The Fever Tree (34 page)

Maria called him a
slangmeester
. He had, so she said, rubbed the venom of snakes into wounds in his skin to give him immunity. There was never any proof of this, though he did once hold up a scorpion in front of the children and let it sting him again and again, and he showed no pain or ill effects. He told snake stories as schoolgirls told ghost stories, and the children sometimes crept to the door to listen to him. There was the time when Maria was still a child. She had pushed open the door from the
stoep
, and a snake, asleep on top, fell down in a noose about her neck. She froze in fright as the snake uncoiled itself and slithered down her back, leaving her unharmed. Jantjie spoke with such conviction that Frances could never tell when he was blurring the lines of truth. He told her about the snakes that had a thirst for milk—he had seen one with his own eyes drinking from the udders of a cow—and the Xhosa woman who had fallen asleep underneath a tree suckling her child and woken to find a puff adder clamped to her other breast.

Frances avoided looking in mirrors, but she couldn’t always help catching a glimpse of herself in the reflection of a window or in the glass in the hall. She noticed over time that the scars were losing their redness. They weren’t as deep and pitted as they had been before, but her skin had taken on the indelicate quality of roughly worked clay. Oddly, in her dreams, she was never scarred, and she wondered whether that would change, like those who—living in another country—begin to dream in a different language.

She longed for news from Kimberley, but few newspapers made their way to the house, and visitors were rare. Occasionally, men stopped in on their way to or from Cape Town, and she would eagerly listen in on their conversations, but she heard nothing of any interest. Only once a trader spent the night, and she overheard him saying business was bad. Smallpox had been declared in Kimberley, and though there was no mention of Edwin, she was pleased that he had succeeded.

F
rances saw that Piet liked her, and was gratified by it. He brought her bugs to examine in matchboxes, chocolates from the dinner table, and one evening, when she was cutting his fingernails, he asked her cautiously whether it was true that her husband had left her.

“Yes,” she said, thinking he must have heard it from his parents.

“Why?” he asked, his head tilted up to look at her.

She held one of his hands in her own, the stumps of his missing fingers round and hard in her palm, and snipped the crown off the tip of his forefinger. “When we married we didn’t know each other well enough.” She held her lower lip between her teeth, and blinked back tears. “By the time we did, it was too late.”

When the older boys rode out onto the farm with their father in the afternoons, she and Piet would read or walk. One afternoon, she asked him if he could keep a secret. If I take you to a special place, will you not tell a soul? He nodded solemnly, pleased to be included in an adventure.

They took a parasol to keep off the sun and a flask full of water. Piet thrust his dry hand into hers, and she clasped it. A fierce, hot wind blew up dust devils which flew across the veldt like miniature tornadoes. The land shimmered and danced in the heat. Piet kept his eyes riveted to the ground. He was looking for the blue-headed lizard, which could be seen staring north in the advent of rain.

When Frances saw the cottage she was torn between joy and sadness. This was the place where she had known Edwin best. Returning here was a way of pretending that nothing had changed. It was an indulgence. As she climbed the
stoep
, memories flooded back. The door was slightly ajar, and she swung it open, wary of snakes. Piet held on to her hand, fascinated by this old, empty shell of a house weighted down with history. The rooms were shuttered and dark, and the hall smelt dry and faintly aromatic of the camphor Edwin had used in his study. She stood breathless for a moment, Piet dangling from her arm, impatient but fearful. Then she stepped into the bedroom. The brass bed had gone. Fingers of light escaped through chinks in the wood, casting a delicate pattern on the bare floor. The beating of wings startled her. A bird flew in frantic circles around the room, dashing itself against the shutters in a bid to escape. Frances lifted the latch and threw them open, letting in a flood of sunlight, and the bird darted outside.

She looked at the worn boards and the peeling, plastered walls. These rooms had been a prison to her before, but now the isolation and simplicity seemed full of opportunity. Why had she refused the possibility of happiness here? It had been growing inside her, a sense of contentment, but she hadn’t acknowledged it. Instead she had resented Edwin for bringing her to Rietfontein and thought about nothing but William. She stepped into the sitting room and gave a low cry of surprise. The piano still stood in the corner. It was the only piece of furniture left in the house, and she wondered why it hadn’t been sold. When she pulled off the sheet a plume of dust rose into the air. She sneezed, then lifted the lid and pulled out the stool which was tucked beneath it. The piano smelt of an English drawing room—of wax and the raw underside of furniture. It was just as out of place as her, this piece of England cast up on the veldt.

