Charles had put on one of her favourite suits, had a bunch of gladioli in one hand and a box of chocolates in the other. He was edgy and looked pale. Encased in bandages and plaster of Paris, she lay on her high pillows and looked at him dispassionately. He was handsome. She gave him that. But his face was without life or character. What she had discovered about him had turned him from a man into a being she did not understand – still good-looking, still her husband, but a stranger.
He kissed her cheek. ‘Is it very painful?’
‘Not very.’
‘You’re not to worry about anything, okay? I mean, we’re going to get the best. A plastic surgeon. It doesn’t matter who it is. We’ll get him.’
‘There’s nothing to do,’ she said. ‘It’ll fade in time.’
But he was not to be deprived. He said again, ‘We’ll find the best.’ He paused, and she could see the struggle within him. ‘Listen. About the other thing. You know. We were only fooling around. I mean, we went there for laughs. If Freda had just asked . . . I mean, we could have told you. It was . . . a bit of sport.’
She let him go on, watching him lacing his fingers and tightening them. So this was to be the mood: contrite, but misunderstood. It was less embarrassing to accept it. But sport? Fooling around? She could see him in the chair as plainly as if it had been a minute or two before. She could see the expression on his face, the lips, the hands, the compliant youth.
‘I mean, you don’t think we do that sort of thing, do you? Jerry heard about the party and we thought, the hell with it, why not let’s go and see what the homos and the moffies do?’
Once when she was little she had caught Duggie playing with himself and he had spoken and looked much as Charles did now. ‘I was itchy,’ he had said. And, in the same breath, ‘Don’t tell mother.’
Here it was again, the small, guilty boy, half-indignant, half-ingratiating.
‘You see, there was this chap Jerry had been to school with . . .’
Too much explanation, she thought. What was it Mrs. Preller had said? Never complain, never explain. Or had it been Smuts? She couldn’t remember. But she knew that the more you tried to explain the unexplainable, the worse it became. Finally, Charles simply ran down, and stopped. They looked at each other for a moment and then his eyes slid away. It’s not his fault, she thought. It’s mine. I should never have married him.
He came to see her twice a day after that and never again mentioned the party. It was understood between them that the subject had been disposed of and need not be touched on again. When she was strong enough to travel he had hired an ambulance and they went back to Saxenburg.
It took much of that summer for her to regain her strength, and Dr. du Toit visited her once a day. His bedside manner was bluff and jovial, but she did not look forward to his visits. She worried about the farm, but he would not let her take up her duties again. ‘Charles is doing all right,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry.’
Smuts became Charles’s tutor, as he had been hers. They had also hired a coloured foreman from one of the big ostrich farms near Oudtshoorn, who moved into Jonas’s old house.
‘You just worry about yourself,’ du Toit said. ‘No, on second thoughts, let me worry about you. Don’t you worry about anything.’
At first she had been confined to bed, but as her strength came back she spent hours sitting by the great windows looking at the sea, watching the colours change from light green to metallic blue and dirty grey as the south-easters roared in.
Her mother and father came to see her, so did Leibowitz and, once, even Jerry. He talked about Freda as though she had just gone down the road to post a letter. It unnerved Kate and she was glad when he and Charles went off to play golf.
Her most frequent visitor, and the one she most looked forward to seeing, was Mrs. Preller. The bond between them now became much stronger. Mrs. Preller visited her at least once a day and they would sit talking – Kate mainly listening – for an hour or more at a time. As far as the accident was concerned, she and Charles had agreed on a story which they had told both to the police and to Mrs. Preller: the four of them had gone to the party in Upper Wynberg. Kate and Freda had decided to leave early, taking Freda’s car. The rest was as it had happened. Only those present at the party knew exactly what had happened and, in their own interests, were keeping silent.
Mrs. Preller’s conversation was either of the past or the future. Kate liked it when it was about the past, for the future now was a blank sheet, but to the old woman it was peopled with grandchildren – ‘once we get you better.’
