John Kitching knew about flying, war and rugby. But nothing about women. He had no idea his bride wasn’t a virgin when he married her in the Addington chapel and they walked out in an explosion of confetti under an arch of rugby balls held high by his teammates. The joyous photograph was on the front page of the
Sunday Tribune;
she wore slipper satin with a sweetheart neckline and carried a bouquet of white chrysanths and Michaelmas daisies. The reception was at the Hotel Edward, just along the Marine Parade. After five hours of Grand Mousseux, vol-au-vents and bad jokes, the bridegroom was too sozzled to manage more than a fumbled embrace and, ‘I love you, babe,’ before passing out on the bed in the honeymoon suite.
So she didn’t need to worry about his finding out – only that he’d notice her grief for the child she’d had to give away. Even when the birth of Hugh, and later Lin, began to fill the terrible void, her first morning thought was, I hope my other boy is happy and well. Until the day she opened the front door to a young man who looked a bit like Hugh, and blurted, ‘Are you Mrs Kitching? If so, I think you’re my mother.’
Shirley has never told anyone about the British diplomat who phones, always during the day, from distant embassies. It’s a secret that fills her with a glow of achievement under the radar of John’s stardom. Maybe now that he’s gone, she can slip away and visit her firstborn and the grandkids she only knows from photographs?
Lin sits fretting about the work she’s had to put on hold during the long weeks of her father’s illness. She’s known at the archives as a researcher who demands excellence and is short on patience. ‘She should get a life,’ her colleagues grumble when she pushes them too hard.
‘What else can you expect of someone with no kids and such a father? Plus a shitty divorce. She’s bad at choosing men.’ The woman who says this often arrives at work with bruises.
‘And now she’s joined us in the morgue.’
It’s a regular joke. Lin’s oral history team assembles genealogies using voice recordings by Zulu elders reciting their tribal lineages, supported by video footage and photos of the old people in their home surroundings. Many have been filmed with the professional digital Nikon she’d bought with her divorce settlement, which also covered the advanced photography training for her archival work.
Mtshali is one of her subjects. He sits in the second pew behind the family wearing a new suit and waistcoat from Abjee’s in Grey Street, as befits the induna of his clan. He had written his lineage for her on lined jotter paper, explaining, ‘The Mtshali were proud people who defied Shaka, so he had all the male members of the chief’s family put to death, except for my great-grandfather who got away.’
‘Did your father know him?’
He shook his head. ‘It was very long ago.’
That unwritten history is what matters now, not the concerns of retired white ancestry bloodhounds who plague the archivists with queries about documents to back their genealogies. Lin feels mired in family myths about immigrant grandparents when the crucial need is to concentrate on Zulu lineage research, recording it before the old people die. Remembering her father’s last words in his diary, she berates herself for not having recorded his stories too.
What had he meant by ‘Life is a game of chance’? He’d always seemed so focused, achieving goals most men only dream about. All she’s managed to achieve is a degree, a corporate position that didn’t last, and relationships that failed. And he’d said a hard thing towards the end. ‘Listen to me, Linnie. You stuffed up your marriage and haven’t given me a grandson like Hugh did. You need a kick-start. Dump that dreary job. Real life, that’s the ticket, eh?’
When J J pronounces, even in a faltering voice, he’s used to getting his way. Photographs are real, she thinks. After this funeral she’ll see that Mum is settled – maybe Barbara can help? – resign from the archives, grab her camera and travel. She needs more than a kick-start, she needs a break from her narrowing life.
‘Lord, let me know my end and the number of my days, that I may be certified how much longer I have to live,’ rasps Reverend George.
And never breathe a word about your loss.
– R
UDYARD
K
IPLING
, If
Shirley was in labour for fourteen hours before she gave birth to the child she had already signed away. The pain was much worse than she’d expected, profound waves of agony, unstoppable as tides. She told her nursing friends afterwards that it was a pity doctors didn’t go through childbirth; they’d never understand how relentless pain could be.
Exhausted, and spilling warm slippery afterbirth, she heard the midwife say, ‘It’s a boy, dear. Do you want to hold him, or shall we whisk him off?’
‘No,’ she mumbled.
‘You don’t want to see him?’
‘No. Yes. I don’t know.’ All along, she’d thought of the coming baby as an inconvenient stranger she had to put up with for a while before moving on with her life. Hanging around in the unwed mothers’ home was like being in limbo.
