The Dust Diaries (35 page)

When he has finished reading Richard remains standing by the bookshelf looking at the poem, as if expecting another line to emerge from the blank page under the text. An alternative thought to turn the poem around, another last line to answer that which closes it now. He holds the book before him, open across his joined hands like a prayer book. I look at his face and I see his lively eyes have dimmed, rimmed with red and filmed with tears.

After lunch in his little dining room we go back into the front room. Richard sits in his armchair. The day is at full heat outside, the window a white square of pure light behind a thin curtain. I want to know what else Richard knows about you, what he knows about your life before Africa.

‘Well,’ he says, his English accent laced with traces of South African flat vowels, ‘I’ve always been interested in people and when I was with him I thought, well, did I dare ask him about, you know, how he became a Christian and all that? And no trouble at all, he told me his kind of spiritual story.’ Richard leans forward, his elbows on his bare, bald knees. ‘Well, he said, it goes back to one moonlight evening. He was reading Keats’ poetry—he was living in someone’s house, his uncle’s house I think he said, but I don’t know now—and he said, ‘I was overwhelmed with beauty and I walked out into the moonlight garden and all the cadences of Keats’ poetry were surging through my mind and I fell in love with beauty. But I didn’t know that was God at the time.’

’

Richard sits back in his chair, a playful smile on his face and his eyes sparking up again. Resting his hands on his stomach, he continues with the story, speaking Cripps’ words as if from a well-rehearsed script;

‘Then he came across a book called
Trooper Peter Halket
by Olive Schreiner. In this book Trooper Halket is horrified when he kills an African, and as he looks at the body lying there he sees the figure of Christ, a black Christ, hanging on a cross. A black Christ. This impressed Cripps very much and he wanted to learn more about the cross and Christ, so the next thing he came across was the Life of Francis of Assisi. Now, he put all those things together you see: beauty, Keats’ poetry and God, Christ in people, black or white, and the life of poverty and simplicity of Francis of Assisi.’

Richard begins to cough and takes a drink of water from a glass on the table. So far this is all a story I know. Your story again, in yet another person’s words. The same story, different words.

‘Well, he decided he wanted to become a priest. He did his training and as a young priest or a deacon he was sent to a church, now I’ve forgotten the name of it, but there, well, something happened, so that although…’ He trails off, suddenly less sure of the well-trodden path of this tale. His manner changes and his voice falters, gets quieter. ‘You see, I only learnt what happened much later…Now this is the strangest thing—I don’t know whether to jump the gun and tell you. I only learnt this years, years later you see. It was when I took early retirement, when I was about sixty-two or sixty-five, and my wife and I moved to the retreat, back in Bonda. While we were there we got a letter from a girl called Mazzy, Mazzy Shine, saying could she come and visit us because, like you, she wanted to find out about Arthur Shearly Cripps.’

He shakes his head, smiling again, ‘It was the strangest thing really. She was a nurse in London and she shared a flat with my brother’s daughter, Grizelda Holderness. So they were living in London, and she read, I think the life of Bishop Paget, which has a number of quotations from me, especially about Arthur Shearly Cripps. So she said to Grizelda, ‘Who’s this Richard Holderness, because I want to get in touch.’ Anyway, she came to stay with us at Bonda, and when we were all there she told us the most startling, strange story. She said, ‘You know I am Arthur Shearly Cripps’ granddaughter?’ And I said, ‘But he never married,’ and then she said, ‘But no, that’s the story.’

’

Icklesham, Sussex, England

The piano stands in the middle of the hall where the delivery men left it, each of its four carved feet set on thick swabs of cloth, raising it off the floor’s scarred flagstones. Ada sits in a chair opposite, her apron untied, a dishcloth and a letter in her lap, looking at it, trying to stop a sob that is gathering like a cloud in her chest from rising into her throat and her eyes.

The letter came with the piano, folded in an envelope slid into the back of the polished lid over the keyboard. It is from Arthur. It is short and to the point, written in his sloping handwriting, dark across the page. It says he is leaving England. That he is going to Africa. A place called Mashonaland in Southern Rhodesia. It says that the piano is a present. Something to remember him by. It says now she will always be able to sing and play. It says he loves her and he loves Theresa, but it is best for all of them if he leaves. And as always, on another sheet, there is a poem.