She did get better, at least physically. The collar-bone mended, the ribs knitted, the cuts healed, the abrasions disappeared, and even the scar faded under the new growth of hair. Her body slowly regained its former strength and energy, but her mind did not recover so easily, largely because she was riven by doubts and uncertainties, and she was not used to that. She knew that the future, not only of herself, but of the Saxenburg estate, rested on her. Mrs. Preller depended on her more and more, not as an employee, but as a daughter; it was an emotional bond. And in a way, Smuts depended on her. So, too, did Charles. And Duggie. And her mother and father. She felt trapped, stifled and panicky about what was to come. She longed to get away, she needed time and space to think.
It was then she had a letter from Mendel. It was an ordinary business letter which ended with a friendly injunction that she should think of visiting London one day to see the other end of the feather business. It was like a life-belt. She had written immediately that she was coming.
‘You can’t go alone,’ Charles had said.
‘Why not?’
‘You’re not strong enough yet. Why don’t I come with you?’ His eyes had lit up.
‘I’m perfectly strong now. Mendel has offered me a roof in London so I’ll be well looked after. In any case, you’re needed here.’
She was right about that. As the weeks had passed, she hardly recognised him as the former well-dressed young man about town. He lost weight and wore dusty farm clothes. He never stayed up late and his temper was shorter than ever; for the first time, he was learning what real work was like.
She had kept to her stateroom for most of the voyage. Memories of Tom were all around her, especially when she went on deck and watched the passengers playing quoits. Mendel and his chauffeur met her at Southampton and she was driven to London in his new Minerva. That had been ten days ago.
She bathed and dressed and was sitting by the window, looking down at the traffic as it moved towards Berkeley Square when, at half-past nine, there was a knock on her door and Mendel came in. As always, she was reminded of a small, neat bird. He was dressed in his usual dove grey suit, white shirt, dark blue silk tie and dark blue handkerchief in his jacket pocket. He wore spats over his shining black shoes.
‘Good morning, my dear.’ He took her hand and bowed over it. There was something Continental about his manner, though she knew he had grown up in London’s East End. During the past ten days she had become very fond of him. ‘Had your breakfast? Good, good. Mrs. McConnell says you need meat on your bones.’
He picked up The Times from her bed and glanced at the main news pages. As he folded it again he said, ‘What would you like to do today?’
‘Anything you say.’
*
Mendel helped to revive her spirits. He was a man of catholic taste and, being a bachelor, liked to fill his evenings with theatre or ballet. He took her to see Diaghilev’s Russian Ballet in La Boutique Fantasque and to hear Chaliapin as Boris in Boris Godounov at Covent Garden. Paul Robeson was in Show Boat at Drury Lane and Evelyn Laye in Jerome Kern’s Blue Eyes at the Piccadilly.
It was a luxurious life. They travelled to and from the theatre in the Minerva and dined at Prunier’s or Rule’s. Sometimes he would take her to Rumpelmeyer’s for coffee and cakes, or to the Ritz for tea. He liked to walk into such places with her on his arm and watch the heads turn. ‘They’ll say to each other that I must be
your uncle, but they’ll think differently. They’ll think, look at that little Jew with the beautiful young woman. They’ll envy me.’
Kate was beautiful that summer. The weeks of enforced idleness had filled out her body. She was still thin, but her breasts and thighs were fuller and her cheeks less sunken. Sometimes, for fun, she would play up to Mendel and take his hand in full view of other diners, and he would flush with pleasure. ‘Maybe they think I keep you in a love-nest in Maida Vale,’ he said.
She had never lived a life of total luxury before and, knowing it could not last, decided to enjoy it. That summer England seemed to match her mood. It was a place of peace, or so it seemed to her. She occasionally read The Times and knew that other places were less peaceful. A bomb attack was made on King Victor Emmanuel of Italy, killing seventeen people, but not the target; the leader of the Croatian Peasant Party was shot and wounded in the Yugoslav parliament; in Berlin there was hysteria at the success of a Junkers monoplane crossing the Atlantic; in France Communists were said to have derailed a train outside the Gare du Nord, which injured thirty-three people. Peace, in Europe at any rate, was being promoted in theory by the American Peace Pact, but did not seem to be fulfilled in practice. Kate, however, was unaware of any tensions.
