The Complete Short Stories (3 page)

‘Well, he’s had an
offer, actually.’

She had been twice to a
dance at Williams Hotel. Young Billy Williams, who was studying medicine at
Cape Town, proposed marriage to her, but as everyone knew, she was to go to
college in the Capital and then to England to stay with the English Pattersons
for a couple of years before she could decide about marriage.

War broke out at the beginning
of her first term at the training college. All her old young men, as well as
her new, became important and interesting in their uniforms and brief
appearances on leave.

She took up golf.
Sometimes, after a hole, when she was following her companions to the next tee,
she would lag behind or even stop in her tracks.

‘Feeling all right,
Daphne?’

‘Oh, I was only
listening to the go-away bird.’

‘Interested in
ornithology?’

‘Oh yes, fairly, you
know.’

When she returned to the
farm after her first term at the college Chakata gave her a revolver.

‘Keep it beside your
bed,’ he said.

She took it without
comment.

Next day, he said, ‘Where
did you go yesterday afternoon?’

‘Oh, for a trek across
the veldt, you know.’

‘Anywhere special?’

‘Only to Makata’s kraal.
He’s quite determined to hang on to that land the Beresfords are after. He’s
got a wife for his son, he paid five head.’ Makata was the local chief. Daphne
enjoyed squatting in the shade of his great mud hut drinking the tea specially
prepared for her, and though the rest of the Colony looked with disfavour on
such visits, it was something which Chakata and his children had always done,
and no one felt inclined to take up the question with Chakata. Chakata wasn’t
just anyone.

‘I suppose,’ said
Chakata to Daphne, ‘you always carry a gun?’

‘Well, yesterday,’ said
Daphne, ‘I didn’t actually.’

‘Always,’
said
Chakata, ‘take a gun when you go out on the veldt. It’s a golden rule. There’s
nothing more exasperating than to see a buck dancing about in the bush and to find
yourself standing like a fool without a gun.

Since she was eight and
had first learnt to shoot, this had been a golden rule of Chakata’s. Many a
time she had been out on her own, weighed down with the gun, and had seen
dozens of buck and simply had not bothered to shoot. She hated venison, in any
case. Tinned salmon was her favourite dish.

He seemed to know her
thoughts. ‘We’re always short of buck for the dogs. Remember there’s a war on.
Remember
always,’
said Chakata, ‘to take a gun. I hear on the wireless,’
he added, ‘that there’s a leopard over in the Temwe valley. The mate has young.
It’s got two men, so far.’

‘Uncle Chakata, that’s a
long way off,’ Daphne said explosively.

‘Leopards can travel,’ said
Chakata. He looked horribly put out.

‘Oh, I see,’ said
Daphne.

‘And you ought to ride
more,’ he said, ‘it’s far better exercise than walking.’

She saw that he was not
really afraid of her meeting the leopard, nor did he need meat for the dogs;
and she thought of how, yesterday afternoon, she had been followed all the way
to the kraal by Old Tuys. He had kept to the bush, and seemed not to know he
had been observed. She had been glad that several parties of natives had passed
her on the way. Afterwards, when she was taking leave of Makata, he had offered
to send his nephew to accompany her home. This was a customary offer: she
usually declined it. This time, however, she had accepted the escort, who
plodded along behind her until she dismissed him at the edge of the farm.
Daphne did not mention this incident to Chakata.

That afternoon when she
set off for tea at the Mission, she was armed. Next day Chakata gave her the
old Mercedes for herself ‘You walk too much,’ he said.

It was no use now,
checking off the years before she should go to England. She climbed Donald
Cloete’s kopje: ‘Are you sober, Donald, or —?’

‘I’m drunk, go away.

Towards the end of her
course at the training college, when she was home for the Christmas holidays,
she rode her horse along the main wide road to the dorp. She did some shopping;
she stopped to talk to the Cypriot tailor who supplied the district with drill
shorts, and to the Sephardic Jew who kept the largest Kaffir store.

‘Live and let live,’ said
Chakata. But these people were never at the farm, and this was Daphne’s only
chance of telling them of her college life.

She called in at the
Indian laundry to leave a bottle of hair oil which, for some unfathomable
reason, Chakata had promised to give to the Indian.

