The Complete Short Stories (8 page)

‘Oh, will it be about
the Colony?’

‘It’s difficult to say.’

He was not sure now that
the Daphne idea would be as appealing as he had thought. He could not envisage
his public, especially that section which he had recently met at dose quarters,
appreciating such a theme.

Michael showed him over
the farm which was up for sale. Ralph said he would almost certainly take it.

They went to see Chakata
and Ralph spoke of Daphne. Chakata said, ‘Why didn’t she settle down in
England? Why did she come back?’

‘I suppose she wanted
to,’ said Michael, and giggled.

Chakata spoke of his
rheumatism. He hobbled out on the stoep and called for drinks. As they
followed, Ralph noticed a lanky old man seated in the corner, muttering to
himself.

He inquired of Chakata. ‘Is
that Mr Tuys? Daphne told me about Mr Tuys.’

Chakata said, ‘Bad year
for maize. I shan’t live long.’

Michael drove Ralph down
to the cemetery. His wife had suggested:

‘Leave him alone for a
while in the cemetery. I think he was in love with the girl.’ Michael respected
his wife’s delicacy. He giggled, left Ralph at the graveside, and explaining
that he had some errands to do in the village, said he would be back by and by.

‘You won’t be long,’
said Ralph, ‘will you?’

‘Oh no,’ said Michael.

‘There seem to be a lot
of mosquitoes about here. Is it a fever area?’

‘Oh no.’ He giggled and
went.

After Ralph had looked
at the inscription, ‘Daphne du Toit, 1922—1950, he walked up and down. He
looked blankly at the gravestones and noticed one inscribed ‘Donald Cloete’.
This name seemed familiar, but he could not remember in what way. Perhaps it
was someone Daphne had talked about.

‘Go’way, go’way.’

That was the bird, just
behind Daphne’s grave. She had often mentioned the bird.

‘It says go’way, go’way.

‘Well, what about it?’
he had said to her irritably, for sometimes she had appeared to him, as in a
revelation, a personified Stupidity.

She would tell him, ‘There’s
a bird that says “Go’way, go’way”,’ without connecting the information with any
particular event; she would expect him to be interested, as if he were an
ornithologist, not an author.

‘Go’way, go’way,’ said
the bird behind Daphne’s grave.

He heard the bird at
some time during each day for the next six weeks while he was completing his
tour of the rural spaces. He was glad to return to the Capital, and to be free
of its voice. Relaxing in the Club, it was as though the bird had never existed.

However, he went with
the Governor for a round of golf:

‘Go’way. Go’way …’

He booked a seat on the
plane to England for the following week. He met Michael once more by chance at
Williams Hotel.

‘That farm,’ said
Michael ‘— someone else has made an offer. You’d better settle right away.’

‘I don’t want it,’ said
Ralph. ‘I don’t want to stay here.’ They sat on the stoep drinking highballs.
Beyond the mosquito netting was the bird.

‘Can you hear that
go-away bird?’ said Ralph. Michael listened obediently.

‘No, I can’t say I can.’
He giggled, and Ralph wanted to hit him.

‘I hear it everywhere,’
said Ralph. ‘I don’t like it. That’s why I’m going.’

‘Good Lord. Keen on bird
life, are you?’

‘No, not particularly.’

‘Ralph Mercer isn’t
going to buy the farm,’ Michael told his wife that evening.

‘I thought it was
settled.’

‘No, he’s going home. He
isn’t coming back. He says he doesn’t like the birds here.’

‘I wish you could cure
that giggle, Michael. What did you say he doesn’t like?’

‘The birds.’

‘Birds.
Is he an
ornithologist then?’

‘No, I think he’s RC.’

‘A
man,
darling,
who studies birds.’

‘Oh! Well, no, he said
no, he’s not particularly interested in birds.’

‘How extraordinary,’ she
said.

The Curtain Blown
by the Breeze

It is always when a curtain at an open window
flutters in the breeze that I think of that frail white curtain, a piece of
fine gauze, which was drawn across the bedroom windows of Mrs Van der Merwe. I
never saw the original curtains, which were so carelessly arranged as to leave
a gap through which that piccanin of twelve had peeped, one night three years
before, and had watched Mrs Van der Merwe suckle her child, and been caught and
shot dead by Jannie, her husband. The original curtains had now been replaced
by this more delicate stuff, and the husband’s sentence still had five years to
run, and meanwhile Mrs Van der Merwe was changing her character.

