‘Thank you, Sipata.’
I feel different, but I suppose it’s because I’m alone.
‘It is what ma’am has been hoping for.’
‘I don’t think so.’
I laid down my paintbrush and looked at her. She’s been a quiet presence in my life for a decade.
‘It will be, ma’am. I see it in your face.’
I got up and looked in the mirror. Sipata was imagining what was not there. Titian hair greeted me, now bleached by the sun; extra freckles across my nose from my hours in the veld; green eyes with a hint of ginger … and wariness, for I’ve travelled this road before.
‘Father,’ I said a few weeks later over the telephone, ‘I thought I’d come and see you.’
‘Oh, do!’ his voice echoed down the line. ‘We’ll go to the docks, like old times.’
‘Are you leaving?’ Mrs van Deventer shouted from her garden when I walked by with my suitcase.
‘No!’ I shouted back sharply. ‘Why should you think that? I’m visiting my father. Back in a week.’
I hefted my case to my other hand and walked on, aware of her eyes following me.
A tiny little thing, she’d called me when I first arrived.
‘Return to Cape Town,’ I said to the ticket master at the station.
‘It’s running late,’ he replied with a shrug. ‘Given way to a troop train from upcountry.’
The stations and sidings ticked past – Worcester, Goudini, Artois Mill – amid rows of vines that marched on either side of the track like soldiers on parade. Water glimmered in the distant, newly full Brandvlei Dam, naked children waved as they splashed in streams turned brown with silt. We turned south. The peninsula hove into view above a layer of low cloud, a many-turreted ship rising from the ocean.
‘Frances!’ Father hugged me on the platform when I arrived. ‘Don’t you look well!’
‘And you, too, Father. Sorry I’m so late.’
‘Not to worry.’ He leant down and whispered. ‘I found a couple of new clients while I was waiting. But such grim news, Fran.’ He gestured at the sombre billboards. ‘There’s still talk of invasion.’
‘No one talks about the war in Aloe Glen. It’s as if it’s not actually happening.’
‘And that’s the problem.’ Father tapped the wheel impatiently. ‘The country’s divided. Troublemakers are agitating against Smuts. It’s outrageous.’
‘I know one of them.’
‘You do?’ He shot me a horrified glance. ‘Come home! Leave that backwater while Julian’s away.’
‘It’s my home, Father,’ I said firmly. ‘Backwater or not, it’s where I’ve made my life.’
‘I’m sorry, Fran. I know it’s not really a backwater but I still feel some responsibility—’
‘Hush! Look at the mountain! I want to paint while I’m here.’
Violet noticed straight away although she didn’t react until Father was out of view and earshot.
‘Oh, Miss Fran!’ She swiftly pulled me into her arms. ‘Praise the Lord! And just before Master Julian left! If only your dear ma and your aunt could be here!’
‘I don’t know, Violet,’ I whispered. ‘It’s early days.’
‘Ja, but I can see it. A woman knows.’
‘You’re looking wonderful,’ exclaimed Daph the following day, running her eyes over me. ‘Who would’ve expected lonely country living to suit you so well? Now, shall we take the children to Muizenberg? Not to swim,’ she cast me a warning glance, ‘but to fly kites. What do you say?’
We went on a day of low swells. Ideal conditions, I reflected, for a freak wave.
‘Trevor’s begun flight training,’ Daph confided with nervous pride while the children unpacked their kites. ‘The Commonwealth plan to boost the RAF. I’m hoping the war will be over before he has to fly combat. What news of Julian?’
Waves crested and broke against the shore. I closed my eyes briefly.
‘Fran? Are you alright? Is it Julian?’
‘No.’ I shook myself. ‘He’s fine, he can’t say much. He complains about the heat and the flies.’
‘Maisie! Give your brother a chance! I’m so pleased you’re back, Fran.’
‘I’m only here for a week.’
‘I don’t believe it,’ laughed Daph. ‘I said to Penny you’d surely stay now Julian’s overseas.’
