The Visitors (27 page)

Listen
,
I say. He stops.

Listen carefully. You can hear the voices of your loved ones. Can you hear them?

His eyes express confusion, then disdain. He begins to rant again.

Stop shouting and listen. If they still live, you will hear them.

His face falls serious and he cocks an ear, looks up askance. His eyes widen, his mouth lifts and he is smiling. I cannot hear their voices. They must be alive. He calls to them, he points at me and laughs. He questions me in Afrikaans. I believe he is asking if I can hear them too.

You can hear them and that is all that matters.

He speaks to them but soon realises they cannot hear him. Yet he is content to listen to them for a time. I will never know what he heard, but I can read in his face the elixir effect their voices had on him.

Caleb is climbing out from beneath the cart.

Do you want to go now? Do you wish to rest?

My Visitor nods his head. His eyes are so tired.

Go now. Go for ever and never come back.

He turns into the wrath of the wind, yet not a hair on his head lifts. He looks his last across his beloved country and he is gone.

Caleb is beside me and grasps my shoulders, turning me so I can read his lips.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ he yells and bundles me back under.

Lottie peers from beneath her shawl. One look from me and she knows instantly what I have been about. Caleb is back under, complaining, but I am not looking at him. Lottie’s eyebrows are asking me if I am well. I nod and smile gently.

The storm passes and we go on to Mimosafontein. We find Maria there, slumped in the corner of the cow barn. I know for a second they think she is dead, but I know different. Her Visitor is not here. She is only asleep. When she opens her eyes and sees her Caleb, she smiles at him and her dirty, tear-streaked face transforms, she becomes the Maria he fell in love with. I will not lie to you, there is a thorny kernel in me that envies them their love, the seed of the angry child I once was who pulled out my hair in clumps and would say now, why her? Why not me? But it is a dwarf, not a giant, and if I can quash it for now perhaps one day I will tame it.

Caleb puts his arm around her, helps her towards the cart. As we leave the barn, white-violet light catches my eye and I see Jurie is here, kicking about in the dust, hands in his pockets.

Hello
,
he says.

Are you lonely?

Yes, I am.

Maria has stopped. I look up and she is staring at me.

‘I will speak with this one,’ Maria says to Caleb, nodding towards me. ‘Alone.’

‘Later,’ he says. ‘Plenty of time.’

‘No, now. She knows why.’

Maria glances back at the cowshed. She nods at me. I understand. I walk with her to the barn. We go inside, so the others cannot see us.

Maria says, ‘Is Jurie here?’

I gesture outside. Then Jurie appears in the doorway.

Are you here to stay?
he asks me.

Maria sees me watching him.

‘Release him,’ she says.

I look deeply at her, frown, nod.

‘Please do it. Tell him I will always love him. Say goodbye for me.’

Go now, Jurie. Your Mamma says she loves you always. She says goodbye. Go now. Go for ever and never come back.

Jurie says nothing. A gust from the veldt takes him, like breath to a taper.

‘Is he gone?’

I nod.

‘Thank you,’ says Maria.

She takes my hands, enfolds them.

When we come back to the cart, I see Lottie has spoken with Caleb. He does not ask any questions, just helps Maria into the cart, wraps a blanket around her and holds her close. Within minutes, she sleeps.

Lottie and I sit at the front. Nobody speaks. As we approach the sad shell of the first ruined farm, I feel a tap on my shoulder. Caleb is smiling at me. Maria lies across his lap, still sleeping. Lottie looks ahead, directing the cart.

He signs to me, ‘Why did you never tell me of your gift?’

‘Do you believe it now?’

‘If you tell me it is true.’

‘It is.’

‘Then I believe it.’

We smile.

On our return, we bring Maria to our guest-house.

‘We have a visitor for you,’ says Lottie to the Germans. They have no love for the British, we know that, but they are devoted to the Boer cause. They take her in and will protect her. They will provide food and shelter until she regains her health. Caleb knows he can return to service, visit her on leave, and one day – who knows when – the war will end and, if both survive, he will surely return to her. Whether he will journey to England, see his family, arrange his affairs, this we do not know. That is his business and, as ever, he keeps it close. Perhaps he will merely disappear from his garrison one night and the Germans will wake one morning to find her gone. That is what I would do.

