Keepers of the House

by JH Fletcher

  Shongwe, at last. Anna studied the man she had come to see. He was big, heavy in the neck and shoulders, the muscles of his arms fluid beneath the dark skin, yet her first impression was not of size. His aura of power was brutal in its intensity yet this, too, was not it. What struck her most was an overwhelming sense of loneliness and grief. More: the anger of a man imprisoned by circumstance and his own nature in a cage from which only violence offered a prospect of release.

  His expression was coldly furious. He looked her up and down, taking his time about it, then shifted his eyes to Mark. ‘Why do you bring this woman here?’

  Contemptuously, as though she were of less account than a bag of old clothes dumped in a corner.

  ‘Now just a minute —’

  Mark spoke through her, his hand on her arm. ‘This is the Australian I told you about.’

  ‘They send a woman to talk to me? In Australia they think the ANC is maybe a knitting club?’

  Now she ignored the restraining hand. She spoke clearly and emphatically. ‘In Australia they think that sanctions are maybe serving no purpose, that maybe they should be abolished. When I tell them about you and the way you have just spoken, they will maybe do just that.’

  He eyed her intently, in silence. But still would not accept her. ‘You are wasting my time,’ he said to Mark. ‘Better you should take her back to Cape Town.’

  Again Anna spoke, also to Mark. ‘That settles it, then. Sanctions go.’ She turned away. After all the performance … Back outrage-stiff, she stalked to the door.

  For a moment Mark hesitated. He stared at Shongwe who looked back at him, as cold and hard as black ivory.

  ‘I do not understand you,’ Mark said. ‘She would have helped, if you’d let her. She has a lot of influence …’

  Shongwe dismissed his words loftily. ‘Women do not sit in council with men.’

  ‘Maybe it’s time they did.’

  He turned and followed Anna out of the room. No one tried to stop them.

  Adam Shongwe sat alone in the empty room.

  I do not understand you. No, he thought, you do not. How can you? You know nothing. If I had been able to explain, it would not have helped. The images are burnt into my brain forever but they are too painful to speak about to people who have not shared them. And without sharing, who can understand?

  They came with bullets and killed the children.

  Listen.

  A house. At night, we lay awake. The adults murmuring, the flicker of firelight. The rumble of the sea; we feared the sea at night, never during the day. At night the flick, flick of the waves, the phosphorescence, conjured spirits, memories.

  Poverty, yes. But warmth. A sense of belonging. A sense that we were one, in our place — not contented, nee, never that, but at least in our place.

  Until the dogs. The guns. The noise, screaming and violent, driving us out.

  Children crying.

  I was also a child. I knew the sea, the sound of waves, the shape of clouds over the water, the space, the blueness rippling to the horizon.

  The little house was home. But the water and the sky above it were our world.

  Ja.

  The guns drove us out. The dogs drove us out.

  There were trucks. The men and their dogs. I remember the snarling teeth of both dogs and men as they herded us into the trucks, the grinding of gears, the stink of petrol fumes, the open, rutted space under a blank sky. No trees, no water, no sea. A voice saying, ‘Here.’

  I stood, looking about, seeing nothing familiar. No home, no people, no birds we knew, no sound of water breaking upon the dunes. This? This is our place?

  One more thing. Onkel Sondag, Uncle Sunday we called him, descended from the old Xhosa heroes, shouting against the brilliant sky, hands clenched and raised, running at the men with guns, shouting: ‘Here? You bury us here?’

  Then the guns sounded, once, twice, and Uncle Sondag, face down in the dust, hands stretched out, clutching at the dust, once, twice, and still.

  And two boys, children, ja, they saw Onkel down in the dust, fingers slack in the dust, a smear of dust on his cheek, his outraged eye, and they also charged the guns and the guns went pop pop and the two boys squirmed in the dust and were still. And I felt my eyes grow round and fearful and I stared at the boys lying in the dust and at Uncle Sunday lying in the dust and I did not move because I was frightened.

  I did not move.

