The Visitors (26 page)

‘I do not know. I have never known. But I can see them and they can see me, and talk to me.’

‘What does he say to you?’

‘He said he was sorry. That he did not mean to be a thief. He said to tell you he was sorry.’

Maria is crying and drops the gun. Lottie should grab it, or I. But we do not. We watch her weep.

‘Is he here right now? Can you speak to him?’

‘Yes. He’s over there, by the barn.’

Her eyes scan the space, desperate to see her son, but fill with tears as she knows she cannot.

‘You believe me?’ I say. ‘You believe some can see the dead?’

‘Yes,’ says Maria, calmer now. ‘I have always known about them. My grandmother spoke of them. I wished I could see them too, but I never did.’

Perhaps other people are like Maria. Perhaps I could tell others one day.

‘How is Jurie?’ she asks. ‘What is he doing, right now?’

‘He points at the ground. Did he bury his special box there?’

‘Yes.’

‘We must see it, Maria. There is a diary in it, Jackson’s diary. We must have it.’

‘Take whatever you wish. Just take me to my son.’

She steps over the gun, walks to me and stands before me, broken, helpless, asking me with her eyes to do this one thing for her, though she has no right to ask it, only the right of a grieving mother.

I take her arm and she leans on me. We walk slowly over to the barn, where Jurie is still pointing at the earth.

I buried my special box there, when we arrived. I buried it there so Mamma would not know.

‘Tell him I knew about the box,’ says Maria. ‘I saw him do it. Boys are always up to something, their little secrets. I did not care. I did not mind anything he did.’

I explain this to Jurie.

You know my Mamma?

Yes.

Where is she?

She is beside me. You cannot see her.

Is she a ghost?

Something like that.

Can you talk to her?

Yes.

Tell her I miss her.

I will.

I sign to her, he misses you. Somehow, the gesture communicates my meaning and Maria nods, understands because she knows what he would be feeling.

‘Tell him I love him. I will always love him. One day soon I will die and I will come to him. I do not want him to be lost here, wandering alone, not to see me, to worry. Can he go on, or must he stay here?’

Lottie joins us, translates for me.

‘I can tell him to go away. I’ve done it before. If I tell them to go away for ever, they never come back. Do you want me to do this?’

Maria looks into the air before us, her eyes searching for something they will never see in this life.

‘No. I cannot bear to lose him again.’

‘It may be kinder. They are not happy when they wander.’

‘No, let him stay.’

I nod.

Maria kneels down and thrusts her hands into the dirt. She digs quickly and efficiently, like an aardvark. The box is unearthed and she pulls it out. She twists a tiny screw on its side and it opens. Inside are many treasures: shells, pebbles, buttons, two pennies with the head of Kruger, a feather. Underneath these treasures are the watch, the penknife and a small journal, navy blue leather with a brass clasp. Maria holds it in her hand.

As I reach out to take the diary, I think of Jackson. Why his Visitor was not to be found, why he did not wander the place of his death as they all do. And I recall Tom, our fruitless search for sad Tom Winstanley who never came back. And then I know.

‘Jackson did it,’ I sign to Lottie. ‘That’s what I think the diary will tell us. He shot himself. That’s why he never came back. Just like Tom. It was nothing to do with the sea. It was suicide. That must be the rule. Suicides never return.’

Lottie’s eyes open wide, she glances out to the distance – her mind travelling through time and space back to her past, to the sea, to her youth – then her gaze returns to me. She nods. Maria hands me the book and I open it. Tiny pages, meant for appointments and reminders, filled with cursive script from the first week of the war until his death, written in smudged grey pencil. I turn to the last page with writing, and Lottie reads it out loud.

‘
This is the last will and testament of Arnold Ewart Jackson. I hereby leave all my worldly goods to my mother and father. I have no wife and children and no siblings. I leave everything to my parents, who have always been kind and good to me and proud of me even when I do not deserve it. I know I have done wrong things and I am sorry to all the people I have hurt. I hate this bloody war and I am glad to be shot of it. I am sorry for my parents that they will have to live with the shame of me doing away with myself like this. It is a cowardly thing to do, I know it. But I cannot bear this life any more, I cannot. I wish to shuffle off and not bother with it any more. I cannot live with myself, so when I have finished writing this entry, I will put down my pencil and pick up my revolver and shoot myself in the chest. I am thinking of my parents at the end, as I will not shoot myself in the mouth, it being horrible for the open casket I know they would want. So that is that. I must get to it. Goodbye then
.’

