The Sea Cave

by Alan Scholefield

  The town, after discussing the matter for a little over a week, gradually forgot about it and went on with its own business of making money in the feather boom.

  But if it was the end of the affair as far as Helmsdale was concerned, it was not so for Kate. What she had seen had disturbed her profoundly. Her own background could hardly have been described as gentle, but what violence she knew had resulted from drink, or poverty, or over-crowding. The manhunt and death of Jonas was something outside her experience. There had been a matter-of-factness about its acceptance that she could hardly credit. Since her arrival from Scotland she had felt, without personal evidence, a latent violence in Africa, a harshness in the light, the landscape, the lives of many of its people. Now she had seen for herself how quickly and extremely violence could break through.

  Underlining this feeling, she became aware of stories in the newspapers that she had not seemed to notice before: murders, rapes, assaults, reported almost every morning.

  What had shocked her most was Charles’s part in the affair. Although he had not fired his rifle – in fact, it was discovered that no bullets had hit Jonas, he had drowned – she held him basically responsible for the death. She fought the feeling, telling herself that Jonas was probably guilty of murder and would have been hanged in any case, that his attack on the policeman indicated how violent he was, that she had seen that same violence in his eyes before, and, finally, that Charles had shouted into the cave, telling him to give himself up. In spite of telling herself all this, she was unable to exonerate her husband.

  The reason, she decided finally, was that he had made a kind of contest out of it. He had sent Jerry away with the police while he had stayed behind, his feeling for landscape and the psychology of the hunted telling him that Jonas was somewhere near. Then, when he had him cornered, it was as though he had tried to force him to run, to add to the excitement of the hunt. When Jerry had arrived, she had felt that they were in competition, as they had been when they had hit golf balls out to sea. Who would be the first to wing Jonas?

  Not everyone, she was pleased to discover, shared the general triumph and support for the hunters. ‘What a bloody example to the rest of us,’ Smuts had said contemptuously when he heard what had happened. ‘With these young buggers growing up, you wonder what’s going to happen to the bloody country.’

  For the moment he seemed to have forgotten that she was married to one of these young buggers, but she said nothing, for she agreed with him. However, it occurred to her that the only person who had actually fired a shot was not young and he was a respected member of the community, supposedly dedicated to saving lives.

  There were others in town, including Leibowitz, the hotel-manager, Van Staden and even Mr. Hamilton, the bank-manager, who had gone man-hunting with a walking stick, who disliked the way things had gone. Lena, Tilly and the farm-workers kept their feelings to themselves, and the fishing-village was quieter than usual.

  Although Kate managed to recover her equilibrium after a few days, she found that her attitude to Charles had changed. If she had not been in love when she married him, at least she had been fond of him. Now even this had been eroded and replaced by a feeling of coolness. Nevertheless, she kept her side of her own bargain, and when he wanted her in bed, she gave herself to him; she was compliant, but uninvolved. She knew it was not the best recipe for marriage, but told herself that things might have been worse, for he seemed chastened by what had happened and by her reaction to it. He kept out of her way when he could and was more than usually considerate. Jerry and Freda had disappeared back to Cape Town and it was a week or two before she saw Dr. du Toit. He gave no sign that he even recalled his part in the affair, treating her with the same friendliness, the same rather overblown graciousness as he usually did. Eventually, even in her mind the memory of Jonas faded and became, with Miriam’s death, part of the past pattern of her life at Saxenburg.

  And that life was thrusting on as it always did, carrying her with it. The farm could not stop for deaths or for anything else. The birds needed attention, eggs were laid and incubated, chicks hatched and grew, feathers grew, were plucked, were sorted, were shipped. Winter turned to spring; summer arrived and the whole cycle of farm life began once more.

