Under Glass

by Claire Robertson

  Mrs Chetwyn’s picnic – the dainty meal she planned almost half a year ago in Princess Royal Avenue and was denied by the landing custom of the colony – now finds its moment. Fuze has been picking up branches as they go, and he makes a fire of these, with Sophronia’s involvement. The Boer boy unearths a covered basin of cold mealie meal and a sack of dried venison, but the men and the boy cease their preparations to watch the women as Mrs Chetwyn and Griffin untuck a wicker box from the rear of the wagon and lay out their tinned and bottled foods. There is also milk for Sophronia and hock that came, like the tins, from England, if on a more recent ship.

  But when Mrs Chetwyn looks up from the bottled eggs and potted meat, the tinned cheese, tinned butter, tinned biscuits, she cannot but notice that the interest the men and boy take in the spread is coloured with concern, as though she is, by her show, displaying the sort of weakness that marks her as unfit for where they find themselves. She sees herself suddenly as a woman making a Sunday picnic when before them lie wild, wide rivers that she must ford in full walking dress.

  They eat the tinned savouries and tinned fruit and tinned ginger cake in silence. The Boer boy watches her from under his hat. The wagoner refuses all of it; Fuze takes some of everything, a taste, shakes his head at further helpings. Chetwyn is insufferably appreciative and her own mood quite turns against all of them. She wishes she had waited until they were alone on their land. She despises herself for planning and collecting a meal months before it would be eaten, and sees how ridiculous it is. With a dreadful sensation of vulnerability she suddenly admits what they are about here.

  Their way is sometimes so elevated that from time to time on their second day, one or other of them is able to call to the others, ‘The sea!’, and claim a glimpse of deeper blue framed by the irregular growth of palm trees or other ragged plants.

  They are growing anxious. She can see it in Chetwyn, the way he keeps near to them and blurts unconnected observations. As for her own humour, as every new vista opens before them she fears it holds their land, if it is broken and poor, or fears it does not, if it is fine. Much of the land is particularly fine.

  They have been travelling parallel to the coast without having crossed a river for some hours and so have come to expect one, going by the pattern of their journey. She looks forward to the rivers – the rest on the bank as the men debate how to cross it, the pull of anticipation and rush of release as first the cart’s animals and then the wagon’s enter the water and make it out and up the far bank.

  Sure enough, here is the next river, at least twice as wide as the largest that they have so far forded, but peaceable enough, bronzed and slow-moving. This bank is a shelving slope of sand bearing the imprints of monkey paws. The far bank is marked upstream by a steep wall that drops gradually as it follows the river downstream until it is low enough to make a natural fording place across from them.

  Chetwyn consults the boy and his wagoner, and Fuze asks questions of his own of the man, and Chetwyn takes a deep breath and widens his eyes and turns to her.

  ‘We are here. We have come. This is ours.’

  As he speaks he makes a curious gesture, not (as might be expected) presenting the land on the far side of the river with a sweeping arm, but splaying his hand, holding it upright and moving it towards the far bank as if to lay it against the wall of a dwelling or the timbers of a ship – some solid thing. He is not pointing towards it so much as feeling it, as a man in a blindfold might.

  She looks beyond the invisible wall he seems to be describing: the land rises on both planes back from the inclining bank, levels and rises again, its undulations at right angles to where she guesses the coast to be. The effect is of gentle, marvellous downs. There seems to be a stand of trees in the far distance, and a rise from which she thinks one must have a view of the sea.

  The river is deep, even at the fording place, and now that she drops her eyes from the high land she sees the dark line of a raft-like craft tethered at the far bank. The wagoner has stripped to his privy skin and, with one end of a rope tied about his chest, is wading into the water and soon striking out with mighty splashing across the deeper part; he gains the far bank and transfers his rope to the raft, tying it with a fist-sized knot. With great hauling by the men and boy on the near bank, he swims it over to them.

  From now on, everything will be an augury: the smoothness of their crossing, the peaceability of the beasts. Extra knots and seriousness attend each step. Even the tea Griffin brews on a small fire, the meal Mrs Chetwyn assembles from the picnic leavings when it becomes clear that the crossing will take the rest of the afternoon – even the meal gains significance: they will set foot on the land fed and whole; this is their last wandering forage.

