Heavenly Date and Other Flirtations

  Outside, on the steps of the City Hall, the guests had lined up for the their departure. Many of them had cartons of confetti and some of the children were already tossing it about. He looked out and winced.

  “Are you ready?”

  Anne was at his side, dressed in the dress that he had helped her choose at Meikles, wearing the hat that her mother had bought her in Salisbury. She held on to his arm, pinching the flesh playfully.

  “Come on.” She turned to her mother, who was hovering at her side. He had never seen them show any sign of physical affection, but now she was in her mother’s arms. They embraced, the mother patting her back, whispering something to her.

  Her father smiled and winked at him conspiratorially: “A woman never leaves her mother, I’m told. Look at that.”

  Then she turned to embrace her father. He noticed the tears in her eyes and the flush on her cheeks. Her father held her gently, pushing her away after a few moments.

  “You’ll be late,” he said. “Remember that we ’ll be seeing you in a week or so anyway.”

  She was sobbing. “You’ll be all right? Will you be all right?”

  They all laughed. “Of course, darling. You silly girl. We’ve been all right for years. Years.”

  Then, in the car, she leaned against him and they kissed. She smelled of a perfume which was new to him – something expensive, exotic. He swept her hair back from her eyes and loosened his tie. She touched him playfully on his chest.

  “A week,” she said. “A week, with nobody else, and nothing to do but look at the Falls.”

  “Tremendous,” he said.

  The car moved off. Some of the guests were still standing in clusters about the gates of the car park; they waved. Two young men reached out and thumped the top of the car; he smiled and waved to them.

  People looked at the car. A cyclist moved over to the side of the road, a black man in torn shabby khaki and wearing a dilapidated cap. He looked into the car, his face expressionless, and then looked away again, as if dazzled by her dress.

  Within a few minutes they were at the station. The driver stopped, got out of the car, and whistled for a porter to take the suitcases. Then they made their way on to the platform and inspected the list of sleeping car accommodation. It was strange for him to see their names together; she pointed it out, and touched his arm.

  “That’s us. Husband and wife, you see!”

  As the train pulled out of the town he struggled with the thick leather strap of a corridor window. Eventually the heavy glass window slid down and he was able to lean out into the night air. It was fresh, and he felt its sobering effect. It was almost dark now, and as the train swayed slowly on its way they could see the lights of the African township burning in neat rows, out towards the edge of the bush and the flat plains of Matabeleland. The line swung slowly away from the city and he was able to see the fire of the engine as they negotiated a bend in the track. Sparks flew up from the boiler, flitting like fireflies into the thick darkness of the night. Other windows were open further up the train and he saw the dark shapes of the occupants. He would leave the window open for the fresh air, even if it meant that smuts of coal dust would come in from the steam engine ahead. He knocked before he entered the compartment. She was standing up as he went in, folding her going-away dress into a suitcase.

  “Can I help you with anything?”

  She shook her head. “Everything’s fine. I’ve put your pyjamas out on your bunk. And your toothbrush is over there.”

  The words sounded so strange to him. Was this what marriage would be about; talking about little arrangements – your meal’s ready, don’t forget your keys, have you seen my pen, and so on? Would they talk like that? And if they didn’t, what else was there to talk about?

  He sat down on the bunk. Did she think that he had slept with anyone before? She would not have done so – he was certain of that – and they had never gone far themselves. She was a virgin, he knew that. He looked at her: she was now his wife. The men had alluded to it so much at university, although he had disliked the smuttiness and crudity. Would this be what all the embarrassment, the physical itchiness, the talk, would be about? What would it be? The sweatiness of skin against skin? Fumbling about in a bunk bed narrow for one, impossible for two?

  She smiled at him. She was embarrassed too; he could see that. He would have to do something to help her. He looked about him; the light – he could turn that off. Then they could get undressed in the dark and each save the blushes of the other.

  He rose to his feet and she gave a start.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

  She laughed. “I didn’t think …”

  He switched out the light, but instead of total darkness there was a glow from a night light above the door. There would be a switch for that too, but where?

  They ate breakfast in the swaying restaurant car, watching the land roll past. The trees were higher now and the bush much thicker; this was no longer cattle country, but untamed land, elephant territory. He sat back in his seat and watched the early morning sun on the forest’s canopy of trees. He knew what the bush was like here. During his three months’ spell of military training he had been on patrol in country just like this. He had spent ten days in a camp cut off from the outside world, shooting for the pot, feeling dirtier as each day passed, prowling through the six-feet-high grass in an elaborate game of overgrown boy scouts. And soon, on the horizon, above the sea of tree tops, they saw the cloud of spray. He offered her his seat, which had a better view, but the tracks suddenly began to turn and the forest closed in again.

  “Half an hour,” he said. “Half an hour at the most.”

  She went back to the compartment to pack, leaving him at the table. He poured himself another cup of coffee and stared at the tablecloth. He felt trapped, a feeling not unlike the feeling he had experienced when he had first been sent off to boarding school. He had been driven there by his father and had been aware of the complete impossibility of escape. This was how he now felt: a prison of walls and barbed wire could not have been more constricting.

