But this girl didn’t have the averted face of the wives who had made up their minds they wouldn’t let their husbands buy. Naas knows what interests the ladies. They don’t notice if guttering is rotted or electrical wiring is old and unsafe. What they care about is fitted kitchen units and whether the new suite will look right in what will be the lounge. When he pointed out the glassed-in stoep that would make a nice room for sewing and that, or a kiddies’ playroom (but I don’t suppose you’ve got any youngsters? – not yet, ay) she stood looking over it obediently through her big round glasses as if taking instructions. And the lounge, a bit original (two small rooms of the old farmhouse from the twenties knocked into one) with half the ceiling patterned pressed lead and the other ‘modernised’ with pine strips and an ox-wagon wheel adapted as a chandelier – she smiled, showing beautiful teeth, and nodded slowly all round the room, turning on her heel.
Same thing outside, with the husband. He was interested in the outhouses, of course. Nice double shed, could garage two cars – full of junk, naturally, when a place’s been empty, only a boy in charge – Kleynhans’s old boy, and his hundred-and-one hangers-on, wife, children, whatnot . . . ‘But we’ll get that all cleaned up for you, no problem.’ Naas shouted for the boy, but the outhouse where he’d been allowed to live was closed, an old padlock on the door. ‘He’s gone off somewhere. Never here whenever I come, that’s how he looks after the place. Well – I wanted to show you the room but I suppose it doesn’t matter, the usual boy’s room . . . p’raps you won’t want to have anybody, like Mrs Klopper, you’ll rather do for yourselves? Specially as you from overseas, ay . . .’
The young husband asked how big the room was, and whether, since the shed was open, there was no other closed storage room.
‘Oh, like I said, just the usual boy’s room, not very small, no. But you can easy brick in the shed if you want, I can send you good boys for building, it won’t cost a lot. And there’s those houses for pigs, at one time Kleynhans was keeping pigs. Clean them up – no problem. But man, I’m sure if you been doing a bit of farming in England you good with your hands, ay? You used to repairs and that? Of course. And here it doesn’t cost much to get someone in to help . . . You know’ (he cocked his head coyly) ‘you and your wife, you don’t sound like the English from England usually speak . . . ? You sound more like the English here.’
The wife looked at the husband and this time she was the one to answer at once, for him. ‘Well, no. Because, you see – we’re really Australian. Australians speak English quite a lot like South Africans.’
The husband added, ‘We’ve been living in England, that’s all.’
‘Well, I thought so. I thought, well, if they English, it’s from some part where I never heard the people speak!’ Naas felt, in a blush of confidence, he was getting on well with this couple. ‘Australian, that’s good. A good country. A lot like ours. Only without our problems, ay.’ (Naas allowed himself to pause and shake his head, exclaim, although it was a rule never to talk politics with clients.) ‘There’s a lot of exchange between sheep farmers in Australia and here in South Africa. Last year I think it was, my brother-in-law had some Australian farmers come to see him at his place in the Karoo – that’s our best sheep country. He even ordered a ram from them. Six thousand Australian dollars! A lot of money, ay? Oh but what an animal. You should see – bee-yeu-tiful.’
In the house, neither husband nor wife remarked that the porcelain lid of the lavatory cistern was broken, and Naas generously drew their attention to it himself. ‘I’ll get you a new one cheap. Jewish chappies I know who run plumbing supplies, they’ll always do me a favour. Anything you want in that line, you just tell me.’
In the garden, finally (Naas never let clients linger in a garden before entering a house on a property that had been empty a long time – a neglected garden puts people off), he sensed a heightened interest alerting the young couple. They walked round the walls of the house, shading their eyes to look at the view from all sides, while Naas tried to prop up a fallen arch of the wire pergola left from the days when Mrs Kleynhans was still alive. To tell the truth the view wasn’t much. Apart from the koppie behind the house, just bare veld with black, burned patches, now, before the rains. Old Kleynhans liked to live isolated on this dreary bit of land, the last years he hadn’t even let out the hundred acres of his plot to the Portuguese vegetable farmers, as he used to. As for the garden – nothing left, the blacks had broken the fruit trees for firewood, a plaster Snow White had fallen into the dry fishpond. It was difficult to find some feature of interest or beauty to comment on as he stood beside the couple after their round of the house, looking across the veld. He pointed. ‘Those things over there, way over there. That’s the cooling towers of the power station.’ They followed his arm politely.
