Chapter Twenty-One
No one could have failed to be aware of the rain that came down all that day just before Christmas, blotting out the light and making it difficult to hear what anyone was saying, but the mother of the sick little girl from the location, the nuns and I were too busy to pay it much attention at first. Emang was only one of several native children who had been brought in to the convent hospital with fever and dysentery. Several of them were very ill indeed, but she was the sickest of all. Sister Mary Columba and I took it in turns to sponge down the child’s hot little body, while Mrs Mahelebe squatted by the end of her daughter’s bed in dumb misery.
We had been thankful of the rain at first: at least it would cool the air and perhaps help us to get the fretful children’s temperatures down a little. We went on doing what was necessary as the storm crashed over our heads, but we began to exchange worried glances as the rain grew into an absolute deluge and then came down in a positive cataract. An unheard-of panic seemed to be gripping the normally hushed and disciplined convent. Outside the wards, orderlies ran about like scalded cats, and as the afternoon wore on, brought news to us of the havoc wreaked by the storm: the hospital kitchen was under six feet of water; the dinner was spoiled; and the sisters’ bombproof had been washed away, while the covered trenches in the women’s laager were now nothing less than a subterranean canal.
“Carry on,” ordered Sister Mary Evangelist calmly.
And so we did, and after a while, the rain abruptly ceased. Little Emang stopped thrashing about in her delirium and became very quiet. Sister Mary Columba held her hand until, a few minutes later, in the hush that at last succeeded the cloudburst, the child breathed her last. The sister laid Emang’s hands across her breast, crossed herself and bowed her head. Then she spoke softly to the mother in her own language and the woman’s keening began, soon taken up by the family who had been crouched outside on the veranda, waiting.
I left the ward, and walked round to the other side of the building, where I stood in the unusual quietness, staring out into the still-dark afternoon. The deluge had at least brought a respite from the shelling, the Dutch presumably having their own disasters to look to, but the storm damage, and the steam now rising from the earth, had added an unreal dimension to the desolation already caused by the shelling of the compound. Tree branches scattered the ground; the tin roof of a little outhouse blown off by a shell, which had lain on the ground for days, now floated on its own little lake on the red mud that was now the path to the women’s laager. A telegraph pole which had been hit lay on the ground like a wounded warrior.
Devastation and despair seemed to lie over everything. I felt overwhelmed by sadness. I suppose little Emang could have died at any time of such a fever, but she might have had a more sporting chance had she been better fed and well-nourished to begin with. How long could we go on like this?
“Mrs Osborne?”
Louisa was tapping my arm. “I can’t find Mrs Armitage anywhere.”
“Perhaps she’s with Mrs Douglas.”
“I can’t find either of them. Nobody seems to have seen them for ages.”
I looked round for the little Kaffir who ran errands for the nuns, and asked him if he’d seen either Lyddie or Caroline. He gave his wide smile and said, “They go see, missis.” He pointed in the direction of the river.
I felt a sudden, inexplicable panic. I knew that as soon as the rain ceased people had flocked down to the river bank to marvel and see what the storm had done, as people will – but what on earth had possessed Lyddie to do likewise? She was so careful of her unborn baby that for the last few weeks she hadn’t ventured out of the convent grounds, where she could easily dive for cover when the shelling started. With all that rain, the roads and paths would be traps for the unwary, and besides, the Dutch might take advantage of the confusion to start firing again at any time. My faith in Caroline as a protector was not great.
Louisa said in a frightened voice, “It’s awful down by the river. The foot-drift’s impassable and they say the stadt’s flooded out.”
For a moment, I stood paralysed, then flew for my bicycle. I grabbed it and began to pedal for all I was worth, followed by Louisa on the nuns’ old boneshaker.
Darkness would arrive within an hour. But the boy hadn’t said how long they’d been gone, so perhaps they were even now on their way back. All the same, I pedalled furiously and headed towards the river bank. Louisa valiantly kept up, and as we bumped through the streets without meeting them coming the other way, my worry and a premonition that something terrible had happened grew with every turn of the wheels. By this time, it had become apparent that the bicycles were worse than useless. With one accord, we dismounted and let them fall where they would, though it wasn’t much better on foot.
