by Isla Morley
AND HERE I AM AGAIN, touching things that don’t belong to me. I walk back out of Susannah’s kaia into the pea soup of the Cape autumn. Around the back of the hut is a double sink with a cold-water tap. A few paces away is the outhouse. I open the door and see the toilet on a wooden box and the doll doily covering the spare roll. The peacocks flutter out of my way when I step back outside. Parading royally down the driveway, they make a sharp right and head for the gap in the fence that divides this property from the neighbor’s.
The bush covering the hillside of the Bredenkamps’ property is singing with insects, a kettle boiling. The hoopoe birds call to one another from telephone poles, and the aroma of my youth, the smell of renosterveldt and dung, rises up from the soil. The memories rise up too—my grandmother’s front porch, knitting needles, and the sharp smell of rooibos tea. Only the ghosts slumber.
After heading up the hill to the main house, I go toward the back door like one who has been coming here for years. Susannah looks up from her rosebush and I say, “I’ll take it,” before she asks.
“A hundred rand a night sound fair to you? That includes breakfast,” she asks. “Right, then,” she says, seeing my nod, “Delia will give it a dust and put new sheets on the bed. She will also stock the shelves with a few dishes and pots and cutlery, and we’ll move in the coffee machine and the electric heater so you won’t freeze to death in the evenings. And don’t worry about the outhouse—Etienne treated it the other day. The only thing is, you will have to take showers in the main house. And you can do that whenever it suits you, except on Sunday mornings, which is when Mother and I go to church and Etienne goes off to the bowling green.”
We drink tea in her kitchen and Susannah asks about living in Hawaii, tells how most of her friends have moved to Canada and Australia. A few luckier ones have moved to Florida.
“My sons are thinking of emigrating and I won’t stop them. It is harder for the younger ones who are just starting out. I keep reminding Etienne that we left when we were their age; we moved to Singapore during the construction boom and Etienne made an indecent sum of money. But we were desperately unhappy and homesick and moved back here after four years. You never know, it might be the same for the boys. Bloom where you are planted, that’s the most important thing, don’t you think?”
“It certainly looks as if that is what you and your family are doing here,” I muse.
“I don’t know if one could call it blooming, but we are certainly planted,” Susannah says. “You are planted in Hawaii, then, or are your roots still here?” It is an unfair question, and instead of answering I look at my watch. If I am to make it to the Perlemoen Hotel, where I checked in for just one night, get my luggage, and make it back here before being charged for another night, I must hurry.
“Where’s your car?” she asks when she escorts me out the front door.
Rental cars are for people with budgets; budgets are for people with money. I don’t say this but rather, “I took the bus most of the way and walked the rest.”
“Well, it’s better than those wretched taxis. Etienne calls them kamikaze taxis. But you shouldn’t walk these parts alone, you know. There have been several incidents recently.” I thank my new landlady, encircled by her panting, chubby dogs, and head down her driveway. I turn back before the tall pine trees obstruct the view of her house, and she waves imperially once again. I step into the shade of the trees and head off to the bus stop.
HOTEL RATES ARE HIGH in Paarl’s city limits, even for a crusty, outdated relic like the Perlemoen Hotel. I am eager to check out and make my way back to the Bredenkamps’ home on the town’s outskirts. It is not quite two miles from the bus stop to the Bredenkamps’ cottage, but it is all uphill and there is no break from the biting wind once I turn onto the main road. The two-way street is wide. Sidewalks must only exist in America; here gravel flanks the road, quickly wearing holes in children’s Sunday shoes. The traffic is occasional and only a few pedestrians are out this afternoon. A woman in a white robe with blue trim, the uniform of the African Zion Christians, smiles at me and I bid her “Molo mfazi” as we pass each other. Farther along, on the other side of the street where it crooks like a fisherman’s hook, is an African boy, not more than ten. He is running, one hand on the raised-wire steering wheel of his homemade car, his breath smoky-cold. He doesn’t see me stop for a rest, switching my suitcase to the other hand. My arms, once accustomed to hoisting Cleo’s thirty-pound frame, have turned to glue.
