The Sea Cave

by Alan Scholefield

  She had begun to smoke as a regular habit and sometimes she would find herself considering whether or not to have a third brandy as she sat alone in her small office or up in her room. Sometimes she felt a sense of despair. This was the time of her life when she should be marrying and having babies.

  These thoughts would, by association, bring Tom very close to her. If he had written then, or even telephoned, she would have gone to him, even though she knew there was no future in their relationship. But he did not, and she found she could not break her silence to make the contact.

  She began to feel more and more remote. The outside world seemed unreal. Edinburgh, Prince’s Street, even Cape Town might have been on another planet. All she knew was the sea on one side and the great plain with its mountain barrier on the other.

  This changed when Charles came back. Instead of three people living in their separate apartments, his presence turned the house back into a home. Whatever initial irritation Mrs. Preller had felt at his ‘resignation’ soon disappeared and he was once again her little boy and Lena’s Master Charles, to be spoilt and cosseted. Sometimes he took his mother for her drive to Helmsdale and freed Kate from what had become something of a chore. In the early evenings he would dig Smuts out of his room and bring him into the drawing-room for a drink, or he might join Kate and the old man in Smuts’ room and sit in front of the fire. Later, he and Kate would play two-handed poker or Lexicon or listen to the Victrola.

  A day or so after he arrived he trapped her in her small office and kissed her. She responded for a moment, then pushed him away.

  She had known that the situation would arise sooner or later, and had prepared for it. She held him off and said, ‘Not here. Not now.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘When I say so.’

  She saw the anger mount in his face until the strange and frightening curtain dropped behind his eyes.

  But she was prepared for this, too, and squeezed past him. At the door she turned. ‘Charles, I like you and it’s nice having you here. But I couldn’t stand it if you were waiting to pounce around every corner. Life would become unbearable. So let’s see what happens in its own time. Don’t push things.’

  The curtain lifted and he smiled uncertainly. ‘You don’t make me feel very welcome.’

  ‘I’ve told you it’s nice having you here. That’s a welcome, isn’t it?’

  When she reached her room she found herself stiff with tension, but she had said something which needed saying and she thought she might have got away with it.

  The problem with Charles was that he did not have enough to do. He began to talk about taking over the business interests in town and relieving his mother of the responsibility. But nothing seemed to come of that for Mrs. Preller still made the daily journeys, driven either by Kate or Charles or, with increasing frequency as he regained enough strength to handle the motor, by Smuts.

  In the mornings, Charles would occupy Kate’s office, ringing brokers in Cape Town, but she never knew if he was trying to find another position or whether he was playing the market. Sometimes she would take a break from her work and have coffee and a cigarette with him. They were moments she enjoyed. It was pleasant to have another person in the house and she missed him on his occasional visits to Cape Town. He still retained his apartment there – though, as she found out from Smuts it was not and never had been his own, but belonged to Preller Estates and was the one his father had used.

  Jerry and Freda came down one week-end. Freda had had her hair marcelled and had picked up from one of her friends just returned from London the current smart word: amusing. Everything was amusing; Jerry was amusing, the hotel was amusing, the flooded golf course was amusing.

  The weather was grey and drizzly and there was not much to do, so Jerry and Charles collected as many golf balls as they could, buying every second-hand ball at the Club and every ball for sale by the little coloured caddies who spent hours beating the tussocks and bush of the rough. They took the balls back to Saxenburg, stood on the verandah and, using wooden clubs, lashed them out to sea.

  Kate discovered that they were competing for the longest drive. There was an uncovered rock about two hundred yards out to sea and this was their target. She watched each drive ending in a small splash on the calm water, and usually in an argument about which had been the longest. They drove a bucketful of balls before they grew bored. She thought she had never seen anything so pointless and wasteful in her life. But Freda found it amusing to sit watching the two men.

  Later she told Kate that Jerry was having an affair with another woman. ‘It’s amusing to watch him pretend,’ she said. ‘He’s been much nicer to me.’

  But Kate did not think she was amused. When she spoke, it was with bitterness. She was also drinking and smoking more than she had.

  On Sunday Kate had to go and see one of the coloured children on the estate, who was ill. When she came back, she found Freda and Jerry preparing to leave.

  ‘Aren’t you staying for lunch?’ she said.

  ‘We must get back,’ Jerry said. ‘You know what the roads are like in this weather. It’s going to take hours.’

  Freda came to kiss Kate and whispered: ‘They’ve had a row. Jerry offered him a job and Charles told him to stuff it up his arse.’

  As the days passed, Kate began to feel a sense of unease. Although Charles had never expressed any interest in farming, she could not help feeling that she was usurping his function. He was the son, the farm would eventually be his responsibility. So she tried, as best she could without forfeiting her own position, to discuss the day to day working of Saxenburg with him. But he was not interested. Instead, he would usually shift the conversation to the profits made by the hotel or the garage; to how he planned to enlarge the bar; how he hoped for the Ford franchise; how he would build a canning factory down at the harbour. His plans were big, and she encouraged him to talk.

