Keepers of the House

by JH Fletcher

  He was angry with her for refusing to acknowledge the unreason of what she was asking. ‘Give up what I’ve got here to work for the UN? Some pollie riding shotgun on every move I make?’

  Yet the idea drew him more than he would have imagined. Its challenge blew his mind. This, too, he resented. ‘It will never work.’

  ‘You’ll make it work! Aid covers everything. War, famine, floods, epidemics. But it’ll do more than that. It will tell the story of what people want for themselves in their own lives, the lives of their children. If we’re lucky it may even show humanity coming to grips with its responsibilities at last.’

  She was around his desk, seizing his hands in hers. ‘Please,’ she said. ‘Please come.’

  Her heat frightened him. The vision was too bright, the challenge too great. Panic was a sour lump in his throat. He drew back. ‘No. I told you before. I like to create my own opportunities.’

  ‘You said you wanted a child.’ It was her last card, thrown down upon the table to join the rest.

  ‘You said you were too old.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about that …’

  More than thinking. Ever since she and Mostyn had bought the house on the harbour, she had been interested in the work of Ruth Ballard, the famous author who had lived there before them. She had read most of her books, most recently a biography of her aunt, the extraordinary Dorrie, who had been such an influence in Ruth’s life. Dorrie had had a child while she was active in the labour movement. She had taken him to meetings, had not permitted him to stand in the way of the work she had to do.

  What was possible for Dorrie was possible for Anna Riordan. She told Mark what she had decided. ‘We can always get some help, if we need to …’

  ‘The Secretary General would never agree.’

  ‘He has agreed. Before I started. I told him up-front it was a condition.’

  He thought about it.

  ‘It’s something I have to do,’ she told him urgently. ‘But you are my life. I’ll keep the house. It’ll be there for us, when we come back —’

  ‘No,’ he said. His voice was weary but firm. ‘I don’t see how it can possibly work.’

  The future was ashes, the glory and the fire gone. She had not realised how much she had been depending upon Mark to join her in this. Now that he had refused, she wondered where she would find the courage to do it all alone.

  She had come so close to pleading with him, trying to make him see that the impossible dream would bring them together. In the end had said nothing. If he could not see it for himself, there was no hope for them. Finally, after so much hope and despair, nothing remained.

  The darkness in which I lie. It was a phrase she had read somewhere. The darkness that existed at noon as well as midnight. That filled thoughts and dreams. That drowned past and future.

  In the first despairing hours, Anna had thought she would give up. What was being asked of her, what she was asking of herself, was truly impossible. If she went on, she would destroy herself to no purpose.

  Now she knew differently. Destruction came from within; only by giving up would she permit it entry into her life. She had to go on because that would be her salvation.

  She carried two images within her. One was the face of her great-grandmother. Anneliese had undergone so much, yet had never surrendered to anything or anyone in her life, had remained ferocious and strong to the end of her days. The second was of a great house girt by mountains, the light of flares golden upon it, mounted men setting out in frosty darkness up the winding trail into the snow-capped hills. She watched them go, those dark and fleeting figures of the past. She saw Anneliese’s face and knew that with these two images she was no longer alone. The commando rode out in pursuit of its own harsh justice. Anneliese lived according to those same precepts. Anna herself was descended from both Anneliese and the giant figure of the man riding at the head of the column. As they had kept faith in what they believed so Anna, in her own day and way, would do the same.

  Work. That was where the real salvation lay. In time, it might even help her to forget.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  She visited the High Commissioner to tell him she had accepted the job.

  He nodded. ‘I am glad. For you and for the world.’

  ‘I was surprised I got it.’ Even to her own ears, she sounded more dispirited than surprised.

  He frowned. ‘I thought you would be delighted. But I see you are not. Why is that?’

  ‘Too big a challenge, maybe.’

  ‘That is not the reason.’

