by Peter Rimmer
The lion roar was two hundred yards from Barend’s camp. Peregrine had hoped they would reach Elephant Walk before sundown, whisky on the veranda vivid in his mind. It was pitch dark, the light having dissipated completely in less than an hour. Only the planets could be seen in the night sky. The fire Barend was nursing, bending down on his knees, blowing the embers of leaves that were still damp, refused to burst into flame. Barend shivered. A thin lacework of cloud added to the dark. The moon would not rise for three hours. Barend’s horse whinnied with fright. He could hear the donkeys pulling against their tethers to the old wagon in which the old man was sleeping. During their four-month odyssey, Peregrine had turned seventy-one. For a man of his age, he was still remarkably fit, but it wasn’t right. For Barend, old men should have a place in the sun, a chair, grandchildren to look after them, memories to mull.
“Wasn’t that a bloody lion?” came from the direction of the covered wagon. “Bloody thing woke me up… Can’t see the fire.”
“Leaves are wet.”
“I’d better come and help. Always said the only way to get anything done was to do it myself… So near to a bottle of whisky and yet so far. It’s dark, my word it’s dark. I rather think only leopards can see at night.”
“Lions can smell.”
“Well, my gun’s loaded. Fear not, Peregrine is nigh.”
The fire caught and burst into bright flames, bringing the campsite into view. The lion roared again, further away. Twigs caught and burnt, and when Peregrine put a pile of precious dry fodder on the flames he could see the slate-green colour of Barend’s eyes. The donkeys had stopped pulling at their tethers and Barend went across in the new light of the fire, a big man with wide, powerful shoulders, to stroke the ears of his horse. The stallion showed him its teeth. On the other side of the wagon, something small was moving in the thick bush.
He had changed his mind the day they left Maun four months earlier. A man, he told himself, could not walk back into people’s lives like nothing had happened. Even without his hatred, he was not the same person who had run away from Elephant Walk more than nine years earlier. They would all be different.
He and Peregrine had come out of the swamps and gone south, Peregrine not greatly minding, rationalising there was always time in Africa to talk, to reason. Life was to be lived as pleasantly as possible for the moment. The flight of a bird. The call of frogs that started and stopped abruptly altogether. A thin sickle moon in a star-studded sky. The evening echo of falling water from drinking game, the only sound in the universe. Peregrine was not in a hurry. He had the rest of his life to spend getting nowhere. For him, the only important place in time was the present moment.
They had first trekked week after week to the diamond town of Kimberley, where illicit diamond buying was punishable by life in prison. The mining people did not like anyone stealing their diamonds. Diamond buying was a closed shop. A monopoly of the De Beers Diamond Corporation. Without careful control of the supply, the prices would fall, some said to nothing. A stone was only valuable when it was rare. They spent an unsuccessful month in Kimberley looking for a buyer and then moved through to Johannesburg, certain at least the seven stones were gem quality diamonds. Selling rocks found on a far-off beach was more difficult than either of them had thought.
Barend had been away from the gold mining town since his fight in the Mansion House. All his old acquaintances had moved on. Everyone was new, expectant, waiting to get rich in a hurry, or waiting with dull eyes to go away. Only a very few grew rich. He had walked into the Mansion House but with no money, they had turned him away. New, meaner-looking people were running the whorehouse and he was glad not to have any money. They turned him away at the door. Inside it was empty of customers where he could see into the cheap bar. The girls looked worn out and uninterested. The band he could hear would have sent him to sleep. Going back anywhere was a failure. Nothing was ever the same. Sadder than he knew why, he had found Peregrine and the wagon with his horse, and though it was night they had gone out of town, moving slowly forward throughout the night. When the dawn came they were safe in the bush and had made camp.
“Why are we going north?” Barend had asked Peregrine.
“You’re going home.”
“I don’t have a home.”
