‘That isn’t the point.’
‘Then what is?’
We’d never had a disagreement before and I could tell he was unsure how to proceed. Julian was always mild-mannered and slow to criticise. Some would say it’s an admirable trait and one I should try to cultivate but, to me, it smacks of having no firm opinions of one’s own. I got up, went around the desk and leant down to embrace him. ‘I’m sorry to arrive unannounced. But no damage was done, was it?’
‘Things happen by the book here, my dear,’ he murmured, fingering a lock of my hair that fell against his face. ‘People don’t like to be surprised.’
‘Or perhaps,’ I adopted a gently teasing tone, ‘you don’t like to be surprised?’
There came a peremptory knock and the door opened.
‘Julian – oh!’ A woman stopped in her tracks, hand over her mouth, eyes sparking with amusement.
I straightened up. Julian struggled to his feet.
‘Frances,’ he cleared his throat, ‘let me introduce Miss Laetitia Snyman, my deputy.’
‘How nice to meet you,’ I said formally, coming around the desk to shake her hand.
Laetitia Snyman was at least ten years older than me, and not conventionally attractive. Her face was crowned with heavy brows that gave her a faintly simian appearance. But there was an energy to her that was reassuring after the inertia that seemed to grip the town, or maybe it was simply a consequence of the temperature.
‘Veels geluk – best of luck,’ she said with a strong accent. ‘I hope you’ll be happy here.’
‘Thank you.’ I glanced from her to Julian. ‘Do you wish to speak to Julian privately? I can wait outside.’
‘It’s the timetable. I can talk to him tomorrow. After I’ve played for assembly.’
‘You play the piano? I heard you as I was walking in.’
‘Yes. I’m the music teacher. And I do history as well.’
‘Ah, yes.’ I laughed. ‘I spent years with a textbook called Cross, Castle and Compass.’
She raised a furry brow. ‘I don’t know that one. We use Afrikaans books, mostly.’
‘Frances is an artist,’ Julian put in, now recovered from the embarrassment of being found in a compromising position with his wife. ‘She’s very talented.’
Laetitia nodded and backed towards the door. ‘Nice to meet you, Mrs McDonald.’
‘Frances, please.’
She nodded and left the room.
I listened to her feet tapping swiftly down the corridor. ‘She seems very enthusiastic.’
‘She is.’
‘Why did you say that local people don’t like to be surprised? She took it rather well.’
‘Frances!’
‘Oh, come.’ I perched on his desk. ‘It’s not the end of the world to be seen hugging your wife!’
For a moment I thought he was going to protest, but he simply looked at me with those kind blue eyes as if I were a pupil whom he’d yet to figure out.
‘Can I tell you something?’
‘Of course.’ I went back to the visitor’s chair and sat down. ‘I’m sorry if I embarrassed you.’
He turned for a moment and contemplated the simmering veld beyond the playground.
‘No one knows that my grandfather, Hamish McDonald, was a teacher here.’ He turned back to me. ‘At this very mission station, although at the time the entire school,’ he raised his hands to encompass the building, ‘comprised only two classrooms. He taught for five years before returning to Scotland.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me? Or my parents? We always wondered why—’
‘Why I’d buried myself in a rural backwater?’
I blushed and sat back in my chair.
‘In his day, my grandfather taught Latin. Today, we have children who can hardly speak English, the language of the world. That’s why I’m here, to give these youngsters a chance.’
‘But then they might leave Aloe Glen—’
‘Indeed.’ He lapsed into the usual reticence.
Yet perhaps it was a front to shield a determined impulse, one that I would never have considered him capable of. ‘You’re saying that you’re here,’ I began slowly, picking my words with care, ‘in this mostly Afrikaans place, to give these children enough English to make their way in the world. Yes?’
He nodded.
‘And yet doing so may split them from their families, allow them to find work in the cities, in jobs that their parents wouldn’t be able to do? Or understand?’
There a pause and I wondered if I’d been too brazen.
