The Conservationist (23 page)

He’s spent the night in the house quite a few times this summer. There are no sheets but a cushion from the sofa does as a pillow and there is the kaross he once bought in Botswana when there was first talk of a consortium to prospect for nickel deposits, and he flew up for a day. It’s nicely made, well-matched skins of Black-black jackal; but one buys these things when one goes about the world and then doesn’t know what the hell to do with them, or whom to give them to. It didn’t look right in the flat. The mosquitoes are bad in that bedroom. Spraying stinks but doesn’t help much. Yet shaving in the dark little bathroom an hour or more earlier than he would be if he were in town, he is feeling as fresh as if he has had a particularly good night’s sleep. Through the eye-level window that opens upwards like a fanlight he watches the arrival of women and old men who have been taken on by Jacobus to come from the location to weed. Thirty cents a day, Jacobus says he can get them for; but if you see how they’re taking it easy, how they’re strolling up and having a good old gas with Alina, and sitting about against the workshop wall - probably not worth more. He is shaving by feel, not looking into the small foxed mirror at all - good God, what’s going on? Now they’re leisurely unwrapping their babies and their bundles, apparently they bring their bread or mealie-pap along, and now young Izak arrives with a can of milk. So it’s a picnic, before the day’s work begins. Everybody’s squatting on the grass in the yard and being sociable. Some of these old girls are quite characters; one crone with nothing but a big safety pin to hold her rag of a blouse together over her huge old tits, now that she’s shed her blankets, catches him out watching through the window and calls a loud and jaunty greeting, one word in Afrikaans and one in their language: Môre, ‘Nkos’. The borehole water is soft; one gets an exceptionally good shave. Those women are giving Jacobus hell over something but it’s all banter; barefoot, his hands hooked in the braces of new bibbed overalls that stand away from his waist like Chaplin’s trousers, he’s arguing theatrically, but there’s laughter, they shout him down, behind their din there is the hurrying tripping skelter of cattle being driven out of the paddock by Solomon and Phineas — a sound queerly equivalent to that of thousands of feet coming up out of the railway stations, away from the buses, far off in the city. Jacobus pretends to threaten a woman with a fist. So that’s how work gets going on the place. Everyone takes his time, nobody’s developing ulcers out here, you’ve got to grant them that.

At the stove Alina is stirring something that already smells burnt. She looks half asleep and moves reluctantly; spoilt - she’s not used to being required in the house in the mornings. Anyway, he doesn’t want breakfast. He flings up the screeching steel fly-screens on the windows in that airless, lifeless bedroom - the moment he’s gone she’ll close everything again - and emerges through the kitchen door, an apparition (sees himself as) in that light grey summer suit with the back vent, Roman coin cuff-links and red silk tie. The guise or disguise of the city; he was here straight from the office yesterday - the old pair of corduroy jeans he keeps to get into at the farm is lying with the heap of the kaross. As he walks through scattering cats (they’ve been attracted from the roof by dregs of mealie-pap dirtily thrown about the yard) to his car, he comes face to face with the weeding contingent, who have been down to the barn to collect their implements and are now on their way to the fields. He is surrounded by the passage of a ragged army advancing on him with hoes, the grinning, knowing faces of the old women, the younger ones not meeting his eyes, their babies’ heads lolling above their backsides as they pass, the old men in scarecrow coats blindly not seeming to know what they are making for. It is only a few moments: they have him in their midst, so that he cannot go forward. It would be absurd to back away - they are all round him.

Jacobus has a bucket and mop and is sloshing water over the windscreen but he waves him off. He must get into town. — What about the lucerne? —

— That far one, there by the pump? I’m going cut today. Is very good day. —

There could be other opinions on that. The weather report on the radio had predicted thunder storms in the afternoon. How big is that field? — it could be cut and then drenched before it’s dry enough to bale — say, two hundred bales lost. Instead of driving towards the farm gate, which is open for the day (the nightwatchman is drinking tea out of a syrup tin in the yard, and has touched his hand to his red-and-white tea-cosy cap in respectful greeting) he’ll take a quick look at that lucerne first. The road is really bad; there’s not time to see to everything. Children run ahead of the car to open the camp gates but they don’t follow him as he heaves through the last one.

