She, flattered that he takes her for a horsewoman, holds herself calm for the mounting. She is afraid of the horse, but refuses to admit any thought but for the stillness of her own middle and the willed easing of her shoulders. Today she can do this.
As she leaves, he presses into her hand a small bundle in a knotted handkerchief. ‘Wardian scrapings,’ he says. ‘Perhaps something interesting among them, who knows. You might let me know how they go?’
She leaves with the gladness of having made a friend, although she thinks there is a fair chance he will not, in fact, remember her at all.
The horse is biddable enough; Mrs Chetwyn keeps its head towards the town when it seems to want to turn back, and keeps it to a fast walk when, once it has resigned itself to going forward, it scents home and seems inclined to jolt her off with a trot. She sits so high on its back that she is reminded of being on the deck of the yacht before her descent in stages to the colonial shore.
Soon she is near enough to the town to have to confront the question of being mounted like a man and riding unescorted, in walking clothes (she has never owned a riding habit) and bonnet. She begins to fear that she makes a comical picture, presenting herself as a proper woman from the waist up and from there to the ground as an untamed, pioneering sort of creature.
She looks about for the means or place to dismount in modesty, but as she does she shies again from imagining herself, in bonnet and muddied hems, leading the horse along the streets of D’Urban.
As though he has been summoned by her need, here suddenly is Fuze jogging towards her, on his face an expression of relief or perhaps achievement, by which she knows she has been missed and searched for. With recourse to his shoulder and cupped hands, Mrs Chetwyn is soon on her own two feet, and he has charge of the horse.
Fuze is no longer naked. He is still barefoot and bareheaded, but he wears a stiff new blouse and a pair of Chetwyn’s trousers, rolled to the knee and knotted at the waist, and whereas the thought of walking into the town proper ahead of a man in native no-clothes leading the horse would have been, she can see now, risible, in his new clothes Fuze gains for her the proper air of mistress.
Soon they are at the hotel, and the horse is accepted by the stables, and Mrs Chetwyn is preceding Fuze across the street and towards the landmark fig.
Without attempting to explain it to herself, she adopts a natural caution about how she has spent her morning. By the time she arrives at the tent she is even preparing a plausible lie of omission, a story that does not include McQuairie, the seeds, the blood flower.
She has the tent to herself for long enough to exchange her skirts and underskirts for unmuddied ones, wash her feet and face and dampen and smooth her hair. She notices her hands as they carry water to her face, cupped, mirroring one another … and she is composed and back in her wifely, motherly, mistress self just in time to hear Chetwyn’s voice on the approach to the tent. He has brought the lawyer – the translator and agent of Chetwyn Senior’s wishes. The man is Meager himself, of Meager, Grubb & Morey.
His visit is by way of a survey. Mr Meager is deciding something about them, consulting with Chetwyn, of course, but with the tones of a local expert who will brook no alternatives: there is a path to be taken by unpartied new arrivals to the colony; Mr Meager is familiar with the path; he will direct them on it. He listens to Chetwyn but blinks and flares the fingers of one hand as he waits for him to stop speaking.
Chetwyn has not been able to discover from the man, through queries subtle and direct, the ultimate sum on which he is permitted to draw. His every move in this direction is parried by Meager with a variation on this: that he must simply propose his purchase and his plans, and Meager, once he has judged them thrifty and sound, will pay what is needed.
She knows that Chetwyn feels keenly the insult of this fatherly trust extended to a stranger and denied the son, and the more so because, with his quicksilver ways, he has already hit upon an ideal prospect, and wants to fly at it with all the natural lucky energy he has relied on for his other several dazzling successes. As she listens to the men and moves between them to gather teacups, Mrs Chetwyn thinks it may be this brilliant first flaring of enthusiasm that the lawyer has been specifically enjoined to temper and test.
