1972 - A Story Like the Wind (62 page)

‘Franpois seemed to have hardly fallen asleep at last when suddenly he was woken by what sounded like someone fumbling at his door. Wide awake at once, he grabbed his gun, always at the ready by his bed, and faced the door fully prepared, although, since it was an inside door, he could not imagine any real danger. Moreover Hintza, instead of warning him, was standing beside his bed and wagging his tail in the most friendly and ardent manner, thumping it against the bed-clothes. Then suddenly the door opened, a torch shone on him and a clear, low whisper he knew well, trembling more with shyness than nerves, said, ‘Please don’t shoot…It’s only me. May I come in? And shush, please…Amelia would murder me if she knew I was here.’

‘Of course, Nonnie, please come in,’ he answered, amazed. ‘But what’s the matter? Just hold the torch steady for a minute while I light my candle.’ He did so and over its pentecostal little flame he saw Luciana standing there, wrapped in a warm dressing gown, yet shivering like someone come in straight from a storm.

‘Why, you’re frozen,’ he exclaimed alarmed. ‘Where have you been? What’s gone wrong?’

‘Oh just everything is wrong, and I’m not shivering because I’m cold,’ she said, sitting down uninvited on the side of his bed and continuing out of her shyness and nerves to be accusing, ‘Don’t you realize I’m going away, that I shan’t see you for another year, if ever, again? You…you ask me so calmly what’s the matter, as if it didn’t matter to you at all whether we ever saw each other again.’

‘Nonnie, how can you say that?’ François protested warmly and quickly, for she sounded near to crying. ‘D’you know, I’ve lain awake half the night thinking about you going away today and how awful it all was.’

‘Oh, have you? Have you really? Please be honest with me.’ Nonnie sounded comforted by the thought that he had suffered a sleepless night on her account and exclaimed, ‘François, I wonder if you know how tired I am of being younger than everybody else?’

She peered closely into his eyes to see whether he knew what she meant and apparently was not entirely satisfied because she continued, ‘But I dare say that’s another thing you just don’t care about. You aren’t interested in ages are you? You’re above such petty things, aren’t you?’

He answered back more indignantly than he would have done if he had understood the need for reassurance behind it all. ‘Nonsense…It’s only that I’m not bothered by these things as you are. What on earth does it matter how old people are, as long as you like them?’

‘But it
does
matter, François,’ Nonnie on her dignity argued in turn. ‘I don’t think you can really be interested in people unless you’re interested in how old they are. Take me, for instance. I asked you the first day I met you how old you were, and you’ve never once yet showed the least little bit of interest in how old I am.’

‘But it’s not at all important to me how old you are, can’t you see?’ François’s reiteration was perhaps as truthful as it was tactless because it increased both Nonnie’s bewilderment and her dismay.

She jumped from the bed and whisked about as if to make for the door. ‘You see,’ she said, ‘you just
don’t
understand and you don’t care and a fat lot of good my coming here has done. I may as well go back to my room and Amelia.’

François instinctively caught her by the sleeve of her dressing gown, and told her sharply, ‘Oh, Nonnie, you couldn’t be more wrong. The only reason I never asked you is because, whatever your age, it’s always seemed just right to me. From the moment we met it felt as if I had always known you…’

He stopped himself abruptly. He was about to refer to the great secret and the impact Xhabbo had had upon him. Fortunately she did not seem to notice, for she faced François and asked in a very small voice, ‘Oh François, is that really so?’

François looked steadily at her and nodded his head emphatically. From far across the river old Chaliapin gave one of his greatest roars, the sound reverberating in the silence all around them like the final Amen on a cathedral organ. The silence that followed, the look on François’s face and his nodding, did far more than any words could have ever done to convince Nonnie.

She took his hand in both of hers, clasped them tightly and said, ‘Coiske, will you promise, please, always to think of me, as being just right for you. Please always think just that.’ And then more lightly, because she was deeply stirred. ‘For your private information I beg to inform you that I’m four months and seven days younger than you are.’