  He waited but she said no more. Once again she saw him with the mingled vision of past and present. She passed behind the suavely cut suit, the tastefully furnished office, into the tiny shoebox of the Guguletu room to which they had returned after their tour of the township.

  They had travelled for hours past shabby tenements, tin shacks, choked and squalid alleyways. They had talked to a hundred people. The elderly, the maimed, the poor with patient, suffering faces. Young studs, strangers to patience, whose hating eyes stripped the clothes from her white body and despised her as they did so. She had listened while Shongwe and others had spelt out why sanctions must stay.

  Now they were back in the little room. Alone. She was exhausted. More than anything she needed rest but was aware as never before of the vitality of the man burning like a remorseless fire in every fibre of his body.

  Never in her life had she felt such desire.

  He looked at her. He had only to lift a finger and she would go to him gladly. She waited, breathless, surrendering herself to his will.

  He stood up. ‘I shall get someone to take you back.’

  What Mark suspected had never happened yet, in her imagination as in his, it had indeed happened with an intensity that she had never forgotten. In a sense I lied to Mark, she thought. Had Adam willed it, I would have given myself to him gladly. How can I possibly pretend that nothing happened at all?

  Now she sat decorously, watching him, and knew that he, too, was remembering that moment of surrender and rejection. Perhaps it had been no more than reaction to everything she had seen and heard, perhaps not. It no longer mattered. Neither of them would ever speak of it.

  ‘I have to thank you,’ she said. Once again. But that she did not say.

  ‘Do it well,’ he said. ‘That will be my thanks. Then perhaps, in the future, we can talk again. In an official capacity.’

  One favour for another; of course.

  ‘I shall look forward to it,’ she said.

  Once again she phoned Mark. ‘I’m leaving for South Africa in the morning. Then on to Geneva. I must see you before I go.’

  At first he refused. ‘It will do no good —’

  This she would not accept. ‘You say you love me, yet you won’t see me, even to say goodbye?’

  So they met. Not for a meal — neither of them could have borne that — but for coffee. A cafe, anonymous and busy-slick, with varnished furniture and people in and out all the time. Surely, in such a place, they could meet and be cordial, wish each other well in parting, without pain?

  They could not; there was such anguish in the meeting. For minutes they sat and said nothing. Only their eyes spoke. Finally, words burst from him like a grenade. ‘It’s impossible. I told you.’

  She sat, and looked, and said nothing. Which provoked more anger still.

  ‘You told me yourself. You’ve got to be out of your mind to do this job. Well, I don’t believe I’m out of my mind, and I’m not willing to chuck everything away for nothing.’

  ‘Is that how you see the idea of spending our lives together? As nothing?’

  ‘That’s what it would come to. Because these fantasies of yours would end up destroying us both. It would be impossible.’

  ‘I don’t accept that. It wouldn’t be easy, nothing worthwhile is, but that doesn’t mean it would be impossible. And at least we’d have the satisfaction of knowing that we hadn’t just turned our backs.’
r />   Anna did not know what, if anything, she had hoped from this meeting but saw now that she might as well not have bothered. Mark had made up his mind.

  ‘We’ve tried twice, now, and it hasn’t worked. Maybe it’s my fault, maybe I don’t want the challenge, but in the end that makes no difference. I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I shall stay here, do my job, try to make a new life for myself. Once again.’ He clenched his fists as they lay upon the table. His despair threatened her like a club. ‘I shall be content.’

  Nicki saw Mostyn at a function at the Opera House. They sailed past each other like ships trailing icebergs in their wake, eyes fixed on the middle distance.

  She was glad; it showed Mostyn wanted no more to do with her than she with him. More than anything she wanted to forget how she’d opened up to him. How he’d laughed.

  A lifetime would be too short. Thank God she didn’t need him, that was all.

  Because he was dished. She’d made sure of that when she’d tipped off the journalist, that time after …

  She didn’t want to think about that time.

