1972 - A Story Like the Wind (48 page)

Luciana told him the full story without hesitation in the most straightforward manner. Her father had been stationed, years before, in the far north as a provincial governor on the borders of Angola. There he had become a close friend of his Portuguese opposite number on the other side of the frontier. Her mother was the daughter of this Portuguese Governor. She and her father had met and, despite their differences of upbringing and religion (he was Church of England and she Roman Catholic, as were Luciana and Amelia), they had become engaged. After one of those extremely prolonged and exacting engagements which Portuguese custom still demands, and of which Luciana, young as she was, already clearly disapproved, they had got married.

Three years before, on their way back from England to her father’s last post as Governor-General of an entire colony, Luciana’s mother had stopped in Angola in order to visit her family in the northernmost province of Carmona. Luciana and Amelia were to follow later from Lisbon where they were staying with an aunt while Sir James went on to the capital of his new Government. Luciana’s mother had not been home with her parents for many days when an army of African people calling themselves the Free Angola Forces who had been secretly gathering in the jungles and forests of the Congo near by, unobserved invaded the province at night, and surrounded all the villages, hamlets, settlements and towns. Attacking at dawn, they massacred indiscriminately close on forty thousand people; thirty-seven thousand Africans, and three thousand Portuguese. Among the Portuguese were her mother, her mother’s family, Amelia’s father, who was Portuguese, and his mulatto wife.

Luciana’s gruesome story upset François greatly. He had never before heard of this terrible Night of the Long Knives of Africa and was profoundly shocked to think that the indigenous people of Africa could have behaved in so savage a manner. He was somewhat shocked, too, at Luciana’s detached telling of the story. Her voice never faltered and she finished by giving François a direct look and saying firmly: ‘And so that was that, and ever since then, Fa seems to have become more of a man than it’s necessary even for a man to be. And I don’t seem to be able to do anything about it.’

She said this as they came to Ouwa’s study full of his great collection of books and the wide desk at which he had always worked, still neatly ordered as he had left it. As the room was in twilight because the shutters had not been opened, François immediately went to fling them wide so that they could take in all the detail of what was for him one of the most exciting rooms in the whole house.

To his amazement Luciana was not looking at the books, nor at the furniture or paintings or rare old Cape prints on the walls. She was staring at the large photograph of Lammie which stood by Ouwa’s writing pad on the desk. It was both Ouwa’s and François’s favourite portrait of Lammie, as she had been when Ouwa first met her. Although taken many years ago, it somehow still seemed to François to represent her essential self. It showed Lammie in a riding habit. With one hand she was holding up the skirt of her habit and her other hand was on the bridle of her horse, Lightfoot, which François had never known except through the tales that Lammie had told him.

She was without a hat. Some obscure village photographer, who had obviously handled his primitive camera with all the reverence the first photographers had for their instruments, as if they were not so much technological devices as instruments of the Holy Ghost itself, had caught her so reverently in an early morning of the temperate south that her abundant hair looked as if woven of strands of the light itself. Her beautiful face looked fresh, young and coolly filled with promise like the dawn of a day in spring.

‘And that, I take it,’ Luciana said with a matter-of-factness that she was far from feeling, ‘must be your mummy. I say, she’s a stunner, isn’t she?’ And then quickly, as if knowing that François might find it difficult to respond in the circumstances, besides being already in her quick, instinctive way on to another trend of thought, she asked, ‘How old is she?’

Thinking that this girl appeared to have an obsession about age, he was shocked to realize that he himself did not know Lammie’s exact age. He knew her birthday, of course, because they had celebrated it lavishly every year but somehow it had never occurred to him to ask the year in which she had been born, and as far as he could remember nobody had ever bothered to tell him. Feeling annoyed that this girl had such an unfailing knack of making him feel inadequate, he answered, ‘I’m afraid I don’t exactly know.’

‘You don’t know?’ Luciana exclaimed in a voice of unbelief.

