Clerkenwell sent their small salary every month. There was nothing to spend it on.
“There’s one thing to be grateful for,” Ralph said. “When the baby’s born, I can take over the teaching and you need do nothing. We can get a nurse from the village, Salome will find someone for us. Then if we have broken nights, you can get some rest during the day.”
The thought of the baby made him proud, worried, indefinably sad. That it would be born here, in Mosadinyana, in the heart of Africa. Anna’s body was swollen, but her face was gaunt, and her arms were stick-thin. In those few days in prison the flesh had simply peeled away from her frame; her bones seemed larger now, and her wide-open eyes made her look sad and frail.
When they stepped out of their front door, in the morning or at evening, the go-away birds wheeled overhead, mocking and barracking, swooping and squawking their single, unvaried message; the only words which nature had given them. They were insistent companions, like someone you pick up with on a journey: someone who claims better knowledge of the terrain, who tries to persuade you to vary your planned route.
Ralph drove Anna to the Lutheran mission hospital, over roads that shook the bones and viscera. The doctor was an elderly Dutchman, worn and faded by the sun; he received her with kindly concern. All would be well, he assured her, passing his hand over the mound of her belly. There was no need for her to think of traveling down the railway line when her time came; he had delivered a hundred babies, and he had plenty of experience if anything, God forbid, should go wrong. He saw, he said, that she was a sensible young woman, stronger than she looked; and after the event, all she would need would be the most simple precautions of hygiene, the common-sense measures any mother would take. “Think what your baby will have,” he said. “God’s blessed sun, almost every day of the year. Quiet nights under the stars and moon.”
Anna looked up at his outbreak of lyricism, half raising herself on the examination couch. Had he been drinking? He laid a hand on her forehead, easing her back. “Mrs. Eldred,” he said, “I have heard of your troubles in the Republic. You and your husband, you are young people who deserve the happiness that will come to you. It will be a pleasure and an honor to me to put your first child safe in your arms.”
Each night, by the light of lamps and candles, they sat over their Setswana grammars. Outside, the darkness rustled and croaked; inside, the only sound was a moth’s wingbeat. And yet they were not alone; there was a settlement out there, lightless, invisible, ragged night-breathing its only sound. In the first week, a parade of blanket-wrapped men and women had come to the door, asking for work. Anna was bewildered. She did not know how to turn them away, and it seemed there was no end to them. Ralph and Anna had made little progress in the language; when they tried to speak, people grinned at them. “You may take on anyone you need to help you,” Anna told Salome. “But not people we don’t need, not people who will just sit around doing nothing. Because it is not fair to choose some and not the others, to pay some and not the others. But Salome, listen, anyone who is hungry, you never, never turn them away.”
Did she turn them away? Anna was afraid that she did—on a whim, or according to the dictates of her own judgment. They had to acknowledge that her judgment might be sounder than theirs. She was their mediatrix, their mainstay. Her English was hybrid, sometimes sliding into Afrikaans. Once she did speak memorably, her hands folded together, her eyes resting unseeingly on something through the window, in the dusty yard: spoke with rhythm and fluency, with perfect confidence that she would be understood. “In the days of our grandmothers, madam, there were many women to divide the task of carrying the water and grinding the millet and sweeping the house. Now there is only one woman. She must work all day in the heat of the sun until she drops.”
“An exaggeration,” Anna said, “but, you see, she was speaking of the advantages of polygamy.”
“What will you think of next?” Ralph said.
“I think we have denatured these people,” Anna said. “Everything old is condemned, everything of their own. Everything new and imported is held up to them as better.”
“Soap and civilization,” Ralph said. “That was the idea. Oh, and God.”
“Oh, and God,” Anna said. “I begin to wonder what Christianity has to offer to women. Besides a series of insults, that is.”
There were quarters on the mission compound for three servants. Two of these whitewashed rooms were already claimed, one by Salome, one by the gardener Enock. But the people Anna could not employ did not go away. The other hut was soon taken by a large family of mother and children whose origin no one knew; other families camped out in the vicinity, built themselves lean-tos even frailer than the shacks on the outskirts of Elim. They were hanging around, it seemed, in expectation; you could not say in hope, for nothing so lively as hope could ever be discerned in the expressions of these visitors of theirs. That was what Ralph called them: our visitors. Their faces showed, rather, an awesome patience, a faith; a faith that one day the beatitudes would be fulfilled, and the meek and the poor in spirit would come into their kingdom. Or into a job, at least. One day Anna would wake up, and find her ambitions quite different; she would need as many servants as Blenheim, or Buckingham Palace on a garden- party day.
Anna wrote home, in cautious terms, about her condition. Her mother’s reply came, two months on: “Last week you were in the minds of our whole congregation. Everyone keeps you in their prayers and thoughts. The people around you, though primitive, are no doubt very kind.”
The cooler weather brought relief. She breathed more easily then, above the arch of her ribs. Only one thing had sickened her, and its season had been brief: the guava tree, riotously fertile, diffusing through the air the scent of eau-de-cologne slapped onto decaying flesh.
Anna said, “Ralph, in my grandmother’s generation …” Her voice tailed off. She hadn’t meant to sound so biblical; she must be catching it from Salome. She began again. “In our family, some years back … there were twins.” She waited. He looked up. She glanced away from the shock on his face. “The doctor can’t be sure, of course, but he says to keep the possibility in mind. He thinks it will be all right.”
“Thinking’s not enough,” Ralph said. He put his head in his hands. “Oh God, if we were in Elim now … If you could get to Jo’burg or Pretoria there would be no problems, every facility would be there for us. We should go south, Anna. Surely they wouldn’t refuse us? It’s your first child, you’ve not been well … Surely they’d make a gesture, a humanitarian gesture?”
“No, they wouldn’t,” Anna said. “If we turned up in Jo’burg or Pretoria they’d put us back in jail.”
“Me, perhaps—not you, surely?”
“Why not? They put me in jail before.” Anna shook her head. “Forget it, Ralph. I don’t want to set foot on that soil. I don’t want that kind of compassion.”
Three weeks before the birth she did go south, but only to Lobatsi, a small town on the railway line. She had booked herself in at the Athlone Hospital; if something went wrong, she and the babies had a better chance here than they would have up-country. She believed in the twins, they were no longer a subject for conjecture; she imagined she could feel the two new hearts beating below her own. While she waited to be proved correct, she passed her days sitting at her window in the Lobatsi Hotel, watching the populace pushing into the Indian trading