François pressed her hand so hard that she came near to wincing. He would have said more but he was prevented by the sound of shutters being thrown open in the kitchen, where Ousie-Johanna, with a private despair of her own because she was losing her great lady of fashion that morning, was getting ready to prepare the farewell breakfasts. They both knew that the great house would soon be waking. Indeed the sound brought a rare look of alarm to Nonnie’s face. It moved François deeply for it made her look so defenceless.

She called out, ‘Oh my God—Amelia. But thank you Coiske, thank you. You will always be the right age for me too. Thank you, and goodbye…and I’ll write to you.’

Quickly she vanished through the door as silently as she had come. It was their own private and personal hail and farewell, as complete as life could for the moment allow it to be.

One need not give an account of the formal farewells that followed, except to mention one small thing. Just before stepping into her father’s truck, Luciana, after cuddling Hintza, suddenly produced a handkerchief. She held it loosely round his neck and tied a knot in it where the ends met. It was many weeks before either Franjois or Hintza knew why she had done it.

And So to the Washing of
u-Simsela-Banta-Bami

I
t is not necessary to emphasize how profoundly Nonnie’s going affected François, nor how slowly the days and nights turned over for him in that exacting measure of time to which one drew attention at the beginning. It was like the wheels of a great mill grinding out the detail of life as bucket after bucket was slowly filled with a trickle from the dark waters of time.

Once more he took refuge in his well-established routine of study in the early hours of the morning, and work and hunting for the pot for the rest of the day, with one welcome variation: once a week there was now an excursion to Silverton-Hill. Always he went armed with presents of fresh meat, fruit and vegetables and was made more and more welcome, making real friends with that gay and colourful little community building a great house to the sound of endless music in the lost world of the bush. He found himself looking forward to these excursions more eagerly as the days went by and blessed Mopani in his heart for having persuaded Sir James, who he was certain would have needed a great deal of persuasion, to entrust him with so mature a task. As Mopani had obviously foreseen, it helped to make him feel in touch with Nonnie and, as he saw the yellow walls of the building grow on the hill, to reinforce the belief that despite his feelings time was passing and the day would inevitably come when the house would be complete and ready for Sir James and his daughter’s permanent occupation.

What was reassuring to him too was how well his experience of Nonnie seemed to fit into the company of himself and Xhabbo, so much so that he revised all his plans for preparing Mantis’s cave for the day of Xhabbo’s return. He revised them so that the cave could be ready for the moment when he could share his secret with Nonnie and it could be a place of welcome not just for two but for three.

Knowing that once Lammie returned, his freedom of movement would be more restricted, he immediately set about equipping the cave as if for a siege. In full control of the ample stores they kept at Hunter’s Drift he hastened, before Lammie returned, to resume his ultimate authority over them, and so to remove little by little supplies which he thought essential for turning the cave into a kind of fortress. For example, he extracted from surplus military equipment that Ouwa had bought up years before from the government three of the largest haversacks, three of the largest field flasks, three pairs of webbing anklets (designed specially to protect human legs from the iron barbs of thorn of the bush), and three metal dixies for cooking. These he deposited in the cave. He took one of the many guns in the gun room, a gun which according to Mopani was the best all-purpose rifle for use in Africa, and two hundred rounds of ammunition, and hid them also in the cave. He had no fear that the absence of any of these pieces, even the rifle, would ever be detected, because it was a department in which neither Lammie nor Ousie-Johanna had ever displayed the slightest interest. In addition, he managed, by setting out before first light, to carry unseen four empty four-gallon petrol tins to the cave and from then on he skilfully contrived to keep them full of fresh water.

After that, acting on the basic precept of the military law of his country that every male between the ages of fourteen and sixty-five must always have available enough food for a fortnight in case of an emergency mobilization, he saw to it that there were always in the cave enough rusks, biltong, sugar, coffee, dried fruit and even as a special refinement of his own, packets of dehydrated soup, to last three people for two weeks. In all this he took great care never to approach the cave by the same route, and once his emergency commissariat was established, he went only when necessary to replace the stale rusks with fresh supplies. It meant that he himself had to eat the stale Mies in the larder but since these rusks were renowned for keeping fresh this was one of the least of his difficulties.

