The Fever Tree (15 page)

She turned away from him, onto her side. What would it have felt like to have had William’s hands trailing over her skin? She gave in to imagining him, and her thighs began to prickle and burn with slow pleasure.

T
hey spent little time together, and this suited Frances. Edwin worked six days a week, leaving before dawn each morning and returning just before nightfall. Frances would curl deeper into the bedsheets when he had gone, drinking in the solitude. Sometimes she would imagine his walks across the veldt in the cool dark of early morning, under a sky dripping with stars. What did he think about? Whether smallpox could be stopped from reaching Kimberley? Whether his wife was content? He was full of contradictions: hardworking and meticulous in everything he did, yet oddly dispassionate; ambitious enough to want a woman of distinction, and yet content to live on the veldt like a savage; a brutal realist, and yet at the same time whimsical enough to have brought her here.

Edwin subscribed to the
Graaff-Reinet
newspaper. It was written in English, and Frances scoured its pages, searching for news of William’s marriage, but there was no mention of him. Instead she read about the arrest of Johannes Swanepoel, a Boer farmer living alone on thirty thousand acres. He had kidnapped the daughter of a neighboring farmer and kept her for five years in a thornbush stockade. When her father finally found her, she had lost the power of speech. The story was creepy, and it caught her imagination. Swanepoel had kept the girl in complete isolation, not wanting to share her with anyone. Edwin was no criminal, and yet there was something strange about the way he had coerced her into marriage and brought her to Rietfontein. Why weren’t they living in Kimberley? Or Cape Town? Or Port Elizabeth? Why had he taken this position, miles from anywhere?

At seven o’clock each morning Frances had to get up and make way for Sarah, who tidied the bed, closed the shutters against the sun, and set a dampened sheet across the door to cool the room and keep out flies. She ate the breakfast laid out for her, then spent the rest of the day sitting in a chair on the
stoep
,
summoning William out of the plains. Kimberley was only a day’s ride away, and every dust devil in the distance could have been him. He emerged from the horizon, riding across the veldt, his hair a swath of black against the bleached sky and his eyes squinting into the white-hot sun. She could almost hear the gravel grinding beneath his boots as he dismounted. He would kneel down beside her, bury his face in her hair, and tell her that he was taking her to Kimberley. Every day she sat and waited for him to come, until her eyes stung from staring, but she couldn’t tear herself away.

The landscape mesmerized her. She had arrived at the beginning of summer, when the sun breathed like an oven over the desiccated plains. It was a brutal, pitiless heat. The earth was too warm to touch, and when she picked up an ironstone boulder the skin on her palm blistered. Even the horses had their hooves greased and bound in hide to stop them from burning.

She stared for hours at the stunted grasses, like parched heather, turning from gold to silver in the breeze. Edwin had nailed a plank of wood beneath their roof, and swallows used it for their nests, swirling and dipping out of sight to the small, round dam which lay behind the house. There was a patch of green here, by the dam: a few square yards of scrubby grass watered by the overspill and a peach tree which stood in the center of it. A few weeks after she arrived it erupted in a profusion of hard, golden fruits. They turned pink as the summer went on, until they were soft enough to be picked, and she would bite through the fuzz of skin into the warm flesh, amazed that such sweetness could come from such desolate ground.

On a clear day you could see the ghost of mountains banking like clouds on the horizon. The rains didn’t come, and as the summer went on the grim, parched veldt began to look like nothing more than a tangle of dusty prickles. She couldn’t believe a landscape could be so endlessly barren. It was the very opposite of the lush, green fields around London with their neat hedges teeming with busy, noisy life. The only sound you were likely to hear on the veldt was the occasional belching of a lizard. Her father couldn’t have imagined this place on his maps of Africa. He would have hated the dust and the heat. She felt a desperate loneliness, having to live without him, and she struggled against a yearning for everything to have been different. His death felt like abandonment. It had uprooted her, and she had been flung out here to this wilderness, where she didn’t belong.

