I looked at her and felt the urge to pity her. I felt like running my hand over her short hair and saying with great sympathy and compassion, ‘Emma le Roux, you are the Don Quixote of the Cape, charging Lowveld windmills with pointless bravery, but now it’s time to go home.’
Melanie Posthumus had told us that Cobie de Villiers came from Swaziland. He told her his stories in fragments. He grew up in an orphanage in Mbabane after his parents had been killed during a robbery in their farm shop. He had no family. After school he worked as an assistant game ranger, later he got a job with the company contracted to repair the environmental damage caused by the Swazi’s old Bomvu Ridge iron mine. He told her wonderful stories – of how the archaeologists worked alongside them to investigate ancient history. ‘It’s the oldest mine in the world, you know,’ Melanie said with authority. ‘There were Africans taking stuff out of the ground in 40,000 DC She said ‘dee cee’ with undaunted self-confidence.
She said, ‘Cobie was an outlander, you know.’ The staff members at the Badplaas resort were an isolated group thrown on their own resources and they would frequently braai and dance and party together. But Cobie hadn’t liked to socialise at the resort, despite the stream of invitations. Instead he would take her to the veld when she had a day off and then the ‘real’ Cobie would surface. It was then that he lived, that the sun shone through him and his shyness evaporated. They slept under the stars, and beside a campfire in the veld he told her that he’d found his niche with Stef Moller; he’d like to stay there for ever, there were so many plans, so much work. Moller’s farms covered fifty thousand hectares. The goal was seventy thousand. That’s when they could reintroduce lions and wild dogs. But not all the neighbouring farmers wanted to sell.
She was the one that began to talk of marriage, ‘because Cobie was too shy’. Initially, he seemed not to hear her hints, later he began to say, ‘maybe, one day’. Melanie had an explanation for that. ‘He was just too used to being on his own, you know.’ She had helped him lose that habit. She let him know that she would come and live on the reserve with him, keep house for him, go to the veld with him, put no social pressure on him whatsoever. Eventually, he began to build up enthusiasm for the idea – in his own quiet way.
I had my own theories about her method of igniting that enthusiasm.
‘One night he came to the resort and he was too serious for words and he said before we can get married there was something he had to do. He would be away a week or two and then he would bring me a ring. I asked him what he was going to do and he said he couldn’t tell me, but he had to do the right thing and he would tell me about it one day.’
She never saw him again.
‘Can you remember the date?’
‘It was the twenty-second of August 1997.’
Emma had brought out her sheet of paper – and the photo of the young Jacobus le Roux. Without a word, she passed the picture across the coffee table. While Melanie Posthumus was looking at it, Emma had written something more on her sheet of paper. Melanie stared at the photo for a long time until she said, ‘I don’t know.’
Her husband, Johan Posthumus, arrived when we were on our way to the door. He was not much taller than his wife. He had protruding ears and a slight paunch. He treated Melanie as if he still couldn’t believe his luck.
As we drove off, they stood close together in the light of the veranda. He kept one hand on his wife’s shoulder, the other waved us goodbye. I read relief in the gesture.
When we turned on to the Nl at a quarter past eleven that night, Emma made a single notation and then put the pen and paper away and stared out of the window for a long time. I wondered what she was thinking. Would she, like me, ponder the glorious irony of Melanie Posthumus – intellectually challenged, but blessed with an instinctive ancient wisdom, knowing precisely how to use her sexy body and pretty face to snare the reluctant Cobie de Villiers? I’d sat there listening to Melanie, the breathless chatter, the childlike naivety, and wondered: why Cobus? As a spa therapist she must have had a constant supply of more well-to-do, better socially adjusted men. What was it about her self-image and genetic requirements that made her choose the ‘outlander’. (That mutation of ‘outsider’ was perhaps her most amusing misuse of the language. It said a lot about the emerging syndrome of quasi-intellectuals. Satellite television brought National Geographic, Discovery and the History Channel to the common crowd, so everyone was familiar with the jargon, although their terminology was frequently faulty.) Was it simply that Melanie wanted the one who didn’t immediately come drooling after her like Pavlov’s dog? Beautiful women do that, even those that aren’t brain surgeons, because the lovely exterior often hides a gnawing insecurity.
And that led me to wonder whether Emma still believed the Cobie de Villiers of Heuningklip and Mogale was one and the same person as Jacobus le Roux. On what grounds? I tried to weigh the compulsion to track down a lost brother against the evidence of the day and came to only one conclusion – her hopes must be dashed. The evidence was against it. But then, I was an objective bystander.
Emma was no Melanie Posthumus. She was smart. She stood up for herself. I respected her perseverance, her relentless crusade to reveal the truth, to ‘know for sure’, as she repeatedly said. But could she see the truth when it was right in front of her nose? Could she take a step back and evaluate the facts without emotion?
Emma slept while I answered Jeanette Louw’s daily ‘ALL OK?’ SMS with one hand. I would have liked to add ‘except for my client’s grasp of reality’ to my ‘ALL OK’, but Body Armour’s code of conduct didn’t provide for that.
Emma didn’t wake when I stopped in front of the Bateleur suite in the Mohlolobe Game Reserve at three in the morning. She was a vulnerable figure in the front passenger seat: tiny, silent, asleep.
I got out, unlocked the suite and turned on the lights. The door had been repaired, the lamp replaced and there was a giant bowl of fruit, chocolate and champagne on the table in the sitting room. I walked around checking the rooms inside, then outside, testing all the windows. Back at the car, Emma was still asleep.
I didn’t want to wake her. Nor did I wish to spend the night in the car.
I stood looking down at her for a long time and then quietly opened her door and gently picked her up, her head against my neck, one of my arms around her back, the other behind her knees. She was as light as a child. I felt her easy breathing against my skin and smelled the blend of her body scents.
I carried her up the steps, and when I took her into her room, she whispered in my ear, ‘The other room.’ I saw that her eyes were still closed. I turned and went into my bedroom. I put her gently down on my single bed and pulled back the covers of the other. Picked her up again, put her in her own bed and pulled off her shoes. Covered her with the duvet.
Just before I turned away to go and lock the car, I caught a glimpse of the very faintest smile of contentment on Emma le Roux’s face. Like a woman who has won the argument.
16
At eight in the morning, I was sitting outside on the veranda drinking coffee when Emma appeared, wrapped up in the complimentary white bathrobe, her hair still wet from the shower.
‘Morning, Lemmer.’ The musical tones were back in her voice. She sat on the chair beside me.
‘Morning, Emma. Coffee?’
‘I’ll get some in a moment, thanks.’
The flaps of the bathrobe slid back to expose her tanned knees. I concentrated on the animals that I had been watching. ‘Baboons,’ I said, pointing at the troop on the opposite riverbank on their way to water. The males, like bodyguards, kept watch over the females and little ones.
‘I see them.’
I drank my coffee.
‘Lemmer …’
I looked at her. The idea that she might be wearing nothing under the bathrobe interfered with my concentration.
‘I’m sorry about yesterday.’
‘No apology necessary.’
‘It is. It was wrong and I’m sorry.’
‘Forget about it. It was a rough day, with the snake and everything.’