Of course, he should have suspected something. Unlikely that you could at last get rid of the Kleynhans place so easily. When they were back in town in Klopper’s Eiendoms Beperk and Juffrou Jansens had brought the necessary documents into his office, it turned out that they wanted to rent the place for six months, with the option of purchase. They didn’t want to buy outright. He knew it must be because they didn’t have the money, but they wouldn’t admit that. The husband brushed aside suggestions that a bond could be arranged on a very small deposit, Naas Klopper was an expert in these matters.
‘You see, my wife is expecting a child, we want to be in the country for a while. But we’re not sure if we’re going to settle . . .’
Naas became warmly fatherly. ‘But if you starting a family, that’s the time to settle! You can run chickens there, man, start up the pigs again. Or hire out the land for someone else to work. In six months’ time, who knows what’s going to happen to land prices? Now it’s rock bottom, man. I’ll get you a ninety-per-cent bond.’
The girl looked impatient; it must have been embarrassment.
‘She – my wife – she’s had several miscarriages. A lot depends on that . . . if this time there’s a child, we can make up our minds whether we want to farm here or not. If something goes wrong again . . . she might want to go back.’
‘To Australia.’ The girl spoke without looking at the men.
The Kleynhans place had been on Klopper’s Eiendoms Beperk’s books for nearly three years. And it seemed true what the husband said, they had money. They paid six months’ rent in advance. So there was nothing to lose, so far as Mathilda Beukes, née Kleynhans, who had inherited the place, was concerned. Naas took their cheque. They didn’t even want the place cleaned up before they moved in; energetic youngsters, they’d do it themselves. He gave them one last piece of advice, along with the keys. ‘Don’t keep on Kleynhans’s old boy, he’ll come to you with a long story, but I’ve told him before, he’ll have to get off the place when someone moves in. He’s no good.’
The couple agreed at once. In fact, the husband made their first and only request. ‘Would you see to it, then, that he leaves by the end of the week? We want him to be gone before we arrive.’
‘No-o-o problem. And listen, if you want a boy, I can get you one. My garden boy knows he can’t send me skelms.’ The young wife had been stroking, again and again, with one finger, the silver-furred petal of a protea in an arrangement of dried Cape flowers Naas had had on his desk almost as long as the Kleynhans place had been on his books. ‘You love flowers, ay? I can see it! Here – take these with you. Please; have it. Mrs Klopper makes the arrangements herself.’
A baboon; unlikely.
Although the medical profession tacitly disapproves of gratuitous publicity among its members (as if an orthopaedic surgeon of the eminence of Dolf van Gelder needs to attract patients!) and Dr van Gelder refused an interview with a fat Sunday paper, the paper put together its story anyway. The journalist went to the head of the Department of Anthropology at the Medical School, and snipped out of a long disquisition recorded there on tape a popular account, translated into mass-circulation vocabulary, of the differences in t
he skeletal conformation and articulation in man, ape and baboon. The old girls yellowing along with the cuttings in the newspaper group’s research library dug up one of those charts that show the evolutionary phases of anthropoid to hominid, with man an identikit compilation of his past and present. As there was no photograph of whatever the doctors had seen, the paper made do with the chart, blacking out the human genitalia, but leaving the anthropoids’. It was, after all, a family paper. WILL YOU KNOW HIM WHEN YOU MEET HIM? Families read that the ape-like creature which was ‘terrorising the Northern Suburbs was not, in the expert opinion of the Professor of Anthropology, likely to be a baboon, whatever conclusions his respected colleague, orthopaedic surgeon and osteologist Dr Dolf van Gelder, had drawn from the bone conformation indicated by its stance or gait.
