The Fire Portrait

by Barbara Mutch

  Unlike the oak in England, it’s not a vantage built on height, but rather on geography.

  To my right the land is succumbing to Karoo semi-desert; to my left it still has elements of the lush peninsula. To my right, sheep browse the scrub and dust stirs over the brown veld. To my left, the river still carries enough water to turn the bordering land green enough to support vines. Above this divide reigns Aloe Peak, directing what little rain there is to one side or the other.

  I paint the divide. And I see the desert encroaching.

  I had to wait to show Father my vantage point until Mother recovered from her illness and the season was favourable. Winter in Aloe Glen was too cold and summer too searing for comfort. They arrived by train on a cool autumn day with the dust devils quiescent and a farmer driving sheep to the train for onward journey to market. Bleating and not-quite-muffled curses echoed along the platform as Mother and Father alighted. The conductor threw up his hands at the chaos and climbed back on board. Mother frowned at my bush shirt and trousers while Father raised his hat to the farmhands as if they were besuited mail ship passengers. ‘My,’ he shouted, watching the loading operation with interest after we’d hugged, ‘so this is how we get our mutton!’

  I drew him hastily away. Father wasn’t to know that the railways had introduced cheap rates for farmers forced to send their entire flocks to slaughter. This was one such tragedy visited upon Sannie Metz and her family from the drier side of town. I tucked Mother’s arm through mine and led her to the motor car. Normally we’d have walked from the station but Father had written to say Mother wasn’t yet strong enough for any distance beyond one hundred yards on foot.

  ‘You can drive, Frances?’ She looked at me uncertainly from the front seat.

  ‘Yes, I took my licence in Worcester.’

  ‘Bravo!’ called Father from the back seat as we lurched off. The train whistled and departed to a further chorus of bleating. I wondered how Mr Metz could bear to watch. There was no sign of Sannie. Men loitering in front of the cafe turned to look at us as we drove by and I nodded to them out of the side window. Mrs van Deventer, on her knees in the vegetable patch, raised a pudgy arm. She’d been more forthcoming of late, since I’d managed to harvest six unblemished tomatoes from the straggly crop nurtured beneath our bedroom window.

  ‘How are you, Frances?’ Mother asked later, patting a hand over her hair and examining me closely.

  ‘I’m well,’ I said as I poured tea on the verandah. ‘Julian and I are content.’

  Mother’s anxiety centres around the fact that there is no baby. I’m also beginning to wonder, for Julian is more accomplished than before. Perhaps my qualified affection is the reason I’ve not yet conceived.

  ‘Indeed.’ Mother pulled her cardigan closer. ‘You must look after yourself.’

  Mother is also disconcerted by the thirsty land about us, but she’s reassured by the number of people with whom I’m on nodding acquaintance. And as regards my personal view of Aloe Glen – should either of my parents ask – I’m prepared to defend what I at first derided, mainly to save Father from residual guilt, but also because I don’t want to be pitied. And also because Director Compton has written back to say that at least one of my specimens was unknown to Kirstenbosch and could I send more paintings?

  We can pay you an honorarium, Mrs McDonald, for similar work.

  I am particularly interested in the aloes.

  I danced around the house, holding the letter.

  Our quiet Sipata broke into a giggle as she polished the furniture. ‘Ma’am is happy?’

  And mostly I am, although just when I believe I’ve forgotten my old love, I see a particular shade of dark hair or I recall the touch of lips that are not my husband’s – and I’m wrenched back.

  Is this a kind of adultery of the heart?

  Father and I set out early the following morning towards the lower slopes of Aloe Peak. I was wearing dungarees and velskoens, to Mother’s distaste. At some stage I must point out that tanned hide, rather than patent leather, convey both status and practicality in Aloe Glen. We climbed steadily, Father and I, him using his stout walking stick on the uneven path. The sky stretched overhead, bare of any clouds; I’ve come to expect that they will occasionally build up only to melt away in teasing fashion. Sometimes there is lightning, sometimes distant thunder brings folk onto the streets, but rain rarely falls. The air is so clear that the horizon appears infinite in a way I never knew in England, extending far beyond the crisp line of the valley or the distant plain that leads to Kimberley and, conceivably, all the way to Cairo.

  ‘It’s certainly dramatic, Fran. And tranquil.’

  We stopped and looked back. A train crawled north under a head of smoke; the mountains thrust sharp profiles into the blue. Father didn’t need to know the unease I still feel, the vibrations beneath the surface that emerge when I meet someone like Wynand Louw who regards me as the enemy.

  Am I safe here? I asked my diary that day.

  ‘At least we don’t have to climb a tree,’ Father gave a quick grin, ‘to get a view.’

  ‘It’s all in front of us,’ I nodded. ‘As far as the eye can see.’

  He unbuttoned the leather case he was carrying around his neck and passed me the latest set of binoculars. I adjusted the focus and traversed the mountainside. Grey-brown bossies struggled to survive amid tumbled rocks of grey and ochre but also – my heart quickened – a pinkish aloe, its tentacled leaves clasped around its heart as if in prayer.

  ‘Your mother is dying, Frances.’