  On one lovely, crisp winter’s day they walked down to the cove and along the beach to the rock pool. Now, in winter, there was a different feeling in the air, the colours had changed, the beach itself was partly covered in driftwood. Jonas was no longer standing among the rocks with his big sea-pole, the sun no longer beat down, the south-easter no longer blew the sand in eddies across the beach. She had partially recovered from her horror of the pools, though she knew she would never swim in them again.

  The tide was low and Charles said, ‘Let’s go to the sea cave.’

  ‘I don’t like it.’

  ‘Come on, there’s nothing else to do.’

  He helped her across weed-covered rocks, wet and slippery, and encrusted with limpets, and they crawled through the small tunnel. The sun was westering and the cave was filled with a strange green light. ‘You only get this light in winter,’ he said. He was standing near the mouth where the wavelets hissed on the shingle.

  ‘It’s beautiful.’

  ‘I know people who have seen grottoes in Italy and they say this is more beautiful.’

  She turned away. ‘It makes me feel claustrophobic.’

  ‘Wait.’ He caught her by the shoulder and turned her to face him. ‘I want to kiss you. I want to kiss you all the time.’

  ‘Kiss me, then.’

  He took her in his arms and her fear of him returned. They kissed, but it was he who broke away. ‘Kate, there’s something I want to ask you. . .’

  She knew what was coming, and held up her hand. He took it in his. His face looked heavy and satyr-like in the green light.

  ‘I think I know what you’re going to say,’ she said.

  ‘Well, if you know . . .’

  ‘Please don’t. Don’t complicate things just at the moment.’

  ‘What things?’

  She thought of Tom and her parents and Duggie. How could she explain? ‘My life is in a muddle. Please don’t make it worse.’

  She could see his mouth begin to turn down in anger. Oh, God, she thought, if he takes me here, there’s nothing I can do.
She put her face up to his and kissed him.

  ‘Soon,’ she said. ‘I promise you things will change soon.’

  As they walked back to the house, which loomed darkly on the cliffs, she felt the need to get away from Saxenburg, from Charles and from Mrs. Preller. She decided to go home the following week-end.

  But on the Thursday, Mrs. Preller sent Lena to find her.

  Chapter Four

  Lena called her before lunch, which was an unusual time. The old lady – Kate still thought of her as that – was in her chair, her face half-hidden by shadow, the lamp glowing on the table beside her, the screen behind her. Another deviation from normal was that a bottle and two glasses stood on the table.

  ‘Come, my dear,’ she said. ‘Sit here by me.’ She indicated a comfortable chair. ‘Now pour us each a glass of Madeira.’

  Kate poured the drinks. Her mind was racing. She had no idea what the purpose of the meeting might be.

  ‘I first tasted Madeira in my father’s house,’ Mrs. Preller said. ‘He used to take it with a biscuit about eleven o’clock in the morning. Sometimes my mother would join him. Perhaps friends would call in. It was more usual in Vienna in those days to take cofee with cream. Such cream! But my father preferred his Madeira.’ She sipped her drink. ‘You would have loved that house. It was in an area called the Cottāge, in Gustav Tschermakgasse. Half a city block the garden alone. A lily pond the size of my tennis court. Red squirrels in the trees. Sometimes my father would take his Madeira in the summer house before the day grew too warm. I would sit on the steps and watch him, and he would stroke my hair. “One day, liebchen,” he would say. “One day you will have this house.”

  ‘But it was never to be. One day never came for me, but it came quickly for him. And when he died, my mother found that he was so great in debt that she had to sell the house. All the years we had been living in that big house on borrowed money, and we did not know it. Then, suddenly, it was the end. House sold. My sisters and mother gone. We – my family – had been in that house two hundred years. While Mozart and Beethoven and Schubert and Brahms had lived in Vienna. But no more.’

  The thin white face and the vermilion lips were still for a few moments and Kate waited for her to continue. She knew that more was to come, for Mrs. Preller had a habit of circumlocution whenever she wished to discuss something important.

  At last she said, ‘You have done well, Kate.’

  It was one of the few times she had used Kate’s Christian name. Was she going to offer a raise in salary? As always, Kate was excited by the praise.

  ‘Much better than I could have thought,’ she continued. ‘Smuts says you have done wonders. Mr. Mendel was impressed. Truly impressed.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘It is we who must thank you.’

  ‘Mr. Smuts taught me everything.’

  ‘There are many who could not have learned. So . . .’

  Now it was coming. Would the raise be substantial?

  ‘Do you ever think of marriage?’ Mrs. Preller said.

  ‘You mean, in the abstract or to someone in particular?’

  ‘You have nothing against it?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘You know, my dear, your age is the best time for a woman to marry. Having babies is easier than it would be later. A woman begins to dry up as the years go by. You understand what I mean?’

  ‘I understand.’ She had, in fact, expressed Kate’s own recent thoughts.

  ‘Tell me, how is your family?’

  Kate told her briefly about Duggie’s operation and convalescence.

  ‘That is sad. Does your father work?’

  ‘I don’t think so, at the moment.’

  ‘Times are hard. They say things will get even worse.’