The light was fading quickly, and as we neared the river, it seemed that the onlookers had abandoned their gaping. I heard the screams before I saw them, somewhere over by the Chinese garden. I lifted my skirts and ran as well as I could. Louisa, younger and unhampered by skirts, outstripped me, but not by much. I could hardly speak by the time we were near enough to see what looked like a struggle taking place on the river bank, two shapes outlined against the line of poplars on the far side, before they disappeared. When we reached the bank, they were nowhere to be seen.
It wasn’t unusual for the river to flood during the rainy season, but today flash floods had swept the Malopo through its creek with a violence rarely seen before. The wide, slow-flowing river had become a rushing torrent of muddy, coffee-coloured water, simply tearing along, bringing with it chicken coops, dead fowls, cooking utensils, the carcase of a heifer, bathtubs.
At this point, the soft red earth of the steep, unevenly sloping bank was a mud slide about ten or twelve feet above the river. I couldn’t see either of them, then I discerned one figure lying in a huddle on a sort of ledge or shelf a mere foot or two below the overhanging lip of the bank. Lyddie, thank God! She was making no sound and at first I thought she had lost consciousness, but then I saw her arm lift. I wanted to shout ‘Don’t move!’ but dare not. The churned-up river racing below was a dangerous torrent. A corrugated iron roof was swept past as though it were a leaf and I knew if she fell in, she would be carried away just as surely as Caroline must have been …for I could see nothing of her.
Louisa seemed to know just what to do, and she and I together knelt and grabbed, first a handful of the shawl Lyddie had pinned around her shoulders, and then her arms. God knows how, but we managed to haul her up to safety. But then, just as we laid her on the grass and I was relieved of her weight, my feet slipped from under me. Unable to save myself, I tumbled helplessly down the bank and into the water. Had I not gone in feet first I should have followed Caroline. Even so, I was in up to my neck, right in the deep water of a sluit, one that led into the market garden, but hidden under the rushing water. Gasping for breath, bracing myself not to be knocked over by the tide of muddy water swirling around me, feeling the ugly suck and pull of it against my body, I suddenly saw strong hands were being extended towards me. Feeling as though my arms were being dragged from their sockets, I was eventually deposited on the grass beside Lyddie.
I wondered where they had all come from, what had brought them all there: the two Chinamen, several women from nearby houses and a few children. Then I remembered the screams. It seemed like hours since I’d heard them, but it could only have been minutes. “Lyddie?” I struggled to kneel over her where she was still lying on the ground, trying not to deluge her with water. “Are you all right?” I asked stupidly.
Her voice was the faintest whisper. “I shall be, directly. I only slipped.”
One of the rescuers was a sensible woman with four children of her own whom I knew a little, and she took one glance at Lyddie and saw she must be attended to. “Mr Rowlands has a little cart. Best get him to take her home – I’ll send one of my boys for the doctor.”
“She’s staying at the convent. There’s a docto
r there.”
She nodded. “But you’ll need attention too, otherwise you’ll get pneumonia.”
“Caroline —?” I began.
But Caroline had gone.
The sisters had Lyddie into bed within minutes. I was shivering in my wet clothes and they gave me some dry ones of a sort. My hair was in rat’s tails but I was too exhausted to do anything but rub it roughly dry while Dr Fox examined Lyddie and advised that sleep would be the best medicine. There was no sign of the baby coming prematurely, so perhaps nothing more would come of this sorry adventure. Sister Mary Evangelist gave her some hot milk and I stayed with her and held her hand while she told me drowsily what had happened. Apparently Caroline had insisted that she would never sleep that night if she didn’t get some fresh air; it had stopped raining and she said she was going to take a walk towards the swollen river and see if all they’d heard about the flood was true. Like me, Lyddie had never really believed she would carry out those histrionic threats of hers to follow her lover to the grave. Unlike me, she’d good-naturedly agreed to keep an eye on her, and decided she’d better agree to go with her.