On the way back, I took a detour past Protea Rise. The owners had built a wall around the property that hid all but the prickly thatched roof. I braked and brought the car to a standstill. Somewhere behind the wall was the orange pincushion protea. I didn’t need to see its blooms, I could copy them from memory.
‘Congratulations, Frances,’ Dr Reed said after examining me. ‘You’ve always been healthy – it just took time. The human body follows its own rhythms.’
I smiled at him and nodded. Dr Reed may be experienced but he is, in this instance, wrong. It took a different lover for me to fall pregnant. I hugged the enveloping warmth. I wasn’t barren, I would have a child to carry our family forward—
‘Let me book your confinement,’ he went on, consulting his diary. ‘Now, eat sensibly and rest well. Come and see me every month. I presume you’ll stay in Cape Town?’
I will tell no one. This will become Julian’s child, conceived before he left.
‘Frances?’
A joyful surprise for him, a life-long secret for me.
‘I’ll be going back to Aloe Glen,’ I said. ‘I may have the baby there.’
‘I’d be happier with you here,’ he countered. ‘Those rural areas may not be well served.’
‘Shall we decide nearer the time, Doctor?’
This baby should be born in Aloe Glen. It will be the seal on my belonging there, and a riposte to those who expect me to retreat to the soft comfort of the Cape.
‘Very well.’ He came around his desk. ‘Take care of yourself, you’re going to have a beautiful baby.’
I walked out of the surgery and sat down on a bench outside. I will have a beautiful baby who will never know his or her real father – but will adore Julian. I’m shameless, Julian has said so himself – in jest, it’s true – but this time he’d know I’m being serious. My husband deserves this child and I have no intention of taking that reward away from him. Mark has a family already, and his greatest gift to me will be one of my own.
The sun warmed the back of my neck as I walked along the treed streets to Father’s house.
I once wondered what would become of me after I went to live in Aloe Glen.
I know, now, and it’s a surprise: I’m no longer sad at having been taken away from all I loved, and I no longer feel cheated of passion. This new self isn’t a victim, either, as I’d once feared in that tiny hardscrabble town. I will return to Aloe Glen and produce this baby and show that I can be a worthy part of the community. I’ll teach, I’ll speak out when I see a friend abused, I’ll paint aloes and stone plants and vygies and send the work to exhibitions and build my name.
And, when that has been achieved, I may choose to leave with my family.
I opened the gate. Violet waved to me from the front door.
Will Gideon come back to me in my dreams more often?
I want to tell him he may soon have a nephew or niece to chase in a drier garden than he ever knew.
Chapter Forty
I don’t intend to tell anyone yet and I’m not showing, so there’s no rush. I confess I want to savour this baby alone for a while. I’ve waited so long.
I hope my pregnancy may change the minds of those who are carefully shunning me.
But if the dominee congratulates me will I be able to resist a little wickedness? I shall adopt a pious expression and say that ‘Die Here’ looked down on us and saw our dutiful churchgoing and chose to reward us for our patience.
I will not confess that this child was conceived with a love such as I have never experienced before. Or that my husband played no part.
I will not say that I commit
ted adultery.
I won’t repent.
Will God – the kinder one in whose church I was married – forgive me?
‘Mevrou?’ The boy looked about the classroom but the other pupils were bent at their work. He leant towards me and hissed ‘Dankie – thank you, mevrou.’
‘For what, Deon?’
‘For the bursary. For talking to my pa. For saying I must go to high school.’
I smiled at him. ‘You deserve to go.’
‘Ja, but—’
‘What is it?’
‘It’s my ma.’
‘I’ll watch over your mother, Deon. I’ll make sure she’s safe.’
‘If Meneer McDonald was here—’
‘I know, Deon. But you’ll have to trust me. I won’t keep quiet about it any more. I’ll get help.’
It wouldn’t be easy. The nearest police station was at least twenty miles away.
‘Mevrou?’ Lottie Engelbrecht raised her hand. ‘I saw a ring around the sun yesterday.’
‘That’s called a halo,’ I said.