‘Come with us, Maria,’ I sign. ‘Come back with us.’

I cannot believe I am suggesting it, but it is what my hands decide to say. When Lottie translates Maria shakes her head, distracted.

I cast an urgent look at Lottie, who adds, ‘We will find a safe place for you to stay.’

‘We can bring Caleb to you.’ Now I am amazed at myself. Why on earth would I offer that, to deliver him – the one I love best – into the hands of the one I hate most? But I do offer it, and I know it to be the only right and true course of action. She looks at me as I say this. I can glimpse in her eyes that she understands me, but they glaze over and she looks past me.

Short of tying the woman to our cart, we cannot persuade her. She will not speak to us. She drifts away, beyond the cowshed and the irrigation ditches out into the wilderness, her head bowed, her arms hanging by her side. Looking for her son.

I say to Lottie, ‘I fear she will lose her mind.’

As we settle on our cart, I tell Lottie to call out to her once more, but to no avail. As we trot away the way we came, I see her turn and shuffle back towards the farm. If she stays here, I think she will starve here, die here.

On the way back we are quiet, haunted by Maria. Once on the train, we are moving closer to Caleb and away from Mimosafontein, her hold on us weakening. We discuss how to convey our good news. How will we reveal our source? We will have to tell Caleb we saw Maria, but what of his lawyer? Will the counsel reveal Maria’s whereabouts to the authorities? We cannot have that. We will have to say she left that place never to return. And how do we explain Jurie’s involvement? We decide we cannot. We must say we found Maria and she was not willing to come back for fear of imprisonment. But she had found the diary in her son’s effects and gave it to us to clear Caleb’s name. I know this is the only way, but it rankles. It will seem to Caleb and all who hear the story that she chose to save him, that she was simply waiting for someone to find her so that she could proffer this vital piece of evidence and only her justifiable fear of return to the camp prevented her heroic act. Caleb will not know that it was me, that I am the one who has the gift that solved the mystery, to talk with the dead boy and find the crucial evidence. That I saved his life. He will never know that.

From Pretoria railway station, we walk straightway to the hospital. Caleb is seated on his bed, dressed and shaven, his hair newly cut short above his ears with the curls tamed into a side parting on top. His back is upright as a board – he is stronger, and it is good to see. Beside him an older man with white hair and a stack of papers in his hand speaks earnestly. They turn and look at us together. Caleb’s eyes light as he sees us, yet dim as he fears the bad news he must tell us. But we have news for him, and for his counsel. We produce the diary, Lottie imparts all the necessary, the counsel is astounded and leaps up.

‘I cannot believe it!’ cries the lawyer. ‘What marvellous detective work, ladies. Caleb, do you hear this? Do you understand? You will be free! This proves it absolutely. You will be exonerated, old chap.’

Caleb has listened to everything with intense concentration, but not yet spoken. He takes the diary of Private A. E. Jackson and reads the final entry.

‘It is true then,’ says Caleb. He looks up at us both. ‘You have saved my life.’

‘They have, they have!’ crows the counsel and takes his leave of us, telling Caleb to remain here while he informs the court of this new evidence. He explains that it may take a few days to confirm the authenticity of Jackson’s diary, but he cannot see why all charges will not then be dropped and the trial cancelled forthwith. He bustles off between the beds and with alacrity informs each nurse and the doctor of Caleb’s news. There is much shaking of hands.

At last, Caleb smiles and seems to understand his turn of fortune. But I know his face, his eyes, very well. There is something missing there, something not quite right. When things have quietened and Lottie is conversing with the doctor about Caleb’s health, I talk with him alone.

‘How was Maria?’ he asks. ‘Where did she go?’

‘She was not well. She grieved for Jurie so. We tried to bring her back with us, Caleb, we tried and tried. But she would not come. She appeared to wander out on to the veldt, but the last we saw she turned back to her homestead. She may still be there. We lied to your counsel. We did not want him to know she might still be on the farm, in case he might inform the authorities and seek her as a witness. We wanted her to be free of all that. Did we do right, Caleb?’

