A Change of Climate: A Novel

SEVEN

At midnight the train stopped. Anna raised herself on one elbow, then scrambled from the top berth, reaching out with her bare toes for a foothold. She swung herself to the floor, pulled down her nightdress, and put her head out of the window. A man was walking by the side of the track. She could not see him, but she could hear the crunch of his boots. She could see the tip of his lighted cigarette, bobbing and dipping with each step.

Ralph said, “What time is it?” He eased himself from the lower berth, put out his head in turn. A moonless night. Not a breath of wind. Useless to ask, why have we stopped, when will we go again? Best just to wait. They had crossed the border. They were in Bech-uanaland, moving north through the night. Not moving now: becalmed. They had been late at Mafeking, late at Lobatsi; “I’ll give you a bed,” the conductor had told them. “You can try sleeping two hours, three. You’ll reach your station before dawn.” He brought two flat pillows and two railway blankets, and four sheets that were as white and crisp as paper.

“There must be a village.” Ralph had picked out the glow of a fire, far to their left. If there had been a wind, it might have brought voices to them. Closer at hand, a baby was crying, ignored, from some outlying hut: Anna heard the thin insistent wail.

She climbed back to her bed. She had wanted the top berth because she felt there was more air, with no other body stacked above hers. It was December now, midsummer; sunset brought some relief from the heat, but it was best if you kept moving. Ralph passed up their bottle of water. It was tepid and stale. She closed her eyes, and disposed her body carefully so that no part of it touched any other part. But the berth was narrow; she folded her hands across her ribs, till the heat and weight of them became unbearable.

The night settled about her like a black quilt. Lucy Moyo had packed a bag for her in Elim, and handed it to her at the prison gate; her cotton nightdress had been starched and smelled of the iron, but now it was a sodden rag. The sheets the guard had given them were rucked damply beneath her hips. Her hair stuck to her neck; she put her arms by her sides again, looked up at the roof of the train. It was a metal coffin lid, a coffin in the air. Hands folded, she made a decorous corpse.

She imagined her voice, floating down to earth. “I think I am pregnant, Ralph.”

What then? What if she said it? What would they do? Lurch from the train at some desert halt, and begin to navigate their passage back to civilization? How would they do it? The South Africans might not let them back over the border. They had been given the choice: take the plane home, or the train north.

She thought of herself decanted into the winter at East Dere-ham, her trunks bumping up the stairs of her parents’ house for storage in the attics; she imagined rubbing together her blue hands, while she tried to explain their situation. You’ve been in prison, Anna? A daughter of ours, in jail? And they would have no place in the world, no future mapped out for them; they would be like fish hauled out of the water, gasping in a strange element, writhing on the hooks of expectation unfulfilled.

No, she thought. My lips are sealed.

She dozed. The train began to move. It carried her onward, into a world of dust.

The Security Branch had come for them before dawn: parking their vehicles outside the compound, and knocking politely, persistently, on the front door of the Mission House until Ralph admitted them. “Will you get dressed, Mrs. Eldred, please? And pack a bag?”

They began another search. They emptied the contents of the wastepaper baskets into bags to take away, and noted the titles of the books on the shelves. They went through the out-tray and read the addresses on the envelopes waiting for the mail. “Who is Dr. Eldred, please?”

“My sister,” Ralph said.

The letter was laid down again. It would go all the way to Norwich, greased by a policeman’s fingertips.

When one of the men approached the filing cabinet, Ralph and Anna exchanged a glance. One impatient pull … they waited for the top drawer to sail from its runners and break the policeman’s toes. But these officers were circumspect, almost reverential. “We give a receipt for anything we take away,” one explained. The drawer remained anchored, innocuous. The policemen went about their work quietly, as if not to injure or alarm the incriminating evidence. The mission staff—Rosinah, Dearie, Clara the washerwoman, Jakob and his boy assistant—had been brought from their beds to stand in a line outside the back door. Their quarters were being searched. With the same creepy-fingered care? Ralph doubted that. “Let me speak to them,” he said. “Just to reassure them.”

“That won’t be necessary, Mr. Eldred,” said the officer in charge. “My men will do all the reassuring that is needed.”

“Mrs. Eldred?” They had brought a female officer; she touched Anna’s arm. “I must come with you while you get your things together.”

“Things?” Anna said.

“For a time away from home,” the young woman said.

“Where do you think you are taking me?”

“You have to …” The girl looked aside. She had a tender skin, a north European skin, and blushed easily; she was not hardened to her trade. “To prison, Mrs. Eldred.”

“To prison.” Anna digested it. The pause made her sound cool. “To prison for how long? And why? On what charge?”

The female officer glanced at her superior. She didn’t know the answer. An expression of impatience crossed the man’s face. “Just take her,” he said.

In the bedroom Anna pulled drawers open, aimless and distracted. She could not stop her hands from trembling. The female officer sat on the bed. “You hurry up now,” she said, not unkindly. “Bring your nightie. Bring soap and your toothbrush. And your sanitary protection if you think you might need it.”

When her bag was packed the woman stood up and took it from her. She ushered her back to the sitting room. The double doors to the front stoep stood wide open. The two officers had gone, and taken Ralph with them.

It was only then that Anna understood that she and Ralph would be separated. She broke away. The woman officer leaped after her, catching at her arm. A man standing outside on the steps slammed the wire door of the stoep back into her face. She heard a car drive away. She put her fingers against the netting of the stoep, as if to force them through.

There was an iron bedstead and a stained mattress; traces of vomit, menstrual blood. She had to force herself to sit down on it, but she thought it was a good sign that they had not given her sheets and blankets. Perhaps they would ask some questions, and release her before the day was out. Dawn came, her first dawn in prison. She listened to the morning sounds, still and attentive: her hands in her lap, her spine sagging slightly. They had taken away her watch, but she estimated that it was about seven o’clock when the door was unlocked. A wardress brought in a tin tray, and put it down on the metal locker by the bed. She went out again without speaking. The key turned in the lock. She heard the stout shoes squeak away.

Left alone again, she investigated the tray. There was a bowl of mealie-porridge. The spoon seemed encrusted with the remains of other, long-ago breakfasts. Quelling her revulsion she brought a spoonful of the food to her mouth, but before she tasted it she gagged, and a wash of nausea lapped over her. It ebbed, left her shivering and light-headed. She dropped the spoon into the porridge and put the bowl back on the tray.

There was a beaker of coffee; it was no longer hot, but she held it between her hands for comfort. She took a sip; it tasted of nothing. Comfort receded.

The third item on the tray was a cob of brown bread. She broke some off and put it into her mouth. It stuck there, unnegotiable, like a stone. Last night at Flower Street, she had complained it was too hot to eat. She had meant to get up early, boil an egg predawn.

Some time later—perhaps an hour—the unspeaking wardress returned. She brought a water jug with a cover, and stood holding it while she waited for Anna to move the tray. In her other hand was a bucket. She put it down by the bed. “Is that what I must use?” Anna said; looking up, without belligerence, wanting nothing but to learn the rules.

The wardress indicated the tray. “You don’t want that?” She picked it up without waiting for an answer.

“Can I have my bag?” Anna said. “Can I have my watch?”

The door clicked shut. The key grated. She was alone again. Her hands returned to her lap. She examined the crack in the cell’s wall. From the base it ran a meandering course, to a height of four feet. Then other cracks seemed to spring from it, creeping wide of their source. It was like the delta of some great river. Anna took her handkerchief from her pocket and dabbed its corner into the water jug. She laid the damp linen first against one eyelid, then against the other. Don’t cry, dont cry, she said to herself. Let this be in place of tears.

At intervals, the spyhole in the door would flick open. She would raise her face to it: let them see that I have nothing to hide, she thought, not even a covert expression. She wondered if they came to stare at her on the hour; she began to count. She thought, by the heat in the cell and what she could see of the sunlight, that it might be midday when the door opened again.

A different wardress. “Kom.”

“Where?”

“Fingerprints.”

They took her along the corridor to a room furnished only with a table and two chairs. A second wardress took her flinching hand, straightened her fingers and pressed them into the pad of black grease. On the waiting paper, she saw loops, whirls, smudges like ape prints. It was hard to believe they belonged to her.

They let her wash her hands then, but she could not get the slime from under her fingernails.

When she came out into the corridor, an African woman in a prison dress was kneeling, scrubbing brush in hand, a scum of soapy water widening around her in a pool. She was singing a hymn, her voice strong, unwavering. When she saw Anna she stopped singing. She sat back on her haunches to watch her pass. Anna looked down into her face; then over her shoulder, to see the woman bend her back again. The soles of her bare feet were a grayish-white, hard as hooves. The hymn followed her as they swung open the cell door:

“How dearly God must love us, And this poor world of ours, To spread blue skies above us, And deck the earth with flowers.”

When the light began to fail, they tossed two blankets into the cell, and brought in her bag. She had packed her hairbrush and a comb but she had no mirror. She could not think why it seemed so important to see her own face. She said to the wardress, “You haven’t got a mirror in your pocket, have you? That I could borrow just for a minute?”

“What do you think, that I’m a beauty queen?” the woman said. She laughed at her own joke. “It’s against the rules,” she said. “You might hurt yourself, you see? Try and sleep now.”

Early in the afternoon there had been another tin tray, with a bowl of broth this time. She had stirred the ingredients without much hope, disturbing cabbage and root vegetables and what might be scraps of meat. Globules of fat lay on the surface, and when she brought the spoon to her mouth the morning’s reaction repeated itself, and she thought she would vomit. The last meal of the day had been another beaker of weak coffee and a hunk of bread. She regretted now that she had let them take away the bread untasted. She was so hungry that her stomach seemed to be folding in on itself, curling into a hollowness above her navel. “Can you help me?” she said to the wardress. “I couldn’t eat earlier, I was feeling sick. Can I have some bread?”

The woman hesitated. “I’ll see,” she said.

She went out, banging the door, rattling her keys. An electric light flicked on overhead, taking Anna by surprise. Anna waited, unmoving, under its glare.

She’ll not come back, she thought. But after some time the woman did return, with bread on a plate and a smear of margarine.

“I can’t let you have a knife,” she said. “You’ll have to do the best you can.”

Anna took the plate. “I’m grateful.”

Then the woman took an apple out of her pocket. “Don’t tell anybody.” She put it down on the metal locker.

Anna said, “Do you know what is going to happen to me? Can you tell me where my husband is?”

“Don’t take advantage,” the wardress said.

“I want to write a letter. I have things to do. I work at a mission you see, in Elim, Flower Street, and there are things I have to take care of. I have to give instructions, or nothing will be done.”

“I dare say they got on all right before you came,” the woman said.

“I ought to be given access to a lawyer.”

“You must take that up with the colonel.”

“When can I see him?”

“In time.”

It was the least hopeful sentence she had heard that day. When the wardress had gone she broke open the cob of bread and tore out the middle, wiping it into the margarine and forcing it into her mouth. She held the apple for a long time before she ate it, running her fingers over its shape, admiring its innocence, its cleanness. She ate it in mouselike nibbles, and wrapped the core carefully in her handkerchief, so that tomorrow morning she would at least be able to taste the juice on her tongue. She held off using the bucket for as long as she could, but in the end she had to squat over it, the metal rim cold against her thighs. She felt debased by the dribble of urine that would be her companion all night, and would be there for her when she woke in the morning.

