The Fire Portrait

by Barbara Mutch

  Long ago, when I was a child, Father didn’t understand that my attachment to our English home would always be about more than its value as an asset. So he fails to realise that my allegiance to Aloe Glen is about more than it being a source of inspiration and, thereby, income. Aloe Glen isn’t beautiful – unless you have patience – but it’s where I shed my entitled youth and grew up. It’s where Julian most needs me. It draws me back. And I have unfinished business there.

  Chapter Fifty

  I’m watching my beloved Cape through a child’s eyes.

  Hamish follows the flight of a fiscal as it dives to the ground, picks up a worm and flies back to its perch. Is there a whisper of me in his interest? Does he want to know how feathers layer along a wing or how stripes on a flower petal lead to the nectar at its heart?

  ‘Look,’ I say, as I lift him out of his pram at Kirstenbosch, ‘these stiff flowers are called proteas. If we wait a while, we’ll see sugarbirds with long tails jump onto them.’

  Hamish blinks his dark eyes and looks up at me and smiles gummily.

  Or maybe he won’t care for nature at all and prefer languages, like his acquired father.

  He’s six months old and I’m still in Cape Town.

  I’ve learnt how vulnerable a young child can be. Hamish became ill one night and I rushed him to Dr Reed who diagnosed croup and advised that it would need watching but wasn’t life-threatening. As I drove home, close to tears of relief, with Violet holding a coughing Hamish upright as the doctor suggested, I imagined a journey of twenty miles or more on largely empty roads through bare countryside to the nearest medical help. So I’ll stay until Hamish is robust enough – and I’m confident enough – to manage both of us in a place that would prefer me not to return. Truda says the tea party ladies keep assuring each other that Cape Town suits me better.

  I now paint Aloe Glen from memory, like I once painted Cape Town.

  Pink-green aloes, miniature stone plants, a nondescript brown bird with a blazing red throat.

  ‘Excellent,’ said Major Jefferson, who wishes to collect more of my work. ‘Could you do Aloe ferox?’

  Layered cloud was piled atop Table Mountain as I drove into town.

  ‘Good morning, Mrs McDonald.’ Alan Field came around his desk to shake my hand. ‘Many congratulations on the birth of your son. Please, do sit down. How may I help?’

  ‘I need to make a sworn statement,’ I said.

  ‘In connection to what?’ He pulled a legal pad towards him.

  ‘It will name people who are implicated in, and responsible for, a fire that destroyed my home.’

  I could tell he was taken aback. The publicity around my exhibition was considerable but it was not common knowledge that the fire mentioned in the catalogue was arson.

  ‘Shouldn’t this information be disclosed to the authorities?’

  I noticed he’d written nothing down.

  ‘Sir, there’s no evidence placing the suspect at the scene. And he’s currently being detained anyway.’

  ‘For another crime?’

  ‘For anti-government activity. For sabotage.’

  ‘Ah.’ The lawyer grimaced. ‘Then what is the intent, Mrs McDonald, of this statement?’

  ‘It’s insurance, sir.’ I thought back to the bank manager who’d lamented the lack of cover on our house. But this was different. This insurance would be a challenge to those who believed I’d never dare speak out. ‘I may need to reveal its contents at some stage.’

  ‘To pursue a court case? For compensation?’

  ‘Maybe,’ I paused, ‘only for persuasion.’

  The cloud layer began to dissolve, tumbling over the precipice into warmer air.

  ‘As your lawyer, I must advise caution. You should speak to me in advance of any accusation.’

  ‘I’d prefer not to use this information at all, Mr Field. But I’d like to place it on the record.’

  I suppose most men see me as a small, slender woman distracted by my art. They assume I’m fragile. They do not see the steel.

  ‘Very well. I assume you’ve written down what you’d like included?’ His eyes flashed amused respect.

  I smiled and drew a handwritten page out of my handbag. He read it, made a few notes in the margin. Then read it again.

  ‘Is it your intention to return to Aloe Glen, Mrs McDonald?’

  ‘In due course.’

  ‘Leave this with me. I’ll rephrase one or two sentences for clarity.’ He flipped open a diary. ‘Can you see me next Wednesday morning at 10 a.m.? We can sign and witness the document.’

