“More than that. Jealous and aggrieved.”
“Perhaps Mrs. Instow used to give her clothes. The best Paris labels.”
They laughed. In the back of a drawer, they had found a photograph of the Instows, the kind of fading snap that people describe as “taken with my old Box Brownie.” A little, huddled, sexless couple they were, false teeth bared in haunted smiles. Where were they now? The mission society’s pension arrangements were not generous. A bed-sitting room and kitchenette, Ralph thought, somewhere like Leamington Spa. God save us. Sometimes now his thoughts turned to what he would do when they left Mosadinyana. His father would be seventy in three years’ time, and his mother’s letters hinted that the work of the Trust was getting too much for him. The Trust had grown a good deal, from its original local foundation; and Uncle James, still toiling among the London derelicts, was approaching what would normally be thought of as retirement age. I should be putting my mind to taking over from them, Ralph thought, going home and finding us a house and beginning the next phase in life. I can face them now, he thought, my mother and father, because I have done and seen things they have never dreamed of. And I have children of my own, now.
Anna seemed disinclined to speculate about the future. She had too many petty day-to-day concerns. A kind of kitchen war had broken out. Someone had taken a whole sack of sugar, just brought in from the store; it must be Salome, Anna thought, because sugar was one of her perquisites, she took it for granted that no one would prevent her from carrying it away by the pound, under her apron. “But a whole sack, Salome,” Anna said, turning on her disappointed eyes. “So that I go to the pantry and there is none— none—not a spoonful for Felicia’s tea.”
Salome said nothing, but a peevish expression crossed her face. Later that day she began her ritual complaints about Enock. “He is not doing his work properly. Always at a beer-drink when he says he is going to a funeral.”
Beer-drink, Anna said under her breath; yes indeed, there are plenty of beer-drinks, with beer brewed by you, madam, brewed with my sugar. Later that day, Salome came back for another attack: “All my vegetables I have planted, they are dying and dead.”
Anna considered. There was some truth in this. What she did not like about Enock was his attitude to the poor things that tried to grow in the earth. It seemed to her that he had chosen his trade specially so that he could be destructive. When things grew, he cut them down. You might call it pruning, she supposed, but he liked to cut until you could see plant blood; she felt for the stunted, cropped-back plants, and remembered how when she had been a small child her mother had in the name of hygiene pared her nails to the quick; five years old, she saw her little fingers, sore and blunt and red, turning the pages of her first reading book. And again and again her mother had done it, and so did Enock, and you could not argue, for they thought it was a thing they were morally obliged to do. What flourished, Enock left unwatered. He killed with his sharp blades, and he killed by neglect.
“Ralph will take over looking after the vegetables,” Anna said. “And I will look after them too when the babies are bigger.”
Salome looked shocked. “No, madam,” she said. And for the first time referred to precedent: Mr. and Mrs. Instow would never have done such a thing.
Ralph said, “They’re against Enock because he is an outsider.”
“He is not an outsider,” Anna said. “He has plenty of friends.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. Somewhere. On the railway line. He’s always sneaking off, you know that. Salome says we should give his job to one of the visitors.”
“Give him another chance,” Ralph said. “Please, Anna? There must be some story that he’s not telling us. There must be some reason he’s like he is.”
Must there? Anna had the feeling a row was building up.
The next thing to occur was the loss of most of Ralph’s clothes. Ralph had gone to Palapye for the day, and she must have been in the schoolroom when it happened; classes were over, but she was making a colored chart for the wall, a colored chart with the nine-times table. The babies had been put down for their afternoon sleep, and Felicia took her own siesta beside them. Anna finished her work, put away the scissors and the big paste-pot; closed the schoolroom door behind her, shutting in its heat; tailed into the house, washed her hands and face, and made for her own bedroom, hoping to rest for an hour. The wardrobe door gaped as usual, but the camphor- scented interior was nothing but an area of darkness.
Enock’s disappearance could not be entirely coincidental. Odd items had gone missing before; Ralph’s wardrobe was not so extensive that she did not notice the loss. She would not have minded so much if Enock himself had seemed to profit from either the theft or the sale. But he still wore the tight tan jacket, sweat stained; the same ragged shirts and broken shoes.
“This time he’s gone too far,” she said. What bothered her was the thought of Enock in the house, pawing their few possessions. She imagined herself confronting him, and could see already the arrogance of his expression, his superiority; at the back of her mind she heard Ralph saying, well, perhaps he is entitled to his expression, perhaps he is indeed superior to us, but she did not believe it, she thought Enock was just one of those people you find everywhere in the world and in all cultures, one of those people who spread disaffection and unease, who sneer at the best efforts of other people and who make them restless and unhappy and filled with self-doubt.
“Let it go,” Ralph said. “We’ve no proof it was him. Where was Potluck, anyway?”
“Asleep under a bush. Besides, he knows Enock, doesn’t he? I’ve had to teach him to leave Enock alone.”
“It could have been one of the visitors. Anyone could have come in.”
“Don’t be simpleminded,” she said. “It’s Enock, he has his trading routes, everybody tells me about it. He takes things and puts them on the train and his pals take them off in Francistown.”
Ralph looked miserable. “We’ll have to start locking the doors, I suppose.”
Anna thought of Elim: the great bunch of keys that Lucy Moyo had put into her hand on her first day at Flower Street.
“Yes, we will,” she said. “And I’ll have to start locking the larder and counting the supplies and giving things out only when they’re asked for. Goddammit, Ralph, are we going to let ourselves be robbed blind?”
“It hardly matters,” Ralph said. “My clothes weren’t that good.”
Then, two days later, Felicia came crying that her skirt had gone, her best skirt, the one that madam had given her. She looked dangerous; she wanted to make an issue out of it.
