Life Times (52 page)

‘I must say, I never feel cut off!' his wife enjoyed supporting him. ‘I've got my peace and quiet, and there's always something to do with my hands.'

Naas spoke as if he had not already told her: ‘We're going to look over the Kleynhans place.'

‘Oh, I thought you've come from there!'

‘We going now-now. I just thought, why pass by the house, let's at least have a cup of tea . . .'

‘Is there anybody there?'

‘Just the boy who looks after the garden and so on.'

When they spoke English together it seemed to them to come out like the dialogue from a television series. And the young couple sat mute, as the Klopper grandchildren did before the console when they came to spend a night.

‘Can I fill up?' Standing beside her with his cup the young man reminded her not of Dawie who had Naas's brown eyes, didn't take after her side of the family at all, but of Herman, her sister Miemie's son. The same glistening, young blond beard, so manly it seemed growing like a plant while you looked at it. The short pink nose. Even the lips, pink and sun-cracked as a kid's.

‘Come on! Have some more biscuits – please help yourself . . . And Mrs Rosser? –
please
– there's another whole tin in the kitchen . . . I forget there's no children in the house any more, I bake too much every time.'

She was shy, that girl; at last a smile out of her.

‘Thanks, I'll have a rusk.'

‘Well I'm glad you enjoy my rusks, an old, old family recipe. Oh you'll like the Kleynhans place. I always liked it, didn't I, Naas – I often say to my husband, that's the kind of place we ought to have. I've got a lovely home here, of course I wouldn't really change it, but it's so big, now, too big for two people. A lot of work; I do it all myself, I don't want anyone in my place, I don't want all that business of having to lock up my sugar and tea – no, I'll rather do everything myself. I can't stand to feel one of them there at my back all the time.'

‘But there's nothing to be afraid of in this area.' Naas did not look at her but corrected her drift at a touch of the invisible signals of long familiarity.

‘Oh no, this's a safe place to live. I'm alone all day, only the dog in the yard, and she's so old now – did she even wake up and come round the front when you came? – ag, poor old Ounooi! It's safe here, not like the
other
side of the town, near the location. You can't even keep your garden hose there, even the fence around your house – they'll come and take everything. But this side . . . no one will worry you.'

Perhaps the young man was not quite reassured. ‘How far away would the nearest neighbours be?'

‘No, not far. There's Reynecke about three or four kilometres, the other side of the koppie – there's a nice little koppie, a bit of real veld, you know, on the southern border of the property.'

‘And the other sides? Facing the house?' The young man looked over to his wife, whose feet were together under her long skirt, cup neatly balanced on her lap, and eyes on cup, inattentive; then he smiled to Mr and Mrs Naas. ‘We don't want to live in the country and at the same time be disturbed by neighbours' noise.'

Naas laughed and put a hand on each knee, thrusting his head forward amiably; over the years he had developed gestures that marked each stage in the conclusion of a land deal, as each clause goes to comprise a contract.

‘You won't hear nothing but the birds.'

 

On a Thursday afternoon Doctors Milton Caro, pathologist, Grahame Fraser-Smith, maxillo-facial surgeon, Arthur Methus, gynaecologist and Dolf van Gelder, orthopaedic surgeon, had an encounter on Houghton Golf Course. Doctors Caro, Fraser-Smith, Methus and van Gelder are all distinguished specialists in their fields, with degrees from universities abroad as well as at home, and they are not available to the sick at all hours and on all days, like any general practitioner. In fact, since so many of the younger medical specialists have emigrated to take up appointments in safer countries – America, Canada, Australia – patients sometimes have the embarrassment of having recovered spontaneously before arriving for appointments that have to be booked a minimum of three months ahead. Others may have died; in which case, the ruling by the Medical Association that appointments not kept will be charged for, is waived.

