by Peter Rimmer
“Are you sure you can find the hills?” asked Kei, seeing the endless trees ahead of them.
“Of course I am,” said Shaka. “Have we not crossed the Limpopo? Are we not in the land of the Matabele? The king’s treasure is over there,” he said, pointing at the nearest tree.
If nothing else, Kei told himself, he enjoyed their company. The country was vast and day after day as they rode north they saw not a living soul nor even a ghost.
While the five men and the dog were making their journey through the mopane forest, two hundred and thirty miles to the east Jeremiah Shank was entertaining Francesca Shaw to dinner at Holland Park. The dining room table was long, and they sat at a distance of twenty feet from each other with a servant behind each of their chairs who kept filling up their glasses. Somewhere Jeremiah had heard it was the way things were done in English country houses, and he always imagined that if Lord Edward Holland had had a wife, he would have dined in such a way at Bramley Park. Jeremiah, at last, and for the first time, was trying out how it would feel to have a well-bred woman at the far end of his table.
The husband had conveniently gone off to war and Jeremiah had found the object of his desire taking tea in Meikles Hotel, of which he was still a director. Explaining that Jack Jones was on the farm to provide a chaperone even if the Welshman was a man, he asked Fran to drive with him to Holland Park. On the journey, when the lady asked him how he came by the name of Holland Park, Jeremiah kept up the myth that his benefactor, Lord Edward Holland, brother of the Marquis of Surrey, was a relation. Intent on the road and looking ahead, he missed the look of amusement that came over Fran’s face. If there had ever been straight talk between a man and a woman she would have told him outright his money was all that mattered and defunct aristocrats were not part of her plan. To maintain the fiction she let out an impressed ‘really’ and kept quiet.
To Fran’s surprise, now that Gregory had ridden off to war, she felt a twinge of conscience as the time was well after lunch and there was little chance of returning to the hotel that night. The only thing going for the little man next to her with the crooked nose and drooping eye was his wealth, the strongest aphrodisiac Fran had ever known. The biggest surprise after weeks of army training was Gregory finally making love. Thinner and fitter than she had ever known her husband, and man again now he was going to war, he had made love to her the night he came back to take his departure, leaving Fran with the first real puzzle to come into her marriage.
Being a woman who always looked ahead, she had accepted Jeremiah’s invitation to look at his horses as men at war very often got themselves killed. When the charade of the dinner was over and Fran quite tight, she was taken into the music room where she found a medium grand piano with the lid up, the stool out and Jeremiah ready to listen. After some tentative notes, Fran found herself playing the piano for the first time in a long while and, drunk though she was, she lost herself in the music. She played for half an hour to the silent bush out through the open windows and never once did Jeremiah interrupt.
Still a little drunk she hung her head over the keys and wondered what in the name of God was she doing in the middle of the African bush away from the old house in Godalming, away from being the daughter and granddaughter of a country solicitor in a country that had not seen war for years. Now here she was with a strange man, common as dirt, being unfaithful to a man who for right or wrong reasons had ridden off to fight for the country of his birth. Helped by the wine, tears flowed down her cheeks, hitting the black and white keys, and for those moments the house and Africa did not exist, only that part of her which had been created by so many English ancestors. She felt an arm on her shoulder and a hand in her hand and she was led away from the piano, out of the room and up a spiral staircase, past a dark portrait of someone’s ancestor with a bullet hole in the painting, to a tower with a roof that wound open and a telescope that looked up at the stars and all of heaven.
“It doesn’t matter none, luv. It don’t matter none,” he said to her in what she recognised as his true voice. And then she was seated in the chair and she was up there, part of the heavens, and for over an hour he talked about the stars and showed her where she was looking, and when they went down to his bedroom and made love, there was nothing wrong and the crooked face no longer annoyed her and the sounds of Africa were background to her pleasure. And then she cried properly before she went to sleep.
