***

A little later on, he inspected a property about ten minutes cycle ride from the Campus. No price was stated in the advertisement.

The grounds seemed extensive, a quarter acre or more, surrounded by a low whitewashed wall. The driveway had two square pillars, taller than a man, and the front wall extended for nearly the whole length of the short road. There was a house at either end of it and rolling parkland on the opposite side of the road which he knew belonged to the Anglo American Mining Corporation. It was in an exclusive district of the town. There’d be no trouble from neighbours!

The house’s nameplate was on one of the pillars: Welgevonden. Well founded! His spirits dropped. This was surely another he couldn’t afford?

He rode up the curving gravel drive, admiring the scarlet poinsettias that lined it as he went. They really were striking!

A long low whitewashed house with a galvanized roof was built transversely across the plot. A mosquito-netted stoep in front: Purple Bougainvillea and Cape Honeysuckle smouldered beautifully along its length. Other tropical shrubs and flowers he did not know the name of grew profusely in the narrow bed directly in front of the stoep.

A woman came out on the stoep to meet him. She was tallish with a good figure. As she approached him, he saw that, although she was not young, she was beautiful.

“Hello!” she said.

She held out her hand. Bright blue eyes, a sensual mouth. A pleasant smile showed good teeth.

“You’re Alex Norfolk, I presume? I’m Drina Harding.”

He leaned his bicycle against the stoep.

“How do you do?” he said, taking her hand. It was cool and soft and intimate.

“Well, thank you! And you?”

“Fine!” he said.

There was no awkwardness in her. He guessed she was usually at ease with herself and others. He found her confidence attractive.

“Where shall we begin?” she asked, indicating the house.

“Anywhere!” he smiled.

She took him through it.

It was old, very large and wandered a lot, having had bits added to it through the years. Many of the rooms were on different levels. All the usual fittings -- nothing lavish or modern -- but practically equipped. He described it to himself as `dispersed with a nice feel to it’.

The kitchen had a big Aga stove and there was a door that had been boarded up. He looked at it wonderingly.

“Oh, that now leads to separate quarters!” she said with a little laugh. “When my second husband left me, I had to keep body and soul together, so I took a lodger. It’s an old Rhodesian farmhouse! Maybe it’s too big for you?”

“Not at all! It’s quite charming! Plenty of room for my family. Even a study for me and a studio for Victoria.”

“Your wife?”

“Yes! She’s always wanted to paint and sculpt.”

“That’s nice!” she said. Then, quickly: “Come and see the main bedroom,” and she walked abruptly out.

He followed her, watching the way she moved her hips.

“Oh, yes, it’s a lovely room!” he said, looking round him.

“Plenty of light, without getting too hot in the Summer and the French doors lead directly out on to the verandah, what we call a stoep here. Do you swim, Mr Norfolk?”

“A little.”

“I swim every day.”

He looked at her, anticipating how she would look in a swimsuit: long slim legs, lovely hips, firm full breasts. She saw him looking and smiled contentedly to herself.

“Come! Now the swimming pool and the garden!”

He followed her out, noting a conscious sensuality in her movements. He had to acknowledge a rising excitement in his blood. She disturbed him.

The pool was large with a short flight of curving steps descending into its shallow end. It had a springboard.

“It’s a lovely pool!” he said.

“Yes! My second husband was—is—quite a wealthy man. He owns a wine-farm in the Cape. He’s also a stringer for a newspaper in London. You might --.”

She stopped and changed her tack, abruptly.

“ --I came here after my first husband died. We farmed out at Rusape. This plot was just full of trees, then.”

“It’s pretty full now.”

“Yes, but we cleared a lot. The ones we left are indigenous! Too beautiful! Except, of course, for that Norfolk pine in the middle.”

She seemed to look at it with nostalgia.

“My namesake!” he said foolishly.

“So it is! How quaint!”

She laughed again.

“Shrubs all the way down to the front wall. An African Flame Tree over there, and here a Sweet Thorn. And this Bottle-Brush Tree over the gazebo! I love them!”

