A Change of Climate: A Novel Read online

  A woman called Clara cleaned the house and washed the clothes. She was a mission girl, had passed her junior certificate. She was ashamed to do such work, and Ralph and Anna saw that it was demeaning for her. Whenever she asked them, they wrote her a glowing reference, recommending her for some job in a store, or a post as a hospital orderly. But employers turned her away. She came back to the house, stony-eyed, and picked up her brush to sweep the rooms out.

  Clara had once had a husband, but he had disappeared, leaving her with four small children. Her expectations of these mild babies were ferociously high: silence, industry, a useful occupation at all times. Each evening she called them to recite Bible verses; if they failed, she told them to bring her the cane. Their little cries, like the mewing of cats, punctuated the evenings. But who could tell Clara not to do it? They must not be like their father; and she believed that only the weals on their legs stood between them and a life of drink and misery, with hell at the end of it.

  It was not difficult to understand why employers turned Clara away, but it was difficult to put into words. She had some quality that stirred unease. It was not an overt violence, as in Rosinah’s case. It was an emptiness; you did not care to think how it might be filled up.

  Each morning at Flower Street, Ralph went into the cubbyhole he called his office to deal with letters and the accounts—recording minutely, faithfully, the futile expenditure of tiny sums. Anna went to the nursery school to supervise the local helpers. It was not a small enterprise; there were a hundred and fifty children, organized by twenty or thirty volunteers, who came and went by some bewil-dering rota that they understood and Anna did not.

  Each morning they put the children into their blue overalls, smocks which fastened at the backs of their necks; this was the day’s first task, feeding squirming arms into sleeves. They employed two women to wash the overalls at the end of the week, and another woman to make the mealie-porridge for midday. The children had to have their porridge scooped into their mouths; they had to be put down for an afternoon rest, supervised on the swings, slides, and climbing frames; they had to be weighed and measured and told stories. There was a waiting list, bigger by far than the current enrollment.

  Once the children were seven they could not keep them at the nursery. They sent them into the dangerous world, for the two and a half hours of education that the new laws allowed them. This period over, the children were at the mercy of circumstance. If their mothers managed to find any kind of work, they took it, leaving the children to the fitful and reluctant supervision of relatives, of older brothers and sisters. Where the supervision failed, they were out on the streets.

  For a few of these outcasts, the mission ran what they called a “play group.” They gave the children soup and bread, and fruit when they could get it. They didn’t give them books because that would have been breaking the law. They tried to keep them amused with games and handicrafts, making sure they did not set their feet on any path that could lead anywhere.

  And were they enforced, these absurd laws? Oh yes. “This town is full of people who will run to the police,” Lucy said calmly. “They will do it for a few pennies. Mrs. Eldred, you must understand that.”

  Anna would ask for nothing for herself, but the sight of the children made her bold. She pleaded with shopkeepers in the white suburbs to help them eke out the daily ration; she petitioned vegetable stores for bruised apples, and bakers for yesterday’s bread. She searched for donors to support children whose parents couldn’t afford the small monthly fee. Every day she set herself a target: so many pieces of effrontery, so many crude demands. She found it hard to work in the house because people were constantly walking in from the stoep, coming to ask her foolish questions or use the telephone; an hour could go by with nothing accomplished.

  One of the nursery classrooms had a storeroom—a large broom cupboard really. She took it over. She had to edge around the trestle table that formed her desk, ease herself behind the table, squeeze her narrow body against the wall. She stabbed with two fingers at a rusty typewriter: stabbed out her begging letters.

  The fact is, Ralph said, this job reduces us entirely to beggars. You can almost never just buy something, no matter how much you need it. You have to plot for it, appeal for it, arrange to borrow it, coax someone else into paying for it.

  Up at the house Ralph had his office door wedged open by a stack of papers. Other papers were stacked on every surface, in dangerous sliding piles. “Do you think the diocese would buy me a filing cabinet?” he asked Anna. “But no …” and he dismissed the thought at once. “There are more urgent needs.”

  Often, at the end of the day, there were nursery babies uncol-lected. They were forgotten—or, rather, the complicated arrangements which underpinned family life had come adrift. Anna would gather up the children, who were wailing or dumb with bewilderment; she would take them to the house, give them biscuits, comfort them, send a messenger to find out what had gone wrong at home. Sudden illness? Arrest?

  At this time of day, Ralph was usually at the police station. Every morning the police appeared on the streets, picking up their quota of pass offenders, herding them together on the street corners, handcuffed two by two; then a van came to collect them. African policemen performed this chore. At first Ralph thought, how can they do it? Soon he realized that they had a living to make. A white sergeant at the station told him wearily, “Mr. Eldred, we all have a living to make.”

  In the afternoon the relatives of those who had been arrested would come to the mission, telling their stories: our son, he just went out to see a neighbor, my sister, she went to buy food and left her pass at home. Ralph would go down to the station, to bail people out, pay their fines. “Next week,” he would say to the relatives, “you must pay me the money back, you understand?” He had to recover the money, or the mission would be out of pocket, and some other head of expenditure would have to be cut. But Ralph could only urge people to remember to take their papers, whenever they stepped out of doors.

