by Guy Butler
‘So did I’, said the Colonel.
The two old palms scooped up the stones on the table, and threw them up and down like an idling cricketer will do with a ball. That was the most awful thing. Every so often all their nonsense would burst into the real world. They were as normal as a couple of Western Province cricketers.
‘I took my stone to our physics department, with the measurements of the pile and asked for an estimate of how many stones the pile contained. This would be an indication of the minimum number of prayers that had been uttered there.’
Now that he was getting round to the real world of figures I began to feel a bit better.
‘Accuracy is difficult’, came the report, ‘but somewhere between one hundred and twenty and one hundred and forty thousand stones.’ They both looked at me hard.
‘Not counting those who added branches, and cakes of honey, and libations of honey beer, over one hundred thousand Khoi had uttered a prayer there – each adding his mite to the pile. Each with his own concern, his own despairing or hopeful cry.’
I must admit I was quite impressed. Anything over 100 000 is an impressive figure, except in bankrupt currencies, like the Rand.
‘I forwarded the report to the Roads Department, but they took no notice. The dynamiters and bulldozers moved in, and within a month buried Heitsi Eibib’s grave under a couple of million tons of rock’, said the policeman.
‘As District Surgeon’, said the Doctor, ‘I had to certify any deaths among the labourers on that contract. During the cutting and filling operations two bulldozers went over that embankment, killing the drivers.’
The Policeman took over.
‘The opening of the new road was a great event. There was much big talk of progress; but in spite of the new safe contours and cambered curves it developed a reputation for accidents, many fatal.’ He rose to his feet and started pacing the floor. ‘Mostly at night in conditions of unexpected fog.’ The Doctor rose, and added, ‘Mostly on what is known as Hasiesdraai. Mr Blasket, we believe Hasie to be a corruption for Heitsi. Gods survive under pseudonyms, you know. They travel incognito.’
‘Where does the woman come in?’ I asked.
‘With me’, said the Doctor.
‘And me’, said the Policeman.
‘She was Annaline, daughter of one of the richest timber growers in the district, and beautiful to boot. She had liberal ideas in advance of her time. Her father said two centuries in advance. But Dr Verwoerd said no, they were hopelessly out of date. She was a highly strung girl, I had to attend her on more than one occasion. “Nerves”, her mother said. “Rooi hakskene”, said her father, who was a coarse, worldly-wise old devil. But my diagnosis was different. She was afraid, terribly afraid of something, but too brave to run away from it.’
The Policeman came in with reluctance. ‘I received instructions from headquarters to keep my eye on her activities during her holidays. Someone had seen her at a mixed party in Cape Town. She was reported to be friendly with members of NUSAS. This was a part of my work I have never liked: the political part. Well, one night I was phoned to come out with an ambulance. There’d been an accident in the pass. “Hasiesdraai?” I asked. “Ja”.’
‘The wrecked car was a terrible mess, and the young man’s body was badly mutilated and crushed. A light-skinned coloured student. He had the high cheekbones and narrowed eyes of a Khoi, no doubt about it. We had to get the blow-torch from the garage to get his body free. The girl had been flung out. She was unconscious, bleeding still from various cuts. If we’d got there sooner, with blankets, and a pint or two of blood, we might have saved her. It was a bitterly cold night.’
And I realised that the peculiar, intense cold which I had experienced earlier had come back, into my very bones.
‘Because both were dead, the awkward racial circumstances of the accident never hit the headlines. Some overseas journalists wanted to make a big story of it, but you know what they are like. For the parents’ sake we managed to keep them out of it.’
‘Is that all?’ I asked. I was shuddering with cold.
‘Almost’, said the Doctor. ‘A year later to the day I was coming down the pass. Moonlight. Sudden patch of fog. Blinding headlights, just as with you. Sound of a crash. Weird singing, thin, high, sharp. The only difference was that I had a torch and knew the terrain. There was a car in the gorge. The driver was dead. The other passenger, a girl, had been flung out. She was unconscious and bleeding, but alive. I applied what first aid I could. She was a substantial Boland girl, and I knew we needed a stretcher and a couple of strong men to get her up to the road. But I took off my mackintosh, and covered her body, to keep out the ice cold drizzle. I clambered back into the car, and drove like a maniac into Caledon.’