I have not gone more than a mile when a pickup truck slows down next to me and what looks like the Pillsbury Doughboy with a tan and a safari suit asks, “Skies tog, het jy help noodig?” I tell him no, I don’t need help, that I am just walking up the hill to the Bredenkamps’ place. And he switches quickly to English, heavily accented, and says, “Hop in, let me give you a ride. Too bloody cold to be walking about.” He leans over and pushes open the passenger door. I heave my suitcase into the flatbed and get in, only to hear my mother say, You don’t get in the cars of people you don’t know. Least of all men.
“Karel van der Walt,” he says, rolling his r’s and shaking my hand with vigor. His heavy Malmesbury bry gives him away as a transplant from the Swartlands. “Pleased to know you.”
“Elizabeth Spenser,” I say, trying not to stare at his front tooth that is no longer there.
He grinds the truck into first gear and it lurches up the hill obediently.
“So you are family of Susannah and them?”
“No, I am renting their cottage.”
“You not from here?” And then he apologizes, “Sorry for my questions.”
“I used to be, but now I live in Hawaii.”
He whistles, “Jislike! Hawaii Five-O! You hula-dance?”
“No.” I smile.
“Ja. I suppose so. Just like all the foreigners think we have lions and elephants in a kraal in our backyards.”
He slows, rolls down his window, and thrusts his hand out to indicate his intention to turn. “You can just drop me off here,” I say. “I can walk up the driveway.”
“No, I take you all the way,” he insists, and we bounce up Susannah’s potholed driveway till we are greeted by the yapping sausages.
Karel jumps out and retrieves my suitcase before I can get to it, and I hear him belt out, “Stupid bloody animals of yours, Etienne; when you going to make lekker kebobs out of them?”
Etienne Bredenkamp, a baobab of a man, lumbers toward the car. His immense torso is carried by trunklike legs and his arms are up shading his eyes from the sun.
“Quiet, hounds,” he admonishes, and the yapping miraculously stops. To the kind knight of the rusty pickup he says, “Not until your wife makes mincemeat out of you, van der Walt, which I hear from the villagers will be pretty soon!”
“Ag, no need to get personal!” Karel chortles, and they shake hands. Etienne Bredenkamp bends down and says in his perfectly clipped upper-class accent, “And who, may I be so bold as to inquire, are you?”
Before I can answer, Karel says, “Jislike, man, she’s your new tenant, all the way from Hawaii Five-O—”
“Abbe Spenser,” I interrupt. “Your wife is expecting me, I believe.”
“Yes, of course,” he says, and extends his hand, which smothers mine. “Etienne Bredenkamp at your service. Please come in. You too, Karel, only if you promise not to eat my dogs.”
“No, I’m on my way to the shop to pick up a lemon tart for Lavinia—she’s having the preacher over for tea.”
“I am glad to see you have reformed,” says Etienne.
“She says if I am not going to church, she is bringing the church to me.”
“Heard you scared off a couple of burglars from the Venters’ place last week? Well done, lad.” Aside, Etienne explains to me that Karel heads the neighborhood watch association.
“Those two scallywags didn’t scare easily, man! Tell the truth, I don’t think we’ve seen the last of them.” He gets in his pickup, leans out the window,
and says, “Good luck, Miss Hula,” and then, to Etienne, “Give my best to Susannah,” and he is gone with a cloud of dust following him.
“Please, this way,” Etienne says, and he ushers me through the front door and into the sitting room, which looks as though it has been transplanted from a castle. Filled with antique furniture and pictures hanging in gilded frames, the room is host to half a dozen cats arranged around a paraffin heater. I am afraid to sit in one of the Queen Anne armchairs, so I stand awkwardly.
“Susannah is resting at the moment. She has not been feeling up to snuff this afternoon, I am afraid.” He goes off to call her and I walk to one olive-green wall hosting a series of oil paintings of First World War airplanes. They are all originals, Allied planes flying between golden clouds. One picture captures the triumphant swoop of a plane emerging from a cloud, while below, in the bottom right-hand corner, a fireball trailing a dark line of smoke hurtles downward.
“My grandfather fought in the Royal Air Force,” Etienne says, returning. “He was missing in action, but, I am afraid, his love of airplanes lives on in me.”
