upholstery worn by long use to an indeterminate shiny gray. There were some scarred tables, a couple of bookcases, indecently empty: a solitary picture on the wall, of Highland cattle splashing through a stream. Their bedroom was furnished with a bulky dressing table with a spotted mirror, and with wardrobes whose doors creaked and swung open when anyone entered the room, disclosing their dark interiors. Their ancient mothball reek lay on the air.
At once, their new routine began. There were new problems, new dilemmas, both human and ethical. There was no time for reflection, no period of induction. It was a month before a letter from Clerkenwell came. It was not an accusing letter, but it was huffy and vague. It wished them success in their new post. “Cooper said it would be temporary,” Ralph said. “But here they say nothing about moving us on. Still—” His eyes rested on his wife. Her pregnancy showed now more evident because she was thin.
“Better the devil you know,” Anna said. “The thought of packing my bags again—it’s too much.” She came over to him and put her hand on his head, stroked his curly hair. “It’s all right. We’ll get used to it.” And that would not be difficult, she thought. There were routine panics: a scorpion in the kitchen, a thorn under a nail. Otherwise, every day was the same.
Enock, a man with no family, dug the garden and raked it: he was aimless, erratic, prone to disappearances. Salome, in the kitchen, presided over their monotonous diet: stringy meat and mealie-pap, small bitter oranges from their own trees. After breakfast each day she washed the clothes and polished the red cement floors. Salome was shapeless, like most of the women who had passed their youth. She wore a lilac overall which she had been given by Mr. and Mrs. Instow: of whom she seldom spoke. She wore gaping bedroom slippers and a woolen hat; each morning by six o’clock she was in the kitchen, stoking up the cooking range, putting the kettle on the hob.
A second month passed, and already their memories were fading. Their time in Flower Street seemed to be an episode in other people’s lives. What has happened to Koos, Anna sometimes wondered, did the police take him? What has happened to Dearie and Rosinah? Was there an informer? If so, who was it? Her mind recoiled from this topic. Even the better memories were soured. She could not think of Flower Street without knowing that they had been betrayed.
Each morning by eight Anna was in the little schoolroom. She had a floating and variable number of pupils: some tots who could barely grip a pencil, some big bold girls who sat knitting and gossiping at the back. Anna did not try to stop them; she had no doubt they needed whatever it was they were knitting. The boys would go off for weeks at a time, herding cattle. Months on the battered schoolroom benches; then months on the trail.
Her aim was not high: just that they should be able to count, add up, subtract, and not be cheated when they went to the store with small coins. They should be able to write their names and read from primers meant for children in English suburbs: children with lawns to play on, and pet dogs, and strawberry jam for tea. There were no lawns here, for each blade of vegetation had to pit itself against God to survive. There was mealie-porridge for tea, and for breakfast and dinner too. And if they saw a dog, her pupils threw stones at it.
They were incurious, apathetic children; impossible to know whether or not they took in what she was trying to teach them. They were, she guessed, often hungry: not with the sharp hunger that goads the mind and makes the hand shake, but with a chronic hunger, grumbling and unappeasable. There was no starvation at this date: not in the village, not in the country. There was, rather, a malnourishment which bred lethargy, which bred an unfitness for any effort beyond the minimum. The Afrikaner farmers had the best land; they sweated it and made it pay. The desert produced thorn bushes and scrub, and in spring, after rain had fallen, a sudden, shocking carpet of strange flowers.
By eleven each day, the sun high in the sky, her pupils slept, nodding and slumping at their benches. Her voice dried in her throat. By one o’clock school was over. The children pressed around her. “Goodbye, and go well,” she would say, in her awkward, minimal Setswana.
“Stay well, madam,” they would say. And enclose her. Their hot bodies to hers. Hands patting. She felt herself shrink inside.
Why? Her own reaction disgusted her. The village men were meager, spiritless and skinny. The women were great tubes of fat, blown out with carbohydrates. They carried vacant-faced infants, strapped tightly to their backs. Too many babies died. The clinic nurse, Mrs. Pilane, could not cure measles. When the women spoke, they seemed to shout and sneer. Their voices were harsh, monotonous, somehow triumphal. God help me, Anna thought: but I don’t like them, perhaps I fear them. These feelings were a violation of everything she expected from herself, of all her principles and habits of mind.
News came patchily from the outside world; the mail arrived twice a week, and a newspaper sometimes. Bechuanaland, the obscure protectorate, was making news itself. Seretse Khama had returned home, the young tribal leader with his white wife; ten years earlier, a bar student alone in London, he had chosen for himself this trim ladylike blond, to the fury and dismay of his relatives and of the South African government, “MARRIAGE THAT ROCKS AFRICA” the
They had been in the newspapers themselves, of course. Emma had sent the cuttings. Their story had run for a day or two, then been dropped as soon as they were let out of jail. The papers had used photographs from their wedding; it seemed no one had been able to find any other pictures of them. In their strange ritual garments they stared into the lens, startled and shy; they looked like children, playing at weddings to pass a rainy day.
News came from Cape Town, too. The archbishop was dead. It was the government that had killed him in the end, Ralph believed. Another apartheid measure had been proposed, with a clause giving the government the power to exclude Africans from churches in white areas; and this brought the old man to his sticking point.
The archbishop drafted a letter: if this becomes law, his letter said, the church and its clergy and its people will be unable to obey it.
The battle lines were drawn at last. Late at night, the archbishop’s secretary came into his study, bringing the final version of the letter for his signature. The old man lay on the carpet. He had fallen by his desk, and his heart had stopped.
Receiving this news, Ralph felt more alone.
Within a week or two of their arrival it became clear that the mission did not provide a job for two people. And Mosadinyana would never grow, as Cooper had purported. The mission was a fossil, a relic; its time was past, and the focus of effort and activity had moved elsewhere. Ralph imagined their lives and careers filed away, in Clerkenwell’s dustiest, lowest drawer.
He was angry. “It is so stupid. They are treating us as if we have committed some horrible crime, as if we are disgraced. But the truth is that there are people in England who would not only sympathize with us but applaud us.”
“We’re not heroes,” Anna said. “We didn’t do anything really. We just got in the way. We were an inconvenience.”
“At least that’s something to be.”
