Shorelines (24 page)

After weeks of drifting along the coastline, Jules and I decided that – even though we classed ourselves as liberal and democratic and all that – to allow your average South African freedom of housing design was to give him a loaded gun. There was just too much individual bad taste about. Many of our seaside villages looked like either tatty nightmares or identical seal colonies.

South Africa needed some architectural consistency, just like there once was in the old Karoo. And in some parts of the Western Cape.

So we needed to have speaks with Julia’s younger brother Martin, who over the years had designed classy coastal homes, hotels and polo complexes collectively worth more than R1 billion. Martin, the distinctly mad genius of the Rattray family, would know.

“The only problem with all this,” I said to Jules and Julia, our new travelling companion sitting in the back of the Isuzu, “is Horst.”

“Oh, Horst is a darling. He’s an absolutely adorable sausage,” said the languid Julia, sneaking a cigarette on the back seat and blowing the smoke out of a crack in the window when she thought I wasn’t looking.

Horst, for the record, was Martin Rattray’s Rottweiler. I had never seen a bigger dog in all my days. Horst could crush your back with one of his front paws. And I wasn’t keen to enter Martin’s place up on Fairview Farm at The Crags unless Horst had been placed safely behind a fence somewhere.

The other dogs in his life were spaniels. Many of them. Martin even had a cherished motor-bonnet ornament in the form of a spaniel in the On Show position. He’d had many a car crash in the district and, no matter how pulverised his old Mercedes would be, the silver spaniel rampant ornament always survived.

The signs in his coach house-cum-office read:

“Let us build such as our children will thank us for”; “A single ugly villa can dethrone a dynasty of hills”; “Beauty is necessary”; “Man becomes what he sees”; “The quality is remembered long after the price is forgotten”; “Piss off, I’m busy.”

Large chalices of wine were poured. Martin was immediately on the case:

“
De gustibus non disputandum
, old boy. About taste there can be no discussion.”

Did the country need a coastal-aesthetics committee, we asked.

“No teeth, no teeth at all. If you want to make sure there is visual, stylish harmony on the coast, it must be written into the building codes,” he said. “In any village, it’s good to have a signature characteristic, a flagship design.”

Why had South Africa been floundering away in a stew of styles, all mixed up and eclectic without being cute?

“Now write this down,” he ordered Jules with a mock-imperious air. “South Africa, by now, should have a style whose mother is Cape Dutch House and whose father is Ndebele Cottage. Look at those Australians and what they’ve done with the typical outback farmhouse.

“And if Plett were in Scotland, you would find an established village built in the time-honoured fisherman style by people using local material – people with a strong sense of community. They would have lived off the sea and there would, of course, be a fishing harbour with a market. It would look marvellous.”

What about ‘low maintenance’?

Martin cringed at the term. Then the light of battle went on in his eyes and he raised his wine glass like a saluting gladiator.

“Mining-camp mentality. Everything is created in a rush, with regard only for usefulness. And then there is the nouveau riche crowd, the ‘look at all my money’ gang. It will still take a few generations of wealth before people have the confidence to relax and not feel the need to show off. I have a client, for instance, who has opted to disguise her spa, gym and steam room in what looks like an old farmhouse. That’s style.

“If you love a plasma TV screen, you can have one. But why not put that TV set into a home built in the style of a fisherman’s cottage? It doesn’t have to be [insert dramatic shudder here] face brick all the way. My friend Gordon Forbes [the former tennis star and author] once gave me the most beautiful brief. He said make me look as if I’ve got a lot of style but no money.

“Charm is marketable. Charm is valuable. I will send Horst the Rottweiler after any person who regards charm as secondary to low maintenance.” As if on cue, the monstrous Horst came into the coach house and showered me with spittle from his spade-like tongue. When he saw Julia his eyes rolled with pleasure and he rumbled over to where she sat.