‘You express it so well, Frances.’ He flashed me a shy smile. ‘You use words like the paint in your pictures. Yes, I want them to make the most of themselves. Isn’t that what education is all about? Even if it means leaving this place.’
I stared at him. He was a radical. He was willing to undermine his community by encouraging a language that many of the locals still associated with the horrors of the Boer War and the hated imperial foe.
From down the corridor came the piano once again, this time with a lively polka. My feet twitched. Laetitia Snyman was a lady after my own heart.
He leant forward. ‘Do you know why I married you?’
I hesitated. ‘You said you loved me.’
‘I do.’ He gave me another shy smile. ‘But I recognised early on that you had a particular gift, quite aside from art. You said things out loud that I often thought but could never express. You seemed able to read my mind and translate it into speech.’
He knelt in front of me and took my hand. There was no confusion in his face, now, only certainty. ‘You have the courage to say and do what I can’t, Frances. I need that.’
The piano stopped. Or maybe the import of what he was saying smothered all other sound.
In that moment, in that small office, I realised I was not the one who had been rescued by our marriage.
My husband needed me far more than I would ever need him.
He got up and held out his arms.
Then he kissed me like he’d done on the road with the fallen antelope and the vultures circling.
Every death serves a purpose in Africa.
As we broke apart I wondered if the death that had occurred was also mine: my younger, naïve self.
And I wondered what new self I would grow.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
I like my husband. I’m not in love with him – those emotions remain locked away in Cape Town with Mark – but I care for him in a way I didn’t believe possible during the stilted days of the honeymoon and the fumbling caresses beneath our nightclothes.
It’s no exaggeration to say that the tone of our marriage changed after Julian’s confession.
He was unburdened; I no longer needed to hold my tongue.
Or did I?
I now had the confidence of my husband and yet I was uneasy.
Or perhaps uneasy is the wrong word …
Since arriving in Aloe Glen I’ve begun to feel as if I can’t quite trust myself or my opinions. The bold instincts that Father encouraged, Mother rued, and Daphne admired, are being disturbed. Like the disturbance you see in a glass of water placed on a barely vibrating surface. A casual glance shows nothing untoward: the glass is intact, the water has not spilt. But look more closely and you see the perturbations, the tiny circular waves building and crashing against one another.
Is it the heat? The remoteness? The lack of green grass? The accident?
The absence of Aunt and her trenchant opinions?
I can’t blame the accident; the tender lump beneath my hair subsided after a week or so.
But the possibility of becoming a victim myself has not. It preys on me.
The innocent buck, the watching veld, the vultures circling overhead.
It is, in its way, a twisted, negative version of the sharpness I felt after falling out of the oak.
I must be on my guard. All is not what it seems.
I am not what I seem.
‘Do you have an art teacher?’ I asked Julian over our first roast chicken dinner. Meneer Erasmus had indeed been willing to provide us with a fresh bird every fortnight. And I’d been first in line on Wednesday morning for vegetables, where I met a tall woman in dungarees whom I’d first seen at the school gate. She said her name was Sannie Metz.
‘No,’ he sighed, ‘we don’t have the funds for a teacher.’
I waited for a moment, hoping he might follow where I was leading.
‘I could start an art class after school. Say, once a week?’
It was, in truth, a selfish offer. If I didn’t reach out, I’d be stuck in my house making the same picture of Aloe Peak over and over, because so far Mrs van Deventer was the only person who’d called and there was little housework since Julian engaged a quiet coloured woman called Sipata to clean the place. I wrote weekly letters to Daph, less often to Sue – my life is now so remote from hers I suspect our correspondence will soon evaporate – but words on a page aren’t enough.
‘What a good idea!’ Julian leant across the table and took my hand. ‘Do you have enough materials?’
‘I do. We could start drawing, and move on to paints later. I have more than enough to share.’
‘My dear,’ said Julian, his pale eyes warm, ‘I’ll announce it at assembly.’