‘Like you get on Jesus,’ piped up Frans van Deventer.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But when the halo’s around the sun, it’s made from ice crystals reflecting the light.’
The children looked at one another and I wondered whether the dominee would have some tricky questions to answer. The schoolmaster’s wife, he’d glower, unsettling things again. So often, and mostly by accident, I find that my classes go beyond art or literacy. While we’re learning to draw or to write grammatical sentences, we stray into fresh territory.
‘Let’s look at “either … or”, and “neither … nor”,’ I said to my small group of ladies at our early evening literacy class a month later. ‘One gives us a choice, the other gives us none.’
‘Mostly there is no choice in life, Frances,’ laughed Sannie Metz, who has recently relented, as have the others. Maybe they sense the coming baby. Maybe, this time, their forgiveness will last. ‘Mostly we must make do.’
‘Ma’am!’ came a shout and we all turned. ‘Ma’am!’
Sipata stood in the doorway, her eyes wild. ‘You must come! Hurry, ma’am!’
‘What is it? Why are you here?’
‘The house, ma’am! I was almost home. Come look!’
I jumped up and ran out of the classroom, the women crowding out behind me. A plume of black smoke was rising into the air above Marico Road.
‘Truda,’ cried Sannie Metz from alongside me, ‘go to the station. We need the water trailer!’
The smoke was coiling into the sky like a snake.
I’ve seen a cobra rise up and inflate its golden hood. We watched each other. I wasn’t frightened. I stepped back and it sank down and slithered away.
Truda sprinted across the playground, feet hardly touching the ground.
‘Go, Frances,’ Sannie Metz pushed me, ‘go save what you can! Take her, Sipata.’
The other women ran to their cars or bicycles. They needed to get home to ensure their fire buckets were in place and their hoses connected. From the direction of the station I heard shouts.
‘Come, ma’am,’ Sipata was urging quietly, ‘we will go there. I will help you.’
Why are the shortest journeys often the longest? The procession down the aisle on my wedding day, the walk to the entrance of Bella Vista Mansions. But the dash to my burning house was the loneliest because there was no Julian or Mark at the end of it, or even a whistle from a passing train, no sound at all other than a distant, obscene hiss. Mr Fourie’s store was closed, the petrol station was deserted, no one was hanging about the cafe.
Can’t you see my house is burning? I wanted to yell. Doesn’t anybody care?
I stumbled on the uneven road surface and Sipata’s steadying arm stopped me from falling.
‘Careful, ma’am. I will help you,’ she panted. ‘I will help you.’
The gate stood open. There was a livid reek of burning. Figures, dimly visible through the whirling smoke, were filling buckets from our newly full tank and passing them hand to hand. One of our lounge windows was smashed and the curtains that I liked to keep open were burning. Deeper inside, orange flames licked at my painted chairs, the maroon rug on the floor, the single place setting laid for me at our dining room table. I must try to save something, anything – my diary—
Julian’s walking stick was propped against the verandah wall.
‘No, ma’am!’ screamed Sipata.
I beat open the front door. It swung back, smoke billowed, the fire flared with the extra oxygen. Heat struck my face, smoke caught in my throat. I clutched at my stomach. The baby—
‘No!’ A man hauled me out of the doorway. ‘Wait for the water trailer! It’s on its way.’
He had a branch in one hand to beat the flames should they jump outside the house. I nodded dumbly and allowed Sipata to guide me away from the wall of heat. The bucket fillers were tossing water through a second smashed window, the one through which I’d first drawn Aloe Peak. But I recognised none of them, they were not my neighbours. And there was no sign of Mrs van Deventer. A van roared through the gate, with a water trailer hitched to it. Two men got out and began to unroll a thick hose and connect it to the tank. Several others joined them and began to pump. The hose filled, like a worm slowly inflating.
‘Thank you!’ I shouted, although they surely couldn’t hear me. ‘Thank you!’
The man in charge ran towards the house with an axe and began to smash the intact windows.
‘Why are you doing that?’ I screamed, rushing after him. ‘Why?’
‘To get the water in!’ he yelled.