She had tea with the
chemist’s wife, then returned to the police station where she had left the
horse. Here she stopped for about an hour chatting with two troopers whom she
had known since her childhood. It was late when she set off up the steep main
road, keeping well to the side of the tarmac strips on which an occasional car
would pass, or a native on a bicycle. She knew all the occupants of the cars,
and as they slowed down to pass her they would call a greeting. She had gone
about five miles when she came to a winding section of the road with dense bush
on either side. This part was notorious for accidents. The light was failing
rapidly, and as she heard a car approaching round the bend ahead of her she
reined in to the side. Immediately the car appeared its lights were switched
on, but before they dazzled her she had recognized Old Tuys at the wheel of the
shooting-brake. As he approached he gave no sign of slowing down. Not only did
Old Tuys keep up his speed, he brought the car off the strips and passed within
a few inches of the animal.

Daphne had once heard a
trooper say that for a human being to fall in the bush at sundown or after was
like a naked main appearing in class at a girl’s school. As she landed in the
dark thicket every living thing screeched, rustled, fled, and flapped in a
feminine sort of panic. The horse was away along the road, its hooves beating
frantic diminishing signals in the dusk. Daphne’s right shin was giving her
intense pain. She was fairly sure Old Tuys had stopped the car. She rose and
limped a few steps, pushing her way through the vegetation and branches, to the
verge of the road. Here she stopped, for she heard footsteps on the road a few
feet away. Old Tuys was waiting for her. She looked round her and quickly saw
there was no chance of penetrating further into the bush with safety. The sky
was nearly dark now, and the pain in her leg was threatening to overcome her.
Daphne had never fainted, even when, once, she had wanted to, during an
emergency operation for a snake-bite, the sharp blade cutting into her
unanaesthetized flesh. Now, it seemed that she would faint, and this alarmed
her, for she could hear Old Tuys among the crackling branches at the side of
the road, and presently could discern his outline. The sound of a native
shouting farther up the road intruded upon her desire to faint, and, to resist
closing her eyes in oblivion she opened them wide, wider, staring into the
darkness.

Old Tuys got hold of
her. He did not speak, but he gripped her arm and dragged her out of the bush
and threw her on the ground at the side of the road out of the glare of the
headlamps. Daphne screamed and kicked out with her good leg. Old Tuys stood up,
listening. A horse was approaching. Suddenly round the bend came a native
leading Daphne’s horse. It shied at the sight of the van’s headlights, but the
native held it firmly while Old Tuys went to take it.

‘Clear off,’ said Tuys
to the boy in kitchen Kaffir.

‘Don’t go,’ shouted
Daphne. The native stood where he was.

‘I’ll get you home in
the van,’ said Old Tuys. He bent to lift Daphne. She screamed. The native came
and stood a little closer.

Daphne lifted herself to
her feet. She was hysterical. ‘Knock him down,’ she ordered the native. He did
not move. She realized he would not touch Old Tuys. The Europeans had a name of
sticking together, and, whatever the circumstances, to hit a white man would
probably lead to prison. However, the native was evidently prepared to wait,
and when Old Tuys swore at him and ordered him off, he merely moved a few feet
away.

‘Get into the van,’
shouted Tuys to Daphne. ‘You been hurt in an accident. I got to take you home.’

A car came round the
bend, and seeing the group by the standing car, stopped. It was Mr Parker the
headmaster.

Old Tuys started the
tale about the accident, but Mr Parker was listening to Daphne who limped
across to him.

‘Take me back to the
farm, Mr Parker, for God’s sake.’

He helped her in and
drove off. The native followed with the horse. Old Tuys got into the van and
made off in the opposite direction.

‘I won’t go into
details,’ said Chakata to Daphne next day, ‘but I can’t dismiss Tuys. It goes
back to an incident which occurred before you were born. I owe him a debt of
honour. Something between men.

‘Oh, I see,’ said
Daphne.

Old Tuys had returned to
the farm in the early hours of the morning. Daphne knew that Chakata had waited
up for him. She had heard the indeterminate barking of a row between them.

She sat up in bed with
her leg in splints.

‘We could be raped and
murdered,’ said Mrs Chakata, ‘but Chakata still won’t get rid of the bastard.
Chakata would kick his backside out of it if he was a proper man.

