by JH Fletcher
‘How did you stop them getting it?’
‘Put in another one. Kept the one they wanted in my pocket.’
‘You made a fool of that captain. He’ll be furious.’
‘Nothing he can do about it.’ He grinned at her cheerfully. She could see he believed she’d forgiven him, told herself she wasn’t going to let him off the hook quite so easily. Yet relief was drowning anger.
He came closer, still grinning. She did not move. His finger traced the line of her eyebrow, gently. She could have slapped his hand away, but did not.
She had changed out of the jeans and military-style shirt she had worn earlier — what the well-dressed woman wears to a riot — and had put on a cotton dress. Now Mark cupped her breasts through the material, staring at her. Again she did not move. His fingers moved to the line of buttons. Step by step, things followed their accustomed path, and she did nothing at all to stop him.
At last, lying together in the narrow bed, she breathed furiously in his ear. ‘Do that again, ever, I’ll kill you. Hear?’
Then passion engulfed her and there were no words at all.
In the morning, as it was getting light, Mark went out to get the papers. Anna got up after he had left. She drew the curtains and looked up at the grey-green bulk of the mountain. The sky was pellucid, the streets quiet in the dew-fresh dawn.
God, this was a beautiful place.
She was wearing a skimpy pair of panties, nothing else. She ran her hands down the length of her body, feeling the silky texture of her skin. After the traumas of the previous day, she felt good, at peace with herself and the world.
Then Mark got back and the sense of peace was gone. ‘There’s a police Landrover around the corner.’
Alarm. ‘Are they coming here?’
‘What do you think?’
‘I’d better get dressed.’
‘They’re not interested in you.’
But she was already grabbing at clothes. The doorbell rang. Mark went to open it. Tugging a comb through her reluctant hair, Anna heard voices.
‘Meneer Forrester?’
‘Forrest.’
‘May we come in, please.’ It was not a request.
Mark came back into the room, the policemen on his heels. There were two of them, a sergeant and a constable, in short sleeves, cotton trousers tucked into polished brown combat boots, pistols in canvas holsters on their hips. They seemed to fill the cottage.
Under the peaked caps, flint-cold eyes inspected her.
‘And you are?’ asked the sergeant.
As though she were a thing. Her chin went up. ‘Anna Riordan —’
Mark intervened. ‘An Australian journalist. A friend of mine.’
Friend …
The word hovered, ambiguously. But it seemed the cops were not interested in her, friendly or not. The gun muzzle eyes switched back to Mark.
‘You gave Captain Scholtz your camera yesterday,’ the sergeant said.
‘Brought it back, have you?’
A spark of anger in the hard eyes. ‘The film had not been used, Meneer.’
‘I must have just changed it.’
‘Did you tell Captain Scholtz you had just changed the film?’
‘I didn’t know what he wanted the camera for.’
‘Where is the other film?’
‘The one I used before, you mean?’
More than a spark of anger, now. ‘In Guguletu, yes.’
‘I developed it. I sent the pictures to Sydney last night.’
‘You have dispatched them already?’
‘Sure. After you blokes dropped me off, I went to my office, developed the pics and filed the story. Have to, sport. Don’t do these things straightaway, they’re useless. Must have been gone ten, time I finished.’
Mark was smiling at them, candidly. See how co-operative I’m being? All the corroborative details. Not that it would fool anybody.
This was a dangerous business. Anna held her breath.
‘You knew why Captain Scholtz wanted your camera.’
Mark shook his head. ‘He never said.’ Smiling and smiling, determined to tough it out.
That was the secret, Anna thought. Make up a story, never mind how dumb it was, and stick to it. I bet they just love dealing with foreign correspondents. She could see how furious they were now, knowing that Mark was giving them the run-around and unable to do anything about it.
As they left, the sergeant leaned towards Mark, almost but not quite touching him. No phony courtesy now.
‘You try to take the piss out of us, you’re making a big mistake. We can be good friends but we make blerry bad enemies, believe me. You should maybe remember that, Meneer Forrester.’
He sounded mean, dangerous, but it was too late for diplomacy.
‘Forrest,’ Mark said and followed them to the door.
No brownie points today.
FIVE
Mark came back, cheerfully. ‘That gave them something to think about.’
But the threatening presence of the police had stained Anna’s day. Beyond the window the sun had shifted, leaving the mountain’s mass dark and threatening. On impulse, she turned on her heel, marched into the bathroom and locked the door behind her.
I need time to think, she told herself.
There was certainly plenty to think about. She was here as a tourist. If the authorities found out the real reason for her visit there would be hell to pay. That phony press card for starters. And now Mark had told the police — the police, in a country like South Africa — that she was a journalist. Passing yourself off as something you were not, that had to be an offence, surely? One phone call was all it would take.
They’re not interested in you, Mark had said. It wouldn’t take long for that to change, if they started digging. They would discover what her real job was in Canberra, hear the name Shongwe … She could see the headlines:
AUSTRALIAN SPY UNCOVERED
Assuming they didn’t chuck her in jail instead. Back home the government would love it; they’d been dying to nail Jack Goodie for years. As for her, they’d probably ask the South Africans to keep her in jail.
