The Complete Short Stories (9 page)

It was about a year after my arrival at
Fort Beit that I came across Sonji Van der Merwe and, together with the other
nurses, read the letter which was about to be sent to her husband four hundred
miles away in the Colony’s prison. She posted the letter ritualistically the
next afternoon, putting on her church-going gloves to do so. She did not
expect, nor did she receive, a reply. Three weeks later she started calling
herself Sonia.

Our visits to the farm
began to take the place of evenings spent at the vet’s, the chemist’s and the
clergyman’s, to whose society Sonia now had good hopes of access. And every
time we turned up something new had taken place. Sonia knew, or discovered as
if by bush-telegraph, where to begin. She did not yet know how to travel by
train and would have been afraid to make any excursion by herself far from the
area, but through one nurse or another she obtained furnishings from the Union,
catalogues, books about interior decoration and fashion magazines.
Travel-stained furniture vans began to arrive at her bidding and our
instigation. Her first move, however, was to join the Church of England,
abandoning the Dutch Reformed persuasion of her forefathers; we had to hand it
to her that she had thought this up for herself.

We egged her on from
week to week. We taught her how not to be mean with her drinks, for she had
ordered an exotic supply. At first she had locked the bottles in the pantry and
poured them into glasses in the kitchen and watered them before getting the
house-boy to serve them to her guests. We stopped all that. A contractor
already had the extensions to the house in hand, and the rooms were being decorated
and furnished one by one. It was I who had told her to have two bathrooms, not
merely one, installed. She took time getting used to the indoor lavatories and
we had to keep reminding her to pull the chain. One of us brought back from the
Capital a book of etiquette which was twenty-eight years old but which she read
assiduously, following the words with her forefinger. I think it was I who had
suggested the black-and-white bedroom, being a bit drunk at the time, and now
it was a wonder to see it taking shape; it was done within a month — she had
managed to obtain black wallpaper, and to put it up, although wallpaper was a
thing unheard of in the Colony and she was warned by everyone that it would
never stick to the walls. There was in this bedroom a white carpet and a
chaise-longue covered with black-and-white candy-striped satin. It was less
than a year before she got round to adding the Beardsley reproductions, but by
that time she was entertaining, and had the benefit of the vet’s counsel, he
having once been a young man in London.

She told us one day —
lying on the chase-longue and looking very dramatic with her lanky hair newly
piled up and her black chiffon dressing-gown — the story of the piccanin, which
we already knew:

‘It was through that
window he was looking. Yere I was sitting yere on the bed feeding the baby and
I look up at the window and so help me God it was a blerry nig standing outside
with his face at the window. You should of heard me scream. So Jannie got the
gun and caught the pic and I hear the bang. So he went too far in his blerry
temper so what can you expect? Now I won’t have no more trouble from them boys.
That’s the very window, I was careless to leave the curtain aside. So we show
them what’s what and we get a new set of boys. We didn’t have no boys on the
farm, they all run away.

There was a slight warm
breeze floating in little gusts through the window. ‘We’d better be getting
back,’ said one of the girls. ‘There’s going to be a storm.

A storm in the Colony was such that before
it broke the whole place was spasmodic like an exposed nerve, and after it was
over the body of the world from horizon to horizon moved in a slow daze back
into its place. Before it broke there was the little wind, then a pearly light,
then an earthen smell; the birds screamed and suddenly stopped, and the insects
disappeared. Afterwards the flying ants wriggled in a drugged condition out of
the cracks in the walls, found their wings, and flew off in crazy directions,
the more extreme colours of the storm faded out of the sky in a defeated sort
of way, and the furniture felt clammy from the ordeal. One day I was caught at
Sonia’s house when a storm broke. This was when she had already settled in to
her status, and the extensions to the house were completed, and the furniture
all in place. Night fell soon after the storm was over, and we sat in her very
Europeanized drawing-room — for she had done away with the stoep —sipping pink
gins; the drinks were served by a native with huge ape-like hands clutching the
tray, his hands emerging from the cuffs of the green-and-white uniform which
had lately glared in the light of the storm. Sonia kept saying, ‘I feel I’ve
made a corner of civilization for myself in doing up this house.’ It was a
version of one of the clergyman’s chance compliments on one of his visits; she
had seized on it as a verity, and made it known to all her visitors. ‘I feel I
must live up to it, man,’ she said. I was always amazed at her rapid
acquisition of new words and highly useful sayings.