They did not take her to see the colonel the next day, but the wardress who had given her the apple brought in a pillow, a pillow case, and a pair of sheets. At least one more night then, Anna thought.

“Did you eat your breakfast this morning?” the woman asked.

“No, I couldn’t.”

“You ought to try.”

“Will you get me another apple? I’d be so grateful.”

“Yes, I dare say you would.”

“Do you think they would let me have something to read?”

“That’s for the colonel to decide. I couldn’t decide that.”

“Would it be possible for someone to go to my house and get me a change of clothes?”

She knew the answer: the colonel will decide. But this is what prison life must be, she thought: a series of endless requests, some great, some small, repeated and repeated, until one day—in the face of all expectation—one of them, great or small, is granted. Can you arrange for me to send a message to my husband? Can I have a bowl of hot water, I cannot get the fingerprint ink from under my nails? Can I have a newspaper, can I have a mirror? Can you assure me that God loves me and that I am his child?

The next day, after the mealie-porridge but before the broth, another wardress came in. “You want to comb your hair, Mrs. Eldred? The colonel is waiting to see you in his office.”

She jumped up from her bed. “Never mind my hair.”

The woman stood back to let her pass out of the cell. To her surprise, two more wardresses were stationed outside the door, and they trod a pace behind her along the corridor. They treat me as if I’m dangerous, she thought. Perhaps I am.

The colonel was a man of fifty, with pepper-and-salt hair shorn above his ears. The regulation belly strained at his uniform belt, but the rest of him was hard and fit looking. He motioned her to a chair. A ceiling fan creaked over her head; she lifted her face to it. Round and round it churned, the same stagnant air.

“I must apologize for not seeing you sooner, Mrs. Eldred. There were some incidents in the men’s prison that have been taking up my time.”

“What incidents?”

“Nothing that should bother you.”

“Is my husband in there, in the men’s prison?”

“You’ll have news of Mr. Eldred very soon—in fact, you’ll be seeing him soon, all we want is that you talk to us a little bit.” The colonel sat down opposite her. “You’ve been to political meetings, Mrs. Eldred?”

“No. Never.”

“You’ve been to protest meetings? About the bus boycott, for example?”

“Yes.”

“So, isn’t that the same thing?”

“I didn’t think so, at the time.”

“We have photographs of you at these meetings. We know you have held political meetings at your house.”

“Never.”

“You have had people from the ANC at your house. Agitators.”

“It’s not illegal to have visitors.”

“So what were you doing, Mrs. Eldred, if you weren’t having a political meeting? Just having tea and cake, were you? Perhaps reading the Bible together?”

Anna didn’t answer.

“We have the names of everyone who has visited you.”

“Yes. I know you have your spies everywhere.”

“It’s necessary,” the colonel said. “Believe me, Mrs. Eldred. We have to keep control.”

Anna pushed her hair back, smoothing it with her hand. It felt lank and greasy; the cell was an oven by midmorning, and she was not given enough water to wash properly. “Can I ask you a question, Colonel? Just one? All I want to know is if any of the mission staff are on your payroll. Has anyone been informing against us?”

“If you were innocent, Mrs. Eldred, you wouldn’t have to ask me that question.”

“Oh, I’m innocent, Colonel.” She felt color rise in her face. She was not afraid. Since they had brought her to the prison she had felt every emotion, but not fear. “I am perfectly innocent, and so is my husband, and I am quite sure that the mission society who sent us out here have been informed of what has happened, and that they will be making representations to your government on our behalf.”

“I’m sure that is so,” the colonel said, “and I am sure their representations will be listened to with the greatest of respect.” He ran a hand over his bristly head. “But you must understand, Mrs. Eldred, that my government takes exception to people such as yourself coming out here to tell us how to run our country, coming out here in the guise of mission workers and then turning political and interfering in affairs that you don’t understand.”

“I do understand,” Anna said. “You can’t expect that line to succeed with me. I’ve seen everything, with my own eyes.”

“With respect, Mrs. Eldred, you have seen nothing and you know nothing. When you’ve been here twenty, thirty years, tell me then.” The colonel looked up at the ceiling, as if self-control reposed there. When he spoke again it was in a flat voice, with his former quite meaningless courtesy. “Can I offer you a cigarette, Mrs. Eldred?”

“No, thank you.”

“You don’t mind if I smoke myself?”

“Feel free.”

“Do you have any complaints, Mrs. Eldred?”

She looked at him wonderingly. “If I began on my complaints …”

“About your treatment, I mean.”

“Could I be allowed some fresh air?”

“I’m afraid there is nowhere suitable for you to take exercise.”

“I can hear other women outside. I can hear their voices.” And laughter. Songs.

“That will be from the courtyard. The blacks go out there to do their washing.”

“I expect I shall need to do washing.”

“It will be done for you, Mrs. Eldred.”

“I should like a change of clothes from home, and some books. Is that possible?”

“I will send someone to see about your clothes.”

Relief washed over her; she had not thought about it until now, but for the first time it occurred to her that they might put her into a prison dress. “And the books?”

“You can have a Bible for now. Will that do?”

“Thank you.”

He inclined his head. “You’re a well-mannered woman, Mrs. Eldred. I’d like to see you keep it that way.”

“I hope I can, Colonel.” Whatever you say, she thought, I shall have the last word. “Could I have the light on for longer, so that I can read? I couldn’t sleep last night. I never can sleep much before midnight.”

The colonel hesitated. “For one hour, perhaps. Till nine o’clock.”

She had gained a piece of information. She had a sense of petty triumph.

“Can I have my watch back?”

“Yes, that is possible. I didn’t know it had been taken away.”

“And this bucket, this so-called sanitary bucket—it’s disgusting. When they brought me down the corridor I saw some buckets standing in a corner, a kind with lids. Can I have one of those?”

The colonel looked stricken. He flung himself from his chair, and chopped the wardress to pieces in blunt Afrikaans. The wardress shrugged, talked back; then became abject. “Mrs. Eldred,” he said, turning to her, “we owe you an apology. I do not know how this can have happened. You’ve been given a native-type bucket. All colored and white prisoners are automatically allocated buckets with lids, that is the rule. Your bucket will be changed immediately.”

Anna stared at him. The colonel had the last word after all.

That night, her legs began to ache; sleep was fitful, but before dawn she plunged into a dreamless stupor. When she woke she was shivering, and her scalp was sore: a vast headache lay behind it. She felt it was difficult to breathe, let alone eat. She had wrapped herself in her blanket, but it didn’t help.

They came for her at nine.

“The colonel again?”

“Ag, Mrs. Eldred, he must be in love with you.”

He was pacing his office; stopped pacing when he saw her. “Good morning, Mrs. Eldred, please sit down.” He looked at her closely. “So it’s a hunger strike?”

“No, it’s not a hunger strike. I just prefer not to eat.”

“You don’t like the food you are given?”

“How could anyone like it? It’s not fit for pigs.”

“So if we were to supplement your diet, you would eat?”

Anna didn’t answer. She didn’t want to give him the satisfaction; didn’t want to allow herself the temptation. Since that first time, there had been no apple. The skin on the back of her hands seemed grayish, as if the color of her blood had altered.

“Come, Mrs. Eldred,” the colonel said. “What would you like? Some fruit?”

She didn’t speak. The headache had gone now, but its ghost remained, and the back of her neck was stiff.

“I’d like to go home,” she said in a low voice. “I’d like to see my husband. I’d like to know why you are keeping me here.”

“In good time,” the colonel said. “You must understand that whatever you decide, we have to send in the prison rations. That’s the rule.”

She nodded, head bowing painfully on the stem of her neck. He seemed to have made up his mind that she was on a hunger strike, even though she had denied it. Well, let him think so. Let it be so. The black woman who scrubbed the corridor, who would supplement her diet? She imagined her own body: saw herself fading, growing meeker, thinner, thinner … For the first time fear touched her. I am not made for this, she thought. Emma, now … Emma could bear it. Bear it? It would be an ornament to Emma. And yet, the fear was almost a relief to her. So I am human, she thought. If I had been in prison, and not afraid, how would I have lived the rest of my life? How could I be allowed the luxury of everyday, ordinary fears, if I were not afraid now? She said, “Colonel, for pity’s sake, tell me what you have done with my husband. All I want is to know that he is safe.”

“We should be able to arrange for you to see him.”

“When? Today?”

The colonel exhaled gustily. “Have patience, Mrs. Eldred.” She saw him struggle to quell his exasperation with her. “Look, Mrs. Eldred, I’m sorry if you think you’ve been treated badly, but the fact is that we are not used to prisoners like you. This situation is unprecedented for me. And for the staff, it is unprecedented for them. That is why we had the mistake about the buckets, and maybe—maybe we have committed other mistakes. No one wants to keep you here for any longer than necessary.”

“But why are you keeping me at all? You’ve hardly asked me any questions.”

“No one wants to harass you, Mrs. Eldred. What you’ve done, you’ve done.”

“Are you asking my husband questions?”

The colonel shook his head. “Not in the way you mean, Mrs. Eldred. Why should you think such things? No one has hurt you, have they?”

“No.”

“Just so—no one has hurt your husband either.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“What can I do then? Except to assure you that you are here as much for your own protection as anything else?”

“Protection from whom?”

The colonel looked weary. “From yourself.”

“You haven’t brought any charge. I don’t think there’s any charge you can bring. Why don’t you let me go?”

“That is not possible, I’m afraid.”

“Why isn’t it?”

Keep asking questions, questions: just once you might get an answer.

“I am waiting on a higher authority, Mrs. Eldred.”

“Are you, Colonel? Waiting for your God to speak?”

“No.” He half smiled. “A telephone call from Pretoria will do for me.”

“And when do you expect that?”

He shifted in his chair, ground out his cigarette in the ashtray. “I no longer expect, Mrs. Eldred. I’ve learned patience. May I commend it to you?”

She looked up into his face. “We might grow old together, Colonel, you and I.”

That evening, unprecedentedly, they brought her a bowl of hot water and a clean dry towel. Until now she had been allowed to wash only once a day. They brought some fruit and a bar of chocolate. “Not all at once or you’ll be ill,” the wardress said. Her face showed her disapproval of this special treatment.

Anna unwrapped the chocolate and inhaled its fragrance, its deep cheap sweetness: sugar and oil. She despised herself. The colonel saw through me, she thought, he knew I was weak. The emulsion slid over her tongue, into her bloodstream. Her heart raced. She sat back on her bed, drawing up her feet. I shall always hate myself, she thought, I shall never forgive myself for this, I shall suffer for it hereafter. She flicked her tongue around her teeth, like a cat cleaning its whiskers: collecting the last taste. Took her pulse, one thumb fitted into the fine skin of her wrist. Its speed alarmed her. But I am alive, she thought.

Then she thought, but perhaps this is only a trick. Perhaps tomorrow they will bring back the porridge and the encrusted spoon, and the native bucket. And I shall not be able to bear it.