It was then that she saw the music book in the stand. She hadn’t noticed it the first time she had sat at the piano. Inside was an inscription: “To my wife. 1880
.
” Regret welled up inside her. He must have bought it for her, and he would have expected her to see it, but she had been too preoccupied.

She didn’t recognize the sonatas, hadn’t even heard of the German composer. She began to play the first, feeling her way slowly through the music, faltering at times. It swelled and filled the room, a wonderful, lilting, nostalgic piece, strangely delicate in this tumbledown wreck of a cottage in the middle of the vast plains, miles from the civilization which had produced such refinement, and she thought of all the times she might have played for Edwin but had willfully refused. He had bought her the piano—a gesture of huge generosity—in the hope that it would be something they could share together, but she had assumed, instead, that he had wanted to gloat over the talents of the girl he had secured in marriage. Of course, she had been thinking only of herself. He must have wanted the music too, the release of it. It might have taken them to other places, opened doors between them, but she had shut down the opportunity.

There were times over the past year when she had been ashamed of the fact that she couldn’t turn herself to any practical purpose. She had felt useless and lacking in some way, but as she played, she remembered something different. The music was exquisitely beautiful, a thing beyond value, and it poured from her fingers. Her pride expanded, stretching inside her, and she remembered that this too was worth something, and he had wanted her because of it.

When the piece came to an end she put her head down on the lid of the piano. She was aware of Piet standing behind her, watching her, but she couldn’t turn around quite yet. She was tired—tired of polishing, of washing, of serving another family and not having her own. She was tired of blaming herself, and tired of wanting Edwin. For a moment she felt overwhelmed. Her body shuddered, gripped with longing for a past that could not be re-created. Her marriage had played itself out here, and she had made nothing of it.

A hand touched her lightly on the shoulder. Piet stood holding out a golden feather. She wiped her eyes and smiled, taking the feather from him. In the old, warped cupboard in the kitchen, she found a tin of Swedish anchovies. The two of them sat on the
stoep
, and she knocked a hole in the lid with a rock and prized open a jagged section of metal. They ate the anchovies with their fingers, delicious and salty rich, and washed them down with gulps of warm water from the flask. A lizard crawled out from behind a rock, the only living creature in a vast empty plain of blackened ant heaps. She had hoped that Nanny might appear, but there was no sign of her.

They took a different route home, walking up the slight incline of the
kopje
until they had a good view of the veldt, the cottage behind them and the farmhouse ahead with its
kraals
and barns. To their right was the dam, shrunken now to a pool that barely reflected the sun on its muddied surface. Vultures wheeled in the air above. Frances had heard they were slaughtering lambs today, to save the ewes.

When they got home, the twins were waiting for them. The brothers were animated. Hendrik held a box, which he promised to show. It mewled and chattered and threatened to overturn itself until he planted himself firmly on its lid. A baboon, Hermanus said, had been driven down from the mountains by thirst. It had ripped the udders from two ewes, sucking them dry for milk. Mijnheer Reitz had shot it, and when they approached they saw she held a baby to her chest.

On cue, Hendrik hopped off the box, flipped off its lid, and pulled out a baby baboon. It was a scraggly, ugly thing, no bigger than a rat, which grappled at his arm and screeched in fear. It had pink ears and a pink face, wrinkled and hairless, the very replica of an old man’s, with tufted eyebrows and a dog’s nose. Its head was bald, and the hair was so thin across its body that you could see the fleas crawling over its skin. Piet tried to take hold of it, but his brother laughed and hurled it at the other, who caught it—or, rather, the baboon caught hold of him, sticking like a burr. It tried to cling on but was thrown back again. Piet took great gulps of air, trying to fathom their cruelty, until Frances intervened. “Let him have it,” she said. “You have played with it all day.” And they reluctantly obeyed.

The baboon, which Piet called simply “Baboon,” was bottle-fed until it was able to suck from a bowl of milk. Then it would crouch, hands on either side of the bowl, only rising, snorting from the white froth, when it remembered to breathe. Piet was the only person in the house who had any interest in it, and the baboon adored the boy, reluctant to ever be prized away. When the twins came close, the baboon swiped at them until they learnt not to touch it. At night, when the family was gathered in the drawing room listening to Mijnheer Reitz reading from the Bible, the baby baboon sat by the lamp catching moths, stuffing them into its mouth with a puff of powdered wings.