  The demand for feathers showed no signs of slackening. Kate now subscribed to all the major fashion and society magazines and would go through them every time the mail-ship arrived, watching for any sign of change but, if anything, interest seemed to be increasing. Pictures of dinner parties and garden parties given by the Rockefellers and the Vanderbilts in New York and by Lady Cunard and Lady Londonderry in London, showed ostrich feathers worn as stoles, trimming dresses, carried as fans. They were everywhere.

  The new arrangement with Mendel worked well and was her personal triumph. She was able to increase profits by nearly twenty per cent so that when the three directors sat down and discussed the affairs of the company, of which the farm formed a part, they were able to vote themselves cash dividends which Kate had never thought to earn in her life. She sent part to her family, put some into gilt-edged stocks on the advice of the bank manager, and still had enough left over to buy herself several new outfits in Cape Town.

  One late afternon when the heat of the day had gone, she and Mrs. Preller were walking in the ruined garden.

  ‘Don’t you think it is time to do something about this?’ Mrs. Preller said suddenly.

  Kate looked at the tennis court and the old swimming-pool with grass and weeds growing from the cracks. It would be nice to have a pool, she thought, for she would never swim in the rock pools again and the open sea was too dangerous. The tennis court had formed the basis of her earlier fantasies, she remembered, of week-end parties with friends from Cape Town, but contact with Jerry and Freda had cured her of those.

  ‘It is a garden for young people,’ Mrs. Preller said. ‘One day there will be young people here again.’ She linked her arm in Kate’s and they strolled slowly along the path. ‘You’ve done well, my dear. Very well. Better than I could have hoped. Even Smuts was doubtful, though he likes you very much.’

  ‘I couldn’t have done it without him.’

  ‘That is true, but maybe it takes a little of a man’s pride to see how well a woman can do his job. With Hennie du Toit, it was different. He said to me that a woman could not do it. He thought I would give it all to Charles. I said, “Hennie, I have run the estate, farm businesses, everything, since Boss Charles died, and now you come to me and tell me a woman cannot do it.” You should have seen his face.’

  They walked on in silence. Over the past six months, they had grown closer. It was a strange bond, part employer-and-employee, part mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, part age and youth, and part genuine friendship, for Kate found much to admire in Mrs. Preller, not the least her strength and determination to hold onto Saxenburg when all about her the big ostrich estates had crumbled.

  There was only one source of disunity and this was mainly on Kate’s side. It stemmed from a phrase Mrs. Preller had used only a few moments before, and which was often on her lips: ‘young people,’ by which she meant her future grandchildren.

  Although she never made any direct allusion to them, Kate was aware of the old woman’s longings. And who could blame her? She had survived so much, both physically and mentally, that the real reward, that of seeing her grandchildren running about the house, hitting balls on the court, diving into the pool, bringing young life to what had been, when Kate arrived, an old, decaying world, should not be denied her.

  Kate longed for a child herself, longed to have someone to love before it was too late and her body ‘dried up’, in Mrs. Preller’s phrase. But all the time, in the back of her mind, was the question: had Fat Sarah damaged her in some way with her probing needles? Could she have a child? The guilt she already felt for abusing her body in the way she had was exacerbated by Mrs. Preller. She began to feel inadequate in this one, all-important area. She felt that all she could do was go
on trying to conceive – but Charles was not helping much.

  Their marriage jogged along and as the months passed he made fewer sexual demands on her. She wondered whether her own coolness had communicated itself to him. She tried to inject more passion into the sexual act, but it did not seem to have much effect on Charles. Had she not wanted a child so badly, she would have been relieved by his indifference.

  Winter arrived again. She saw less and less of him. He had long since given up any interest in the farm and his mother still refused to allow him to deal with the business side. He was now promoting an idea of a fish-canning factory. It was to be on the same lines as Kate’s arrangement with Mendel – and directly inspired by it. Fishermen caught as many fish as they could, whenever they could, and this sent prices down. Why not have a contract between them and the canning-factory whereby the factory could agree a general price with the fishermen and control the amount caught. There would be no scarcities and no gluts and the price would not fluctuate wildly.

