Bloodlines (40 page)

Had I been less concerned with hiding the truth about myself, I might have felt her interest in my story comforting, but her compassion was laced with questions.

“Must have been so difficult for you to pick up and sell your farm,” she said. “We have friends in Bulawayo—were you near there?”

“We were closer to the northern border,” I said.

“Oh,” she said with surprise. “I didn’t know there was much cultivation in that area. What did you farm?”

“We had a cattle farm,” I said uncomfortably, making up the story from what little I had been told about the area. “We grew
mielie
s and sorghum and sweet potatoes, and my husband planted grape vines, too. He always wanted a vineyard, but he was killed before the vines matured. The new owner will probably go back to staple crops, and the vines will go for firewood.” I paused for effect. “But that’s no longer my affair.”

“No,” she said, “but it would be nice for you to know what they decide to do. Are you in touch? I could have my friends in Bulawayo contact them for you.”

“I know how to contact them if I need to,” I said. “But I do appreciate the offer.”

“That’s good,” she said, and to my relief, she dropped that line of enquiry. But she moved quickly on to the next. “So here you are, all on your own. I think it’s wonderful that you chose this area to resettle. Do you have family nearby? I mean, are your people from here? It’s difficult enough to manage as a woman in this community, but you need people to call on if you have problems. Running a farm without a man’s hand can be terribly difficult.”

“Some of us manage quite well,” said a voice at my side, and I felt a solid hand on my shoulder. “Come on, Phyllis, we all want a chance to meet her.”

Phyllis’ pale face flushed with indignation, and I smiled as I turned away, relieved.

“Forced rescue,” whispered the newcomer in my ear as she took my elbow and led me away. “Phyllis will milk you dry of information, and without even a bloody cup of tea for sustenance. Come on, let’s get you set up.”

She took me to the table furthest from the fireplace where two women watched us approach, sat down and patted the empty chair beside her.

“Letty,” she said, “pour Grace a cup of tea while I make the introductions.”

Across the table, Letty, with short grey hair, high cheekbones, and no makeup, took the instruction benignly, smiled at me, and poured. My rescuer continued.

“That’s Letty MacGregor, Grace, pouring your tea. I’m Jane Williams. You don’t know us yet, but you will. You’ve seen the sign for Glen Acres Farm on the way to the co-op? That’s ours—we’re a hop, skip and jump from your door.”

I turned to look at Jane. She had a wide, elfish smile and big, clear blue eyes; her face was round, with a ruddy complexion, and her sandy hair was chopped short. She was solidly built, with a big bosom, and I was surprised to see that she wore khaki trousers, a print shirt with yellow flowers on a light red background, and a creamy silk ascot around her neck. She was not dressed for the occasion—but she was so confident, and she had such a pleasing manner, that she was, in her own way, appropriate.

“Thank you so much,” I said. “If you hadn’t turned up when you did I might have bolted.”

“Wouldn’t have blamed you,” she said. “That woman’s a vacuum cleaner for gossip. But you’re not out of the woods yet—you still have to satisfy our curiosity.”

“No you don’t,” said Letty, pushing a cup of tea in my direction, and looking at me out of calm grey eyes, “unless you want to. Be still, Jane, she’ll bolt yet if you keep it up.”

“Doesn’t look much like a bolter to me,” she said, grinning.

“You’re being rude,” said Letty. “You still haven’t introduced Anna.”

“Please, excuse my bad manners,” she said. “Grace, that genteel lady across the table, who’s been waiting patiently to be introduced to you, is Anna McWilliams, the better half of Brian.”

I turned to look at her, surprised to see my foreman’s wife at this gathering. I knew that Brian had a family, but Anna had not yet come to the house to introduce herself, and I didn’t want to be intrusive, since the cottage they lived in was on my property.

“Hello, Mrs. Michaels,” she said in a high, breathy voice. “I have meant to come by and introduce myself—I set aside some homemade peach jam for you. But I’ve been so busy with the children.” Her face was long and narrow, and her hair, lank and pale, fell straight, hugging her scalp and her neck. She stared at me over the table. “We have four children, you know.”

“Do come by,” I said. “And bring the children, too. I’ve already met your oldest boy, Michael. Your husband brought him to the farmhouse last week.”

She pushed her chair back and rose and her dress hung on her, a skinny woman with fleshless arms. She stood behind her chair, gripped the backrest with white knuckles, and fixed her eyes on me.

“I wanted to meet you, Mrs. Michaels, and I didn’t want it to be at my home or yours. That’s why I came here today.” There was a nervous quaver in her voice. “To meet the woman Brian works for. And now I have, so I can go back to my husband and my children.” She paused. “We have four, you know. Four young children.”

Then she turned and rushed out, and there was a shocked silence at the table as we watched her go.

“Perhaps I should just leave,” I said eventually, “before someone throws a teapot at me. What’s the matter with these women?”

“You’ve created something of a stir in our little backwater, Grace,” murmured Letty.

“But I haven’t done anything,” I objected.

“Not quite true. You’ve upset the natural order of things. Jane and I sometimes set people’s teeth on edge, too—but they don’t respond this viscerally to us.”

“Apparently,” said Jane with a wicked smile, “one woman living alone is more of a threat than two women living together.”

“We’re not after their husbands,” said Letty, “and they know it. That’s the difference.”