He takes my hands and holds them fast. He looks at me deeply in the way I have oft hoped he would.

‘You did, Liza. You did everything right. You always have. Thank you. Thank you, my dear. My lovely girl.’

And he breaks down, he cries as I have never seen a man cry. He has hold of my hand and his hot cheeks burn against it and his warm tears soak my skin and his fist crushes my fingers. Lottie comes running and many heads are turning, bobbing, then they look away to spare him.

Within a week, Caleb is a free man. The court ruled that Arnold Jackson ‘did wilfully injure himself’. Telegrams have been dispatched to the Crowes and Mother. We receive back grateful congratulations and overflowing joy, straightened into the few clipped words permitted to the telegraphic style. Lottie and I have spent our time discussing our plans. What to do next? Caleb will soon go back to his regiment and we must move on. But to go home? Or to travel onwards, to trace our original plans backwards, by ship to Gibraltar and up through Spain and France from there, to explore Europe as we planned that lifetime before? We cannot think of reasons why not. We have achieved what we came here to do, spectacularly, beyond our wildest hopes of success. Lottie is happy, I can see that. She is content and complete – her beloved brother free – excited too about ideas of further travel and adventure. Our Grand Tour is welcome to me, but only as an escape from a difficult truth, not as an escapade to be embraced.

To me, our time in Africa has not been a thrilling quest, but a trial. I have come through it victorious yet I feel my soul has been wrung too harshly, the life of it crushed. I have saved my love, knowing full well as I did it that I have lost him too. I knew it when I first saw him in his hospital bed and he told me he loved her. Yet when he held my hands and wept, I saw his gratitude, his love for me, his acceptance of my love all these years, my dogged refusal to abandon it. He kissed my hands that day and thanked me, over and over. I believe he was truly saying, thank you for loving me, thank you for that, Liza. In that moment, the desperate need I always had for his regard, for his devotion, for his love and to possess him utterly, the rock of it I had shouldered these many years, seemed to lighten its load a very little. There was in his thanks a kind of release.

Caleb is granted leave for two weeks to recuperate. The morning of his release, he comes to us at the Germans’ guest-house.

‘I must go to Mimosafontein. I intend to spend these two weeks I have in searching for Maria. Will you help me?’

He does not need to ask. The trip to the farm is not so easy this time. The wind blows strong and we wreathe our poor heads in shawls, Caleb pulling down the brim of his cap to little avail. Just past the second farm there is a dust storm and we are obliged to blanket the pony’s head and hide under the cart until it will pass. Hiding under another blanket, all three of us crushed together, the granular wind slapping at our limbs and making us spit, we try to rest and hold on to each other. It is the closest I have been to Caleb for years and I surprise myself. I am not weakened by it, yet strengthened. I, the lonely one, the only child whose blindness and deafness enclosed her from the world, met a woman who saved her from the abyss and loved her. And here is her brother. My brother. Somehow in that moment, under the buffeted blanket, we three become a family.

A voice is calling. It is a Visitor of course. They are the only voices I will ever hear. Beneath our covering I cannot see anything but the three of us, blurred. Lottie and Caleb have their heads down, enduring the storm. The voice is there again. I sense a Visitor approach. I lift one corner of the blanket to look for it. Caleb yanks the blanket back down. I see feet appear, gnarled and buckled men’s boots standing firm in the wild weather, the purplish light leaking from the edges of his brown weather-beaten trousers. I slip out from beneath the blanket and stand up to him. It is the Boer ghost I saw on our first journey. Caleb’s fingers grasp at my leg. I step away. This Visitor is furious, tormented. The worst I have ever seen, much angrier than my gypsy. He glowers at me as if he would take me by the neck. Dust strikes my body and attacks my eyes. I use my shawl to protect my head as best I can, but I am barely able to stand. He is unaffected by the storm. He inhabits a separate vein of the spectrum, free from worldly pressures. He begins to spit words at me, Afrikaans that I cannot comprehend. He is telling me a tale of great woe. Perhaps his wife and children are in a camp, perhaps they are dead. He tears at his hair as he tells me his story, waves his arm beyond us at the land, he jabs his finger violently at my breastbone, though all I feel is the faintest graze.