  He did not like to cooperate with the government in this way. But he was not sent to Africa to encourage people to break the law, and James’s letters reminded him of this. He was not required to be a hero or a martyr, only to go on doing his best in the circumstances in which he found himself.

  People are not starving, he wrote to James. The poorest can just about feed and clothe themselves. But they live on the brink of an abyss. A few days’ sickness pushes them over the edge: the loss of a few pence in the week. Women struggle to bring up their children clean and with good manners, literate. They hope there is a future for them, but from the children’s eyes you can see they are wiser than their parents to the drift of events.

  Naught for your comfort, Anna thought. Only a long littleness consoles you—putting another stitch, then another row, into a blanket square. As winter approached, the women’s knitting became zealous and purposeful. On Wednesdays there was a sewing circle, too, and Anna felt she must put in an appearance; Lucy Moyo, or some other woman with a strong voice, read from the New Testament while their fingers flew, and faith stiffened their spines. Compare them to these people, and the Norfolk families were atheists; the Martins of East Dereham were godless hedonists, the Eldreds of Norwich were heathens, and debauched.

  Thursday was the day for the women’s church meetings. The Mothers’ Union wore starched white blouses and black skirts, with their special brooch pinned to their blouses and black cotton kerchiefs on their heads. Unmarried mothers—if they were penitent—could wear the uniform. But never, ever, the brooch.

  The Methodist ladies wore red blouses and black skirts. The Dutch Reformed wore black skirts and white blouses with broad black collars. They made the Methodists look skittish.

  Dearie, every Sunday, went missing for hours. Anna was concerned. “Don’t fret, Mrs. Eldred,” Lucy Moyo told her. “She is attending Bishop Kwakwa’s church, all day singing and dancing. She is going there for wearing a uniform with braid, and whooping a
nd making an unseemly spectacle. And their tom-fool pastor going about with blessed water in a bucket.”

  In the afternoons at Flower Street, there were meetings of various welfare committees. These concluded, Anna and Ralph went out together to see people who were sick, bouncing over the rutted roads in the mission’s car. Four o’clock, sinuous shapes melted into the walls; the young boys, who had run wild on the veld all day, had come back to town.

  By five o’clock they had taken up their station, these boys: they lounged outside the cafes, sometimes passing a cigarette from hand to hand. They gave off a palpable air of dis-ease; they were waiting for dark. It would be sunset when Ralph and Anna arrived home. As they rattled along to the corner of the street, as they approached the corner that would bring the Mission House within view, Ralph felt Anna in the passenger seat grow pale and still with tension. In summer she would be hot and dusty, in winter chilled to the bone. She wanted to wash and eat her supper, just that; but she could not know, until they turned the corner, what was waiting to frustrate her.

  What she dreaded was the sight of a half dozen men collected on the stoep, waiting for them with some problem they would not be able to solve. The only worse sight was that of a whole family, waiting with a problem they would not be able to solve. If it was a group of men, possibly Ralph and Anna would have to climb back into the car and jolt to the police station for some verbal conciliation and a payout; but if it was a family, they would need food, and they would need shelter for the night, at the very least. When Anna saw that the stoep was occupied, that they were expected, she felt her pulse rate rise, and a bitter taste, like bile, swim into her mouth.

  Evening at Flower Street: Anna had hardly any time with Ralph. They never sat down to a meal alone; Father Alfred would be in, or some of the nursery teachers, or committee people with unfinished business. By bedtime they were often too exhausted to make love, and always too exhausted to talk; sometimes they had no thoughts they cared to voice. And the nights were often broken. A woman had been taken ill, or there had been an accident, or a young man had been hurt in a drunken fight.

  When night fell, there were beatings, stabbings, robberies, rapes. Each of these incidents caused the men in the Department of Native Administration to shake their heads and talk of “a trouble spot,” and “the breakdown of law and order.” They did not see the Mothers’ Union, in their starched blouses; they saw only gallows bait. The vogue weapon of the gangs was the sharpened bicycle spoke. Approaching their victim from behind, they would stab the spoke into his thigh, and empty his pockets while he was frozen with shock and pain.

  It was onerous, the nightly routine of locking up the Mission House: keys, bolts, bars, clanking from room to room. Futile, really, because if anyone comes knocking you have to let them in. You can shout through the door for their name but if their name means nothing to you that isn’t a reason to keep them outside.

  On Saturday mornings Ralph and Anna gave out supplies from the back porch: vegetables, sacks of mealie meal, sugar poured from sacks and bagged up, and whatever tinned food and clothing had been donated by the white charities in the last week. They trusted that no one would come for food who did not need it, but they knew they trusted in vain; they must endure Lucy Moyo’s impatient clucking, the turning up of her eyes to her God. On Saturday afternoons there were funerals; hymn singing, ululation. Charity filled the grumbling stomachs of the mourners.

  Ralph would say:

  “But who hath seen the grocer

  Treat housemaids to his teas

  Or crack a bottle offish sauce

  Or stand a man a cheese?”