  “Don’t expect to enjoy your honeymoon,” a cynical colleague had said to him. “Nobody ever does.”

  To his relief, the feeling passed. That evening, as they sat on the terrace of the hotel and watched the last of the sun in the cloud of spray, he felt relaxed again. They had been joined for sundowners by another young couple whose room was in the same corridor as their own. He was an engineer with the Goldfields company; she worked for an accountant in Bulawayo. Their presence seemed to act as a catalyst for Michael, and she noticed this. He’s better with other people about him, she thought; he ’s gregarious. That didn’t matter, of course, she liked company herself and would be quite happy to be sociable. Honeymoons, she had thought, are meant to be times for privacy, but there would be time enough for that in the future. There were years ahead with just the two of them, although that afternoon she had found morbid thoughts coming upon her, unwelcomed. She had imagined him dying in some way, here at the Falls, perhaps slipping on a rock in the rain forest on the lip of one of the gorges and falling hundreds of feet into the river below. She had read of that happening to another honeymoon couple and she could imagine the desolation. She pictured herself returning, a widow, to the sympathy of her parents, bearing the name of a dead husband and memories of a married life measured in hours. She struggled to dispel these thoughts, just as, when she was ten years old, she had dispelled fears of the death of her parents.

  They sat outside until the first mosquitoes began to trouble them. Then they went inside and bathed before dinner. Although they had made no arrangement to meet again that night, the other couple beckoned them over to their table and they joined them. She felt a momentary surge of anger at the intrusion, but suppressed it and joined in the mood of the evening. Wine was ordered; she felt it go quickly to her head, making her feel light, almost dizzy. The other woman became flushed and laughe
d in a shrieking way whenever her husband made some witticism. Michael drank lager with his food, keeping pace with the other man.

  By ten o’clock they were the last people in the dining room, watched over by several patient waiters too cowed to protest at the extension of their normal hours. When they rose to leave, the waiters swooped on the tablecloth and the empty glasses. They returned to their room, saying goodnight to their friends in the corridor. Then, the door closed behind them, she kicked off her shoes and flung herself on the bed. He stood at the door for a moment, as if uncertain.

  “My God, I’m tired,” he said. “I could sleep for hours.”

  She looked at him. “Why not? You’re on holiday.”

  He crossed to the other side of the room. “I mean, I’m really tired,” he said. And then, as if suddenly seized of an idea: “Why don’t I sleep on cushions tonight? On the floor? We’d both get the sleep we need.”

  She did nothing. He thought for a moment that her eyes were closed and that she had gone to sleep, but then he noticed that she was watching him. He tossed his head back and laughed.

  “Don’t take me seriously,” he said. “I’m only joking.”

  She giggled. “I didn’t,” she said. “Of course I didn’t take you seriously.”

  The school lay thirty miles outside Bulawayo. It had been built in the thirties, at a time when there was a demand for private education from those who would otherwise have been inclined to send their sons out of the country, to expensive boys’ schools in the Transvaal or Natal. It was modelled unselfconsciously on the pattern of the English public school, and liked to employ Oxbridge men. After the War, the supply of such graduates declined just as the fortunes of the tobacco planters and ranchers improved. The expansion of the school meant that graduates of South African universities were considered, second-generation Southern Rhodesians; gentlemen, nonetheless, as the headmaster insisted.

  The site for the school had been well chosen. It was built on land donated to the first board of governors by a wealthy cattle rancher who saw the gesture as a possible way of securing an education for an ineducable son. There was more land than the school could possibly use, several hundred acres in fact, cleared out of the low scrub bush on the side of a range of hills. It was a healthy spot, dry, and cooler than the hot plains over which it looked. Gum trees had been planted as the buildings were constructed and these now provided welcome shade in the height of the hot season. There were playing fields, irrigated from the sluggish green river that flowed a mile away from the main buildings, and a small farm which the members of the school farming club ran.

  The nearest settlement was ten miles away, at a point where a few stores clustered around a junction on the strip-road that led south to the Limpopo and the South African border. There was a mission school there, staffed by two German priests and several African teachers, and, some distance further along, a small gold mine, the last of the mines to operate in the area. In the bush around the school itself, there remained the old workings of the earlier mines, dangerous, unprotected shafts and tunnels that bored into the hard red-white earth.

  On his marriage, Michael was moved out of the single staff quarters, a long, low, rather barrack-like building near the rugby fields, into one of the junior staff houses. It was a bungalow, one of the earliest buildings raised on the site, and was considered by the other staff to be the bottom of the housing ladder. The roof, which was made of corrugated iron, protested loudly against its restraining bolts as the morning sun heated it up; the bath, an ancient tub on claw feet brought from a demolished house in Bulawayo, was chronically uncomfortable, and the kitchen was regularly invaded by ants. Anne, however, chose to defend it on the grounds of its character and surprised everybody by saying that she wanted to remain there rather than move when a better house became available.