  He stood up and came around the desk and shook my hand.

  ‘I’ve seen your work, Mrs McDonald. You have a rare gift. There are other communities where you could exercise it and be more warmly received. Sometimes it’s best to move on.’

  ‘One more thing,’ I said on an impulse. ‘Do you still have connections with the property market?’

  ‘We do.’

  ‘I want to buy a house, sir. I don’t have the funds yet so it will have to be a future purchase.’

  ‘You’re very wise to plan, Mrs McDonald. We can assist you as we did over your late aunt’s property. Let me know when you’re in a position to go forward.’

  Chapter Fifty-One

  I have a sense that there is a further war in the offing, I wrote in my diary.

  Father does not see it yet.

  It will emerge after this war is over. It will be a local war, and not overtly about gold and diamonds.

  I saw it in my face after the fire, and in the charcoal self-portrait.

  I heard it in the words of the women who confessed that their men knew about the potential petrol-bombing of my home and did nothing to stop it.

  I saw it in the discontent of the poor folk on the edge of town who fear they will always be second class.

  Father and I drove to Aloe Glen on a late summer’s day when the air was heavy with cloying heat and a belt of haze hovered over the isthmus of the Cape Flats. Hamish slept in his basket in the back of the car, his face flushed, his black hair sticking to his forehead. Father took us on the scenic route via the coast of False Bay, the road squeezed between rolling sand dunes and the vast, flat stretch of Muizenberg beach. I’d swum there a few weeks before, striking out beyond the breaker line, relishing the frisson of danger, while Father watched Hamish. He is quietly dangling before me the diversions I’m leaving behind.

  ‘I need more bush subjects, Father,’ I countered. ‘And I promised Julian we’d be reunited there.’

  The Americans have landed in North Africa, Montgomery has won at El Alamein, and Julian’s tour of duty is coming to an end. And while I’ve loved the unfettered warmth of family and friends, I’m craving a little adversity. I want a harder environment.

  And I want my son to know the veld, smell its aroma, marvel at its pinched vitality.

  We stopped in Wellington for the night and tackled Bain’s Kloof Pass and Worcester early the following day, arriving in Aloe Glen in the afternoon, just in time for Father to board the last train for Cape Town. Truda, Sipata and Lena met us, and Tifo helped with my luggage.

  ‘Frances!’ Truda hugged me hard, her white plait falling over her shoulder. ‘Welkom terug!’

  ‘Beautiful baby!’ Sipata whispered, while Lena stroked the child’s kicking legs.

  I left Hamish with them and walked Father to the station. Aloe Peak loomed overhead, the grey-green veld stretched to the horizon and a pair of jackal buzzards circled.

  Father glanced about, unnerved by the emptiness, the quality I’ve learnt to value.

  ‘I worry, Fran—’

  ‘Don’t.’ I reached up and kissed him. ‘Thank you, Father, for bringing me. For understanding.’

  Am I safe here? I remember writing in my diary in the early days.

  After a week I realise that, finally, I may very well be – by force of circumstance.

  I know the truth, and the town knows that I know.

&n
bsp; They watch me, I watch them.

  There’s also an ingrained respect for motherhood that I first sensed at the school gate: they won’t touch me if to do so would put my child in harm’s way. This tentative truce does not yet stretch as far as outright approval, for word has got back that I hung burnt paintings alongside pristine ones at my exhibition. They sense implied criticism. When my acquaintances – are they friends? – drift back, they do so cautiously.

  ‘Welcome,’ says Cora Engelbrecht, avoiding my eyes, bending to coo over my son.

  ‘Lovely to see you, Frances,’ says Sannie, while Aletta and Anna smile nervously.

  Why have you come back? they surely wonder.

  Some are generous straight away. Mrs van Deventer waddles down the road with a meat pie, clucks over Hamish, glances at my inadequate frame and shakes her head. ‘Eat, Frances. For the baby.’ The dominee’s silent wife appears at my door, hands over a knitted romper, and slips away before I can invite her in. ‘Good day.’ Mr Fourie comes around the front of his counter. ‘How may I assist you, Mrs McDonald? And what news of your husband?’ The poor whites and coloureds from the edge of town are ever welcoming. I feed off the warmth in their eyes.