Next day they told her that she had a visitor. “A kaffir,” the wardress said, turning down the corners of her mouth. “The colonel has given permission.”

Lucy Moyo was seated in the room where the fingerprints were taken. Her handbag rested on her vast knees. She wore one of her ensembles: a plum-colored dress, a pink petal hat to tone with it. Her handkerchief was folded and secured under the band of her wristwatch. She smelled of lily of the valley.

Anna flew toward her, her arms outstretched. But Lucy Moyo took her by the shoulders and held her off, in a brutal grip. “Brace up, brace up now, Mrs. Eldred.” Her voice was fierce. “Do not let these people see you cry.”

Tears flooded Anna’s face. Letting go of her for a moment, Lucy twitched her handkerchief from under her watch strap. She took Anna by one shoulder and began to dab and scrub at her face, just as if she were one of the nursery children who had taken a tumble into the dust. Anna’s tears continued to flow, and Lucy to wipe them away, all the time talking to her in the same tone, brisk and firm and no-nonsense, as if she knew that sympathy and tenderness would break her spirit.

“Mrs. Eldred, listen to me. Everything is in hand, everyone has been informed. We have telegraphed to London—Father Alfred has done it, that man is not such a fool as he sometimes appears. The High Commissioner is sending someone from Cape Town. Everyone is praying, Mrs. Eldred. Do you hear me?”

“Yes, yes, I understand—Lucy, have you seen my husband? Is there any news?”

“Father Alfred has seen him. He is well and in good spirits and saying not to worry. At the mission we are all well, we are all in good spirits, the monthly accounts are done, the wages are paid, you must have no fear, everything is in good order.”

“Five minutes,” the wardress said. Her face was set into a grimace of distaste. She held out her arm, showing her watch, as if Lucy might not understand.

Lucy looked at her hard. “Are you a Christian woman?” she asked. She let Anna go. She fell against the table, limp as a rag doll. Lucy opened her handbag. “They said one book, no more. I have brought you this. I know this book is dear to you because you have brought it from your home in England, and as you once told me, given to you by your mother.” Lucy put into Anna’s hand her copy of The Sun-Drenched Veld. She kissed Anna on both cheeks, shook off the wardress’s arm, and sailed from the room, her bag over her wrist. She left her perfume behind her, lying heavy on the air.

Back in her cell Anna sat with the book on her knees. She heard her mother’s voice: “One of the Windows on the World series, Anna.” She flicked through the pages. (There is no fruit more refreshing than the golden pulp of paw-paw … natives often reverence their ancestors … Today ostrich-keepers look back with wistful eyes at those days when fashion favored their wares.” She closed the book, and stared at the purple-blue mountains on the cover. The hills of heaven, she thought. Another night gathered in the corners of the room.

Lucy’s visit seemed to Anna to indicate that release might be at hand. Don’t raise your hopes, she said to herself; but she hardly slept.

In the morning she made no attempt to eat. She had developed a disgust for the tepid water in its metal jug, and had to make an effort of will—tip her head back, hold her throat open—to pour it into herself. She was thirsty all the time, and once again shaky and cold, her nerves taut.

She wanted peace from her own thoughts, from their relentless, spinning nature. She realized that not once since she had been in prison had she prayed. It had not crossed her mind to do it. She looked into her heart, on this sixth morning of her imprisonment, and found a void where the faith should be.

At ten o’clock the cell door was unlocked and the colonel came in. “How are you today, Mrs. Eldred?”

“I want a bath,” she said instantly. “I want news of my husband. I want you to let me go.”

The colonel held up his hand: peace, peace. “Mrs. Eldred, your husband is here. I have come to escort you to my office, where you will find both Mr. Eldred and a representative of the High Commissioner. Will that do for you, for now?”

Ralph rose from his chair when he saw her, his face dismayed. “Anna! Good God, what has happened?”

For a moment she thought she might faint. She saw that Ralph’s face was puffy and bruised, his lip was cut. Her stomach tightened and churned; a spasm of physical and moral disgust shook her, and she felt suddenly raw, as if her skin had been peeled; I can’t bear it, she thought. She loved him, he was her child, and it made her lightheaded with rage to think that he had suffered a moment’s pain, and from these swine … The room swam and shivered, the ceiling fan churned the air, the colonel put his hand under her elbow, and a stranger wedged into the corner of the office bobbed up from his chair and said, “Cooper from Cape Town.”

She found herself sitting. She grasped Cooper’s damp, extended hand, not seeming to realize what it was for. “She’s been a silly girl,” the colonel said. “Refusing food.”

“And you let her?” Ralph said.

“What would you have preferred, Mr. Eldred, did you want me to force-feed her?”

“It would be better if you sat down, Mr. Eldred,” Cooper from Cape Town said, “so that we can conduct our business in a seemly and civilized manner.”

“We’re in the wrong country for that,” Ralph said.

But he did sit; took Anna’s hand and touched her dry lips with his.

“May I begin?” Cooper said. Too young a man, ill at ease, sweating inside his businessman’s suit. He cleared his throat. “To be frank, this is turning into something of an embarrassment.”

Ralph leapt from his chair again. “Embarrassment? We are taken away in the middle of the night and detained without charge, I am threatened with violence and my wife is starved, the mission staff are terrorized, and you call it an embarrassment?”

“Mr. Eldred, you are not helping your case,” Cooper said. “Of course you are aggrieved, but as Her Majesty’s representative my duty is to extract you from the unfortunate situation in which you have placed yourself, and to do this without damage to the relations of our two governments.”

“What do you mean?” Anna swooped forward to the edge of her chair. “What do you mean, the situation in which we have placed ourselves?”

“Please, Mrs. Eldred,” the colonel said mildly. “Listen to the man. He’s come a long way to talk to you.”

“Thank you, Colonel,” Cooper said. “Now, the situation roughly speaking is this; you can as I understand it be released almost immediately, but there are certain conditions with which you must comply.” Cooper took out his handkerchief and swabbed his forehead. His no-color eyes traveled from side to side.

“I think it would be easier for you,” the colonel said, “if I left you alone with your nationals.”

“Properly speaking,” Cooper said, “that is what should occur.”

The colonel smiled slightly. “You are not afraid of Mr. Eldred?” Cooper didn’t reply. “If I hear the sound of your skull being pounded on the floor, Mr. Cooper, I shall come right away to your relief. Depend upon it.”

The colonel went out, closing the door on them. There was a moment’s silence. “It will be easiest if you resign,” Cooper said.

“Never,” Ralph said. “Let them throw me out, if that’s what they want. I’m not going to do anything to make their lives easier.”

“We have been in constant touch with your employers in Clerkenwell. Your mission society.”

“So they know exactly what’s happened?”

“They do, and they are less than delighted. With you, I mean, Mr. Eldred. I am assured they have forsworn any political involvement, any whatever.”

“It’s easy,” Anna said. “From Clerkenwell.”

“There is a suggestion …” the man hesitated. “That is, I am empowered to put to you a suggestion—”

“Yes?”

“That it would, as it were, save face—”

“For whom?”

“—for all concerned … if you were to leave voluntarily rather than be deported …”

“We’ve been through this,” Ralph said.

“… but without altogether quitting, as it were, your field of mission endeavor.”

“Do you speak English, Mr. Cooper?” Anna asked.

The man swallowed. “Do I understand that you have no wish to return to the United Kingdom as of this time?”

“No wish,” Ralph said. “No intention.”

“Mrs. Eldred?”

“I want to go home to Flower Street,” Anna said. “That’s what I want.”

“You know that is impossible.” A note of scolding entered the official’s voice. “The South African government will no longer have you on its territory. But I am directed to put to you, on behalf of your mission society, a proposal that you should take up a post, possibly a temporary one, in Bechuanaland, in the Bechuanaland Protectorate.”

“Clerkenwell is proposing this?”

“I am only the intermediary.”

“What do you mean by temporary?”

“They mean three months, probably,” Anna said. “Until the fuss dies down and the newspapers have forgotten about us and they can sneak us back into England and then sack us.”

“Oh, I hardly think—” Cooper began.

“Shut up, Cooper,” Ralph said. “No one is interested in what you think.”

A silence. They seemed to have reached an impasse. “My husband means,” Anna said, leaning forward, “that it would be better if you just gave us the facts. Where is this post they’re offering?”

“It is at a place called Mosadinyana. Remote, I understand.”

“That makes sense,” Ralph said. “Get us well out of the way.”

Anna put her hand on his arm. “Let’s listen to him.”

“As I understand it,” Cooper said, “the couple who ran the mission station have been repatriated on medical grounds. It is not a place of any size. There is a small school, I am told.” He looked at Anna. “There is a requirement for one teacher—”

“And what would I do?” Ralph said.

“Administer, Mr. Eldred. You would administer.”

“I’ve never heard of this place,” Anna said.

“Your Society describe it to me as a toehold,” Cooper said. “A toehold in the desert.” He seemed pleased with the phrase. “There is the possibility that in the years to come it may grow into something larger.”

“A foothold,” Ralph said.

“Is it on the railway line?”

“Not exactly,” Cooper said.

“What is there besides the school?”

“There might be a trading store,” Cooper said, frowning. “I could look into that.”

“If I went up there,” Ralph said, “do you think there is any possibility that at a later date I might be able to return to Elim?”

Cooper favored them with a thin smile. “Not unless there is a change of government, Mr. Eldred.”

“You are putting us in a very difficult position,” Anna said. “You are asking us to go up-country, to a place we know nothing about—”

“I am required to encourage you to regard it as temporary,” Cooper said. “I am required to assure you that should the posting prove unsuitable you can be replaced. Really, Mrs. Eldred, there is nothing to fear. The South African government—” he hesitated— “that is, it has been indicated to me—the South African government would have no objection to your traveling through their territory to take up this post. But should you refuse the opportunity, they have reserved two seats on a flight to London departing tomorrow.”

Ralph and Anna looked at each other. “Tomorrow,” Anna said. “That’s ludicrous. We couldn’t possibly leave at that sort of notice. We have to put everything in order at Flower Street, it will take a month at least to hand over to someone else.”

“I’m afraid you don’t grasp the situation, Mrs. Eldred. You can never return to Elim, as I imagined I had made adequately clear. After all, there is no one who could give a guarantee as to your conduct.”

“You make us sound like schoolchildren,” Ralph said.

“You are little more, Mr. Eldred.” The man closed his eyes. “Little more.”

Ralph took Anna’s hand. “We must decide.”

“Yes.”

“Anna, you look ill. Perhaps to go home would be best.”

“I’m not ill.”

“I can’t risk you. I love you, Anna.” Cooper looked away in distress.

“If we go home now we will have failed.”

“Oh God,” Ralph said. “I wish we had never seen this bloody country. I wish we’d gone to Dar.”

“No,” Anna said. “I wouldn’t have missed Elim, Ralph.” It will always be the place where we grew up, she thought. I shall never forget Flower Street. She looked up at Cooper. “All right, we’ll go.”

“I congratulate you on a brave decision.” Cooper put his hand out. Ralph ignored it.

In the small hours, the train set them down on an empty platform. Their two bags—their trunks would be packed for them, and sent on later—were placed at their feet; then the train gathered itself for the next haul, and steamed away up the line.

