by Guy Butler
Sally felt there was something irresponsible in this talk. Sure, things had prices. That didn’t mean they were valueless. One must save one’s money for what was good, but get value for money. Okay, there were some things money could not buy. They were gifts, gifts from nature, like rain and sunlight; or from people, like love and friendship; from God, like faith and mercy. One can’t buy them, or determine when such gifts will come.
One of the greatest gifts from God was Sister Scholastica. And also Dr Rosen. And as she knelt at the altar rail she’d thank God for them.
As for Percy, was he also a gift from God? Was he? Was that a question one could even dare to ask? Of course he was a gift from God. Of course, of course.
Sally sat down beside her deeply engrossed husband.
‘Henry Rockridge died in the night’, she said. ‘Violet told them while you were out.’
He looked up, real concern in his face. ‘How did they take it?’
‘Jill started crying. They all looked to Percy. He led them upstairs.’
‘What should we do? Join in the mourning?’
Sally shook her head. ‘Leave them to it.’
‘They’ll be down for a shoebox for the coffin in a minute’, she prophesied, ‘and I’ve got one ready.’
Not only did they come for a box (Desmond’s task), but a winding sheet (Jill’s) and candles (Kit). Percy quietly invited William to make a cross out of two sticks. The censer presented greater problems, but, entering into the spirit of the thing, William made a creditable burner out of an old brass ash tray, while Sally went to Mr Patel’s comer shop for some josh sticks, for incense, which she broke up small. Sam the gardener reluctantly dug a small grave near the compost pit; Violet stood stolidly aside from all these heathen proceedings, shaking her head, saying: ‘Hai, hai.’
The preparations were interminable, Percy being a punctilious priest. There were several false starts. They were just about to set out when Jill said, ‘We’ve not got flowers for Henry. ‘ So the naked coffin was left parked on the Persian carpet, while floral salutes were prepared, some with cards on them. There was even a card from Lucky, written on his behalf by William. ‘Forgive me my irresistible impulses as you hope to be forgiven yours.’ It was a funny message which no one understood. Its composition exhausted William, who withdrew from the obsequies into his book.
Sally continued sewing, gently thanking God for the life and death of Henry: it had been an absorbing and unifying interest for her children.
Violet Nkwinti watching from the kitchen window, gave occasional bulletins on the progress of the cortège to the grave. The hymn singing was ragged; the only point at which there was the happy concord of unison was the Lord’s prayer, which was used as a frequent reassuring chorus to sustain the flagging interest of Jill and Kit.
An hour later Percy appeared in front of his father. William knew that he had come on serious business.
‘Yes, my boy?’
‘Is Henry’s soul in Heaven yet?’
Quite taken aback, improvising, William looked at his watch. ‘What time did he die?’
It was an unfair question, Percy’s grasp of time being minimal.
‘Ten o’clock’, he said, with absolute conviction. Wrong. The funeral had engrossed them since eight. William shook his head.
‘Not yet. Why do you want to know?’
‘We just want to know’, said Percy, and left.
William reverted to his book, flipped to the back, hoping to find some useful page references under ‘soul’ or ‘life after death’ but it was a very popular book and had no such handy aid as an index.
Five minutes later Desmond appeared.
‘Is Henry in heaven yet?’
William did not know what to say. He looked at his watch once more.
‘Not yet’, he said, playing for time.
Next came Jill, bored to impatience.
‘How much longer?’ she sighed.
He looked at his watch. ‘About two minutes.’
Then came Kit. William looked at his watch. Fifteen minutes had passed, so Henry must be safe in heaven. This must be a different embassage. What are they up to now?
‘Percy wants matches’, said Kit.
‘What for?’ he asked, frowning. No reply.
As he did not like the children to be playing with fire, he went to the stockade. There was Henry’s grave, hidden under a hillock of flowers. Nearby, Percy was busy breaking up sticks for a fire, assited by Desmond. But Jill was sitting at the graveside, pensive, mourning.
‘It’s too close to the hedge for a fire. Move it here’, and he made a mark by jabbing his heel into the ground, hard. ‘Tell me when you’re ready, and I’ll come and light it for you.’
He went inside, and was soon lost – for how long? – in the effects of mechanisation on culture. And then Jill came, hesitant, downcast.
‘They’re ready.’
William looked at his dejected daughter. She had a band round her forehead in which was a single upright feather.
‘My Minnie-ha-ha!’ he exlaimed, grabbing her round the waist, rising, sweeping her aloft.
‘It’s Red Indians again!’ he shouted at Sally in the sewing room. ‘They’ll want some sausage or something for a braai.’
Minnie-ha-ha wriggled unhappily in her father’s arm. She thought, perhaps, that she was too big to be carried? So he put her down. His three sons, arms folded and in solemn line like Redskin chiefs, stood proud in head dresses, of Rock Pigeon feathers; and there, on a small improvised grid-iron next to the ready-laid fire, was the plucked body of the late Henry Rock Pigeon, looking Oh so naked and Oh so dead.
‘The beastly little cannibals!’ came Sally’s voice from behind him. ‘The soul of Henry’, said William ‘is safely in heaven. This is merely his mortal remains.’