  The men in their peaked caps, taut white faces, white, white, white, with their dogs on steel leashes, tongues red between white teeth, laughed.

  Later there was the mission school; someone had decided I was bright. At eighteen I matriculated, the only pupil in all that barren plain to pass the school board examination.

  Already I knew my place in the white man’s world. Already I knew I did not intend to stay in it.

  What was taken by the sword will be reclaimed by the sword. The cries of the people will be heard. The oppressors will be put down. Their dogs, their guns, will not avail them. The blood of Onkel Sondag, the murdered children, the thousands of the dead, will be appeased.

  I, Adam Galeka Shongwe, say this.

  Anna and Mark drove back to Cape Town. Neither of them spoke, but the weight of the futile meeting lay upon them both. Back in the cottage at last, Mark looked at her.

  ‘And now?’

  She didn’t know. ‘I’ve blown it, haven’t I?’ Yet was certain she had been right. Without mutual respect they would have learned nothing from each other. She wondered how Jack Goodie would take it when he heard that she’d met an ANC activist and had then walked out before he could tell her anything.

  I’ll make up a yarn, she thought. What he doesn’t know can’t hurt him. But was angry, all the same. ‘Sanctions are supposed to help them. Why bother, if they’re all like him?’

  Yet she was not really thinking about sanctions. Strange how impressions of the man lingered. Normally, after meeting someone she didn’t like, her mind discarded him so completely that she found it difficult to remember anything about him at all. Not this time. Shongwe’s physical presence — his impressive size, the sense of power — was as vivid as though he were in the room with her still. Above all, she found herself remembering that extraordinary mixture of sorrow and anger that had revealed itself in his fierce eyes, even in the way he had dismissed her so peremptorily. Of no account, because she was a woman.

  It made her angry again to think about it. It was primitive, barbaric. Yet perhaps it was the culture and not the man that was to blame. If he had been brought up to believe such nonsense of course he would dismiss her, his cause too important to waste time with people whom he believed did not matter.

  Now she wished she had stayed in the face of his contempt, had somehow discovered a way to bludgeon him into acknowledging that she did indeed matter. By running away, she had justified his prejudices.

  Not that it would make any difference now.

  She thought: These Africans, white and black, are so different from us. Different attitudes, different backgrounds. No wonder a meeting of minds is so difficult. Yet with Pieter Wolmarans, I believe I have made at least a beginning.

  Now there was a character. Roots so deep in the soil it was surprising he could move at all. Yet seeing him, listening to him, she had caught an echo of how her great-grandmother had been; for the first time in her life had the faintest inkling of how Anneliese had come to do the terrible thing she had.

  I shall never be like them, she thought. I would not wish to be, yet perhaps by meeting Pieter, talking with him, I’ve gained a measure of understanding that I didn’t have before. As I had hoped to do with Adam Shongwe.

  How easy all these things seemed, from a distance! Reason resolving problems … But how two men as dissimilar as Pieter Wolmarans and Adam Shongwe would ever come to a settlement she had no idea. Thank God, she thought, that’s not my problem.

  She smiled at Mark, hand on his arm. ‘Thank you for trying, anyway.’


  That night Anna was passionate. Selfish, too, which normally she was not. She mounted and used him, riding and riding, hair a sweaty tangle, breath hoarse, moving her body a fraction this way, a fraction that, seeking the moist and compelling path to her own satisfaction. Back arched, head thrown back, she cried her release into the darkness — in which images flowed.

  Oudekraal. Anneliese, bereft, hatred like a fiery brand blazing in her night. Adam Shongwe, his presence as well as his skin a darkness in the curtained room of the little house. All one. And herself, with them.

  In the morning she drove back to the farm for what she suspected would be the last time. The sense of imminent departure made her more acutely aware than ever of the countryside through which she was driving. The vine terraces, the mountains, the trees clustered along the banks of rushing streams.

  Oudekraal has become part of your life.

  Perhaps it has, she thought. It is in my blood, after all.

  It was a thought that she suspected she would never have had, had she never left Australia.