The Colonel lit a cigarette.
‘I was surprised to see him, and more surprised to hear his story. In fact, I did not believe him. I gave him a drink, and he repeated the story. What I could not accept was the correspondence, in detail, between his experience and the original accident.’
The Doctor took over.
‘As District Surgeon I had authority to order the ambulance, but it took me all my eloquence to get him to call out his squad. Four vehicles raced back to the site. The fog had disappeared. It seemed that the headlights of the wrecked car had burnt themselves out. With the help of our torches we clambered down into the gorge.
But there was no wrecked car below, and not a sign of a body either. And no skid marks on the road, no sign of any accident. Only the cold, quiet moonlight. One thing alone saved my credit with the Colonel: my mackintosh, exactly where I had left the girl in the lea of that boulder.’
The Colonel handed me another stiff tot. I shook myself, and knocked it back.
‘Thanks. I suppose I’d better be on my way again.’ I rose and crossed to the hall stand.
‘Where did you get that vintage mackintosh?’ asked the Doctor, his voice suddenly resonant.
I turned round, slowly.
‘Jose’s Junk and Second Hand Treasure Trove, Claremont.’
‘Aah’, he said. ‘I’d take it back there if I were you.’
The Policeman added: ‘And I wouldn’t wear it on the way back.’
Jose did not look surprised when I asked him to take back the coat.
‘How much do you want for it?’
‘What are you prepared to offer?’
‘Half of what you paid.’
‘OK’
He took the heavy thing off my hands.
‘You’ve had a rare experience, wearing a haunted coat. It’s been out five times already. The Colonel and the Doctor, they never let the coat down. They’re always there. Real old regulars’, he said. ‘Read this.’
And he handed me a piece of cardboard with Argus, Die Burger and Cape Times obituary notices posted on it.
The Colonel and the Doctor had been dead fourteen and ten years respectively.
As for the coat – the coat had come to Jose’s Junk and Second Hand Treasure Trove with a pile of odds and ends four years ago, on the death of the Doctor’s widow.
Alexandra and I are together again. She’s given up horses. I’ve given up vintage cars. We don’t need to dress up any more.
13
The Remarkable Vermaaks
By the time I came to live in Ladycole there were no Vermaaks left in the place. But the name kept cropping up, always in an interesting context. I first heard it in the Masonic Hotel after a rugby match. The talk was warming into a hot debate as to which was the most memorable try ever scored in the town.
An old chap said: ‘There is no need to argue about the matter. Stoffel Vermaak’s try will remain the most memorable, for ever and ever, Amen. Have you forgotten how young Vermaak …’
It was clear that those present had not forgotten; also that they were not prepared to listen to the old gentleman’s account yet again.
‘Oom, we are talking of modern times, since Hertzog became Prime Minister.’
&n
bsp; I should have followed the matter up then and there. The old chap died a month later, and wasn’t around when I needed him to clear up some finer points.
About two years later I was standing in the post office queue while the clerks took their half-hour tea break behind the grille. I couldn’t fail to hear what they were saying. The older woman, in a black dress, was telling her pretty apprentice of the recent death of her husband; or rather she was using her marriage to him as a terrible warning.
‘I’m telling you, a girl can’t be too careful about these older men. Take me. I was pretty, believe it or not, and I could have had any of the front-rank forwards, but no, I was flattered by the attentions of this ou, an old man of thirty-five, who’d come across from Graafies to ref the match. In a smart car, and wearing such a blazer as you never saw. My mother said to me, “My child, watch out, he looks like another Henry Vermaak to me.’’ Well, perhaps my husband wasn’t quite as bad as Henry Vermaak. For instance, his funeral went off without all the trouble that made Henry’s funeral such a scandal. Still, I would have done better to stick to one of the front rankers. But in those days a car and a blazer could turn the head of a girl … Yes Meneer? The price of an air letter to New York? By air? You sure? Let me see. Where’s that list, now?’