“You’ll be sorry to leave them!”

“Sad, isn’t it?”

He got a glimpse of the passion in her then.

“And here are Guelder Roses, Poinsettias and Frangipannis.”

She indicated the frangipannis. Somehow, she gave the names of the trees and the plants capital letters when she spoke of them.

“Did you know they are also called Temple Flowers?”

“No, I didn’t!” he said, apologetically. ”I know the poinsettias. But that’s about all.”

“And, dare I mention it, Lion’s Ear?”

“What’s that?”  

“There! See! I love the orange flowers in the Autumn. It’s Dagga!”

“Dagga?”

“Perhaps you know it as Cannabis or Hemp?”

“So that’s what it looks like in the raw!”

“Yes! It grows wild here. And periodically the police come and I have to pull it up. But I always leave a little of the root and it grows again. Wicked of me, I know! But I love it!”

She was being deliberately ambiguous. She laughed again.

After she had given him tea on the stoep he took his leave. The price she mentioned was out of his range. But the house was just right for his family.

“The kids would love it here. The pool! The space!”

He heard their shrieks of delight in his mind’s ear.

Afterwards he realized Drina Harding had disturbed him.

***

For the next couple of weeks he turned the prospect over and over while he continued to inspect other properties. However, hers was the one he kept coming back to. He returned a number of times to see it. He told himself he needed to refresh his memory, and then felt uncomfortable because he knew he went to see Drina Harding.

She was always glad to see him and asked every time if he had made arrangements for the bond yet.

“I’m negotiating with the University to see if they’ll assist me.”

“Let’s hope!” she said simply. “I need the money.”

Three days later, he had good news from the University Council: they would grant him a loan! Not a lot, but sufficient to cover the deposit on the house. He was delighted!

He realized now he should have soothed her.

Then, when they first went to Africa -- to a little country called, at that time, Basutoland -- she seemed to be happier. She gave herself to bringing up the children. But she could have gone back to her art. After all, she had servants to do all the donkeywork. Instead, she went the rounds of Campus coffee-mornings and afternoon tea parties. She read a lot: classic novelists and poets, hundreds of women’s magazines; she joined a film society and a Bible class. She seemed contented enough.

But eventually it became apparent that something had gone dead inside her.

“If you want something different to occupy your fingers, you could try typing out some of my poems,” he suggested one day.

“Is there much to do?”

“Oh, lots!”

She typed a few scripts for him, but the spell was soon broken and she decided she would rather do some typing for money -- part-time secretarial work for the University. She worked at home as the impulse took her.

That fizzled out after a time, as well.

Then, one day, she surprised him. She showed him a poem she had written. It wasn’t half bad! In fact, it was damned good! He said so when they discussed it, but his remarks didn’t seem to be what she wanted to hear. She showed no pleasure in his praise. The comments sank like coins in quicksand, quietly, leaving no traces behind them.

After that, he saw no more poems. She returned to her torpor. In the flurry of lectures, meetings, marking scripts, and tutorials, he forgot about the incident.

It was only now after the shock of her failure to turn up in Cape Town, he recalled the incident. He worried and analyzed and dissected their past: feelings, conversations, and so on and on. Like a dog with a bone it could not crunch, he just couldn’t make sense of her decision.

Sometimes, a colleague would ask:

“When is the wife and family coming out? You’ve bought a nice house for them!”

“Victoria is uneasy about the war.”

“Tell her we never see a sign of it!”

“I have! But I will again.”

He didn’t want to believe she wouldn’t come. At last, he could stand it no longer. December and January came and went -- the hot months before the rains: ‘suicide months’ they called them when everyone seemed to be under stress. His patience suffered. He wrote and gave her an ultimatum.

Right or wrong, that is how he felt. Of course, he had told her (hadn’t he?) that he didn’t want a divorce, that he wanted her, and he had no intention of deserting her. It was true he didn’t want to lose her but had he told her? She didn’t want a divorce, either. But it made no difference to her decision to remain in England. She didn’t say she would come. In her own good time, or in anybody else’s time. Or ever.

