He has thought for all these years about going back but could not imagine it. Now the imagining is taken out of his hands; he will cross back under arms, one of thousands, given cover by his uniform and by other men, to be seen again by his uncles, and his mother if she lives.
On the day that Fuze leaves, at dawn, the daughters murmur and jostle near his stirrups, and hand up to him small objects once owned by their father – a neck stock, a celluloid-shelled penknife, a small mirror, a collar box to hold them. Fuze does not pack the box away but keeps it behind the saddle horn as he salutes them, once, in Zulu, and turns, and sets his horse’s head for the break.
Cosmo watches him from the deep veranda of the lower cottage. She imagines a line from his diminishing figure to her own body, and feels its tightening as grief. She sees, or imagines, the slightest shifting of his shoulders as he passes between Missenden’s white pillars, as if to shrug aside something that has alighted there.
Fuze tracks the bottom edge of the estate to its farthest corner, then sways with the mare down a shortcut to the river and swims her across the Oomzube. On the far bank he tethers her and there, where a low, looping branch dips to the earth, he scrapes a hole in the ground and buries the box. Then he mounts up, weightless, and takes the road.
MRS CHETWYN
There are questions for Mrs Chetwyn to answer; perhaps there ought to be charges. Instead, she rehearses for her son the story of his settler family, for when he is old enough to be schooled in the sympathetic fictions.
She tries for a bitter pun: ‘Port Natal was backwards,’ she will say, ‘and upside down.’ She sees a heel lifting from a slick of water over sand, and then another heel, then both again in their turn, lifting and sinking into waterlogged, but no longer waterglazed, sand. She knows that truth depends in part on where you begin the story, and so her husband carrying her from the ferry raft to the Missenden bank that first day on the estate, and the two men who took her from the small boat to the shore, are one in her telling, and she is hanging over the naked shoulder of a man whose name she will never know, facing back the way she came, gamely upside down.
Nudging the cradle of her last child on the veranda of the white house, Mrs Chetwyn is softer than the spare girl who landed two decades before, at least to look at. Her body has spread and relaxed outward, as if what were once the cool, mechanically cut pages of a girlish diary have, with the entries and erasures, eased in their fibres. Her covers tilt open as though time itself has volume, has heft, and stitches surely dimple her spine.
As she lessons her son in her mind, a crinoline of her imagining has been unbuckled and collapsed into an unruly disc; her misremembrance will include later fashions, more flattering than those she had actually worn on the ship out. Crinoline cages are an acceptable joke by the time she decides to recall that hers is under the other arm of her man and … and the tall African, tall as a parent, is entirely unsurprised by it when it is handed down to him from the boat.
For a moment, before she forgets, Mrs Chetwyn remembers being held in a close black hold, heeled and tossed and helpless.
But she is almost ashore. Every four or five steps her obliging African makes a sound of exertion and shifts his arm, which is curled about her in the region of her skirts.
If she raises her head she can watch her daughter riding high on the arm of another man, who is otherwise hung about with luggage. Her daughter’s arms are tight around his neck. He says something to his companion, and Mrs Chetwyn’s man answers him.
Mrs Chetwyn keeps her attention on the heels, the sand. She solves the matter of what to do with her hands: they are pressed against his back in their neat, intact grey gloves. She can at least brace herself enough to keep her upper chest from meeting his shoulders.
She watches his heels. She refuses to see his buttocks. She closes her eyes and they strain towards the land.
THANKS
For the unexpected gift of an excursion deep into the sugarlands, for reading early drafts with a kind and expert eye, and for help and encouragement during the writing of this book; for sharing memories of childhood imphepho, and digging out the ancestral Victorian travelling desk, and especially for making it easier to knuckle down and write, my true thanks to James Robertson, Helen Sullivan, Julia Sullivan, David Eldridge, Zingiswa Portia Manzana, Rachel Browne, Susan Broodryk, Anton Ferreira, Magdel du Preez, Trevor and Sharneen Thompson of Seaforth farm in Umhlali, Fourie Botha, Beth Lindop and most definitely Jenefer Shute.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Part One Cosmo
Chapter 1
Cosmo
Chapter 2
Cosmo
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Cosmo
Chapter 6
Cosmo
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Cosmo
Chapter 9
Cosmo
Chapter 10
Cosmo
Chapter 11
Interregnum Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Part Two Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Cosmo
Fuze
Mrs Chetwyn
Thanks
Guide
Cover
Contents
Title Page
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