During this time, she also learned a great deal about the European end of the ostrich feather industry. Almost the first thing she saw when she arrived in London was a large hoarding advertising Mistinguett in a Parisian revue. The bill-board showed the famous French artiste almost entirely covered by a great, coral-dyed ostrich feather fan. Feathers were everywhere. The Ritz was full of them, so was Rumpelmeyer’s. Mendel took her to the Derby and wherever she looked, she saw feathers. She smiled to herself as she thought of the plucking boxes and the dust and the sweating coloured labourers on the Saxenburg Estate, and wondered what these women would think if they knew where their expensive feathers came from.
One morning, Mendel took her to the heart of the London feather industry at Cutler’s Wharf in the Pool of London. There, in a great warehouse amid hundreds of buyers and sorters, she smelled the familiar smells and saw the familiar dust. She had never seen so many feathers. Hundreds of thousands of plumes, black, white and grey, were sorted into row upon row of divided tables. Buyers walked up and down, looking and touching. Some wanted feathers for dusters, some for mattresses, some for fashion houses. Some were buyers from New York and Paris and Berlin. At one end of the warehouse were great bundles of feathers still to be unpacked. Their labels were all South African: Oudtshoorn, Helmsdale, the Sundays River Valley, Beaufort West . . . suddenly the bleak, windswept plains were brought very close.
In fact, although she had buried herself in London, she was never far away from Saxenburg in her imagination, for all her memories were being constantly stimulated by a steady flow of letters. Smuts wrote to her, and so did Mrs. Preller and Charles, when he had the time. Smuts wrote of practical things: the winter rains, the number of eggs, the health of the chicks, the increasing ‘strangeness’ of Lena, the problems caused by Betty. Mrs. Preller wrote mostly of money and plans for the future and in one letter, told Kate that two thousand pounds had been placed to her name in Barclay’s Bank in Cockspur Street. Charles’s letters were short, as though he was squeezing them in between work, and were tinged by a note of self-pity. She pictured the winter gales and the loneliness he must be experiencing. She saw in her mind’s eye the great house with the two old people and Charles, and at such times depression gathered on her like dust.
There were also stiff, rather formal notes about the family from her mother. Duggie had lost his job because of retrenchment and had begun to drink again, but her father was in full employment in the removal firm and there was talk of him becoming a partner. Mrs. Buchanan’s feet were no better and she was suffering from the damp; otherwise things seemed normal. These letters, too, with their conjured images and smells of the small villa in Observatory, produced in Kate a feeling of unhappiness.
Every letter she received, either from Saxenburg or from her mother, asked after her health and wondered when she was coming back: ‘home’ as Smuts and Charles and Mrs. Preller described it. She could not answer their questions, either in her own mind or in the letters she wrote in reply. She seemed to be in a kind of limbo. She was enjoying herself with Mendel but even that, as the weeks went by, became less stimulating than it had been. She told herself that after her accident it was only natural that she should be depressed from time to time. Who wouldn’t be? But she knew deep down that it was not the only reason. She knew that the accident and what she had learned of Charles had formed a kind of watershed in her life. From the small house in Cape Town where she had existed with her family, Saxenburg had seemed first like a haven and then like a palace waiting for its princess. But from London, both places seemed remote, the palace a forbidding castle. Once she was back, the draw-bridge would be raised and she would be trapped. And what of the future? How would she conduct her life with Charles? How would she continue to sustain a charade in which Mrs. Preller’s grandchildren would only be figments of the old lady’s mind; for Kate knew she would never sleep with Charles again.
The days slipped away and became weeks. She felt inert, unable to make up her mind, unable to think about her future.