  She loses count of the number of times the little ferrying raft crosses and recrosses the water, but at last Chetwyn rouses them and tells them they are next. For a short while – the time it takes for the crossing of one of the wheels and a plough and a nest of kitchen implements that together make up a last ungainly load – the women and girl are alone on their bank of the river, with the men and boy and almost every possession either on the water or heaped on the far bank. She tells herself there is nothing to fear in this, but when Sophronia leaves her side to follow a butterfly she calls her back sharply, unsettling them both.

  Then Chetwyn and Fuze are grounding the raft-ferry in the shallows and the women and girl are aboard, and on the river. On the other side Chetwyn, in the water, reaches up and embraces Mrs Chetwyn about her skirts. He tips her over his shoulder, drops her to his cradling arms, and sets her down on the sand bank with a huzzah! Fuze scoops up Sophronia and swings her ashore. Griffin lifts her sari skirts and steps into the water and up onto dry land.

  In safety once again, watching the men harness and inspan the freight animals and reload the wagon and cart, Mrs Chetwyn feels the quickening in her belly for the first time, the unfolding flutter. She blushes, standing still amid the effort of the men.

  After the day’s work, all of the party are moving slowly and speaking less, and their outward tranquillity matches her private contentment as, to a few words of encouragement and then no more than the sounds of their passage, the little convoy makes its slow way up the slope of the first rise to see the late afternoon light slanting across the land.

  Most of the next day is spent exploring it. The animals are left out of harness and yoke; the Boer child and his wagoner are left in camp; they have been hired for the month for the heavy work of setting up some sort of homestead. The chosen site is near a little stand of trees. Sophronia and Griffin stay behind and Chetwyn, Fuze and Mrs Chetwyn set off, leading a horse, to survey the property.

  Within the hour it has been proved to her that she can see the sea from their land. The highest portion ends in a stubby little bluff, part of the river’s jumble of gorges and banks, and allows a view down to a v-shaped gap in the low escarpment; in the gap is the ocean, as true as a wall, at this early hour almost white.

  Once they are off the bluff and on the rolling lands that are more characteristic of the place, the far horizon is only green, and above it only sky. Still, it cheers her to know the ocean is there; the land otherwise is somewhat … lost in Africa.

  On the journey here, the Boer boy had from time to time recognised features of the land – a particular huge tree, a formation of rocks or a hill. The Dutch emigrant farmers have begun to salt the land with history. Soon they will fill it, even if they do not pack it side to side. She imagines the English and Dutch jostling for elbow room for their stories, but pictures no Fuze, no crowd of Fuzes, similarly engaged. In a way that she does not stop to question, she sees him as somehow the territory itself.

  She has heard the shopmen of D’Urban sharply correct newer men on the matter of natives – they are not native, d’ye hear, not native to the place but refugees from their own unsettled kings! Refugees from across the Thukela! – but the distinction, often made in argument, is seldom recalled in the common-
sense business of life in the colony.

  The three of them break through the bush to one side of the little bluff, into wilder land, a back quarter subtly rougher than the seaward side. There are trees and grasses as before, if some more plentifully. It has, she thinks, the sense of a room but lately quit. There is, if not quite a haunting, a presence hanging on the air.

  As they stand at the edge of the thicket, looking toward the back lands, something very large shifts in the trees, so close that they can hear its purring, echoing breathing, and, as one, Chetwyn breathes, ‘Elephant,’ and Fuze a word that sounds like ‘lore voo’, low and eerie as the animal’s own sounds.

  Chetwyn places his hand on her stomach and presses Mrs Chetwyn into the shelter of the bushes, and she and the two men step backwards through the little copse, then turn and move quickly to where they have left the horse. Chetwyn helps her to mount it, and takes its halter and leads the way at a long stride to the somewhat more obviously empty part of the land.

  Fuze makes Chetwyn – who he addresses as ‘Captain’ – understand, and Chetwyn relays to her, that he has discerned traces of people in Elephant Camp, as they are already calling the back quarter.

  Mrs Chetwyn feels a clutch of dismay, an inherited horror of trespassing and complications, but Chetwyn meets the news with satisfaction: ‘People? So close? That is a stroke of luck, I must say. Fuze, you must …’ and he lapses into their business of mime and the odd shared word to indicate recruitment, labour – hoeing and digging, perhaps eating.

  Part of what they are about on this survey is naming. She sees it is the very basis of comprehension, as she had not, even when she talked Sophronia through infant games of touching the child’s nose, and her own nose, and saying ‘Nose!’ as though at a happy discovery. Already they have Elephant Camp, and Home Camp for the rolling lands. And all of it? For reasons filial and prudent they decided before seeing it to honour the General’s birth village and sentimental home, and it is already ‘Missenden’. It fits well enough. The river already has a name, and that even older than Dutch: the Oomzube. She counts the layers – river names in Zulu, towns in Dutch or Dutch-ish proper nouns, their brand-new estate in crisp English and named for a Buckinghamshire village.

  They are coming down the side of an easy slope when Mrs Chetwyn’s horse begins to baulk and mince. Of the three of them, only Chetwyn is familiar with horses, and he understands in an instant: he has her off its back and in his arms and the reins handed to Fuze. He sets Mrs Chetwyn on the ground.

  ‘Bound to have been a snake,’ he says, as if to reassure her.

  Fuze, ahead of them by half a dozen steps, stops with a sound of fright and wonder. Chetwyn rushes to his side. She stays where she is. The men have their heads lowered and weaving in curiosity and trepidation above a hole burrowed at a slant into the ground, before which is crumpled a heap of some grey stuff she cannot make out … As she takes a step towards it, it resolves itself as the shed skin of an immense snake, as broad as two hands and, now that Chetwyn is uncreasing it, longer than two men are tall.

  He soon has it stretched to its length, and with Fuze is looking from it to the hole; the two of them signal awe with whistles and shaken heads. Careful to keep on the far side of the hole, Mrs Chetwyn bends to look at the thing: repellent as dead skin, superb as figured silk, it shows both a pattern in lighter and darker greys and the imprint of scales. Some of the length of it is split, and some holds its tubular form. The ghost of its head is there, too, preserved in the translucent, crackling skin. Mrs Chetwyn regards it intently. The men have fallen silent. Chetwyn kneels and rolls up the skin. Once he has it in an awkward bundle he stands, and with his free hand removes his hat; he wipes his brow on his sleeve, then gestures to the hillside. ‘Python Camp,’ he says and after a moment more of shared stillness, they walk on.

  The sky is purpling by the time they make their way back to Home Camp, where it is dark enough to make out the fire, light enough to see the smoke that rises from its green wood. She, at least, is somewhat dazed by the place, by Missenden, as she must learn to say. It is so many things at once: the sweep of it, from the bluff to the start of the dense bush at its seaward edge, and the edgeless hills from side to side, yes, but also the minutest grass seedheads holding the light, and the twisted trees rising from the dense bush, some in fruit, some as implacable and unmoving as a carved thing on whose settled branches it is impossible to imagine anything as ephemeral as a flower, and whose leaves are surely never tender and new.

  It seems almost lovable, drawing on a category of feeling beyond pride of ownership, and perhaps closer to the way Chetwyn says Fuze feels about cattle. From whom have they bought this land, and why ever did they sell? She must remember to ask.

  As well as the evidence of a python – one so large it has outgrown its already fantastical skin – and the intimation of an elephant, they had seen a tiny buck, a pert, pretty creature whose polished hooves matched its little horns.

  ‘Impunzi,’ Fuze had said.

  ‘Impunzi,’ they had echoed.

  COSMO

  If the haircut delays the mill visit, my first jacket seems to bring on the day (I cannot guess their thinking). I who have reached what they are calling the age of reason come to tea in my jacket and knickerbockers and Father swallows and comes to me and brings a hand to hover about my head. It settles on my shoulder, and he says: ‘Well, my … Cosmo, I’d say tomorrow’s the day! Over the hill with Papa. You shall be the engineer and start us off, and we’ll try out the configuration we have just today set for the works. What do you say?’

  The girls are listening. Maude drops her eyes to her book to hide her envy, but I have the attention of the others: the one, granted this – required to do this, in fact, when it is not required of them. They sniff about this new thing like mice. And from Father’s hand on my shoulder to the settling of the visit: Mother watching.

  The next day begins with me in my own bed, and breakfast, and then to the parlour, where Latin from a book and sums share our time with games. Today for Pretend I am conscripted for stiff-armed marching and musical shouting. ‘Oh the grand old Duke of York, he had ten thousand men, he marched them up to the top of the hill and he marched them down again.’

  Mother and I step in place, bellowing in time. We laugh. Is she tiring me out? Is she testing the limits of my voice’s volume and energy? I know only that I am encouraged to march and shout and after a while, when she has shown me how, I do so. When we are only halfway up, we are neither up nor down.

  Soldiers’ games, and, later, the privilege of the mill. I leave Griffin watching from the veranda until we are almost out of sight, Father, Fuze and me, and I dare to turn around and push at the air to tell her to leave me – leave off watching me. She shakes her head but turns away and I, in my triumph, walk on with the men, along the break between the cane, over the hill to Python.

  Downhill from us, somewhere in the towering, muttering cane, is our old house, Fuze’s home. Now we know it as ‘the compound’ and are forbidden to go there, and mostly obey; the castle and its gardens, and the closer cane and breaks, are enough for us, with snakes and night leopards for excitement and one another and pilgrims coming up the breaks for company.

  On the other side of the hill, when we are undoubtedly on Python, we meet a gang of cutters along the break: naked to the waist, with bright rags on their foreheads, each with the cutlass we call ‘panga’, sometimes two, leaning on his shoulder. They do not break their stride, but close their lines to clear the path for us, and greet Father as ‘nkosi’, dipping their heads towards him but watching Fuze and giving him a share of their tribute.

  Fuze speaks to them, an easy greeting, and an enquiry, and we and they slow for their answer. To my astonishment, I see – by his gestures and their turning heads – that he has mentioned me.

  We are accustomed to utterly ignoring one another, we children and the cane-cutters. We know ourselves to be nothing but a shameful irritation to them, and when
– as has happened only once in my memory – they cut the home stands of cane, moving close to the house in their swaying, flashing squad, we were herded first into the drawing room and then upstairs.

  We spied, then, on their fearsome knives and their deep songs – boomed forth, or droned, and sometimes sketched with half-voiced breaths in an absentminded way, a placeholder until one of them reached the end of his line, straightened his back, drew a full breath and gave voice as he clutched for the next stalk and swept down his knife arm.

  We know helplessly, that, like a dog to a bird, we do not exist for them until we move, and yet here they are, looking me over, boots to straw hat, which hat I now jam lower on my head. I hear the word ‘umfaan’ rumble among them, and then we are past one another and Father is nodding foolishly and Fuze is leading us down the hill.

  I have been to the mill before, at least as far as its periphery: for each year’s first pressing we are piled into the pony cart and carried over to Python and lined up as a favour to the men who work there, and to Father. Then we are piled back into the cart and continue down to the road that marks Missenden’s southern boundary, and along this, in the direction away from the river – ‘Capewards’, says Maude – until we find the track that leads to the beach. It takes a couple of hours to get to the sea, and we stay the night in a permanently pitched tent raised on its own platform of wood and packed earth. Father rides over to join us at dusk, for a bonfire and picnic, and we sleep around the fire. This is not our land, the land between Missenden and the sea, but is somehow yet Chetwyn’s Camp.

  The mill visit on that annual ritual is little more than a pause on the journey to the sea; until the day of my introduction, none of us has been inside the low brick building uphill from which the crushing mill lies.

  In my jacket I am seen as I approach between Father and Fuze. The men busy with the oxen at the crusher grin and turn their heads to watch us approach even as they circle in the great machine, each at the shoulder of an ox. We reach them and stop there, and Fuze speaks to them, about me, in tones that seem to present me as proof of something only presumed.