“Oh yes, you do. She’s waiting for you. Now, humour an old man. It’s a long time since I drank Brigandshaw whisky. Hopefully, Harry will have forgiven me for leading him a dance in pursuit of Lobengula’s gold. Which, by the way, I don’t think exists; money gets spent if it’s left lying around. We had a nice time looking. There was no trace of his boyhood black friend, Tatenda. No one had heard of him for years. An old witch gave me the evil eye. I think she knew. Even Harry’s fluent Shona couldn’t get it out of her. The old hag gave me the shivers. Bloody ventriloquist. Could throw her voice up into the trees. The villagers were petrified of her… I need a good bottle of whisky to drink.”
“It’ll take a month or more.”
“So what? Young man, do you have a better idea? If it doesn’t work you can go on your way. You won’t look back and not know. Face life, don’t run away.”
“I’ll go north on one condition. You tell me why you ran away. Why you ran away from your family and hid in the African bush. I’ll go to Elephant Walk only if you tell me who you are. After so many months you owe me that much.”
“If I tell you a very long story. And there are rivers to cross and this is the rainy season, early but here. We may spend days waiting for the river to go down so we can cross over. It may take us many weeks… I want you to be the custodian of a letter I have written to my family. I have lived a long time. At my age death can strike quickly and I’m not talking about the lions. All those bits inside us that keep us going year after year. Only one has to pack up. Poor old Clary and Jeff. They worry me the most. No one else will look after them. Maybe they will carry me to Valhalla but I don’t think so. But my family should know about my death. You see, this wreck of an old man with not a penny in his pocket for all these many years, is Peregrine Alexander Cholmondeley Kenrick, Ninth Earl of Pembridgemoor. Our greatest estate became my property in trust when my father died. Luck was, I saw his death in the paper, a piece of old newspaper young Harry Brigandshaw had used to wrap his crystal glasses. The trust will have taken care of everything, that much I knew when I read the notice, in 1907 I think it was. I had then been away over forty years, so it was far too late for me… Her name was Patricia. A very ordinary name. She was Irish. She was, I still tell myself, the other half of myself. Maybe she was or maybe she wasn’t as I was never allowed to find out. She was the first girl I ever knew, the only one who could look through my eyes into my being, that individual, us, without which the universe does not exist. Maybe it was an illusion. Maybe she was built by my mind as a lifelong companion. Maybe I am a romantic old fool and now it doesn’t matter except for you. If I can do one last thing in my life, it is to bring you back to your Madge, to find out. To not have a demon, a lonely demon to rule you the rest of your life. Looking back I can see my life was pointless. I did nothing with it. Not even one child. Not a painting. Not a book. Not one poem. I did nothing with my gift of life and that was wrong. Don’t you, Barend Oosthuizen, make the same mistake. You have been like a son to me these many weeks. My first companion since leaving America. I don’t want you to lose your life. So bear with an old man and take this letter to post when you hear I’m dead. Let an old man go and find what I hope will not be my last bottle of whisky… Now, that’s enough about me. I’ve always found it boring talking about myself.”
“What happened to her?”
“I have absolutely no idea. In life, we never find out what happens.”
The rest of Peregrine’s life flooded out in the next three weeks. Barend thought he was hearing a man’s confession, and without the knowledge of a priest, he kept quiet and innocent. At first, he thought the story had been for his benefit only, a way of making him go home by examp
le. By the time the lion roared, heard by both Madge and Barend, Madge from the Brigandshaw veranda, Barend from his camp just short of Elephant Walk, he knew Patricia as well as any other person in his life. Twice, alone in the dark, he had found himself crying at the pointlessness of life. The old man’s story made him think in ways he had never thought before. To him at twenty-three, life was endless, and here he had been listening to another life from its beginning to almost its end.
The next day, Peregrine fiddled around, seemingly unwilling to journey the last part of his endless journey.
“Why don’t we go?” Barend said impatiently.