Edwin went walking every Sunday, starting out early. He always asked her if she wanted to join him, but she declined. It seemed lunatic to go traipsing around in the heat, and besides, everything on the Karoo looked the same. There were barely any trees, no shade, not a thing for miles around that wasn’t covered in a fine red dust. You could set off in a certain direction and be certain to die before you met another soul. There were snakes and spiders and a constant invasion of flies. She couldn’t work out why anyone in their right mind would choose to live here. It was a hostile place, barely clinging to life, with no pretensions of prettiness, utterly devoid of romance, and yet despite, or because of all these things, she found a perverse comfort in it. She saw herself reflected in its bleak, stark surfaces. She admired its resilience and found it reassuring.

Frances learnt to be wary of the snakes. There were cobras, puff adders, skaapstekers, whipsnakes, coral snakes, horned adders, and boomslangs. Reptiles, Edwin said, couldn’t regulate their body temperature. They needed shade, or their blood would boil in their skins. The house, with its dark, shuttered rooms, was a perfect haven. Once, in the cool of early morning, she opened the kitchen door and a cobra glided out, straight over her feet into the dust.

Of all the insects, it was only the spiders she dreaded. The red men at night, and during the day the hunting spiders. They raced over the soil, looking for grasshoppers, crickets, and beetles. At first, Frances mistook them for balls of grass blowing over the veldt, the long hairs on their legs working as a disguise, but once Edwin had pointed them out she realized they were everywhere.

It was the spiders that endeared Nanny to Frances. She had tried to ban the meerkat from the house but soon gave in. She had never imagined they were living with so many bugs until she saw Nanny pulling them out from between the floorboards—termites, cicadas, and burrowing spiders with thick, bristling legs; even scorpions, which she managed to disarm with a quick paw before crunching delightedly at their still-squirming legs.

The problem was that ever since Frances had locked her in the study, the meerkat had treated her with deep suspicion. She couldn’t be convinced that Frances was anything other than dangerous. If Frances walked into a room, Nanny left whatever she was eating, stood up on her hind legs, and edged her way along the sides of the room with her back to the wall in a curious sidestep, as if she didn’t want to offend Frances but needed rather urgently to excuse herself.

One morning Frances positioned herself at the door and waited. Nanny approached and looked indecisively between Frances and the house, as if trying to decide whether she could make a dash for it. Ignoring Edwin’s instructions not to feed her, Frances held out a biscuit, and Nanny, who had obviously tasted the delights of baking before and recognized it as something altogether more delicious than a termite, shuffled up to her. When she got close, she stood politely on two legs and reached out for the biscuit with one paw. She stayed in that position, swaying and eyeing Frances beadily while she crunched away in a shower of crumbs. From then on, they were friends. The creature had little black patches round her eyes which made her look very earnest, and long whiskers, and when you stroked her belly she made a wonderful throaty purr.

Nanny sat with Frances in the afternoons on the
stoep
, her paws crossed over her chest, looking out over the plain like a sentry. Occasionally she fell asleep so that the slight weight of her body rested against Frances’s leg. When she woke up it was with a jolt, her nose wrinkling almost as if in embarrassment. When Edwin was home, Nanny would delicately deposit specimens at his feet for pickling, and in return he scratched her gratefully behind her ears.

The Reitzes owned all the land around, which came to about a hundred thousand acres. The farmhouse and outbuildings were so sprawling and numerous that they could almost be called a village. According to Edwin, there were over sixty people, white and black, working on the farm, about ten thousand sheep, as many goats, and a fair number of ostrich and cattle. There was only one dam on the farm, and in the late afternoon herds could be seen from the house picking their way over the plains, kicking up in their wake a fiery, billowing cloud of dust. The scene was biblical in its simplicity, and she was reminded of the Israelites leaving Egypt for the Promised Land.

There were things she ought to have been doing to improve the house, but she couldn’t bring herself to embark on anything. She should have been altering her dresses to make them more practical. There was fabric to be ordered from Port Elizabeth and curtains to be made. Edwin had asked Mevrouw Reitz if they could borrow her sewing machine, but Frances didn’t want to admit to either of them that she had never used one, so she put it off.