  The whole town was talking about how Mostyn Harcourt had got his comeuppance at last. Nobody knew where the rumours had come from, but there had been plenty willing to confirm them once the word was out. The great Hatchet on his knees to his ex-wife, imploring her to pull his chestnuts out of the fire.

  No one came back from a humiliation as dire as that. He would stagger on, in a wounded-duck sort of way, but for a man like Mostyn it would be no more than a living death. It would be a thousand times worse, knowing that without Anna’s help he would not have had even that.

  Thank God I got away from him when I did, she thought. At least I’m still a free agent.

  And went looking for her partner.

  ‘It is an appropriate thing that we do now,’ Pieter Wolmarans said.

  He stood at Anna’s side as they gazed across the open grave, the symmetrical rows of vines, to the mountains overlooking the valley. They were huge, blue, silent. Among them Anna caught a momentary glimpse of a slowly moving speck gleaming in sunlight, a great bird circling.

  ‘I often ask myself what those hills would tell us if they could,’ Pieter said. ‘They have seen good people and bad. And all the rest of us who are neither or perhaps a bit of both.’

  Anna had brought from Australia the urn containing the ashes that had remained after the cremation that Anneliese had insisted upon. Archer had made up some story about cremation being contrary to God’s will. Anything to avoid expense but for once Margaret had stood up to him.

  ‘That’s what she wanted, and that’s what she’ll get.’

  As always, Archer had suckled his grievance at the mouth of a bottle but had been unable to change her mind.

  Now Anneliese was coming home.

  Anna opened the urn and, bending, emptied its contents upon the fecund earth.

  ‘Maybe we should say something,’ Pieter wondered uneasily.

  He had wanted a dominee to bless the interment but Anna had told him that Anneliese would not have wished it. He had been dubious; Anneliese had died when Anna was only fifteen, how could she possibly know what her great-grandmother had wanted? Anna had stood firm and won. She was convinced that she was right, knew that at that moment, in that place, she was very close to her.

  ‘My spirit will not rest …’

  It could rest now.

  ‘Say something,’ Pieter said again.

  The opening in the earth was chocolate brown against the bright grass, the tawny vines reaching terrace by terrace up the hillside. There had been another grave in Anneliese’s life, the wound in the yellow earth that she had mentioned so often, the place where the children of her marriage had lain with other victims of that terrible war. There had been no hope that they might eventually be brought home to this valley surrounded by mountains. Their home was the earth, without name or anything to show where they lay. No one could do anything about that but Anneliese, twenty-eight years after her death, had reached sanctuary at last.

  Across the valley the sunlight lay upon the tranquil hills and struck sparks of light from the tears filling her eyes.

  ‘Welcome home,’ Anna said.

  Shovels rasped as two of Oudekraal’s workmen filled in the hole. Around them the graves of the Wolmarans lay like the roots of a stone tree. They stood for a moment, heads bowed, then walked side by side to the house.

  ‘I shall arrange a headstone,’ Pieter said. ‘It is important there should be a headstone.’

  The family Bible, huge, worn, its cover edged with brass, lay open upon a table in the voorkamer. Pieter walked over and studied it silently. Looking over his shoulder, Anna saw a list of names, many of them very old and faded and, at the bottom, the Afrikaans text he had written there.

  ‘What does it say?’

  ‘Anneliese Riordan, formerly van der Merwe, died Australia 14 December 1970, buried at Oudekraal 10 October 1998.’

  Again Anna felt like weeping. ‘That is kind of you. But the name Riordan … They were never married, you know.’

  ‘In the sight of God,’ he said, and smiled. ‘There is more.’

  ‘What?’

  He cleared his throat and read again. ‘Anna Riordan, born Australia —’

  Now she did weep. ‘Others before me,’ she managed. ‘My mother, grandfather —’

  ‘You are the one who came home,’ he said. ‘In the days when the keepers of the house shall tremble. It is from the Bible.’