It took a little time to find the list. ‘Now, where did you say? New where?’
I almost said, ‘Who was Henry Vermaak?’ But the queue was rather long. My social conscience is always interfering with my detective instincts. So when I did need to ask more, the good woman had retired and gone to live in Baardskeerdersbos with her favourite daughter, poor girl.
I suppose I would have forgotten all about Stoffel of the Marvellous Try and Henry of the Bright Blazer, but for a third exemplary use of the Vermaak name. It came from old Simon, a stone-mason so old he could claim to have built half of Ladycole himself and nobody would care to contradict him. How we got on to the topic I don’t know. I think it was the Daisy de Melker murders in the Sunday Times – her cold-bloodedness, her calculated, heartless actions, which neither of us thought typical of the fair sex. I could only think of Clytemnestra’s careful planning to kill her husband – but that was a crime passionel, a once-off affair. Simon wasn’t really interested in Greek tragedy. We were looking for someone cooler, of implacable, relentless determination. Simon put his trowel down, and said, ‘Hester Vermaak is the only person I can think of that could have kept it up. But she wasn’t exactly a murderess, although she had reason enough. That husband of hers, Henry –’ and he shook his head – ‘now there was a rotten man. Not bad or wicked. Simply vrot.’ And he started putting his tools in his canvas hold-all, and took his jacket from under the quince hedge, where he’d put it to keep cool.
‘These Vermaaks – I’m always hearing about them, a bit here, and a bit there’, I said. ‘Who was Stoffel Vermaak?’
‘Stoffel? Stoffel was Henry and Hester’s youngest son, who scored a try that no one will ever forget.’
‘I keep hearing about that try, but never the details.’
‘The details? You want the details of Stoffel’s try? Or of the trouble between Hester and Henry?’
‘Both.’
Simon wasn’t my only informant. There were two others: Mr Bitterlight, the local photographer, and Mr Hurst, the undertaker.
Mr Bitterlight, a highly educated man for the Karoo, was a deep mine of information on Ladycole’s history since the 1890s. His university career at Oxford had come to an end when he started coughing blood. He’d arrived with rotten lungs, and a camera as big as an elephant’s head which stood on legs as thin as a heron’s. Not only did he photograph all public events – the royal visits (two), all the vice-regal visits (one), all the local manifestations of rebellion (two) and the world wars (two), but eclipses, comets, floods, general elections, hoisting of new flags and opening of schools – but also private occasions such as weddings, baptisms and sometimes an occasional funeral; and, of course, rugby teams. People who say that nothing ever happens in Ladycole should ask Bitterlight.
We happened to meet at a garden-party given by the magistrate during the visit of the Circuit Court, the usual dull affair designed to confirm judges in the dignity of their office and to bore all except the local legal profession out of their minds. Bitterlight and I were sitting at a table in company with the grizzled head of Ladycole’s oldest firm of attorneys. He’d had his happy five minutes chat with the great judge, and was able to relax. At twenty past three there was a silent pause filled with the photographer’s profound boredom and the lawyer’s exhausted obéissance. So I threw a stone into the murky pool.
‘Does the name Vermaak mean anything to either of you?’
‘Bad debts. Nothing worse’, said the attorney.
‘A Rolls Royce’, said the photographer.
Although these two observations were not readily compatible, neither of my informants seemed prepared to jog their memories further. But two days later I bumped into old Mr Bitterlight in the library foyer.
‘Was it you who asked about the Vermaaks the other day? Funny thing, serendipity. Going through my old glass plates, looking for Edward, Prince of Wales, I came across a batch of pictures which I took for some American busybodies. They came out in the wake of the Carnegie Commission into the Poor Whites. Solemn, good people they were. They found the Vermaaks very interesting indeed, and asked me to go out to their place and photograph them. I went twice – once shortly before the mother, Hester’s, death, the second before the father, Henry’s, death.’