The doctors do not consult on Thursday afternoons. The foursome, long-standing members of the Houghton Club, has an almost equally long-standing arrangement to tee off at 2 p.m. (Caro and van Gelder also take long walks together, carrying stout sticks, on Sunday mornings. Van Gelder would like to make jogging a punishable offence, like drunken driving. He sees too many cases of attributable Achilles tendonitis, of chondromalacia patellae caused by repetitive gliding of the patella over the femur, and, of course, of chronic strain of the ligaments, particularly in flat-footed patients.) On this particular afternoon Fraser-Smith and van Gelder were a strong partnership, and Methus was letting Caro down rather badly. It is this phenomenon of an erratic handicap that provides the pleasure mutually generated by the company. The style of their communication is banter; without error, there would be nothing to banter about. This Thursday the supreme opportunity arose because it was not Methus, in his ham-handed phase, who sent a ball way off into a grove of trees, but Fraser-Smith, who on the previous hole had scored an eagle. Van Gelder groaned, Fraser-Smith cursed himself in an amazement that heightened Caro's and Methus's mock glee. And then Caro, who had marked where the ball fell into shade, went good-naturedly with Fraser-Smith, who was short-sighted, over to the trees. Fraser-Smith, still cursing amiably, moved into the grove where Caro directed.

‘Which side of the bush? Here? I'll never find the sodding thing.' At Guy's Hospital thirty years before he had picked up the panache of British cuss-words he never allowed himself to forget.

Caro, despite the Mayo Clinic and distinguished participation at international congresses on forensic medicine, called back in the gruff, slow homeliness of a Jewish country storekeeper's son whose early schooling was in Afrikaans. ‘Ag, man, d'you want me to come and bleddy well hit it for you? It must be just on the left there, man!'

Exactly where the two men were gazing, someone – something that must have been crouching – rose, a shape broken by the shapes of trees; there was an instant when they, it, were aware of one another. And then whoever or whatever it was was gone, in a soft crashing confusion among branches and bushes. Caro shouted – ridiculously, he was the first to admit – ‘Hey! Hey!'

‘Well,' (they were embellishing their story at the clubhouse) ‘I thought he'd pinched old Grahame's ball, and I wanted to say thanks very much, because Methus and I, we were playing like a pair of clowns, we needed some monkey-business to help us out . . .'

Fraser-Smith was sure the creature had gone up a tree, although when the foursome went to look where he thought it had climbed, there was nothing. Methus said if it hadn't been for all the newspaper tales they'd been reading, none of them would have got the mad idea it was anything but a man – one of the black out-of-works, the
dronkies
who have their drinking sessions in there; wasn't it true they were a problem for the groundsmen, no fence seemed to keep them and their litter out? There were the usual empty beer cans under the tree where Fraser-Smith said he . . . ‘Anyway, the papers talked about a monkey, and we all saw – this was something big . . . a black, that's all, and he got a scare . . . you know, how you can't make out a black face in shadow, among leaves.'

Caro spoke aside: ‘A black having a crap, exactly . . .'

But van Gelder was certain. No one had seen, in the moment the being had looked at the foursome, and the foursome had looked at it, a face, distinct garments, limbs. Van Gelder had observed the gait, and in gait van Gelder read bones. ‘It was not a monkey. It was not a man. That was a baboon.'

 

The couple didn't have much to say for themselves, that day while Naas Klopper was showing them over the Kleynhans place. In his experience this was a bad sign. Clients who took an instant liking to a property always thought they were being shrewd by concealing their keenness to buy under voluble fault-picking calculated to bring down the price. They would pounce on disadvantages in every feature of aspect and construction. This meant the deed of sale was as good as signed. Those who said nothing were the ones who had taken an instant dislike to a property, or – as if they could read his mind, because, hell man, he was an old hand at the game, he never let slip a thing – uncannily understood at once that it was a bad buy. When people trailed around in silence behind him he filled that silence entirely by himself, every step and second of it, slapping with the flat of a hand the pump of whose specifications, volume of water per hour, etcetera, he spared no detail, opening stuck cupboard doors and scratching a white-ridged thumbnail down painted walls to the accompaniment of patter about storage space and spotless condition; and all the time he was wanting just to turn round and herd right out the front door people who were wasting his time.

