Naught for your comfort, Anna thought. Only a long littleness consoles you—putting another stitch, then another row, into a blanket square. As winter approached, the women’s knitting became zealous and purposeful. On Wednesdays there was a sewing circle, too, and Anna felt she must put in an appearance; Lucy Moyo, or some other woman with a strong voice, read from the New Testament while their fingers flew, and faith stiffened their spines. Compare them to these people, and the Norfolk families were atheists; the Martins of East Dereham were godless hedonists, the Eldreds of Norwich were heathens, and debauched.

Thursday was the day for the women’s church meetings. The Mothers’ Union wore starched white blouses and black skirts, with their special brooch pinned to their blouses and black cotton kerchiefs on their heads. Unmarried mothers—if they were penitent—could wear the uniform. But never, ever, the brooch.

The Methodist ladies wore red blouses and black skirts. The Dutch Reformed wore black skirts and white blouses with broad black collars. They made the Methodists look skittish.

Dearie, every Sunday, went missing for hours. Anna was concerned. “Don’t fret, Mrs. Eldred,” Lucy Moyo told her. “She is attending Bishop Kwakwa’s church, all day singing and dancing. She is going there for wearing a uniform with braid, and whooping and making an unseemly spectacle. And their tom-fool pastor going about with blessed water in a bucket.”

In the afternoons at Flower Street, there were meetings of various welfare committees. These concluded, Anna and Ralph went out together to see people who were sick, bouncing over the rutted roads in the mission’s car. Four o’clock, sinuous shapes melted into the walls; the young boys, who had run wild on the veld all day, had come back to town.

By five o’clock they had taken up their station, these boys: they lounged outside the cafes, sometimes passing a cigarette from hand to hand. They gave off a palpable air of dis-ease; they were waiting for dark. It would be sunset when Ralph and Anna arrived home. As they rattled along to the corner of the street, as they approached the corner that would bring the Mission House within view, Ralph felt Anna in the passenger seat grow pale and still with tension. In summer she would be hot and dusty, in winter chilled to the bone. She wanted to wash and eat her supper, just that; but she could not know, until they turned the corner, what was waiting to frustrate her.

What she dreaded was the sight of a half dozen men collected on the stoep, waiting for them with some problem they would not be able to solve. The only worse sight was that of a whole family, waiting with a problem they would not be able to solve. If it was a group of men, possibly Ralph and Anna would have to climb back into the car and jolt to the police station for some verbal conciliation and a payout; but if it was a family, they would need food, and they would need shelter for the night, at the very least. When Anna saw that the stoep was occupied, that they were expected, she felt her pulse rate rise, and a bitter taste, like bile, swim into her mouth.

Evening at Flower Street: Anna had hardly any time with Ralph. They never sat down to a meal alone; Father Alfred would be in, or some of the nursery teachers, or committee people with unfinished business. By bedtime they were often too exhausted to make love, and always too exhausted to talk; sometimes they had no thoughts they cared to voice. And the nights were often broken. A woman had been taken ill, or there had been an accident, or a young man had been hurt in a drunken fight.

When night fell, there were beatings, stabbings, robberies, rapes. Each of these incidents caused the men in the Department of Native Administration to shake their heads and talk of “a trouble spot,” and “the breakdown of law and order.” They did not see the Mothers’ Union, in their starched blouses; they saw only gallows bait. The vogue weapon of the gangs was the sharpened bicycle spoke. Approaching their victim from behind, they would stab the spoke into his thigh, and empty his pockets while he was frozen with shock and pain.

It was onerous, the nightly routine of locking up the Mission House: keys, bolts, bars, clanking from room to room. Futile, really, because if anyone comes knocking you have to let them in. You can shout through the door for their name but if their name means nothing to you that isn’t a reason to keep them outside.

On Saturday mornings Ralph and Anna gave out supplies from the back porch: vegetables, sacks of mealie meal, sugar poured from sacks and bagged up, and whatever tinned food and clothing had been donated by the white charities in the last week. They trusted that no one would come for food who did not need it, but they knew they trusted in vain; they must endure Lucy Moyo’s impatient clucking, the turning up of her eyes to her God. On Saturday afternoons there were funerals; hymn singing, ululation. Charity filled the grumbling stomachs of the mourners.

Ralph would say:

“But who hath seen the grocer

Treat housemaids to his teas

Or crack a bottle offish sauce

Or stand a man a cheese?”

Saturday at sunset, funerals and parties merged. Enamel mugs of sorghum beer were passed from hand to hand: beer that looked like baby vomit. The hosts played gramophones in their yard. There was drumming and dancing far into the night. When the guests had had enough they rolled up in their blankets, and slept on the ground.

Sunday mornings there were church processions, the women in their uniforms, their sons in suits with polished faces. Later the small girls tripped into Sunday school, their hair braided and tied up in ribbons. Their frocks were from the Indian store, and had stiff net skirts, with which they scratched each other’s shins and calves. They had white gloves, and pochettes hanging over their skinny wrists. In a year or two they’d be saving up for skin-lightening cream. They’d be begging their parents, for a birthday treat, to find the money to send them to the hairdressers to get their hair straightened. “When you are older,” parents say. “Wait till you are fifteen, then we will see.”

On Sunday mornings, after church, the men of Elim visited the barbers who set up shop under the trees. On Sunday afternoons there were football matches. Anna and Ralph entertained Father Alfred to tea, and the Sunday- school workers too. Anna could see in her face what opinion Lucy Moyo held of her baking; her scones were flat, and fizzed in the mouth, unlike the scones of Mrs. Stan-dish.

After the tea party was over, they were, briefly, alone. Ralph held her in his arms as she swayed with fatigue, whimpering against his shoulder. “I shouldn’t have brought you,” he whispered to her. “But we can’t go home now.”

Only weeks, months had passed; they were sealed so securely inside Elim’s bitter routines that they could not imagine any other kind of life.

Anna forgot sometimes what lay beneath the surface. She saw the baked soil and red cement floors, the ant trail and the cockroaches’ path. But Ralph was there to remind her of the truth: she was walking on diamonds and gold.

Every evening, at dusk, the women lit braziers. The smoke rose into the darkening sky, and lay over the township in a haze: blue and fine, like the breath of frigid angels. Every evening, when the women lit the braziers, some two-year-old would fall into them.

There were hospitals in Elim, but casualties came to the mission: walking, or carried in their mother’s arms, or limping between two friends and dripping blood. Mrs.

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