It is a square building whose shuttered windows on three sides open onto verandas on the ground level and wide balconies on the first storey, these supported and linked by squared-off pillars, and bonded by a balustrade on the upper level. I have heard it since called striking modern and indeed, it has no round tower, no crenellations nor widow’s walk nor steeple nor battlements – just the twin trim lines of shade, just the blinking white. A shaggy bougainvillea and the enormous mahogany tree are its only decoration. Even the shutters are white.
The facing aspect is not entirely featureless, though. There are shallow bays on four windows, almost at the corners, two up, two down. I would learn that they were chiefly for strength, insisted on by Father and resisted by Mother, who wanted above all else an uncomplicated front. In conceding the bays she won a line of French windows that could open out almost one entire wall of the drawing room, though she never did open it out that I can recall. Still, they make it a room as greenly lit as any forest.
I have a place of my own, around the back. There is a stretch of wall there that rises the height of the house without a window to break it. Smooth and white and for some of the afternoon in shade. This is where the water pumped or carried from the river arrives at its reservoir, and growls and burbles in the pipes like a bull pigeon. I saw this there, in this shaded place: a bird alighted on the sheer wall. Though there was no clawhold in the design of it, there must have been yet a straw or shred of something left by the plastering crew, and on all the wall the bird found it and perched there and looked down at me, framed by the expanse.
In the way that the castle house speaks to travellers and visitors and they respond correctly, so it is expected that we children of the place will live and behave according to the house’s rules – to do with running, or not running, and places in it where we might be and where we must not go. This means one another’s bedrooms for me and my sisters, and also, I would realise, for Mother and Father.
In fact there is a room for every separate thing in our white castle. Every separate category of thing: downstairs, seven or eight of them cling like chicks around the kitchen – coal room, pantry, scullery, laundry room, storerooms, meat pantry.
In the awake hours, in the day, there are also rooms in which to be, and rooms forbidden to us. I must be in Mother’s morning room every day after breakfast until late in the morning. I cannot say where my sisters must be at that time. They must report for lessons when I am released and may quit the house, I and my tall shadow, for the garden-but-no-further. I am speaking now of when I am five or six, a year of great change for me.
Until now I have been dressed like Maude – smocks by day, nightgowns by night (though I think hers could not have been so trippingly shaped as mine; she has more public feet) – and although I am denied the story-time bed of my sisters, feel myself during the day – for meals, games, scoldings – to be with them, if always more closely watched than they, never without Griffin. Once I am called pretty as a girl by a visitor, and enjoy the novelty of hearing an adult chided in words addressed to me: ‘What a thing for Mrs Slocombe to say to my handsome Cosmo!’ And Griffin, no sooner squatted in the corner, has to unfold herself and hurry me away.
At five or six, the changes: in a fat parcel from Gardiner’s, cloth cut out for new day dresses for the girls, for Maude’s first proper dress, and for me a pair of identical sailor suits. When Mother and Griffin are done with their stitching fortnight, the girls have two new dresses apiece, white, but they differ in interesting ways – lace or not lace, the height of the ties, the colour of the ribbon that attaches at the waist. One of the twins’ has a square bodice with lines of embroidered daisies. It is for best.
My best and my everyday resemble one another exactly: a white loose blouse with a sailor’s collar edged in dark blue, to surmount the new thing among us, breeches, also white. These end at my knee with a buckle there, and fasten at my waist with a flap held in place by two vertical rows of buttons, all of which have to be undone to shed the wretched things, for Mother has sewn the buttons to make a tight fit. A most impractical arrangement and I think them unfair, in the way that solitary lessons, when the girls have theirs all together, seem to me to be.
The new clothing comes with demands. First among these is that my appearance be altered to suit it. They sit me on a chair in the back garden, outside the scullery door, and Griffin folds a cloth about my shoulders. Mother is ready with scissors from her sewing basket and Father’s brushes, and her mouth is a line. I know that none of us has had our hair cut in this way before today. I know this because Maude contrived a month or so before this to fall asleep on a shard of toffee, and awoke with such a nest of seized tangles that it had to be cut from her by Mother, who said as she worked that she trusted Maude would learn from this, that it would be years before she would recover, that she had hoped to cut no more than the monthly trim from any of us as her hair had been trimmed but not cut for all her life, and now this.