As usual in this part of the world, the conversation drifted to the weather. I remembered Plett from years gone by, when the rainy season would seriously set in and we’d spend many consecutive days indoors, wandering why the hell we came down here hoping for quality beach time anyhow. Now, it seemed, there was more sunshine than anyone needed. The district was drying up.

“I live on rainwater that falls on my roof,” said Martin bitterly. “I sometimes have just enough to wash with a bucket and a face cloth. And that brings me to my next question: why on earth don’t all South African homes have underground water tanks by now? We still haven’t realised we’re living in a dry country. We pray for rain in the dry season, and then when it comes we just let it run off our roofs without storing it.”

As the afternoon at The Crags wore on and the wine flowed, the conversation went walkabout a little. We were now in Scotland, with Martin inhabiting a castle he had inherited. A castle that burnt down in mysterious circumstances. Martin wasn’t saying a thing about that. But he did tell us about the delicate ‘Code of Butlers’.

“While I was living in Scotland, I visited a friend living in another ‘rotting stately’ up the glen,” he said. “When I asked the butler how my friend was, he told me that ‘milk had been needed upstairs’. That’s butler-speak for ‘Her Ladyship has a dreadful hangover’.”

Inspired by Scottish memories, he rushed off and fetched a bottle of Bell’s. Pouring generously, he added:

“I learnt to drink whisky in Scotland. They say they use enough water when they make it, so you shouldn’t add more. And ice? Oh, ice bruises the whisky.”

Then we were in London with Martin, where he’d had a brush with the law.

“I’ll never forget the headline: ‘Boozy Toff Attempts to Enter Ritz Without Exiting Car’. I complained bitterly to the judge about the lack of parking space in Piccadilly.”

After two more Bell’s monsters, the Rottweiler had truly set in on the afternoon, so we fled down the hill with a promise to meet Martin early the next morning.

We were a few minutes late in arriving at the entrance to Fairview and there was Martin, tapping his foot on the asphalt of the N2 racetrack. He was looking forward to the outing.

Our first stop was up the road, at the Kurland Estate. Martin had designed much of this grand homage to polo. The budding greenie in me bristled at the arrogance of the ponies, all the Plett bling and the Countess of This and the Prince of That and the Eurocopters that “thickened the skies” here over Christmas. And at all those millions of litres of much-needed water going to waste in the “hissing of summer lawns” (to quote Joni Mitchell) and the White Russian blood lines and curlicues and such.

But the old-time libertine in me was totally fascinated by the Jilly Cooperishness of it all, the who’s-bonking-whose-wife-ness of it all, the airs and graces and rush of the chase on the polo field and the gasps of the sexy young things in the summertime. That’s always been Plett, really.

We had come to Kurland to admire Martin’s new pavilion, an exquisite series of three white buildings, spacious and airy, with the delicate Victorian lines of spun sugar.

“Oh yes, the hissing of those summer lawns again,” I cursed, as a spray of water hit my camera. To make matters worse, you could see the not-so-distant smoky haze of the firestorm that was beginning to suck up an awful lot of the forests and plantations and villages around here. But the morning was hot, and both Jules and Julia stood barefoot on the green polo field allowing the spray to irrigate them from top to bottom. Jules tucked in her shirt and did a surprise cartwheel, and we all applauded. Meanwhile, the water flowed at Kurland, at a rate of 1.5 million litres a week. I remembered Rod Hossack’s words:

“These guys are so rich they just say … find the water, ship it in somehow, bugger the cost. The stakes are high, my friend. Money’s on the move.”

We drove back past Plett to the former home of one Andries Stockenstrom le Fleur, who led a group of Griqua settlers to Plett in the late 1920s. Martin Rattray had been commissioned by the local authorities to restore the old farmhouse into a museum and to create a hamlet within the nearby Griqua Kranshoek community.