As time went, he added all sorts of other basic substances such as tins of condensed milk, tins of bully beef and sardines, a large tinned plum-pudding, and slabs of bitter chocolate. Above all, he did not forget a complete snake-bite outfit and a small Red Cross stock, complete with quinine and the latest sulpha-drugs.

He could give no rational explanation to himself why he did all this. The plan was based entirely on some instinct that had been stimulated by his favourite story of Robinson Crusoe, and Defoe’s detailed account of how his hero had been compelled, wisely, to create a secret fortress for himself when alone on a desert island.

Yet sometimes he thought that he was being ridiculous; playing a retarded boy-scout game with himself. These misgivings were usually most acute at the end of the day when he was tired. But it was significant to him how a good night’s sleep would send him into the day happy at the thought of the cave, close at hand and now completely self-contained to give Xhabbo a safe place of return at any moment that he might choose to come.

It was indeed fantastic what reassurance equipping the cave and maintaining it in a constant state of readiness brought to his deprived spirit, in the feeling that he was providing Xhabbo with a secret larder and a place where first the two of them and perhaps later even Nonnie could one day meet and talk unobserved.

Considering how careful he had to be not to arouse the suspicions of their observant Matabele partners, and that all his experience had taught him that one never was anywhere in even the densest bush without some ‘eye’ upon one (not to mention Ousie-Johanna who normally seemed to know if only one grain of sugar had been illegally extracted from her pantry), his difficulties were formidable. But somehow his new, cunning self accomplished the task in perfect secrecy. Only it took so long that he had hardly completed it when, some two months after the departure of Nonnie and Sir James, Mopani arrived with the news of Lammie’s return.

François, as always, was overjoyed to see Mopani and delighted, moreover, that Mopani had come a few days before Lammie’s return at Hunter’s Drift Siding to be with him and to visit Silverton-Hill. It brought to François the first hint of a feeling that time had moved on, and would perhaps increase its sluggish pace. The feeling was confirmed when he and Mopani! rode over to Silverton-Hill and saw how high the walls of stone of Sir James’s buildings were rising above their foundations. That made him happier. But one slight incident there reproduced that odd upsurge of inexplicable and acute alarm which had afflicted both him and Mopani ever since that fateful evening when they had concluded that, for good or ill, the birds in the bush had changed their tune.

In fact this particular cause of alarm had not vanished for François. Not a twilight or a dawn or, for that matter, the dead hour of the day, had gone by without the birds announcing to his sensitive ears that something in the universe had occurred to trouble the rhythm of their singing. By comparison, the incident which produced this new flare-up of anxiety was prosaic enough—it happened merely over a large consignment of enormous crates which had been brought by ox-wagon from the railway. Some of the Cape-coloured workmen were busy opening them and, to François’s amazement and unbelief, extracting one red roof-tile after the other.

‘But surely, Uncle,’ he found himself exclaiming loudly, ‘surely Sir James ought to know Africa well enough to realize that a tiled roof in this part of the world won’t last a single summer. Surely he knows we get at least three or four bad hail-storms a year. Only one would be enough to smash his tiles to pieces! Besides, he has miles of river reeds for a perfect roof of thatch.’

Mopani nodded before answering, with the air of resignation of someone accustomed for years to having himself and his experience of Africa rejected, ‘I know, Coiske, I know. I warned him about it when we went over the plans. But you must know by now that this house he is building will be almost an exact copy of his old home in England. It’s meant to be as much a cure for homesickness as a practical piece of building, and he made light of my warnings. He merely said that a few broken tiles were a trifle and that there were plenty more where they came from. I told him that replacing tiles in a bad season, perhaps two or three times a year, might strain anyone’s purse, but he just waved my arguments away and there was nothing more I could do about it.

‘But Uncle, that’s stupid, and surely he’s not a stupid man?’ François protested, more troubled by this example of unreason and obstinacy in Sir James than even Mopani, perhaps because he feared the power of such inflexible characteristics in his own regard in the particular as well as in the general area of personal relationships between Hunter’s Drift and Silverton-Hill. So he pressed on, hoping for some reassurance, ‘Do you think he hasn’t got it in him any more to learn? Surely he’ll have a lot more to learn if he’s going to be happy and successful out here.’