Outside, the night
sounds were coming back. One could hear the beasts finding each other again by
their calls whenever Sonia stopped talking, and even further in the distance,
the drum business, with news of which kraals had been swamped and wrecked, or perhaps
no news, for all we understood of their purpose. Just outside the window there
was an occasional squelch of bare feet on the wet gravel drive which Sonia had
constructed. She rose and adjusted the light window curtains, then drew the big
ones. She was better now. During the storm she had squatted with hunched
shoulders on the carpet like a native in his hut, letting the waves of sound
and light break over her. It was generally thought she had some coloured blood.
But this, now that she had begun to reveal such visible proof of her glamorous
fortune and character, was no bar to the society of the vet, the chemist and
the clergyman. Many of the doctors from the clinic visited her and were
enchanted by her eccentric grandeur, and much preferred her company to that of
the tropical-skinned vet’s wife and the watery-blonde chemist’s wife and the music-loving
clergyman’s wife, at sultry sundowner times in the rainy season. My brother
Richard was fascinated by Sonia.

We nurses were astonished that the men were
so dazzled. She was our creature, our folly, our lark. We had lavished our
imagination upon her eager mind and had ourselves designed the long voile ‘afternoon’
dresses, and had ourselves put it to her that she must have a path leading down
to the river and a punt on the little river and a pink parasol to go with the
punt. There was something in the air of the place that affected the men, even
those newly out from England, with an overturn of discrimination. One of the
research workers at the clinic had already married a brassy barmaid from
Johannesburg, another had married a neurotic dressmaker from the Cape who
seemed to have dozens of elbows, so much did she throw her long bony arms
about. We too were subject to the influence of the place but we did not think
of this when we were engrossed in our bizarre cultivation of Sonia and our
dressing her up to kill. At the time, we only saw the men taking our fantasy in
earnest, and looked at each other, smiled and looked away.

In the year before
Jannie Van der Merwe was due to be released from prison I spent much of my free
time at Sonia’s with my brother Richard. Her house was by now a general
meeting-place for the district and she conducted quite a salon every late
afternoon. About this time I became engaged to marry a research worker at the
clinic.

I do not know if Richard
slept with Sonia. He was very enamoured of her and would not let anyone make
fun of her in his hearing.

She said one day: ‘Why d’you
want to marry that Frank? Man, he looks like your brother, you want to catch a
fellow that doesn’t look like one of the family. I could get you a fellow more
your type.’

I was irritated by this.
I kept Frank from seeing her as much as possible; but it was not possible; all
our lives outside the clinic seemed to revolve round Sonia. When Frank began to
ridicule Sonia I knew he was in some way, which he was afraid to admit,
attracted by her.

She chattered
incessantly, her voice accented in the Afrikaans way. I had to admire her quick
grasp of every situation, for now she was acquainted with the inner politics of
the clinic, and managed to put in effective words here and there with visiting
Government officials who took it for granted she had ruled the district for
years and, being above the common run, pleased herself how she dressed and what
she did. I heard her discussing our disagreeable chief radiologist with an
important member of the Medical Board: ‘Man, he got high spirits I tell you,
man. I see him dig the spurs into the horse when he pass my house every morning,
he goes riding to work off those high spirits. But I tell one thing, he’s good
at his job. Man, he’s first rate at the job.’ Soon after this our ill-tempered
radiologist, who did not ride very frequently, was transferred to another
district. It was only when I heard that the important man from the Medical
Board was a fanatical horse-lover that I realized the full force of Sonia’s
abilities.

