Tea with the Devil

Tea with the Devil

by R. Eric Swanepoel

'That's it! Turn off here!' Sure enough, that was it - the buckled and
rusted sign carried the bullet-holed silhouettes of a kudu and a
brahmin bull and the words: "Laaste hoop, Koos en Marietjie Swarts."
The van, which Cathy would soon learn to call a bakkie, rattled as
tarmac gave way to potholed dirt, and she was forced to close the
passenger window against the swirling dust. This was a painful process
as the handle had broken off and the stubby lever was stiff and angular
and left its brute imprint in her pale hand. The "choice" between heat
and dust was relative anyway - the open window barely ameliorated the
stultifying mid-afternoon chaleur, and, when closed, did nothing to
prevent the broken ventilation system from admitting pulverised acrid
Africa. Adrian glanced at his wife, and smiled. Her eyes rolled above
the scarf she held over her mouth and nose. He couldn't tell whether
she was smiling or not. He was back in his childhood again, and the
dust and sweat were as balm after the lost cold European years. He cut
the engine, and the bakkie coasted to a halt under the canopy of a
thorn tree. He opened his door, and signalled that she should open
hers. 'Listen.'

For him all the bird songs were distinct and meaningful, the initially
hesitant and erratic 'Boo... boo... boo' of the wood dove accelerating
and falling in pitch at its diminuendo ending: 'Boo... boo... boo..
boo, boobooboo,' the harsh 'Kweh, kweh, kweh/go way, go way!' alarm
call of the kw?vo?l/go-away bird, the rattle of the francolins... He
stepped from the battered vehicle, inhaled familiar smells, drank in
familiar sights and knew he was home. Even the patterns the treads of
his shoes left in the roadside dust, the little black ants scurrying
over and among the dried devil's thorn stalks, and the tattered bantu
beer cartons along the roadside testified to his belonging.

'Let's get going, Adrian! I could do with a bath!'

The bath had necessitated a spider evacuation exercise on an heroic
scale. Cathy had tried to be calm about it all, and Adrian had made
light of what he knew was traumatic for her, 'Ach, don't worry! They're
harmless enough, and in any case you've seen the worst now - you'll
never see so many again! Remember this place has been unoccupied for
months...' For Cathy it had been only too occupied! Mice had definitely
been partying in the kitchen - the smell and mess in the cupboards
sickened her - and the nocturnal rustlings in the attic evoked memories
of terror-filled childhood nights in her grandparents' country home,
where she could never quite believe that the scrapings and bangs were
merely tree branches against her window. Nevertheless, Adrian's evident
pleasure at returning to his roots compelled her to reinforce the
British stiffness of her upper lip. Like the cream of colonial wives of
old, she was determined to make the best of it.

The huge decaying farmhouse, at first so foreign and forbidding,
stewing in the secrets of generations of the Swarts family, ceded
gradually to Cathy's conquistadorial zeal. As she immersed the mophead
for the umpteenth time in the discoloured contents of her bucket, the
aptness of this task struck her - her Ph.D. in soil science and
hydrology made her the best qualified dust remover on the planet! She
laughed aloud, and "the housegirl" looked at her strangely, at this
"madam" who got her hands dirty and whose myriad thoughts flickered so
transparently on her pale face.
Little had Cathy realised what events would follow from that meeting of
eyes across the canteen table in the Perthshire College of Agriculture.
What was it that had attracted her to the quiet man with the crisp
accent studying for a Diploma in Tropical Agriculture? They say that
one instinctively recognises those with similar attitudes to life,
before even the first word is exchanged. And they did have some things
in common.

The strangeness of her girlhood had only struck her when she had left
school. Most people had not spent their childhoods commuting between
boarding school in the home counties and military quarters in Germany,
Belize, The Falklands... Most people did not hear their father
addressed as "Brigadier." Perhaps more significantly, most people did
not think of their mother as "the Brigadier's wife." This was not just
a convenient and dismissive tag, it was a way of life, a duty, a
vocation, and her mother had excelled. Yes, she had excelled in tea
parties and maintaining the home front, the stable base for the
Brigadier apparently always the same, regardless of country. Everything
was comme il faut, decorum and protocol. Her mother knew the ins and
outs of the unwritten rules of the military wives' hierarchy. She was
respected, and sought by new army wives in need of advice. How
pointless and empty her life had become when the Brigadier had retired
to a cottage in Cheshire. And when television had woken her to modern
Britain, how pathetic sounded her remarks about the "terrible state of
affairs" in which the world found itself. Still, the Telegraph (read
only after the Brigadier had broken the pristine pages) reassured her
there were still sensible people of her mind around. She railed at
Cathy about all this. And still didn't see her. Always the absentee
mother to her late surprise child. (Referring to this, Adrian now
sometimes affectionately called Cathy his "laat lammetjie," his late
wee lamb.) And Cathy had cried secretly and rebelled by becoming a
scientist. And then the eyes across the lunch table.