“These are quite striking,” I say. “I can’t make out the artist.”
“Yours truly,” he says. “Painted more than thirty years ago. Before I realized I had to make a living, and canvases and paintbrushes weren’t the tools with which one typically accomplishes that.”
“He could have made a living at it,” says Susannah, sweeping into the room wearing a persimmon and black kaftan and cooling herself with a sandalwood fan even though it can’t be more than sixty degrees inside. “But he thought an architect would impress my father more than a struggling artist.”
“Well, now that you have had a brief lecture in the history of the Bredenkamps, my dear,” Etienne says, “let me officially welcome you to this our humble abode. You are going to have to put up with our rather eccentric ways—”
“Not to mention my menopausal moods,” interjects Susannah.
“—but we trust your stay will be a good one.” I half expect him to give a small bow, and as I say a quiet thank-you, Mrs. du Toit hobbles into the room from the adjoining dining room and says, “Etienne, my pipes have stopped working again.”
“Good Lord, Mother, no!” he says in mock horror, and he and Susannah snicker.
“Oh for heaven’s sake, grow up! I’m talking about my water pipes,” she barks, shaking her cane at him. They both crack up, Etienne with deep guffaws and Susannah snorting through her nose.
“This is the third time my sink has blocked up, and if you cannot fix it once and for all, I’ll evict the bloody lot of you, so help me!” But I can see she is straining from the effort not to smile, even though she has her right hand raised as if before a judge. She looks at me and says, “Oh yes, the Spenser girl,” and then does a U-turn and exits before I can say anything. Etienne follows her and Susannah bids me sit.
“Delia!” she crows, “tea please,” and I hear cupboards opening and china being set down in reply.
“My mother lives in the adjoining granny flat,” Susannah explains, “but this used to be her house. She conveniently forgets she sold it to us fifteen years ago, and uses it now as leverage to get Etienne to do her bidding. Not that he wouldn’t anyway.”
“You seem very happy,” is all I can think of to say.
“Oh, we get along all right; it’s when the boys come home that all hell breaks loose.”
“The boys?”
“Our children. Well, they’re not boys anymore. Neville is forty-one and Toby is thirty-three. The one lives in Jo’burg—Neville—he’s an architect like his father. And Toby hasn’t settled down anyplace particular yet, so he often ends up crashing here between adventures.”
“Very English names,” I comment.
“Well, we are all English, I guess, except in surname. Etienne’s mother was straight off the boat from Southampton, and she married an Afrikaans farmer from Parrow, hence ‘Bredenkamp.’ Etienne got his father’s Afrikaans name but his mother’s breeding and the best private education sheep’s wool could buy. And we du Toits haven’t been anything other than roaring Lefties since the Boer War. Both my mother’s sisters are still alive, but Mother swears my father’s kin all died off because God was doing target practice on the Nats.”
I smile, and when Delia walks in carrying a tray of tea and homemade meringues, I try not to dwell on how it is that a left-wing democrat can be employing an old black woman to make her a cup of tea she is perfectly capable of making herself. I forget the dichotomies of Africa, the double standards, the layers of life and politics, and how sometimes they intersect and sometimes they do not.
As if reading my mind, Susannah says, “You remember Delia. She is part of the family and practically raised our two sons single-handedly, didn’t you, Delia?”
“Yes, two very naughty boys, madam.” She laughs.
The air is so comfortable between them that I half expect Delia to sit down on the Queen Anne settee with us and take the cup of tea that Susannah pours and offers me. But she doesn’t. Traditions bind us together long after naughty boys grow into men, after constitutions are written and enacted. Instead, she heads out to the kitchen, and Susannah picks up the milk jug and says, “White or black?”
THE DOOR TO THE COTTAGE is open, and I notice a window box mounted on a ledge beneath the front window. It is filled with brown soil, and Susannah explains how she just planted daffodil bulbs, hoping they will “cheer the place up a bit” come spring. The watering can is next to the front door, and if I want to give them a bit of water each day, that will be lovely, she explains. It seems ridiculous to be so overwhelmed by the responsibility for something growing, so I issue a hasty “Sure.”