Today, as she fits the scissors to her fingers and advances on me, I judge her more upset than she was even with Maude. She lifts the hair with a brush and cuts, and I come aware of my nape.
When I join them on the veranda Father looks from me to Mother and back to me. They murmur, her hand on his forearm as if to check him, but he escapes her and crosses the veranda to leave us.
In the glass in my bedroom I regard my head, shorn back to babyishness when the day before I had known myself to be almost six, and closing in on the great day when I should be allowed to go to the boiling house. I turn my head as far to the side as it will go while still being able to keep the glass in my sight, and I see my raw ears, and pale neck, and know the loss of the confiding, appealing curls that framed my face and fall yet about the faces of my sisters. I have to look harder at my reflection to discover my eyes, my mouth – cutting away the frame of my hair has changed these. I cannot be said to be pretty as a girl, thus.
2
THERE IS A MANNER OF accommodating oneself to living in a tent that makes of it but one room in a wide world of a house. Call it bedchamber, and make for a kitchen the open fire in its forecourt, and make a kitchen, too, of the milk seller’s route, the pie shop on the corner, the benches behind the hotel (one of the town’s long, low buildings is a hotel). A cut from the hot joint at the Leopard coffee house will furnish supper, and the hotel itself, at least in its public rooms, is your drawing room, and the public house hard by is your retreat. All the space between is for you to use for your traffic between these, and to the bathing places at the river, and the other place beyond that, in the bushes.
There is another way of living in a tent, one that makes of its one room every room. Against this edge there is the bed that is also the withdrawing room, parlour, nursery and closet. Over here, the bathing area, where you may set up a basin, ease off your outer clothes and wipe yourself where thus exposed with a furtive sea sponge, not making a sound, or, if your sea sponge is miles away and probably still on a ship in the bay beyond the bar, use a sacrificial strip from your least-favourite petticoat. Your favourite is speckled with ticks, and they are also what the fire is for.
With a half turn of your head you may see the larder of salt-meat and tea that perfume your home. The thump on the apex, bringing the canvas smartly against your head, is a raiding monkey. Sleep here, work here, wait here. Do not pace, for between your skirts, your tent mates and your things, there is not room for more than your stillest, smallest self.
The bed has one blanket. Sophronia sleeps under Mrs Chetwyn’s dress. Mrs Chetwyn waits.
She wakes in the morning to a sun already so disturbingly hot that, stirring on the seaweed mattress, she feels her skin is being dissolved into the air. She fancies she is melting, as though she is made of fat and in an oven. She envies the flies that can move with such fresh haste through this air. They spark rage in her, too.
She has a cohort, the colonists with whom she travelled on the Lady Lee. Many of them are subscribers to one or o
ther immigration scheme and have been put up in barracks on the lands of their antecedents, men who tried cotton and indigo and arrowroot and have three seasons since turned their hands to making a go of it with immigrant rent.
These out-of-town parties visit D’Urban in flocks, rolling in on wagon beds. They carry their spirits about with them in clouds of shared sensibilities and seem to have agreed to call fear by a new name, although ‘hope’ is terrible, too. To a man and woman they are cast down on Wednesday and curse the swindler who brought them here; on Friday a settler has gained fame by charring and grinding and steeping a pot of coffee from his own tree, and they are the new Brazil.