Five days into her reign she woke early, and realised that she was
actually looking forward to her day of scrubbing, rearranging, painting
and pesticiding. A new broom sweeping clean a new life in a new country
in a new decade. The 1980s yawned ahead, rich with possibility and
hope. That night she lay aglow with healthy fatigue, a queen in her
realm, full of plans for the morrow. Adrian smiled to himself to notice
this change. The next day he whistled as he oversaw the re-concreting
of the cattle troughs, and at the end of the day he delighted "the
boys" with a crateful of beer from the local store, beneficent in his
joy.

Even so, Cathy did not feel quite as firmly seated as she would have
liked. There were the servants. In Africa there were always the
servants. When Adrian had told her he was from South Africa it had been
disconcerting. Struggling to reconcile what she knew of the injustices
of apartheid with the background of the man she loved, she had told
herself that there were two sides to every story, and that one could
not - should not - judge a situation from the outside. That had kept
the problem at bay. For a while. Now, "diep in die ou Transvaal," she
was not presented with a choice about how to behave towards "the
blacks" - and, worse still, she found herself resenting "the blacks"
themselves. The guiltier she felt, the more she disliked them. 'I don't
know, Adrian. I mean Selina works hard enough in one way. I can't fault
her on that... it's just that there's this air of, ...of sullenness.
There's no spark there, no initiative. If I tell her to wipe the table,
she wipes the table, but she won't think to lift the tray to wipe under
that... and she never utters a word. Yet when I see her go in the
evening, and she meets her friend outside, she's a different person,
laughing and joking, and... alive. It makes me uneasy... I know that
English isn't her first language, but...'

'You can never know everyone and everything, Cathy, just accept that,
and blacks are blacks. Selina speaks Sotho, Tswana, Zulu and Afrikaans
of course. Her father was Pa's chief stockman. I used to kick a ball
around with her brothers. You know Cathy, you're doing wonders here,
but you might make your life a bit easier for yourself if you learnt
Afrikaans at least. It's really not that difficult!'

It was a week later when Cathy was sitting on the stoep (verandah)
having her mid-morning tea break, and pouring over Afrikaans for
Beginners that Oom Stompie made his appearance. 'Good morning, mevrou
Swarts! So you are the new family! Welcome!'

Cathy was startled, not least because he had emerged from round the
side of the house, his simultaneously bloated and wrinkled figure
materializing barely a yard from her at the shady end of the stoep.
More than that, though, he appeared to her like the avatar of a future
Adrian, given a few more decades in the sun, and the normal ration of
braais (barbecues) and beers to go with them. Of course she'd seen
photographs of Adrian's uncle before, but she'd somehow never put these
thoughts together, and now it was staring her in the face, literally.
The family visage was congenial enough, with its broad grin and the
rough deep voice that went with it, the syllables prominent like the
wrinkles in old leather shoes, but the recognition of its existence
somehow underlined Adrian's distance from her, his integration in this
foreign land, this culture. Perhaps she had never really known
him.

'So, I hope Adriaan is good to you - I know it can be difficult for a
woman alone all the day.'

"Uh-drrri-aaan" - the name was different! But of course - she'd called
him Adrian for so long she'd forgotten that he'd adopted this
pronunciation for the convenience of the slack-tongued English in their
wet green isle. Here it was "Adriaan," as harsh as the black stubble
left after a veld fire. 'You must be Mister... meneer Swarts, Adriaan's
uncle?' She was pleased with herself there.

'Ja, that is right! You must excuse me. I have seen your photographs so
many times! You must call me Oom Stompie, of course, everyone does
round here!' He pointed to his truncated right leg, a real wooden peg
below the knee, a rubber stopper on the end.

'I have seen your photographs too. Adrian... Adriaan has told me a lot
about you... he thinks very highly of you! You must call me Cathy. It
is a pleasure to meet you, Oom Stompie!' She kept up a bright front,
but there was a mass of thoughts moiling behind it, amongst which 'I'm
sure the blacks don't call you Uncle Stumpy!' was the most subversive.
Adriaan had been so fond of this old man, who'd dug him into his
culture and set of values, but paradoxically given him the imagination
to leave it - he'd filled his childhood with stories, every day a new
one concerning the abbreviation of his appendage: titanic struggles
with crocodiles, elephants, hippos, lions or hyenas, a marathon desert
trek on a leg in the process of being digested by puffadder venom, an
assegaai wound in a battle with kaffirs, a fall while scaling a cliff,
a sacrifice to the appetite of a starving and bloodthirsty boatmate
when they'd been adrift on the high seas... Cathy even knew his other
nickname, Duisend-en-een (Thousand-and-one), or, more simply, Ou
Duisend (Old Thousand), because of his legendary Scheherezade-like
gifts. Apparently no-one knew, or at least no-one claimed to know, what
had really happened to his leg, but the strongest rumour involved a
banal tractor accident.