The men led the hose closer. An arc of water gushed from its end and began to play towards the house, seeking the gaping windows as a route to the furnace inside. Smoke and flame erupted into steam. The fire, I realised, would only do part of the damage. The water would ensure that anything left unburnt would be drowned. My precious Cape Town paintings, the aloe flowers pressed between the pages of my heaviest book, the bush clothes that have helped me to fit in here, the city clothes that have made me stand out, Julian’s wedding suit, the melon that Sipata cut for me this morning and that I would have finished tonight … and my precious diary, the passage of my life—
‘Come, ma’am.’ Sipata drew me away.
I turned to stare at a crowd that was now gathering at the gate: the neighbours, late to arrive.
You didn’t run to fight my fire. You left it to strangers.
I teach you English, I help your children, but you didn’t run to fight my fire.
The smoke seemed to be abating, or perhaps it was simply less visible against the darkening sky. Orange flames still darted but the hungry roar was giving way to a smouldering rasp. Through the gloom I saw that one of my paintings was still on the wall, its frame buckled, its glass cracked, its subject – a disa, I think, although I’ve lost my bearings – streaked with soot.
How much time has passed?
Mrs van Deventer lumbered over and spoke some words that I couldn’t hear.
The strangers who’d been filling buckets of water stopped, came to my side, and muttered about how it might have started. A lamp knocked over, maybe. I wanted to retort that there’d been no one in the house, and Sipata knew never to leave a lamp lit, and then I realised that these were not strangers. They were Sipata’s neighbours: poor men of all colours, fallen on hard times. Their clothes weren’t just ragged from their efforts to help, they’d been ragged before they ran across town to fight a fire in a home far wealthier than their own.
‘Thank you for helping, sir. Thank you,’ I spread my arms, ‘to all of you—’
‘You can rebuild, ma’am.’
Rebuild? Was this not a signal to leave?
What sort of foundation was this for Julian and me to rebuild upon? For our child?
I pushed my hair from my face. The heat blast must have blown out my combs. Abel Metz came towards me, his eyes red from the smoke. ‘Sannie fetched
me, I was nearby. I’m sorry, Mrs McDonald.’
‘Frances!’ Truda’s eyes were bloodshot, too. ‘You must come home with me, Frances.’
I stared at her and then back at the charred house. My heart was throbbing as if it had been physically struck. I’ll have to tell Julian, even as I’ve been savouring the moment to tell him about the baby—
‘The ceiling’s gone.’ Abel Metz, again. ‘We’ll get the engineer from Worcester to come and look.’
‘We’ll watch it for a while longer, Mrs McDonald,’ said the man on the hose. ‘You go now, ma’am.’
The remaining water throwers shrugged on their thin jackets, tipped their caps to me and left quietly.
‘Ma’am must lie down,’ said Sipata in a stronger voice than normal. ‘Ma’am must eat.’
The baby. My child. A house is just bricks and glass. A child is far more fragile.
‘Go with Truda Louw,’ ordered Mrs van Deventer. ‘You must rest.’
Does she know? Can she tell?
They are looking at me curiously, sympathetically and, in the case of Mrs van Deventer, with some impatience. She’s probably thinking I will never survive this blow. And maybe I won’t, although she never thought I’d last this long from the start.
‘Come, Frances.’ Truda took my arm.
Why were two of the windows already broken when I arrived?
Chapter Forty-One
I don’t remember much about the rest of that night, other than my dreams.
I know that Truda and Sipata walked beside me to Truda’s house, and then I was drinking hot tea and Truda ran a bath and left me some nightclothes and led me to Deon’s room – Deon who was now at school in Worcester thanks to Julian – and I sank onto his narrow bed and slept.
The dreams pursued me all night.
I saw my brother Gideon running away from me while Protea Rise burnt in the background.
I saw a child – my child – smiling at me while Aloe Peak disappeared behind a wall of smoke.
I saw Julian in the desert, amid a bombardment of guns and tanks, their cannons spitting orange flame.
The Fire Portrait Page 19
