This Life (14 page)

She had grown up in Worcester: her parents were both dead and of the six daughters the eldest was married, while the youngest lived with her to help with the children; two lived in town and worked as seamstresses, and the remaining two became governesses, and that was how Miss Le Roux came to us in her dusty black dress, with her travelling-case and her trunk, recommended to Father by old Dominee himself, as she often stated emphatically, as if it gave her special standing. She could not have been much older than twenty, a stout, giggling young woman in a black mourning frock, with her effusiveness and excitability and her hiccuping laugh, with her nerves and swoons and sudden tears, her eau de cologne and her vial of smelling salts.

She returned to the Roggeveld with us and the big bed in my room was given to her, while I shared the narrow cot in the corner with Maans; she unpacked her things and hung her black dresses, her black caps and her black cape on the nails in the wall. We spent all day together, she and I, and at night in the dark I listened to her regular breathing in the big bed. She brought along writing paper and quill
pens and a knife to sharpen the points and readers in Dutch and English: I knew how to read and write after a fashion, but she made me practise anew and taught me to spell, she read me poems and made me recite them, I learned arithmetic and she told me Bible stories – it was probably all she knew, but it was more than most people in our parts did in those days. I was a quick learner, she said in generous moments, and assured Father that I was a clever girl. Only with sewing and other needlecraft she had no success, in spite of her patience and perseverance, for I was an awkward child and no matter how often she made me unpick the uneven stitches and start over, it only resulted in the cloth becoming even more crumpled. I learned what she could teach me and listened to the lengthy accounts about her sisters and the house where she grew up, and at night I listened to her regular breathing in the dark, but she remained a stranger whose presence I endured silently as she hovered over me, gushing and breathless.

Of course she must have been lonely. Had anyone warned her of the remoteness of the Roggeveld; could she have guessed how isolated our lives were? But even if she had been warned, what alternative did she have? Her parents were dead and somehow she had to make a living, and she was probably only too grateful for the old Dominee’s recommendation. Father was kind, as he was to everyone, but it was Mother who determined the course of events in the house, and to Mother Miss Le Roux was a hireling who had to remain aware of her inferior station and her dependency. Could this young woman’s education have unsettled her, and was that why she treated her so dismissively? Who will ever know what went on in Mother’s thoughts? Mother reacted to the long stories, the nerves and the fainting spells with a disdainful silence, and it was only Miss Le Roux’s skill with the needle that gave her a certain status. Thus, after our lessons she hemmed the innumerable sheets and pillowcases that would be used
by our family for many years to come, on the farm as well as later in the town house: Mother died in a bed made up with sheets Miss Le Roux had sewed and after Maans got married, Stienie still used that linen for a long time. In the kist where our linen was stored, the bedding piled up without explanation, just as the land and the sheep flocks were accumulated silently and steadily during those years, in preparation for an unknown yet alluring future.

How could she have been happy with us? On a board across her knees she wrote long letters to her family in the Boland, but how often could she send off those letters? I do not know. And what passerby ever brought along a reply? But sometimes a letter did arrive somehow, and I remember the tears and the excitement, and the long stories she told me about this one or that one, and about the births and deaths in the distant world beyond the mountains where she came from. When a rare visitor arrived, she was always excited too and, giggling and breathless, she presented herself in the voorhuis uninvited, to join the company. It was usually a young man from one of the neighbouring farms who had ridden over with notice of a funeral or a visit from the Dominee, and the way she hovered and fussed made him uncomfortable, and long after the visitor had left, after the sound of the horse’s hoofs had died away and the familiar silence had taken hold of the farm once more, she remained restless and agitated. The young men in our parts were unfamiliar with the Boland girls and their ways; she frightened them away with her unbecoming eagerness when they called on us, and when we attended church services in the district, it was clear that they were avoiding her. But what other future was there for her?

I see that emptiness now, I recognise that loneliness, though I still do not quite understand it, but at the time I was only aware that she was making herself ridiculous with her fluttering and her airs in the company of the young men who were invited into the house for a
bowl of coffee, and with all her questions and insinuations after their departure. Over the untidy, irregular stitches of my sewing, I studied her in silence, as deprecating and scornful of her weakness as Mother herself, and I decided that I would never behave like that; that I would never be like her.

What did I mean by that resolution, the silent disapproval of a mere child who knew nothing about other people or about life? Even today I am not quite sure. I would never be as dependent as she, I thought – on her brother-in-law, on the Dominee, on Mother’s goodwill and Father’s wages, on the favour of any random young man; I would never deliver myself into the power of others the way she did, fluttering around an embarrassed young caller in the voorhuis who was trying his best to escape. I was already learning to be silent and to hide my feelings; in due course I learned not to feel at all, and with practice and experience my skills improved. I was a quick and intelligent girl, and I learned fast.

For a year life continued in this way. Perhaps Miss Le Roux had been hired for a year, or perhaps there was simply no chance for her to leave the Roggeveld until the end of autumn when we moved down to the Karoo again. When the time came, she was very excitable and high-spirited for a while and she spoke of the Boland and her people and her friends more than ever, while preparing and packing for her departure. Down in the Karoo she embraced me tearfully and told me never to forget her, and I stood there with Maans’s hand in mine and watched as she and Father left in the cart for the place where she would be fetched. It was over, I thought impassively; but it was not. One day before the end of winter Father fetched her again and Miss Le Roux returned to us with her trunk and her travelling-case; she came back to the Roggeveld with us, and unpacked her things again in the room she had left a few months earlier, and hung her black dresses on the
nails in the wall. She was quieter and more subdued, the moments of excitement rarer, and after each outburst she withdrew into herself again; she did not speak of the Boland as often as before and did not write so many letters. Our lessons were resumed where we had left off and nothing was said, only Mother was cooler and more distant than ever. She was not free to choose what she wanted to do with her life, and it probably turned out to be the only possibility for her, to return for another year to the solitary farm, the lonely house, and the company, all day long, of a silent, critical girl and a toddler.