Oh my God. What a crime to wake up morning after morning in that flat. Never mind the huge firm bed and the good coffee. The car door shuts under the slow swing of its own weight behind him. The mechanical two-syllable sound disappears instantly as the substance of the morning closes over it, heavy and clear as the sea. Oh my God. The field dips away before it rises again towards the river. It has drifted into flower since the sun rose two hours ago - yesterday afternoon it was still green, with only a hint of sage to show the bloom was coming. Just touching, floating over its contours, is a nap of blue that brushes across the grain to mauve. There is no wind but the air itself is a constant welling. It is the element of this lush summer. He has plunged down past the pump-house where a big pipe makes a hidden foot-bridge buried in bowed grasses and bulrushes over an irrigation furrow. His shoes and the pale grey pants are wiped by wet muzzles of grasses, his hands, that he lets hang at his sides, are trailed over by the tips of a million delicate tongues. Look at the willows. The height of the grass. Look at the reeds. Everything bends, blends, folds. Everything is continually swaying, flowing rippling waving surging streaming fingering. He is standing there with his damn shoes all wet with the dew and he feels he himself is swaying, the pulsation of his blood is moving him on his own axis (that’s the sensation) as it seems to do to accommodate the human body to the movement of a ship. A high earth running beneath his feet. All this softness of grasses is the susurration of a slight dizziness, hissing in the head.

Fair and lovely place. From where does the phrase come to him? It comes back, tum-te-tum-te-tum, as only something learned by rote survives. It’s not his vocabulary. Fair and lovely. A place in a child’s primer where nothing ugly could possibly be imagined to happen: as if such places exist. No wound to be seen; and simply shovelled under. He looks out over this domain almost with fascination, to think that, somewhere, that particular spot exists, overgrown. No one’ll remember where you are buried.

The shoes are a mess.

There ought to be a yellow duster on the glove shelf - but an old company report serves. He smears off the wet and scraps of grass. There are some early grass-seeds, too. Once on the main road, there’s heavy traffic at this time in the morning. Truck-loads of builders’ supplies, road-making equipment mounted on huge, slow trailers marked ‘Abnormal Load’, haulage of all kinds, although he calculated that factory workers would have gone to work already and the office and shop people would be going a little later. Overtaking and being overtaken, the tread of these vehicles and his Mercedes criss-cross again and again the experience he has just left behind him (half an hour he wandered, stood in the field, or maybe not more than ten minutes): quickly it is covered by a kind of grid. On its tracks are laid down many automatic responses to everyday situations of no importance and one of these is that he does not see people who thumb lifts; he would certainly not have been aware of the pair (even though the old man was dressed so peculiarly) who take courage to come right to the car while he is held up behind two crawling trailers just before the entrance to the freeway. An elderly man in commissionaire’s uniform and a girl or young woman. Difficult to say no, when you can’t drive off, and there’s a whole great empty car. He has told them, shortly, to get in, then. They have both scrambled humbly into the back, just time to bang the door too hard behind them the way people do who are not used to these big cars that respond to the lightest touch, while he suddenly sees the opportunity to get past the trailers, in a fast manoeuvre, and work his way into his lane again.

He is up front alone like a chauffeur and would be content to leave it at that. But a face under a gold-braided cap, cut off by the lower limits of the rear view mirror where thin pink wattles are caught into an even more elaborately-braided stand-up collar, determinedly catches his eye, although it must be impossible to tell, from the back of his head, whether this sociable move has been successful or not. The old chap must be sitting forward on the edge of the seat. — No, I was just saying, as a matter of interest, weren’t you at the late show,
Trinity Is Still My Name
, on Friday? —

— You’re talking about a cinema? —

— That’s right. The Elite 300, Starland City. —

— No, no, I wasn’t at any cinema. —

— Now that’s funny, you know I’ve got an eye for faces, and when I come up just now I said to myself - I’ve seen that one recently. Not Saturday night, then? There was a gentleman with a party of four, nice-looking people, a blonde lady one of them — I could have sworn it was you. Well, I’m not so young as I used to be, old soldiers never die, they say, but I reckon I see three to four thousand people a week going past me, and often I’ll say to one of them, Good evening, sir, and did you enjoy the show
last week
— giving the name of the picture, whatever it might happen to’ve been, you see, and who was starring - and by George you should see their faces then! What a memory, they’ll say to me! See a face once, in all those thousands, and pick it out again just like that! Not that every face’s a face you’ll remember, you know. There’s some you don’t want to lay eyes on again, I can tell you that. —

— I’m sure. —

— It takes all kinds. You’ll get them that push the tickets under your nose like it was a bone for a dog and you’d think you’re expected to have four hands at once, they can’t stand a moment. A person must take their turn, one man’s as good as the next, and what’s the rush, you’re going in for an evening’s pleasure aren’t you? You want to relax, take it easy, isn’t it so? —

The old face in the mirror is smiling in the bounty of its philosophy. He nods vociferously enough for this to appear, from the back of his head, adequately appreciative.

