Rumours of Rain Page 9

  We started out again, round the barn and the stable where the red mare stood looking out over the half-door, whinnying plaintively; past the cowshed, empty at this time of day and redolent of manure and hay, a row of upturned pails outside, waiting for the evening. Through the tatty orchard – it was a dry year – and past the row of pomegranates, down to the dam, an unsightly concrete structure below the windmill and surrounded by uneven patches of long green grass. We sat on the wall eating pomegranates, abandoning ourselves to the luxurious sun.

  “Hell,” said Bernard, “why didn’t we bring our swimming gear with us?”

  “It’s Sunday,” I reminded him.

  “So what?” said Elise.

  “But your father—”

  “My father is enjoying the sleep of the just. And I can’t see how a swim on a hot day can land one in hell.”

  Leaning over she scooped up a handful of water and watched it running glistening through her fingers. I look at her hand, smooth and wet, the long fingers, the delicate pattern of veins on the back.

  “Do you always swim here?” she asked.

  “Since I was a child,” said Bernard. “My friends and I spent most of our summers down here.”

  “You’re lucky,” she said, almost wistfully. “If one grows up like me, all by oneself, with right and wrong spelled out on all sides—” She sucked some spilt pomegranate juice from her palm. “Even persuading my father to allow me to go to college was a major achievement. What does a girl want to do with education and all that crap?”

  The word shocked me, coming from that lovely formal Sunday girl.

  With a smile Bernard shook some pomegranate seeds into his hand and offered it to her: “Clean your mouth with this,” he said.

  She laughed, her cheeks still flushed with excitement; and holding his cupped hand in both of hers she ate up all the sweet red seeds, staining her lips. Then, jumping down from the wall, she kicked off her shoes. With that inimitably graceful gesture which comes naturally to women she put her hands up under her dress and stripped off her stockings, downward over pointed toes. I felt too self-conscious to look at either of them. (But I saw without looking.) Without any hurry or hesitation she took off her church hat, removed her bracelet, wrist-watch and necklace, and turned her back to me.

  “Will you undo the hook for me, please?”

  My hands were dumb and fumbling. Still with her back to us, she peeled off the dress and kicked it from her feet; followed by her petticoat and suspenders. (God, the clothes girls wore those days!) I thought – and Bernard too, I’m sure – that she would keep on her underclothes. But as matter-of-factly as before, as if she were alone in a bathroom, she brought her hands up behind her smooth tanned back and unfastened the bra. She stepped out of her small white panties. Suddenly she was naked.

  From the top of the wall she looked down to us. Sun on her high breasts.

  Somehow we followed her example. I jumped in sideways, trying to hide my erection. Showing off like small boys we cavorted and played around for an hour and then began to mill around, embarrassed about getting out. Once again Elise took the lead. But she didn’t run off to dress as I’d rather hoped she would. Wet and naked she sat on the edge of the warm concrete wall, her head thrown back to dry her hair and to relish the sun beating down on her upturned face. Bernard and I scrambled out on the opposite side and put on our clothes. With some pretext or other he disappeared into the orchard. I remained behind the wall, not sure about what to do next.

  Then she called me: “Martin! Where are you?”

  “Are you ready?” But when I came round the corner I stopped short. “Oh, I’m sorry. I thought you—”

  “Like some pomegranate?”

  “Thanks.”

  I went right up to her, until her knees, seated on the high wall as she was, were pressing against my chest. She held out a handful of seeds to me, just as Bernard had done with her before. (Was that her way of taking revenge on him?) Droplets of red juice ran down her wrist and spattered delicately on her full breasts. I ate from the cup of her hand, then, holding her wrist, impulsively kissed her palm. When I looked up she was watching me with the same imperturbable expression she’d had in church. This time, daring and defiant. I stared back: at her face, her breasts, her belly, and whatever could be seen in the shadow of her thighs.

  “Never seen a girl before?”

  From my throat came a croaking sound which meant: “Not one like you.”

  She shook her damp hair back over her shoulders, raising her face to the sun as before, impervious to my stare.

  “I don’t understand you, Elise.”

  “There’s nothing to understand.” Almost irritably she added: “Now go away, I want to get dressed.”

  She waited for me to go. I looked back once and saw her still sitting on the wall. Feigning lightheartedness, I waved. But she didn’t respond.

  When she was ready, we joined Bernard in the orchard and returned to the farmyard; he took us round to the back, where she could brush her hair in the bathroom before confronting her parents. And after some constructive conversation round the coffee table they went back to town, the boot of their car filled to capacity with carrots, mealies, cabbages and pumpkins, two chickens and half a slaughtered sheep. She kissed me when she left, her cool lips burning on mine until long after she’d gone.

  In this dignified hotel room in London that distant day appears like an impossible mirage: the tall dark-blonde girl feeding me pomegranate seeds from her hand, unashamedly naked on the wall above me. And now my wife. Where, between then and now, did that girl disappear? Was it she who changed in the process, or I?

