1999 - Ladysmith (35 page)

She started to move, and he groaned again and gripped her hipbones. In response, she stopped and waited, immobile except for the slightest pulse. As she did this, she looked down into his face with mocking eyes. He had to look away, concentrating on the dark shape of his rifle, propped up against the wall. Soon, when he was calmer, she put her hands on his chest and started to move again. She used her hands as levers to get the rhythm; and then the rhythm got him, the tempo increasing until, helpless, he closed his eyes and unloaded himself deep inside her.

“Come on,” shouted the Biographer, “come on in.”

Naked, Perry Barnes hovered on a pale sandbank at the edge of the Tugela, and then jumped.

The Biographer approached him like a greedy crocodile. “Now I can touch your fudge-box,” he murmured lasciviously.

Once, unobserved under the cover of the river’s silvery surface, they had finished (for they had been lovers for weeks) and the Biographer had frigged him off under the water—Perry’s white string, seed of his forefathers, floating off downstream to God knew where. Afterwards, they got out and towelled themselves down.

The two men walked back to camp in silence, glowing with shame and the after-warmth of pleasure. The Biographer smoked a cigar.

Then Perry said, “If I get potted…when you get into Ladysmith, tell Tom he was a good brother.”

“Don’t be silly,” said the Biographer. “You’ll be able to tell him that yourself, when you see him.”

E
ach eye had its own vision, thought Nandi, but some eyes saw nothing at all. To be specific, white eyes. They did not see that all this digging and cleaning of latrines to which she had been put by the military might be beneath her. It was simply
kafferwerk
, her natural lot, this carrying of shit and earth, sometimes with her bare hands. It amazed her the extent to which the whites failed to see her as human. It was not even that they thought her nearer to the beasts, the oxen and mules; it was that they failed even to see her at all. To them, all blacks were invisible, and silent too. The truth, of course, was that the voices of all her people were as noisy as the shells which, even now, screamed in the air above her; it was just that the whites did not understand the language. Not Zulu or Xhosa—she meant something deeper than that: the blackness which shut like prison bars.

Another shell went over. It had grown dark now, and she could see the orange mark the shell made in the sky. She just shrugged now when the bombs came; whereas earlier, like everyone else, she had crouched and cringed. Now it was all simply part of the routine. No shelling—that would have been extraordinary, that would have broken the pattern of events. But in Ladysmith now, with the siege in its one hundred and tenth day, the routine was as set and fixed as the passage of the earth round the sun.

And yet, that day, a strange thing had happened. The young mama, Miss Bella, had come up from the tunnels to the small shack she and Wellington had built in the ruined garden behind the Royal (the original servants’ quarters having been hit) and asked for their help. She had never known anything like it before. Wellington had not been there, and it had been to him in particular that the young mama had wanted to talk. He had been out beyond the lines, checking for heaps of stones, for
isivivane
. According to her son, Muhle had made some pledge about meeting him by one—but to her own mind, in spite of missing her husband terribly, it would be better if Wellington did not go outside the perimeter, as he put his life in danger each time he did. He had now stopped going on missions for the white men, and spent all the time scouring the hills and the plain for his father.

A kind of mania about this had come over him, and it was all she could do to prevent him from spending all day and night out there. At least the young mama’s suggestion (for which she had already made a payment) kept Wellington in the town, even if it did seem dangerous enough in itself. She would tell him about it when he came back, and send him down to see Miss Bella at the tunnels. Nandi, who had once taken some food down there on Mr Kiernan’s instructions, was glad she didn’t have to go herself. The holes by the Klip made her think of the
umgodi
, the mine shafts on the Rand—and those she associated with death, only death. Whatever happened, after all this, she would rather cut her wrists than go back there.

She heard a noise, and looking out of the shack, saw Wellington appear in black silhouette, standing out against a vague red glow of shellfire. When he came in, she told him what the young mama had said. He went immediately down to the tunnels to meet with Miss Bella. All that night Nandi Maseku lay awake, smoking her second-best pipe.