  She paused, as though to make sure she chose the right words.

  ‘Sometimes I think that my situation here is similar in many ways to Vienna. There a family lived in one house for so long, but not in trade, you understand. Here is also one family for a long time. In trade, ja, but not shopkeepers. Two families with position, money, a little bit of power. Comfort. Wealth. Then suddenly, kaput. I ask myself sometimes: What if I had stayed in Vienna? But I know that in those days I could have achieved nothing there. Women were flowers or donkeys, no more. Here I had to do something, and found I was able to do it.

  ‘Then I say to myself, what would have happened in Vienna if I had been a person like Kate? Could I have done more? You understand me, my dear?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘We needed a Kate. Someone like you, ambitious, trustworthy, clever, hard-working . . . no, no, my dear, I mean it. We had property in the Salzkammergut, we had a small estate in the Waldviertel. Things could have been done to save them. But no one thought. My father died. And the end for my mother and my sisters was a small apartment in Nussdorferstrasse, near a railway bridge. No more cream after that.

  ‘And now here is a situation that reminds me of those days. Except for one thing: I have seen it before, so I recognise it. So what to do? Smuts is an old man, I am an old woman . . .’

  ‘Mrs. Preller, you’re –’

  ‘Please . . . morphine makes you old before your time. And so I look around me. Who can save Saxenburg, I ask? Charles? He is my son. I love him, but if I am honest, I must say he is more like my own father than myself. You see, my dear, there is a paradox in life. If you come from the top, you can only sink; from the bottom, your struggle is upwards. That is what this place needs, someone who will struggle. And there is still another problem: a person will seldom struggle hard to make others rich.’

  She drained her Madeira. ‘So . . . I am sorry to talk for so long. It is tiring. But think about what I have said. It is important for both of us.’

  Kate spent the remainder of the day analysing the conversation, trying to probe the meaning behind Mrs. Preller’s words, the thoughts in her subtle Viennese mind. She wondered whether Charles had inspired them. Had he dared to go to his mother and say, ‘I want Kate. Buy her for me’?

  The thought infuriated her, but that evening when she was having her ‘spot’ with Smuts, he came in and remarked, ‘I might have guessed you’d be at the brandy!’ It was said so guilelessly and matter-of-factly that she was convinced he’d had nothing to do with the conversation. Charles was less than subtle.

  *

  That night, she could not sleep. She believed she understood what Mrs. Preller had offered, and its magnitude, the difference it would make to her own future, was overwhelming. And yet . . . could she be wrong? Had the old woman simply been maundering on, had she only wanted company? But she had specifically asked if Kate understood her. There had been the references to her family and to marriage. The whole structure of the conversation seemed to have been carefully thought out. Again Kate checked herself: Were her ambitions not racing ahead of her, muddling her thoughts? Did Mrs. Preller really intend her to marry Charles? And what if she did? Might she not be worse off than she was now? At least she had her independence, such as it was. What if Charles controlled the purse-strings and she had to go to him for every penny?

  The following day, as they were driving into Helmsdale, the old lady said, ‘Have you thought about our conversation?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And what did you think?’ The voice was chilly, businesslike. Today there were no ‘my dears’, and no Christian names.

  ‘I think that you’re probably right. You do need someone permanent to look after Saxenburg, someone who doesn’t simply work for wages.’

  ‘Someone with a personal interest.’

  ‘Yes. But say this person was a woman . . .’

  ‘To have a personal, a genuine personal interest she would have to be married to Charles.’

  ‘Yes, I can see that.’

  ‘Tell me, as a young woman yourself, would that be appealing?’

  ‘It might to the right person. Someone who loved him.’

  ‘All marriages are not based on
love, you know. Some of the best had nothing to do with love. Do you think the Hapsburgs married for love?’

  ‘I understand that. But if the person, say the woman, was the kind of person you would want, who would hold the estate and the business interests together, then that woman would not want to have to ask her husband for a pound here and a pound there.’

  Mrs. Preller laughed softly. ‘The kind of person needed would have to be of independent means, naturally. And the estate would see to that.’

  *

  On Friday, Kate went home for the week-end and arranged for Smuts to take her to the station, but when Tilly helped her downstairs with her bag, it was Charles who met her at the door. ‘I’ll run you into town,’ he said. ‘I’m going, anyway.’

  He was dressed in his long, leather driving-coat and his tweed cap, which suited him well. He took her case and put it in the dickey while she got into the front seat. They drove along the cliffs for a mile, and then swung inland towards the mountains.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she said. ‘The train leaves in twenty minutes.’

  ‘I’m taking you to town.’

  ‘You know this isn’t the way.’

  ‘I said I was going to town. Cape Town. We’ll be there long before the train. Relax. You’re off duty now.’

  He was right. She was off duty. A feeling of release and freedom came over her as they headed across the flat sandy plain covered in fynbos. Charles reached behind him and gave her a heavy tartan travelling rug. ‘You’ll need it if it’s cold in the mountains.’

  She snuggled down under the rug and pulled her heavy coat around her. Her hair was covered by a black beret and she, like Charles, wore leather gloves.