‘Why don’t you offer adult literacy classes?’ From the broken conversations at the school gate it was clear the children weren’t the only ones in need of English tuition. ‘I’d help with that, too.’
Again, it was a selfish suggestion but you can’t expect a town to embrace a stranger until she proves her worth. I was in need of credibility that went beyond merely being the headmaster’s wife.
‘English classes for grown-ups?’ He gave me an amused glance. ‘That might be controversial.’
‘More than art? Think of all those Rubens nudes …’
He gave me a startled glance. ‘You wouldn’t—’
‘Of course not! We’ll draw flowers and sunsets – I promise!’
‘I can’t wait for us to have our own family, my dear. You’ll be a fine mother.’
I smiled at him. I had no wish to start a family just yet, even if it would provide welcome distraction. It seemed to me that motherhood in Aloe Glen was a kind of treadmill. As soon as one child was born, the pressure was on to deliver the next, and the next. Mothers at the school gate corralled flocks of children. Julian’s reserve in the bedroom, I reflected with some guilt, meant I was unlikely to fall pregnant until his awkwardness – and his technique – improved.
On the first day of my project, I settled myself in the junior classroom with sheets of paper and boxes of pencils and awaited my first pupils. I planned to take the children outside, steer them towards a suitable subject – a shiny beetle, the outline of Aloe Peak, that lone tree at the school gate – and then we’d return to the classroom to capture what we’d seen on paper.
That first, critical glance … I heard Mr Cadwaller saying.
‘Good luck!’ Laetitia Snyman poked her head around the door. ‘It’s very good of you to make time!’
I have more time than I know what to do with, Laetitia.
I listened to her heels clicking down the corridor. No one came. I sat for an hour. Then I got up and looked in a small mirror on a side wall.
Maybe it was my hair? I refused to scrape it into a bun as was the local style. It was loose, swept back off my face with the tortoiseshell combs Mother had given me for my eighteenth birthday. I gathered up the paper and pencils and put them into my basket and closed the classroom door quietly behind me. Julian was supervising a student teacher and not available. The whistle of the afternoon goods train cut through the quiet. I walked across the playground, down the main thoroughfare and along Marico Road to our house. The odd shout came from invisible children playing in hot backyards. No cars came along the road. I didn’t turn in. I didn’t want to go home. I kept walking until the road petered out and the veld began. The sun pounded down and I angled the brim of my hat to protect my neck, and picked my way through the low scrub. Heat mirages danced at the horizon. I began to feel light-headed and pulled two sheets of paper from my basket and placed them down, gathered my skirt beneath me, and sat. Ants scurried by my feet, twitched about my sandals, but moved on. Around me, low grey-brown bushes with tiny, hard leaves thrust themselves from the dry earth. Here and there, thin spears poked upwards. Maybe – I leant forward with a stab of interest – they were actually the stalks of bulbs past blooming?
I grabbed a sheet and pencil and began to draw.
A thin black stem tipped with a shrivelled head that I’d have missed if I hadn’t been at ground level. I should come back to this spot, watch through the season, wait for their flowers, dry one and send it to Kirstenbosch with a sketch—
‘Ma’am?’
I swung round and scrambled to my feet. A woman in a faded dress and a battered hat stood behind me.
‘Hello,’ I said, wiping my hand on my dress before extending it. ‘I’m Frances McDonald.’
She ignored my greeting and bent down and retrieved my sketch from where it had fallen, and examined the drawing as if it were a medium she’d never come across before. Then she knelt and pointed to the plant I’d been copying.
‘Yes.’ I knelt down beside her. ‘I think it’s a bulb.’
‘Bulb.’ She pronounced the word slowly, and nodded her head.
‘Does it have flowers, in the springtime?’
‘September.’
‘What colour? Watter kleur?’ I reached for my smattering of Afrikaans.
‘Purple.’
