Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms (5 page)

“And . . . Cynthia Vincy drove by West Edge,” said William. “Again.”

“Oh.” A syllable can express a great deal. Will's sounded of resignation but also of swear words, and the smells of rotting vegetation, and wary amusement and bitten fingernails.

Captain Browne had met Cynthia Vincy on his last trip
into Harare. She was a widow, much younger than the captain and much, much better-looking. She was not the typical farmer's wife, who were leather-skinned and masculine; Cynthia Vincy was well-dressed, strong-jawed, long-legged, conscious of her power over men: formidable.

Will had taken just one look and had known that the captain—who was usually stern and a little forbidding—was a goner—scribbled, head over heels, a smitten kitten. And Cynthia Vincy must have known it, because now she often drove along the road that bordered the farm. She never stopped when Will's father was there, because she'd taken a hissing dislike to his wary eyes and massive, rough frame, but when it was only the captain and the men, she would clamber out to ask his opinion on some problem, wriggling and cooing admiration. And, William said, she was as false as plastic flowers, like air-conditioning against honest wind, margarine against butter, false as “dammit.” “She asks him about tobacco,” William said. “Simple things, storage, harvesting times—with big eyes, nodding with those open lips,
ja
—but she
knows
about tobacco. Her husband was a tobacco farmer, for pity's sake.”

Will had never seen Cynthia up close, but that didn't stop her from hating her, intensely and by instinct. Thinking about it, Will put down the iron and ran her fingers through
her hair, gripped at the roots and tugged at the tangled mass and scowled. . . .

“Will!” Her father was laughing. He kissed her on the forehead and reached for the iron. “You're burning a hole in my sock, Cartwheel.” He poked a finger through the hole and wiggled his finger at her. “What am I going to do now? I'll have to wear it as a glove, hey, chooky?”

“Oh! Sorry, Dad!” As suddenly as it had come, Will's anxiety disappeared. All would be well. “Sorry-sorry, hey.” She spat on the iron so that it would fizz, as a sort of full stop. “Come, Papa. Lezzgo,” she said.

She took hold of his sleeve, scrunching it in her fingers and sniffing its earth-and-oil smell, and led him out into the evening air, her chin and stomach thrust forward to the dimming light.

•  •  •

That night, Will's father came into her room to say good night, which rarely happened. He un-looped the curtains, which had been tied up in a knot, and he fingered the material. They were made of sacking—most curtains were, that Will had seen—but her mother had embroidered these with flame lilies, the national flower of Zimbabwe. Lilibet had enchanted things with her needle. When Will touched the delicate spiny red petals, they felt real—and when the
curtains billowed out in the wind, it was as though the flowers were blooming.

Will knew that sometimes, while she was supposed to be asleep, her father would open the door, touch the curtains, and watch her, breathe her sleeping-African-child smell. She did not open her eyes beyond a crack—because if it helped him to believe she was asleep, she didn't want to spoil it—but in the light flooding from the corridor behind him, she had the impression of strong shoulders stooped, and waves of sadness, and protective love. Protection she felt sure she didn't need and couldn't always accept.

And he whispered, as he turned away,

“Sweetest, sweetest Lil.”

Lil was what her mother had called her—Will, Lil, Lilly, interchangeably. Her mother's name had also been Lil—Lilly, Lilibet, Elizabeth.

W
ILLIAM AND LILIBET—WILL AND LIL—HAD
married young.

William Silver had been born in England but bred a Zimbabwean. He loved the English hills but not the English weather. “Full of gray drizzle,” he told Will. “ ‘
Grizzle
,' we called it.” He sang without noticing, to his intense embarrassment, in a bass baritone. He was, said the Harare women, “as plain as a pikestaff,” “you wouldn't look twice in the street,” with a large nose and large ears and a large mouth, and large hands and feet. But in spite of that, they went after him, whitened-tooth and lacquered-nail, because William was courteous, never brutal, and because he was unlikely to give, or get into,
trouble. “I'd look after him,” they told each other at tea parties.

But William did not intend to be
looked after
. He wanted to do his own looking in life. He wanted to look inward and outward and sideways, and so when, as a young man, he
had
thus looked, and had seen an advancing line of smooth-plucked skin and leather handbags, he had widened his large eyes in terror and boarded a boat for England. And there he had met Elizabeth, whose skin had not been smooth and whose breath had smelled of greengages and lilies, sharp and sweet.

William Silver had sent a telegram to Charles Browne:
HAVE FOUND WIFE
. Farmers were used to poverty, and William economized on everything, including the word
A
.

Browne was sitting on the veranda, looking out at his beloved trees, when the telegram was handed to him. “Thank you, Lazarus.” He read it, nodded, and without turning round replaced it on the tarnished silver tray Lazarus held at his shoulder. His face was suddenly stiff. “Mr. Silver is bringing home a missus, Lazarus. There is going to be a madam.”

“A madam?” Lazarus sounded dubious. And then, with new formality, he added, “I see. A madam. Yes, boss.”

“Tell the men, will you, Lazarus?”

“Yes, boss.”

“A missus, Laz.”

“Yes, boss.”

“A woman in the house! Have to change our ways, eh, Lazarus?”

“Ah, yes, boss.”

“Lazarus—” said the captain. He seemed to have trouble clearing his throat.

“Yes, boss?”