‘I’m afraid not,’ he reaffirmed, trying to excuse himself but wondering why it mattered anyway. Lammie had been there ever since he could remember, as if before and beyond time, like the bush; one did not think it necessary to ask oneself precisely how old things were that had always been there so why ask it about Lammie? Yet the excuse did not work completely for, with Ouwa now dead, perhaps the girl was right and one should begin to ask oneself such questions.

Luciana, with reasons of her own for thinking that François’s apparent lack of interest in matters of people’s ages, particularly her own, had a deeper and more disturbing significance, thought it better not to ask any more questions on the subject. She just stood there looking at the photograph repeating how beautiful she thought Lammie was and then, after a long pause, remarked more to herself than to François, ‘I wonder what she’ll make of Fa?’

François could not have known either from her tone or her manner that her imagination was racing away into the future where she had successfully contrived a match between her father and François’s mother.

Indeed the complete blue-print, or perhaps one should say white-print, of an ideal wedding was taking shape in the most minute and loving detail with a speed that sent her heart off at a gallop and filled her eyes with a light as vivid as a dream. Even she, used to her capacity for fantasy, was amazed how all this took shape as if bespoke to the measure of her own needs, for the bridesmaids were chosen, the wedding dress designed, a flower of her own choosing in Sir James’s buttonhole, his front glittering with orders, medals and decorations, even the wedding cake baked and the couple, radiant of course, walking down the aisle of the church, no—a church was too humble for so important an occasion—down the aisle of some cathedral with the music of an immense, Gothic organ filling the air up to the loftiest dome like the sound of the swell of the sea breaking on yellow sand. It seemed to her that fate could not possibly have presented two human beings, situated as her father and François’s mother were, with a more perfect remedy for the tragedy inflicted on them.

Such a solution, indeed, appeared so Heaven-sent that she had great difficulty in not blurting out there and then what she had in mind. But an inner prompting told her that if she went further she might defeat her own dream before it was born by estranging François, still suffering from his father’s death. So with great difficulty she held her peace.

Nevertheless through her preoccupation it was with great satisfaction that she heard François say, ‘I’m certain she will like your father very much indeed.’

Luciana, perhaps feeling herself imperilled by the conflict of imagination within her accordingly changed the conversation, announcing that she would now love to go round the outhouses and gardens with François and Hintza, since there was a great deal of the house and its establishment which they had not seen.

They returned just in time for breakfast. There is nothing like a garden in the early morning with the dew heavy upon it and the atmosphere charged with the incense of growth for producing a state of inner harmony, so they returned in the highest of spirits. Amelia, however, was waiting for them with disapproval. She had obviously not forgotten what had happened earlier in the morning, and her sense of grievance must have been heightened by Luciana’s disappearance without her permission for some hours and her neglect in helping with the packing.

Sir James, however, dispelled most of her irritation by being in great good humour. His meeting with !#grave;Bamuthi had brought alive in him something of what he had felt when he first arrived in Africa full of ideas, zeal and hope for the future. All the weight of the compromise that the rigid official years had inflicted on his original self, appeared to have dropped from him for the moment. In fact he looked very much younger, even innocent and was obviously excited and impatient to be off back to his own holding. For one brief, warm, privileged moment he was nearer to his daughter and to a certain extent to François, than he had yet been since their first meeting.

By the time he had heard of Hunter’s Drift he had already, in the course of a career which had taken him all over the vanished Colonial Empire, seen much of European exploitation of virgin earth and nature and its effect on primitive societies. As a result he had anticipated the worst from Pierre-Paul’s intrusion into his own pre-selected world. His astonishment therefore was considerable when he found Hunter’s Drift akin to something that he had planned himself. It was true he was not happy about all the features of Hunter’s Drift. There was, for instance, the question of over-familiarity with people like Ousie-Johanna and !#grave;Bamuthi which was something to be excluded from the way of life that Sir James proposed for himself and his small family on his own vast tract of land farther up the river. But if he had to have neighbours, he was gracious enough to admit to himself, he could have fared a great deal worse than have the Jouberts.