After that day in the Cape cart swaying back from Mimosafontein, where Caleb and I smiled at each other one last time unobserved, we have not had another second alone together. He spends his fortnight’s leave at the guest-house daily, tending to Maria every waking minute. It is quite a test of my new-found peace with him to see him attend to her with such devotion. But the times Lottie, Caleb and I spend together as she sleeps – chatting and strolling, like the old days on Whitstable promenade or down the hop lanes after picking work in the warm evenings at home – are like medicine for my malady. We find some of our old ease in those hours; we are companions again. As Maria recovers, Lottie and I grow to know her a little, to see the strength returning to those clouded eyes of the woman Caleb first met. We edge to a kind of closeness in our discussion of the Visitors, who fascinate Maria; she quizzes me about them most engagingly. By the time we plan to go, just before Caleb’s leave is up, I have an understanding of how he came to be captivated by her, most of all her intense and searching mind. I cannot say I find her easy, but I respect and admire Maria Uitenweerde. She pats my hand when we say our goodbyes at the guest-house, and mouths very clearly, ‘I hope we are like sisters now.’

My leave-taking with Caleb is public; naturally Lottie is there and even dear Wallis accompanies us to Pretoria railway station to wish us well. It is a busy train with much pushing and shoving on the platform, from which Caleb and Wallis shield us as they lead us to our carriage. There is no still moment to sign a thoughtful phrase to Caleb, but in the seconds before the men leave us to our seats and we have all said goodbye and good luck and farewell and we shall write, he takes my hand swiftly and silently spells in our old way one word for me: ‘Sorry.’ The same word my mother laid out for me that first time we ‘spoke’. I shake my head and look hard at him, grasp his hand and try to spell, ‘No.’ I will not have that be our legacy, I do not want his pity. But he turns and leaves the carriage and I feel I cannot speak to Lottie of it. Instead, I sit and stare from the window at the bright rainbow of foreign lives and the ghostly blue of the lost Visitors, seeking Caleb in the crowd but not finding him, as we lurch forward towards Cape Town, our ship and the ocean beyond.

I sit on a wrought-iron bench beside the lake, beneath the shedding blossom of a cherry tree, contemplating the looking-glass water and the Evian shore beyond. The Alps are masked by morning mist. Only a hint between the fleeting clouds suggests there are mountains there at all. But soon the spring sun will rise and burn away the fog, revealing the startling solidity of this view, ancient stone thrusting up from the restless earth. Beside the lake drift dozens of Visitors, solitary and aimless, staring across at the mountains or eyeing me curiously. I have spoken with many of them since we arrived. My spell in Africa taught me treasured lessons about my Visitors. Now each time I converse with a new Visitor, I tell them if they listen very carefully, they may be able to hear the voices of their loved ones. Some can and it gives them great pleasure. It is a balm to their restlessness which cures their distress. Then I always ask,
Do you wish to move on?
I can help them, if they want it. Many agree and I always sense a release of tension, cool air after a thunderstorm, a sigh of the soul as they depart. After a long day’s journey, they can rest now.

I pull my shawl closer about my shoulders. Lausanne stirs, the baker’s boy scooting past on his bike, his basket full of warm Swiss pastries for delivery, the restaurants still sleeping after their late night, their shutter-eyes closed whitely to the morning. Lottie slumbers too, within our pistachio room in the Château D’Ouchy behind me. We may stay here a while. We have explored Geneva, the little towns along the lake, neat Morges with its flower-dotted parks, quaint Vevey with shadowed lanes of boutiques to stroll through, and the Château de Chillon with its grisly dungeon, frequented by scores of despondent Visitors. I helped many there. And surrounding it all, the Alps; so still, so set in their flinty way, their mighty permanence gazing proudly at their double in the glassy Lac Leman. I am very small.

I sit solitary beside the lake to read a letter I received last evening. The concierge gave it to me when Lottie was upstairs, and as I saw its hand I pocketed it and kept it a secret. I saved it until now, for I have given up much in the last year. Now I want this one gift of my own. A letter from Caleb. The first letter I have ever received from Africa addressed only to me. We have had communications for the two of us over these months. Caleb’s regiment, the East Kents, were sent home in May 1901, their service at an end. We hear Wallis went back to his work in Kent as a painter and decorator. Caleb chose to stay in Africa, and Maria recovered her health and joined him in Pretoria. The war drags its stony wake of chaos into the new year of 1902, the Boer bitter-enders fighting on as Caleb predicted they would. Meanwhile, we pass gaily on in our Grand Tour, through Spain and France, Italy and Austria, to Switzerland. Caleb and Maria returned to her farm. They spend their days reconstructing, pulling weeds, digging wells and trenches, sowing seeds and tending sheep. He is a farmer again. He has found his home at last and builds it himself, stone by stone. He wrote last in January to tell us that Maria is with child. Lottie is delighted to be an aunt. It is good to hear such happy news in his letters to Lottie and me. Yet this one is a letter for me alone, the second only to my first letter almost a decade ago, a child with a doll who had just learned to write and she read of oysters and the sea. In my lap lies my spectacles case. I put on my reading glasses and notice, as ever, that the Visitors disappear when I put them on. I am alone now.