  Michael seemed largely indifferent to it. He cursed the ants, laying down ineffective poisons for them, and he hated the way the verandah let in the sun at the wrong times, but for him a house was a place to eat and sleep in, not a thing to exercise the imagination or the emotions. He converted the spare bedroom into a study and would sit there when he had to write a letter or fill in report forms on the boys; for the rest, though, he always seemed to be at the school or visiting other staff members in their house.

  Anne did her best to create a home. She studied pattern books and made curtains for the windows; she replaced some of the furniture with items given her by her parents, and she hung paintings which she bought in a small art shop in Bulawayo. They were reproductions of Constable and Turner, symbols of the culture to which they all knew they belonged, which was the reason for their presence there in Africa, but which seemed so distant, so impossibly beautiful in the midst of the pervasive dust and beneath the hot dome of the sky.

  Michael scarcely looked at the pictures; he felt unmoved by them. His ideal of beauty, if he had ever bothered to define it, would be a Cape valley with towering blue mountains behind it and a Cape Dutch farmhouse on the lower slopes.

  They settled awkwardly into their married life. Anne was busy with the house and filled her days that way, although she knew that the time would come when the curtains were all made and the sitting room completely decorated, and what then? The African cook did all the cooking and the cleaning of the kitchen; it would have been unthinkable for her to take on responsibility for that. So what would there be for her to do?

  She looked at the lives led by the other wives. They fell into two groups, the older ones, who spent their mornings drinking coffee together and playing bridge, and the younger ones, who had children. She was tried out by the bridge players, but she lacked interest in the game and found it difficult to concentrate on remembering which cards went out. She withdrew from bridge and dallied with the young mothers; but they had concerns which seemed petty to her and from their point of view they were merely waiting for her to become pregnant and to share their interests.

  Sundays were the worst of days. During the week, Michael would immerse himself in his duties at the school and could find a reason for absence from the house; on most Saturdays, his responsibilities for the boys’ sports would keep him busy all day, often, for away games, in Bulawayo itself. On Sundays, however, there was no sport, and it was a school custom that the boys would be left to their own devices around the hostels or encouraged to go out on day-long expeditions into the surrounding country. She would sit in the house with Michael, reading or listening to records, but he would begin to feel restless and would go out for a walk. She offered to accompany him, and did so on one or two occasions, but it became clear to her that he wanted to be by himself. He would walk out ahead, and then wait for her to catch up, an expression of irritation on his face. She stopped going with him, and would wait on the verandah, paging through a magazine or working on the Bulawayo Chronicle crossword puzzle, but all the time willing him back. She needed his presence, even if he seemed to be indifferent to her company. She liked just to sit and look at him, savouring his undoubted handsomeness. She thought of him as a beautiful animal – a young tawny lion, or a leopard perhaps – who had wandered into her life and had to be guarded. She thought his distant behaviour might be nothing more than his maleness, his otherness. She had no right to expect him to settle down like a domestic cat.

  Her parents waited for an invitation before they made the journey to visit them. She had seen them briefly on their return to Bulawayo after the honeymoon, but she had hesitated to ask them to the house until a few weeks later. This was her separate life now, her adult life, and they would come into it as invited guests rather than as parents.

  She had arranged for them to come for dinner one Saturday and then to stay overnight before returning to the farm the following morning. They arrived with a car full of presents; bits and pieces for the house, sticks of biltong from kudu he had shot on the farm, books from her childhood: her inscribed Bible, her swimming prize, her ballet album. She laughed at these mementoes of childhood but was se
cretly pleased.

  The four of them sat on the verandah for sundowners. The conversation was largely about the house and the school. Anne ’s father sought details of the fate of schemes which he had been involved in as a governor: the new pavilions, the expansion of the fields, the new house for the headmaster. Then, over dinner, the conversation seemed to dwell on family friends of theirs, whom Michael did not know. He listened to the chatter and then, pleading tiredness, went to bed.

  “So, you’re happy then, as a married woman?” her father asked. “Your new life going well?”

  She avoided his eyes. “Of course. It’s all so different. This house, this place, everything …”

  “But you’re happy?” he persisted.

  Her mother intervened. “Of course she is. It’s different for her. It’s all new.”

  “I’m sorry,” her father said, smiling. “I was just checking up that all was going well. I’ve always wanted to know that my girl’s all right. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

  He met his wife’s hostile gaze and then looked away.

  “I’m sorry, darling. I don’t want to pry. We’re a tiny family, now … You’re very precious …” He stopped. There was a silence in the room. He had his hands folded on his lap, his wife was looking up at the ceiling. Anne, sitting next to him, leaned across and put her arm around his shoulder.

  “I’ll tell you if there ’s anything wrong,” she said. “Don’t worry. I promise I’ll tell you.”

  Several weeks after this visit, he had to accompany a school team into Bulawayo for a rugby match. She had not gone with him on one of such trips before, but she could not face the prospect of a Saturday by herself and asked him to take her. They drove into town in silence; she assumed that his mind was on the forthcoming game, which he had announced they were bound to lose, and so she did not attempt to engage him in conversation. When they reached the host school, he swung the car into a parking place under a jacaranda tree and turned to her.