Browne turned creakingly round in his chair, and rubbed his pouched old eyes, and saw his house afresh. The veranda ran along the length of the main wing, giving a panoramic view of the farm, but the windows looked suddenly dirtier, the paint was more chipped, the elephant-ear plants flapped across the windows more boisterously. To him, it was perfect—but . . .

“Everything covered in dust, Lazarus.”

“Yes, boss. Sorry, boss.”

“Oh, for Christ's sake! Not blaming you, Lazarus. But—look at this . . .” And Browne allowed himself one final, rather pleasurable, shiver of sadness for what had been, just him and his men—and it was a shiver that clattered his bones together. Then he straightened in his chair, ramrod straight, and he shook his military head. “Not fit for a woman.”

So the Great Scrub began. For two weeks before
Elizabeth Silver's arrival, Browne and his men, headed by an ever-frowning Lazarus, washed and scrubbed as if the queen of England or the chief of Mashonaland (the two ranked more or less equally in the captain's estimation) were coming, rather than one awkward, hopeful young woman.

Browne fretted over fabric and worried over the washing late into the night. He struggled to understand the intricacies of salad forks and fish knives. He bought secondhand a book called
An Easy Guide to Etiquette
, and then burned it in a rage. “Load of old piffling finicking fossicking bloomin'
rubbish
.” He walked around the bedrooms in the moonlight, touching things, reciting like a young boy at his times tables, “Blankets,
ja
. Headboard, bedspread, bolster . . .
ja
. . . .” He surveyed with creaking anxiety the range of female delicacies laid out on the dressing table, murmuring, “Ingram's Camphor Cream, Pepsodent, toothbrush, Pears soap, talcum powder . . . Is that it? Is it
right
? And is it enough now?
Is
it?”

But when Silver and his bride appeared, one look was enough to see how unnecessary the fuss had been. She opened the door of the car before it stopped, leaped out, fell on hands and knees like a cat, and ran on bare feet up the drive to throw her arms around the old man's neck, lifting her feet off the ground and swinging like a child. It was as if she had known him all her life.

“You are Captain Browne. I'm Mrs. Silver.” Her voice, he thought, was like water running over pebbles in sunshine. And he thought too how absurdly young she looked to be a Mrs. Anything; and although he said nothing, the tips of his thought must have brushed against her, because she laughed and added, “But you'll have to call me Lilibet. When I am fifty,
then
you may call me ‘Missus.' ” She drew a deep breath. “It is
so
good to see you in the flesh. But, Captain, I have the advantage over you, because I've seen you already in everything else—in everything but flesh, I mean.” And she looked at the captain's nicotine-stained skin, at the wrinkles and the veins, as if she ached to kiss them. “Because I've heard about nothing but you all the way from England. So of course I love you already. But you'll have to wait before you love me.”

Wordlessly, he took her hand, bowed over it, kissed it. She was wrong. He had loved her from that second.

Weeks later, Browne watched her as she scooped him a mug of homemade soup from a tin bucket. (The bucket, he noted, was one he had bought for chilling hypothetical wine bottles. This seemed a far better use.) It was odd that the men on the farm spoke of her as beautiful, because she was not, or not really. The skin of her forehead was often spotty, and her teeth were not straight, and her features were
too large for her face. Moreover, as if unable to walk slowly through a life so tremendously exciting, she ran everywhere and as a result was always bruised and scarred. Scarred, they said, but never scared. She was destined for great adventures.

Lilibet Silver, they said, knew many things. She knew how to fold the morning newspaper into a hat for the captain; she knew how to patch up the captain's truck with carpet and saucepan lids; she knew how to catch and cook the cane rats that ran wild in the field. She knew how to weave glass beads into bracelets that came halfway up her arms, which she pulled off and gave to strangers whose faces she liked. She knew how to recite poetry so that her listeners blinked and sniffed behind their teacups, how to cut her own hair with the rusty kitchen scissors, how to outswim the trout in the lake, how to swan-dive off overhanging branches, how to supplement coffee with chicory and make redbush tea, how to fall in love with every man she met and stay effortlessly faithful to Will's father.

Lilibet knew how to dig with an improvised spade, and which days to work in the vegetable patch. Things grew for her. Within a month of her arrival, the scrubby, dusty flowerbeds in the formal garden tumbled and bubbled into life. There were birds everywhere, lizards everywhere; Lilibet knew how to sit in absolute stillness for hours on end, so that
dragonflies and bees would perch on her neck and shoulders. It was never too late, she said, to turn a living thing around, and a garden was the most living of things. Within two months there was jasmine on every wall, and flame lilies along the veranda. Lilibet knew how to charm buds from roses that hadn't flowered for years. When Wilhelmina arrived, Lilibet knew the exact knot that would fix her baby to her back with a swathe of red cloth.

But Lilibet did not know how to remember the Nivaquine malarial tablets during the rainy season, and she did not know how to rest and recover. Will, aged five, stumbled into her bedroom to find her father standing clutching fistfuls of the sack curtain, tears streaming down his face. His mouth was stretched open, soundlessly, and tears fell onto his tongue. Outside the window was a pool of vomit.

Neither could speak. That was the day that a silence settled on the pair of them, and they were bound close by it. Will felt, in that moment, too small to face such misery, but she knew that she would have to expand, now, with a terrible rush, to fill the empty space.