But this girl didn't have the averted face of the wives who had made up their minds they wouldn't let their husbands buy. Naas knows what interests the ladies. They don't notice if guttering is rotted or electrical wiring is old and unsafe. What they care about is fitted kitchen units and whether the new suite will look right in what will be the lounge. When he pointed out the glassed-in stoep that would make a nice room for sewing and that, or a kiddies' playroom (but I don't suppose you've got any youngsters? – not yet, ay) she stood looking over it obediently through her big round glasses as if taking instructions. And the lounge, a bit original (two small rooms of the old farmhouse from the twenties knocked into one) with half the ceiling patterned pressed lead and the other ‘modernised' with pine strips and an ox-wagon wheel adapted as a chandelier – she smiled, showing beautiful teeth, and nodded slowly all round the room, turning on her heel.

Same thing outside, with the husband. He was interested in the outhouses, of course. Nice double shed, could garage two cars – full of junk, naturally, when a place's been empty, only a boy in charge – Kleynhans's old boy, and his hundred-and-one hangers-on, wife, children, whatnot . . . ‘But we'll get that all cleaned up for you, no problem.' Naas shouted for the boy, but the outhouse where he'd been allowed to live was closed, an old padlock on the door. ‘He's gone off somewhere. Never here whenever I come, that's how he looks after the place. Well – I wanted to show you the room but I suppose it doesn't matter, the usual boy's room . . . p'raps you won't want to have anybody, like Mrs Klopper, you'll rather do for yourselves? Specially as you from overseas, ay . . .'

The young husband asked how big the room was, and whether, since the shed was open, there was no other closed storage room.

‘Oh, like I said, just the usual boy's room, not
very
small, no. But you can easy brick in the shed if you want, I can send you good boys for building, it won't cost a lot. And there's those houses for pigs, at one time Kleynhans was keeping pigs. Clean them up – no problem. But man, I'm sure if you been doing a bit of farming in England you good with your hands, ay? You used to repairs and that? Of course. And here it doesn't cost much to get someone in to help . . . You know' (he cocked his head coyly) ‘you and your wife, you don't sound like the English from England usually speak . . . ? You sound more like the English here.'

The wife looked at the husband and this time she was the one to answer at once, for him. ‘Well, no. Because, you see – we're really Australian. Australians speak English quite a lot like South Africans.'

The husband added, ‘We've been
living
in England, that's all.'

‘Well, I thought so. I thought, well, if they English, it's from some part where I never heard the people speak!' Naas felt, in a blush of confidence, he was getting on well with this couple. ‘Australian, that's good. A good country. A lot like ours. Only without our problems, ay.' (Naas allowed himself to pause and shake his head, exclaim, although it was a rule never to talk politics with clients.) ‘There's a lot of exchange between sheep farmers in Australia and here in South Africa. Last year I think it was, my brother-in-law had some Australian farmers come to see him at his place in the Karoo – that's our best sheep country. He even ordered a ram from them. Six thousand Australian dollars! A lot of money, ay? Oh but what an animal. You should see – bee-yeu-tiful.'

In the house, neither husband nor wife remarked that the porcelain lid of the lavatory cistern was broken, and Naas generously drew their attention to it himself. ‘I'll get you a new one cheap. Jewish chappies I know who run plumbing supplies, they'll always do me a favour. Anything you want in that line, you just tell me.'

In the garden, finally (Naas never let clients linger in a garden before entering a house on a property that had been empty a long time – a neglected garden puts people off), he sensed a heightened interest alerting the young couple. They walked round the walls of the house, shading their eyes to look at the view from all sides, while Naas tried to prop up a fallen arch of the wire pergola left from the days when Mrs Kleynhans was still alive. To tell the truth the view wasn't much. Apart from the koppie behind the house, just bare veld with black, burned patches, now, before the rains. Old Kleynhans liked to live isolated on this dreary bit of land, the last years he hadn't even let out the hundred acres of his plot to the Portuguese vegetable farmers, as he used to. As for the garden – nothing left, the blacks had broken the fruit trees for firewood, a plaster Snow White had fallen into the dry fishpond. It was difficult to find some feature of interest or beauty to comment on as he stood beside the couple after their round of the house, looking across the veld. He pointed. ‘Those things over there, way over there. That's the cooling towers of the power station.' They followed his arm politely.