Owen Sheers - The Dust Diaries

She cared as best she could for Anne, though secretly she dismayed to watch her daughter growing up in such a rough environment. Anne, meanwhile, took to the country better than her mother, and was happy to play in the dust with the native children until one of her parents would find her and scold her, shooing away her playmates as they picked her up and carried her inside. As she grew older Anne’s increasing ease with the country and the pioneer lifestyle fed her mother’s corresponding unease. Eventually Mrs Cole persuaded her husband to send his daughter back to England; there she would live intermittently under the care of her aunt and the stern regime of a girls’ boarding house, where she and her fellow classmates saw out their months as discarded children of the empire, waiting for the precious sea mail letters that told of their lost lives abroad. And that was when Mrs Cole eventually cried: six years after her arrival in Salisbury when she saw the wagon carrying her eight-year-old daughter shrink in the tall grass and slip away behind the kopje that stood on the edge of her restricted world.

Until then she had withstood it all: the lion attacks at the edge of town, the drunken behaviour of the prospectors back from the bush, the ongoing struggle with the natives to understand and be understood, and even the petty attempts to maintain London society in a ramshackle town of six hundred souls. This ‘society’ came complete with the hierarchies necessary for its existence. Administration men and their wives naturally assumed themselves a step above the prospectors and farmers, and did all they could to keep themselves there. Mrs Cole knew of wives who had starved themselves for weeks, eating only bully beef so as to be able to lay on the most enviable dinner in town, if only once every two months. But the departure of her child (her only child, she and Mr Cole did not produce any more in Africa, and she was not surprised, her womb felt as arid as the summer veld) was the trial that eventually broke the cast of her perfect pioneer womanhood. She did not, however, allow Mr Cole to see her cry, composing herself until she had walked around the back of the house to the new lean-to kitchen she had built. And it was in here, sitting on a sack of mealie meal with the white ants crawling over her broken yellow boots, that she finally wept. The tears came from six years deep, and each sob felt as though her soul was turning inside out. With the tears, something else left her as well that morning. Whatever it was that had been holding her up from the inside began to dismantle and fragment, as if she had been carrying a fragile egg within her which now was breaking, cracked as it was by the leaving of her only daughter.

So as Fort Salisbury grew and assembled itself around her, as her own house expanded from mud hut to wood then brick, Mrs Cole did the opposite. As the dirt tracks became tar macadam roads, so the lines of communication with her husband disintegrated. With every new brick building and every new public office that asserted their civilisation a step further into the veld, she felt the veld counterattack in her, edging itself an inch further towards her heart. It was a sensation that was exacerbated by her husband, who disapproved of this change in his wife. Maybe he didn’t realise that he held the power to stem this flow away from herself. His kindness, his love, that she now had to convince herself had once existed, would have been enough to bring her back. But instead, he grew more distant, throwing himself even more into his work in Dr Jameson’s administration and the foundations of Salisbury, which continued to grow towards the promise of its name just as Mrs Cole continued to shrink from the promise of hers.

And that is why she was disappointed tonight. Because it had been the first night in such a long time that she had felt herself abate this movement away from herself. It had been the first time for months and maybe even years that she had felt that movement reverse, felt herself wake and move again towards the Mrs Cole she recognised in her memories. She was not disappointed because the evening had gone badly, but rather because it had gone well, and because now it had simply gone. Passed. She wanted it and that feeling back.

She had to acknowledge, also, that there had been anticipation beyond just the meal itself, and the relief it offered from her boredom. There had also been the anticipation of meeting Father Cripps. Over the last few months she had heard various reports about the young priest. He was up in Umtali living at a mission, undertaking language training while assisting the Anglican priest there. The opinions and views of him that trickled in with travellers coming in from the east were varied and confusing. That there were any at all was a mark of the man. Few would have much interest in another missionary picking their way through the country, but Cripps had attracted attention, and that in itself was interesting. Many of the men were impressed by him when they met him. He was a straight talker, and a physical man, like them. He seemed to be a suitable church man for the country, and they admired the distance and speed of the treks he undertook through the country of the Eastern Highlands. But then others thought him a trouble-maker, a liberal and a negrophile who let his ideas obscure the realities before his eyes. He was talented with the Africans, but too lenient. They thought he would soon be hoodwinked by the wily Shona. And then there had been the dispute with some farmers outside the town. Cripps and another elderly missionary at St Faith’s mission, Rusape, had been accused of moving the boundary pegs of a farmer’s land, little by little, over a period of nights. When he was confronted by the farmer, Father Cripps had openly admitted to moving the pegs, claiming the farmer was encroaching on land reserved for the natives. It was this story particularly that had caused a stir in the rumours and gossip that blew between the settlements like a trade wind. Nobody wanted an interfering missionary in their territory. For her part, Mrs Cole found the image of two priests moving land pegs under the cover of darkness an amusing one. But the story had caught somewhere deeper in her as well, as if a long-buried concern had been accidentally snagged and disturbed.

The third view of Father Cripps that had excited her curiosity did not come from general gossip or opinion, but from one person, a woman. She was the wife of a travelling doctor who had met Cripps up country when he was on one of his treks. While her husband was setting up his stall in the high street, she recounted quite openly to Mrs Cole over tea in the hotel (a long open-fronted shack with a bar) the deep impression that Cripps had made on her. She spoke about his eyes a great deal and left Mrs Cole in no doubt that for a woman, beyond any other reason, Cripps was a man worth meeting.

♦

His arrival was quieter than she had expected, though why it should have been any other way she couldn’t think. Maybe anticipation had led her to expect something else, a shift in the air when he entered her world, a noticeable change in her environment. But it was all the same, all so familiar. He had come in from Umtali that day by wagon, and had not long left his case at the Bishop’s lodgings when the two of them turned the corner of her house and walked up onto the wooden veranda Mr Cole had left half-finished when he departed for the war. She was sitting under the shade of the convolvulus that twined its way around the corner pillar, holding a glass of whisky and soda and reading a novel that had somehow found its way from England into her dusty outpost life. The sun was low in the sky and the light of the day had softened. She wore a red dress, her only evening dress, and a large opal pendant that her husband had given her on his first return from Africa. Out in the veld the under-murmur of twilight was rising to meet the encroaching darkness. It was her favourite time of day, and although the town had grown since her husband claimed this plot, there were still no other buildings to obscure her view. The ground beyond their house was too swampy and marshy to support the weight of foundations. She looked across it now, through a quivering cloud of flies suspended above the patchy grass and took a sip of her drink, feeling the tightening around her lower jaw that she always felt with the first touch of alcohol. And then they were there, silhouetted against the light of the dying day, the diminutive, stocky Bishop coming up to the taller man’s shoulder.