An Arab stud in Khartoum, a purported emerald mine outside Udaipur, his commission in the 16th in Lucknow … Chetwyn’s occupations had been chosen for their dash and beauty and had, she had seen, been valued mainly for these qualities in Princess Royal Circle, where the splendid scarlet of the Rajput Regiment’s red coat had lit the dim rooms of the villa, so vital beside the stuffed redbreast under its glass bell. But that was when Chetwyn spoke as a boy in his letters and on his visits home, and fat fortunes in the twelve per cents had seemed the General’s own safeguard of life everlasting. Now the son must put aside childish things for the only guarantee of living on: succession and land.
Mrs Chetwyn knows she is, of course, indispensable to the former, but in her quick survivalist way sees in an instant that she is being judged by the lawyer on aspects beyond it. He has barely taken his eyes off her since they were introduced. She assumes his exercise of power must include approval of her as he stands at the tent’s hearth, and so she ceases her business with the tea and comes to stand at Chetwyn’s side. She holds one hand in the other at her waist, makes herself drop her shoulders and lower her gaze to a mild, womanly level to allow him to look her over. She extends a fluttering hand to Sophronia and brings her to her side and reties a hair ribbon, and keeps at this until she judges that the lawyer has been humoured enough.
The immediate impetus, Meager says, is to get the Chetwyn party to quit the tent and tree and outdoor fire for the next station on the pioneer’s progress.
He calls to a carter who has brought his cart and beasts as far as the roadside running past the encampment, and leaves his man and Fuze to the striking and loading of the tent and chattels. As Mrs Chetwyn follows her husband away from the camp, with steady Griffin and Sophronia by, she looks back to see Berriball waiting at their hearth, looking it over with a jealous eye. He has a rolled carpet with him, she supposes to be spread to guarantee his claim.
5
THEIR NEW HOME IS NOT yet a proper house but a form of dwelling that is almost all thatch above a thin, low wall of daub pressed into a wattle frame. Chetwyn barely inhabits it, so urgent is his need to get away, to get started, but Meager will not be rushed. The authority to withhold is the sum of his power in the matter, and once he has granted Chetwyn the complicated usufruct title to the land he chooses, and has negotiated among the several stores of the town for the goods Chetwyn will need, it will be spent. Therefore he will not be rushed.
As the weeks pass and then a month, Chetwyn appears sometimes as if he will combust at the delay, at this irritable obstacle with his slow speech and judging questions and his unfashionable hat.
Nor will Meager have his hand forced in the matter of the trays and trays of seed cane Chetwyn wants to buy now, this week, from the man who will be his neighbour if he gets the land he wants. Chetwyn finds sugar mill fittings that must be bought today or forever be lost, but Meager will not hear of them.
Mrs Chetwyn believes her husband may be the better for a checking hand on his rein, but she shares his irritation with the lawyer – dislike, almost – for the way he has involved himself in every aspect of their lives since Chetwyn presented himself at his offices in the glad expectation of at least a measure of bounty, only to be met by conditionality and delay.
In particular, Meager has entered into a puzzling and unwelcome performance with Mrs Chetwyn. She cannot fathom it when it begins, one morning: he is limping and clearly in pain as he comes upon her at the new place; she rises from the wooden stool she is sitting on outside the front door and offers it to him. Has he injured himself? The roads here are so very rough. She has strained her own ankle many times … but he is made furious by her mild words, to the point – in an angry, indrawn breath – of almost
openly castigating her. As it is, he offers hostile sarcasm. ‘I have not, Madam, tripped in the road,’ he says, as if tripping in the road is the practice of fools, and her words and her offer of the seat are insults.
There are other instances of his unpredictable and patternless vehemence, and she is alarmed and intrigued. Is he insane?
She learns from Chetwyn that Meager is prone to gout, and she seizes on this, and constructs a reason for his manners that has to do with his hunger for womanly compassion and nursing when there are so very few Englishwomen here. He resents her for being what he wants and dislikes her for not being available to him – to the point that she is, also, not what he wants. Inevitably, he judges her as a lesser type than the ideal, who would have understood his pain.