  Saturday at sunset, funerals and parties merged. Enamel mugs of sorghum beer were passed from hand to hand: beer that looked like baby vomit. The hosts played gramophones in their yard. There was drumming and dancing far into the night. When the guests had had enough they rolled up in their blankets, and slept on the ground.

  Sunday mornings there were church processions, the women in their uniforms, their sons in suits with polished faces. Later the small girls tripped into Sunday school, their hair braided and tied up in ribbons. Their frocks were from the Indian store, and had stiff net skirts, with which they scratched each other’s shins and calves. They had white gloves, and pochettes hanging over their skinny wrists. In a year or two they’d be saving up for skin-lightening cream. They’d be begging their parents, for a birthday treat, to find the money to send them to the hairdressers to get their hair straightened. “When you are older,” parents say. “Wait till you are fifteen, then we will see.”

  On Sunday mornings, after church, the men of Elim visited the barbers who set up shop under the trees. On Sunday afternoons there were football matches. Anna and Ralph entertained Father Alfred to tea, and the Sunday-school workers too. Anna could see in her face what opinion Lucy Moyo held of her baking; her scones were flat, and fizzed in the mouth, unlike the scones of Mrs. Stan-dish.

  After the tea party was over, they were, briefly, alone. Ralph held her in his arms as she swayed with fatigue, whimpering against his shoulder. “I shouldn’t have brought you,” he whispered to her. “But we can’t go home now.”

  Only weeks, months had passed; they were sealed so securely inside Elim’s bitter routines that they could not imagine any other kind of life.

  Anna forgot sometimes what lay beneath the surface. She saw the baked soil and red cement floors, the ant trail and the cockroaches’ path. But Ralph was there to remind her of the truth: she was walking on diamonds and gold.

  Every evening, at dusk, the women lit braziers. The smoke rose into the darkening sky, and lay over the township in a haze: blue and fine, like the breath of frigid angels. Every evening, when the women lit the braziers, some two-year-old would fall into them.

  There were hospitals in Elim, but casualties came to the mission: walking, or carried in their mother’s arms, or limping between two friends and dripping blood. Mrs. Standish had been a nurse, and people could not grasp that Anna had not the same skill. “We have to know our limitations,” Anna said. “I’d feel easier in my mind if we had a doctor on call.”

  Ralph said, “Koos is on call. In effect.”

  Koos had his surgery on Victoria Street, in a dusty single-story building with a tin roof. There was a waiting room and a consulting room, and another room at the back where Koos slept on a camp bed. In the yard were two shacks, one for cooking and the other fitted out as the laboratory and sometime cathouse of Koos’s dispenser, Luke Mbatha.

  Koos might have been thirty, might have been forty. He had straw-colored hair and a worried face; his smile was rare though his general disposition must, one supposed, be benevolent. He wore stone-colored shorts; his legs were mottled and stringy, his knee joints large and starved. His face and arms were red from scrubbing with a fierce antiseptic soap. Ralph washed his hands once at Koos’s place, and felt that the skin had been taken off them.

  Koos had a vast number of patients. He treated them for a few coppers. “But they must pay,” he told Ralph. “If they don’t pay for their treatment they don’t believe in it, you know? If you just give them the medicine, they think, this thing must be rubbish, if he is giving it to me. They go out and pour it in the road.”

  Ralph said, “Anna’s trying to persuade our kitchen girl Dearie to bring the new baby down. Anna’s worried about him, she says he’s not gaining weight. Dearie won’t admit there’s anything wrong, but I suppose she must care, mustn’t she? We can’t work out what she’s up to. She’s got colored strings tied round his wrists and his ankles. Yesterday, Anna thought he’d been dropped and got a big bruise on his head, but it turned out to be some ash he’d been rubbed with.”

  Koos said, “She’s been to see one of my rivals.”

  “No harm, I suppose,” Ralph said.

  “Except it makes for delay.” Koos shrugged. “Then, you see, perhaps she thinks it’s some African disease.”

  “Are there such things?”

  “In
people’s minds,” Koos said. “They think there are diseases that white people can’t understand. It’s right, up to a point. If I get a woman in here complains of palpitations, fainting, short of breath, I can listen to her chest and send off a blood sample, but sooner or later I have to say to her, look, what’s your church that you go to? Have you been dancing at your church? Have you got possessed by a spirit?”

  “They’re not barbarians,” Ralph said, needled.

  Koos’s sandy eyebrows shot up. “No? So quick to learn, man. Do you know what I think? I think we’re all barbarians.”

  Ralph always wanted to ask Koos, why are you here? It was like meeting a man with only one leg: you feel desperate to know what has happened to him. Accident? Illness? You want to ask, but you can only hope he’ll tell you.

  Six months in Elim. Ralph wrote to his uncle James:

  We could manage better if there were thirty hours in a day and nine days in a week, and yet I wonder if we are usefully employed at all. We don’t have much time to stop and think, and I don’t know whether that’s bad or good. But every week we have to make some decision which seems a matter of principle rather than of procedure, and there’s no one we can go to when we want to talk things over. My nearest approach to a friend is our Afrikaner doctor, but though I think he is a good man and he has a lot of experience he looks at the world so differently from us that I can’t go to him for advice, because I probably wouldn’t understand the advice he gives me.