But when Silver and his bride appeared, one look was enough to see how unnecessary the fuss had been. She opened the door of the car before it stopped, leaped out, fell on hands and knees like a cat, and ran on bare feet up the drive to throw her arms around the old man’s neck, lifting her feet off the ground and swinging like a child. It was as if she had known him all her life.
“You are Captain Browne. I’m Mrs. Silver.” Her voice, he thought, was like water running over pebbles in sunshine. And he thought too how absurdly young she looked to be a Mrs. Anything; and although he said nothing, the tips of his thought must have brushed against her, because she laughed and added, “But you’ll have to call me Lilibet. When I am fifty, then you may call me ‘Missus.’ ” She drew a deep breath. “It is so good to see you in the flesh. But, Captain, I have the advantage over you, because I’ve seen you already in everything else—in everything but flesh, I mean.” And she looked at the captain’s nicotine-stained skin, at the wrinkles and the veins, as if she ached to kiss them. “Because I’ve heard about nothing but you all the way from England. So of course I love you already. But you’ll have to wait before you love me.”
Wordlessly, he took her hand, bowed over it, kissed it. She was wrong. He had loved her from that second.
Weeks later, Browne watched her as she scooped him a mug of homemade soup from a tin bucket. (The bucket, he noted, was one he had bought for chilling hypothetical wine bottles. This seemed a far better use.) It was odd that the men on the farm spoke of her as beautiful, because she was not, or not really. The skin of her forehead was often spotty, and her teeth were not straight, and her features were too large for her face. Moreover, as if unable to walk slowly through a life so tremendously exciting, she ran everywhere and as a result was always bruised and scarred. Scarred, they said, but never scared. She was destined for great adventures.
Lilibet Silver, they said, knew many things. She knew how to fold the morning newspaper into a hat for the captain; she knew how to patch up the captain’s truck with carpet and saucepan lids; she knew how to catch and cook the cane rats that ran wild in the field. She knew how to weave glass beads into bracelets that came halfway up her arms, which she pulled off and gave to strangers whose faces she liked. She knew how to recite poetry so that her listeners blinked and sniffed behind their teacups, how to cut her own hair with the rusty kitchen scissors, how to outswim the trout in the lake, how to swan-dive off overhanging branches, how to supplement coffee with chicory and make redbush tea, how to fall in love with every man she met and stay effortlessly faithful to Will’s father.
Lilibet knew how to dig with an improvised spade, and which days to work in the vegetable patch. Things grew for her. Within a month of her arrival, the scrubby, dusty flowerbeds in the formal garden tumbled and bubbled into life. There were birds everywhere, lizards everywhere; Lilibet knew how to sit in absolute stillness for hours on end, so that dragonflies and bees would perch on her neck and shoulders. It was never too late, she said, to turn a living thing around, and a garden was the most living of things. Within two months there was jasmine on every wall, and flame lilies along the veranda. Lilibet knew how to charm buds from roses that hadn’t flowered for years. When Wilhelmina arrived, Lilibet knew the exact knot that would fix her baby to her back with a swathe of red cloth.
But Lilibet did not know how to remember the Nivaquine malarial tablets during the rainy season, and she did not know how to rest and recover. Will, aged five, stumbled into her bedroom to find her father standing clutching fistfuls of the sack curtain, tears streaming down his face. His mouth was stretched open, soundlessly, and tears fell onto his tongue. Outside the window was a pool of vomit.
Neither could speak. That was the day that a silence settled on the pair of them, and they were bound close by it. Will felt, in that moment, too small to face such misery, but she knew that she would have to expand, now, with a terrible rush, to fill the empty space.
PERHAPS A SUSCEPTIBILITY TO MALARIA, rather like a susceptibility to love, is contagious. Will thought it must be. Seven years after his wife’s death, William Silver started running a temperature. The next day, he collapsed on the packed earth floor of the stable and was put to bed by Lazarus, who was suddenly indignant and motherly and stern. “You shoulda said something,” he scolded as he poured water from a tin mug onto a flannel. “Who’s going to look after the farm now, eh? You got to stay still now, till the captain comes back with the doctor. Don’t you move.” Will watched him sponge at her father’s forehead with thick fingers, more gentle now than she had ever seen him. “You got to get better, Mr. Silver.” Get better, yes, and do it better than she did. Will could see the words pulsating, unspoken, in the air.