  Mrs. Preller backed him to the extent of telling him that if he could raise the capital for the building of the factory she would make a present of land near the harbour on which to build it. What she would not do was invest her own money or allow him to borrow against the farm; it had to be outside capital.

  Charles seemed happy with that, and it was to raise the capital that he now spent more and more time in Cape Town. Often, when he returned, Kate thought he looked worn out and would wonder if he was getting enough to eat, or whether he was drinking too much with his business contacts.

  He would stay in the Cape Town flat for four or five days at a stretch, and even then not make love to her when he returned. She would force herself to take the initiative, but often their love-making was still ineffectual, and it was in the sadness of these untender, mechanical moments that she would feel the chill dread of the future and see herself, a childless old woman moving about the dim corridors of Saxenburg without family, without even a friend like Smuts. By comparison, Mrs. Preller’s situation looked positively rosy.

  Her life slowly reverted to a pattern she had adopted before she was married. Whenever Charles was away she would go to Smuts’ room and have her ‘spots’ with him. He seemed to lay great store by her evening visits and would have the brandy and water ready when she came in. ‘Sundowner time!’ he would say as he poured her first drink. He still smoked heavily and had a cough that shook his entire frame.

  ‘Don’t you think you should stop smoking?’ Kate said once.

  ‘Everyone’s got to go,’ he replied. Dr. du Toit had also advised him to give up smoking and drinking, but he said, ‘You might as well take me out and shoot me.’

  He loved his brandy and his cigarettes, though he could no longer hold his liquor and four or five drinks would make him almost incoherent. Kate would often leave him dozing in his chair in front of the fire.

  He liked to talk about the old days when Mrs. Preller came as a young bride to Saxenburg. ‘Now there was a beautiful woman. Fresh. With a white skin and pink cheeks. The sort of complexion we never see here. Everybody loved her, but she looked so sad . . .’

  She was probably homesick, Kate suggested, though it was a feeling she had never known herself.

  ‘It was more than that. You felt there was something wrong. I mean, you wondered how someone like her came to a place like this. She never complained. But you could see the sadness in her eyes. Lena knew. She used to worship her, you know. Still does, but she’s gone a bit peculiar in her old age. To me, they were like beauty and the beast, I mean Miss Augusta and Boss Charles.’ As he gave himself another drink, Kate could hear the slight slurring of the vowels.

  ‘Was he as bad as that?’ she said.

  ‘As what?’

  ‘You called him the beast.’

  ‘He was a bastard.’

  She waited for him to continue; he had never been so indiscreet before. ‘I mean, a real bloody four-square bastard. I always wondered how someone like him got someone like her. The way he treated her – Jesus, you wanted to shrivel up! He spoke to her like a bloody servant. And once or twice he used his hands on her.’

  ‘You tried to stop him, didn’t you?’

  ‘Who told you that? Charles? Well, it’s true. Sometimes he’d get drunk. Those were the worst times. Once he nearly knocked me through a door; a closed door, my friend.’

  ‘He made Charles’s life a misery, too.’

  ‘He made everybody’s life a misery. No wonder she looked . . . elsewhere. You could hardly blame her.’

  ‘You mean another man? A lover?’

  ‘That’s exactly what I mean, my friend.’

  She suddenly recalled something that Dr. du Toit had said about Smuts worshipping Mrs. Preller. Could she have turned to him? Could Smuts have been her lover all those years ago? She waited for him to go on, but he said, ‘Ah, what the hell, it’s no good looking back. It’s just water under the bridge.’

  *

  During the winter when there was less to do on the farm, she spent more time in Cape Town. The flat had remained unchanged since Boss Charles’s time and was dowdy. She decided that if she could not redecorate the big public rooms at Saxenburg, at least she could brighten the flat. She spent several happy week-ends searching out wallpaper and curtaining and when she finished, it reflected her love of colour: cool yellows and greens for summer, with a change to oranges and reds in winter.