“Oh,” I shot back, “and you think I am?”

Jane laughed. “Don’t be daft,” she said.

“My dear, it’s bad enough that you’re single,” interrupted Letty quietly, “but you’re more attractive and younger than most of these women. If that weren’t enough, you own your own farm. What Jane and I think doesn’t matter—what matters is that you’re enough of a threat to raise the hackles on most wives’ necks.”

“I assure you that I have no interest in their husbands. Graham Collins seems nice enough but I have no designs on him, and I can’t imagine being interested in my foreman.”

I was angry and defensive, and on the verge of telling them that I was quite happy with the man I had. But I bit my tongue.

“That’s good to know,” said Jane. “But Letty’s trying to tell you in her very roundabout way that it makes no bloody difference to us. We’ve been looking forward to meeting you. We were saying over breakfast this morning how delighted we are that you’re here, if only to divert some of the gossip from us.”

“By and large this is a lovely place to live,” said Letty, “and people don’t have a choice but to put up with us. We don’t need them—and I’m the eighth generation of my family to be farming this land. We belong. Besides, we do a lot of good in the community.”

“You, on the other hand, are a newcomer,” added Jane, “and you don’t fit into the family stereotype. That makes you fodder for the gossip mill. Until you lose your looks or get a ring on your finger, they’ll watch you like a hawk. Might as well be a witch living in the dark ages. Just get used to it, and choose who you spend your time with carefully.” She reached over and patted my hand. “You’re always welcome at our place.”

“Right,” said Letty. “In fact, I think you should come for supper next week. We’ll have Andrew there, too—my brother—he says he hasn’t met you yet. But he’s the local sawbones—and you need to be on good terms with him if you’re going to run a farm around here, so far from the nearest clinic.”

“That would be wonderful,” I said, grateful for the invitation, and for the opportunity to meet her brother, whom everyone called Doctor Mac. It would be useful to meet him socially, before I had a call for his medical skills on the farm. “When next week?”

“Wednesday night,” said Jane. “Don’t dress for dinner, and don’t bring anything with you. Just show up. We have drinks at six.”

I went home that night, had an early supper, and threw myself into bed, exhausted. I had made two friends, encountered a few hostile women who didn’t know me from Eve and had no desire to, and I now had a new context in which to think of myself. Until then, I had seen myself only through my own eyes—as a woman living by choice in isolation, with no neighbors and no community, doing clandestine work and waiting, always waiting. It was the life I had selected and I was not unhappy with it—but it did have a bleak aspect.

Now, however, I knew that I had a place. Like a witch in the dark ages, to which Jane had compared me, I had a position in the community. But my position was tricky, a mixed blessing. I was a challenge to my neighbors’ competence and their femininity; they saw me as young and beautiful, moneyed and able to compete with—and for—their husbands.

It was difficult to reconcile this image of myself with the other images I carried, because I was also escaped fugitive and lawbreaker; terrorist; adulterer and marriage breaker, deserter of children and husband. I was a clandestine Jewess, white lover of a black man and, perhaps most difficult of all, I was a fraud, pretending to be someone I was not.

I lay in bed, wondering which of all these things I would choose to be if given a choice. To survive without going crazy, I knew that I would have to meld them into a single whole, and to reconcile them into a coherent version of myself. It may not yet have become completely true, but I believed with all my heart that I had traveled too far to ever go back to being only one thing, and that I had made my decisions. The time for choice was over.

The next day, after more than a week away, Khabazela came home. That night we lay together and I told him what happened at the ladies’ tea. My bedroom was in darkness but for the firelight reflecting off my dressing table mirror. It cast soft shadows on everything in the room, and in the flickering dimness I could see his expressions. He smiled as I spoke, and his eyes moved over my face.

“You still define yourself through the eyes of other people,” he said as he stroked my cheeks with his fingertips, “even though you know that you are invisible to them. This is a new experience for you,” he continued softly, “but for us, it is a part of the life we live every day. Can you imagine how it would be for your
induna
, my Uncle Solomon, if he saw himself only through the eyes of the white men for whom he works? Or if I based my worth on your foreman’s opinion of me? We would not survive, Michaela. In our world, the people we live among think us valueless; they have no idea who we are or what our lives are like. Imagine what it would be like if we depended upon them for our sense of self.”

He was lying on his side with my head on his arm, and he ran his hand across my waist and down the side of my thigh.

“And now you have joined that world. You need to learn to walk among them the way we do—as if you were walking through water.”

“Water?”

“Yes,” he said. “They must be as transparent to you as you are to them.”

The following Wednesday evening I took the old, faded army-green Jeep across the valley to Glen Acres Farm. It was only a ten-minute drive and I had passed by the entrance many times, but never turned down the dirt road that led to the farmhouse. It was lined with eucalyptus saplings, interspersed with the occasional old hardwood that towered over the road, and there were
mielie
fields on both sides.

Unlike my workmanlike operation where the farmhouse was cheek by jowl with the yard, Jane and Letty had a much more elegant setup. At the end of the long track the road forked, and the farmyard with its machinery, barn and chicken run were out of sight down to the right. Off to the left around a curving driveway was the old stone farmhouse, and although it was winter and the light was fading, the flowerbeds were still awash in color, and trees on the front lawn were covered in yellow and white blooms. I was envious—there was no time in my life for flowers.