Across town, in the hospital, Nevinson too lay awake, waiting for his dose of morphia. That, and douching his head with boiling hot water, were the only ways of easing the pain in his skull, which seemed to have swelled to the size of a football. He craved the needle like a lover. Aping Chatterton, he dangled his arm from the bed. Chatterton the poet-forger, whose supposititious verses were attacked by another, eighteenth-century George Steevens. Was the scholar an ancestor of his departed friend? He’d never had time to ask.

A gowned figure glided over. The nurse’s cool fingers plucked up the flesh of his arm; the prick was over before he felt it; and he waited for the vial’s brown liquid to do its magic. Afterwards, once the warm feeling had flooded through him, he felt unassailable. Nothing in the world was evil, everything was possible, and all lived happily in joyous anarchistic communities. He heard a voice, and seemed to see a white light above him.

A
bove him, Torres saw the dark roof of the church. He could feel something worrying at his shoulder, pulling at his shirtsleeve. He looked down and saw a thin black face.

“Get dressed, nkosi,” the face said. “We go.”

Torres looked around; everyone was asleep.

“What’s happening?” he whispered back.

“Do it quick please, nkosi, mama waits outside. She says you are to escape.”

The barber dragged on his clothes quickly and followed the boy to the vestry. Its door creaked awfully, and in front of him Torres heard the boy catch his breath. Once they were inside, the boy lifted away the iron grille that covered the window. It was clear that he had undone the screws from the outside, and then replaced the grille loosely after he himself had climbed in. Now he motioned that the barber should climb up out of the window. Torres looked at him askance: the gap was narrow, and to go through it presented a hazard of the sharpest character. But then he thought of all the long days he had spent locked up in the place, and the ever-present threat of being shot by the British on a cooked-up charge. With these thoughts in mind, he lifted himself up and poked his head out of the window. The moon shone brightly over the yard, but the eastern fence was in shadow. That must have been where the boy came in. Holding on to the window-frame, he put first one leg out and then the other. Then, with some difficulty, he manoeuvred himself through the gap, the iron frame scraping his back. Falling awkwardly to the ground, he looked over to the sentry’s hut, just twenty yards away, and saw that he would be plainly visible if the man sitting outside happened to look.

His rescuer dropped down beside him.

“Wait,” said the boy, and pointed over towards the sentry hut.

In the moonlight, Torres saw the slim figure of Bella Kiernan approaching the soldier where he sat on the stool outside the hut. The soldier sprung up immediately on seeing her and, as Torres watched, the two of them were soon locked in an embrace.

“Now,” the boy said, and began to run across the yard towards the eastern fence. Mystified, and not at all sure of the good sense of embarking upon this adventure, Torres followed. There was no point in hesitating now. On reaching the fence, the boy knelt down and crawled through a neat square hole, evidently cut by pliers. Again Torres followed. Suddenly they were outside. He wanted to stop, wanted to catch his breath, but the boy was running on, with light, quick steps. As they passed from an area of ruined, deserted buildings to scrubland covered with bush and trees, the details of the plan which had, for reasons deep in the heart of Bella Kiernan, been hatched on his behalf, suddenly became apparent to the barber.

“You must get inside,” said the African. “Miss Bella, she said wait for her.”

Wellington pushed aside the branches of the trees, into the clear space they fringed. Torres came behind, nearly tripping over one of the straining mooring ropes. The brazier which heated the air had been lit earlier in the night, and the great linen-clad shape was now full and warm. Torres stood motionless for a second, and then climbed into the basket.

He understood now, this was what it had all been leading up to, this was where fate had been pointing.

His guide handed him a knife. “For the ropes. I must go now, nkosi. If the soldiers find me here, they will kill me.”

“Me also, I should think,” said Torres. “How can I thank you for this?”

The Zulu boy stood there in his ragged clothes, the whites of his eyes picked out by the glow of the brazier.

“You do not need to thank me. I was paid.”

“All the same,” said Torres, “you have been very brave.”

Wellington said nothing, just turned his head, and then was gone, into the shadows.

Alone, Torres waited. He warmed his hands over the coals, and looked out into the foliage, hoping to spot the white of a petticoat or bonnet. Above him, the quilted membrane fluttered and flapped. The only other noise was the hiss of the brazier and, now and then, the faint sound of a falling coal knocking against the iron, near by and visible, but so faint that it sounded like something heard over a long distance. He looked into the fire and, as his thoughts drifted, seemed to see into the depths of life. How had this happened to him? He shook his head, as if to shake off an illusion.