But Captain Browne did not return with a doctor. Instead, running down the drive to meet the doctor’s little Mazda, Will saw only the captain’s old truck, the roar of the engine drowning the lament of the bullfrogs and grasshoppers. Through the fumes that clouded the night air, Will thought she could see a sleek female head. Will hesitated, standing on one bare foot, feeling suddenly sick. In astonishment she looked down at her hand, and saw it shaking, as from the passenger seat emerged a brisk ankle and a heeled shoe; a long, muscular calf; followed slowly by the neck and head of a woman who could only be Cynthia Vincy.
Captain Browne smiled nervously. “Will, this is Cynthia. Cynthia, this is Will; Wilhelmina, of course. Not the Will that you’ve come for. . . . Though, I don’t mean . . . I’m sure this Will will also be delighted. I mean . . .” He grew confused in the face of the woman’s arched eyebrows, and began again. “Cynthia has come to help us with your father, Will. She’s a trained nurse.”
Cynthia smiled down at Will. The smile marred the woman’s perfect poise; it was a square smile, like a letter box. Cynthia was aware of this, and rarely smiled.
“It doesn’t sound too serious a case, from what Charlie has told me,” said Miss Vincy. (Charlie! thought Will in horror. She called him Charlie! The captain was Charlie to one man only, her father; to her, he was sir, or Captain. Charlie!)
“These sharp attacks are the least dangerous; it’s the chronic cases you need to watch. I told Charlie there’ll be no need for the expense of a doctor. Don’t look so sullen, my sweetie! Just money matters; nothing for children to worry about.”
“Oh.” Will stared up at Cynthia, at her neatly painted doll face, and understood why she’d so hated the idea of her. She’d been right to hate her. Cynthia was shoddy.
“We’ll have him up in no time, won’t we?” said Cynthia, making what was evidently a capable nurse face. But that was a pointless sort of sentence, Will thought. There was no such thing as “no time.” She tried to lower her voice so that only the captain would hear: “I think, hey, Captain . . . I don’t think . . .” Will’s tongue was suddenly too big, and she tried again. “Do you think Dad—my father—will want this”—this plastic woman, she’d been burning to say—“this Miss Vincy for a nurse? . . . Sir,” she added.
Cynthia gave Will a We understand each other smile. “I know how you feel, Will. But I am fully capable to deal with this, I promise. And there’s lots that only a woman can do in a house”—she looked sideways at Captain Browne—“to make the men comfortable. Isn’t that right, Will?”
No, it was not. Will fought the need to hit her, to set the dogs on her, to tear at her smart belted dress. No, her whole body cried. No, no! We don’t want to be comfortable. Go away. We just want to be as we were: well, and healthy, and happy. We are so happy. . . .
But the captain looked so imploringly at Will, and he looked so frail, so oddly desperate for her approval, that Will could not move any muscle but her neck, in a quiet nod.
“Yes,” she said.
“Yes, what?” said Cynthia Vincy.
What, what? Will looked down at the mosquito bites on her arm for help, and down at her long-toed muddy feet. “Yes, ma’am?”
“Yes, ma’am! That’s right, Will! I like the old-fashioned forma
lities, don’t you, Charlie?”
And Captain Browne, caught in the fierce beam of Will’s meaning and miserable eyes, smiled a ghastly smile and led the woman inside to the darkness of the sick man’s room.
That was the first day. On the third (which to Will’s bewilderment was sunlit and full of the smell of the jasmine, as if there were no father delirious behind the sacking curtains), Cynthia began to make herself felt. Simon called to Will from atop the stone wall that wrapped round the captain’s formal garden. He was writhing with laughter and with anger and barely able to keep his balance.
