John Berger - G.

The next morning she decided to stay in bed. She knew that it was not the kind of decision she would ever have made before her marriage, before she left the farm. Jocelyn expected her to run the house and keep an eye on the dairy: he was away at a point-to-point in Leicestershire. A surveyor who was coming that afternoon expected her to prepare papers for him. Everybody would expect her to treat a small, already less swollen wasp bite as though it were nothing. Before her marriage she did what was expected of her. Now she did not.

She gave instructions and took a bath. Still wet, she stood looking at herself in the tall tippable mirror in the bathroom.

She did not pretend that her gaze was that of a man. She drew no sexual conclusions as she stared at herself. She saw her body as a core, left when all its clothes had fallen from it. Around this core she saw the space of the bathroom. Yet between core and room something had changed, which was why all the house and the whole farm seemed changed since her return. She cupped her breasts with her hands and then moved her hands slowly downwards, over her hips, to the front of her thighs. Either the surface of her body or the touch of her hands had changed too.

Before, she lived in her body as though it were a cave, exactly her size. The rock and earth around the cave were the rest of the world. Imagine putting your hand into a glove whose exterior surface is continuous with all other substance.

Now her body was no longer a cave in which she lived. It was solid. And everything around, which was not her, was movable. Now what was given to her stopped at the surfaces of her body.

In nightgown and wrap she returned to bed. She lay back against a bank of pillows and imitated the cackling noise of a turkey. When she noticed the portrait of her father she stopped. Some women might have considered the possibility that they were going mad. She began to move her head from side to side on the bank of pillows, thus tilting her view of the room from side to side. When she felt giddy, she got out of bed and dropped on to her hands and knees: the carpeted floor was level and still. On the level ground in the free space she was conscious of being happy.

At her dressing table with a silver-backed mermaid-embossed hairbrush in her hand she asked herself as she had many times during the previous six months: Why do I feel no deep loss? Her way of answering the question was to search in her mind to make sure that its supposition was correct. Then her answer, which entirely satisfied her, was: Because I don’t.

Captain Patrick Bierce was killed on 17 September 1901, in the mountains north of the Great Karoo, Cape Colony. A British encampment was attacked by Boer commandos under General Smuts. The commandos were desperate, lacking both supplies and ammunition. In some close fighting among rocks Captain Bierce had half his head blown away. The Boer who shot him at close range had used an explosive Mauser cartridge (generally used for big game) because he had no other ammunition. Later, after the British had surrendered, the Boer found the mutilated officer whom he had shot dead, and was distressed at having had to use such ammunition. He argued to himself, however, that there was not a great deal of difference between killing a man with an explosive bullet and smashing him with a lyddite shell.

The colonel who broke to Beatrice the news of her husband’s death said: We soldiers count as our gains — our losses. Those men we love most to honour are those who die in a great cause.

What afflicted her was the shock which she imagined her husband feeling at his own death. She imagined him dying in mortal disappointment. But the fact that their life together was over impressed her too as a gain rather than as a loss. She could leave Africa. She could leave him. She could leave his brother officers.

I do not know for how long the relationship between Jocelyn and Beatrice had been incestuous.

I do know that Beatrice must have married Captain Bierce in order to simplify her life.

The power which Jocelyn exercised over his sister was essentially the power of the elder brother of childhood prolonged into adult life. He was protective and possessive; he was the moral arbiter in a world he knew better than she. Her virtue must lie in her obedience to him and her indifference to the judgement of others. Yet after adolescence this power of his over her depended upon her collaboration. More than that — this collaboration contributed more to their relationship than any adult ability on his part to be masterful. His domination was the result of her willing it for him. Hence the strangely circular nature of their moods and intimacy …

Into this circle stepped Captain Bierce, confident, huge, beaming, straight-speaking — simple and uncomplicated as only a man in uniform can appear to be. He courted her. He knelt before her and said he was her servant — her giant servant. He worshipped, he said, the very ground on which she trod.

He seemed to demand neither connivance nor complicity. Instead he asked her formally for the gift of her hand in marriage. The conventional metaphors became persuasive in their very simplicity. Leading her by the hand, he would show her the world.

She accepted his proposal.

They were married in the parish church of St Catherine’s.

They left for Africa.

The land surface of the earth is estimated to extend over about 52,500,000 sq. miles. Of this area the British Empire occupies nearly one quarter, extending over an area of about 12,000,000 sq. miles. By far the greater portion lies within the temperate zones, and is suitable for white settlement.… The area of the territory of the Empire is divided almost equally between the southern and northern hemispheres, the great divisions of Australasia and South Africa covering between them in the southern hemisphere 5,308,506 sq. miles while the United Kingdom, Canada and India, including the native states, cover between them in the northern hemisphere 5,271,375 sq. miles. The alternation of the seasons is thus complete, one half of the Empire enjoying summer while one half is in winter.

Within a few weeks of their arrival in Durban, Beatrice began to suffe: a delusion: she came to believe that everything was being tilted, that everything around her was taking place on an incline which was gradually becoming more acute. As the angle of incline increased, so everything on it began to slip downwards, nearer to its bottom edge. The inclined plane extended over the whole sub-continent, and the bottom edge gave on to the Indian Ocean.

One early afternoon in February 1899 in Pietermaritzburg she took a rickshaw despite the fact that Captain Bierce had recently been mysteriously insistent that she should not do so. However, she had few illusions left concerning her husband’s mysteries.

The Zulu rickshaw-boy wore a head-dress of tattered, dyed ostrich feathers which smelt of burnt hair. His long legs were crudely whitewashed. The previous night there had been a thunderstorm and the sky, cleared by the storm, was an unusually harsh blue. The frayed ostrich feathers above her, shaking as the Zulu between the shafts ran, appeared to brush the blue sky as though it were a tangible, painted surface.

They passed a company of marching British soldiers. Under the blue sky, in front of the low, shack-like hastily constructed buildings, along the unmysterious absolutely straight streets, each platoon looked like a box in which twenty or thirty men were helplessly vibrating.

Here, as in Durban, the activities of her countrymen never ceased. Every moment had its duty. The rickshaw passed some officers on horseback who bowed slightly without looking at her. To them she was an officer’s wife. She had selected among Captain Bierce’s brother officers those whom she would prefer to be killed at Ladysmith if a certain number had to be.