She stopped slouching;
she lost the lanky, sullen look of a smallholder’s wife; she cleared the old
petrol cans out of the yard, and that was only a start; she became a tall
lighthouse sending out kindly beams which some took for welcome instead of
warnings against the rocks. She bought the best china, stopped keeping pound
notes stuffed in a stocking, called herself Sonia instead of Sonji, and entertained.

This was a territory where you could not
bathe in the gentlest stream but a germ from the water entered your kidneys and
blighted your body for life; where you could not go for a walk before six in
the evening without returning crazed by the sun; and in this remote part of the
territory, largely occupied by poor whites amidst the overwhelming natural
growth of natives, a young spinster could not keep a cat for a pet but it would
be one day captured and pitifully shaved by the local white bachelors for fun;
it was a place where the tall grass was dangerous from snakes and the floors
dangerous from scorpions. The white people seized on the slightest word, Nature
took the lightest footfall, with fanatical seriousness. The English nurses
discovered that they could not sit next a man at dinner and be agreeable —
perhaps asking him, so as to slice up the boredom, to tell them all the story
of his life — without his taking it for a great flirtation and turning up next
day after breakfast for the love affair; it was a place where there was never a
breath of breeze except in the season of storms and where the curtains in the
windows never moved in the breeze unless a storm was to follow.

The English nurses were
often advised to put in for transfers to another district.

‘It’s so much brighter
in the north. Towns, life. Civilization, shops. Much cooler — you see, it’s
high up there in the north. The races.’

‘You would like it in
the east — those orange-planters. Everything is greener, there’s a huge valley.
Shooting.’

‘Why did they send you
nurses to this unhealthy spot? You should go to a healthy spot.’

Some of the nurses left
Fort Beit. But those of us who were doing tropical diseases had to stay on,
because our clinic, the largest in the Colony, was also a research centre for
tropical diseases. Those of us who had to stay on used sometimes to say to each
other, ‘Isn’t it wonderful here? Heaps of servants. Cheap drinks. Birds,
beasts, flowers.

The place was not
without its strange marvels. I never got used to its travel-film colours except
in the dry season when the dust made everything real. The dust was thick in
the great yard behind the clinic where the natives squatted and stood about,
shouting or laughing — it came to the same thing — cooking and eating, while
they awaited treatment, or the results of X-rays, or the results of an X-ray of
a distant relative. They gave off a fierce smell and kicked up the dust. The
sore eyes of the babies were always beset by flies, but the babies slept on
regardless, slung on their mothers’ backs, and when they woke and cried the
women suckled them.

The poor whites of Fort
Beit and its area had a reception room of their own inside the building, and
here they ate the food they had brought, and lolled about in long silences, sometimes
working up to a fight in a corner. The remainder of the society of Fort Beit
did not visit the clinic.

The remainder comprised
the chemist, the clergyman, the veterinary surgeon, the police and their
families. These enjoyed a social life of a small and remote quality, only
coming into contact with the poor white small-farmers for business purposes.
They were anxious to entertain the clinic staff who mostly spent its free time
elsewhere — miles and miles away, driving at weekends to the Capital, the north,
or to one of the big dams on which it was possible to set up for a sailor. But
sometimes the nurses and medical officers would, for a change, spend an evening
in the village at the house of the chemist, the clergyman, the vet, or at the
police quarters.

Into this society came
Sonia Van der Merwe when her husband had been three years in prison. There was
a certain slur attached to his sentence since it was generally felt he had gone
too far in the heat of the moment, this sort of thing undermining the prestige
of the Colony at Whitehall. But nobody held the incident against Sonia. The
main difficulty she had to face in her efforts towards the company of the vet,
the chemist and the clergyman was the fact that she had never yet been in their
company.