“She’s mad, Will,” he said. “The bad sort of mad. Tedias met her first. She calls him Thomas. She says she can’t pronounce ‘Tedias.’ ” And Simon made a gesture to express what he thought of that. “So I thought, okay, I’ll go look at the captain’s madam. And I ran down, from the fields, fast, and I couldn’t stop, and she was out picking flowers and I ran into her, boom! And she was mad like a hornet, mad like a whole nest of stingers, Will, man! And she’s huge, Will—a proper zisikana, this huge woman! And she said she caught me in the private garden again—private garden, Will! Like it was hers, or something—she’d get the boss—that’s what we all got to call the captain now—to beat me. And then, ja? She smiled, and said I could tell my little friends that the same applies to them, and I told Peter and he said we’d put mambas in her bed, but I dunno how we’d catch them—”
He had been telling his story fast, with gestures, miming his collision, boom!—crash—but Will thought he looked suddenly darker, subdued, and he screwed up his face.
“I don’t like her, Will. I . . . hope you’ll be okay. And your baba, your dad, too? I’m gonna have to stay this side the wall for a while, ja—but remember, any trouble, and we’ll get Tedias and Peter and all that lot, and we’ll pull down the fence and set the bushdogs on her. Ja? Okay? So—no worries, my madman.” But Simon’s bravado was breaking down in patches, and he sniffed and frowned and tried to grin and then, defeated, dropped behind the wall. Will was left with a picture of a boy crouching, ill at ease, with unknown laws sweeping in on him.
On the fourth day, Will knew there was a fear in the house. The doctor’s Mazda arrived at midnight, and did not leave until the next afternoon. As soon as the car drove off, Will ran to see her father, clutching a fistful of cannas and roses and grass, a bouquet from the bush, but Cynthia had locked the door from the inside. Will hammered on the heavy dark wood.
“Hello? Can I come in? Hello? Papa? Dad? Please let me in, hey! Miss Vincy, ma’am, please, I’ve got to, please, I’ve got to come in. My dad needs to see me.”
On the other side of the door, Cynthia was winding herself into a fit of indignation. Dad needs to see me. It was sad, deluded. How would a scrap of a girl, not reached puberty, know what a sick man needed? Cynthia opened the door a crack. Will had not known brown eyes could look so cold.
“Will!” she hissed, “Your father is asleep. But if you continue this noise, he will not be for long. If he doesn’t sleep, he won’t recover. And it will be your fault.” She hadn’t meant to say that, but it shot out, venomously—snake words. “Do you want to kill him, Wilhelmina?”
On the fifth day, Cynthia herself found the door locked. Pressing her ear to the keyhole, she heard the voices of the captain and of Silver. The captain’s voice was gruff, his breathing ragged at the edges.
“Of course I’ll keep her safe, Will. You know I will. That girl . . . she’s my sunlight.”
William Silver laughed, weakly. “Would have thought you had enough of that here, Charlie,” he said.
But the captain blinked tears from his milky eyes. “She’s sunlight and she’s water and earth,” he said. “And she’s fearless. Remember when I was chewed by that hyena? Remember the blood? The shrieking? Any other child would have quailed, William; no other girl would have done what she did and washed and bandaged and sung like that. She’s . . . William, if I’d had a girl, and she’d been an ounce as valiant and strong as yours, I’d be dying happy.”
Silver’s face was rigid with pain, but his voice smiled. “Ach, Charlie, I am dying happy.” There was a pause, while William fought for air. “But, Charles . . . I wish I’d had longer . . . I’d have left her with . . . a mother, or a home, or . . . a future, or . . .”
“Sus, Will! That’s nonsense, hey? Ja? Ach, William, my boy, Bill, Will, what are you talking about? As long as I have the farm, your girl’ll have a home here. And I hope to have it to my dying day. And as for a mother . . .” His voice trailed off. Cynthia pressed herself so hard against the door that its grain was imprinted on her cheek. She thought she heard a muttered “. . . Miss Vincy . . .” But it may have been phlegm, a cough, a wheeze from an ugly old man.
The captain lifted his voice again, unnaturally hearty. “Anyway, Lazarus asked after you, William. I told him he could come in later. The baccy crop’s looking good, ja, and one of the mombies calved this morning. Lucian said . . .”
Cynthia Vincy had no interest in the staff. She stole away.
• • •
On the seventh day, Will was sitting by the edge of the stone pool, building pyramids of pebbles and dangling her feet in the water. Captain Browne came to find her, calling her name in a voice too weak to echo. He was thinner than ever, and his skin no longer seemed to fit. Will could see long loops of it hanging from his chin, covered with week-old stubble.
He crouched down beside her.
“Howzit, Will?”