After the legal transfer of Drina Harding’s house went through, he lived there on his own. He rattled around like a dry single pea in a pod. Drina Harding collected her money, said goodbye, and left for South Africa. He continued to work hard in his new job and whenever he got the time went on writing his poems and stories.

Six months passed by and then twelve. Victoria did nothing. He had asked her to set the divorce in motion in the UK. The grounds would be `irretrievable breakdown’. Under English law, he could have sued for desertion. But it would be kinder to her the other way.

After eighteen months not one book or file had been packed and shipped across to him despite his offer to pay for professional packers to do the job for her. He couldn’t puzzle out what was behind her attitude. And it was three years before he could get the money together to go to the UK and see to the legal proceedings for himself and get his goods and chattels together and ship them to Africa.

He began to think that she might have a lover in the offing. But, nothing of the kind!

A year later the divorce was over.

They no longer corresponded but he heard from friends that Victoria had made her debut as a poet!

The news astounded him!

Her volume was well received. She sent copies to – interestingly enough -- all his friends, not, it seemed, to her friends -- with little printed orders for more. Then she told everybody — her mother (especially her mother, a lifelong Roman Catholic), the children, her relatives, his friends -- that he had deserted her! That for years, throughout their marriage, he had oppressed her! He was stunned by the enormity of the lie -- desertion -- and the enormity of the charge -- oppression!

3

Then, Drina Harding returned from South Africa. She visited him -- to have tea, and he felt the old attraction growing. They became friends. And then lovers. It was only after they had been married for five or six years that he began to put two and two together. At last, he thought he understood what was behind Victoria’s behaviour.

My words were wrong for you. You heard, not the tones of love, but the volume and pitch of some alien voice, the carpings of a critic and the voice of judgement of some oppressor! My rhetoric, my style, was wrong for you.

And how silent you were! You did not tell me what was inside you.

Always, you have been timorous. Always you have looked out of your feelings as if they were a thicket in which you must hide and must look out only with frightened eyes, as if I were an enemy. And you made no murmurs to tell me where you were, where you were hiding. You knew you were like a tiny frightened life of fur. You called yourself a moral coward. That was another barrier, the phrases you hid behind, or used as a justification and an excuse.

If you had spoken, if some inkling of what was inside you had come through, I would have come to you. But it was as if a muddied pool submerged you, or a thicket hid you, and I did not see and I did not hear. So your timorousness led thus to my deceit, and to your lies about me, to your misreadings of me. And to my ignorance of you.

Oh, you should have spoken!

But I was left to guess, left to misunderstand, left to send my words winging away from you like emigrating birds, instead of toward you, the warmest climate for my heart.

Once, in all those years, once, a long time ago, once when we first came to Africa, once only did you give me a sign and I did not read it. Once, shyly, you showed me something you had written. I was hoping to see some new sketches, or drawings, or sculptures, things you had dreamed of producing for years, their lines full of your whimsicalities, your humour in their conceptions, your vitality in their colours.

But you showed me typed words on a page -- and sweet enough words they were, too -- of a bird you had seen in a mealie field, a Secretary Bird, a raptorial bird, and I praised the words as much as I could praise them.

And was this the sign you wanted me to read?

Was it for me to understand that you had changed and that this was what was inside you? A predator that would snap me up in its long beak? That would gobble up me and my poems? That you could not be my Secretary Bird, but only another kind of bird of beautiful independent plumage?

Or simply to say that no longer did you want to put your dreams on canvas, or into clay or marble, but only into words? And did you feel your words to be the equal of, or better, than mine, and was your envy satisfied and your resolution made then? That very then?

And so my words of encouragement were sung to the wrong tune and the wrong beat, not what your ears were attuned to hear. And was it thus that your little foray out of the thicket of your feelings and fears and hopes did not bring forth from me what you wanted and you slunk back into your thicket and hid there for many many years, not again to emerge, for me, at least?

