1999 - Ladysmith (11 page)

He remembered her removing her arm from his own with gentle awkwardness, and then turning towards him. As she did so, the green covering that shaded her eyes fell back, revealing her pale, aristocratic face. He thought she was about to allow him to kiss her, but instead she spoke.

“You must know.”

“Must know what?” he replied.

“It is Luis who is the choice.”

Her eyes quickened with grief, and then she pulled her mantilla about her and ran away from him. Once more, from far away in Ladysmith, he beheld her figure as it fled through the flower beds in the direction of the glimmering square where, sitting on a bench outside the cathedral, her chaperone awaited her. Bewildered, he had sat down under a bit of broken tree. He must, he recalled, have sat there for hours, staring at the white pebbles, for by the time he went home it was evening and the moon above the city was a hard pebble itself and the streets had become unlovely.

Torres heaved a sigh. He should have rescued her from that hidebound world, not run away from it himself…

The vista of the years resolved itself in his barber’s mirror, where he found he was reflected. The flame of the candle, disturbed by some parvenu draught, was flickering now, playing about his and its own image. Standing up, he shook himself and, picking up his glass, went out on to the porch to finish his sherry. As he stood there, looking out into the infinite country of the night, he heard—over the whisper of the oil lamp hung by the door—the faintest pad-pad-pad.

Across the street, a shape emerged, silvered by moonlit rays. Suddenly, there at his feet, was a flap-eared, long-tailed dog. He recognized it as a pointer. His father had had one for hunting, its keen tail signalling anything from duiker to partridge; even trout once, wading into a stream near Beira. Crouching down, he put his glass on the boards and patted the animal on the head, and then went upstairs to his lodgings to find it something to eat. But there was nothing in the meat safe, and when he came back down the dog was gone. He went to bed wondering if it had been a ghost.

I
ntombi Camp was about four miles south-east of the town, down the railway line. The first train during the twenty-four-hour ceasefire had left about five o’clock the day after the meeting—a great long snake of a thing filled up with wounded lying in their green ‘coolies’, as the litters were called, and with tearful women and children, and not a few of Ladysmith’s menfolk. The moans of agony coming from beneath the green covers, as the coolies lay in the station yard waiting to be loaded, had been terrible to hear.

This, as everything, had to be recorded. Every day, Nevinson would take his report to the censor, Major Mott—a man who, according to MacDonald, ‘combined the directness of the soldier with the literary sagacity of the sub-editor’. Since the telegraph had been cut, it was increasingly difficult to get messages in or out by any means: the proposed heliograph link had not yet been established, and some correspondents were making use of the homing pigeons.

It was a method Nevinson had found to be unreliable. The only other options, so far, were the official military messengers or amateur kaffir boys. All put their lives in danger. Sometimes the enemy took the runners in for questioning; sometimes they shot them on sight, like the pigeons. As a consequence of the danger, the boys (it was a cant term, since many of them were fully grown men, and others could only be described as old) were charging £20 or more either way. This was a preposterous figure, as it was far, far more than they might earn in a year; but considering the trip might cost them their lives, he supposed it was a bargain. And it could indeed be a journey that would cost them dear, since the Boers had laid bell wires everywhere to alert them to any movement.

If an official runner was used (and under the martial law that now governed Ladysmith, it was strictly illegal to use any other), the message had to go through Major Mott. In the early days, when the British still had the telegraph wire, he had been harsh; in these present times he was merciless. The slightest suggestion in a correspondent’s copy of Imperial weakness would be struck out in red ink—even the notion that the town needed the relief column to arrive at all. As the Boers knew this was not the case, and the British knew this was not the case, and the Africans and Indians caught in the middle knew it also, the process was clearly a nonsense.

“You mean to give the impression that we’re cowering behind kopjes?” demanded Mott, on the day after the ceasefire had expired. “That the British Empire is on its knees behind an anthill?”

“Well, we are overstretched…” came Nevinson’s rejoinder.

“Certainly not! It’s a question of tactics.”

“But Major, the report will be in cipher.”

“Ciphers can be broken.”

“Oh well, cut it if you must.”