Ada reads the letter again. So that is why he came last week. Out of the blue, the first time she’d seen him for over four years. He’d said he was visiting Reverend Churton and wanted to call on them while he was here. He’d said he was sorry he hadn’t warned her he was coming, but he was worried that she would say he could not come. He did not say he had come to say goodbye. He did not say he had come to see his daughter for the first and maybe the last time. He had said nothing about this. Until now. Ada looks up from the letter to the piano again. The front door is still partly open and a slab of winter light falls across it, catching the carvings on its legs and its lid. A dark wooden upright, carved all over with leaves as if it were overrun with dark ivy. Delicate and ornate, it looks out of place in the bare hall. From another world, its clawed feet fantastical above the stone floor.

Ada stands and goes to it. She lifts the lid of the keyboard. Still holding the letter and the cloth in her other hand, she presses her finger against the middle C. The action of the hammer is smooth and effortless, releasing a single note through the body of the piano into the still air of the hall.

As it fades she hears the kitchen door open behind her. She turns and sees Theresa standing there, looking at her. Then she looks at the piano. She walks towards Ada, frowning at the instrument.

‘What’s that?’ she says, pointing at its carved legs.

‘It’s a piano, sweetheart.’

‘Is it yours, mama?’

Ada sits back on her chair and draws Theresa to her, stroking the hair from her face. ‘No, love. It’s ours.’

Ada knew she was pregnant long before she began to show. It was the summer of 1896. A hot summer full with scents and tastes which became more vivid to her overnight. Some just stronger, others repulsive. The honeysuckle in the lane, the turned hay, the pig food, the fermenting hops. The smells she had grown up with all her life, startling and pungent in a way they had never been before. And tastes too. She remembers crushing a raspberry against her tongue and its sweetness seeming almost unbearable in her mouth. As if she were feeling for two. And when she didn’t bleed for the second following month, she knew her instincts were right. She was carrying Arthur’s baby, and it was already alive in her, feeding her sensations as she was feeding its growth.

When she was sure, she told Arthur. He held her and reassured her, told her everything would be all right. He loved her and he wanted her to be his wife. But then they had to tell her father. And Arthur’s brother. She had been so unprepared, she sees that now. She had not expected her world to be taken out of her hands like that. As if her life were not hers after all; as if any sense of it being so had been nothing more than an illusion. She remembers feeling like one of her father’s prize sows, an item of stock to be traded on, passed into another farmer’s hands. She had always hoped one day her father would give her away, but never like that.

And Arthur. Where was he then to tell her everything would be all right? He had always seemed so worldly compared to the other men in Icklesham. Educated, assured. But in the face of her raging father…that had been a terrible thing to see. She had witnessed her father’s anger before—when some chore was left undone, when he thought he’d been swindled at market. But never like this. An anger so complete that at first he was silent. Arthur and her standing before him, and him saying nothing. Just the throbbing vein at his temple and her mother going to stand behind him, placing her hand on his shoulder. Then his shrug when she did, flinching her hand away with a jerk of his arm as if the touch of any woman would have scalded him then.

And then his anger found its voice. Ada had collapsed and cried to see him so: his face, filled with blood, the skin tight across his jaw and phlegm spitting from his mouth as he threw Arthur out of the house. And the words he said. She had never heard her father talk like that before. And to hear him she couldn’t help but think that he was right and that she, his daughter was the worst sinner on this earth. ‘You’ve brought shame on us, you hear me Ada Sargent, shame!’

‘Think you can have your way with us, do you? Well, damn you, Mr Cripps!’ And Arthur, with his learning and his poetry and his university, Arthur the man whom she loved, became a boy before her father’s rage. Age slipped off him like water and when she last saw his face, through the closing door, over her father’s shoulder, it was the face of a young man who was lost in a world he had thought he knew so well.

She never saw him again until that day last week. He wrote, but soon her father found the letters and forbade them in the house. And then it was all so quick. His brother William came. One night, a week after that day of rage and tears. She didn’t see him, just heard the low bass of two men’s voices in the parlour below her bedroom. She couldn’t make out their talk, but she recognised their tone. She had heard it a hundred times before. At the market, in the village shop. They were bargaining.