The Johannesburg zoo stated once again that no member of the ape family was missing, including any specimen of the genus anthropopithecus, which is most likely to be mistaken for man. There are regular checks of all inmates and of security precautions. The SPCA warned the public that whether a baboon or not, a member of the ape family is a danger to cats and dogs, and people should keep their pets indoors at night.
Since the paper was not a daily, a whole week had to go by before the result of the strange stirring in the fecund mud of association that causes people to write to newspapers about secret preoccupations set off by the subject of an article, could be read by them in print. ‘Only Man Is Vile’ (Rondebosch) wrote that since a coronary attack some years ago he had been advised to keep a pet to lessen cardiac anxiety. His marmoset, a Golden Lion tamarin from South America, had the run of the house ‘including two cats and a Schipperke’ and was like a mother to them. He could only urge other cardiac sufferers to ignore warnings about the dangers of pets. ‘Had Enough’ (Roosevelt Park) invited the ape, baboon, monkey, etc. to come and kill her neighbour’s dog, who barked all night and was responsible for her daughter’s anorexia nervosa. Howard C. Butterfield III had ‘enjoyed your lovely country’ until he and his wife were mugged only ten yards from the Moulin Rouge Hotel in Hillbrow, Johannesburg. He’d like to avail himself of the hospitality of ‘your fine paper’ to tell the black man who slapped his wife before snatching her purse that he had broken her dental bridgework, causing pain and inconvenience on what was to have been the holiday of a lifetime, and that he was no better than any uncivilised ape at large.
Mrs Naas Klopper made a detour on her way to visit her sister Miemie in Pretoria. She had her own car, of course, a ladies’ car Naas provided for her, smaller than his Mercedes, a pretty green Toyota. She hadn’t seen the Kleynhans place for, oh, four or five years – before the old man died. A shock. It was a mess; she felt sorry for that young couple . . . really.
She and her sister dressed up for each other, showing off new clothes as they had done when they were girls; the clean soles of her new ankle-strap shoes gritted against the stony drive as she planted the high heels well apart, for balance, and leant into the back of the car to take out her house-warming present.
The girl appeared in the garden, from the backyard. She must have heard the approach of a car.
Mrs Naas Klopper was coming towards her through weeds, insteps arched like proud fists under an intricacy of narrow yellow straps, the bombé of breasts flashing gold chains on blue polka dots that crowded together to form a border at the hem of the dress. The girl’s recognition of the face, seen only once before, was oddly strengthened, like a touched-up photograph, by make-up the original hadn’t been wearing: teeth brightly circled by red lips, blinking blue eyes shuttered with matching lids. Carried before the bosom was a large round biscuit drum flashing tinny colours.
Mrs Naas saw that she’d interrupted the girl in the middle of some dirty task – of course, settling in. The dull hair was broken free of the knot, on one side. Hooked behind an ear, it stuck to the sweaty neck. The breasts (Mrs Naas couldn’t help noticing; why don’t these young girls wear bras these days) were squashed by a shrunken T-shirt and the feet were in split takkies. The only evidence of femininity to which Mrs Naas’s grooming could respond (as owners of the same make of vehicle, one humble, one a luxury model, passing on the highway silently acknowledge one another with a flick of headlights) was the Indian dingly-danglys the girl wore in her ears, answering the big fake pearls sitting on Mrs Naas’s plump lobes.
‘I’m not going to come in. I know how it is . . . This is just some of my buttermilk rusks you liked.’
The girl was looking at the tin, now in her hands, at the painted face of a smiling blonde child with a puppy and a bunch of roses, looking back at her. She said something, in her shy way, about Mrs Naas being generous.
‘Ag, it’s nothing. I was baking for myself, and I always take to my sister in Pretoria. You know, in our family we say, it’s not the things you buy with money that counts, it’s what you put your heart into when you make something. Even if it’s only a rusk, ay? Is everything going all right?’
‘Oh yes. We’re fine, thank you.’