Jill had moved to her mother, who lifted her up, from which vantage she looked, large-eyed and baffled, at her father and her brothers. William went down on his haunches and struck a match.
Outside the stockade, oblivious, Henry’s deep-cooing relatives were driving the Pouters away from the bird bath, and languid Lucky was watching them from bored, uninterested, icy eyes.
The flame spread from the match head to the crumpled page of the Sunday Times, and so on to the kindling. William rose and left the Blackfoot Clan, minus their Squaw, to their own devices. He had never felt so touched and so confused in his life. He took an aimless turn on the lawn and then went inside.
Inside Jill and Sally were sitting in the window seat, sewing together, as pretty as a Victorian picture.
For once in his life William’s interest in anthropology’s links with religion became painfully serious. He saw now that, all day, he had been in the presence of great, very ancient, perhaps eternal mysteries; on the brink, as it were, of the divine; but the fact that he knew as much as he did prevented him from crossing the barriers to belief set up by his intelligence. He could no longer enter His gates with uninhibited praise like Sally and Percy could. He had no rituals to help him on that journey, no believed-in rites of passage which he could perform. He was rational 20th century man, very naked and very dead. His soul was the unhappy inheritor of the philosopher’s heaven of abstractions.
8
The Mountain Tortoise Cure
‘In the name of Heaven, what the hell am I doing in this Godforsaken place?’
The further his galloping horse took him into the rising heat and the widening desolation, the more bitter his self-questioning became.
At every turn, at each decision that had led to this crazy canter, he’d wanted to say no, not now, not for me; but always there’d been wills other than his own, more powerful, or persuasive.
And now, barely two days after arriving in his first practice, even before the ox wagon with the furniture had arrived, he’d been obliged to leave his beloved wife Janet on the stoep of an echoing old Cape Dutch House which had stood empty for years; Janet, from the Dee and the Tay, with not more than t
hree dozen words of Afrikaans: abandoned in a dorp where most people spoke only that language.
The first mistake had been the decision to become a junior partner in the practice of Dr Rademeyer in Wellington, his old home town, where his mother and father were living; and to accept their pressing offer of half the vast pastorie until such time as his Scots bride had learnt some Afrikaans, some South African customs and some Boer cooking; and who better as a tutor than his mother? Let the young people spend a year or two there, and then they could think of moving into a fashionable practice in the Peninsula, Gardens or Claremont, places for which Janet had fallen at once. He groaned, blinking into the glare.
The folly of it. He dug his heels into the sweating horse to express his fury with himself. Dr Rademeyer had been trained in Leiden, not Edinburgh, and his continental medicine came out of the Ark. Yes, the Ark. He would have done well looking after all those animals. A fine vet. Within a week he knew that the partnership wouldn’t work; and Janet was pursing her lips, and not saying much about her acclimatisation under the bombazine wings of her proudly clucking mother-in-law. The Dominee’s wife was known as the Duchess of Wellington. He watched his admirable mother try to take his adorable wife in tow – like a great ocean liner moving majestically with a red-sailed skiff tacking rebelliously in its wake. What on earth did those two have in common, except their love for him? By what right had he imposed this proximity upon them? And he marvelled at the nature of love, and the elaborate labyrinths called happy families.
And then his father, his dear, dear, dear father. Yes, he was a marvellous man, there was no denying that. And he’d better not forget it. It was just too easy to forget how marvellous his father was. And he unconsciously relaxed the horse’s pace to be more in tune with that deliberate personality. He really couldn’t fault the Dominee, who had never, never been the crushing parent Dominees were supposed to be. In fact, the very opposite.
After a year at Glasgow, trying to take theological definitions of free will, election, works and grace seriously, David Martyn had written home saying, like the prodigal, Father, I have failed and am no more worthy to be called your son; but I really cannot spend my life preaching complicated doctrines which, try as I will, I cannot grasp. I must abandon the call of the ministry. You may ask what I propose instead? Medicine, Father.’
Fortunately the Martyns were not short of money. The Dominee himself came from a sound family, and had married one of the rich De Villiers’ from Franschhoek. His mother accepted the change of profession less readily. She’d always wanted the best for her boy; the best would have been to own one of the great wine estates, and live like an English lord; the next best, to be a dominee, the uncrowned king of every dorp, even, sometimes, of a big town. A doctor? Well, yes, it was better than being an attorney, but a doctor is too much at the mercy of other people’s complaints, most of which are bogus anyway.
And then they’d been so very patient about his slow progress with his studies. In fact, his dear mother had excused his repetition of most years by saying he was a perfectionist, and wanted to be word-perfect in every subject. The fact is that he’d been playing rugby for Edinburgh University instead, and was once first reserve for Scotland. He’d taken many holidays on the continent, broadening his mind and his interests, listening to endless talk about the young Freud and the young Jung, and the economic theories of Marx and the biology of Darwin, and he’d even gone to lectures of the Society for Psychical Research. David Martyn took these intellectual cross currents no more seriously than he took anything else. He had moved fairly lightly through all landscapes, cultural or geographical – until this morning. There was no lightness of heart in this ride.
