Owen Sheers - The Dust Diaries

And Arthur. Where was he then to tell her everything would be all right? He had always seemed so worldly compared to the other men in Icklesham. Educated, assured. But in the face of her raging father…that had been a terrible thing to see. She had witnessed her father’s anger before — when some chore was left undone, when he thought he’d been swindled at market. But never like this. An anger so complete that at first he was silent. Arthur and her standing before him, and him saying nothing. Just the throbbing vein at his temple and her mother going to stand behind him, placing her hand on his shoulder. Then his shrug when she did, flinching her hand away with a jerk of his arm as if the touch of any woman would have scalded him then.

And then his anger found its voice. Ada had collapsed and cried to see him so: his face, filled with blood, the skin tight across his jaw and phlegm spitting from his mouth as he threw Arthur out of the house. And the words he said. She had never heard her father talk like that before. And to hear him she couldn’t help but think that he was right and that she, his daughter was the worst sinner on this earth. ‘You’ve brought shame on us, you hear me Ada Sargent, shame!’

‘Think you can have your way with us, do you? Well, damn you, Mr Cripps!’ And Arthur, with his learning and his poetry and his university, Arthur the man whom she loved, became a boy before her father’s rage. Age slipped off him like water and when she last saw his face, through the closing door, over her father’s shoulder, it was the face of a young man who was lost in a world he had thought he knew so well.

She never saw him again until that day last week. He wrote, but soon her father found the letters and forbade them in the house. And then it was all so quick. His brother William came. One night, a week after that day of rage and tears. She didn’t see him, just heard the low bass of two men’s voices in the parlour below her bedroom. She couldn’t make out their talk, but she recognised their tone. She had heard it a hundred times before. At the market, in the village shop. They were bargaining.

And then her father made up his mind.

‘Tom Neeves,’ he told her, ‘is a good man. He’s always liked you, you know that. His farm yields well, and as I say, he’s a good man. So, there it is Ada. You’ll marry Tom Neeves and I won’t hear a word said against it.’

Her mother said it was chopping the onions that made her eyes so red, but Ada knew that wasn’t true.

And it was so quick. All her life before then seemed as leisure, and now it was running downhill. Reverend Churton announced the marriage banns. At the same service he told the congregation that Father Cripps, now he was ordained, had left Icklesham to take up a Trinity living at Ford End, Essex. He married her and Tom a month after that service. She was beginning to show and although folk would recognise the baby was early, her father reckoned he’d rather they thought Tom Neeves had been too eager than his daughter had birthed a bastard child.

So no one knew that Theresa was not Tom’s child. Except, of course, for Tom himself. He alone had that knowledge and the knowing of it rubbed sore at him like a stone in a shoe. Soon, too soon after Theresa was born, he made sure Ada was carrying his own baby. But Theresa was there now. A reminder to him every day of Ada’s romance with Arthur. ‘His flesh and blood in my house,’ he would say when they’d argued. Then, turning to the child herself, he’d bend down low and face her, though still speaking to Ada, saying in a low voice through a tight mouth, ‘Not one of us, this one.’

And Arthur made it worse for her. He sent letters with money and books. He was trying to help, but if there was one thing sure to fire Tom up, it was finding a letter from Arthur with those notes neatly folded inside the envelope.

And now he had sent this. Ada looks over the carved piano again. What will Tom say about this? She knows he will not let her keep it, not if he knows it is from Arthur. And now Arthur has gone. Sailed to Africa. For a moment when she had seen him standing there last week, nervous, tall, his blue eyes unsure, his hat in his hand, she had thought he had come to take her back. But he had not. He had come to say goodbye, she sees that now. But at least he had seen Theresa, and, from where she stood half-hidden behind her mother’s skirt, Theresa had seen him. This strange man who spoke so softly to her mother and who looked down at her long and hard, like he was seeing right through her.

♦

The latch on the back door clicks. The door opens and slams shut. Ada hears Tom stamping the dirt from his boots in the porch. She looks into the kitchen, his lunch half-done on the table. Standing, she puts the palm of her hand against Theresa’s back.

‘You go and play now dear,’ she says. ‘Your father’s home, he’ll be wanting his lunch.’

She opens the door to the parlour and Theresa goes through. Ada pushes it to and knots her apron. She slips Arthur’s letter into the pocket of her skirt and stands in the hall against the piano, the light from the open door falling across her shoulder, waiting.

Noel Brettell lets the bike free-wheel down the slope towards the wooden bridge over the stream, feeling the rough surface of the road shake and jolt in his legs and his arms. It is after midday. The sun is high, and as he rattles over the planks of the bridge a pair of black-collared barbets strike up a duet from the branches of a jacaranda tree overhanging the bank. On the other side he begins to pedal up the slope. At the top of the hill he disturbs a yellow-billed kite pulling on the carcass of a rodent at the side of the road. The bird hops and flaps away as he passes. Looking back over his shoulder he watches it strut back to the carrion, its bright beak dipped with red.

He is cycling out to see Baba Cripps again, the cloth bag slung across his back heavy with books of poetry. Heavy with the words of poets which he is bringing out here, into the bushveld, to read for the blind old priest. How long has he been doing this, every Thursday afternoon, cycling out to read for Cripps? Six, maybe seven years? He remembers that first visit well. Arriving at the clearing, the old man waiting for him beside his pole and dagga rondaval, his spread of peanut-butter sandwiches on the makeshift table. And then, when he was seated beside him, the strange welcoming ceremony performed by children from the missionary’s ‘dame school’. A long file of them, all heights, all ages, parading before him under the eye of their African school mistress. Shuffling, clapping, twisting, knees bent, arms akimbo, repeating a shrill chant, over and over.

‘What are they saying?’ he had asked, leaning in close to the priest’s ear.

‘They are saying,’ Cripps had replied, a faint smile on his lips, ‘we are glad you have come to be a friend to our father.’

Noel remembered turning back to the crocodile line of children and looking at them again, their earnest faces, their singing mouths. An idiot boy was weaving in and out of them, performing his own dance, eyes aslant, his face throwing grimaces, his bare limbs grey with dust. And then he had looked back at Cripps, watching them, or rather not watching them with his blind eyes, tapping his carved walking stick against the ground in time to their chant. He had reminded him of a chief he’d once seen, watching a parade of his warriors, or of a grandfather listening to the songs of his grandchildren.

♦

Back then, all those years ago, Noel offered to read for the old priest out of sympathy for the isolation of his blindness and his peculiar form of self-exile. And that was still partly true. Cripps’ life had become increasingly eremitic: he was retreating into the bush like an old lion or an ancient elephant, rooting himself in its silence and its wilderness. But over the years of Thursday afternoons Noel had carried on with the readings, not just out of sympathy, but also because of his interest in Cripps as a poet. He became fascinated by his primitive writer’s eye, isolated as it was from the modern world of cars, cold storage and literary coteries. He knew Cripps’ poetry had suffered as a consequence of this isolation: unexposed to the onward movement of form and language, he had remained committed to the outworn style he had grown up with. A diction suffocated under anachronistic mannerisms, learning his craft as he had between the Pre-Raphaelites and the Georgians. And yet, when he wanted to, Cripps could capture Africa. His use of the Anglo-Saxon term ‘wold’ to describe the gaunt lines of stony hills he trekked across was as strangely apposite as it was archaic. And when he let his anger subside from a poem, when he looked with his eye that had lived under the African sun for so long, then he made moments of bush life live: