There is a lull in the harvest work. There is cane arrowing in some of the upper lands, the second cycle on the first lands they planted. In the lower fields, and over the hill in Python, the hot sandy soil lies in humped lines, and no shoots show themselves.
A trader in small goods calls at the estate, setting Sophronia and the twins hopping for ribbons, and little Maude struck dumb at the sound of his tiny bells. Mrs Chetwyn comes out to satisfy their cravings, and see about ink and paper and soap and trimmings for herself, and for the other women of the household.
Zodwa and her aunts hang back as the little girls surge about the boxy cart, whose sides lift to make a hanging and a shelved riot of gaudiness. Mrs Chetwyn sees Fuze cross from his room with a fistful of coins; he approaches the cart as the trader’s boy comes out from behind the vehicle and catches sight of Fuze. He does not bow exactly, but dips his head and takes a step backwards, and keeps his head down until Fuze, upon reaching him, says something to him in low tones. Mrs Chetwyn knows that what she is seeing is deference of a genuine and instinctual kind, shown by the boy to Fuze, and she turns a questioning gaze on the latter, and is royally ignored.
The tinker’s boy seems to be an ordinary fellow, perhaps younger than Fuze, and competent in his dealings with his customers. Then he stretches into a high corner of the cart-shop for a kettle at Griffin’s direction and is checked in his movement: some judder of imbalance upsets what ought to be an easy, unthinking movement for a young man. Noticing this about him, this brief stiffness, presents him afresh to Mrs Chetwyn, and she looks him over more closely.
There is a suggestion in the dullness of his cheeks, and the colour of his hair – some steps below lustrous black, towards a rusted shade – that tells its own story, and, put with his weakness, make a recent history. He is deliberately jaunty, and almost bright of eye, but she guesses that under his patina of new fortune – gainful work, a meal today, yesterday, perhaps every day for a week – there is bone-deep experience of hunger, and damage done to his young frame. This young man has starved, and that recently.
Without knowing that she does so, Mrs Chetwyn brings her hands to lie over her middle, spread in the fingers, a
gesture of protection or comfort that is noticed by Griffin and the other women. The daughters of Missenden amuse themselves by nicknaming the long-jawed young man Donkey Face.
Zulu Companion is always at hand, and by now many of its phrases come to her without thought, but she notices the effect they have on Fuze. Is it the way she says them? Is she making vulgar insults out of blameless nouns with her faulty sounding of them? Is she saying words that ought not to be said by a woman, or by a woman to a man?
The bending of his language to her approaches is not an easy business: it shows its seams. There is the larger matter, perhaps, of different thinking here. But as the words perform their work of signalling blunt intent and obscuring meaning, meaning can be glimpsed, below.
Fuze has his own vocabulary of English words, and seems sometimes to rush to use these to forestall her Zulu when she starts in on a laboured phrase to do with a bucket of water or cleaning the digging tools or saddling a horse. It is all water and tools and saddles: there seem to be no words for real matters – who he is, who his parents are, or were, where his family is. What happened. Boy, get up; the sun has already risen: Wena umfane, vuka, ilanga selipumile. Go loosen the horse; knee-halter him: Hamba, utukulule ihashe; liguqise. There is a great deal of hamba, vuka, wena.
Chetwyn had said only that Fuze was alone when they encountered one another in empty country. She questions her husband about it, more closely.
Fuze had been carrying a mat rolled under his arm, and a skin and a basket, and had started wildly at seeing Chetwyn, who was on foot, also by himself, some way ahead of the wagon.
Fuze had been hurt in some manner – some wound that drew their attention once he and Chetwyn reached the wagon – yes, a burn to the lower leg; they dressed it with bear grease and it healed.
There had been no other soul in that quarter but Fuze. Not a cow, not a man or woman, and the trembling sense he had noticed or imagined, the way the land was haunted by war, was sharply felt there. They had shot some birds, and a buck for the larder, turned south and not looked back.
Fuze had, he says he now recalls, been accepted among the hunt servants with deference, but had not stood on his status, whatever that was, and had quickly done his part and found a place for himself as Chetwyn’s gunbearer and rough guide.
‘Useful. A useful chap,’ says Chetwyn, and that concludes what he noticed upon, as he puts it, discovering Fuze.
This conversation with Chetwyn about their man takes place over the midday meal in the front room of the little house. When she leaves the house again shortly afterwards, with the idea of walking to the river to look for lily seed – or is it a bulb she seeks? Or a rhizome? Or a cutting? – Fuze is crossing from the seedbeds to his quarters, and on impulse she calls to him and with the words for wanting and water, and a gesture of heavy invitation, gets him to join her.
There might be wading, she tells herself. There is sure to be wet work of some sort, and he can manage that better than I.
She steps ahead of him so that she proceeds him between the naked rows and down the sloping lands. She knows nothing of lotus lilies but for a dim recollection, in another context, a poetic or allegorical context, that the replicating generative part of a lily is the oldest collected seed among all plants. Is it one hundred years a lily can be kept in suspension, neither rotting or dead nor fresh and shooting? A hundred years, a sealed box sent from so far in the past to the everyday now …
She has walked some way ahead and so has time to stop and wait for him, at a bend in the path to the river, slightly before it dips down to the level of the water. She turns to face back down the path, but is in the shade of a stand of trees and so he does not see her as he comes; she sees his face in an unguarded instant and is somewhat startled to notice that Fuze is in profound conversation with himself, a dialogue of alternative outcomes. She understands this as clearly as if he has begun to hold forth in parliamentary English: on one hand such, on the other, not such; he tells his thoughts with the expression on his face, the merest movement of his hands. He is deep in it. Quickly, she drops her gaze and dips her head until she is bowed slightly in the attitude of one similarly sunk in thought.
When, at his step on the path (does he make a deliberately heavy footfall to likewise give her time to arrange her features for him? The thought is as satisfying as a true conversation), when, at his step, she naturally enough looks up to acknowledge him, he wears the guarded face with which she is familiar.
She makes a vague movement with her head to say she sees him and turns to again precede him on the downward path, and then onto a leftward fork that tracks the river on its western bank, moving upstream. She listens for his footsteps behind her, and thinks she hears them, but does not turn around to make certain of this.
Soon they come to a bend in the river, tucked into the elbow of which is a natural pond with a colony of lilies.
Those that are in bloom are fully open in the early afternoon light, blue-petalled and as neatly, sharply whorled as to suggest an affinity with a pine cone, or pineapple, or cycad fruit; the connections among all life are maddening to her, being so apparent and then so unlikely … But overlying this is simple delight in the aesthetics of the lilies, fresh against the grey-green clouded pond, their grey-green pads spread under them like circles of water reconstituted into plant material.
She leads the way to where a trio of plants comes nearest to the lip of the pond, and leans for a plant. She cannot reach it, but Fuze is there, stepping into the water and moving deeper, until he is up to his knees. He spreads the fingers of both hands to make a loose basket of them, and slides this under one of the plants and pulls it towards her.
Mrs Chetwyn takes hold of it and tears it clear of the water – it is about half her own length, from its pads to it
s roots at the end of a long, pale stem. She can see no sign of where the fruit might be.
Fuze has moved slowly in the water, and has disturbed the pond matter only where his feet have trodden. In the water to one side of him, Mrs Chetwyn makes out a dark egglike shape on the silky bed. He sees it too; he catches his shirt against his chest with one hand and with the other he reaches down and fetches it up.
She scoops it carefully from his open palm; it is the decaying bud of a flower, but a bud from the end of the flower’s life, as though it has, after blooming, circled back to its beginning. She tests it with her fingers and feels a hard, living growth within.
There is barely a sound. Their presence has silenced the birds. The river, although it runs by just on the other side of an earthen wall from this still pond, does so almost silently.
Fuze, pushing the plants apart, isolates one that has no bloom but is something more than just the naked pads: the residual flower is decaying on a stalk, and this he pulls through the water to her. She kneels on the bank and bends low to dip her fingers beneath the surface and surround the pad with the rotting flower, and feel, as delicately as a gillie tickling trout, about its underskirts, learning the plant by touch. The only water lily she could find in Chetwyn’s books had had a hard fruit under the leaf, so – even though she knows she has the fruit of the local lily and that from the pond floor – she tests the evidence of her senses against what is described by science, tests here against there.
Their silent concentration and gentle movements have reassured the local creatures that they might take up their lives again. As well as birdsong there comes the looped push-and-pull call of a bullfrog, so confidently and irritably reasserting its rights to the pond that Mrs Chetwyn almost laughs. She catches Fuze’s eye; he, too, has been nudged into broad amusement. Now that she sees his smile she sees what careful custody he keeps of it.
She has not the words to ask, What troubles you, Fuze? but she is moved to make an attempt, and says in English, ‘Are you troubled by something, Fuze?’ As she speaks, she holds one hand towards him.
He, demonstrably making out that she has asked a question or a favour or the performance of a task, and holding out her hand moreover, answers in Zulu: ‘Another one? I will see if I can find one,’ and turns back towards the pads and steps deeper into the pond.
Mrs Chetwyn judges that to say his name and shake her head for no will not much improve matters. Yet she also understood, instantly, before he made matters clear with the movement of his limbs, that his reply was a rebuff.
Lily seed she had seen in an illustration, one-hundred-year-old time-travelling lily seed, had nested in a curious pie-dish pod with seeds peeping from it in multitudes like plums from a batter pudding – but also like eyes set in a multi-holed skull. Its seeds were hard, harder than a tooth might crack, harder than a hazelnut; she could well believe they would last decades.
Her seeds, however, are packed together in the fruit, and clad, each one, in a clear, golden jelly; the seed itself is black and tiny. She has one opened fruit and six more still in the green-egg stage when she and Fuze make their way back up Missenden’s hill.
They have been gone for hours. The long shadows and settling air of the estate attest to it, and next this is confirmed by a shout of ‘Fuze! Where the devil did you get to? I needed you!’
Chetwyn is coming to meet them. Fuze, who has reversed the order of their outward journey to precede Mrs Chetwyn, jogs away from her without a backward glance.
She keeps one hand among the pods and lily fruit in her pocket, rolling them against one another. Perhaps not, in the case of the local plant, seeds that could outlive a woman.
She can see her daughters flocking around Griffin under the homestead tree. Zodwa is wearing Maude on her back, but picks up from the twins the intelligence that their mother is near, and with a movement that is at once all elbows and adept and startling, sweeps the baby under her arm and around to her front. Maude, wakened by losing the warm back, grizzles.
Sophronia and the twins lift their heads to watch their mother approach. She does not quite gain them, but turns onto the pathway through the seedbeds, acknowledging them with a glance as she passes, and one for the grinding stone.
The tinker’s cart is the first visitor to Missenden in ten days, but in the way that she is learning not to question, on the day following that rare event another caller comes and this time in a full wagon, drawn by eight oxen.
It turns off the road that runs along the lower edge of Missenden and the oxen labour a dozen paces up the hill, and stop. There is nothing much to remark in a wagon settling in to outspan on their land; there is, however, a hiccough of newness in the fact that no one from this wagon immediately starts up the estate drive to greet his hosts or sends a boy to make his deliveries. Looking down the slope of the land to the wagon in the distance, Mrs Chetwyn sees only the driver and his boy, busy with lifting yokes and turning the cattle out onto the natural lands that, being of indifferently clayey earth, are too cool to be worth ploughing for cane.
Instead of going back into the house she skirts it to the outdoor kitchen to stoke heat under the kettle. Back in the parlour she frees cups and saucers from a shelf and silver spoons from the press and lays a tray with these, on clean cloth where otherwise wiped-down oilcloth daily is. The caddy is fragrant and the biscuit barrel ready on its island in a dish of ant-proof water.
Griffin brings the kettle and makes a start on the tea. Mrs Chetwyn returns to the front door and looks down towards the road. There appears a man walking towards the wagon from the direction of the river. His head is bent in close examination of the ground at his feet.
He stops with awkward suddenness, and crouches as though to prepare for attack, and spends some moments in this attitude, peering at the ground and moving his hand with a delicacy apparent even at this distance; he is parting or teasing out or gently excavating something there. At last he stands, and looks around as if to seek someone to tell of what he has found, and as he looks about him he takes from his pocket a handkerchief and from his head his hat and wipes his brow. This reveals to her the deep-red, blood-red, wound-red hair of the man from the experimental gardens, the botanist who gave her her seeds.
Mrs Chetwyn feels a smile come, and she casts a protective glance at her seedbeds, and feels a clutch of worry about her seed manual, at how rough and childish it might appear, the project of which she is so proud. The mad botanist, here.
As she watches, he replaces his hat on his strange, rich hair and crouches to tie his kerchief to the branches of a low shrub. He stands, picks up his pace and turns for the wagon. He is lost to her sight behind it.
She has just, in her swiftly gained bedroom, touched a finger damp with cologne to her throat and temples when she hears his step and, smoothing her hair with both hands, and next her better apron, she comes out to greet him.
His body fills the doorway of the front room and is in silhouette against the day, and she has the unnatural sensation of being seen without being able to read the face of her regarder. She sets her features in as bland an arrangement as she can as she crosses the room to him, and makes a smooth smile, looking towards where she guesses his eyes to be. When he steps back, onto the veranda and into the light, she sees that he has not been surprised to recognise her – that he anticipated finding her here – but before she can give this the attention it surely warrants, he sketches a bow-like nod of his head and speaks.
‘Those surely cannot be they? So soon and so hale?’
He is turning from her as though in the middle of a conversation, with perfect ease, to gesture with his hat towards her neat beds. Mrs Chetwyn feels not a moment’s discomfort – rather, is aware of a buoyancy in the exchange, as of two minds in a conspiracy deciding to speak their civilised words out of the proper sequence: they are indulging, like children starting their dinner with a dish of sherbet, in the main thing there is of interest between them.
She steps through the door,
passing close to him as she crosses the veranda and leads the way to the beds, saying over her shoulder, as though to one of the children, or a familiar friend, ‘Not so soon as all that. Years. Three growing seasons. Some of them have already delivered seed from the second generation.’
She turns to look at him full in the face for the first time, and addresses him directly. ‘You recall that they were none of them labelled? That there was no indication of their nature?’
‘I recall all too well. A handful of scrapings from the case, folded into your pocket. Do you mean to say you have come so far as an inventory?’
Along with his direct address, he is not troubling to hide his admiration, and she sees the cool sparkle of eyes that were dulled and dark when she saw them last.
‘A beginning only, a start on finding them out. Here, for instance, for a season, were rhubarb and the beginnings of a maple, bedmates ’til I had the maple moved. And the rhubarb stewed with our own sugar.’
He laughs, and she, with a feeling almost like choking, is startled into answering laughter. He kneels on the grassy verge of a bed and lifts a leaf, seeming to gauge its health by touch, and she is reminded of him on the road, crouched.
She says, ‘But something caught your notice, I think? In the lower lands?’ And he comes back to himself, smiles widely and stands.
‘Of course! At once! You must see it at once!’ and he is off across the homestead garden and down the approach driveway, and she does not hesitate, nor turn back for her bonnet or calash or stronger boots, but catches up her skirts and runs after him like a girl and reaches him and settles to striding, as he does, but skipping every so often to catch up as they hurtle towards the road.
Under Glass Page 12