The darkness was total. They heard footsteps approach, shockingly loud. A railway employee called out a curt greeting in Afrikaans. Anna answered him. “We are late. There’s no one to meet us, where can we stay?”

The railway employee was a man of few words. “He says there’s only the waiting room. And it’s here behind us. And he says that everyone knows the train is late. Everyone concerned.”

“They won’t abandon us,” Ralph said. The footsteps retreated.

The waiting room had a cement floor and two wooden benches. It seemed to offer no more comfort than the platform, so they took up their station on the single bench outside. Though it was midsummer, the starlight was cold. They leaned together, their heads touching. “We’re nowhere now,” Anna whispered.

Ralph said, “We are in the heart of Africa.”

“Yes. Nowhere.”

She lay down on the bench, her head on his knees, a cardigan draped over her. His head drooping, he dozed.

Ralph woke to a touch on his shoulder. A torch beam flashed into his face. As soon as he looked up the torch was switched off. An African voice, a man’s, said, “Mr. Eldred, sir. Come, baas, come, madam.”

Hands reached for their bags. Anna stood up, stiff from sleep, disoriented, chilled. Beyond the station compound they saw the lights of a truck. “This is yours?” Ralph asked.

“No, baas.” A silence. Ralph thought, how can I stop them calling me that? I never want to hear that word again. The man said, “It is mine and my brother’s truck, and his brother’s also. Mrs. Pilane, the clinic nurse, has asked me to lift you to the mission.”

“Thank you,” Ralph said. “The train is very late. We thought no one was coming.”

“I was coming,” the man said calmly.

As they approached the truck, they saw by torchlight a half dozen figures rise from the ground, draped in blankets. No one spoke. One by one, the half dozen climbed into the back of the truck, handing up to each other parcels and sacks. “Who are these?” Ralph said.

The man replied, “They are people who are traveling.”

Ralph pushed Anna into the cab of the truck and scrambled in beside her. “Do you work for the mission?” Ralph asked.

“No. There is only Salome. And there is Enock.”

The man did not enlarge on this. He kept his own name to himself, a private possession. They drove on in silence. The track was rough, and stones clattered away from their wheels; ruts jolted their spines. Small branches brushed the sides of the truck with a metallic click-click-click. Sometimes branches lashed across the windscreen; the glass protected them, but instinct made them duck. Anna leaned against Ralph, her head on his shoulder. The metal shell filled with their quiet, ragged breathing.

Almost imperceptibly, the sky began to lighten. The road became less bumpy. “We are arriving,” the driver said. The village of Mosadinyana took shape about them: the cattle kraals of plaited thorns, the shaggy thatched roofs of the rondavels, the mud walls which enclosed each yard. The driver pulled up. There was a moment’s stillness; Anna looked at the walls; a pattern was set into them, striped and zigzagged, ochre and dun. The travelers melted away, wrapping their blankets more tightly around them; the women balanced their parcels on their head.

The sun was almost up now, but the pale light could have been dawn or dusk. Anna looked up beyond the village. Her vision filled with low brown hills, an interminable range of hills: like the mountains of the moon. Around the borehole, donkeys bent their necks and plucked at the scrubby ground.

They jolted up to the Mission House a few minutes later. The driver dismounted to take down their bags. “You may give me three shillings,” he said.

“Gladly,” Ralph said. “I am very grateful to you.”

Money changed hands. The Mission House was a low building, its walls gleaming white in the half light. There was a candle burning on a table on the front stoep. As they watched, it was extinguished. The sun burst over the hills, born fully armed: a great disc of searing gold.

They found inside the house the sticks of furniture left behind by their predecessors, Mr. and Mrs. Instow. There were dusty, sagging armchairs, the upholstery worn by long use to an indeterminate shiny gray. There were some scarred tables, a couple of bookcases, indecently empty: a solitary picture on the wall, of Highland cattle splashing through a stream. Their bedroom was furnished with a bulky dressing table with a spotted mirror, and with wardrobes whose doors creaked and swung open when anyone entered the room, disclosing their dark interiors. Their ancient mothball reek lay on the air.

At once, their new routine began. There were new problems, new dilemmas, both human and ethical. There was no time for reflection, no period of induction. It was a month before a letter from Clerkenwell came. It was not an accusing letter, but it was huffy and vague. It wished them success in their new post. “Cooper said it would be temporary,” Ralph said. “But here they say nothing about moving us on. Still—” His eyes rested on his wife. Her pregnancy showed now more evident because she was thin.

“Better the devil you know,” Anna said. “The thought of packing my bags again—it’s too much.” She came over to him and put her hand on his head, stroked his curly hair. “It’s all right. We’ll get used to it.” And that would not be difficult, she thought. There were routine panics: a scorpion in the kitchen, a thorn under a nail. Otherwise, every day was the same.

Enock, a man with no family, dug the garden and raked it: he was aimless, erratic, prone to disappearances. Salome, in the kitchen, presided over their monotonous diet: stringy meat and mealie-pap, small bitter oranges from their own trees. After breakfast each day she washed the clothes and polished the red cement floors. Salome was shapeless, like most of the women who had passed their youth. She wore a lilac overall which she had been given by Mr. and Mrs. Instow: of whom she seldom spoke. She wore gaping bedroom slippers and a woolen hat; each morning by six o’clock she was in the kitchen, stoking up the cooking range, putting the kettle on the hob.

A second month passed, and already their memories were fading. Their time in Flower Street seemed to be an episode in other people’s lives. What has happened to Koos, Anna sometimes wondered, did the police take him? What has happened to Dearie and Rosinah? Was there an informer? If so, who was it? Her mind recoiled from this topic. Even the better memories were soured. She could not think of Flower Street without knowing that they had been betrayed.

Each morning by eight Anna was in the little schoolroom. She had a floating and variable number of pupils: some tots who could barely grip a pencil, some big bold girls who sat knitting and gossiping at the back. Anna did not try to stop them; she had no doubt they needed whatever it was they were knitting. The boys would go off for weeks at a time, herding cattle. Months on the battered schoolroom benches; then months on the trail.

Her aim was not high: just that they should be able to count, add up, subtract, and not be cheated when they went to the store with small coins. They should be able to write their names and read from primers meant for children in English suburbs: children with lawns to play on, and pet dogs, and strawberry jam for tea. There were no lawns here, for each blade of vegetation had to pit itself against God to survive. There was mealie-porridge for tea, and for breakfast and dinner too. And if they saw a dog, her pupils threw stones at it.

They were incurious, apathetic children; impossible to know whether or not they took in what she was trying to teach them. They were, she guessed, often hungry: not with the sharp hunger that goads the mind and makes the hand shake, but with a chronic hunger, grumbling and unappeasable. There was no starvation at this date: not in the village, not in the country. There was, rather, a malnourishment which bred lethargy, which bred an unfitness for any effort beyond the minimum. The Afrikaner farmers had the best land; they sweated it and made it pay. The desert produced thorn bushes and scrub, and in spring, after rain had fallen, a sudden, shocking carpet of strange flowers.

By eleven each day, the sun high in the sky, her pupils slept, nodding and slumping at their benches. Her voice dried in her throat. By one o’clock school was over. The children pressed around her. “Goodbye, and go well,” she would say, in her awkward, minimal Setswana.

“Stay well, madam,” they would say. And enclose her. Their hot bodies to hers. Hands patting. She felt herself shrink inside.

Why? Her own reaction disgusted her. The village men were meager, spiritless and skinny. The women were great tubes of fat, blown out with carbohydrates. They carried vacant-faced infants, strapped tightly to their backs. Too many babies died. The clinic nurse, Mrs. Pilane, could not cure measles. When the women spoke, they seemed to shout and sneer. Their voices were harsh, monotonous, somehow triumphal. God help me, Anna thought: but I don’t like them, perhaps I fear them. These feelings were a violation of everything she expected from herself, of all her principles and habits of mind.

News came patchily from the outside world; the mail arrived twice a week, and a newspaper sometimes. Bechuanaland, the obscure protectorate, was making news itself. Seretse Khama had returned home, the young tribal leader with his white wife; ten years earlier, a bar student alone in London, he had chosen for himself this trim ladylike blond, to the fury and dismay of his relatives and of the South African government, “MARRIAGE THAT ROCKS AFRICA” the Daily Mail had bellowed. For a few weeks the world had turned its eyes on the protectorate. Frozen out, banned by the British from his own country, the chief had now returned, to the ululations of tribeswomen and the pop of flashbulbs. Ralph said, “In the news again, think of it. James and Emma and our parents, reading about us in Norwich. It makes you feel we live in a real place, after all.”

They had been in the newspapers themselves, of course. Emma had sent the cuttings. Their story had run for a day or two, then been dropped as soon as they were let out of jail. The papers had used photographs from their wedding; it seemed no one had been able to find any other pictures of them. In their strange ritual garments they stared into the lens, startled and shy; they looked like children, playing at weddings to pass a rainy day.

News came from Cape Town, too. The archbishop was dead. It was the government that had killed him in the end, Ralph believed. Another apartheid measure had been proposed, with a clause giving the government the power to exclude Africans from churches in white areas; and this brought the old man to his sticking point.

The archbishop drafted a letter: if this becomes law, his letter said, the church and its clergy and its people will be unable to obey it.

The battle lines were drawn at last. Late at night, the archbishop’s secretary came into his study, bringing the final version of the letter for his signature. The old man lay on the carpet. He had fallen by his desk, and his heart had stopped.

Receiving this news, Ralph felt more alone.

Within a week or two of their arrival it became clear that the mission did not provide a job for two people. And Mosadinyana would never grow, as Cooper had purported. The mission was a fossil, a relic; its time was past, and the focus of effort and activity had moved elsewhere. Ralph imagined their lives and careers filed away, in Clerkenwell’s dustiest, lowest drawer.

He was angry. “It is so stupid. They are treating us as if we have committed some horrible crime, as if we are disgraced. But the truth is that there are people in England who would not only sympathize with us but applaud us.”

“We’re not heroes,” Anna said. “We didn’t do anything really. We just got in the way. We were an inconvenience.”

“At least that’s something to be.”

Clerkenwell sent their small salary every month. There was nothing to spend it on.

“There’s one thing to be grateful for,” Ralph said. “When the baby’s born, I can take over the teaching and you need do nothing. We can get a nurse from the village, Salome will find someone for us. Then if we have broken nights, you can get some rest during the day.”

The thought of the baby made him proud, worried, indefinably sad. That it would be born here, in Mosadinyana, in the heart of Africa. Anna’s body was swollen, but her face was gaunt, and her arms were stick-thin. In those few days in prison the flesh had simply peeled away from her frame; her bones seemed larger now, and her wide-open eyes made her look sad and frail.

When they stepped out of their front door, in the morning or at evening, the go-away birds wheeled overhead, mocking and barracking, swooping and squawking their single, unvaried message; the only words which nature had given them. They were insistent companions, like someone you pick up with on a journey: someone who claims better knowledge of the terrain, who tries to persuade you to vary your planned route.