T
he Reitzes had stocked the dam with fish many years ago, and they had multiplied. Now the water, a fraction of its former size, became a broiling mass of bodies. Every day it receded, and the fish were crammed more closely together. They flipped and turned, scales glistening through the mud, in a desperate bid to keep their bodies out of the sun. Mijnheer Reitz said that any man on the farm was welcome to take them away, and in the afternoons native boys could be seen wading into the water, grasping at them with their hands, shouting and laughing as the fish pumped and slid out of their tight fists like writhing chunks of muscle. They tossed them into canvas buckets and took them home. Hundreds were hauled out of the water with nets and left on the banks to die, mouths gulping under a hot sun, wet scales sticking with dust, and their eyes drying up in seconds to a hardened crisp.

At the house, Frances was asked to help the cook gut the barrelfuls which were brought in from the dam, still alive. She stood in the kitchen, her hands glistening with slime and her arms covered in scales, knocking the heads of the fish against a corner of the zinc tabletop. Occasionally, one wriggled from her grasp, flipping onto the kitchen floor, where it lay motionless, gills heaving with knowing desperation. She sliced open stomach after stomach, spilling the guts into a bin. The Reitzes and their servants ate fish soup, fish pie, fish curry, fish balls, fish ten different ways, and still they weren’t rid of it. The cook jarred bottles of fish pickle and fish sauce, and every room in the house reeked of it afterwards.

Every day, Mijnheer Reitz came back with blood on his shirt and stories that told of life disintegrating on the farm. When the men had watered the sheep, herds of springbok pushed down amongst them to draw water from the dam. The springbok wouldn’t move away, even when the men began shooting at them. Still the springbok pressed down to the water’s edge. That night they carried home thirty or forty animals, and for days they skinned the carcasses, butchered the meat, and hung sheets of biltong up to dry. Mevrouw Reitz said they ought to have saved the bullets for the cattle. They would need them before long. Ostrich, great shabby balls of feathers, gathered on the plains and strutted round the house, rapping on the windows, and Frances was reminded of stories of the Irish famine—the starving tenants of the rich being refused admission to the feast—except no one was feasting here. Everything was locked in a battle for survival. If the rains failed again, the Reitzes would be finished. The land would be impossible to farm.

One afternoon, Frances discovered Maria shredding a newspaper, and she stopped her, asking if she could read it. She took it up to bed with her. It was three weeks old, from Cape Town. The front page was dominated by the fall of share prices in Kimberley: thousands bankrupt, the bottom fallen out of the market, banks refusing to lend. “Moneylenders are finding out that they have killed the goose that laid the golden egg,” the journalist declared. Property prices had fallen by 1,000 percent. She felt a thrill of satisfaction. Baier must be suffering.

Inside, there was an article about a jailer at a prison in Natal who had deliberately starved to death half his native prisoners, dousing them with freezing water and beating them with clubs, while keeping the other half in perfect luxury. Then another article about Boers abandoning their farms because of the drought. Her heart stopped when she read the name Dr. Edwin Matthews in a headline on the third page. The article declared him a hero: “He has worked tirelessly to expose one of the most shameful medical scandals in British history.” An inspector had been sent to Kimberley from Cape Town and had instantly declared the disease smallpox. A handful of Kimberley doctors had lost the right to practice, and Baier had been taken in for questioning. She read the article over and over, smiling each time she came to the bit about Edwin. It was the news she had been waiting for. He had been vindicated, and Baier—even if he managed to escape justice in court—would be financially crippled.

But when her pleasure at reading the news had worn off, she was left feeling more alone than ever. Edwin’s success accentuated their separation and her failure to show courage when he had needed her to. She wondered whether he was still working with Sister Clara. They had been side by side for so long, and their companionship, and the faith Edwin clearly put in her, might surely have turned into love. The idea tortured her, and she woke up in the night, palms sweating, throwing off the covers, trying to get away from the thought that he had found happiness with someone else.

In the long, hot afternoons, when there was nothing left to do and the house settled into sleep, Frances would walk with Piet to the cottage, Baboon riding on his back, clutching his shirt with neat adroitness. The boy seemed to love the peace of the place, and he would bring a handful of toy soldiers and line them up on the crumbling
stoep
outside. Frances went immediately to the piano. Touching the keys worked on her as a kind of drug. She made her way through the book of sonatas, imagining as she read the music that she was playing for Edwin. There were six in total, and they were difficult—technical and unfamiliar—and it took her time to master them. The first was delicate, but they became increasingly dynamic, full of startling life and a brutal sadness. This music had meant something to Edwin. He had wanted to share it with her, and as she brought it into being, it was as if he were there talking to her, telling her about himself. It took their relationship out of the realm of memory into new territory. It was a gift, and she was grateful for it. Her sanity began to rest on being able to come here and place her fingers on the cool, ivory keys and conjure a different reality into being. But when it was over and silence had reclaimed the house, the fantasy receded and she was all alone in the empty room.