And then her father made up his mind.

‘Tom Neeves,’ he told her, ‘is a good man. He’s always liked you, you know that. His farm yields well, and as I say, he’s a good man. So, there it is Ada. You’ll marry Tom Neeves and I won’t hear a word said against it.’

Her mother said it was chopping the onions that made her eyes so red, but Ada knew that wasn’t true.

And it was so quick. All her life before then seemed as leisure, and now it was running downhill. Reverend Churton announced the marriage banns. At the same service he told the congregation that Father Cripps, now he was ordained, had left Icklesham to take up a Trinity living at Ford End, Essex. He married her and Tom a month after that service. She was beginning to show and although folk would recognise the baby was early, her father reckoned he’d rather they thought Tom Neeves had been too eager than his daughter had birthed a bastard child.

So no one knew that Theresa was not Tom’s child. Except, of course, for Tom himself. He alone had that knowledge and the knowing of it rubbed sore at him like a stone in a shoe. Soon, too soon after Theresa was born, he made sure Ada was carrying his own baby. But Theresa was there now.
A
reminder to him every day of Ada’s romance with Arthur. ‘His flesh and blood in my house,’ he would say when they’d argued. Then, turning to the child herself, he’d bend down low and face her, though still speaking to Ada, saying in a low voice through a tight mouth, ‘Not one of us, this one.’

And Arthur made it worse for her. He sent letters with money and books. He was trying to help, but if there was one thing sure to fire Tom up, it was finding a letter from Arthur with those notes neatly folded inside the envelope.

And now he had sent this. Ada looks over the carved piano again. What will Tom say about this? She knows he will not let her keep it, not if he knows it is from Arthur. And now Arthur has gone. Sailed to Africa. For a moment when she had seen him standing there last week, nervous, tall, his blue eyes unsure, his hat in his hand, she had thought he had come to take her back. But he had not. He had come to say goodbye, she sees that now. But at least he had seen Theresa, and, from where she stood half-hidden behind her mother’s skirt, Theresa had seen him. This strange man who spoke so softly to her mother and who looked down at her long and hard, like he was seeing right through her.

The latch on the back door clicks. The door opens and slams shut. Ada hears Tom stamping the dirt from his boots in the porch. She looks into the kitchen, his lunch half-done on the table. Standing, she puts the palm of her hand against Theresa’s back.

‘You go and play now dear,’ she says. ‘Your father’s home, he’ll be wanting his lunch.’

She opens the door to the parlour and Theresa goes through. Ada pushes it to and knots her apron. She slips Arthur’s letter into the pocket of her skirt and stands in the hall against the piano, the light from the open door falling across her shoulder, waiting.

Maronda Mashanu, Mashonaland, Southern Rhodesia

Noel Brettell lets the bike free-wheel down the slope towards the wooden bridge over the stream, feeling the rough surface of the road shake and jolt in his legs and his arms. It is after midday. The sun is high, and as he rattles over the planks of the bridge a pair of black-collared barbets strike up a duet from the branches of a jacaranda tree overhanging the bank. On the other side he begins to pedal up the slope. At the top of the hill he disturbs a yellow-billed kite pulling on the carcass of a rodent at the side of the road. The bird hops and flaps away as he passes. Looking back over his shoulder he watches it strut back to the carrion, its bright beak dipped with red.

He is cycling out to see Baba Cripps again, the cloth bag slung across his back heavy with books of poetry. Heavy with the words of poets which he is bringing out here, into the bushveld, to read for the blind old priest. How long has he been doing this, every Thursday afternoon, cycling out to read for Cripps? Six, maybe seven years? He remembers that first visit well. Arriving at the clearing, the old man waiting for him beside his pole and dagga rondaval, his spread of peanut-butter sandwiches on the makeshift table. And then, when he was seated beside him, the strange welcoming ceremony performed by children from the missionary’s ‘dame school’. A long file of them, all heights, all ages, parading before him under the eye of their African school mistress. Shuffling, clapping, twisting, knees bent, arms akimbo, repeating a shrill chant, over and over.