She is grateful to have people to greet but eager, too, to strike free of them. She is making a new set, here in the camp, where she is learning to cook food. The former servants in the camp are kind and teach her. She assumes they do not mind her needing help. Her thinking, were it laid out to air like Berriball’s library, would set down these competent camp women as a species, a peaceable species that, when they are not busy with their own families, give suck to other pups. At least this is the case with the women. From some of the men Mrs Chetwyn fancies she feels a complicated regard, a wariness about her. It is as though she, in being among them in the camp and relying on their wives, will introduce a reordering. Generosity and helpfulness are recast when they come from home spinners or manufactory men to one who passes for a gentlewoman but is yet a neighbour in the same poor camp, and more so when they come in the brisk movements of their wives, one-time cooks or maids here landed in hopes of being a new sort of woman. To men who have, on landing, subscribed immediately to the universal enfranchisement of England’s adult white men of good character, Mrs Chetwyn knows she is a reminder. But if they can be made over, so can she. Is she not doing her own housework like any new woman in America or Australia?
And if she cannot quite be free in the town, a woman alone, she can leave it. She has a ritual: almost every day, she visits the shore to see about her goods. She believes she is both forbidden this freedom and permitted it under the rules of colonial etiquette; she takes the risk and holds her breath to pass the cattle gallows, and beyond these fills her lungs and strikes out.
There is something about the place: they all keep an eye cast inland as if towards slumbering danger, and yet where she is now, on the salty, sticky coastal road, all is benign. She daily walks further before accepting a seat on a cart or a wagon plying the two miles to the sea. She is for moments on the track utterly alone. Sometimes the breeze picks up to a wind, sometimes the day is so still she thinks her passage cleaves the air, and she hears only the movement of her clothes.
At first upon reaching the landing spot she goes directly to the agent’s room at the end of a mud row, but this begins to irritate him to the edge of politeness, and so she instead walks to a safe place close to but not among the lading men to see their dealings with fish, or timber from a wrecked ship, or fresher salvage.
She enjoys watching the work of bringing ashore what they have got from the sea and now husband tenderly: unrolling and laying out roods of canvas, picking it over as finely as a cook about weevil work in her larder, or corralling a cargo of sodden, fear-dazed sheep.
If she raises her gaze she can see the masts of the Lady Lee, and nods a salute as if to a protector.
She even earns, by her daily presence for ten days and her bright interest in their work, a regular greeting from the unclad stevedores of the Natal shore. Her Zulu Companion is back in the tent and is anyway not helpful in matters of simple friendliness, so she contents herself with ‘Good morning’ and receives ‘Good morning how do you do’ in return, every day. Of course, it may be that they are laughing at her. She does not know.
The place has begun to dull the new edge of everything with the comfort of repetition, of matters that hold their nature on the second or third sighting and can begin to frame the larger matter of life here. One native man does not stand to address her; let another in the course of the morning do likewise, and now here is a conviction about all native men: they are uncivil. Or a native girl smiles shyly at Sophronia, and another comes gently forward to touch her cheek: they are sweet-tempered. She has to learn the place, and all she has for a teacher is this habit of habits.
From what she can recall of it, the Chetwyn cargo is of the usual sort – there is vastly too much of it, and it tells, as if painted on a market banner, the story of their lives and all that they anticipate of their colonial lot. Do they bring a ploughshare, or is that a piano? A trunk of embroidered linens or a bachelor’s patent camp bed? The Chetwyns had not had so much as a cinder bucket or roasting jack to their name before outfitting for this colonial task, and along with not joining an emigration scheme had thought themselves thrillingly modern to travel with little more than linens and cash. But into this first a writing slope had wedged itself by the thin end, and this had admitted a trickle and then a torrent of other goods until they had grown so liberal that, in common with the rest, they have in several cases of ‘this?’ or ‘that?’ brought both, and much besides that was suddenly found to be essential, missing though it had been from their lives until the day they ordered it from a chandler or a colonialist’s catalogue and it was brought by a boy on a cart to add to the growing pile in the stables at Chetwyn’s father’s home, Gordon Villa, Princess Royal Circle, Hull.
When she tries to remember her cargo in its constituent parts as she paces on the shore, she has to resort to patterns, and know it by, for instance, its heaviest part and its lightest: the lightest is a profound and formal letter under seal; the heaviest a pair of carriage wheels – the wheels that she saw, as she stood in the general store, so vividly plunging overboard and taking every other Chetwyn-branded thing with them, and Byronic hencoops and spars besides.