“Manners, my boy. Always arrive at the right time of day. Sundowners are the answer. When the sun goes down. Then we shall join them. Joyous, oh joy, a cut crystal glass full of whisky. Now there is something to look forward to in Africa. Funny, isn’t it, how the last minutes are always the longest? We will do one last hunt, you and I. Our gift of food to the family. Then Clary and Jeff shall take me in state. Your steed below you. Knights of old, back from the Crusades. We will be welcome. Joy will flow. Be patient, Barend. You are almost home.”
They rode through the open gate of the stockade that had been built by Barend’s father during the Shona rebellion of 1896, not long after Tatenda had disappeared from Elephant Walk. The two donkeys led the way, with the old wagon and Peregrine seated on the wooden bench, and Barend riding in behind on his horse. The dogs pelted across the well-kept lawns between the msasa trees, ready for whatever fight or fun befell them. Egyptian geese took off in honking fury for the river, up and over the other side of the wooden stockade. The sinking sun was only just beginning to redden in the western sky. It had rained shortly before, and the bush green and the russet foliage of the msasa trees were still dripping water onto the round flowerbeds below.
Sir Henry Manderville heard the commotion from his potting shed, where he was inspecting the small, green seedlings that had not yet been planted out into the land. Not being a man to waste time when he was onto a good idea, Henry had been standing in the lands all day watching a gang of shirtless blacks in three groups, the first with Dutch hoes ridging the ploughed land, that otherwise would have been planted with maize corn, the second with hand trowels and green plants, the trowels opening the head of the ridge at intervals, so when the soil filled in again the roots were standing up untangled. The third group came along with buckets of water and sloshed each plant despite the probability of rain. There were enough seedlings to plant out two acres and Henry was well satisfied with his work and the planting instructions from Cousin George in Virginia. The barking dogs reminded Henry it was almost time for his well-deserved drink. He went into the house to wash his hands before joining his family on the veranda of Emily, Madge and Harry’s house; the guests, Robert and Lucinda, would come across from the house that had been built by Tinus Oosthuizen, Barend’s father, and left vacant when Alison and Katinka went south to search for the son who had run away in 1904.
When Henry had washed his hands in the bathroom that boasted hot and cold running water, and one of Mister Crapper’s flushing toilets, he moved into the only bedroom in his small house to change his shirt. Outside, his granddaughter Madge was picking flowers for the main house where he was about to enjoy his drink when she dropped the cut flowers and the scissors on the grass and began to run. All Henry could hear was the dogs’ commotion, his view of the matter plain to Madge but blocked to him by the wall of his bedroom. Going to the window, he leaned out as far as he could to see Madge running past Clary and Jeff with old Peregrine waving his hat in the air while standing up precariously on the box section of the wagon. Then a good-looking horse walked into view with a broad-shouldered blond stranger sitting high on its back who was leaning down to hoist his granddaughter up behind onto the horse’s rump.
“Hey,” he shouted in desperation, thinking the man was snatching his granddaughter, and about to turn the horse’s tail and bolt out of the compound through the open gate.
Ducking back into his bedroom, he ran through the house and out of the front door, to find Madge clinging to the back of the stranger who was riding forward with a big, somehow familiar grin on his face. Everyone else was coming out of the houses including the house servants, grinning from ear to ear.
“What’s going on?” he demanded.
“It’s Barend,” shouted Madge. “Barend’s come home.”
The festivities carried on well into the night. Peregrine the Ninth had been taken off by Henry Manderville for delousing which Peregrine thought quite unnecessary; anyone who lived with him was quite welcome; he had never once seen a bedbug Henry was so determined to exterminate. But like any good guest singing for supper, he went through his paraffin-laced bath, and appeared fresh and scrubbed in a smart white shirt and khaki shorts that only hid his old, knobbly knees when he stood up. It was too hot for the long socks, so there he was on the veranda in his old, faithful sandals with an endless glass of whisky. To keep up the charade, he allowed himself to totter to the back of his wagon when the grandfather clock in the dining room, which he could see through the veranda window, struck one o’clock in the morning. He even did his head-first dive onto the prepared mattress and snored immediately to get rid of Henry who was just as drunk. Peeping through a tear in the canvas, Peregrine watched him walk into one of the msasa trees, swearing profusely, and reach the safety of his one-bedroom house by the light of the moon, followed by a loud crash from inside that Peregrine wondered about. Satisfied by one of the better whisky drinks in his life, lying on his back and listening to all the night sounds of Africa, he drifted off into a dreamless sleep.