‘Just hold him a mo, dear.’ The midwife’s kind sweaty face was haloed by the lights above her. ‘You’ll regret it if you don’t. I know about these things. We’ll put you in a side room for a while.’
The lights and clattering theatre noises receded. Shirley felt a swaddled bundle being laid in the crook of her arm, and looked down. The elfin face had unfocused blue eyes and a delicate pointed chin. The tiny nose was perfect. Dark wavy strands of hair were plastered against his head. This was her boy. Her son. His translucent little mouth made sucking movements as he turned his head towards her, rooting for a breast. She felt a surge of love as powerful as the pain and would have lain there gazing at him forever if someone hadn’t taken him away.
Groote Schuur gave her two weeks before summoning her to start her new job in a ward of post-operative orthopaedic patients.
‘Hard work gives you no time to think,’ the matron said. ‘Knuckle down and forget, Sister Barnes.’
They were hustled into a hall with rustic pine walls bristling with antlers and horned skulls and glassy-eyed stag heads, mounted shotguns and fans of daggers with tusk handles. Sailing across the top of a grand piano was a fleet of photos of a heavy-lidded blonde woman and men in hunting gear, all striking genial poses for the camera.
T
HE BISHOP
’
S FINGERS ARE TAPPING AGAINST HIS COPE
, giving the purple brocade an irritable shimmer.
Clyde mutters, ‘See that, Mr P?’
‘He’s not used to keeping quiet in his own church. It’s the Kitching son who wanted the township priest to officiate too.’ Purkey gestures towards Hugh. ‘He’s married to that black girl sitting next to him.’
‘You serious?’ Clyde’s ear horns give off reddish glints as he shifts his eyes to Nelisiwe. ‘But she’s not bad, eh?’
‘If that’s your fancy.’ Purkey says he’s not a racialist, but he doesn’t think going with black girls is safe any more. And anyway, he’s married.
‘I wouldn’t mind. She’s hot.’ Clyde clatters his tongue stud on his teeth.
Chins wobbling, Purkey jabs his arm, ‘Watch yourself, sonny. Straight face and eyes front. Mr Digby Senior’s rules.’
‘Jeez.’ Clyde settles his stiffened cock back between his balls.
Reverend George looks up from his text and ack-acks the next sentence along the two rows of Moths, as if accusing them of flaunting their medals. ‘Every man living is altogether vanity!’
‘He’s left a bit out,’ Lofty says.
‘How do you know?’ Kenneth is sitting next to him, dapper in a new blazer and grey cashmere trousers, his medals polished and hanging just so.
‘You go to enough mates’ funerals, it sinks in.’ Lofty’s medals are tarnished and hang from ribbons with the dusty look of old tents.
‘I don’t attend these things unless it’s unavoidable. Can’t do with churches and clergy. Look at the way the bishop lords it over the other chap.’
Lofty thinks,
He
can talk about lording it. Never comes to Moth meetings unless there’s a vote, then holds forth and buggers off straight after the voting. Fish out of water at the Shellhole. Barracuda to our sardines. Comes from living up there at La Lucia and hobnobbing with sugar barons and captains of industry. Still, he hasn’t forgotten about being in the bag during the war. The Nazi souvenirs are there.
He looks down at the gnarled fingers of the retired advocate’s right hand and says, ‘It’s tempting fate, slating priests in a church. God might sizzle you with a thunderbolt.’
‘That’s complete crap, Lofty. We tempted fate and got away with it. Why are we sitting here when so many others have gone? I thought J J would be the last. He was always so fit. Such a hero.’
Lofty is silenced by the sarcasm. He wasn’t at Moosburg, but is one of the few who know J J’s secret. Now is not the time to drag it up, though. He needs to concentrate on what he’s got to say in three minutes flat about his Moth comrade and all the young men who died early. He wonders how the holy Joes will respond to his roll-call, and how they can ever reconcile their grand ideas about God with the callous obscenity of war.
Retief Alberts shifts on the rubber ring cushioning his wheelchair, hoping he can make it through the service. He has to wear protective underpants now and the muscles of his buttocks are thinning under his hip bones. He shouldn’t have left the wheelchair, but was determined to walk with J J up the aisle. This will be his last public appearance after years of matches, speeches, rallies, and National Party meetings where the tone gradually changed from patriotic fervour to a domineering self-satisfaction that made him ashamed of his people, who are now superseded by the oppressed and complaining about being oppressed themselves. Again. God in die hemel, Afrikaners have a lot answer for. Not as much as the Germans, though.