She did her work thoroughly and dutifully, I must admit, and however restless and moody she may have been at times, in her lessons she was painfully precise: what she taught me I retained, and remember to this day. “Remember, your late father paid dearly for your education!” old Oom Flippie Marais chided once, years later when I was a grown woman, in the hallway of our town house one late afternoon shortly after Father’s death. “He paid a lot of money for your education,” he snapped, “with governesses from the Boland and what not! Who else in these parts had as much?” He must have come to visit Mother that afternoon, for he was an elder in the church and they lived in town, but what was the reprimand about, and why was the old man so upset, a spiteful, envious old man who came upon me in the half-light of the hallway where I was not expecting him? But he was right: who among the people of that generation was as educated as I, a mere girl? Father paid her in gold coins, I remember, and she locked away the money in a tin box in her trunk; and what she taught me I retained all my life, everything except the sewing and the handicrafts.

The mourning period for her parents had long passed, and when she was in the Boland some family member gave her a brightly-coloured frock – why do I suddenly see it so clearly, the grey material with the small, regular pattern of purple flowers? She planned to remake it for
herself, and from time to time she would suddenly throw herself into the task resolutely and work at it until late, using fine, strong, tiny stitches, her head close to the candle-stub, oblivious to all else in the world. A stiff, glossy fabric with a pattern of stripes and flowers, round and round, and she mentioned a white collar she wanted to make. Why did she rush so to finish it? For what occasion and for whose benefit did she want to wear it? But the next minute it was as if she had lost interest or hope, and for weeks the unfinished frock would lie folded in her trunk once again. I never saw her wear it: I suppose she first had to wear out her black mourning outfits. It must have been at this time, during the second year Miss Le Roux spent with us, that I went to our bedroom one evening to fetch something. It was twilight but not yet dark, so that I did not take a candle, and in the half-light I saw her: motionless at the window with the dress on her lap, needle in hand. She was startled when I entered so unexpectedly and averted her head quickly and brushed her hand across her face. I was scared and shy and pretended not to see or understand; with my back to her I stooped to search for something in the chest in the corner, feeling around in the dark, not remembering what I had come to fetch, and again I promised myself, blindly and uncomprehendingly, with my face to the dark wall, unaware of what I wanted to avoid or how I would do so, that this would not happen to me.

Thus Miss Le Roux spent two years with us in all, and the next time we went down to the Karoo for the winter, she and Father left in the cart once more, after which we did not see her again. I must have been fourteen or fifteen by that time, for soon afterwards I was confirmed and considered fully educated: I could read fluently in Dutch and English, even the old-fashioned black letters in our family Bible, and give the meaning of most words I encountered, I could write evenly in round, open letters on unlined paper, with few spelling
errors, and I could do arithmetic on paper as well as mentally, and calculate amounts in pounds, shillings and pence. I was the youngest in the confirmation class in Worcester and I knew more than any of the other young people, boys or girls, so that the old Dominee praised me in front of all the others and held up Father and Mother as an example to all parents in the Roggeveld. The other young people avoided me more than ever, however, as if I were a strange apparition, and it was almost as if they felt an animosity towards me that I could not understand. But what did I care about their antagonism? I had been confirmed and we returned to the farm and I would have nothing more to do with them.

When she left, Miss Le Roux left behind the books from which she had taught me, for Father had probably paid for them, and she counselled me not to forget what I had learned. The books remained in my room and I read in them regularly, without Mother ever commenting, though I know she was not fond of books or book-learning and never liked to see anyone read in our home. I helped her in the house and looked after Maans, and when he was about five or six, Mother said it was time for me to teach him what I knew, so that was added to my duties. I taught him to read and write and do arithmetic, everything I knew, and from time to time Father got in touch with a Dominee in Worcester and had a few more books or a case of pens and writing paper delivered. He was an easy-going child who tried his best and gave me no trouble, even though he did not learn very well, and I did not mind sharing my own knowledge with him. Personally I had never seen much use in my education, for it was more than was needed to be confirmed, and otherwise it only served to set me apart from the other young people at Nagmaal and church meetings, the boys staring at me awkwardly and the giggling girls with their arms around each other turning away from me.

Why do I relive all these things? Why do I remember how, in the late afternoon, towards evening, Maans and I would sit on a bench in front of the house, he spelling out the letters in his reading-book while I was busy with some task? The child bent over his work and the peace of the late afternoon, the wall of the house still warm behind my back with the precious heat of the day, the time when the cows came home to be milked and the shadows stretched across the yard – why do I remember this? The child asks me something so that I bend down to help him: I look up, and across his bowed head I see the veld stretched out in the evening light and the horizon changing colour, and I realise with sudden clarity that this is why they gave me an education, why Miss Le Roux was fetched from the Boland and paid in gold coins, why Father ordered the books and the cases of writing paper from the Cape: not for me, their daughter, but for the grandson and heir, so that when he was old enough I would be properly equipped to take on the task of his education.

What else did I expect then, and what reason did I have to be surprised at this insight? In some way I must have believed that it was for my own sake, their only daughter, their only remaining child, as a sign of affection that seldom found any other way of expression; but it was a foolish and reckless belief, for surely I had no right to expect more than the food, clothing and shelter that were granted to me? I still remember the desolate feeling that came over me as I sat beside the child on the bench in front of the house, staring at the veld stretching away to the horizon in the evening sun, wide and unbroken: the bench and the child beside me, the bowl on my lap – what was I doing? – and the emptiness before me in the evening light. Then I realised again how alone I really was.