  I pulled the glasses from my eyes.

  ‘No! It can’t be—’

  Mother, carefully set Mother?

  Who tried and failed to mould me in her likeness, whom I’ve loved but never really understood—

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  Father, his face suddenly haggard, put his hands on my shoulders and drew me into his arms. ‘They say it’s her lungs.’ He rocked me gently, the glasses pressed between us. ‘It may have started even before we left England. There is no cure, my dear.’

  I didn’t cry.

  I sat down on the stony ground and Father levered himself down beside me.

  He pulled his watch out of his waistcoat and looked at it, as if the time mattered.

  ‘Will she have treatment? Is there a chance?’

  ‘Dr Reed says they’ll try, but it’s already too late. We must be strong, Fran.’

  The sun crept higher across the face of Aloe Peak, illuminating clefts that had earlier appeared flat.

  ‘How long does she have, Father? How long do we have?’

  I measure time by the seasons that pass without rain.

  ‘Months. Maybe a year.’

  Mother may not live to see whether I have a child.

  ‘Will you tell me my brother’s name?’

  Father didn’t answer for a while. But I had to know. I had to talk to Mother about him so that he could live on even when she was gone.

  ‘Gideon. His name was Gideon.’

  ‘How old was he, when he died?’

  ‘Four years old, Fran.’ Father closed his eyes for a moment. ‘He died of tetanus.’

  The disease that comes when children run and fall and scratch themselves.

  ‘That’s why, when you fell, Fran, your mother—’

  ‘She thought I might die, too.’

  Father put his arm around me. How often have we sat, side by side at a vantage point, while he taught me about what I was seeing or what history lessons I should heed or the value of a solid investment?

  But never before about my brother. Or Mother’s fear that I might die like him.

  A rock kestrel hovered over the veld, then dived, then pulled up and hovered again.

  ‘What will you do, Father?’

  ‘I will carry on.’ Father straightened his shoulders. ‘Just as you will. I will seek out new clients, and you will paint more pictures.’

  I stared straight ahead. I didn’t want to
see his face, or show him mine. The sky was turning more white than blue as the day warmed. Soon, the kestrel might decide to return to its nest and wait for the cool of evening before beginning its hunt for food once more.

  Father got to his feet and held out his hand to me. ‘Shall we go back?’

  ‘Just a little further, please, Father.’

  When we reached it, the aloe I’d spotted through the binoculars looked as if it had been rolled across the veld by the wind and somehow anchored itself just before falling down the mountainside. From that precarious attachment, it didn’t then stretch out its spiked leaves for balance but bundled them together so that they resembled a kind of circular arrangement of barbed wire. And it was a shade of dusty pink. An armoured, pink plant that would require the blending of rose madder, viridian and ochre, along with brushwork of the utmost precision to reflect its harsh lines. I knelt down and examined the plant-ball, avoiding the razor-sharp leaf margins. No sign, as yet, of a flower stalk.

  I could wait.

  I’m always waiting in this place.

  I’d sketch it now and then come back when it sent up a flower.

  And Mother might die before that happened.

  But this could be a slow leaving. Unlike Aunt, who was torn away from me overnight.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  ‘Throw them out!’ shouted a man from the back of the school hall. ‘Throw the government out!’

  Mrs van Deventer, seated along from us in a knitted hat and matching shawl – there was snow on Aloe Peak – worked her eyebrows at me. Her grandson, Frans, is one of my art pupils, so I’ve risen again in her estimation following the success of my tomatoes.

  Julian took my hand. ‘Don’t react.’

  Under my coat I was wearing a plain blue skirt and a white shirt, an outfit carefully contrived to fall between bush clothes and Cape Town formality.

  The member of parliament held up his hands.

  ‘Dames en here, ladies and gentlemen, let us be calm.’

  ‘Why? Waarom?’ shouted random voices, and I could understand their outrage. I’d visited farms whose vines had died after years of dessication. My tiny vegetable patch outside the kitchen door was rock-hard. The Metz children’s school uniforms were threadbare, my art pupils drew riverbeds that were dry.

  ‘We have a coalition government,’ the MP said soothingly. ‘We must be patient.’

  ‘Smuts is a traitor! We need to follow Germany!’ came a voice that I recognised. I looked around and saw Wynand Louw on his feet and Truda cowering in silence beside him. Wynand has picked up English from Truda who is a regular at the literacy classes Julian and I run once a week, when I am not in Cape Town visiting Mother who is now confined to bed.

  ‘He admires Herr Hitler,’ Truda whispered to me last week. ‘He says he will save Germany.’

  ‘We will make representations, you may be sure of that,’ the MP said hastily.

  The rumble of dissent rose until half the audience was on its feet. Only representations!

  ‘What about the poor whites on the edge of town?’ a woman’s voice called.

  ‘It’s the Engelse!’ yelled someone. ‘They want to use the droogte to steal our land!’

  ‘Shut up,’ shouted another. ‘We fought in the Great War while you were hiding away!’

  ‘Did your mother die in the Boer War camps?’ came the swift rejoinder.