And thus I missed my chance with one of the dawnings of life. My fault, my deficiency, my sin -- not to see that you no longer cherished the dreams I had met in you when we were young. My failing to see that your competitiveness was really an envy of me?

Your dreams had died, changed, grown again. They were different. Were they dreamed in part to show me my place?

No! I did not see it.

My exhortations that you paint and draw and sculpt turned sour in your mind and what I breathed on you with the gentle breath of love roared in your ears like the hateful voice of the lions of oppression.

I became oppressor, critic, jailer!

Oh, the fruits of misunderstanding!

And the children, their long hair shorn, their suitcases full of new clothes, more money in their purses than we ever had to spend on ourselves. I understand now that your Mother freed you, you about to do what I had no idea you dreamed of doing.

What was the lethargy I saw? The days when I left you sitting on the sofa, old copies of women’s magazines scattered around you -- under the cushions, on the chairs -- the drawers full of everything you had shifted out of sight, days of dishes still in the sink. Was it laziness? Was it depression? Was it that you had gone into your lair, your thicket of feelings, full of your musings, your dreamings, that I knew nothing of?

When I returned a long day later, I saw you sitting exactly where you were sitting when I had left in the morning -- on the sofa among the litter of magazines, the drawers still full of unwashed clothes, pegs, knives and forks, and bits of washed coal, the furniture heaped with unwashed washing, unironed washing, and discarded books you had read or not read.

What was it? Whatever it was, you didn’t say. You did not speak. I could not ask. I did not know.

But never once did I attack you about the mess. Do you remember? The chaos you expected me to live among and in?

It was very much later, when your Mother angered me, when I asked and learned nothing, when I was told nothing, that the dam broke. Then my anger washed over us in a flood.

I hope you remember the years and years when you got nothing but love and patience and tolerance and the absence of any word of displeasure from me. And how you simply looked without speech from your thicket of fears, the little furry animal you were?

Oh, that I had understood what was inside you! Oh, that I could have said: Come with me to Africa, my love! And that you would have radiantly come!

Now, it is all too late!

Because you have poured calumny on my head, anointed me with the stinking names of deserter and oppressor, smeared the smell of a false lubricant in the nostrils of my friends and your own kith and kin; therefore, I cannot forgive you.

If you wanted to be free and alone for the stirrings inside you that had to find form and breath, for that alone, I could have forgiven you—even given you my help. But for the falsity of the aroma, the evil smell of your words that you caused to cling about me, I cannot forgive you. Nor for your deceit of me. It is sad.

Sad!

If only I had understood what your problem was, I would have continued to give what whisperings of encouragement I could. If only I had known what the source of deadness in you had been, where the fountains of lethargy were. But I did not know. I did not understand. Only now, many years later, do I understand what it was you wanted to do.

But do you now, will you in later years, understand how you misjudged me?

My faults in other ways, I freely admit. I can overweigh myself. I can calumniate myself. But, oh, the terribleness of your misjudgment, will you understand that?

Involuntarily, he murmured, softly aloud:

“My love, my dove, my undefiled!”

Drina and Alex were sitting together in the cool of the African evening, listening to the melodious whoo-whoos of the fruit bats. The swimming pool glittered in the brightness of the moon. The silence of the trees and all the shrubs and the flowers Drina loved were about them like a cloak of odours.

They had been silent for a long time.

“A penny for ’em, Alex!”

He brought himself back with difficulty.

“Oh! Just thinking! Just thoughts!”

“What kind of thoughts?”

He looked up at her slowly, fondly, and reached for his glass half-full of wine and held it aloft.

“Bolster me with flagons; comfort me with apples!”

Knowing then where his thoughts had been, she responded:

“Are you sick of women, of love?”

“You? No! Yours? No!”

“That’s good! That is very, very good!”

She held her own glass high, then.

“Because my orchards are prolific. My ciders are sweet!”

And she gave him a blinding smile that penetrated to the dark roots of him, lighting up his being. He reached across the white metal top of the table to hold her hand.

“Drina! I know! I know!”

She could not reply. Her eyes were full of tears. For herself and for him.