Ralph drove Anna to the Lutheran mission hospital, over roads that shook the bones and viscera. The doctor was an elderly Dutchman, worn and faded by the sun; he received her with kindly concern. All would be well, he assured her, passing his hand over the mound of her belly. There was no need for her to think of traveling down the railway line when her time came; he had delivered a hundred babies, and he had plenty of experience if anything, God forbid, should go wrong. He saw, he said, that she was a sensible young woman, stronger than she looked; and after the event, all she would need would be the most simple precautions of hygiene, the common-sense measures any mother would take. “Think what your baby will have,” he said. “God’s blessed sun, almost every day of the year. Quiet nights under the stars and moon.”

Anna looked up at his outbreak of lyricism, half raising herself on the examination couch. Had he been drinking? He laid a hand on her forehead, easing her back. “Mrs. Eldred,” he said, “I have heard of your troubles in the Republic. You and your husband, you are young people who deserve the happiness that will come to you. It will be a pleasure and an honor to me to put your first child safe in your arms.”

Each night, by the light of lamps and candles, they sat over their Setswana grammars. Outside, the darkness rustled and croaked; inside, the only sound was a moth’s wingbeat. And yet they were not alone; there was a settlement out there, lightless, invisible, ragged night-breathing its only sound. In the first week, a parade of blanket-wrapped men and women had come to the door, asking for work. Anna was bewildered. She did not know how to turn them away, and it seemed there was no end to them. Ralph and Anna had made little progress in the language; when they tried to speak, people grinned at them. “You may take on anyone you need to help you,” Anna told Salome. “But not people we don’t need, not people who will just sit around doing nothing. Because it is not fair to choose some and not the others, to pay some and not the others. But Salome, listen, anyone who is hungry, you never, never turn them away.”

Did she turn them away? Anna was afraid that she did—on a whim, or according to the dictates of her own judgment. They had to acknowledge that her judgment might be sounder than theirs. She was their mediatrix, their mainstay. Her English was hybrid, sometimes sliding into Afrikaans. Once she did speak memorably, her hands folded together, her eyes resting unseeingly on something through the window, in the dusty yard: spoke with rhythm and fluency, with perfect confidence that she would be understood. “In the days of our grandmothers, madam, there were many women to divide the task of carrying the water and grinding the millet and sweeping the house. Now there is only one woman. She must work all day in the heat of the sun until she drops.”

“An exaggeration,” Anna said, “but, you see, she was speaking of the advantages of polygamy.”

“What will you think of next?” Ralph said.

“I think we have denatured these people,” Anna said. “Everything old is condemned, everything of their own. Everything new and imported is held up to them as better.”

“Soap and civilization,” Ralph said. “That was the idea. Oh, and God.”

“Oh, and God,” Anna said. “I begin to wonder what Christianity has to offer to women. Besides a series of insults, that is.”

There were quarters on the mission compound for three servants. Two of these whitewashed rooms were already claimed, one by Salome, one by the gardener Enock. But the people Anna could not employ did not go away. The other hut was soon taken by a large family of mother and children whose origin no one knew; other families camped out in the vicinity, built themselves lean-tos even frailer than the shacks on the outskirts of Elim. They were hanging around, it seemed, in expectation; you could not say in hope, for nothing so lively as hope could ever be discerned in the expressions of these visitors of theirs. That was what Ralph called them: our visitors. Their faces showed, rather, an awesome patience, a faith; a faith that one day the beatitudes would be fulfilled, and the meek and the poor in spirit would come into their kingdom. Or into a job, at least. One day Anna would wake up, and find her ambitions quite different; she would need as many servants as Blenheim, or Buckingham Palace on a garden-party day.

Anna wrote home, in cautious terms, about her condition. Her mother’s reply came, two months on: “Last week you were in the minds of our whole congregation. Everyone keeps you in their prayers and thoughts. The people around you, though primitive, are no doubt very kind.”

The cooler weather brought relief. She breathed more easily then, above the arch of her ribs. Only one thing had sickened her, and its season had been brief: the guava tree, riotously fertile, diffusing through the air the scent of eau-de-cologne slapped onto decaying flesh.

Anna said, “Ralph, in my grandmother’s generation …” Her voice tailed off. She hadn’t meant to sound so biblical; she must be catching it from Salome. She began again. “In our family, some years back … there were twins.” She waited. He looked up. She glanced away from the shock on his face. “The doctor can’t be sure, of course, but he says to keep the possibility in mind. He thinks it will be all right.”

“Thinking’s not enough,” Ralph said. He put his head in his hands. “Oh God, if we were in Elim now … If you could get to Jo’burg or Pretoria there would be no problems, every facility would be there for us. We should go south, Anna. Surely they wouldn’t refuse us? It’s your first child, you’ve not been well … Surely they’d make a gesture, a humanitarian gesture?”

“No, they wouldn’t,” Anna said. “If we turned up in Jo’burg or Pretoria they’d put us back in jail.”

“Me, perhaps—not you, surely?”

“Why not? They put me in jail before.” Anna shook her head. “Forget it, Ralph. I don’t want to set foot on that soil. I don’t want that kind of compassion.”

Three weeks before the birth she did go south, but only to Lobatsi, a small town on the railway line. She had booked herself in at the Athlone Hospital; if something went wrong, she and the babies had a better chance here than they would have up-country. She believed in the twins, they were no longer a subject for conjecture; she imagined she could feel the two new hearts beating below her own. While she waited to be proved correct, she passed her days sitting at her window in the Lobatsi Hotel, watching the populace pushing into the Indian trading stores, wanting buckets and sacks of sugar and sewing cotton and beer. Men who had called at the butchers dragged up the dusty road, carrying sticky parcels from which gray intestines flopped. Women sat on the hotel steps and sold knitted hats; when evening came their daughters sat there and sold their bodies, elbowing each other and shrieking while they waited for trade, passing from hand to hand a cigarette, a plastic comb, a mirror encrusted with glass jewels.

The weather was cool, blue and still, the mornings sharp with frost. There were few white faces in the street. She listened every day for the call of the train, from the track beyond the eucalyptus trees; she saw the procession that trailed to the station, women hauling sacks of onions and laden with boxes and bags, and boys with oranges running to sell them to the travelers. When the train drew in, the passengers mobbed it, swinging from its sides and swaying from it, as if it were a steer that must be wrestled to earth. Sometimes it seemed to her that the whole country was on the move; yet she became stiller, heavier, more acquiescent to the strangeness and the pain that lay ahead.

In the depth of winter, and before dawn, her babies were born. Her own Dutch doctor had intended to be there with her, but he had been delayed, impeded somehow—broken axle, perhaps, or sudden minor epidemic—and she felt some protection had been withdrawn. She heard strange voices in the corridors, and the moans of another woman in labor; and this sound seemed to come to her now from her left, now from her right, now from the hospital gardens beyond her window and once perhaps from her own throat. When her daughter was born she held out her arms for the child, but when her son was born she had become an object, leaden with fatigue, her arms no longer hers to command. She heard him cry, and turned her head with difficulty, very slowly, to see him in a nurse’s hands, his body transfixed by a shaft of early light. Ralph stood by her bed, and held her hand as if it were a stone. They had already chosen a girl’s name, Katherine. “The boy after your father,” Anna whispered. “Because it will heal … because it will heal …”

Because it will heal all wounds. She left him suddenly, hurtling into sleep like an unstrung climber from a cliff face.

The doctor took Ralph by the arm and led him from the room. His heart felt small, very heavy, a pebble in his chest, contracted with shock and fear at the sight of the bloody streaked beings his wife’s body had produced. Later that day, after he had slept for a couple of hours, he went to see the babies again. He saw that there was no reason to be afraid. The twins were small, but healthy. They had curls of black hair, and eyes of black-gray: hard but melting, like the eyes of puppies.

months that followed were months of a lulling calm, shot through by the small emergencies of infant illness and ill-temper, by the vagaries of life in the wasteland; and these months, when Ralph and Anna looked back on their time in the protectorate, would seem like years. They were years of air so dry it seemed to burn the lungs; years of thorn and scrub, of a fine dust that covers every surface. The country’s spectrum was narrow: rose red, through brick, through lion-color, to stone. In summer, under the sun’s unclosing eye, the landscape seemed flattened, two-dimensional, as if it were always noon. Mosquitoes whined in the darkness, plunging unseen at swollen ankle veins, and ticks bit and clung and swelled fat with blood, engorged like blue-gray peas. About the place early one morning, inhaling a hot dawn mist, Ralph saw baboons in the garden, stripping the fig tree, handling the wormy fruit with murmurs of appreciation. Still as death, he watched them from the back stoep; it was as if he were watching someone else’s dream, or the reenactment of a myth. It puzzled him; he could not say what myth it was.

In summer the sky was violet, sullen; when storms came, the downpour whipped garden snakes from their heat trances. Green mamba, boomslang, spitting cobra: after the rains, the ground seethed like a living carpet. Six legs, eight legs, no legs: everything moved.

Salome found a woman called Felicia, to be the children’s nanny. Felicia must have her own home; the mother and children who had taken over the third servants’ hut moved out, and Felicia moved in. She would have a bed in the twins’ room, but she must have privacy, a place for her possessions; and I, Anna thought, wish sometimes to be alone in my house. The displaced family built themselves a lean-to. They seemed to accept the situation. Still they waited, week after week, to be called to Anna’s service.

Felicia was a tall erect woman with a smooth face and thin, almost Hamitic features. She was twenty-three years old, she said, was a mission girl herself, and had two children, who stayed with their grandmother in Kanye, in another part of the country. It was Matthew she liked best to carry on her back, but—as if in compensation—she placed on Katherine’s wrist a bracelet of tiny blue beads. When the babies were tiny, she wafted the cattle flies from their faces, and soothed one while Anna fed the other; when they grew she taught them to sit up and clap their hands and sing a song. She was scrupulous and clean, diligent and polite, but she spoke when she was spoken to, and then just barely. Her thoughts, she reserved to herself.

In winter there were porcupine quills on the paths, and the nights were as sharp as the blade of a knife. The waterless months brought wild animals to the edge of settlements, and once again the baboons crept down at dawn, shadowing the compound families, waiting to seize a porridge-pot left unwatched. Once, early in the morning and from a distance, Anna saw a leopard, an area of clouded darkness covering his chest. The darkness was fresh blood, she supposed; she imagined how the sun would dry it, and the spotted fur stiffen into points.

Anna spoke now in an arbitrary blend of English, Setswana, Afrikaans—any language which served. She loved her children with an intemperate blend of fear and desire; fear of insects and snakes, desire for their essence, for their shackled twin souls to be made free. She placed the brother beside the sister, watched them creep together, entwine limbs; she wished for them to grow and speak, to separate, to announce themselves as persons. An only child, she envied them and found them strange. When she prayed, which was almost never, it was only for Ralph: God preserve his innocence, and protect him from the consequences of it. She felt it was a dangerous thing, his bewilderment in the face of human wickedness; she felt that it left them exposed. She had been told as a child that you could not strike bargains with God, but she had never understood why not; surely God, if he had once been Man, would retain a human desire for advantage? Where simple strength is required, she bargained, let Ralph provide it; but where there are complexities, give them to me. Alone in her schoolroom and her house, below the tropic of Capricorn, she saw her path in life tangled, choked, thorny, like one of the cut-lines that ran through the bush and melted away into the desert.