Emily, Harry’s mother, had been the first to go to bed, determined herself to ride into Salisbury the next day to send a cable to Alison, Barend’s mother, her heart soft with the pleasure she knew her words would bring.
Alone in the house they would now share with Barend, Lucinda convinced Robert St Clair there was no point in her brother staying longer at Elephant Walk. She had never seen anyone shine with so much happiness, and hoped it would last for Madge, but she wondered. Nine years away was a long time. They were both grown up, no longer children, even if she herself still remembered the crush she had had on Harry Brigandshaw when he first arrived with her brother at Purbeck Manor in Dorset. She was now going to be a spinster for the rest of her life. There were no more feminine tricks she knew to play on Harry to draw his attention.
Barend had basked in the centre of attention all night and told them selected stories from his travels, forgetting the oath of vengeance he had taken on the kopje overlooking the old Anglo-Boer War battleground at Paardeberg. There was no mention of Marie Putter, the first of many women who had shared his bed. No mention of the many men who had shared with him his hatred of the English. No mention of the Mansion House in Johannesburg, or his fight with the English men that had given him so much satisfaction and sent him running out of Johannesburg. After months with Peregrine, his English had returned to full fluency and he was the man they wanted him to be. The prodigal son who had come back to them. Twice he retold the death of the Great Elephant that Harry had once hunted and how it had stopped his wish to hunt big game forever. They drank and ate and talked and laughed. On the surface, all was well and the drinks helped. Madge had changed from the girl in his dreams to a woman, twenty-one years old. They tried all night to remind each other of their childhood together and kept up the smiles. Madge was the last before Harry to go to bed. Barend was even a little relieved to be left alone on the veranda with Harry, the pretence left alone for the night. They took their drinks out into the night where clouds were scurrying across the moon. Peregrine was snoring from his wagon, Harry’s grandfather from his house.
“They are both going to have sore throats in the morning,” said Harry.
“Yes, they are.”
For a long while they were silent, each with their thoughts.
“You’ll have to start all over,” said Harry at last. He had
drunk himself sober but knew he was going to have a hangover in the morning. “She was a kid. Now she’s a woman. Give her time… We can either split the farm or farm Elephant Walk together… You think grandfather’s tobacco might work?”
“You’ll have to build a curing barn to find out. Before the plants mature. I’ll look at Cousin George’s plans tomorrow.”
“It’s already tomorrow.”
“I’ve something to show you that might change all this and I need your help. We’ll have to go back inside.”
“I’m a bit older than you, Barend.” He spoke softly so no one in the house could hear what he was saying. There were often people lying awake, thinking. “You can’t make life do what you want it to do. I won’t ask you why you came home. Those years are your business. Glad enough to have you back. Hard as I’ve tried, I can’t imagine myself married to Lucinda, pretty as she is. I saw my parents as you did. Your father and mother to begin with. That was love. My mother’s and father’s would have lasted forever. Maybe it will. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do, is all I’m saying. Now, show me what you’ve got.”
“Do the dogs always follow you?” asked Barend.
“Even in their sleep.”
They were still talking diamonds when the sun came up in the morning and the new day began.
“Do you hate us very much?” asked Harry.
“What on earth are you talking about?”
“The English. The people who hanged your father.”
“How do you know?”
“We grew up together. Men hate for good reasons. I rather think I would have hated the same as you.”
“It’s not as bad as it was.”
“I’m glad of that. The human race has made a bloody mess of it ever since we can remember. And I rather think it’s going to do it again, only worse. There’s going to be a terrible war in Europe. A world war, I think, because everyone on earth is going to be affected.”
