A Change of Climate

  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. T
hese 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 h
er, 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..