Later, of course, she wondered at herself; how could she not have seen the road ahead? Even in the early days—before the wisdom conferred by the event—any trouble, any possible trouble, seemed to settle around the sullen, fugitive form of Enock, the man who was nominally in charge of the garden.

Enock, like them, was a refugee from the south. So they understood; asked where he came from, he nodded his head indifferently toward the border, and said, “Over that side.” Ralph tried to talk to him: look, whatever you’ve done there, whatever happened, it doesn’t matter, that was there and this is a different country. Ralph suspected that Enock had been in prison, for some petty criminality rather than for some offense against the race laws; though they make sure you can’t distinguish, he said, between a criminal act and an act of protest, and God knows, he said, if a man like Enock were to cheat or steal, should we make a judgment? Who can say what I would do, in his shoes, in the shoes of a black man in South Africa today?

But then Ralph would come back, from another dragging, weary quarter hour with Enock, and say, well, we never get anywhere. I’m just a white man to him.

Anna nodded. “And isn’t he just a black man to you?”

“I try not to think like that.”

“How can you not? You have to make him into something. A victim. Or a hero. One or the other.”

“Yes. Perhaps you’re right.”

“But it’s not like that. He’s just an individual.” She considered. “And I think as an individual he’s a waste of time.”

Ralph shook his head; he wouldn’t have it. “We can’t know what his life has been. How can you know? You are talking to him and he walks away.”

“And yet he understands you. He understands what you say.”

“Oh yes, that’s not his problem. He reminds me of Clara sometimes—do you remember how she would freeze you out? I used to wonder if something so terrible had happened to her that she just couldn’t bring herself to speak about it—she seemed numb. And Enock’s like that. Oh well,” Ralph said. “If I think I can help him, I must be patient and persist.”

Enock was about thirty years old, a handsome and composed man, with the same thin features as Felicia, an even, impassive face. He wore tattered khaki shorts and the cast-off jacket of a European-style suit. Ralph wondered about the original owner—who would have bought such a thing? The jacket was tan, and it was tight under his arms, and shiny from wear. Sometimes, when he went about his tasks, he would take it off and hang it on the branch of a tree. One day, the puppy took it down and worried it; Anna dragged it from his jaws in a state not too far from the original, but she felt that this was one more grievance for the gardener to chalk up on his soul.

This dog of theirs; your dog, she said to Ralph, when it ate books and dragged blankets outside into the dust. Ralph had brought the puppy home from a trip to Palapye, a settlement on the railway line; he had climbed out of the truck dazzled by the sun, thirsty, weary, coated in dust, and put into her hands a baffling fur bundle, an indecipherable animal like a tiny bear, with boot-button eyes and a dense, lemon-colored coat. “Whatever is it?” she had said, alarmed, and Ralph had said, reassuringly, just a dog. The

McPhersons gave him to me; they said, this is what you need, a dog about the place.

“What a strange thought for them to have,” Anna said. “Don’t they think two babies are enough?”

“The babies don’t bark,” Ralph said. “That’s what he’s for, a watchdog, not a pet.”

“I suppose he can be both.”

“When I was a child I was never allowed to have a dog.”

“Nor me,” Anna said. “I had a goldfish once, but it died. Just as well. I always thought that my papa would usher some customers through from the shop, and tell them he could get two fillets out of it.”

“So,” Ralph said. “So, you see, the twins, they’ll have a dog, and we didn’t have.”

“What is it, anyway, what breed?”

“The McPhersons claim its mother is a pure bred Alsatian, and they did—Anna, give me another glass of water—they did show her to me, and she looked authentic—but then they say his father is a yellow Labrador, also of good pedigree. I can’t believe that. I think his mum climbed out of the compound and took potluck.”

That was what they called the dog: Potluck. Potluck, as young things do, passed through a phase of great beauty. His button eyes grew large and lustrous, and his lemon fur turned to the color of butterscotch. His temperament was mild, and when the twins were fractious and unrewarding Anna would pick him up and kiss the velvet, benign space between his ears. Even Salome and Felicia, who did not see the point of dogs, would sometimes take time to speak to him, and caress him in a gingerly way.

At the age of eight months Potluck grew ugly. His head was huge, his muzzle blunt, his ears pointed different ways; he developed brusque, selective barking, like an old colonel suddenly moved to write to the papers. Almost grown now, he shambled around the mission compound, winning friends and giving offense. “It is a horrible, English trait,” Ralph said, “to despise people who are afraid of dogs.”

“Enock’s not afraid,” Anna said. “He just affects to be.”

“I like to think well of Enock,” Ralph said, “and in fact I make it my policy, but it has to be said that he’s becoming a bloody nuisance.”

It was Salome who had begun the complaints. “He has stolen from me,” she said. “My straw hat.”

“Do you think so?” Anna said. “What would Enock do with your straw hat?”

“Sell it,” Salome said. Anna almost asked, sarcastically, and what do you think it would be worth? She checked herself. These people negotiate in pennies, rather than shillings, so perhaps it’s true, perhaps Enock has sold her hat.

She said to Ralph, “Salome is always complaining about Enock, and now she says he’s raiding her wardrobe.”

“Then I must have a word with him. We can’t have Salome upset. Do you think she’s telling the truth?”

Anna frowned. “Hard to know. She has a preoccupation with clothes at the moment. She thinks she should be given dresses, castoffs. But I have a difficulty here, because I can’t manufacture castoffs, no one can. I could make her a dress, that would be no problem, but it wouldn’t be the same, it’s my clothes she wants.”

“Nothing of yours would fit her,” Ralph said. “Even if you wore your clothes out, which you don’t.”

“I gave a skirt to Felicia—that one I made in Elim, out of the roll Mr. Ahmed gave me. That gray-green paisley skirt, do you remember?”

“Yes,” Ralph said, lying.

“I was pleased with that skirt, it was the nicest thing I’d ever made for myself. Now I’m an inch too big for it, so I thought I’d give it to Felicia, she’s so smart and neat.” Anna smiled. “She doesn’t like it much. She thinks it’s drab. Still, I like to see her wearing it. It hangs well.”

“So Salome is jealous?”

“More than that. Jealous and aggrieved.”

“Perhaps Mrs. Instow used to give her clothes. The best Paris labels.”

They laughed. In the back of a drawer, they had found a photograph of the Instows, the kind of fading snap that people describe as “taken with my old Box Brownie.” A little, huddled, sexless couple they were, false teeth bared in haunted smiles. Where were they now? The mission society’s pension arrangements were not generous. A bed-sitting room and kitchenette, Ralph thought, somewhere like Leamington Spa. God save us. Sometimes now his thoughts turned to what he would do when they left Mosadinyana. His father would be seventy in three years’ time, and his mother’s letters hinted that the work of the Trust was getting too much for him. The Trust had grown a good deal, from its original local foundation; and Uncle James, still toiling among the London derelicts, was approaching what would normally be thought of as retirement age. I should be putting my mind to taking over from them, Ralph thought, going home and finding us a house and beginning the next phase in life. I can face them now, he thought, my mother and father, because I have done and seen things they have never dreamed of. And I have children of my own, now.

Anna seemed disinclined to speculate about the future. She had too many petty day-to-day concerns. A kind of kitchen war had broken out. Someone had taken a whole sack of sugar, just brought in from the store; it must be Salome, Anna thought, because sugar was one of her perquisites, she took it for granted that no one would prevent her from carrying it away by the pound, under her apron. “But a whole sack, Salome,” Anna said, turning on her disappointed eyes. “So that I go to the pantry and there is none— none—not a spoonful for Felicia’s tea.”

Salome said nothing, but a peevish expression crossed her face. Later that day she began her ritual complaints about Enock. “He is not doing his work properly. Always at a beer-drink when he says he is going to a funeral.”

Beer-drink, Anna said under her breath; yes indeed, there are plenty of beer-drinks, with beer brewed by you, madam, brewed with my sugar. Later that day, Salome came back for another attack: “All my vegetables I have planted, they are dying and dead.”

Anna considered. There was some truth in this. What she did not like about Enock was his attitude to the poor things that tried to grow in the earth. It seemed to her that he had chosen his trade specially so that he could be destructive. When things grew, he cut them down. You might call it pruning, she supposed, but he liked to cut until you could see plant blood; she felt for the stunted, cropped-back plants, and remembered how when she had been a small child her mother had in the name of hygiene pared her nails to the quick; five years old, she saw her little fingers, sore and blunt and red, turning the pages of her first reading book. And again and again her mother had done it, and so did Enock, and you could not argue, for they thought it was a thing they were morally obliged to do. What flourished, Enock left unwatered. He killed with his sharp blades, and he killed by neglect.

“Ralph will take over looking after the vegetables,” Anna said. “And I will look after them too when the babies are bigger.”

Salome looked shocked. “No, madam,” she said. And for the first time referred to precedent: Mr. and Mrs. Instow would never have done such a thing.

Ralph said, “They’re against Enock because he is an outsider.”

“He is not an outsider,” Anna said. “He has plenty of friends.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know. Somewhere. On the railway line. He’s always sneaking off, you know that. Salome says we should give his job to one of the visitors.”

“Give him another chance,” Ralph said. “Please, Anna? There must be some story that he’s not telling us. There must be some reason he’s like he is.”

Must there? Anna had the feeling a row was building up.

The next thing to occur was the loss of most of Ralph’s clothes. Ralph had gone to Palapye for the day, and she must have been in the schoolroom when it happened; classes were over, but she was making a colored chart for the wall, a colored chart with the nine-times table. The babies had been put down for their afternoon sleep, and Felicia took her own siesta beside them. Anna finished her work, put away the scissors and the big paste-pot; closed the schoolroom door behind her, shutting in its heat; tailed into the house, washed her hands and face, and made for her own bedroom, hoping to rest for an hour. The wardrobe door gaped as usual, but the camphor-scented interior was nothing but an area of darkness.

Enock’s disappearance could not be entirely coincidental. Odd items had gone missing before; Ralph’s wardrobe was not so extensive that she did not notice the loss. She would not have minded so much if Enock himself had seemed to profit from either the theft or the sale. But he still wore the tight tan jacket, sweat stained; the same ragged shirts and broken shoes.

“This time he’s gone too far,” she said. What bothered her was the thought of Enock in the house, pawing their few possessions. She imagined herself confronting him, and could see already the arrogance of his expression, his superiority; at the back of her mind she heard Ralph saying, well, perhaps he is entitled to his expression, perhaps he is indeed superior to us, but she did not believe it, she thought Enock was just one of those people you find everywhere in the world and in all cultures, one of those people who spread disaffection and unease, who sneer at the best efforts of other people and who make them restless and unhappy and filled with self-doubt.

“Let it go,” Ralph said. “We’ve no proof it was him. Where was Potluck, anyway?”

“Asleep under a bush. Besides, he knows Enock, doesn’t he? I’ve had to teach him to leave Enock alone.”

“It could have been one of the visitors. Anyone could have come in.”

“Don’t be simpleminded,” she said. “It’s Enock, he has his trading routes, everybody tells me about it. He takes things and puts them on the train and his pals take them off in Francistown.”