  ‘I do not understand what you mean.’

  For a moment he pondered. ‘No trembling now,’ he said at length. ‘Thanks to you.’

  ‘I did nothing.’

  ‘You saved Oudekraal.’

  It was, indeed, as simple as that.

  ‘I could never have done it without Adam Shongwe. He put the boot in with the State President, got that fellow Tembe sorted out.’ She smiled. ‘They sent him to Paraguay. Would have made it Greenland, he said, but apparently there is no legation in Greenland.’

  ‘I have named Oudekraal for you in my will,’ Pieter said.

  She frowned. ‘There is no need …’

  ‘There is a need.’

  ‘But I have commitments. I won’t be able to live here. Who will look after the place?’

  ‘Nico Walsh is a good manager. Good winemaker, too. He has done more to run the place than I, these several years.’

  ‘Would he be willing?’

  ‘Why not? It is his home, too.’

  ‘That quotation from the Bible,’ Anna said. ‘How does it go on?’

  ‘I’ll read it for you.’ Pieter’s gnarled hands turned the pages of the Book until he reached the place he was seeking.

  ‘Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain —’

  ‘Not what you’d call cheerful, is it?’

  ‘There is more.’ Again he read. ‘Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.’

  Quietly he closed the book.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ she said for the second time. ‘What does it mean?’

  ‘It means life. Endless renewal. A circle, on and on forever. That is what immortality is. What love is.’

  She paid a courtesy visit to the State President and his new wife, then flew out to Geneva. An official car drove her from Cointron airport to her offices overlooking the lake.

  Over the next days, the grinding weight of her new job descended upon her. It was proving impossible, indeed, but it was the impossibility that made it worthwhile. She worked herself and her aides to exhaustion so that at night, what there was of it, she slept. But it was not good sleep and each morning, when she awoke, her first thoughts were of all the things in her life that might have been and were not.

  She remembered what Pieter Wolmarans had said about the keepers of the house. He had talked about a circle going on and on forever, symbolising immortality a
nd love. Where were the love and immortality in her own life?

  A month after her arrival; a morning like any other, clouds hanging above the lake. She got up, dressed, had a telephone conference with New York while she breakfasted on croissants and black cherry jam. She read the latest reports on the Australian aid worker who, as he had threatened, was attempting to white-ant her before she had really got started.

  That out of the way, at least for the moment, she was driven to her office. Where her secretary, smooth and dark and serene, very efficient, met her.

  ‘A man,’ she said. ‘He has been here over an hour. I warned him you’d be late, but he said he’d wait.’

  Anna nodded, walked into the lobby leading to her office. Stopped.

  Mark.

  He said, ‘I’m on my way to London. Thought I’d stop off, see how you were going.’

  Anna was conscious of her hands. Her breathing was giving her trouble. ‘I’m going fine.’

  ‘The BBC’s making a series out of Cry from a Dark Continent,’ he explained.

  ‘That’s good. Good.’

  ‘They’re planning a big budget feature. There’s been quite a lot of interest in the States …’

  She did not know what to say. ‘Next thing you’ll be a star,’ she managed. ‘Too proud to know us.’

  He nodded absently, prowling about the office, touching this, lifting that, never settling. His uneasiness set her nerves on fire.

  ‘I’m surprised you were able to get away from Sydney.’ She attempted a feeble joke. ‘Don’t newspaper editors work any more?’

  ‘The Board wouldn’t have a bar of it. I told them what they could do, so they got hold of Schneider in New York. He said I’d be letting him down. Made it personal. You know how he operates.’

  She knew very well; had seen the media tycoon in operation more times than she cared to remember.

  ‘When that didn’t work, he said he’d make it his business to see I never worked in the industry again. I’m rather afraid he meant it.’

  For a moment she’d been hoping, not daring to breathe. Now, for the zillionth time in their relationship, knew there was no hope.