He grew up with Germans, Northern Natal farm boys schooled at Hermannsburg near Greytown. Tough kids with shaved heads and veld sores daubed with gentian violet. Impatient riders at one with their horses, stumbling up stony koppies where they made fires to cook guinea fowl shot with the rifles their fathers gave them when they turned twelve. He’d also been given a rifle so he could be one of them; his father taught him to use it, warning only, ‘I hold you responsible for your own safety, Retief. If your friends are not disciplined enough to be trusted, you will come home. A Boer does not take unnecessary chances.’
That he would not have to fight against friends was his only solace when he wasn’t allowed to join up. Now he wishes that he’d made more friends because there are so few left. If it weren’t for his beautiful Bonsmara cattle – three parts Shorthorn to five parts Afrikaner – it would be lonely sitting on the farm under the brooding bulk of Majuba, his wife long dead, and his family scattered to the cities. They no longer want to farm. The love of the land is being lost.
Herbie Fredman looks at Retief. Poor old guy, he thinks. Even past eighty, Herbie will not admit to being old. He feels like a spring chicken most days and can still pleasure his wife, their lovemaking as familiar and comforting as a pair of old leather gloves clasping together.
He knows he’s lucky. Always was. First being dragged out of the burning plane by J J, and again when the SS Hauptsturmführer at Stalag Luft VII tapped the SAAF wings on his flying jacket with a riding crop, which he jerked towards a train heading for a labour camp with no gas ovens.
‘For man walks in a vain shadow and heaps up riches,’ accuses Reverend George, glaring at Kenneth.
‘He trimmed another verse to get that dig in,’ Lofty murmurs.
Kenneth shrugs. ‘Water off my back. Lefties are all the same. Like that boy of J J’s there.’ He inclines his head towards Hugh in the family pew. ‘No chip off the old block. Just an academic who takes up with a younger black woman after his wife leaves him. Married her to make a point, if you ask me. She won’t last.’
‘J J couldn’t understand it. Told me he thought Hugh was puss-happy.’
Lofty smiles at the memory of J J muttering over the photograph taken after the registry office ceremony to which only Lin had been invited. Shirley had been hurt but J J said, ‘If they didn’t want us there, stuff them,’ and to make up for the snub, swept her and Barbara into Durban for dinner at the Royal Hotel.
Nelisiwe was a surprise to her in-laws: self-assured, shrewd and affectionate with Hugh, and she hadn’t been impressed by the double-storey house overlooking the sea. ‘But it’s so big,’ was the first thing she’d said when he brought her to meet them; after shaking his father’s hand she’d stood back, appraising.
‘We wanted the children to grow up in a garden with access to the beach. They loved swimming.’ It was J J’s standard reply to envious comments.
‘Lucky kids. I grew up in a shack with an outside tap.’
J J went on, ‘We needed a house with entertainment rooms. My job demanded a lot of socialising. Dinners, and so forth.’
‘I heard. Hugh told me about the cook – Mtshali, nè? I’m looking forward to meeting him. My mother was a domestic worker.’
‘Was?’
‘She’s late, I’m sorry to say.’ Nelisiwe went up the steps to join Hugh who stood hovering by the front door, unsure which parent to try and placate first: his mother, who had refused to talk to him since the wedding, or his bemused father in the driveway.
Kenneth raises the Order of Service leaflet to shield his mouth from the priest and says to Lofty, ‘Hugh made it his mission in life to do the opposite of what his father wanted. It’s a reflex with boys.’
‘J J can’t have been easy.’
‘No. It’s tough living up to a hero. My father got a DSO for rescuing two wounded men at Delville Wood and never let me forget it. Never. When I told him I didn’t want to join up, at least until I’d finished my degree, he said I was a fucking coward.’
‘And?’ Lofty has never heard this.
‘What choice did I have? I volunteered like the rest of us poor suckers.’
‘You’ve done all right, though.’
‘Have I? Three years in the bag, buggered fingers, and damaged plumbing that couldn’t be fixed, so no family. Have I really done all right?’