The first photograph was of the Vermaak home: a place of mean proportions, a low, flat-roofed cottage with small windows, and a rickety narrow verandah all round the raised earthen stoep. But it had a cared-for look, as did the garden, which contained various vegetables, and a few sunflowers and geranium plants. On the stoep stood a large woman, wearing a white apron over a black dress, her arms folded across her generous bosom. Her hair was scraped back neatly from a broad forehead; her mouth was firm but not mean. The dark eyes were her most striking feature; they glinted, looking at something beyond the camera’s point of view. With her were four children. There were two large girls, one of whom could have been eighteen, with a bold beauty which her mother might once have had. Then there was a boy of about fifteen, with all the misery of adolescence in his pimply face, wearing the poor but honest clothes of a child from a struggling home. Another boy, about ten, grinned at the world, seemingly untouched by the shades of poverty and parental unhappiness. Could he have been Stoffel of the Miraculous Try? At his feet lay two equally careless looking dogs of the large non-species which we call brak, laughing with tongues lolling out. Slightly separate, a pretty girl was hanging on the arm of a massive young man in the uniform of the South African Railways. There was no other adult male in evidence.
The other photograph could not have been more different: it was filled by the untidy mass of a pepper tree under which was parked a car, a Rolls Royce, no less. Its roof reached close to the lower branches of the berry-laden tree; it also supported a chicken coop, from whose darkness two bright bantams seemed to be stepping. One of the back tyres was flat, and this had the effect of giving the wreck a jaunty tilt. Seated at the wheel, smiling confidently at the camera, was the fabulous Henry. He was florid, bearded and mustachioed, with an old sporting cap perched on a tumult of uncut curls, and the forearm and elbow, thrust over the door, showed he was wearing a blazer.
‘What was he like?’ I asked.
‘A superb fraud’, said Bitterlight. ‘He called himself Captain, but dropped that title when the Nats got in. Fat as Falstaff, and as thirsty, but he had no wit. And those slit-eyes, that drooping wispy moustache and beard – he could look like a Chinese sage, but he had no wisdom at all. In fact, he was stupid. But he managed to impress the Carnegie people. In their car, driving home, they discussed his case at length. ‘How come a man of the world with a Rolls Royce can end up in such circumstances? Post-war depression? Shell shock? Capitalist expl
oitation?’
Simon the mason also had his views on the Carnegie Commission into Poor White Poverty. What was so special about White Poverty that it needed a Commission all to itself? He didn’t need Americans to come and tell him why Henry was under a pepper tree. That’s just the sort of thing that happened to vrot people, sooner or later.
During the 1914-18 War, Henry saw service as an officer’s servant. Early on he had been told to look after a British liaison officer, Captain Smithyman. Henry earned his affection by his ability to conjure up alcoholic and feminine comforts in what were, to say the least, unpromising circumstances. The arrangement continued afterwards at Roberts Heights.
The notice of the captain’s posting to England coincided with Henry’s demobilisation. Smithyman had lost his last brass farthing at cards and needed hard cash. As usual he turned to Henry for help. Would Henry sell his Austin car for him, at once? Henry said he could not promise to get a decent price in a hurry. After hectic negotiations with an anonymous third party (Henry himself), the Captain sold the car for about half of Henry’s demobilisation pay. Smithyman was so grateful he gave Henry his cricket togs and his sporting blazer as a farewell present, and Henry gave himself the honorific title of Captain.
The spoils of war were, however, wasted on Henry Vermaak. Had he been in less of a hurry he could have found a wife with a much bigger piece of land than Marigold Robertson of Ladycole, a pretty and pretentious little scatterbrain. Old man Robertson, however, sized his son-in-law up, and saw to it that the land, small as it was, was entailed to his daughter’s children. She died in childbirth, leaving Henry and the midwife (Simon’s wife) with a helpless baby, for whom a wetnurse had to be found.
The Ladycole outspan was close to Henry Vermaak’s farm boundary, so he got to know the transport riders well. One of these was a widower ‘Remskoen’ van Heerden, a godfearing, hard, old man, a little embittered by the fact that his late wife had produced girls only. What use were girls on trek? Loading and unloading? True, he made them work as if they were men. His eldest daughter, Hester, grew up hardy, handy and healthy, and hungry for a home of her own.