Ralph looked miserable. “We’ll have to start locking the doors, I suppose.”

Anna thought of Elim: the great bunch of keys that Lucy Moyo had put into her hand on her first day at Flower Street.

“Yes, we will,” she said. “And I’ll have to start locking the larder and counting the supplies and giving things out only when they’re asked for. Goddammit, Ralph, are we going to let ourselves be robbed blind?”

“It hardly matters,” Ralph said. “My clothes weren’t that good.”

Then, two days later, Felicia came crying that her skirt had gone, her best skirt, the one that madam had given her. She looked dangerous; she wanted to make an issue out of it.

Anna thought: oh, the barefaced cheek of the man! She had done as Ralph told her, she had said nothing, but now she was not going to consult Ralph, she was going to sack Enock that afternoon and be done with him. Her patience was at an end. Felicia had been a good girl, she was careful with the babies, it was against their interests to have her upset.

She called to Enock from the back stoep. He sauntered toward her with his corner-boy’s gait. Salome stood by, swollen with self-righteousness.

Anna looked out over her parched, devastated garden: “Enock, what has happened to Felicia’s skirt?”

Enock’s lip curled. “Ask that woman,” he said, barely indicating Salome with his eyes.

“You skelm,” Salome said, furious. “God will strike you.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Anna said. “Salome does not steal.”

“Sugar,” Enock suggested.

Anna conceded it. “Maybe.” Her eyes traveled sideways to Salome. “I don’t mind sugar, or anything within reason. But it is you who steal clothes and sell them, Enock. It is a bad thing to steal from my husband, bad enough, but it is worse to steal a skirt from Felicia, who is poorer than you are.”

“I did not see this skirt,” Enock said.

“Rubbish,” Anna said. “That’s rubbish, Enock, and you know it.”

And into the sentence she put contempt; what she meant to say was, Enock, I don’t hate you, I just despise you, you’re in my way and I want to clear you out, and get something better.

The man looked straight at her, into her face. Their eyes locked. She tried to face him down, and was determined to do it. The moment drew itself out. A voice inside her said, it is ridiculous, that you should engage in a battle of wills—you who have everything, you who have an education, a husband, twin babies, you who have God’s love—with this poor wanderer, this gardener, this man with no home. A further voice said, it is ridiculous in itself, this battle of the gaze, perhaps it is some convention that we have in Europe, yet how does he know of it? Perhaps all people know it, perhaps animals even. And perhaps, thought Anna, it is one of the battles that I am equipped to fight..

So it proved. Enock, his mouth moving around words unspoken, dropped his gaze and turned, his head down, and moved hunch-shouldered toward his own quarters.

There was a silence. Anna looked down at her dusty sandals, as if her eyes were worn out from the effort. Salome spoke, taking her own time, and her voice had a sick gladness in it. “Oh, Mrs. Eldred, oh, madam. You know it is a thing you must not say, you must not say to a person, you are rubbish.”

“What?” Anna said. She looked up again. “I didn’t say that. I didn’t say he was rubbish. I said his excuses were rubbish.”

“It is the same,” Salome said complacently.

Anna felt a quiver of doubt inside. There were, she knew, these forbidden phrases in every language; phrases that seemed harmless in themselves, but contained some deadly insult. Uncertainly, she asked, “I’ve said something bad?”

Salome nodded. “Enock will go away now,” she said.

“Good,” Anna said. “That is what I want. I don’t like to sack him, you understand? But if he goes because I have spoken the truth, I can hardly be responsible for that. We can have another gardener now. One of the people who lives in the huts may come.” She heard her strange, stilted speech, but didn’t regard it. That was how she talked these days.

That morning would always stay in her mind. It was many months since rain had fallen. There were bush fires on the hills, ringing the village and the settlements near by. They smouldered, sometimes flared: at night you could see them moving slowly, like an affliction in the blood.

It was just as Salome had predicted; Enock was gone by nightfall. His room had been cleared, and there was nothing left of him but his distinctive footprints dragged through the dust. Anna found them next morning on the cement steps of the back stoep, outside the kitchen. Perhaps he had come to make amends, to plead his case? If so he had thought better of it, and turned away, and vanished into the bush. By afternoon they had engaged another gardener from among the visitors, and the whitewashed room was occupied. Enock had taken the curtains with him, and Anna sat down at her sewing machine to make another pair.

She brooded while she worked: so much unpleasantness, over so little. She was reluctant to have perpetrated even the smallest injustice, though she tended to be practical in these matters; to be brisk about other people’s squabbles, as schoolteachers are. Nothing would ever be taught or learned, if you stopped the lesson every two minutes, to hold a court of inquiry: Madam, madam, Moses is stealing my pencil, Tebogo is sitting in my chair, Effat is hitting me and calling me a cat. It seemed to her that this was a case of the schoolroom kind. Perhaps Salome had taken the skirt, out of spite. It was possible. And Salome herself had been claiming for the past month or more that she had seen the gardener leaving Felicia’s room in the early morning. Would Enock steal from his mistress?

Yes, quite likely, Ralph said, when she put it to him. He seemed to have grown tired suddenly. Or tired of this situation, anyway. “You were right,” he said. “We should have sacked Enock long ago. Anyway, he’s out of our hair now. Not that you have much,” he said to his son. He lifted Matthew above his head. “Up to the roof,” he said. “Up to the roof and up to the moon. What a big strong boy! But when will you get a head of hair like your sister?” Kit watched from her cot, a finger in her mouth, her face dubious. “Up to the moon,” Ralph said. “Up to the moon, baby. And down again.”

Next day Salome said, “Storms tonight, madam. The weather is corning up.”

It was August now, and not warm; there were clouds blowing over the hills. “Good,” Anna said. “We need the rain.”

Let it be a good storm, she thought, one that fills the water tanks. I don’t mind tomorrow’s cold and the damp, even tomorrow’s snakes, as long as we have water to see us through the winter.

Early in the afternoon, just after school was over, Potluck came in from the garden—plodding, poor dog, as if his feet were lead. It was not like him; usually he bounded and bounced. “What is it, Potluck?” He staggered toward Anna, falling against her legs. “What’s the matter, chicken?” His great butter-colored head drooped, nuzzling her shin. Then suddenly his body contorted. He seemed to shiver all over, in a violent spasm or fit; then his ribs arched, and he began to vomit.

Anna watched him, stepping back in shock, calling out to Ralph to come and see; but Ralph was not in the house. Potluck’s body seemed to shrink, as if his bones were contracted by his efforts. And yet there was no effort, because a stinking liquid seemed to flow from him as if a tap had been turned on inside. Yellow-green, viscous, the fluid pooled about his feet, washed across the carpet, widened about the room. Its stench rose up; it hit Anna like a fist. She herself gagged; it was like nothing she had smelled before, a hellish compound of rotting plant life and burnt rubber, a smell of panic and morbidity and flesh revolted against itself. On and on it went, a ceaseless flow. She had heard of cancers, of malignities that are so foul that even the most Christian of nurses must enter the rooms with masks. Was that what she was inhaling now? She wanted to turn and run, skitter down the steps of the front stoep and out into the air. But pity for the creature gripped her; it held her to the spot. She saw the dog’s ribs heave, saw his eyes turn up into his skull; hand over her mouth, she saw his whipped crouch, his buckling joints. Potluck fell, lurching stiffly onto his side; but still that revolting fluid pumped on, and on. How could his body contain so much? She moaned his name; oh, Potluck, my little dog, what has happened to you? She crouched beside him and put her hands on him. His fur was wet, and a thousand pulses seemed to jump at her through his side.

But as she touched him, the flow stopped. The feculent pool ceased to grow. With a final expulsive effort the dog heaved his body clear of the floor, like an animal galvanized in an experiment. He dropped back, thudding against the floorboards. He drew a great breath, shuddering as a human being might. His whole body twitched, and his lips curled back from his teeth. He closed his eyes.

But Potluck was not dead. When she put her hand on his head, his tail moved, once. It beat the floor, spreading the hideous efflux to her skirt. She looked up, saw Ralph in the doorway, staring down at them. “Poisoned?” he whispered.

They said nothing further. They were afraid to speak. They picked up the dog and carried him to the veranda next to their bedroom; they sponged the filth from his coat, wrapped him in blankets, and dabbed water on to his dry muzzle, hoping he would lick. Anna sat by him while Ralph dragged the ruined carpet into the air, and threw buckets of water and disinfectant onto the floor, and swept out the froth and scum.

When he finished, and returned to Anna, Potluck was licking water from her fingers. His eyes were still closed, and the orbs danced and jerked under his lids. “I think he’s saved himself,” Ralph said. “God knows what it was, but no doubt if it had been in his system another hour it would have killed him.”

Potluck is a big dog, Anna thought. The poison for a dog would kill a child, kill two babies. A horrible rush of fear swept over her, left her nauseous, weak, clinging to the windowsill. “What can it have been?” Her voice shook. “What can he have eaten?”

“Something left for him,” Ralph said. “Bait.” He dropped his head. “I’m sorry, Anna. Enock’s final act of spite, I think. He never liked Potluck and he knew that we loved him, I have seen his lip curl when he has heard me talk to him. You were quite right about the man, I should have listened, you were completely right and I was completely wrong.” He held out his hand. She took it. “Anyway, he’s failed.” He stooped, patted the animal’s side. He looked vindicated, as if good had won out. As if it had prevailed. As if it always would.

For the rest of the day Anna checked Potluck at intervals, first every ten minutes, then every half hour, then on the hour; keeping a fearful vigil, as she had for the twins in their first months. She would have brought him to a more convenient place, but he was an outdoor dog, and did not understand carpets and furniture; to lie on the stoep was as much as he could tolerate. By dusk he had heaved himself from his side into a more alert position, and his strange swivel-mounted ears had begun to move in accordance with the sounds of the household and the compound. But he was halfhearted about his vigilance, and when he tried a bark he had to ponder it; the sound was muffled, and afterwards he looked bemused and exhausted. “Never mind, Potluck,” Anna said, rubbing his head. “You’re off duty tonight.”

“He’ll be all right now, won’t he?” Ralph said. “I would have cried, I think, if we’d lost Potluck. I love him for his simple and greedy character.”

“He’s like the twins,” Anna said. “That is their character, exactly.”

He took Anna in his arms, pressing her head against his shoulder, feeling her shiver from the stresses of the day. He stroked her back, murmuring meaningless, reassuring words, pet names; but he was shot through by self-doubt, shaken inside by it. This business with the gardener, it had bothered him, disturbed him a good deal. Anna would say, oh, of course there are injustices, there are miscalculations: they all even out. But he did not believe that. He did not say so to his wife, but he thought her attitude faintly repulsive; it is fatalistic, he thought, it releases us from the responsibility which we should properly take. We should do our best, he felt, always our best—consult our consciences, consult our capabilities, then, whenever we can, push out against unjust circumstance.

Enock was a crook, a petty criminal, perhaps accused of the one crime he didn’t commit; all acts of injustice are magnified in the victim’s eyes. The error may be irretrievable, Ralph thought; we have made a choice about him, perhaps the wrong one, but what can we do now? The situation could not stand still. We had to choose.

