Fly Away Home (25 page)

“She's not coming back,” said Monica.

Mirinda shook her head in disapproval. “A mother who deserts her child doesn't ever deserve to have that child back.”

Francina caught Hercules's eye and knew that they were both thinking of Lucy. Zukisa, she hoped, would not, in her excitement, blurt out Francina's plan to Yolanda and Mandla.

The front door opened and Monica's father walked in, carrying a fishing rod and tackle box.

“Paolo, you should leave all that outside,” said Mirinda.

“Look who I found in the driveway,” said Paolo.

Oscar appeared next to him. As soon as he saw Francina and Hercules, the grin slid from his face. “I didn't know you had company,” he said.

“The more the merrier,” said Monica. “Come and sit down. This is a nice surprise.”

There was an empty spot beside Francina on the couch, but Hercules stood to offer his chair, and then sat down next to Francina.

Ignoring his wife's directive, Paolo trudged through the house with his fishing equipment, and returned to bring in the bucket that contained his catch of the day.

“Snoek!” he exclaimed proudly. “A big one. Do you think it's too late to put it on the braai?”

Monica assured him that it was not, and he went to join his son-in-law, whom he adored, even though he had once told Monica that she shouldn't marry an Afrikaner.

Francina looked everywhere except in Oscar's direction, while Hercules could not keep his eyes off the man. Monica must have been aware of the tension in the room because she tried to make a joke.

“You two could have a dry run of your mayoral debate.”

Everyone smiled except Oscar. “Actually, I came to see you,” he said to Monica. “I found something while I was out on a long hike today.”

“What did you find?” asked Mirinda. “Come on now. It's not fair if you keep it from the rest of us.”

Oscar shifted uncomfortably in his seat. Francina felt sorry for him. He was probably wishing that he'd telephoned instead.

“I found a grave on a small koppie north of the golf resort.” Oscar explained the exact location.

“You walked almost as far as Velddrif,” said Mirinda.

Oscar shrugged. “It's what I like to do.”

Francina saw Hercules studying Oscar's face. Perhaps he was thinking about all the intellectual pursuits he could accomplish in the time Oscar spent tramping about the countryside.

“Well, whose grave is it? A Bushman's?” asked Mirinda.

Oscar shook his head. “The tombstone was decorated by the San people—” he corrected Mirinda's use of the pejorative name for the nomadic tribesmen who had roamed these parts many years ago “—but the grave belongs to a European woman.”

“You found it? You found Lady Helen's grave?” asked Monica in an excited voice.

Oscar nodded. “The paintings on the tombstone are of a lady in a long dress with a parasol. It can only be Lady Helen. I started to dig, but when I found the first bone I lost my nerve. Those archeology professors who came to take pictures of the San paintings up in the cave can excavate her remains to check if my theory is correct.”

“Do you think her husband killed her?” asked Monica.

“No. I think that after her husband marched all the slaves she'd freed back to Cape Town, she continued to live here with the assistance of the nomadic San people.”

“That's incredible,” said Mirinda. “I don't know if I would have made the same choice she did.”

“She probably didn't
have
a choice,” said Monica. “She must have run away as soon as she knew he was coming. If her husband had caught her, he would have killed her rather than return to Cape Town with the woman who had made a fool of him.”

Zak put his head into the living room. “Hello, Francina. Hello, Hercules. Oh, I didn't see you there, Oscar. How are things?”

“Oscar's staying for dinner,” said Monica. She turned to Oscar. “You will stay, won't you?”

“I was just about to tell you all to come and get it before it's cold,” said Zak. “Come on, Oscar.”

Oscar shook his head, but Monica would have none of it. “You're not leaving after you've told us this exciting news. We have to celebrate.”

Oscar's expression was more fitting for a man who'd been told he had to walk over coals if he wanted to get home, but he graciously accepted and followed Francina and Hercules into the dining room, where dinner was to be served, since it had turned too cool to sit outside.

As they passed around the bowl of homemade apricot jam that they had been instructed by Paolo to smear on their braaied snoek, Mirinda asked the two mayoral candidates if they would care to let the assembled group know the basic tenets of their campaigns.

Francina did not know the meaning of the word
tenets
and hoped that Oscar would be given the chance to go first, but he insisted on being a gentleman and letting her start.

