'He won't disappear. Petrus knows him. In any event, no one disappears in the Eastern Cape. It's not that kind of place.'
`Lucy, Lucy, I plead with you! You want to make up for the wrongs of the past, but this is not the way to do it. If you fail to stand up for yourself at this moment, you will never be able to hold your head up again. You may as well pack your bags and leave. As for the police, if you are too delicate to call them in now, then we should never have involved them in the first place. We should just have kept quiet and waited for the next attack. Or cut our own throats.'
'Stop it, David! I don't need to defend myself before you. You don't know what happened.'
‘I don't know?'
'No, you don't begin to know. Pause and think about that. With regard to the police, let me remind you why we called them in in the first place: for the sake of the insurance. We filed a report because if we did not, the insurance would not pay out.'
'Lucy, you amaze me. That is simply not true, and you know it. As for Petrus, I repeat: if you buckle at this point, if you fail, you will not be able to live with yourself. You have a duty to yourself, to the future, to your own self-respect. Let me call the police. Or call them yourself '
'No.'
No: that is Lucy's last word to him. She retires to her room, closes the door on him, closes him out. Step by step, as inexorably as if they were man and wife, he and she are being driven apart, and there is nothing he can do about it. Their very quarrels have become like the bickerings of a married couple, trapped together with nowhere else to go. How she must be rueing the day when he came to live with her! She must wish him gone, and the sooner the better.
Yet she too will have to leave, in the long run. As a woman alone on a farm she has no future, that is clear. Even the days of Ettinger, with his guns and barbed wire and alarm systems, are numbered. If Lucy has any sense she will quit before a fate befalls her worse than a fate worse than death. But of course she will not. She is stubborn, and immersed, too, in the life she has chosen.
He slips out of the house. Treading cautiously in the dark, he approaches the stable from behind. The big fire has died down, the music has stopped. There is a cluster of people at the back door, a door built wide enough to admit a tractor. He peers over their heads.
In the centre of the floor stands one of the guests, a man of middle age. He has a shaven head and a bull neck; he wears a dark suit and, around his neck, a gold chain from which hangs a medal the size of a fist, of the kind that chieftains used to have bestowed on them as a symbol of office. Symbols struck by the boxful in a foundry in Coventry or Birmingham; stamped on the one side with the head of sour Victoria, regina et imperatrix, on the other with gnus or ibises rampant. Medals, Chieftains, for the use of. Shipped all over the old Empire: to Nagpur, Fiji, the Gold Coast, Kaffraria.
The man is speaking, orating in rounded periods that rise and fall. He has no idea what the man is saying, but every now and then there is a pause and a murmur of agreement from his audience, among whom, young and old, a mood of quiet satisfaction seems to reign.
He looks around. The boy is standing nearby, just inside the door. The boy's eyes flit nervously across him. Other eyes turn toward him too: toward the stranger, the odd one out. The man with the medal frowns, falters for a moment, raises his voice.
As for him, he does not mind the attention. Let them know I am still here, he thinks, let them know I am not skulking in the big house. And if that spoils their get-together, so be it. He lifts a hand to his white skullcap. For the first time he is glad to have it, to wear it as his own.
SIXTEEN
ALL OF THE next morning Lucy avoids him. The meeting she promised with Petrus does not take place. Then in the afternoon Petrus himself raps at the back door, businesslike as ever, wearing boots and overalls. It is time to lay the pipes, he says. He wants to lay PVC piping from the storage dam to the site of his new house, a distance of two hundred metres. Can he borrow tools, and can David help him fit the regulator?
'I know nothing about regulators. I know nothing about plumbing.' He is in no mood to be helpful to Petrus.
‘It is not plumbing,' says Petrus. 'It is pipefitting. It is just laying pipes.'
On the way to the dam Petrus talks about regulators of different kinds, about pressure-valves, about junctions; he brings out the words with a flourish, showing off his mastery. The new pipe will have to cross Lucy's land, he says; it is good that she has given her permission. She is 'forward-looking'. 'She is a forward-looking lady, not backward-looking.'
About the party, about the boy with the flickering eyes, Petrus says nothing. It is as though none of that had happened.
His own role at the dam soon becomes clear. Petrus needs him not for advice on pipefitting or plumbing but to hold things, to pass him tools - to be his handlanger, in fact. The role is not one he objects to. Petrus is a good workman, it is an education to watch him. It is Petrus himself he has begun to dislike. As Petrus drones on about his plans, he grows more and more frosty toward him. He would not wish to be marooned with Petrus on a desert isle. He would certainly not wish to be married to him. A dominating personality. The young wife seems happy, but he wonders what stories the old wife has to tell. At last, when he has had enough, he cuts across the flow. Petrus,' he says, 'that young man who was at your house last night - what is his name and where is he now?'
Petrus takes off his cap, wipes his forehead. Today he is wearing a peaked cap with a silver South African Railways and Harbours badge. He seems to have a collection of headgear.
'You see,' says Petrus, frowning, 'David, it is a hard thing you are saying, that this boy is a thief. He is very angry that you are calling him a thief. That is what he is telling everyone. And I, I am the one who must be keeping the peace. So it is hard for me too.'
'I have no intention of involving you in the case, Petrus. Tell me the boy's name and whereabouts and I will pass on the information to the police. Then we can leave it to the police to investigate and bring him and his friends to justice. You will not be involved, I will not be involved, it will be a matter for the law.'
Petrus stretches, bathing his face in the sun's glow. Tut the insurance will give you a new car.'
Is it a question? A declaration? What game is Petrus playing? 'The insurance will not give me a new car,' he