“She was in such a strange mood, Hannah, I couldn’t let her go alone. But I never thought that she meant —”
“She didn’t, I’m sure …don’t think of it. Try and sleep.”
But she needed to talk before she could sleep. They had reached the river, she went on, and were peering down into the rushing water from the bank when Caroline began to talk wildly of how easy it would be, just to jump in and let herself be carried away. Lyddie had held on to her, desperately trying to talk her out of it, to pull her back, screaming for help, until somehow they both fell. “She wouldn’t have done it, Hannah, when it came to it, I know she wouldn’t. She was only trying to steady herself by holding on to me, and we both slipped. Such a silly accident.”
Silly – and needless. Had Caroline ever meant to take her own life, or had it only been a gesture, a means of attracting attention? I had over the last few weeks become very tired of Caroline and the unnecessary drama she was making out of her situation. I felt ashamed of myself now. I should have had more sympathy, more compassion.
All the same, I could not imagine why Lyddie had agreed to that ridiculous request, especially knowing Caroline’s state of mind, though she was not entirely rational either, these days. If this was what having a baby did to you, perhaps I was fortunate not to be having one.
Presently she fell quiet and her lids began to droop. “Don’t worry about me, Hannah – or the baby,” she whispered. “He has a charmed life.” She fell asleep with a smile on her lips.
There was nothing I could do by staying at her bedside but I was not easily persuaded to leave her. I gave in only when Lyall arrived to take my place to sit grey and stone-faced by her side.
“I’ll come back and see her tomorrow morning, first thing.”
“God help you, Hannah dear,” said Sister Mary Evangelist oddly.
I went to see Louisa before I went home. She had fallen into the deep, easy sleep of youth. I kissed her forehead, my gallant little friend, and she never even stirred. Our bicycles were still down by the market garden, but it didn’t matter. I doubted whether I could have kept my balance, for my legs had been trembling uncontrollably ever since we had pulled Lyddie back from the brink of that fearful river. I walked homewards with dragging steps through the oddly silent streets, my footsteps echoing. The guns were still silent and the air smelt sweet. As I walked, my face was brushed by moths and night breezes.
With a part of my mind that was not still seeing those struggling figures on the bank, or feeling that filthy, rushing, sucking water around me, I noticed in a detached way how much damage the storm had done to the town which had already been looking very shabby and knocked about, its windows cracked and patched up with cardboard, tin roofs askew or missing altogether, piles of debris wherever a big shell had scored a direct hit. The lookout tower on top of Riesle’s stood black against the sky, and through a line of poplars I saw the little red fort on the top of the kopje and I wondered if I should find Hugh at Lyddie’s house when I arrived, for once snatching time off from military matters, as other men seemed able to do from time to time. I was not really surprised when I did not find him there. We were becoming virtual strangers
The truth was, I had fallen out of love with my husband (or thought I had, which came to much the same thing). I had slowly come to realise that we had never, perhaps, spent enough time together to enable us to get to know each other. I saw now how different we were in our natures, how little we had in common, with few shared interests. He was a good man, none better, but the spark had gone from our marriage. There were black holes in our relationship, which we could only fill with superficialities. Wider issues were never discussed. But I tried not to think of it. These were black thoughts at the end of a black day.
Then as I walked up the short path to the house, I was halted in my tracks by – music. Not gramophone music, but a piece I didn’t recognise, played on Lyddie’s second-hand piano. A liquid outpouring of notes, as unlike her cheerful, energetic strumming of the popular songs of the day as anything could be. I was reminded of my first day in Mafeking, with Nellie Melba’s glorious voice singing over the desert air. In its way this was even stranger. No one I knew played like this.