That afternoon, irritated by the Major’s intransigence, Nevinson determined that he would get himself his own African runner, independent of Mott’s man. He let it be known to the loafers who hung around outside the Royal that he would interview candidates at the cottage the following day.

When morning came, he went out before breakfast to find a line of some twenty Africans waiting for him. Wearing crumpled hats or wrapped in blankets (Ladysmith mornings could be misty, in spite of the heat to come), most seemed to him too old to make the run, or had a look about them which made him suspect that they would dump the letters.

He had almost got to the end of the line when a bony young kaffir with a melancholy face presented himself.

“What’s your name?” Nevinson asked him.

“Wellington Maseku.”

“Wellington? Well, I hope you’re as brave as the general because this is a dangerous business. You realize what it entails?”

“Yes, nkosi.”

“That if you are caught the Boers might shoot you?”

“I understand.”

“Good. I would like you to leave tonight. Your destination is Maritzburg—or, failing that, the nearest British outpost you can find. They will, in all likelihood, give you a packet of letters to return to me. Do you follow?”

“Yes, nkosi.”

“Right. Come back tonight at seven o’clock and I will give you some food for your journey, and the first part of your payment.”

Having watched the boy go off, Nevinson retired inside the cottage. He felt weary and a little bilious, a condition that did not improve the breakfast of coffee, dry bread and an old rind of Dutch cheese that was all the larder could offer him. There were also a tin of corned beef and a box of biscuits, but he decided that he ought to save those for the boy, as they would travel better than bread and cheese.

Making the rounds of his informants later that day, he found weariness everywhere. Expectation of early relief had fallen off, and sorties—the only real excitement, unless shell-dodging could be called excitement—were an increasing rarity. Townsfolk and soldiers both were so oppressed by the vagaries of bombardment that even life-saving work had become a tedious chore.

Nevinson visited Green Horse Valley in the course of his tour, and watched Tom Barnes and his chum digging shelter trenches, throwing all their frustration and boredom into every strike of spade and pickaxe. But they had evidently had a more eventful breakfast than he, if the large shell crater in the middle of the work area was anything to go by. Tom and Bob Ashmead told Nevinson the tale over a cup of tea—“Fancy a brew, sir? We ain’t got no milk, but we’ve got the leaves, the means of the boiling, and the cups to go with it.”

…They told it to him, and he wrote it up: how Tom went off to find his mess-tin, and Bob leaned on the safety rail the carpenters had erected around a newly dug trench, thinking, as he had put it, ‘I would have myself a smoke’. As he was searching his pockets for tobacco, a shell hummed over. Before he could dive into the trench, the railing—hit further along—gave way and he fell into the hole. Tom was no less lucky. Once the bombardment had ceased, he came to their tent, to find it rent and tumbled over, raked by shrapnel. The mess-tin he had been on his way to find had been squashed flat. The occasion was only lightened by the sight of Lieutenant Norris who, in the midst of taking his customary morning bath, had suffered an upset. A shell had struck a tree, bounced off a rock without exploding and, rolling into the camp, turned over the bathtub with him inside it.

Said Bob: “You should have seen ‘im there, standing by his tent naked as the day he was born, holding the metal bathtub in his two hands and staring at the dent in it.”

The dent in it
…wrote Nevinson in his journal that evening. It had begun to rain, and the tin roof above him was pitter-pattering with the noise of it. How strange it was, the way these stories possessed him…no, not just him, but all of them in Ladysmith, as if in each individual death or hairsbreadth escape, everyone was given a foretaste of their own demise, or of some extravagant piece of personal history on which they would be able to look back and say, ‘I was there, this happened’. But which of us—Nevinson wrote the words down, and felt a black tremor in his soul—will be here at the end? It was a drama with all the makings of a Greek tragedy, yet it was already dragging on too long for the modern stage.

His train of thought was interrupted by a knock at the door. He went to answer it, and was almost surprised to see standing there the young African boy he had commissioned that morning. He hadn’t really forgotten that he had told him to come back but—between shell and the story of shell, shell and the image of shell—it had half slipped his mind.