“Francina believes we should not sacrifice the character of our town for commercial gain,” said Hercules.

What a sweet husband,
thought Francina,
to understand my confusion and step in to help.

“What does she propose?” asked Oscar.

“Banning tour buses from Main Street,” replied Hercules. “They clog it up, they pollute the air. Francina believes they should have to park outside of town.”

Francina remembered discussing this issue with Hercules, but she had never decided on a plan of action or considered it part of her campaign for mayor.

“Shop and gallery owners on Main Street rely on tourists for a large part of their livelihood,” said Oscar, looking not at Francina but at Hercules. “If we make travel inconvenient for tourists, they'll start going to other towns on the West Coast, and Lady Helen will suffer as it suffered before.”

In the past, a group of Afrikaner farmers had moved into Lady Helen to breed ostriches and sell the feathers overseas, where they were highly prized in women's fashions. But the cooperative lost business to the large-scale operation in Oudtshoorn, a small town southeast of Lady Helen in the Klein Karoo, and eventually the farmers turned to the ocean instead. For almost sixty years, Lady Helen was a successful fishing port, but then deepwater trawlers belonging to large corporations started appearing, and the local fishermen could not compete.

“Art, scuba diving, shark watching—they all require outside interest,” added Oscar. “As does fashion.”

“Francina does very well without having to rely on clients from Cape Town,” replied Hercules—a little too abruptly, she thought.

The two men stared at each other.

“More snoek, Hercules, Oscar?” said Monica, in an obvious attempt to dispel the tense atmosphere.

Francina remembered the time, long ago, when Oscar and Hercules had gone for each other's throats like wild dogs—in a figurative way of speaking. Hercules had just met Oscar and was not used to his straightforward way of talking. Now it seemed that Hercules had thrown off his usual cloak of decorum. And neither man seemed concerned to hear the tenets of Francina's campaign from her own mouth. Why were they behaving this way, years after their first clash? Francina and Hercules had built their lives together; they had a daughter now. And while Oscar had never married or, as far as Francina knew, dated, he had gone on with his life, doing construction work in the town and looking for Lady Helen's grave. After all these years, he could not possibly still be in love with Francina. Or could he?

For the rest of the meal, Oscar and Hercules were mostly silent, and Monica, Zak and Mirinda tried hard to lighten the mood at the table. Paolo, who was oblivious of the friction, entertained the children with stories of improbable fishing adventures.

 

Later that night, when they were alone together in their bedroom, Francina confronted Hercules over his behavior at Monica's house.

“What has gotten into you? You've managed to be civil to Oscar all these years and now this.”

“I've been civil to him because we haven't had much to do with each other. Now all of a sudden he enters the mayoral race mere minutes after you entered. Come on, Francina. Don't you think it's a little suspicious?”

“Hercules, people don't pine away for years for someone they once cared about.”

“Sometimes they do,” he said softly.

She should have thought before speaking. On her first visit to Hercules's home in Dundee, long before they were married, Francina had discovered that Hercules had been sleeping with his late wife's nightgown under his pillow ever since her death fifteen years before. His deep depression had needed the care of a psychiatrist.

“That man is still in love with you.”

“And if he is, what does it matter? I'm married to you. We have a family.”

Hercules breathed out noisily through his mouth. “I just don't like it. What's he doing? Waiting for me to fall off a cliff, or to get sick?”

Francina wished that she had never entered the race for mayor so that her encounters with Oscar would remain as they had been for years: rare and brief. Young girls thrived on drama like this, but she had orders to complete, a child to take care of, a family to bring to Lady Helen.

O
scar was not in church the morning after the disastrous evening with Francina and Hercules, and Monica thought she knew why. She caught up with him as he was leaving his house for a hike to the alleged grave of Lady Helen.

“What was that all about last night?” she asked, employing his typical straightforwardness.

“I don't know what you're talking about,” he replied, shifting the weight of his pack on his back.

“Oscar, you and I have known each other for a long time. I'm sorry you still feel so much for Francina.”

Oscar looked her straight in the eye. “I'm not. I'm only sorry that Hercules knows. Don't tell me it isn't healthy that I haven't gotten over her, because I know that. Don't tell me I'm wasting my life, because I'm not. I haven't met anyone who compares to her. I'll wait for her until she's free.”