  “Fallen for her, have you?” asked Bernard when we were lying in bed in his room that night, the heavy odour of the candle wax still lingering in the dark.

  “She’s fallen for you,” I tried to defend myself.

  “I told you I’ve known her since she was a knock-kneed child with freckles and buck teeth.”

  “Surely you can’t think of her as a child any more!” The eyes, the breasts, that sly and secret mouth. “My God, she’s beautiful. I couldn’t believe my eyes this afternoon.”

  “I noticed.” He chuckled in the dark. “If that old dam, hideous as it is, could speak! It knows more about me than my own parents. Ever since I was a small boy. Everything always seemed to happen on Sundays or holidays, when there were church meetings like today, or when neighbours came round. Dingaan’s Days were the best of all. That’s where I first discovered what a girl tasted like.”

  “Why aren’t you interested in Elise?” I insisted. “If I were you I’d never leave her in peace.”

  He didn’t answer.

  “But of course,” I said, feeling something grudging stir inside me, “you’re spoilt by having all the women you want, I suppose.”

  “This is different,” he said. “It’s quite different. Nothing wrong with some mutual fun, provided neither is deceived in the process. But I know damned well if I started anything with Elise she’d take it seriously. She’ll think I’ve fallen in love and all the rest. And then it becomes a way of committing murder. I just can’t do it to her.”

  “Haven’t you ever thought of getting married?” I asked.

  “Of course. But I have no wish to become domesticated too soon.”

  “Is that all there is to it?”

  He was silent for some time, before he said: “Look, marriage is marvellous for people who are prepared to become an indispensable habit to one another. If you’re prepared to accept your mate as a key to your own existence. But I’ve still got too much which I can only do on my own. I simply can’t limit my freedom of choice at this stage.”

  “You’ve got a larger range to choose from than anyone else I know.”

  He laughed. “That’s not what I mean. I’m not talking about choosing a wife, but about one’s need to choose from moment to moment as one goes on. The sort of choice which makes it worthwhile to go on living because you don’t allow
yourself to avoid or exclude anything beforehand.”

  “What has that got to do with marriage?”

  “Well, if you get married you immediately exclude a whole series of choices because you assume responsibility for someone else’s happiness. Then it becomes all too easy to avoid your other responsibilities by saying: Sorry, but I’m married, I’ve got a family, you can’t expect me to do this or that.”

  “Suppose I told you,” I said impulsively, “that I’ve decided I’m going to marry that girl?”

  “You sure it isn’t just your cock looking for a nest?”

  “Bernard!” I sat up, scandalised. “How can you say that?”

  “Because you’re so bloody young and romantic. At your age it’s natural to wrap your natural urges in a cloak of lofty ideals.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “She’s a wild one, that child.”

  “I think I can tame her.”

  “I’m sure you can. You can also break in a horse. But then, what? Once you’ve had your way and the horse meekly accepts the saddle – perhaps the thing you miss most, then, is the very wildness you tamed. And once that’s gone, it’s gone.”

  “You’re a pessimist.”

  “Or a realist,” he said. “An idealistic realist.”

  He argued from the same point of view when, on one of our daily wanderings on the farm – in search of strayed sheep, or checking the jackal-proof fencing, or just exploring – I questioned him about his docile acceptance of his parents’ religious obsession: why he, whom I knew to be so outspoken, lapsed so readily into the role of the obedient son in their presence, observing duties I knew he must find meaningless if not down-right objectionable.

  He merely shrugged. “Why shouldn’t I? You know how I feel about these things. And I never keep quiet about it when I’m with people one can argue with. But what’s the use of hurting someone quite needlessly? They’re my parents, they’re old, I love them and respect them.”

  When it came to politics he did occasionally remonstrate with his father, but even then he never allowed a discussion to become too serious. Their most heated arguments had to do with Malan’s persistent efforts to remove Coloureds from the common voters’ roll.

  “That’s pure treachery,” Bernard would say. “Isn’t Malan the one who urged the Coloureds to vote Nationalist in the thirties because he said they were Afrikaners just like us? And then he calls himself a ‘man of God’!”

  The old man was irritable but couldn’t really counter his son’s accusations. “I admit there’s a lot of sinfulness in our people,” he said one evening after prayers (the Bible was still lying on the table, his folded gold-rimmed reading glasses on top of it). “We’re just like the Jews, you see. I’ve often noticed the moment things go well with us, we get difficult. The Afrikaner has always been at his best in the wilderness, not beside the fleshpots of Egypt.”

  “So you agree one can’t leave things as they are?”

  “Of course we can’t. But there’s a right way to do a thing and then there’s a wrong way. And it’s not for us to turn against the leaders God gave us. If we pray as we should the Lord will provide.”

  “You had no qualms about sabotaging your own government during the war and going to concentration camp for it!” Bernard reminded him.

  “I know, but that was because Jan Smuts had turned off the true way of the Boers to start a love affair with England.”

  “And suppose Malan also abandons the true way?”