Then two things happened which were to bring her out of this mood. The first occurred casually when Mrs. McConnell brought up her breakfast one morning and said, ‘The boy made a mistake and delivered the Chronicle instead of The Times.’ A hand seemed to grip her stomach. She could not even eat a slice of toast. She drank coffee and smoked cigarettes and stared at the paper as though it were a bomb waiting to go off, and in a sense, it was.
She had struggled to keep Tom out of her thoughts and had succeeded, up to a point. During the early months of her marriage, this had seemed important. Later, when things had started to go wrong, she had told herself she must not use Tom as an excuse to escape. But on the ship and now in London he had seemed much closer to her. The ship contained its memories of the passage out; in London she had the feeling that this was his territory, that his tall, rangy figure was walking its streets, driving in its cabs, waiting on its station platforms, eating in its restaurants. Wherever she had gone with Mendel she was conscious that she might see him. It had been part of her bargain with herself that she would do nothing to harm her marriage by seeing, or trying to get in touch with him. She had not sought him. She had not even bought a copy of the Chronicle. The fact that Mrs. McConnell had dropped a copy on her bed was not her fault. It was fate. She picked it up and leafed quickly through it, but did not see his name. She went back to page one and this time studied each column, taking her time. Nothing. She felt a sense almost of grievance. She had fought her own desires successfully for so long that now there should at least have been the reward of his name. That was all she wanted, just his name. A few days later, she told Mrs. McConnell that she would prefer to have the Chronicle rather than The Times. After that, she scanned it from front to back, but each day she was disappointed. She could have telephoned his office, but that would be breaking the rules of her particular game. The newspaper had come to her unexpectedly and not by any overt move on her part.
Then, ten days later, she saw his name on the leader page, under the heading, what now for yugoslavia? the bullet or the ballot? under it was the sentence, From Tom Austen, our Middle European Correspondent, and under that was the dateline, Vienna.
She knew where Vienna was on a map: hundreds of miles away. He was as lost to her as he had ever been. All that day she kept to her room, until Mendel felt worried enough to ask if she needed a doctor.
The other occurrence which was to affect her was a weekend she spent at a country house in Hampshire, belonging to Lady Vyvyan Bixby. Mendel had taken her to ‘Vyvyan’s’ a shop just off Hanover Square, to let her see the end product of many of the best of Saxenburg’s feathers, for Vyvyan was London’s most fashionable milliner.
‘An aristocrat
,’ Mendel told Kate as they were driven through Berkeley Square. ‘Mind you, I’m not saying she cannot design hats. No, no. But being a lady helps.’
‘Vyvyan’s’, with its striped awnings in brown and gold, and its gold window lettering, reminded Kate of an expensive box of chocolates. Instead of a window crammed with merchandise, there were only three hats on display, two of which were trimmed with ostrich feathers. The shop’s interior was even more elegant than its outside had promised: gold-painted Louis Quinze chairs, occasional tables inlaid in ivory, one or two hats on stands and, in one corner, a Chinese vase holding long ostrich feathers in the Saxenburg manner, except that these were dyed in shades of magenta and aquamarine, cerise and coral and apple-green.
Lady Bixby was almost as elegant as her shop, but in a different way. She was about forty, tall and broad-shouldered, and wore peach-coloured Oxford bags, a cream shirt and a large foulard tie. Her face was square and her hair was cut short. She greeted Kate with a firm and friendly handshake.
‘So you’re from Saxenburg,’ she said. ‘Mr. Mendel has told me a great deal about Saxenburg; a great deal about you, too. Come along and I’ll show you what we do with your feathers.’
She led the way upstairs to her work-rooms. Twenty or thirty women were working at long tables. One wall was lined with shelves holding boxes of dyed feathers and other trimmings. Lady Bixby pulled out pieces of fur. ‘Coney,’ she said. ‘Nutria. Muskrat. Beaver.’ She moved on and lifted a pile of black and white feathers. ‘These might even be yours.’ There were boxes of cream straw from Tuscany and plaited straws from Java and Manila.
Kate watched the milliners blocking straws and felts, hand-sewing ribbons and delicate silk flowers, trimming and curling the ostrich feathers.
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