The room looks different. Although its thick walls and small windows reminded me earlier of a cave, it is now caked with cheer. An enamel pitcher of protea is centered on the table. The faded quilt has been replaced with one of bold fall hues. The single lightbulb now has a beige shade on it, and when Susannah turns it on, a warm glow fills the room.
“No need to hang on to Jesus,” she says.
“Excuse me?”
She points to the faded picture of the carpenter’s son hanging above the bed. “It’s been up there forever, but take it down if you like and we will find something else to hang in its place.” She shows me the bowl of chocolate Easter eggs on the bedside table. “Should you choose to indulge.
“And we changed the lock; here’s your key. It is the only part of the property that doesn’t have an alarm, unfortunately.”
I give her five twenty-rand notes and thank her, and she turns to go, then thinks better of it.
“I hope it’s comfortable enough for you.” After a pause she goes on. “I sense you want your privacy. You will find us to be a rather private bunch ourselves. But I want you to know you are welcome at the main house anytime, should you need something. Even if it’s just company.” And then, quite unexpectedly, she puts her arms around me in a quick embrace, and before I can respond she flutters away. Her kaftan sails behind her so that she appears to be a moth.
I unwrap a chocolate and look at Jesus daydreaming. “So. How’s Easter working out for you?” Which makes me wonder how Greg’s Easter went. His first without a pulpit. Did he miss proclaiming the mystery this year or did he miss planning the coronation more? If Greg had been a first-century disciple, he might not have outrun Peter to the grave site after hearing Mary’s incredible news, but he most surely would have arrived with his clipboard and tape measure and digital camera. Perhaps it is unkind to say the details of the Easter event capture Greg’s interest more than the event itself. But Greg is not one for apparitions; an incorporeal Jesus who begs not to be held suits him less than this more sensible rendering still averting my gaze. “Think we can get along for a few days?”
I unpack my suitcase and arrange a framed photo of Cleo and the windup alarm clock on the bedside table. Cleo’s blanket goes at the foot of the bed and her bunny she got for he
r first Easter goes at the top. And I look around, eyes finally resting on Jesus. There: home.
EIGHTEEN
I wake up, disoriented, to the crowing competition between roosters and peacocks. Turning on the small electric heater to dispel the chill of Paarl’s April morning, I stumble out the front door into the tepid sunlight and mark time to keep the seeping cold of the cement floor from making too much progress up my legs. The mauve light of dawn stretches out beyond the darkened pine trees lining the Bredenkamps’ driveway. The morning mist is lifting above the town, brushed in a golden glow. Somewhere to my left is the faint sound of gospel music. Walking around the side of the kaia, I locate the boom box perched on top of a rusty petrol can. Next to it is Delia, hanging her madam’s washing on the line behind the garage and singing along in the clicks and clacks of the Xhosa language, a typewriter’s hammering keys. Between hanging up her boss’s pants and reaching into the basket for the next item, she lifts her hands and bounces them heavenward as though she were propping up the sagging contents of a top shelf.
When I return from the outhouse, I sit down on the red vinyl backseat from some long-gone car and watch the century-old tradition of a black woman hanging white people’s laundry. When the line between the tree and the end of the garage roof is full, Delia lifts her basket to the top of her head and reaches for her boom box. She sees me and shouts, “Molo, m’faan, kunjani?”
“Molo, Delia; I am fine, thank you,” I reply.
She walks toward me, her free hand steadying her basket on her head. “Ow,” she exclaims, “madam not feeling all right?”
“Just the outhouse, probably, and I ought to eat breakfast,” I say.
“I’ll bring you some,” she offers, and then turns to walk up the path with her renewed purpose.
“Delia,” I call, “please don’t go to any trouble. I can go to the shop and pick up something there.” The local grocery shop that Etienne owns is only half a mile down the main road and is flanked on one side by a petrol station, and on the other by a pub named Ye Olde Aardvark. Painted on the store windows in white shoe polish are advertisements for such local delicacies as ostrich biltong, sausage rolls, and samoosas, all of which sound strangely tempting for seven o’clock in the morning.