But in the morning for Fran Cotton, the world was hard and cruel the way it had been before. The false voice was back, the eyelid drooped, the nose was crooked and the man she had vowed to live with for the rest of her natural life was off hundreds of miles away still riding out to war.
While Fran was watching Jack Jones break in a horse destined for the British Army, twenty miles on the other side of Salisbury, eight-year-old Madge Brigandshaw was putting the finishing touches to her tree house, obeying a primal instinct from her distant ancestors to build her home high off the ground away from the predators. Harry, nearly twelve, back from boarding school in Cape Town for the holidays and bored stiff, was giving his sister a helping hand while almost four-year-old George got in the way as usual. With war having cut the railway line, Harry was not sure when he would be going back to school, and with not even his grandfather to supply a mild form of amusement, Harry was trying to grow up fast so he could run off and join his uncle in the war. To Harry’s great relief, Tinus Oosthuizen had not joined the Boer army and even though Barend was the same age as Madge, Harry had spent most weekends on the new farm in the Franschhoek Valley thirty miles from his school. Alison, with the ulterior motive of seeing Harry, had written to Emily recommending the school that was run by the Church of England: many said it was the best in the Cape. With Seb’s dividends from African Shipping he could afford the boarding fees, and were it not for the unpredictability of his father, Seb would have sent the boy to England for his education.
Sebastian watched his children and the son that was almost a man and wondered where the years had all gone. Alone on the farm, he employed over one hundred black people, and were it not for the war and his feeling of guilt, he would have been as happy as any man was able to be in a world that no one could ever predict.
“A penny for your thoughts,” asked Emily, seven months pregnant with their fourth child.
“The war, Em. Am I being a coward? Even your father is down there with a gun in his hand.”
“Why do men always want to fight?”
“Maybe they have always had to fight for what they wanted and then protect what they got. So long as some are rich and some are poor, man will fight. He thinks it such a short life to prove his worth. And all that striving is mostly worthless in the end. I mean, what’s the point?”
“You think we made a mistake coming out here?”
“Probably.”
“You think I should have stayed with Arthur!”
“How can I even think of that? We should have told them you were pregnant with Harry.”
“When you were out on the high seas, kidnapped by your own father? Frankly, The Captain wouldn’t have cared a damn. Whichever way, the boy was his grandson. Your father is so vain he can’t see the wood for the trees, and your mother is scared stiff of him. Don’t worry about the war, Seb. It’ll be over once General Roberts launches his offensive and the Boers like Tinus will be happy as part of the empire. It’s Christmas tomorrow and likely Fran will come back from Fort Salisbury. She has a soft spot for the children, you know that. And your brother will come over from the mission and he always brings a train of people and we will all have a lovely time.”
“You are always so enthusiastic, darling Em.”
“There’s no point in being otherwise… Children! Please come down for lunch.”
“What’s for lunch?” Harry called down.
“Come and see.” There was one sure way of getting children out of trees. She smiled and put her hands on her belly to feel the baby kick.
The trellised v
ines were heavy with small green fruit that stretched in lines at the level of a man’s head as far as the eye could see. The valley was green and perfectly ordered, interspersed by the gabled homes of the wine growers and the clusters of labourers’ houses. All around the Franschhoek Valley towered the mountains, purple in the varying light, the vast protection for the valley people from the other world.