Chetwyn had been so proud and yet so uncertain about the scheme to bring the wheels. Without consulting her he had ordered them, and they were so new when they arrived at his father’s house that there was yet a shaving of wood trapped between a spoke and the rim. But her murmur of doubt – which was, in reality, more a sound of surprise at their size and, in that instant, their alien beauty – had settled his unset resolve and where he had suggested he then insisted, brusquely, and she had mutinied in her usual manner, silently.
Long after he had set off for Africa it had fallen to her to shepherd his wheels by hired wagon from Hull all the way to the Plymouth docks, by hawser and cursing stevedore to the ship, and now onto this shore by, she presumes, the same brute male muscle that carried her to the beach.
She needs the wheels to come safely ashore, not slip and sink and take with them her hope of advantage over him. Let them be proved ridiculous; let them land on a quay made from scrapped wheels before a wheel mountain, and their way to town be lined with half-buried spokes of wheels rayed like the sun. Let men laugh and children point as their wagon passes with, atop their wicker coops and china jugs, the massive oak and iron imported pair somehow balancing there, strapped highest of all … she stops, her breathing thinned with anger at him, still off in the wild world and she in her second week here and sometimes afraid.
She has already had from the agent the satisfying news that offloading them will cost Chetwyn a supplementary charge; there has been a note about them from the ship. Her every fear about her husband’s fitness for this enterprise, and her own fitness, too, rests in those wheels. She needs them to come ashore and disprove and prove the case; she signs for the shillings more.
So much for the heaviest article among it. As for the lightest, the letter, she has carried it blind. It is from Chetwyn Senior, by the hand of his lawyer, addressed to his son, and handed to her with sacramental and grave looks; she understands that their future is set out behind the old-fashioned, portentous red seal.
The ten days she has spent on shore have, however, softened much of its terrible power. What had been Africa, the colony, the future, has resolved into the tent under the tree, with Berriball stealing
looks at her, the milkmaid’s face growing miraculously distinct from the face of every other girl, the Wedlocks’ nightly screams and sudden silences knitting the rest of the camp into a solidarity of glances exchanged the next morning, and moments when happier bonds are formed, usually among or thanks to the children of the camp. Here they are, human beings amid the green earth, surviving, gathering food, raising their young. Each day, faces shine with the achievement of it.
Each day she both longs for his arrival and imagines him anew as lost, killed, even as she knows her imagining for a dangerous game.
She reminds herself that she has fed and sheltered Sophronia (and Griffin) for more than ten days now, and even has found out the cost of a late subscription to one of the schemes, and of passage home to England, a ship to Calcutta and a ship to Mauritius, and has hereby proved to herself that she could survive without him.
In the afternoons she counts the money she has left, while Griffin takes Sophronia for a walk through the encampment, from their tree to another some distance away. Chetwyn Senior – he is known only and always as the General, a family joke to do with a trade in horses in the Napoleonic wars – has gone to some trouble to draw their paper money on a bank of unimpeachable reputation, or so he told her, and given her much of it in unblemishable coin besides, and it is lasting well. Her coin is welcomed and her scrip acceptable. Beef is cheaper than at home, though laundry far dearer, milk a reasonable blessing and vegetables so scarce beyond pumpkin and ‘mealies’ that they are no temptation. Firewood she has a boy bring from the bush for next to no cost, and Griffin hauls water from the river. Mrs Chetwyn continues to make do with cat baths. As well as their daily or almost daily food purchases, she has to buy only tea, and sugar, and salt, and soap.
If Chetwyn should indeed not return, and she is left here with Sophronia and Griffin, she will simply, day by day, have to do as she is doing now and, in small movements, decision by decision, go forward. She has come this far alone. She can bear the stinking rubberised top sheet. Flies. Snakes. Huge crickets. Heat. The smells of her own body. Prickly heat sprinkled with flour until she is a crusty, sour mess. Sophronia’s hair stuck to her forehead above red cheeks and dull, unhappy eyes. Beginning to hate, actually dislike, her dress. She can bear it all.
Under Glass Page 3