“Fine, Captain. Fine, thanks.” Will was lying, and she knew she did it badly. “And you, sir?”
“Ja, not bad, Will, not bad.” Then he drew breath, and looked properly at the tense, honest little body next to his. The wrists looked like skin-covered glass, terrifyingly fragile. In the thin face the girl’s brown eyes were bush-baby round, and her clothes had not been changed for a week. It hadn’t seemed important. They fitted badly, for Will too had lost weight; for seven nights, she had shuddered in the dark, waiting, hoping, fiercely praying—a long stream of half-conscious words. “Please, God, please, Lord, God, I need you now, God, please.” Praying that her father would open the door, look in, whisper her name. He hadn’t come.
The captain laid a hand on Will’s knee. “Listen, little Cartwheel. Your father . . . it’s not just a short attack. William’s ill, ja? Seriously ill. Very, very seriously ill.” The captain looked at Will, a miserable look from under bushy brows. “Do you understand what I mean, Will?” he asked.
Yes, Will understood. And it was as though the farm and the trees and the pool had gone up in sudden flames.
“Ja,” she said. “I understand,” and as she said it, she felt so weary and tight and small that to drop down, fainting or asleep or dead, would have been a relief. But you couldn’t faint by choice.
“You okay, chooky?” The captain had never seen anyone so white.
Will tried to nod, but her head wouldn’t move. Through the ringing in her ears she could hear a terrible nothingness; no crickets sang. Will tried to speak then, in fear of this new brand of hush, tried to say “Ja, I am. I will be. We’ll be okay, sir,” or just “Yes, Captain Browne,” but the words got trapped in the back of her throat, mixed up with vomit, and Will could only mutter, choked from behind closed lips, and touch his knee. And then she ran, hard, tripping over a spade, ran out, past the limits of the formal garden, to be sick, wretchedly, behind a bush.
Lazarus, passing ten minutes later, found her crouched on her haunches, weeping hacking sobs, roaring, spitting, crying deep rivers of tears down a dusty face. Wordlessly, but murmuring soft noises, he gathered her up and took her in strong arms to his own fire, where she wept for hours, as though her father were already dead.
So when the time came to actually say good-bye, Will was strong again, and only her awkward, passionate love for her father was with them in the darkened room—no despair, and no strange doctors, was allowed. She kissed the frighteningly thin hands, and cheeks, and forehead and chin and lips an
d eyes—eyes that were open, at half-mast, and very tired.
“You look after yourself, chooky,” William Silver whispered.
Will stared at his hand, very hard. The ache in her nose and the roof of her mouth meant tears were coming. Don’t you dare cry, she told herself fiercely. No tears. No hullabaloo. Just love. Not tears.
“Ja, Dad,” she said quietly. “Will do.”
“And be good, my girl. Always goodness. Be brave. Be happy, okay? Courage, chook, ja?”
“Yes, Dad. Of course.” Her voice was wobbly, and she licked a single tear off her upper lip. It tasted of salt, and love.
“Good, and brave, and happy, little Cartwheel. Ja?”
“Ja,” said Will. Her father tugged at her arm, and she bent forward. He planted one single long kiss on her forehead.
“Ja,” said William Silver.
After that, neither spoke. There was nothing they needed to say. Will knelt by the head of the bed, one hand on her father’s bare chest, feeling the beating of his heart for hours and hours. Or perhaps only minutes. It was odd, she thought, but she couldn’t feel time. Maybe the timelessness of death was here, in the room. But eventually, her dad’s eyes closed, in sleep, or because he was dead, she wasn’t sure, and she got up, and shut the door behind her, and picked up the rucksack she had packed with dried beef and flatbread and raw mealie, and, coming to the kitchen door, climbed over it, so that it would not squeak—she could not have borne that squeak—and without stopping for a saddle, she mounted Shumba and rode out into the bush.
WILL RETURNED A WEEK LATER. She was hot and dry and resolved to new goodnesses, in her father’s memory.
She was also newly thin, so bony she could almost smell her own marrow, and very hungry.
She stroked Kezia, who had scampered, shrieking with excitement, to greet her. “Food, Kezi!” she said as they ran up the path. “Let’s get us some food. What shall we have? Raisins? Bread? Cheese . . . ?”
Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms Page 4