  She also saw more of her family. Duggie’s leg had been removed just below the knee. He had spent months as both an in- and out-patient of the orthopaedic ward of the Somerset hospital and now he could use his artificial leg with a certain dexterity. He walked with a limp and used a stick, but otherwise he was able to lead a normal life. With the absence of pain his drinking had become less of a problem and through a fellow-patient he had secured a clerking job in a ship’s chandlers near the docks.

  Her father, too, was in work. His neighbour, the coloured man who had the small removal business, had begun to do well enough to expand. He had bought two old lorry chassis and had hired Buchanan to build the bodies. There was talk of moving to a better house in a less run-down suburb, but nothing came of it.

  She enjoyed these breaks from Saxenburg and would have enjoyed them even more had it not been for the fact that she had no real friends of her own. Jerry and Freda were Charles’s friends, so were the others she had met. She had only had one friend of her own and he had been more than a friend, and he had gone and she had tried to forget him.

  But as the weeks passed she found that when she went away she worried about Mrs. Preller. The bond that had grown between them had weakened the bulwarks which the old woman had built around herself over the years. When Kate had arrived at Saxenburg she had been simply an employee, but now she was a member of the family and Mrs. Preller seemed to depend more and more on her presence. She told herself that she needed the breaks and that Lena and Smuts between them could handle any problem that arose. But she worried nonetheless.

  There had been a change in Lena, as Smuts had said. She had always been religious and had never failed to attend the long services at the mission in the coloured village. Recently she had become increasingly devout, until her enthusiasm bordered on fanaticism. Kate would sometimes find her on her knees, praying, in the kitchen. On occasions, alone in the drawing-room, she would sense a presence, turn and see Lena in the doorway staring at her, her eyes burning with a strange fire that seemed to put her beyond reach.

  On Sundays, dressed in her dark frock and her black straw hat, hymn book and Bible in one hand, shoes in the other, she would hurry bare-footed along the cliff road so as not to be late for the service. Occasionally, Kate drove her. Sometimes she would come back at nine or ten o’clock in the evening, sometimes it would be midnight.

  Thinking of her walking through the night, alone, and remembering Miriam, Kate said: ‘Aren’t you afraid?’

  Lena did not answer.

  ‘If you telephoned me, I would come and
fetch you.’

  ‘God has spoken to me, Miss Kate.’

  Once when Kate was having a drink with Smuts they heard her singing hymns in the kitchen. ‘They’ll put her in the loony bin one of these days,’ he said.

  Betty came back towards the end of the winter and Kate hardly recognised her. When she had left to stay with her aunt she had been a pretty adolescent; she came back a woman. At nineteen or twenty, her beauty was startling. Her pale, café au lait skin was perfect, her cheek-bones were high and her face heart-shaped. In the house she wore a light dress and the shape of her body beneath it was clearly visible. Remembering a moment she had once witnessed in the kitchen, Kate found herself glad that Charles was spending so much time away from home.

  Lena’s burning, angry eyes followed the girl everywhere and she seemed to double the intensity of her care whenever Charles was home.

  If Betty noticed her mother’s unease, she did not show it. She ignored Charles as she ignored the rest of them. She lived in her own private world, emerging only to do battle with Lena. Their fighting was worse than ever and the reasons soon emerged.

  Betty was causing havoc among the coloured farm-workers. The men flocked around her as though she was a bitch in heat. But that wasn’t all. Kate found out that she was stealing liquor from the house both for herself and for any man she was with. Smelling it on her breath, she began checking the levels in the bottles and saw how rapidly they went down.

  There was a recklessness about the girl that had not been there before. Kate was sorry she had come back and would have been pleased to see her return to her aunt. But she was loath to say anything in case Lena took it into her head to leave. Kate herself could have managed with Tilly, but Lena was like Mrs. Preller’s left hand. So all she could do was try and keep the lid on a situation which would, she knew, either resolve itself or have to be resolved.