  Pieter said, ‘I would like to talk to you about what happened to send Anneliese Wolmarans away from this place to Australia.’

  ‘Don’t your grandfather’s journals say anything about it?’

  ‘Only the bare facts. What happened and how it was decided that she had to go. Of course, all the district knows the story. But how she felt about things … No.’

  He paused, thinking. ‘I suppose it is too much to hope that she told you her side of it —’

  ‘She told me everything.’

  ‘I am surprised. I was sure she would have been too ashamed to do that.’

  ‘She was not ashamed at all. Until the day she died she was proud of what she’d done — although she told me once there were times when she still heard screams.’

  ELEVEN

  Sydney, 1996.

  Anna had planned to arrive at Hugo’s for her lunch with Mark Forrest at twelve-thirty and did so, on the nail. Usually she made sure that she was the last person to arrive at a restaurant, having learned over the years how important it was to make an entrance, but today she had other ideas. She sat at the table by the window overlooking the harbour, nursing a mineral water and thinking over what she wanted to say to Mark when he arrived. The announcement of a marriage break-up could hardly rate as a triumph, however positive a spin she put on it, but at least it would give her the chance to get her version of events on the table before Mostyn got in on the act.

  She had been there five minutes when Mark arrived.

  He had returned to Sydney only three years before, after the enormous success of his book. Even so, it was amazing that, in such a close-knit community, they had managed to avoid each other so completely in that time. Now, catching her first glimpse of him, knowing every inch and particle of him at once, she felt a savage jolt of recognition, of memory.

  Stop it, she told herself. That’s not what you’re here for.

  He spoke to a waiter, who pointed to her table. She watched as he threaded his way between other tables, nodding and smiling to the people he knew. After so many years, she found herself watching the shadow of the lover she had known, the actuality of the stranger she had not met. For the first time she was nervous about their meeting.

  He stopped by the table. She saw he was as unsure of himself as she was; to help things along, she stood and gave him a chaste peck on the cheek before they sat down together.

  For a while they exchanged a trivial succession of words that emphasised rather than concealed the important silences that lay between them.

  ‘Busy?’

  He shook his head ruefully. ‘Flat out. And you?’

  ‘I began to wonder if I was going to get here at all. When I left the office, my secretary was bellyaching about the number of messages I had this morning. About a million people all wanting me to ring back. I’ll have to get hold of them this afternoon, I suppose.’

  Both of them had been too busy for too many years to waste much time on chit-chat; soon Anna was telling him why she had wanted to see him.

  ‘I’ve broken up with Mostyn. I thought the Reporter might like to run a small item about it. Something on the lines that our views about a number of things have become basically incompatible and that we’ve decided it’s best to separate. For the time being, anyway. We remain good friends. That sort of thing.’

  Mark frowned dubiously. ‘Will that be enough?’

  ‘Why not? People who know us will read between the lines and the rest don’t need to be told.’

  ‘It’s nice to know that one of you doesn’t believe in washing dirty linen in public.’

  Anna looked at him. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Are you telling me you haven’t seen today’s Trumpet?’

  Stillness, like an animal scenting danger. ‘Why should I read that rag?’

  ‘Mostyn controls it, doesn’t he? It ran an interview with him this morning.’

  Anna was shocked to her boots; she knew it showed and for once didn’t care.

  ‘The bastard must have planned it —’

  Mark shrugged. ‘Mostyn’s always been a planner.’

  Until that moment, Anna had managed to convince herself that it had been a spur-of-the-moment job; it was a little hurtful to realise that it had been nothing of the kind.

  ‘It’s a highly sympathetic interview,’ Mark warned her. ‘Sympathetic to him, that is. I assumed that was why you wanted to see me.’

  ‘What’s he been saying?’

  ‘Plenty. None of it particularly complimentary. I’m amazed no one told you about it.’

  She thought of the unanswered calls and shook her head helplessly.

  ‘I brought a copy of the article with me,’ Mark told her. ‘You ought to read it. If you don’t mind being put off your lunch.’

  ‘To hell with lunch.’ Anger was a cold fist about her heart. ‘What’s he been saying?’