Three weeks ago his father had taken him to one side, quietly asking questions, eliciting his dissatisfactions: things were not working out. Dr Rademeyer had also said as much, and it would be a pity for a son to come between his father and an old friend. As for their dear women folk, well, yes, you know how unreasonable they can be. He could see an unholy row brewing between mother and daughter-in-law, which must be avoided if possible. The lovely Janet was at a total disadvantage at present; but once she had a son – a grandson – once she had graduated to the status of mother, she’d be more of his dear wife’s fighting weight, – metaphorically speaking. The more the Dominee thought and prayed about it, the clearer it had become: the young couple must move, and move quickly, and establish themselves on their own, before any deep wounds were inflicted.
The problem was, where? The first practice had been found for David by his parents; he must find the next. So he could not blame his father for the choice of this desolate Karoo practice half the size of Scotland.
Neither could he blame Dr Rademeyer although he was instrumental, introducing him to Dominee Robertson of Ladycole.
‘You will hardly have heard of Ladycole’, said Dominee Robertson in his Scots/Afrikaans accent. ‘Named after the governor Sir Lowry Cole’s wife. Before Sir Harry Smith’s wife had two towns named after her, one in the Cape, one in the Free State. Ladycole is Karoo, remote Karoo, Dr Martyn. It was never much of a place. It prospered for about twenty years when the road to Kimberley and the north went through it – stage coaches, ox wagons, you know, but the railway killed that traffic. But we are left with a nice little clutch of public buildings: a handsome Dutch Reformed Church, and others for the Anglicans, Methodists and Presbyterians. Schools, too – one for whites, one for coloureds.’ He got up, pulled his waistcoat down, and looked at David Martyn with a pleasant scowl. ‘Our Doctor has retired suddenly, to the Strand. I have been sent to find his successor. Urgently. And, by all accounts, you are he.’
David squirmed slightly. He had not been thinking in terms of a Karoo practice at all. He had his feelers out in Cape Town; but so too, he gathered, had another six hundred doctors. Cape Town was alive with medical feelers, like a nest of octopi.
For Dominee Robertson, however, the profession of Medicine, like that of the Church, was a calling; and, just as a dominee would be called to a congregation, so could a doctor be called to a practice.
‘I come to you’, he had said with weight, ‘with a call from the people at Ladycole, to be their doctor. And I devoutly hope you will accept.’
David discussed it with his father, who had the same old-fashioned notion: that a doctor had a calling, and could be called. A doctor was not someone, really, who put out feelers to find a comfortable practice; he was someone who went where there was a need for him. ‘Go and work for your people in the country, my boy. You’ll never regret it’, said his father, with emphasis.
Well, for once his father was wrong. He had started regretting it almost at once. Janet had accepted the venture with good grace, but he had seen her cheerfulness wilt during the ten day journey by Cape cart – up Bainskloof, through Worcester, beyond Touws River, on and on, drier and drier, spending nights in rudimentary inns or boarding houses where the hospitality was impeccable and the plumbing primitive.
It was a sad business for her, sitting alone in the cart, hour after hour. Under the necessity of getting himself fit for his practice, David had ridden the fine horse which his Mother had given him. And just as well he had done so. But what had it done to his wife, and to their relationship?
The first glimpse of Ladycole had been reassuring enough – an oasis of oaks, pears and macracarpa, and white-washed houses on the bank of a river, and running water in stone-lined furrows in the streets; but the old doctor’s house was intimidating. It had a broad, elevated stoep; great, heavy gables from which the plaster was peeling; the black thatch needed repairing, there was green moss on the walls. The decayed grandeur of the exterior was a prelude to a bleak interior. Almost empty of furniture; the fine high ceilinged rooms were intimidating and there was little in the village shops that could be acquired to make it comfortable. Their mentor, Dominee Robertson, had not yet returned, and the village seemed singularly incapable of making their new Doctor feel as welcome as their ‘urgent ca
ll’ suggested they would.
At five o’clock that morning, an imperious knocking had announced Andries Vosloo, exhausted from eight hours in the saddle. He’d ridden through the night from dusk to dawn.
‘My mother is dying.’
In the early light, in the great, bare front room, David listened to the story of his first Ladycole case, while Janet provided relays of coffee, followed by thick oatmeal porridge.
Andries Vosloo was a substantial farmer, a big man in his late thirties, completely matter of fact, not a fool, but with no sense of humour or irony. He came from the farm, Arries Graf, where his mother lived too. In the loft. Yes, she had taken to the huge loft, reached by the outside staircase. Shortly after his father had died, she’d moved up there, the better to detach herself from worldly concerns and to prepare to meet her Maker and, incidentally, her late husband, again. Now that she was dying the family felt she should be brought downstairs into the east wing, but she wouldn’t hear of it. It was a big house, and nobody need get in her way there. Even though she was bedridden, she had this dread of people getting in her way, or of herself getting in theirs. Age? She was still young, for a Vosloo, that is. Seventy, in fact. What was her complaint? Andries Vosloo shrugged his shoulders.