Alison sat on her stoep on Christmas morning in the first light of day listening to the squeals of her children opening up the stockings she had hung in the middle of the night at the end of their beds, full of silly things. An orange for colour, a box of Christmas crackers, a water pistol for Barend and a small doll that rolled its eyes for Tinka. Christo was mercifully still asleep. The morning was cool with a gentle breeze from the Berg River and the first cup of tea she had made herself in the brown pot she brought from England was always the best one of the day. To add to her pleasure the new baby was not making her sick in the morning. Tinus had been fast asleep with his mouth wide open making a fluttering sound more than a snore, and none of the servants had risen from their beds. Morning birds called to each other and the smell of damp soil from yesterday’s rain was rich. Down in front of the raised stoep, some ten feet above the lawn, the house built on a slope, the ducks were swimming in the large, lily-filled pond, the flowers sweet and smiling. Her new home was the most beautiful place she had ever seen, and instead of being a children’s nurse in someone else’s establishment she was mistress of the house. Alison Ford, she told herself, had come a long way after climbing down the ladder at Hastings Court. Maybe only youth did things like that, never fearing the consequences. Halfway across the valley, six feral geese were flying in a perfect skein, the heavy beat of their wings alive on the wind. Halfway through her second cup of tea Christo woke and the moments of peace were gone and Alison’s day began.
The sun rose half an hour later at Elephant Walk and Sebastian had taken his worries down to the Mazoe River. Behind, through the msasa trees and the stockade from the Shona rebellion, his family was still asleep. Further downriver at the compound there was little noise on this day decreed as a holiday. The day would be hot and humid, the main rains having broken a week earlier. The fox terriers were still asleep at the foot of Harry’s bed but the two ridgebacks had followed him down to the river five hundred yards from the stockade, quiet but alert to the day’s potential. The river was flowing strongly from the good rains and brought with it the debris from the banks upriver. It was Christmas Day and Sebastian wished everyone a happy Christmas, which brought his mind back to England and the house The Captain had built, the winding avenue of oaks planted by his father that hid the horse but not the rider, and he wondered why life had sent him so far away. He wondered what he would have been doing on this Christmas Day were it not for Em and the cruelty of his father. He had never thought of a career, so engrossed had they been with each other. Every year in Africa, on her birthday and for Christmas, Sebastian had written to his mother telling her the news of her grandchildren and never once had she sent him a reply. She had other children more important than the black sheep. Looking back, he thought he had loved his mother, and she had loved him back.
The wild geese began the morning run over the trees, honking at each other in full flight, and in front of his toe a dung beetle was pushing a ball of horse dung relatively the size of a house. Seb watched the beetle for a full five minutes before the insect got it wrong and the ball fell down the riverbank into the water where it was rushed away on the current. The beetle stood still for a long moment before going off to roll another ball of dung, the primal instinct to procreate by laying its eggs in the dung too strong to accept defeat.
And then the worries came back to Sebastian, and he had to look at them all over again. James, who at that moment was leading his troop further into enemy territory towards the railway, had said the war was about gold but Sebastian was not sure. Life was never that simple. Despite their isolation, Sebastian was as well informed as anyone even if the newspapers were many weeks old. The books he ordered came to him in crates and he devoured them page by page and mostly more than once. It was his recreation and many an hour of deep pleasure was spent in a wicker chair under the shade of a msasa tree reading the knowledge accumulated by man. The reason for the war in Sebastian’s mind was jealousy, hatred of British arrogance, dislike of the man at the top but most of all, the wish of other nations in the world to destroy the British Empire and take the trade for themselves. The argument was about power and if one of the smallest nations in the world could beat the British Army as they had done in South Africa, the empire itself was vulnerable and the world was a dangerous place for Englishmen.
Ever since Bismarck had herded the German states into one country, England’s power on the continent had been challenged and now the Kaiser, Wilhelm II, had sold the Boers Mauser rifles and was building a navy to challenge the British. Russia had spent years intriguing against the British in Afghanistan, peering over the frontier passes and coveting the wealth of India down below. France for as long as France existed had been the enemy of England. And America, the one-time British colony, had almost gone to war with England in 1895 over the border between Venezuela and British Guiana. Only the Royal Navy, twice the size of the next two navies in the world, held the wolves at bay, wolves now looking at England as a wounded animal where an army of amateur soldiers could defeat the largest British army ever sent overseas. For Sebastian, the problem was not the gold on the Witwatersrand but the survival of the empire, the survival of Britain itself, and Britain had very few friends.