She is unsatisfactory to him but he cannot stay away. He must have the ordering of her time. Meager it is who suggests another way to lay the springy laths to form the bed in the thatched rooms of their new home. (This bed is, like that in the tent, immovable, constructed on short forked poles driven into the earth floor.) Meager it is who sees to the placing of the fire stones, and the trivet among these, and the direction of the handle of the kettle on the trivet. Meager it is who begins even to direct her in the matter of the pinafore she dons for the maddening business of cooking over an open fire, but today she dares to check him with a cool look.
She immediately tries to cover this with a humbler sort of manner, remembering all that he has in his gift. It is, however, too late. He steps away from her to the window (and it is only a step in the narrow room) and turns his back on her to tap at the calico panel that covers the opening in the thatch, and turns back almost at once and says, ‘You should smile more, Mrs Chetwyn. A young lady ought to smile.’
She is not smiling but she feels her mouth pull back over her teeth and make a terrible shape, and she flushes and turns away.
He taps the calico pane again, as if to test for soundness, or perhaps to deliver some commentary on who has glass in his windows and who cloth. She prays he will leave, and when he does she is soon not sorry to have appeased him, if that will settle his crazed resentment. One of them must, after all, give way.
Besides, she tells herself, he must eventually release the funds or risk suspicion from his distant client. She is prepared to wait, and has the comfort of the periphery of the business in which to do so: it is Chetwyn who is at the heart of it.
Chetwyn, when he is not groaning with frustration at the lawyer, keeps himself satisfied with talk of sugar, day after day. He has borrowed books on the matter, and on most days there is a letter in The Witness from a planter, or a doubter, or a booster, casting the crop as the false siren’s call for the colony or its salvation.
Sugar is to Mrs Chetwyn the unwieldy loaf on the shelf in the corner that serves for a larder, or the sweetshop of her childhood, or the second ingredient of three in the making of berry jam; it is barely credible as a crop. As a girl she had been old enough to be caught up in the Queen’s wedding, and young enough to care most of all, amid reports of the gown and the continental guests, about the splendid cake, impossibly huge, impossibly elegant and covered in white powdered sugar mixed to cement, hard and pure and dazzling.
What did sugar seed even look like? If Chetwyn is ordering seed cane – or will once Meager gives in – does this imply that sugar does not have seeds? Are there plants without seeds? She is newly aware of coming up against her own ignorance, or of having reached the outer borders of what she knows. She feels she stepped off that edge when she visited McQuairie’s garden, or was about to when she had to leave it for home, where she has to commit her life to a pursuit she does not have the first comprehension of. (The kerchief of seeds is in a corner of a dressing trunk; she is not yet prepared to address it.)
One afternoon Chetwyn’s absence coincides with a lull in her duties; she sees Griffin and Sophronia off on a walk through the town, then takes up one of his borrowed books, to consult it specifically on the question of sugar cane seed.
She is rewarded with a description of cane grown from sprouting pieces of cane, then cut back but not uprooted each season, to sprout again from the stock left in the ground. She is absorbed by this economy of planting once for three crops – it is a household species of economy, an economy of one roast furnishing a week’s meals. One planting: generations of crops. No seed, ever, but the mother plant’s offcuts replanted when it has been tired out.
It is in the second of Chetwyn’s borrowed books that she finds her seeds. This book is almost unintelligible, and wanton in those parts she can understand with its talk of egg and sperm, male and female plants, petiole, pistil, fertilisation and – aha! – gestation. She takes up a dusting cloth and keeps it by her to cover the book should she be surprised in the reading of it, and presses on, making out three words in ten, but at least gaining some sense, she thinks, of the work of this book – the selective breeding of cane to change its nature.
There is noble cane, and there is hybrid, and there is simply wild. And there is, as she turns the page, an illustration of sugar cane seed and other seeds, to show its relative size, which is almost the smallest of the six, larger only than some species of grass and dwarfed by wheat, corn, beans and the rest. The rest includes the stones of fruit trees. The illustration shows seeds in cross section. A bean is shown in germination, its twinned plump halves splayed, a shoot curling from the base of one, reaching towards a simple leaf. She feels again that she is transgressing, but she does not close the book.