A stranger was sitting at the keyboard, his fingers moving effortlessly, caressingly, over the notes. Sitting in the circle of lamplight, he played with absorbed concentration, his eyes closed. I stood in the shadows, listening, and it was only the squeak of my boots as I shifted from one foot to another that broke his concentration. He stopped playing and stood up. “I say, I do beg your pardon. I must apologise for appropriating your piano – it’s so long since I played, I couldn’t resist …”
“Please don’t apologise, it was exquisite. That piano’s never been played like that before.”
He laughed. “Oh, but you should hear my mother play Chopin, Mrs Armitage.”
“I’m sorry …I’m not Mrs Armitage. Hannah Osborne.”
“Oh, Lord. It’s I who should be sorry, bursting like this and not introducing myself. I’m Harry Chetwynd.” He smiled and held out his hand and I gave him mine. I saw him looking at my other hand, at my wedding ring.
He was a young man of medium height, with a thin, dark face, extremely good-looking, with winged eyebrows and a mouth that seemed used to smiling. I would have given anything if he hadn’t been there at that particular moment. I wanted no one, least of all a stranger with whom I should have to make conversation.
He was looking at my hair, at my damp boots: they hadn’t been able to find any others to fit me at the convent. “Mrs Osborne, shouldn’t you sit down? You look pretty well done up, if you’ll forgive my saying so.”
“I’ve just fallen in the sluit.”
“The what?”
“Sluice, you would call it. By the river.” I was done up, exhausted to my very bones, and not up to explaining further, and though I could sense his curiosity, he was too polite to ask for any. He was looking less than up to the mark himself. His bush jacket had evidently received a thorough soaking and dried on him, his boots seemed as wet as mine. He looked as drained and exhausted as I felt.
“You must be wondering what I’m doing here.” He told me then that he was a war correspondent, of whom we already had several in the town. “I have an assignment to write something about the way you brave people are surviving in Mafeking. Mr Whale, editor of your local paper sent me to seek out Mr Armitage. The boy let me in, saying Missis would be back presently.”
“You’re very brave, coming into Mafeking. Everyone else wants to get out.”
He laughed. “I dare say I can get out the same way I came in, if I want to.” Which had been by way of the old post road from Vryburg, and through the enemy lines with the help of one of the native runners, and so through to the location and thence the town.
“Are you hungry?”
“I had some
dried biltong last night. Wasn’t bad, if you’ve the teeth of a tiger.”
“You haven’t tried our horsemeat sausages,” I said, with a tired attempt to respond to his joke, mentally taking stock of what food there was. Amos might stretch the bully beef into something passable. He looked cheered by the prospect of something to eat, but then he said, unexpectedly, “Please – sit down and never mind the food. You’ve obviously had a bad day of it.”
“A bad day? I — I think it’s been the worst day of my whole life,” I said shakily, having no intimation then that there was worse, much worse, to come.
He then did something quite extraordinary. He reached out a finger and gently pushed back from my face a lock of hair that had escaped the untidy knot into which I’d bundled it, an extraordinary liberty which in other circumstances would neither have been taken nor allowed. Why there was such intimacy between us, right from the start, was a mystery to me. We stood looking at one another – and as kindness will, his quite overwhelmed me. I couldn’t help it, tears I hadn’t shed all day filled my eyes. And it seemed quite natural that I should let this stranger, whom I had not known above five minutes, put his arms around me and press my head into his shoulder.
Afterwards, we were both embarrassed, and slightly shamefaced. I sat on the sofa and dried my eyes. “What about that food? I must tell Amos.” I couldn’t remember having eaten a thing all day myself, except for a barely palatable bowl of mealie porridge at lunch.
“Let me tell him —” he began, standing up, wincing as he did so. “It’s all right, don’t worry. Just twisted my knee getting in. Mistake to rest it. Should have kept it moving. I — I believe it’s —” So saying, he turned deathly pale and grabbed on to the nearest thing, which happened to be the shawl covering the piano, and fell to the floor in a faint, still clutching the shawl, bringing down with him in a clatter the photos from the piano top.
Shadows & Lies Page 28