A simultaneous attack at the same time by three or four of her erstwhile and present enemies would bring down the greatest empire the world had ever known with everyone fighting for a piece of the disintegrating prize. Roberts on his way out from England had to win the war and quickly, before England lost her credibility. But for personal reasons, Sebastian was unable to go out and fight for the country of his birth as there was no way in the deepest recess of his mind that Sebastian could go to war with Tinus or any of his tribe. Without Tinus Oosthuizen, Sebastian knew he would have been very little in life. Not only did he owe the man for his wealth and his life on more than one occasion in the bush, but he also owed him for a friendship that had seen and protected a young man with no wealth and a young man in jail and in fear of his life. The families loved each other, and that was the end of it. They could even call him a coward if that was what they wanted.
Even through the trees, he heard the gate being pushed open in the stockade. Dogs barked and the two ridgebacks raised their heads for a brief moment, recognised the fox terriers, and went back to dolefully contemplating the flowing river. A late owl dropped from a tree on the riverbank and glided across the river.
“Brought you some tea, Dad,” said Harry sitting down next to his father on the fallen tree trunk. Sebastian turned and smiled at his oldest son, the one true cause of both of them looking at the African river. The dogs went off together in their endless pursuit. The tea from the flask tasted good with just the right amounts of milk and sugar.
“You mind if I have some?” asked Harry. “Mother’s still asleep.”
“Happy Christmas.”
“Happy Christmas. I didn’t get a stocking again this year.”
“Of course not. Your mother should have stopped when you were six.”
“It’s not so much fun growing up… Dad, when are you going to the war?”
“I’m not, Harry.”
“But why? Uncle James and Grandfather have gone and Mother says he’s too old but he went.”
“Because of Uncle Tinus.”
“But I told you, Uncle Tinus is not going to fight for the Boers.”
“I hope not but when people start killing each other’s families, they take sides.”
“But you don’t want to take sides.”
“Oh, I’m on the English side because I’m English. Same way Tinus will be on the Boer side because he’s a Boe
r. But we don’t want to fight.”
“Where’s Aunty Fran?”
“I’m not quite sure. Salisbury. Meikles Hotel, probably.”
“I like Uncle Greg but I don’t like Aunty Fran.”
“You mustn’t say things like that, Harry. It’s rude.”
“Are you a coward, Dad?”
“I hope not son, I really do.” Sebastian tried to put his arm around his son’s shoulders, but the boy moved away.
Without another word between them, they waited for the dogs and then walked up to the house for a breakfast of cold meats so that the house servants would only have to come to work for the big Christmas lunch at three o’clock in the afternoon.
“This one’s not going to be easy, Tinus,” he said to himself as he went through the gate.
The rest of his children were running across the lawn towards him shouting happy Christmas and Em was waiting for him on the veranda with a smile.
“Happy Christmas, my darling.”
“When are we going to open the presents?” demanded Madge.
“When Uncle Nat and Aunty Bess arrive with the children.”
“I wish they’d hurry up,” piped George.
When away from the children, Sebastian told her what had happened down by the river. Emily shuddered.
“I’m not going to war,” he promised her again.
“It’s not only you I worry about. There’s Alison and Tinus. Tinus, he’s the one to worry about. Hasn’t he got a pack of nephews in the Transvaal?”
“I rather think he has.”
“Harry’s the least of our worries.”
“He thinks his father is a coward.”
“Well, you’re not.”
By eleven o’clock on Christmas morning Ezekiel Oosthuizen, the father of the seven sons, was in a spiritual trance. The Boer army under General Cronjé had been slowly moving south to confront the British. Ezekiel, dressed in a black frock coat and top hat, harangued his congregation from a rise, the great red beard, the colour inherited from his Scottish mother, covering his chest, the old, blackened teeth feeling the spittle of his words. Not a man in the crowd seated down the slope from his feet took their eyes from the preacher, the light of the sun making the man larger even than life.