Can we make it a rule that the plants of which we eat the seed or fruit, we plant with seed, and plants of which we use only the growing woody part, we plant with that? She does not know even one thousandth of what she needs to know to meet her thirst for rules.
The sugar seed, the book says, exists in a tangled nest of fuzz, but she is ready to leave sugar. Chetwyn, in any event, will surely not be about the slow, careful, blind business of breeding a better strain of sugar plant; she knows it will be all he can do to raise a crop that takes so long to mature.
She begins to dream of cotyledons, of a splitting self, and soon, by her tender breasts and tighter corset, understands why. In a few more weeks she is certain enough of her condition to tell Chetwyn, in allusive and strategic silences, and he spends five minutes being pleased and interested before realising with a shout that this is, as he puts it, their ticket.
He takes his hat and hurries off to find Meager, armed with an unassailable (and only somewhat exaggerated) reason for settling matters before Mrs Chetwyn should be in no state to travel to and establish a home on raw land.
He is armed, too, with a protective paternal energy that, more than his arguments, moves Meager’s hand, and suddenly, it seems, within a scant few months of her arrival in D’Urban, they are released from their sticky, uncomfortable, stalled existence to the vigour of enormous purchases: the abstract land, a tangible cart, seed cane, a second tent, the hiring of more men …
Townsmen congratulate Chetwyn on every side, and Mrs Chetwyn can see, in the stares of the shop owners, that by their great enterprise her young family has at a stroke broken from the herd of sorry green colonialists and set itself on a more splendid path.
Every day is filled with lists – agricultural, domestic lists that help to calm their fright at what they will soon be about: land two days’ ride from civilisation, cutting and clearing virgin bush, let alone planting one’s hope of fortune in the ground. These are impossibly large matters; but a bolt of calico, and slate and chalk for Sophronia’s lessons, and so many sacks of rice, and so much bear grease, soap, lime, so many candle moulds and spoons – these are not.
Similarly, the business of keeping her balance and Sophronia’s in the wagon leaves no time to contemplate the fearsomeness of here. There are sometimes native homesteads on the road, and always there is a thread of craal smoke rising calmly in the distance. D’Urban is long since lost to sight, and scent, and is already a smaller matter than the patch of too-thick f
at unscraped from the wagon sail near her shoulder, waiting to mark her dress.
When they stop there is often only the wind, and when the wind settles, birdsong. Perhaps children calling to one another, perhaps a raised voice, perhaps mentioning them. Sophronia has retreated to her quieter travelling self, and before they start off again she and Griffin find a corner in the cart, fold into one another and close their eyes to make the journey pass in sleep.
Mrs Chetwyn thinks, after some hours of swinging and jolting in wild lurches, that she might travel in more comfort were she tied against some solid pieces of household furniture. She hopes that holding her midsection stiff as a barrel for so long will have no effect on her condition.
As they prepared to quit D’Urban, Meager had dared to pass comment on it in an aside, to the effect that she was being ‘relied upon’ to bring forth a son. He said this with a grim undertone, a rebuking note, as though she had a record of failing in this.
At the time she was so infuriated by his colonial brazenness that she had not remarked to herself about the sinister delivery, but now, as her body grows accustomed even to the tipping and righting of the wagon, she turns it over in her mind.
On the move none of their party speaks, but there is noise enough to announce their passage. The wagon and team they hired for the journey came with a Boer boy and a native man, and at intervals one or the other tips his head back and screams. This is directed at the oxen, as are the long and short whips they crack and whirl; the sounds they make have a blind, infant quality.
At last the Boer child concurs with something the wagoner says and the latter walks alongside the oxen, speaking to each pair, and in slow sequence they halt. Chetwyn, who is making the journey on horseback, must have heard the change in the noise they make, for in a while he rides up, approaching from the west.
Under Glass Page 6