It didn’t bear thinking about. She decided to think about Mark, instead. Not much joy there, either. Last night she had been so relieved to see him that, after her initial fury, she had let him talk her around. Now her anger re-surfaced. It was time they sorted a few things out.
She marched out and flung the words at him:
‘I still reckon you could have let me know when you got back to your office.’
He sighed, too obviously. ‘I’ve told you already. I couldn’t.’
‘That’s crap!’
He moved swiftly, taking her arms in his strong hands, glaring down at her. ‘It was out of the question. Don’t you see that?’
This time she would not be fobbed off so easily. ‘No, I don’t! Why was it out of the question?’
‘Because the phone’s tapped.’
She was in no mood for fairy tales. ‘Don’t be paranoid.’
‘It’s the same with every correspondent. They listen to all our conversations.’
She stared.
‘It’s true, I promise you.’
A shaker. She gestured at the phone on the side table. ‘This one, too?’
‘Of course.’ An apology for a laugh. ‘Don’t go phoning Jack Goodie, will you?’
Which was exactly what she’d thought of doing.
Still she wouldn’t let it go. ‘Half a dozen words, that’s all. So what if they heard? Where’s the harm?’
‘Because they’d have known I was at the office. At that time of night they’d have wondered why. Might have paid me a visit. Certain to, once they found out about the film. I had to get those pictures away, don’t you see? Had to.’
Anna was trapped in a world of nightmare. She did not know what to believe. Phone taps, police raids … It all seemed too fantastic. Perhaps he was making it up. Yet she could not bear to think it.
>
Please God, she prayed, don’t let him be lying to me.
‘I hate this country,’ she burst out. ‘Hate it.’
‘You’ve only seen one side of it. Politics apart, it’s a great place.’
‘The SS probably said the same about Auschwitz.’
It was nonsense and she knew it, yet the shock of yesterday was still poisoning her every perception. She stared at Mark, and there was a tightness in the air between them that had not been there before.
‘You know what I think you should do?’ he said. ‘That cousin of yours … Got his address?’
‘I got it before I came over.’
‘Why don’t you give him a call, go and see him? Go back to your roots. You never know; it might give you a completely different idea of the place.’
‘I shan’t forget what happened in the riot …’ She said it threateningly, as though afraid she might.
‘But it’ll help put it in perspective.’
‘Will you come with me?’
Mark shook his head. ‘Family’s everything to these old timers. He’ll never open up if I’m there. In any case, I must hang on here in case Shongwe tries to get in touch. Don’t mention him,’ he cautioned her. ‘Not to anyone. Under South African law, he’s a criminal.’
‘What are South African jails like?’ she wondered.
‘Not good, I imagine. Why?’
‘The way things are going, we’ve a good chance of finding out.’
The old man came out through Oudekraal’s big oak door and walked to the end of the shaded stoep. There was a rocking chair and a small table beside it with a bit of cloth, so that a drink could stand on it without marking the surface of the wood. It was Pieter Wolmaran’s special place. He went there for pleasure or, as now, whenever he was tired or troubled.
He was sixty-one years old, with grey hair that had once been yellow and blue eyes in a face weathered by years of storm and sunshine. It was a farmer’s face and the strong body with its powerful arms and shoulders was a farmer’s body. When he stood, he was well over six feet. When he sat, he filled the chair.
He sat down now, heavily, and the chair creaked and rocked beneath his weight. Both table and chair had been in the same position for more years than he could remember. From the chair he could see across the valley with its neat rows of vines to the distant fence of white palings that marked the end of the property. There were trees along the boundary, great oaks that had been there for over a hundred years, although none as old as the patriarch that leant heavily over the courtyard and that tradition said had been planted by the founder of the family almost two and a half centuries before.
Every evening when he had finished his work, he came and sat in this chair, the table with a tall drink upon it, and watched the sunset. Today was different, though, because he had much to think about.
Early that morning, with the sun barely above the eastern mountains, he had received a telephone call. Soos ’n bliksemstraal uit die helder lug — like a bolt from the blue — a young woman he had never heard of, claiming to be his cousin from Australia.
The violent leap of his heart had left him breathless. As far as he knew, no one had ever heard from Anneliese after she had run away. Now, seventy-nine years later, this stranger was claiming to be her descendant.
Well, perhaps. One read about people claiming to be what they were not. So he had been cautious.
‘And what cousin might that be?’
But he had known, oh yes. Something in his body’s response told him that this caller was genuine.
‘Anneliese Wolmarans was my great-grandmother,’ the strange voice said. ‘She married Dirk van der Merwe, and then, after the Boer War, came to Australia and changed her name to Riordan. She died in 1970, when I was fifteen. I was with her the day she died.’
Pieter’s wits were scrambled by shock but he could recognise the truth when he heard it. Not that it made him feel any better; hearing all this was like bringing back a world that he had hoped was gone forever. Like many old bachelors, he spent a lot of time thinking about the past, but as an observer or the reader of a book. Listening to this strange woman talking about her great-grandmother, it was as though Anneliese herself had returned from the grave.