‘He says it’s because of
a debt of honour,’ said Daphne.

‘That’s all you get from
Chakata. Whatever you do,’ said Mrs Chakata, ‘don’t marry a blerry Englishman.
They got no thought for their wives and kids, they only got thought for their
blerry honour.’

It had always been understood that she was
to go to England in 1940, when she was eighteen. But now there was no question
of going overseas till the war should end. Daphne had been to see a Colonel, a
Judge and a Bishop: she wanted to go to England to join one of the women’s
services. They told her there was no hope of an exit permit for England being
granted to a civilian. Besides, she was under age: would Chakata give his
permission?

At twenty she took a
teaching job in the Capital rather than join any of the women’s services in the
Colony, for these seemed to her feeble organizations compared with the real
thing.

She was attracted by the
vast new RAF training camps which were being set up. One of them lay just
outside the Capital, and most of her free time was spent at sundowners and
dances in the mess, or week-end tennis parties at outlying farms where she met
dozens of young fighter pilots with their Battle of Britain DFCs. She was in
love with them collectively. They were England. Her childhood neighbour, John
Coates, was a pilot. He was drafted to England, but his ship and convoy were
mined outside the Cape. News of his death reached Daphne just after her
twenty-first birthday.

She drove out to the
camp with one of her new English friends to attend a memorial service for John
at the RAF chapel. On the way the tyre burst. The car came to a dangerous
screeching stop five yards off the road. The young man set about changing the
tyre. Daphne stood by.

He said to her for the
third time, ‘OK. All
set,
Daphne.’ She was craning her head absently.

‘Oh,’ she said, bringing
her attention back to him. ‘I was listening to the go-away bird.’

‘What bird?’

‘The grey-crested
lourie. You can hear it all over the Colony. You hardly ever see it. It says “Go’way”.’

He stood listening. ‘I
can’t hear a thing.’

‘It’s stopped now,’ she
said.

‘Are there any
yellow-hammers here?’ he said.

‘No, I don’t think so.’

‘They say “a little bit
of bread and
no
cheese”,’ he said.

‘D’you find them all
over England?’

‘I think so. Anyway,
there are millions in Hertfordshire.’

She engaged herself to
marry a flight-lieutenant instructor. He was killed the following week in a
flying accident. He had said, describing his home near Henley, ‘Ghastly place
really. The river simply walks over the garden. Father’s been doubled with
rheumatism, but won’t move.’ These words had somehow enchanted her. ‘The river
simply walks over the garden,’ and she knew that the river was the Thames and
that the garden was full of English bushes and all the year round was green. At
his funeral she felt that the garden had gone under the sea. His family lived
not far away from the English Pattersons. ‘No,’ he had said, ‘I don’t think we
know them.’ It seemed incredible that he did not know his neighbours of only
fifteen miles distant. ‘No,’ wrote the English Pattersons, ‘we don’t know the
people. Are they Londoners come down since the war? There are a lot of
Londoners…’

In the Christmas
holidays after her twenty-first birthday she said to Chakata, ‘I’m giving a
term’s notice. I’m going to Cape Town.’

‘Have you had more
trouble with Tuys?’ he said.

‘No. It’s just that I
want a change. I should like to see the sea.’

‘Because, if you have
had trouble with Tuys, I shall speak to him.’

‘Are you at all thinking
of getting rid of Old Tuys?’ said Daphne.

‘No,’ he said.

He tried to persuade her
to go to Durban instead of Cape Town. ‘Durban is more English.’ He did not like
the idea of her staying with her father’s people, the du Toits, in Cape Town.

Cape Town made her
hanker all the more for England. There was just enough of the European touch —
old sedate Dutch houses, cottage gardens, green meadows, a symphony orchestra,
a modern art gallery —to whet her appetite for the real thing. The fact that
the servants were paler than those of the Colony, and more European in feature,
suggested to her a proximity to England where servants were white. ‘We have no
one left,’ wrote the English Pattersons, ‘but Clara, and half the time
we
have
to wait on
her.
She has lost her memory and she keeps thinking you are
your mother. She thinks Toad is Uncle Pooh-bah. Aunt Sarah is a trial.
She
thinks
we pinch her sweet coupons.