She had dark eyebrows that contrasted with hair which was almost white, presumably bleached from the sun. Her skin was tanned nut-brown. Then she handed me the sketch and ran off, her bare feet agile and sure over the scrub. She didn’t return to the road but instead leapt across the veld like an antelope rather than a human. I had a sudden picture of her running across a road oblivious to an oncoming motor car, and colliding with it.
‘I’m so sorry, my dear,’ Julian said later, over dinner, about my slow start. ‘We’re part of a rural community. Culture isn’t a priority.’
‘I’ll give it another try. I’ll ask Laetitia if she can find a candidate in one of her classes.’
Maybe if one child came, others would join. And this wasn’t like swimming beyond the breakers; I didn’t need to be mindful of leading anyone into danger. Daph, the unknown boy …
‘I know these people,’ Julian went on, ‘they’re not easily swayed. If you haven’t had any takers, I doubt you will again. Don’t agonise, my dear. There are other things to occupy you.’
‘What, exactly?’
‘Why, this house,’ he gestured, ‘your own art, a garden with some vegetables, you have the seeds—’
‘But I want to make a difference, Julian, like you do.’
I could tell this was an argument I wouldn’t manage to translate for him. Julian came from a world where women were supportive, perhaps clever, but not necessarily enterprising.
‘I don’t want to be a decoration!’ I found myself shouting. ‘I want to make something of my life here!’
‘And you will,’ he soothed, patting my clenched fist on the tablecloth. ‘Give it time.’
It was what Mother said in her latest letter: It will take time, Frances. You’re always too impatient.
I breathed deeply and toyed with my leftover chicken.
‘I met a woman today.’
‘Excellent!’ beamed Julian. ‘I’m sure you’ll soon have a circle of friends.’
‘She ran through the bush. She didn’t stay on the path.’
‘What were you doing out in the veld? I’ve warned you not to stray—’
‘I was just at the end of Marico. Where it becomes scrub. Looking at the plants.’
‘Who was this woman?’
I gathered our plates. There were oranges for des
sert. Mr Fourie had kept some aside for me. I’d peeled them and cut them into rounds and we’d have them sprinkled with a little sugar.
‘She never told me her name. She had white hair. And she could run fast.’
She was gone before I could pin her down.
Like the child in my dreams slipping away before I could tell if we looked alike.
‘I’d rather you didn’t talk to strangers, Frances. There are vagrants about, you’re a beautiful young woman. And please stay in town, the veld is rife with scorpions and snakes.’
‘I could draw them,’ I murmured, staring out of the window.
‘Frances.’ Julian ran a hand through his sparse hair. ‘Please, my dear. Don’t be irresponsible.’
You’re lucky, I wanted to shout once again, and bang the plates I was holding until they smashed. You’re not searching for occupation!
But I didn’t. I reminded myself that he is my husband and a good man. Laetitia Snyman has said that Julian is transformed since our marriage. He’s more confident with the staff, more decisive. If I stray, if he loses what I’ve brought him, that new-found bravery will drain away. Whereas I—
We washed the dishes in silence.
Afterwards, when Julian retired to prepare the following day’s lessons, I went out of the kitchen door and sat on the step and watched the mountains change from purple to grey, and sniffed the fragrance rising from the veld. I closed my eyes and conjured up Protea Rise and the sugarbirds hopping in the proteas. And then I imagined myself floating by the side of a dark-haired young man at Muizenberg as the swells lifted us on a turquoise sea.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Mornings and evenings were the time for subtlety in Aloe Glen. The rising or lowering sun softened the landscape before it succumbed to the harsh glare of yellow sun or the dead black of night. In the weeks after our arrival, I drew Aloe Peak from each of our rooms in the morning and in the evening. Ten sketches so far but none worth posting to the director at Kirstenbosch due to my own failings rather than the mountain’s. I looked for bright proteas in the foreground, or towering yellow-woods, or the darting purple flight of a kingfisher, but there were none of those and my pencil faltered. I could have changed subjects and drawn the antelope whose terrified eyes and broken body were still sharp in my mind, but that was too much like trespassing on a tragedy.
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