They said nothing for a while, a few seconds of mutual appraisal and
thought: 'This one'll be a tough nut to crack. So be it.

'Would you like some tea? ...Or coffee?' This last offer was tacked on
as she remembered the preferences here.

Oom Stompie smiled, 'Ja, thank you very much. I am now just back from
Pretoria, and I came directly here to see you. Adriaan was working by
the gate and he told me to come. I am thirsty.' He clomped up the
stairs and lowered himself onto the old riempiesbank, the interwoven
leather strands creaking under the khaki-clad flesh. 'I will join you
with your tea,' he said, indicating the pot in a strangely embarrassed
gesture. 'They say, when in Rome... it is true that you English always
drink tea, ja?'

Cathy smiled, in preference to embarking on a long stereotype-breaking
discourse on the various caffeine consumption habits of her
countrymen.

'You know, we have a drink here called rooibos tee, red bush tea. You
should try it. It is very refreshing!'

Cathy had tried it, years ago when Adriaan had returned to England
after his mother's funeral, bringing a suitcase full of South African
"delicacies". The only one she'd liked had been the marula fruit
liqueur, but she knew enough not to hack at the branch of amity he was
clumsily extending. She prolonged her smile. 'That would be
interesting!'

'So, you have cleaned up the old place! Ja, it is good to see it like
this again. I see you have been battling with the ants!' Oom Stompie
indicated the white powder around the cracks in the stoep.

'Yes. I'm not really used to all the insects. We don't have so many in
England. I think they have invaded the house in the last few years.'
She regretted saying that as soon as it was out of her mouth. Oom
Stompie's puffy face had clouded. Was it that she'd reminded him of the
death of his brother and sister-in-law, or that she might have appeared
to have been calling his custodianship into question? As if to save
her, a hornet appeared, flew around the table and settled on the sugar.
Cathy had jumped at its first appearance.

Oom Stompie was pleased to be able to regain charge: 'Don't worry,
Cathy. We call it a perdeby in Afrikaans. I don't know what you call it
in English - a horsebee? Just stay still. You know in general with
these things if you leave them alone, they leave you alone. But you see
where that one comes from?' He pointed towards a fist-sized brown
bauble suspended in a dark corner under the stoep roof. A couple of
other hornets buzzed around it. 'It is probably best to destroy the
nest. If you wait until it is dark and they are all inside, you can put
it in a jar or a sack, and get rid of them all safely in one go. I'm
sure Adriaan can do that for you. Otherwise I can send round one of my
boys...'

Cathy almost blurted, 'I didn't know you had any children!' but
recalled in time that this was they way they talked of their
servants.

Oom Stompie continued, 'Ja, Johannes is the best for things like that.
I remember once there was a snake in the toilet...' Cathy's evident
horror stopped him, '...but moenie worry nie - that only happened once,
and sometimes you won't even see a snake for years! Africa is not so
bad, really! You just need to learn what is what and how things are
done, then you will have no problems. You will see it is good here.
Adriaan tells me that you have no servants in England!'

'No, no - that's true. We don't really need them. Our houses are not so
big there, but some people have what we call charladies. That's women
who come round once or twice a week and do some cleaning. It's very
expensive, though!'

'Ja, well... ahh... that is what we must talk about. You know... ahh...
I have had some difficulty today. You will find the kaffirs here are
generally very good people. We have worked together for a long time in
this place. We know them and they know us. We are all happy here, and
we have our own ways... You know I am not one of those who believes
that a man must only work. My boys can drink and party if they want to.
They can even fight, and believe me they can fight. Ja, no - what they
do in the compound is their business. So long as they do their work for
me that is all fine. I give them food, and I give them their beer and
their accommodation... They get two weeks' leave and a Christmas bonus.
There is even a school for their children, so they can read and write.
They have a good life. But you must understand, this is a poor country.
It would be very nice if we could all be rich, but it is not possible.
You know it is not right to give too much, because they will always
want more, and where will that lead? It would be a cruel thing... Also
you cannot give to the one and not the other. That is not right. In the
past everything has been peaceful here... You know, when I got back
from Pretoria the boys were waiting for me. There was a story that the
new madam was paying her housegirl R200 a month. Now I am sure that was
an honest mistake. It is good to be charitable - it is even in the
Bible - but you need to think of the... ahh... the consequences. It is
not your fault to make a mistake like that, but you should know we pay
R50 a month here. Selina will not come back. Another girl - a good girl
I promise you - will come round tomorrow. And now I must go. We will
not talk of these things again.

'It has been a pleasure to meet you, Cathy, and you are very welcome in
our family. I shall send the boy round to get rid of these horsebees
for you! Tomorrow you will try rooibos tee!'

Oom Stompie disappeared as suddenly as he'd arrived. Cathy sat, dazed.
Flies and hornets buzzed around her, but she was oblivious. In the
distance a go-away bird was calling: 'Go way, go way, go way!'