— But most of the time you meet a nice class of people coming to the shows at Elite 300. Lots of them know me by sight. They’ve got a smile and a good evening for you. You don’t get these young hippies you get in the big cinemas, putting their feet up on the seats and burning the carpets. Some people’ve got no respect for anything. It’s the parents I blame. I’m not prejudiced, I don’t say that every kid with long hair’s a loafer, mind. I’ve had youngsters of my own, and I’ve got grandsons. But what would I do with myself sitting around at home? Dad, my daughter tells me, you’ve done your bit. All through Delville Wood in ’14 — ’18, yes. But I’d go out of my mind sitting doing nothing. I was five years at the old Metro before they pulled it down. But you can’t compare the comfort with a small exclusive cinema like the Elite, no question about it. You’ve been there, of course. Once you get down into one of those seats you’re like in a beautiful armchair in your own home. Just as good. —

There is an anxious silence for the last few minutes of the journey; the old fellow seems to feel guilty that he has run through his conversational repertoire. Anyway, at the first robot towards the centre of town both passengers alight, with sounds of heaving and pushing as the veteran slides along the seat and gets himself out (perhaps he has some disablement). The girl has never uttered a word during the ride; the old man, after profuse thanks, suddenly signals as the car is about to pull away. Of course they’ve left something.

— It’s still on. Trinity, I mean. It’s a good Western, I think you’d enjoy it, you know — The light’s green, everyone is nosing and blaring at the stationary car, the old man is carried in a momentum of people let loose from where they were damned up at the crossing, and some impatient bastard even shouts abuse whose sarcastic twang catches at the car window as he whips by.

All right. All right. The Mercedes sinks into the entrance of the underground garage where the attendant Zulu with disc ear-rings stoppering his lobes, and a cap less grand than a commissionaire’s, has recognized it instantly, and drawn aside, ceremonially as a curtain, the loop of chain that bars unauthorized entry.

He felt that he really must have a strong cup of coffee. Doing without breakfast when he slept at the farm was a good thing, almost a virtue he liked to enjoy, but there was an arch of emptiness under his diaphragm that only decent coffee and a first cigar could support. One of the little girls at the office would bring him a cup of instant if he waited a few minutes for them to come in, but he was earlier than the lowliest messenger on days when he came from the farm, and he didn’t want to wait even ten minutes. Not that that muck was coffee. He went up to the foyer and out into the street. There must be a place near by. Business lunches simply meant driving from one underground parking bay to another; the only time he walked through the streets was when he went to get his hair cut.

The coffee bar was packed. Apparently young people crowded in to meet their friends before work in the mornings, clustered along the counter like birds on a telephone wire. It was an Italian place, smelt deliciously of what he’d come for, and was noisy as the street. He got a double espresso and stood where he could find room for himself, at a ledge that formed a table of sorts for the cup, at elbow height, round a pillar. How they talked, little typists and students — whatever they were — predominantly girls, although a few young men fooled here and there, a few moony couples were holding hands between the stools and absently caressing. How they could talk! Confidential, animated, fresh from the toothbrush, their eyes circled with colour, butterflies on their trousers, hieroglyphs on their satchels, almost skirtless bottoms almost bare on stools - they could have been his daughters. Any of them. The coffee seized upon his tongue. He concentrated on sipping it round the edges of the cup, it went down slow, thick and fiery as dark molten metal poured into the ingot and as soon as it was comfortable to drink he was already at the dregs, and ordered another. To get the fresh cup off the conveyor band that moved along the main counter, carrying orders to customers one way and dirty cups the other, he had to lean his long arm in the pale grey sleeve with the half-inch of striped shirt cuff and the Roman coin cuff-link, between blonde and dark heads: a strange intrusion. The two whose conversation it parted slowed talk momentarily and looked at it as something disembodied, out of their world. He caught a whiff of scent - not perfume, something they washed their hair with or sprayed under their arms. This cup he could take more temperately; he could wait until it was possible to hold a mouthful, hot and strong. He had lit a cheroot. But one was smiling at him - one of the dozens of girls — twiddling the fingers of a hand in a childish wave. He looked away as when, in a crowded room, a glance intercepts the greeting intended for another. When he looked up again the girl was laughing, shaking her head a little as if to say: it’s me.