Lying awake sometimes, listening to the sounds of the bush, he brooded on the larger thoughts that routine keeps at bay. This I could do, or that … Each action contains its opposite. Each action contains the shadow-trace of the choice not made, the seeds of infinite variation. Each choice, once made, trips contingencies, alternatives; each choice breeds its own universe. If in the course of his life he had done one thing differently, one tiny thing, perhaps he would not be where he is now; his frail wife in his arms, his twins on the knee of their dark nanny, his convalescent dog at his feet, ribs heaving with delight at mere survival. Everything in the universe declines to chaos and waste; he knows this, he is not so poor a scientist. But he believes that his choices have been the right ones, that this is where he wishes to be; believes it simply, as he believed in Bible stories when he was a child. If his choices have led to this, have brought him to this moment, they have an intrinsic rightness; as for those other worlds, the alternative universes, he will not inquire. And surely, in the end, he says, my will is free? The world is not as Anna says. There is no dispensation that guarantees or provides for an evening-up of the score. If we are not to be mere animals, or babies, we must always choose, and choose to do good.

In choosing evil we collude with the principle of decay, we become mere vehicles of chaos, we become subject to the laws of a universe which tends back toward dissolution, the universe the Devil owns. In choosing to do good we show we have free will, that we are God-designed creatures who stand against all such laws.

So I will be good, Ralph thought. That is all I have to do.

The storm broke that night, around nine o’clock. Ralph and Anna had lit a fire in the twins’ room, and left them, warm and drowsy, under Felicia’s eye. The twins did not wake much at night now, and Anna was happy to attend to them when they did; so usually the nanny would have been back in her own quarters. But the rain was heavy, unrelenting, cold like frozen metal and falling like metal rods. On her haunches before the fire, Felicia rubbed her shins and indicated that she would stay; and her own bedstead, with its two plump pillows and crocheted blanket, was more inviting than the battering wind outside.

The world was full of noise, you had to raise your voice against it; the metal rain drummed the roof, and the wind moaned. Anna stood at the window, watching sheet lightning illuminate the garden, the fig tree, the mutilated fig tree that was part of Enock’s legacy. It lit up the straggling boundary fence of the mission compound, the shacks of their visitors—lighting them as they had never been lit before, because there were people in those shacks who could not afford candles. The inhabitants would be awash in brown water and mud, their roofs carried off perhaps, their cooking fires dowsed, their cardboard suitcases spoiled and their bundles and blankets and Sunday clothes now sodden. Tomorrow, she thought, we will tackle everything. Nothing can be done tonight, nothing can be done while this rain is still falling. She shivered. Ralph put into her hand a glass half full of Cape brandy. She stood sipping it, still at the window; behind her the paraffin lamp guttered and flared. The coarse spirit warmed her. “Fetch Potluck,” she said to Ralph. “Carry him in. We could put him by the fire, it would do him good. I know he doesn’t like to be inside but he might like the fire. Besides, if the wind veers round, that stoep will be awash within a minute.”

Ralph went out, a torch in his hand, down the passage to the back of the house. No respite; still the wind howled, the rain slashed in its rhythm against roof and wall and window. He heard the dog lift his head and whimper. Ralph clicked his tongue at him. “Come on, Potluck.”

Potluck tried to get to his feet, his paws scraping on the polished floor. But the effort was beyond him; he fell back and lay miserably on his side. Ralph put down his torch, squatted by him, heaved him into his arms; his legs thrust out stiffly, Potluck grunted, half in indignation and half in relief.

It was dark in the house’s central corridor, and Ralph guided himself by letting his shoulder brush the wall; he was on his way back to the sitting room, to Anna standing by the fire with her brandy. Now Potluck kicked his legs, as if he would like to make efforts for himself—so outside the kitchen Ralph lowered him gently onto his feet. Wagging his tail feebly, the dog crawled away under the kitchen table. “Come to the fire,” Ralph said to him. “Come on with me, Potluck.”

From outside the back door, Ralph heard a little noise, a scrape, a cry. It was a woman’s voice, very small: Baas, let us in. He thought, it is our visitors, the poor people in their shacks; they are panic-stricken, their houses are carried off, they want shelter. The thought crossed his mind: your dog has been poisoned today, there is a man with a grudge against you, you are not entirely safe. Then he heard the voice again, little and pleading: Baas, we are washed away, we are frightened, let us in.

And so, without more thought, he made his choice; he turned the key, stepped back, and drew the stiff bolt. As he swung open the broad, heavy back door, he felt it pushed, smashed back into his face; and he was not then surprised that Enock stood there, his face mild, curious, composed. Enock reached inside his jacket. As calmly as a man takes out his wallet—as calmly as a man in a grocer’s shop, offering to pay—Enock took from inside his coat a small hatchet.

At once, Ralph smashed it from his hand. He had time to think, and he thought at once of his superior strength; so many years of full-cream milk, of lean beef, of muscle-building protein, and beneath his hand this poor felon, whose cloth jacket tore under his hand, ripping at the seam. Enock slid along the wall, his hands thrown up in front of his face.

Ralph smashed his fist into the man’s jaw. He felt the intricate resistance of tooth and bone, felt pain in his own hand; and as he closed in on the man to throttle him he felt the slithering resistance of his sinews, of his stringy muscles and green bones. He had ripped away not just the jacket but the familiar sweat-soaked, third-hand shirt, and he pushed against the wall clammy hairless flesh, pounding his fist above the man’s heart as if that would stop it, adding this rhythm, thump, thump, to the drumming of the rain. He wanted nothing but death, nothing but to feel Enock wilt and stagger, droop, retch, fall, and then his feet would do the rest; and already in a kind of red-out of thought, a bloody dream, he saw his booted foot kicking in the delicate skull, splintering bone, scattering teeth, thudding and rebounding, thudding and rebounding like a machine, until the creature was dead.

He saw this in his mind; yet at the same time sensed movement in the darkness behind him. He heard the dog stir, try to get to his feet, fall back. Then a dull blow, very hard, between his shoulder blades. He believed he had been hit with some huge, blunt object, like a fence pole. His mind filled with a picture of damage, of a huge bruise like a black sun. He turned around on this presence behind him, moving more slowly than before, and put the palm of his hand against a looming face, and shoved it away. It was a stranger’s face, and though later he would think and think about it he would never be able to identify it. He also wondered, later, at how long it had taken him to realize that he was bleeding. The dull blow was a knife wound, a wound between his ribs; and as his blood began to flow, he fell against the kitchen wall.

The next moments were lost, would always be lost. He had a vague consciousness of his own heart, an organ he had given no thought before. Unregarded, unpraised, heart beats and beats: but heart jibs now.

He lay down, passively, curiously tired. He was waiting to die. Let me die, his mind said, dying is not too bad. It is too much trouble to stay alive. I am warm now. This easy emission of blood is to be desired; flow on, and on. I am warm now, and soon I will be safe.

When the stranger entered the room where she stood by the fireplace, her drink in her hand, Anna did not scream, because she found she had no voice; she knew the essence of fear, which is like a kind of orgasm, and she was numb and white and still as she listened to the man’s demand for money, as she took the keys from the top drawer of the sideboard, opened up the mission cashbox and gave him what was inside. Without looking at them, the man thrust the notes into his pockets with his free hand. He spilled some coins; he did not seem to care about them, and yet those coins too were money, a lot of money. She watched them roll away, under the furniture. The man kept his eyes on her face. So, she thought, have they come here to kill us?

She saw a torn shape creep into the room. “Enock!” she said. The strange man closed in on her, took her by the arm. But rage made her strong enough to tear her arm from his grip—to pick up the bottle of brandy from which Ralph had poured her drink, to smash it against the sideboard, that ghastly piece of furniture the Instows had so loved. Let them turn it on me, she thought, let them take it out of my hand, let them blind me, but let me blind them first.

A moment later she was alone. They had gone. The alcohol fumes rose into the room. Shattered glass lay about her feet. The neck of the bottle was sealed in her palm, as if it were fused to the bone. She was alone, the storm still battering the house; within her was a small dangerous silence, like a chip of ice in her heart.

She must move from the spot, and find out what hideous thing had occurred; the splintered bottle in one hand, the lamp held high in the other. She must walk from the room to the kitchen, see her husband slumped in death’s narcotic embrace; she must walk from the kitchen to the room where her children were left sleeping. In that room she will receive her own deathblow; the one that will leave no mark on her skin, but will peel and scalp her, part the flesh of joy from the bone of grief. Let her move from this room, and she will be impaled to suffer slowly, to suffer as much when she is a woman of eighty as she will suffer now—a little pale English girl with black hair, footsteps pattering down a black corridor, running into an abandoned, empty room.

Dawn came late. Felicia had gone, and taken everything from her hut, all her possessions; she had packed and flitted, in an orderly and premeditated way. There was blood on the kitchen walls, and less noticeable blood, dark and slippery, on the red cement floors. Ralph, white as a bandage, lay cocooned in other bandages. The light was splintered, refracted, full of water; the grass moved, the bush moved, the earth seemed to shiver and shift.

Anna walked, tottering, between Salome and an Englishman who appeared to be an official, perhaps a kind of policeman. Everything will be done, she was told; for, Mrs. Eldred, this is unprecedented, we have never before in the history of this country recorded the abduction of a white child, of two white babies, and from their family’s compound at night—no, Mrs. Eldred, there has been nothing like it.

She thought, because there is no precedent, they wish to believe it cannot be true. They wish me to say that, finding myself alone, finding this shattered bottle welded to my palm, I ventured out, saw my husband half dead on the floor, saw by the light of my lamp the blood on the walls; that I proceeded then into my children’s room, saw that their nurse was gone, saw the doors open, saw all the doors of the house open, saw the wind and rain flying in—saw my children’s beds empty, but no: no, there I was mistaken, for there is no precedent for it, it has never been heard of, such monstrosities cannot be entertained. I was mistaken when I thought my twins were gone; my son, Matthew, my daughter, Kit. They were safe all the time, dear policeman. My husband’s lifeblood had to be washed from the walls, and I am the woman who did it; but no, in this matter of my twin children, I was mistaken. I must be. You cannot bear it, otherwise, your official burden is too great. For if they are really missing, you must track them now, in the fractured light of the day after the storm: the country awash, the mud sliding, the fords in flood … Anna broke away from them, from the supporting restraining hands, and walked alone in the gardens, red mud caking her bare legs, her arms wrapped across her chest, walking, walking, while living creatures scattered from her feet.

It was nine o’clock that morning when Anna found her daughter. The party on the stoep saw her stumble toward them, holding in her arms what they believed to be a baby’s corpse. They saw her approach them through a shivering silver light: like a woman breaking through sheets of glass, like a woman plowing through mirrors. One child in her arms, but only one: plucked from the snake-seething ditch, plucked from muddy-brown water, blood-caked, rigid, frozen. Hands reached out again—to pull into the circle of humanity the bereft woman, the tiny carcass.

“Oh, Mrs. Eldred,” Salome moaned. “That God in all his goodness should send this trouble to you.”

But then the child began to utter: not to cry, but to make a jarring, convulsive, sucking sound, louder and louder with each breath, as if her tiny ribcage were an uncoiling spring.