  In the early morning, I lay Hamish on a blanket and tie him on my back and walk into the veld with my folding stool and sketchbook. I draw, then return to the flat above the petrol station during the heat of the day, add paint to my sketches while he naps and, as the sun loses its fierceness, set out again to capture the same scene with the sun in the opposite quadrant. It’s an echo of my morning-and-evening sketches from the bedrooms at Marico Road; a new series, Dawn-to-Dusk, capturing the transition.

  After a long trek around the circumference of Aloe Peak, I found a group of three young quiver trees on the driest slopes where it seemed nothing of tree size could possibly grow. I smiled and touched their rough bark. Aloe dichotoma, sometimes known as upside-down trees because their thorny heads resemble roots. Birds cluster on them, especially when they’re laden with yellow tubular flowers that poke between the limbs like multiple candles.

  ‘Frances!’ Truda bounded across the veld and stopped beside me, panting. ‘Kokerbome!’

  ‘Yes. I’m drawing them for people in London.’

  ‘The Bushmen use the trees. They make holders out of the old wood for their arrows.’

  I remember Julian’s words over the dead antelope. And I modify them.

  Every life, every death, serves a purpose in Africa.

  Seven youngsters came to my revived art class.

  ‘Today, we’re going to use pastels,’ I said, handing out the chalks. ‘Now that the drought is well and truly broken, we can make softer pictures. And you can smudge them with your fingers or a tiny piece of paper, like so.’ I demonstrated, drawing the outline of Aloe Peak in navy and then adding lines of green and brown for the lower slopes and blending them in. ‘Now you try.’

  ‘Are you famous, mevrou?’ asked Toby Engelbrecht. ‘My ma says people pay you for pictures.’

  ‘It’s my job, Toby. Like your father is a sheep farmer and gets paid for his wool? I’m an artist, and I get paid for my paintings.’

  ‘Mevrou,’ muttered Frans van Deventer after the lesson, when the younger pupils had left, ‘I saw him.’

  I glanced up from Hamish’s basket. He’d slept all the way through. ‘Saw who?’

  Frans looked at the others and they nodded at him: Magda Metz, Toby and his sister, Lottie, who’d once asked about the halo around the sun that I’d said was due to science and not necessarily to God.

  ‘Mr Louw. I saw him at your house. When the fire started.’

  I sat down at the desk.

  Scorched linen, broken ceiling panels, the smell of petrol on a purple rug …

  ‘I saw him, ma’am. He had a cloth tied around his mouth and nose.’ Frans hauled a grubby handkerchief out of his pocket and held it over his face to demonstrate. ‘But I know it was him. I told no one, not Ma or Pa or Ouma van Deventer. Only my friends.’

  ‘Tell about his coat,’ hissed Toby, and reddened. There’s a doggedness to Toby. Others will abandon a messy drawing but Toby will erase his mistakes, drop his pencils several times, pick them up and keep going until he’s satisfied with the result.

  ‘Wag!’ Frans flapped an impatient hand. ‘Wait, Toby!’

  He turned back to me. Magda came closer to my desk; Lottie hung back.

  ‘He had a package, ma’am, under his coat. I thought he was delivering something, ma’am.’

  ‘Where were you, Frans? How did you see this?’

  ‘I was in Ouma’s back bedroom. I saw him take a bottle out of the package, bend down and light it, and then throw it through the front window. Then he went round the side and I heard a crash and that must have been the other window, ma’am. And then he walked away fast. He didn’t look back, ma’am.’

  Frans paused for breath. ‘I didn’t see the fire at first. Then I saw flames inside and then the coloured people and the poor whites came and started throwing water, and then you and Sipata came and I,’ he stopped and blushed, ‘I stayed inside until my ouma woke up. She was sleeping before supper like she always does.’

  Here was the evidence the police were waiting for: the perpetrator, identified at the scene of the crime.

  ‘We didn’t tell any of our parents,’ Magda whispered, looking around at the others. Frans stuffed his handkerchief back in his pocket and rubbed his face. Lottie examined her fingers and shot a glance at me from beneath her fringe. They were teenagers, now, these children whom I’d first taught ten years ago. They’d grown up while I was away.

  ‘No one else knows?’

  They shook their heads.

  ‘Thank you, Frans.’ I got up from my chair. ‘Thank you for telling me. Mr Louw is already in prison. He can’t do any more harm.’

  They looked at each other and then back at me.

  ‘But that was for the railway, ma’am!’ burst out Toby. ‘Not the fire. And you said Mr Louw wasn’t a hero, you wrote to Deon—’

  I caught my breath.

  I can’t tell you how to answer your friends, I’d written from Cape Town in reply to Deon’s letter, when they say your father is a hero for sabotaging the railway line.

  I can only say that heroes should inspire the best in each of us.

  ‘We must tell the police,’ Toby said stoutly.

  Frans nodded. ‘Mr McDonald would say the same if he was here.’

  ‘Honesty will never be punished,’ put in Magda. ‘Mr McDonald told us that.’

  Oh, dear God, forgive me. Forgive Julian. What have we unleashed?

  If there’s evidence that Wynand Louw threw petrol bombs into our house, it should be revealed. But the witness is a teenager. He’d be testifying in open court against the wishes of his parents. When his testimony is shredded by a determined lawyer – how far away were you, it was early evening, how can you be sure? – I must step up to defend him. I must submit the sworn statement of the wives’ confession to me. Not just because of my burnt house but because of the courage of a young man.

  ‘I don’t want to hurt Mrs Louw,’ I said slowly. ‘Can you understand that?’

  Rain splattered against the window. It’s still a surprise, as is the grass on the sports pitch

  ‘The fire wasn’t fair, ma’am,’ said Lottie, speaking for the first time. ‘Mr Louw must go to prison for it.’

  I smiled. The young see events in primary colours, they don’t notice the shading, the blending of colours that make the truth and its consequences more complicated, more dangerous. Frans, Toby, Lottie and Magda are seeing the world like I did after the fall. Sharply. Clearly.

  The fire is their equivalent epiphany.

  I’ve learnt, slowly, sometimes painfully, to temper my zeal. And what would Julian say? Would he be pleased that his pupils – the product of his quiet radicalism – are planning to betray their parents?

  Would he be proud of their independence?

  The
youngsters grabbed their satchels and ran out.

  I went over to the window and watched Toby battling to keep up, Lottie sweeping her hair out of her eyes as she galloped, long-legged, across the playground. They were shouting and laughing, as carefree young ones do, through the softly falling rain.

  Their mothers kept the secret to save their fathers.

  The children are about to pull the house down on both.

  Hamish woke in his basket and began to cry.

  I went over to him and lifted him out and held his warm body against mine.

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  My dearest Fran

  I can’t wait to be with you. It’s been a difficult few months but I’ve been holding onto the prospect of seeing you soon, and lifting my beloved Hamish in my arms for the first time. I’ll telegram my arrival. We won’t be separated again. I’m determined about that, especially now we’re a family.

  All my love

  Julian

  I could have gone to Cape Town to meet him, but Julian was insistent we should be reunited as we’d planned in Aloe Glen. I brought in an extra bed and squeezed it alongside mine. One of the quiver trees was still in exuberant bloom and I sketched it while Hamish toddled precariously on the stony ground. ‘Your daddy’s coming,’ I sang to him, ‘Daddy’s coming home!’

  I hung the painted version above our beds.

  ‘When will Mr McDonald be here?’ Frans van Deventer asked at the art class.

  ‘Soon.’

  I’ve no idea if he’s been to the police and I won’t ask.

  It’s not my position to encourage or forbid, only to stand by him if need be.

  It was winter when Julian arrived. Light snow dusted Aloe Peak, softening its outline and brightening the cliffs. A bitter wind drove across the veld, blowing the last of the dried Brunsvigia heads on their seed-scattering path. The station was empty but I found myself looking over my shoulder for Wynand Louw. The train was late and I waited on a bench, with Hamish squirming by my side in his best dungarees, a woollen jumper knitted by Violet and a felt cap. ‘It’s Daddy,’ I whispered.