“I am here, nkosi.”

“Good, good. Hang on there a moment.” Nevinson looked at him in the doorway, dripping with rain. “Actually, you had better come in.”

The boy took a step forward, and stood there mutely in the hall.

“I’ll just go and get the packet,” Nevinson said. “I suppose I had better wrap it in view of the weather. In fact, it might be better if you go early in the morning, once things have dried out; otherwise the wet might show your tracks. Or you’ll trip on the wires. You know about the wires?”

“Yes, nkosi.”

“Up to you.”

“The morning is when I will go. Before sunrise.”

“Right. Come through.”

The boy followed him into the kitchen. Moving his journal aside, Nevinson took out his pocket knife and cut a piece out of the oilskin cloth that covered the table. Then he fetched the cardboard package of reports and letters (he had collected several on his rounds that afternoon, including one from Tom Barnes) and tied the oilskin around it. This he then gave to the boy, who stood there immobile for a moment, as if puzzled, and then tucked the oilskin packet between his black chest and his rag of shirt.

“I’ve got you some food, as I promised,” Nevinson said, and retrieved the tin of bully beef and the packet of biscuits from the depleted larder. The boy stuffed them into his trouser pockets.

“And here’s the money.” He handed him £20 in Bank of England notes. “You’ll get the rest when you come back. All right then? You’re not going to run off? I’ll catch up with you if you do, believe me.”

“Don’t worry. You can trust me very well. You will see my face again.”

Nevinson led him through to the front door. “Well, good luck then.”

“Thank you, nkosi,” the boy said.

On a sudden impulse, Nevinson held out his hand. Wellington took it and they shook, then the boy turned round and trudged off into the clouded moonlight, his feet slushing through the mud that the evening rain had brought. As the thin figure disappeared, Nevinson realized how cold the boy’s hand had been: it was as if it had left an icy imprint upon his own palm.

It didn’t surprise him, as he was turning to come back inside, to hear a shell burst: they were generally now given a few at bedtime, to make sure no one slept too soundly. He stopped and waited for it to fall—somewhere near the Town Hall, he reckoned, or maybe the Royal Hotel.

On going up to bed later that night, he looked in on Steevens, who had been rather out of sorts the last few days. But the
Mail
–man was asleep. Nevinson stood by the open door for a second, listening to his colleague’s regular breathing.

The morrow saw a fuller bombardment, during which all sat down to be shelled. Running for shelter, Nevinson saw a shell burst and a great splash of red suddenly appear on the window of Major Mott’s office. With the bombs still falling all around, he rushed inside, expecting to find struck down the man who had struck him out so often. Then—as he looked from side to side—he felt ashamed that such a thought, at such a time, could have passed through his mind. But as it turned out, it didn’t matter. The ruined office was empty, and the ‘blood’ was only a pot of red copying ink that had been thrown off the upturned table and dashed against the window.

So that day the censor escaped the unconscious wish of the correspondents—although as he had been on the lavatory at the time, it didn’t really count as a hair’s-breadth escape. Some did escape by such a measure. That night, a shell entered the room in which Bobby Greenacre, the town scamp, was sleeping. His father rushed through smoke and masonry dust into the room, to find the boy absolutely unhurt.

It seemed, however, that the Boers were intent on a sequel. Bella Kiernan went round in the morning to congratulate the parents on this lucky escape, only to see Bobby’s pet rabbit cut in half by a shell splinter as she left.

It was a sign of the deteriorating food supplies that even this mess of fur and flesh was taken to his tent by a soldier for stew—and had Bella known that the soldier was Trooper Barnes, it might have given her pause in her precipitous imaginings of some kind of life with him.

Or perhaps not. Hunger, until now an uncommon experience in Ladysmith (among whites at any rate), created a certain moral latitude. Walking past Star’s Bakery that afternoon, and seeing Mrs Star kneading dough in the window, gave Bella an intense desire for freshly baked bread. She stood watching Mrs Star’s hands working the dough in the wide tray, folding the white paste over and over, stood smelling the scent of baking bread coming out of the vent above the door—and could not resist going inside.