Mrs Naas tried to keep the weight on the balls of her feet; she could feel the spindle heels of her new shoes sinking into the weeds, that kind of green stain would never come off. ‘Moving in! Don’t tell me! I say to Naas, whatever happens, we have to stay in this house until I die. A person can never move all the stuff we’ve collected.’
What a shy girl she was. Mrs Naas had always heard Australians were friendly, like Afrikaners. The girl hardly smiled, her thick eyebrows moved in some kind of inhibition or agitation.
‘We haven’t got too much, luckily.’
‘Has everything arrived now?’
‘Oh . . . I think just about. Still a few packing cases to open.’
Mrs Naas was agreeing, shifting her heels unobtrusively. ‘Unpacking is nothing, it’s finding where to put things, ay. Ag, but it’s a nice roomy old house—’
A black man came round from the yard, as the lady of the house had, but he didn’t come nearer, only stood a moment, hammer in hand; wanting some further instructions from the missus, probably, and then seeing she was with another white person, knowing he mustn’t interrupt.
‘So at least you’ve got someone to help. That’s good. I hope you didn’t take a boy off the streets, my dear? There are some terrible loafers coming to the back door for work, criminals – my! – you must be careful, you know.’
The girl looked very solemn, impressed. ‘No, we wouldn’t do that.’
‘Did someone find him for you?’
‘No – well, not someone here. Friends in town. He had references.’ She stopped a moment, and looked at Mrs Naas. ‘So it’s all right, I think. I’m sure. Thank you.’
She walked with Mrs Naas back to the car, hugging the biscuit tin.
‘Well, there’s plenty to keep him busy in this garden. Shame . . . the pergola was so pretty. But the grapes will climb again, you’ll see, if you get all the rubbish cleared away. But don’t you start digging and that . . . be careful of yourself. Have you been feeling all right?’ And Mrs Naas put her left hand, with its diamond thrust up on a stalagmite of gold (her old engagement ring remodelled since Naas’s prosperity by a Jew jeweller who gave him a good deal), on her own stomach, rounded only by good eating.
The girl looked puzzled. Then she forgot, at last, that shyness of hers and laughed, laughed and shook her head.
‘No morning sickness?’
‘No, no. I’m fine. Not sick at all.’
Mrs Naas saw that the girl, expecting in a strange country, must be comforted to have a talk with a motherly woman. Mrs Naas’s body, which had housed Dawie, Andries, Aletta and Klein Dolfie, expanded against the tight clothes from which it would never burgeon irresistibly again, as the girl’s would soon. ‘I’ll tell you something. This’s the best time of your life. The first baby. That’s something you’ll never know again, never.’ She drove off before the girl could see the tears that came to her eyes.
The girl went round back into the yard with her tall stalk
, flat-footed in the old takkies.
The black man’s gaze was fixed where she must reappear. He still held the hammer; uselessly. ‘Is it all right?’
‘Of course it’s all right.’
‘What’s she want?’
‘Didn’t want anything. She brought us a present – this.’ Her palm came down over the grin of the child on the tin drum.
He looked at the tin, cautious to see it for what it was.
‘Biscuits. Rusks. The vrou of the agent who let this place to us. Charles and I had to have tea with her the first day we were here.’
‘That’s what she came for?’
‘Yes. That’s all. Don’t you give something – take food when new neighbours move in?’ As she heard herself saying it, she remembered that whatever the custom was among blacks – and God knows, they were the most hospitable if the poorest of people – he hadn’t lived anywhere that could be called ‘at home’ for years, and his ‘neighbours’ had been fellow refugees in camps and military training centres. She gave him her big, culpable smile to apologise for her bourgeois naivety; it still surfaced from time to time, and it was best to admit so, openly. ‘Nothing to get worried about. I don’t mean they’re really neighbours . . .’ She made an arc with her chin and long neck, from side to side, sweeping the isolation of the house and yard within the veld.
The black man implied no suggestion that the white couple did not know their job, no criticism of the choice of place. Hardly! It could not have been better situated. ‘Is she going to keep turning up, hey . . . What’ll she think? I shouldn’t have come into the garden.’
Life Times Page 40