When Bella came, panting from having run, Torres was like a man in a trance, and it was almost as if he did not know what he was doing as he cut the ropes. The balloon, shrugging itself free of the copse like someone trying to evade grasping hands, lifted from the earth into the night air above Ladysmith.

By imperceptible gradations, the moon-flushed grey linen sphere rose into the sky. Tom, himself flushed from Bella’s kisses, bemused by her inexplicable change of heart and her sudden departure, saw it in the sky, and thought it odd that the observers should take it out so late at night. Gleaming, an exclamation mark of reflected light, the balloon slid above the town, passing over the journalists’ cottage, over the battered roof of the Royal Hotel, where Bella’s father slept the uneasy sleep of the guilty, over Mr Grimble’s untended fields, where starved, released horses roamed loose, over Mrs Frinton, as her gentle snores drew in the damp air of the tunnels, over the oxbow of the Klip, over the V where the railway branched, over the thorn-tree dotted scrub of a hill—in the lee of which lay Muhle Maseku, curled up in his burrow, under its lid of leaves and branches.

A
t Intombi, one evening towards the end of February, Jane Kiernan found Tom Barnes shading his eyes against the setting sun and looking in the direction of the hills above town. She asked him what he was looking at.

“Men,” he said.

“Boers?” she queried.

“I think,” he said, quietly, “that they might be our own.”

Although exhausted from the heavy work there at the hospital camp, Jane found herself flinging her arms round the battered soldier, who winced when she did so. She said she was sorry, and then shouted out. Others came to look, straining their eyes at the specks on the red horizon. But soon it grew too dark. Everyone was so excited they could hardly speak, still less sleep…

That night, by candlelight, Jane applied more Condy’s fluid to the lacerations on Tom’s back. He had arrived at Intombi in a bad way, having been ordered flogged by Lieutenant Norris for allowing Torres to escape. They talked about Bella again. Neither could believe what had happened.

Among the others who had gathered at the hospital camp to watch the silhouettes of the distant soldiers that evening was Wellington Maseku. He was quite well known there now, but his arrival there this last time, on the same day as Tom, had caused quite a stir. With a tramp-like, leaf-covered, leg-dragging figure leaning upon him, he had burst into the wounds tent demanding attention for his companion. It was his father, whose burrow he had finally discovered, having stumbled across the
isivivane
.

Under normal circumstances, the doctors and nurses would not have countenanced treating a stray African, but they were grateful for the supply runs Wellington had made in the past, and considered that the least they could do was clean and dress Muhle’s wound. Full of dirt and badly infected, it had deteriorated considerably, on account of the long, dangerous walk from his hiding place to the camp. One doctor said he thought the leg was turning gangrenous, and might have to be amputated.

So as Wellington watched the figures on the horizon with the others, his mind was elsewhere. The relief of Ladysmith did not seem, to the young Zulu boy, the most important thing at all. He decided that in the early morning he would make his way back to the town to bear the bittersweet news to his mother. Once again, he would brave the Boer lines—the lines in which Dr Sterkx, trying to keep his mind occupied with his work, thought constantly about his wife, and whether the kaffir had got through. It was the last time Wellington Maseku would pass through those lines, and it was the worst of all his journeys, as the battle round Ladysmith began in earnest that day.

In the town itself, about a week later, Nevinson—recovered from his illness, and just about free from the lure of morphine—noted through his glass a great disturbance in the Boer camps. Lines of men and wagons had started moving towards the railway junction, and the roads that led to the Free State. A derrick or tripod of wooden posts, like a huge letter ‘A’, had been erected above the remaining Long Tom, to lift it from its pit. It gave the correspondent great pleasure to see the whole machinery brought down by a shot from one of the naval guns. Later in the day, he rode up to one of the outposts with MacDonald to get a better view of the long silver snake of Boer wagons disappearing into the green background of the hills. The silvery aspect came, he realized, from the sun reflecting off the white covers on the Boer wagons.