It was, perhaps, a pity that he could not feel quite as certain in his mind about François. For some strange reason which he had neither the time nor the inclination to examine, the boy was something of a problem to him. And he liked to think th, at there were no problems to which he did not have an immediate answer. But he seemed to like and yet disapprove of this boy at one and the same time. So, unknown to himself, whenever he looked at François or spoke to him, subtly both his expression and tone would change. The change was not enough to impair his cheerful mood. Yet it was obvious enough to his daughter who, for reasons of her own was watching the way that her father and François were reacting to each other. As breakfast progressed, clearly she became uneasy, for her own high spirits left her and she took almost no part in the conversation.

Something of all this perhaps was apparent even to François in the manner in which Sir James finally took himself and his party away from Hunter’s Drift. First of all there was his refusal of François’s offer to show them the way to his own tract of land. François had indeed a horse, saddled and bridled and ready to guide Sir James’s party. Strictly speaking, however, a guide was not necessary because the road Ouwa had made connecting Hunter’s Drift with the railway line went over Sir James’s property. The most inexperienced novice could follow it without going wrong. Sir James knew all this already both from François and !#grave;Bamuthi, and used the fact as an excuse peremptorily to turn down François’s offer of help.

In fairness to Sir James, however, one must not overlook the fact that the land for which he was making had become, in his long absence, almost a fairy-tale reality. He wanted to see it again as in the first instance, without any strangers present. Indeed, ever since the beginning of this return journey he had found himself silently reciting again and again Stevenson’s Requiem, beginning with the lines:
Under the wide and starry sky
and ending:

Home is the sailor, home from sea
,

And the hunter home from the hill
.

A second incident arose when they all emerged from the breakfast room to find truck, trailer and caboose waiting at the front door. François asked Sir James to delay his departure for a moment. He wanted this because since his first meeting with the party he had been thinking of many things that Hunter’s Drift might contribute to make their life in the camp (which would be their home while Sir James’s house was being built and his own land cleared and developed), as agreeable as possible. The most obvious things of course were fresh fruit and vegetables.

So, early that morning, he had ordered two of the Matabele gardeners to pick several bags of bright tomatoes, ripe melons, cucumbers, marrows and pumpkins, all fruit that would keep. He knew that at any moment the gardeners would appear with wheelbarrows full of these things for Sir James to take with him.

But apparently Sir James could not find it in himself to wait any longer. It is true, he thanked François punctiliously, if not graciously. But he added that he thought he ought to be on his way at once, and wondered whether François, if he insisted on such a gift, would hand it over to the wagoners who would be following in his track.

Considering that it was only a matter of delaying the departure for a minute or two, François could not help feeling that in similar circumstances he would have been naturally compelled to wait. Anything else too, by Ouwa’s and Lammie’s standards, would be taking things too much for granted. By Matabele standards, of course, it would have been inexcusable, considering that no Matabele François had ever known would have accepted the gift of even something so small as a sixpence without holding out both hands cupped together to receive it. But perhaps, he told himself, he was over-sensitive in a way he would not have been if he had felt more secure in Sir James’s company. Yet even the expression on Luciana’s face suggested that she herself was disturbed by her father’s manner.

All the nuances of the occasion, however, were soon lost in the tumult of goodbyes that followed. The tumult was largely of Amelia’s creation, who seemed to be emotionally as well as physically a lady of extremes. Unlike François’s gardeners, Ousie-Johanna had arrived punctually on the scene of farewell with two large baskets full of gifts for the visitors; some loaves of bread still fresh and warm in their white linen wrappings; half a dozen pounds of fresh butter, bottles of fresh milk, gleaming jars of yellow peaches, apricots, pears and mulberries preserved in their own juice, bottles of the green fig and Cape-gooseberry jams which were among Ousie-Johanna’s finest specialities, a fruit cake and, of course, quantities of rusks.