The Van der Merwes’ farm
lay a few miles outside Fort Beit. It was one of the few farms in the district,
for this was an area which had only been developed for the mines, and these had
lately closed down. The Van der Merwes had lived the makeshift, toiling lives
of Afrikaner settlers who had trekked up from the Union. I do not think it had
ever before occurred to Sonia that her days could be spent otherwise than in
rising and washing her face at the tub outside, baking bread, scrappily feeding
her children, yelling at the natives, and retiring at night to her feather bed
with Jannie. Her only outings had been to the Dutch Reformed gathering at
Easter when the Afrikaners came in along the main street in their covered
wagons and settled there for a week.

It was not till the
lawyer came to arrange some affair between the farm and the Land Bank that she
learned she could actually handle the fortune her father had left her, for she
had imagined that only the pound notes she kept stuffed in the stocking were of
real spending worth; her father in his time had never spent his money on
visible things, but had invested it, and Soma thought that money pad into the
bank was a sort of tribute-money to the bank people which patriarchal farmers
like her father were obliged to pay under the strict ethic of the Dutch
Reformed Church. She now understood her cash value, and felt fiercely against
her husband for failing to reveal it to her. She wrote a letter to him, which
was a difficult course. I saw the final draft, about which she called a
conference of nurses from the clinic. We were wicked enough to let it go, but
in fact I don’t think we gave it much thought. I recall that on this occasion
we talked far into the night about her possibilities — her tennis court, her
two bathrooms, her black-and-white bedroom — all of which were as yet only a
glimmer at the end of a tunnel. In any case, I do not think we could have
succeeded in changing her mind about the letter which subsequently enjoyed a
few inches in the local press as part of Jannie’s evidence. It was as follows:

Dear Jannie there is going to be some changes I
found out what pa left is cash to spend I only got to sine my name do you think
I like to go on like this work work work counting the mealies in the field By
God like poor whites when did I get a dress you did not say a word that is your
shame and you have Landed in jale with your bad temper you shoud of amed at the
legs. Mr Little came here to bring the papers to sine he said you get good
cooking in jale the kids are well but Hannah got a bite but I will take them
away from there now and send them to the convent and pay money. Your Loving
Wife, S. Van der Merwe

There must have been many occasions on
which I lay on my bed on summer afternoons in Worcestershire, because at that
time I was convalescent. My schooldays had come to an end. My training as a
radiotherapist was not to begin till the autumn.

I do not know how many
afternoons I lay on my bed listening to a litany of tennis noises from where my
two brothers played on the court a little to the right below my window.
Sometimes, to tell me it was time to get up, my elder brother Richard would
send a tennis ball through the open window. The net curtain would stir and part
very suddenly and somewhere in the room the ball would thud and then roll. I
always thought one day he would break the glass of the window, or that he would
land the ball on my face or break something in the room, but he never did.
Perhaps my memory exaggerates the number of these occasions and really they
only occurred once or twice.

But I am sure the
curtains must have moved in the breeze as I lay taking in the calls and the to
and fro of tennis on those unconcerned afternoons, and I suppose the sight was
a pleasurable one. That a slight movement of the curtains should be the sign of
a summer breeze seems somewhere near to truth, for to me truth has airy
properties with buoyant and lyrical effects; and when anything drastic starts
up from some light cause it only proves to me that something false has got into
the world.

I do not actually
remember the curtains of my room being touched by the summer wind although I am
sure they were; whenever I try to bring to mind this detail of the afternoon
sensations it disappears, and I have knowledge of the image only as one who has
swallowed some fruit of the Tree of Knowledge — its memory is usurped by the
window of Mrs Van der Merwe’s house and by the curtains disturbed, in the rainy
season, by a trifling wind, unreasonably meaning a storm.

Sometimes, on those restful
afternoons, I was anxious. There was some doubt about my acceptance for
training as a radiotherapist because of my interrupted schooling. One day the
letter of acceptance came by the late post. I read the letter with relief and
delight, and at that same moment decided to turn down the offer. It was enough
that I had received it. I am given to this sort of thing, and the reason that I
am drawn to moderate and tranquil motives is that I lack them. I decided
instead to become a hospital nurse and later to follow my brother Richard, who
was then a medical student, to Africa, and specialize, with him, in tropical
diseases.