Monica could not hide the shock she felt. “But Oscar, she might never be free, or she could be an old lady by then.”

He shrugged. “She's worth it.”

“If you didn't want anyone to know how you feel, why have you entered the race for mayor?”

“I didn't know Francina had entered, too. I'm thinking of withdrawing my name.”

Oscar was very invested in this town; its history was his passion. But if the race for mayor was going to stir up all his suppressed love for Francina, perhaps he was better off out of it.

“That's your decision,” she told him, knowing that he would be disappointed with her careful response.

“I take it the
Lady Helen Herald
is not endorsing me?”

Monica attempted a laugh. “You sound like a politician already. The paper is not endorsing anybody.”

She left him to carry on with his hike, and returned home to find Yolanda cooking lunch. Monica told Zak what Oscar had said and that she thought he should drop out of the race—and perhaps leave Lady Helen, too.

Zak disagreed. “His feelings don't appear to be causing him any harm. If I thought he was suffering from depression, I'd tell him.”

“It can't be—”

“I know you want to help, but I think you'd be making a mistake to prod him to follow your suggested course of action. What you think is right might not be right for Oscar.”

“But he's—”

“If this is the way he wants to live, then let him be.”

Monica sighed.

“If you think about it, you'll agree.”

 

Monica thought about it as she drifted off to sleep that night and as she readied Mandla and Yolanda for school the following morning. She still had not reached the same conclusion as Zak when she arrived at the office, but perhaps over a cup of Dudu's hot tea, she would come to see his point of view. Her thoughts, however, were interrupted by a telephone call from her friend Miemps, who was out of breath.

“The government finally processed our land claim, even though we missed the cutoff date. We've been informed that we can either go back or take the money.”

Years ago, Miemps and Reginald had lived in District Six, a cosmopolitan neighborhood on the slopes of Table Mountain in Cape Town. In 1968, two years after the apartheid government invoked the Group Areas Act to declare Cape Town's city center and surroundings a whites-only area, the government began forcing District Six's “colored” or mixed race residents to move to low-cost housing provided by the state fifteen miles away, in a desolate, outlying area appropriately named the Cape Flats. By the early eighties, more than sixty thousand people had been relocated in a large-scale attempt at social engineering.

Some said that District Six had been demolished not because it was a vision of how an integrated South Africa might be one day, but merely because the view of the ocean from the slopes of Table Mountain was too highly valued to waste on working-class people. Miemps and her brothers needed only to step onto the veranda of their house to watch ships from all over the world come into the harbor.

More than just buildings were destroyed. District Six had been an urban neighborhood; many of its residents worked in the nearby Woodstock clothing factories, in central Cape Town, or at the Morning Market, which supplied fruit and vegetables to the whole city. There were no employment opportunities in the Cape Flats.

Every day for twenty-five years, Miemps's father had walked down Constitution Street to his job at a sweet factory in Cape Town, but after the move he had to spend more than two hours each day riding buses and trains. When he returned at night, the man who'd once played the trumpet in the church choir had barely enough energy to eat the dinner his wife had placed under a saucepan lid in the darkened kitchen.

In 2000, in a ceremony presided over by President Thabo Mbeki, the land was formally returned to seventeen hundred tenant families who had been evicted. There were tears as people who had not seen each other since the forced move were reunited. Some of these families had chosen to go back, others had elected to take the cash settlement. Miemps, Reginald and many others had missed the cutoff date for the land claim, but thanks to a group of activists, an extension had been granted.

“Congratulations, Miemps,” said Monica. “So which are you going to choose?”

“The money, of course. If we left Lady Helen we'd be leaving a community that is like a modern-day District Six.”

Monica was relieved to hear her answer, and told her so.

Miemps's voice broke. “Reginald cried when we got the news, Monica. I've never seen my husband cry. He says good things like this don't usually happen to people like us.”

People like us.
Monica felt herself choking up at Reginald's characterization of himself. How sad that some of the older generation would never shake off the terrible repression that had forced them to lower their expectations of life.

There was a lesson in this for her. No human being had the right to tell another where to live. She had seriously considered ignoring Zak's advice and telling Oscar that he should move to the city, where he was bound to meet someone and fall in love again. Through God's grace she had been saved from offending, and perhaps even losing, a good friend.