  “Don’t talk nonsense, man!” said his father, pretending to be annoyed. Turning to me, he winked: “I don’t know where this son of mine gets his stroppiness from. Been like that since he was a boy. You know, once, he was about eight or nine, he went for a swim one night, not knowing the dam was half empty. And when he dived in he struck the bottom and the piccanins who were with him pulled him out more dead than alive. He was ill for months. Half paralysed and not right in his head. Then one day when I told him to do something for me he just looked up and said: ‘I won’t.’ So I went to my wife and I said to her: ‘Mum, you needn’t worry any more. Bernard is all right for he’s getting stroppy again.’”

  Bernard grinned. But he was like a puppy who refused to let go once he’d got his teeth into something. “Don’t avoid the issue, Dad,” he said. “If it was right to turn against your Government in wartime, it is right again now.”

  For a long time the old man just looked down on his large rough hands in the lamp-light. Then, without raising his head, he said: “I won’t say no and I won’t say yes. For it’s a deep thing which one can’t solve with yes or no.”

  “When does one have right on one’s side?” demanded Bernard.

  “Why can’t the two of you just leave it?” said the tiny old woman on the far side of the table, flicking her crochet needle. “We haven’t even put away the Bible yet.”

  “I insist on an answer from Dad,” said Bernard.

  Uncle Ben looked up, his great grey mane wild and almost terrifying on his old lion’s head. “The only answer I can give you, is this: one never knows in advance what road to take. All you can be sure of is that whatever road you take, you must be careful. And whatever you do, whether you get up or sit down on your arse, you place yourself in the hands of the living God.”

  His wife knew very shrewdly when an argument had gone far enough. Without the slightest faltering in the motion of her crochet needle, without even looking up, she called out in a voice out of all proportion with that frail body: “Rachel!” One of the three house servants appeared on the doorstep. “You may bring the evening coffee,” said Aunt Lenie.

  But Bernard was in a difficult mood. Unexpectedly he switched his attack to his mother. “Why can’t you let the servants go home earlier at night?” he asked, staring sternly at her under the hanging lamp.

  “They enjoy having their supper by the stove,” she said, unruffled.

  “And five o’clock tomorrow morning you expect them to start working again?”

  “How else will you get your morning coffee?”

  “I can make it myself.”

  “Don’t be such a boil-in-the-arse, man,” said his father, cleaning out the head of his pipe with a used match.

  “There are some things we shouldn’t tamper with,” said Aunt Lenie, crocheting. “God brought us to a hard land where we must labour in the sweat of our brow. And then He gave us kaffirs to help us with our work.”

  “A hard land, all right,” agreed the old man, stopping to blow through the stem of his pipe. “But we mustn’t complain.” His boy’s eyes were watching me from under his broom-bush brows: “In the North-West where I grew up we really shat stones. I can remember one year it was so dry the sheep ate up all the soft rocks, leaving only the hardest ones.”

  “Now, Dad,” said Aunt Lenie without much conviction.

  “We still got a good life here, man,” he went on. “There’s only one thing you got to learn and that is you must take the Lord as you find Him. He’s not the sort of man you can order about. If He wants you to suffer, you blerry well suffer. And if He decides to wash you away, it’s a worse Flood than the one that hit old Noah.”

  It really was a bad year. Several times, out in the veld, Bernard and I found sheep too weak to go on. Usually the Black labourers would load them on the truck and take them home to food and water; but sometimes it was too late and we had to cut their throats.

  Most of the time it was good to be there, though. There was a quiet intimacy about our relationship. Eating, swimming, sleeping, wandering about. Occasional trips to the Co-op in town. From time to time neighbours arrived to talk “business” with Uncle Ben or just to share a cup of coffee: then the men would seat themselves on the stoep in a wide circle of pipe smoke and loud voices, while the womenfolk kept their distance inside the cool front room, in subdued conversation or eager listening, shuddering and swaying with laughter on their chairs whenever one of the men made a joke; interrupted by the soundless coming and going of b
arefoot kitchen maids serving coffee and fresh farm cream, and aniseed buns and rusks and milk-tarts and cakes.

  The tone of our holidays was determined by our endless conversations, especially at night after the candle had been blown out. Discussions on religion and sex and politics, on the farm and university and the country and the world; and often on the future.

  Bernard: “Right, so you’re going overseas next year. But what are your plans for when you come back?”

  “I don’t even know yet for how long I’m going.”

  “Makes no difference. Sometime you’ll be back, won’t you?”

  “Of course. I suppose I’ll try for an academic job like yours.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. It’s an artificial, claustrophobic existence.”

  “Why are you at university then?”

  “I’m moving out at the end of the year,” he said.

  “You never told me that before!”

  “I’ve only made a final decision during the past few days.”

  “Where are you going to?”

  “To the Bar. As you know I’ve been defending cases in the Cape over the last few years. Now I’d like to have a go full-time.”

  “Won’t it mean sacrificing your security?”

  “I can do without security. There are more important things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like getting involved in what’s happening in the country. Before it changes into a sort of fate one has to endure without taking any responsibility for it.”

  “Things will change in due course, don’t worry,” I said.