We were in a quiet valley full of Jersey cows and old stone pines. It was time for lunch, and we had packed a picnic of exotic breads, tomato, cold meat and cheese. Not a drop of booze in sight. Looking for a likely spot, we came upon the Roodefontein Dam, which was allegedly the water supply of Plett. It was drying up fast, and within a few months it would be at a meagre 5% of capacity. Something was drinking Plett dry.

We drove into the back of yet another estate that had been in the news (and not in a nice way), but by now we had developmental scandals clogging up our ears. Greed was going to close this part of the Paradise Coast down for good.

We drove past a rehabilitation centre where Martin may or may not have spent some time.

“Oh yes. The Pletty Ford Clinic,” he quipped. “They used to have horses there too. One day, however, some of the inmates rode them over to a shebeen in Kranshoek, exchanged the horses for drugs and went on the tear. Dreadful business.”

We had now decided to drive into the Harkerville Forest for our overdue picnic. As we bounced down the gravel road between tall indigenous trees, Julia casually mentioned that she’d come here to do dolphin therapy at some stage.

“For a story, of course,” she added.

“When I woke up, I found I was levitating, rigid as a board, two feet above the sofa. The woman told me not to worry, and I gradually floated down again.”

Lunch was delightful, but the lack of liquor was weighing heavily on our spirits. So off we went, like slavering gypsies, to Enrico’s at Keurbooms Strand. The late-afternoon setting on the beach was superb. We quaffed wine and ale and met some of the locals, who delighted in passing on scurrilous stories about Plettenberg Bay.

We heard about fugitive millionaires fleeing from foreign debts, of pharmacists wanted by Interpol, of boats offloading contraband in the night, of old-time pizzerias where you could order the drug of your choice and it came delivered in the same box as your Four Seasons.

During the high season in December, the N2 was called the “black crocodile” because it ate so many people. The local airport became Heathrow over Christmas and farmers rented out fields to aircraft owners for parking. Society hostesses were at full gallop with their rounds of parties … and then suddenly, in the midst of a flow of unprintable gossip, Martin appeared from nowhere and called out:

“Enrico, that fantastic French-café music, please.”

And suddenly Paolo Conte was amongst us on that deck with his bistro sounds and everyone, including the waiters, was jiving away joyously. Down at the shoreline, children danced with the waves and the light of the setting sun shot through the tankards of ale and suddenly we were all talking about onions.

“Did you know,” said the owl-eyed Julia, “it’s still legal in certain states in the USA for housewives to throw onions at persistent salesmen? Apropos of nothing, of course.”

I remembered Enrico Iacopini, who used to own the wildly successful Roma Pizzeria in my stamping ground of Melville, Jo’burg. He left Melville in 1998 after being shot in the stomach by a robber.

“But it’s not safe here in Plett either,” he said with a wide grin. “Just last week, Martin threw a pumpkin at me.”

Then photographs were taken, drunken-marriage certificates were produced, a wealthy woman’s pearl was temporarily purloined, and Martin embarked on a long tale about one Lady Sophia Gray.

“Who rode around on churchback, designing horses.” Yes, the Rottweiler had set in once again – on a perfect day in Plett …

Lightning strikes deep into the dry
fynbos
behind the Tsitsikamma mountain ranges, and a fire begins to brood and smoulder in privacy. There is no question of rain, so the flicker becomes a blaze, spreading over the ridges and down into the valleys towards the sea. The rest of the country looks on with mild interest via millions of television screens and the protective distance of headlines.

But for the thousands of farmers, timber workers, homesteaders, shepherds, villagers and N2 commuters in the eastern and southern Cape, it’s all too real. The wall of fire grows two storeys high and is fast and deadly as it marches in a wide, united front along the Garden Route, seeking out resin-rich pine plantations and wattles and stately blue gums that become huge tree-bombs as they explode.

Jules and I leave Plettenberg Bay knowing little of this. We’ve seen the smoke smudges in the distance, but hell, there’s always a little blaze or two around here. They’ll put it out in a day or so and all will be well.