In the evenings Edwin would come home, but he never asked Frances what she had been doing, never criticized her over the state of the house, and never probed to see whether she had looked through the catalogs he had ordered from Port Elizabeth. The piano sat untouched under its cloth. Edwin didn’t ask her to play it, and she didn’t volunteer. She was grateful to be left to her own devices. She wrote to Anne and Mariella, and received letters in response. They both seemed settled and happy. Anne had been given responsibility over the native ward at the new Kimberley Hospital—she wrote that the work was tiring but rewarding—and Mr. and Mrs. Fairley had made a good start in Stellenbosch. She was happy for her friends, but their letters made her feel her own discontent more keenly.

She missed England, and wrote to Lucille asking for news of the family. Her cousin wrote back, and her letter conjured the season perfectly. It had been one of the coldest winters on record: icy cheeks, frozen fingers stuffed into mittens, and an Oxford Street dusted with snow. She described the gaieties of house parties in the country, ice skating in Hyde Park, hunt balls, and shooting weekends. The letter had arrived with a copy of a London Society magazine. Lucille had circled an article that mentioned her attendance at a number of important events. The pages were full of advertisements for perfumes and dresses, and descriptions of operas, dances, and debutantes. It was strange to think that this was the life she might have had. It felt so far removed from Rietfontein that it was as if the magazine had been torn from the pages of a fairy tale.

Edwin only once asked her if she wasn’t going to paint in the afternoons, since she had a talent for it. He suggested she pick some of the plants from the veldt. It gave her an idea, and she asked him to order a volume of Sowerby’s
English Botany
from London. When it arrived she set up her easel on the
stoep
and began copying some of the delicate, hand-colored illustrations, compiling a whole series of flowers to remind her of home: roses, dandelions, crocuses, and daffodils.

Every evening they ate the same thing: mealy bread, a sort of steamed pudding made of ground corn, eggs, and spices, smeared with sheep’s fat, which took the place of butter. Frances grew sick of the taste of it, and in an attempt to vary their suppers she secured a leg of mutton from Mevrouw Reitz. Her aunt’s book on household management had a whole section dedicated to recipes. All morning Frances turned the pages, growing more and more agitated. It was like reading a different language. When did a gravy run? What was forcemeat? And what did the writer mean by “buttered paper”?

She inspected the kitchen and found almost none of the items listed as necessary for a family “in the middle class of life.” Where was the bread grater? And what did a bottle jack look like? Or a dripping pan? The recipes were problematic in different ways. Either they called for ingredients she didn’t have, or they asked you to do something tricky like cutting out the knuckle or sewing up the meat.

She chose a recipe for braised meat and tried her best, but the mutton was delivered to the table a shriveled, burnt crisp, with a greasy coating of flour across the top. Edwin didn’t say anything, and Frances cried out in frustration, embarrassed by her failure.

“Why didn’t you ask my help?” he asked.

“Because I should like to do something on my own for once!” Frances said, pushing her plate away and standing up so abruptly that her chair clattered onto the floor. He never mentioned the incident afterwards, but he borrowed a shotgun from Mijnheer Reitz and would walk home in the evenings with a brace of quail or partridge, or a
korhaan
—a type of bustard—and he taught Sarah how to cook them.

Once a week Edwin rolled on top of her in the dark and expended the passion which seemed to be so lacking from the rest of his life. It was a relief when she realized he wouldn’t ask for it more often, and she let him fondle her breasts, showing neither enthusiasm nor unwilling. When it was over he kissed her gratefully, almost apologetically, as if he had defiled her in some way. He seemed satisfied by the perfunctory nature of these performances. He was a neat, careful, tidy man, and she thought her lack of ardor might well have suited him.

Unlike Frances, for whom the hours of each day stretched endlessly ahead, Edwin was always busy. He spent the evenings either in his study sterilizing specimens or in the sitting room reading articles by eminent geologists, while she gazed into the flame of a candle or flicked halfheartedly through one of his newspapers. It was just like him, she realized, to want to preserve and categorize the things around him. Life, with its unreliable physicality and mutable emotions, was too messy for his ordered mind. His study was where the inexorable transformation of life into history took place. Putting himself at the point of this axis empowered him.