Family legend had made much of the woman who, at the beginning of the century, had fled South Africa with her Irish lover, one step ahead of the law. That had been just after the Anglo-Boer War and Pieter supposed allowances had to be made for the times; even so, it was hardly an episode to boast about.
‘And why are you phoning me?’
Of course, he had known that, too.
‘I’m in South Africa on holiday,’ Anna said. ‘Anneliese told me so much about Oudekraal and the family. I wonder if it might be possible to come and meet you?’
Pieter was not a man who was easy with strangers, particularly foreigners, but did not see how he could refuse.
‘When do you wish to come?’
‘Today? If it’s convenient?’
One of the family albums had a photograph of Anneliese at the time of her marriage to Dirk van der Merwe. After he had put down the telephone, Pieter went and dug it out.
He studied it thoughtfully. She had been a spirited girl, that was obvious, with a mouth that said watch out. Even an old bachelor like himself could see how she would have had no difficulty in drawing the eyes of men, or in getting her own way when she had done it. Of course, that had been before all the troubles that had engulfed her later.
He thought for a while, then went into the room he used as a study and took down from a bookshelf the bound copy of the journal that his grandfather Deneys had written about those years.
Pieter had not read it for a long time but knew that the journal set out everything that had happened to Anneliese and her children and the crime she had committed afterwards.
‘If this Australian wants to discover her roots,’ Pieter told the room that had seen all these things, and many others, in its time, ‘she may as well hear the whole story, while she’s about it.’
He took the leather-bound journal, and the photograph, and went back outside to wait. An hour or two later, Anna arrived, driving along the dirt road from the main gate, dust blowing from the wheels of her car.
With Anneliese’s ghost beside her, Anna drove along the narrow road that wound across the valley floor. Many things would have changed since Anneliese’s day — the bitumen road, the pattern of vines extending far up the flanks of the hills — but much remained. The white tongues of the jetting streams, the stands of oaks as stalwart as the earth itself, the mountain crests flourishing their stone signature against a brilliant sky — all were as Anneliese would have remembered.
Other things, too. Anne remembered everything that Anneliese had told her about this place, the living memory of all that had happened here. In one sense Anneliese had never left this valley at all, yet in physical fact she had left it seventy-nine years before, and what Anna was seeing now was not the setting of the tales with which Anneliese had peopled her childhood. The valley she could see about her was as remote from those stories as Anna herself. It was like visiting an unknown country equipped only with an out-of-date guide book. Anna was glad; to be too close to those traumatic memories might have been unbearable.
Yet echoes remained. Changed or not, this was still the setting of Anneliese’s early life, of her father Christiaan and brother Deneys, of all the tragedies and triumphs that had marked the history of the Wolmarans clan. All had been played out here and in the great stone house that she had come so far to see.
She drove around another bend; surely she must be almost there by now? She found herself waiting with tight breath for the first glimpse of the house, yet still could see only the terraced vines, with the blue and moss-green face of the mountains beyond them.
On the far side of a spinney of oaks, a river flowed silently beneath the trailing fingers of willow trees, its placid surface reflecting the willows’ pale green light.
>
Anna thought, This must be the river she told me about, where the owner of the store saved the coloured woman and her child from the flood. Unbidden, the man’s name came to her: Sarel Henning. And the woman’s name had been Hendricks.
The alien sound of the names was like a sudden discord in a piece of music. The land itself, so peaceful, was strangely familiar, and then the harsh bark of the Dutch consonants reminded her that here everything was foreign.
Once, on a visit to England, Anna had rented a small yacht and sailed along the coast of the English Channel. Each night she had put into a different port. Now she remembered one such occasion: a small yacht harbour protected from the sea by massive stone groynes, the town spread across the slopes of the enfolding hills. It was evening; she picked up a visitor’s buoy close to the shore and tidied ship. When she finished, she sat in the cockpit and drank the one ceremonial whisky she permitted herself at the end of the day. Darkness came sifting down. The yellow lights of the town emerged stealthily about her.
She had sat in the midst of the little town that she had never visited, in which she knew neither building nor person. To be in a place yet not in it … It was an impression that Anna had never forgotten.
Now, driving down this valley that was so familiar that she might have been born here, the feeling returned, a sense that she was re-visiting a place that she had never seen before.
She rounded yet another corner, and there it was.
Before her, rising amid still more oak trees, she saw the white walls of a great house, the carved pediment framed by the wind-fluttered spread of leaves. Anneliese had told her that the oak tree beside the house was over two hundred years old, like the house and the family that had owned both all that time.
Generation upon generation of Wolmarans had moulded and changed the land, even as the land, inexorably, had moulded and changed them.
She remembered Anneliese’s voice, cracked with age, death’s grasp upon her throat. ‘Oudekraal is mine …’
Was that why she had come? To live out the fantasies of an old and dying woman? To reclaim something that had never belonged to either of them? To seek roots the lack of which had never troubled her?