‘God, what have we done?’
I said to my best friend.

She said, ‘Leave well
alone. She’s getting us a new wing.’

Sonia made plans to obtain for Richard the
job of Chief Medical Officer in the north. I suspected that Sonia meant to
follow him to the north if he should be established there, for she had remarked
one day that she would have to get used to travel; it must be easy: ‘Man,
everyone does it. Drink up. Cheerio.’

Frank had also applied
for the job. He said — looking at the distance with his short-sighted eyes,
which gave to his utterances a suggestion of disinterestedness — ‘I’ve got
better qualifications for it than Richard.’ So he had. ‘Richard is the better
research worker,’ Frank said. This was true. ‘Richard should stay here and I
should go up north,’ Frank said. ‘You would like it up there,’ he said. All
this was undeniable.

It became apparent very
soon that Frank was competing with Richard for Sonia’s attention. He did this
without appearing to notice it himself, as if it were some routine performance
in the clinic, not the method but the results of which interested him. I could
hardly believe the ridiculous carry-on of these two men.

‘Do they think she will
really have any influence in the question of that job?’

‘Yes,’ my best friend
said, ‘and so she will.’

That important member of
the Medical Board — he who was passionate about horses — was in the district again.
He had come for a long weekend’s fishing. It was all mad. There was no big
fishing at Fort Beit.

I began to want Richard
to get the job. I cooled off where Frank was concerned; he did not notice, but
I cooled off. Richard had become highly nervous. As soon as he had free time he
raced off in his car to Sonia’s. Frank, who was less scrupulous about taking
free time, was usually there first.

I was at the tea-party
when the ageing, loose-mouthed, keen-eyed chief of the Medical Board turned up.
Richard and Frank sat at opposite ends of a sofa. Richard looked embarrassed; I
knew he was thinking of the job, and trying not to seem to be exploiting his
attachment to Sonia. I sat near them. Sonia, reciting a long formula from her
book of etiquette, introduced us to the important man. As she did so it struck
me that this recitation might to some ears sound like a charming gesture
against the encroaching slackness of the times. She sat the man between Richard
and Frank, and clearly she meant business.

She stood by. She had a
beautiful shape; we nurses had not provided that, we had only called it forth
from the peasant slouch. She said to the old man, ‘Richard yere wants to talk
to you, Basil, man,’ and touched Richard’s shoulder. Frank was peering into the
abstract distance. It occurred to me that Frank was the administrative type;
none of the research workers I had known were dispassionate, they were
vulnerable and nervous.

Richard was nervous. He
did not look at the man, he was looking up at Sonia’s face with its West End
make-up.

‘Applied for the job up
north?’ said this Basil to Richard.

‘Yes,’ Richard said, and
smiled with relief.

‘Want it?’ said the man,
casually, in his great importance.

‘Oh, rather,’ Richard
said.

‘Well, have it,’ said
the man, flicking away the invisible job with his forefinger as lightly as if
it were a ping-pong ball.

‘Well,’ Richard said, ‘no
thank you.’

‘What did you say?’ said
the man.

‘What that you say?’
said Sonia.

My brother and I are
very unlike in most ways, but there are a few radical points of similarity
between us. It must be something in the blood.

‘No thank you,’ Richard
was saying. ‘After all, I feel I ought to go on with research in tropical
diseases.’

Sonia’s fury only made a
passing pattern on her face. Her first thought was for the old man, fussed and
suddenly groundless as he was. ‘Basil, man,’ she said, bending over him with
her breasts about his ears, ‘you got the wrong chap. This yere Frank is the boy
I was talking of to you. Frank, may I have the honour to introduce to you this
yere distinguished —’

‘Yes, we’ve met,’ said
the man, turning to Frank.

Frank returned from the
middle distance. ‘I’ve applied for the job,’ he said, ‘and my qualifications
are, I think —’

‘Married?’

‘No, but hoping to be.’
He turned duly to me and I smiled back most nastily.

‘Want the job?’