’ve got a paper for you.”

He went through to his room and fetched it. When he came back in, Steevens was standing over his washbowl with his head in the water. Nevinson stood behind him, holding the paper, until Steevens pulled his head out of the water and shook it, like a dog. Nevinson was disgusted to see how stained and yellowed were the bottoms of his friend’s pyjamas.

“I say, George, are you all right?”

Steevens rubbed his face with the hand towel and let out a burst of breath. “Yes, just feeling a bit faint. Thought the application of some cold water might help. Though it’s tepid, of course. God, this business is an unredeemed curse. Dismal! Weary, stale, flat, unprofitable, the whole thing…”

He got back into bed, the tendrils of damp hair round his greenish face giving him, to Nevinson’s mind, a slightly Medusa-like air.

“Dismal!” repeated Steevens. “For my part, I feel it will never end. Henry, I now know exactly how a fly in a beer bottle feels.”

He did look awful, thought Nevinson, handing him the paper. “How’s your book going?” he asked, trying to take his mind off his gloomy thoughts.

“Just a dull diary now. I’ve abandoned my new monologues of the dead. I haven’t the heart for them. Someone else can write the bloody things. I’ve lost my edge. I feel like a monk without a vocation. I’m just going to carry on writing the diary, and then when we’re still here in twenty years’ time, dropping off one by one from old age, I will wrap it up in a Red Cross flag and bury it under the tree outside.”

He threw the notebook on to the floor and snapped open the newspaper that Nevinson had given him. “And then, in the enlightened year 1999, after antiquarians have come to dig up the forgotten towns of Natal and discovered it, the unnumbered readers of the
Daily Mail
will know what a siege and bombardment was really like!”

The wildness of Steevens’s imagination was almost frightening to Nevinson; he felt helpless in front of it, and saw nothing to do but retire and let his friend calm down in his own time.

“I’ll leave you to the paper then, George,” he said, mildly.

“Go and write up my own reports. Bang on the wall if there’s anything you want.”

“Hold up,” said Steevens. “The bloody Boers have captured Winston Churchill. Something to do with an armoured train. I can’t believe it. He seemed to have so much promise. What a blow. It’s all so pointless and stupid.”

“Do you know him?”

“I suppose you could call us friends. We met in the Sudan, with Kitchener’s expedition…had dinner together on the Nile. Then I bumped into him at a junction in India, when he was stationed there and I was reporting. In fact, we always seemed to run into each other in transit. We were together for five days once on a boat in the Mediterranean, and for two on an express on the Continent. I gave him some help with the proofs for his book on the River War. His prose used to be rather heavy—not the modern style—but it’s getting better. He came for a long Sunday lunch once at my house in Merton, too. He has great plans in politics, you know…but I suppose those are all done for now. It’s a shame. He could have gone far.”