  ‘I’ll read you some of it.’ Mark took a slip of paper out of his inside pocket and unfolded it.

  ‘I’m quite capable of reading it myself.’ She stretched out her hand. Banner headlines: the Trumpet’s speciality.

  HARCOURT SPEAKS. SHE LEFT ME NO CHOICE TOP BUSINESSMAN TELLS OF HEARTBREAK by CAROLE GITTINGS

  Anna had met Gittings once at a party. Voracious eyes; hard, brilliantly painted mouth. One of the Trumpet’s top sleaze-merchants. She ran her eye swiftly down the printed column.

  ‘It’s the shareholders I worry about,’ Mostyn Harcourt told me. ‘They’re the ones who lose out when a key director takes her eye off the ball.’

  Queasiness was a thick clot in her throat.

  ‘A genuine interest in the well-being of people less fortunate than oneself is praiseworthy,’ he said. (Unctuous prick.) ‘It’s something that’s always interested me greatly. And, of course, the production of wealth is beneficial to the whole community.’ (He’s never given a stuff about the community.) ‘But ambition can be a terrible thing. For thirteen years my wife and I have been as close as two people can be, so I think I can claim the privilege of giving her some advice. Pursuing your personal career is all very well, Anna, but you’ve got to remember you’ve a responsibility to other people, too. I’m not trying to do her dirt,’ he told me with evident sincerity, ‘but I can’t help thinking about the little investors who’ve entrusted her with their money. To leave them in the lurch for the sake of a place in the government of this state, if that’s what she’s planning to do …’ He shrugged and smiled bravely. ‘A bit too rich for my blood, I’m afraid.’

  At the end, like a dagger waiting in ambush, this:

  Tomorrow: A woman’s rise to power, Carole Gittings continues her exposé of the boardroom — and bedroom — politics of our nation.

  Anger as hot as lava. ‘Carole Gittings obviously hasn’t forgotten who pays her wages.’

  Mark slipped the cutting back into his pocket. Smiled cynically.

  ‘You’re surely not suggesti
ng that would influence her?’

  ‘He’s her boss, for God’s sake!’

  ‘A journalist’s only boss is her conscience.’

  ‘In your dreams.’ But she smiled too, a little ruefully. She found that even after all these years Mark still had the power to make her feel good, despite the circumstances. She had been right to phone him.

  ‘The point is,’ Mark said, ‘most of the Trumpet’s readers won’t know Mostyn’s her boss. They’ll take what she writes at face value. What are you going to do about it?’

  She hesitated, unsure of her ground. ‘Publish a rebuttal?’

  He shook his head. ‘Nobody would read it. The Trumpet’s readers don’t care if the story’s true or not. If they weren’t hooked on sleaze, they wouldn’t buy the paper in the first place. The people who matter don’t buy the Trumpet, but will hear about it just the same. People like your co-directors. The last thing they’ll want is blood all over the papers. You can’t ignore it, all the same.’

  ‘Tell me what to do,’ Anna said.

  Mark thought, You have to admire her nerve.

  Tell me what to do …

  As though the years of silence had never happened. To say nothing of the incident that led up to it.

  He had always told himself that the time would come when she would turn to him again. In the early days, the pain still fresh, he had promised himself that if it ever happened he’d send her away with his boot up her backside. Those feelings were long gone; now he was simply glad they were together again, if only for the time it took them to eat their lunch.

  The truth was he had never got over her. He did not understand why but, sitting and watching her, knew it was so. I admire her, he thought, I suppose that’s it. That business with Shongwe in Africa … And what she’s done with her life since. It took guts and he’d always been a sucker for guts.

  Hardly justification for an obsession that had lasted fifteen years. Even to say it sounded ridiculous.

  On the other hand, it might have been the making of him. Tennis had promised the world but in the end had never delivered. He remembered telling Anna how journalism, instead, would push him up the ladder to fame and fortune. So it had, he supposed, but wondered how far he’d have gone if Anna and he had never met — hadn’t broken up, come to that.