  I sensed the intake of breath around me. Kitchener’s concentration camps and his policy of scorched earth was forever branded on the soul of these people. But this harking back would do nobody any good. Where was the thundering dominee? Why didn’t he take charge with the authority he dispensed from the pulpit?

  ‘Say something!’ I hissed to Julian. ‘This is your place, you teach children to debate without shouting!’

  But it was not Julian’s style to impose himself.

  I stood up and clapped my hands above my head.

  There was a surprise lull. The headmaster’s odd wife, I heard them thinking. The one who draws, who looks as if she will fall over in a strong breeze.

  Julian looked up at me with an expression of horror.

  ‘The headmaster has something to say,’ I said.

  I smiled and gestured for him to stand up.

  For a moment he hesitated but then I saw the cloak of schoolteacher drop around his shoulders and he rose and stepped into the aisle. His voice, when it came, was steady. The whimsical smile I used to find so annoyingly deferential now seemed the perfect foil to the emotions sweeping the hall.

  ‘One of the first lessons we teach our pupils is how to attract attention.’ He lifted an arm into the air. ‘It’s to prevent uproar in class and give everyone an equal chance to be heard. We also have rules about language.’ He gave an exaggerated wink and the audience grudgingly nodded. ‘Shall I therefore play schoolmaster and give everyone a chance to speak, one by one? Mr Louw, will you allow Mrs Engelbrecht to begin? Thank you, sir. Madam, over to you.’

  It was the turning point.

  Cora Engelbrecht received a round of applause after asking for help for the poor whites on the edge of town. Abel Metz said there should be an increased police presence to stop sheep rustling. Mr Fourie stood up nervously and said that the morning train was often late and that it was a disgrace that his customers had to wait so long for their goods. The audience nodded in agreement.

  There were no more yells about bringing down the government. Afterwards, the member of parliament asked Julian if he’d ever thought about a career in politics.

  The dominee appeared from the back of the hall and said he was just about to intervene when Julian had done so. Mrs van Deventer said it was just as well Julian had intervened because that Wynand Louw was ready to turn the place upside down. Laetitia Snyman grinned and said she’d play me a military polonaise next time I was at school. And a previously silent mother from the regular group at the school gate approached me as I was pouring tea and said her name was Anna Visser and she wanted to thank me for standing up and making the men quieten down.

  ‘I don’t know what to say, my dear,’ Julian confessed as we walked home, ‘you are my better half.’

  He stopped on the corner of Marico and bent down to kiss me with the same passion as when we were crouched by the roadside after the accident with the young antelope. Julian is most aroused when we are in danger, or at a moment of revelation. It’s when we’re both most alive, when our marriage might be more than a habit, when I might conceive Julian’s child.

  ‘You bring out the best in me,’ he murmured against my mouth. ‘And you terrify me.’

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  There are parts of me that my husband doesn’t know. He doesn’t know about my brother, who died before I was born and yet who lives in my dreams, a laughing child just out of reach.

  In a small town, little is private. There is speculation about why I have not had a baby.

  I sense Julian is anxious. He sees a family as the ultimate expression of unity.

  My barrenness can no longer be put down to a tentative husband. Julian has learnt how to love me and there’s no reason, according to our family doctor whom I visited quietly in Cape Town, for me not to fall pregnant. Daph has two children already. Susan, in England, has twins.

  I’m ready for a child. I’ve made my peace with this place. I have banished – I think – the unease, the vibrations that once disturbed me and I don’t go looking for trouble.

  I grow vegetables in our plain garden with mixed success, but at least I try.

  The Afrikaans woman, Truda, has become my friend. We are in tune despite her husband’s antipathy towards me. And I know a dozen women by name who will speak readily to me and who I hope, this year, will accept an invitation to tea.

  Just as I’ve waited for the veld to bloom, so I have waited for the first shoots of friendship.

  I’m writing this on the train. Snow speckles the very tops of the Hex River mountains. The vines are winter-bare against the e
arth.

  The sidings trundle by, Orchard, Sandhills …

  North-west to Tulbach to avoid the gradients of Du Toit’s and Bain’s Kloof, south to Wellington.

  The first sight of Table Mountain.

  I see Mother once a month. When she has gone, there will be less excuse to visit Father and my beloved peninsula so frequently.

  ‘She’s better today, Miss Fran,’ Violet murmured. Mother has replaced Aunt Mary in Violet’s affections. ‘She always is when she knows you’re coming.’

  The velvet curtains were half-drawn – Mother finds daylight too bright – casting the bedroom into permanent twilight. She was propped up against the pillows, a shrunken figure but still carefully coiffed. Violet sets her hair for her every other day. I wish Sipata was more like Violet, more like a friend.

  ‘Frances!’ Mother held out her arms.

  I went over and embraced her gently. Mother still doesn’t do fulsome hugs, but she’s more emotional than she used to be. She cannot close doors behind her any longer.

  ‘How was the journey? How is dear Julian?’

  ‘It was beautiful, Mother. Snow on the mountains. Julian sends his love.’

  She sank back against her pillows. ‘I’m so relieved – every day, Frances – that you have Julian.’