I was awoken the next morning by cacophony. My head raged with brandy; the sounds I was hearing seemed designed to torture a man suffering from overindulgence; and yet I felt strangely uplifted; almost, dare I say it, happy.
I had not registered the presence of a pianoforte in the drawing-room, though it was hard to believe that the flatulent, dislocated sounds I was hearing could thunder from strings designed to vibrate with the inspiration of Mozart, Beethoven, Liszt. This music, if music I must call it, was utterly disobedient, straining like a dog at its leash: the left hand pounding out a relentless rhythm while the right hand took horrible liberties, the treble seeming to dislocate itself quite deliberately from the bass. As if this wasn’t extreme enough, a clarinet began to wail in blatant collusion with the hammering on the keyboard, followed by the impudent rattle of the banjo, the twanging of whose strings reminds me of a cat vigorously scratching itself for fleas. Could this be the Cakewalk, at present taking London and the Americas by storm?
It has to be said that not even the dons and fellows of the Oxford colleges are safe from the pernicious influence of this so-called music. Well do I remember how my sacred evening hour in the company of the Senior Common Room was recently shattered by the triumphant entrance of a young history tutor bearing aloft a most hideously decorated cake, his prize for an unseemly display of leg-kicking and bodily contortions, produced with the energetic co-operation of a female partner. These antics are performed every Wednesday afternoon in a local dance house from whose windows issue the sort of sounds presently disturbing my fortifying slumbers; with what gusto did that young cake prize-winner proceed to demonstrate to his startled audience those very gyrations which had won him his honours.
I lay in my bed, the image of the dancing don suddenly vivid in my memory, resurrected, it seemed, to strut again to the raucous noise from below. My own neat legs lay outstretched beneath a monogrammed blanket, while the upper part of my body sloped upward at forty-five degrees, with the support of four large pillows, still necessary after my bronchial attack.
Reluctant to move from my warm bed in spite of the dissonance, I found my mind drifting back to the events of the night before. In the haze of alcohol that still made ordered thinking impossible, I remembered little of my conversation with Frank Harris, though the earlier part of the evening was vivid enough. Nevertheless, I was aware of a feeling of warmth towards Harris, a feeling that began to arrange itself into an urge to see him again, though for ill-defined reasons.
Then I noticed something very peculiar happening to my nether anatomy.
I could scarcely believe the evidence of my astonished eyes. The entire length of my left foot, from the ankle to the tips of my toes, was twitching under the blanket with a violent, rhythmic movement, as if it belonged not to my precise body but to the unseen players in the room below. I watched its gyrations, dumbfounded, as if betrayed by the insolence of an outer limb – but even as I watched, the realisation dawned that another part of my feeble frame had succumbed to the influence of the music: my head, the very seat of my accumulated wisdom and discipline, was nodding in an equally compulsive fashion, in frank collusion with my foot.
And then, strangest of all, my entire body rose from its bed, as if pulled by the dancing don himself, and proceeded to wriggle and writhe in a most unseemly fashion, my legs even kicking out and upwards in an abandoned manner. (It occurred to me that I might have been bitten by a tarantula, apocryphal as the stories of its dance-inducing venom might be.) The ludicrousness of the situation was exaggerated by the fact that my jittering legs were entirely naked under my night-dress! Unwillingly, I observed the extreme pallor of my skin, and the veritable forest of black hair, sprouting to no purpose from the knees down.
I am a man unacquainted with his body. I do not admire the exposed flesh of Michelangelo’s sculptures or Rubens’ overfed women. In particular – like Ruskin – I am repelled by bodily hair. I do not see the need for it. The late Mr Darwin could undoubtedly have explained to me how the unnecessary coils around my genitalia fit into the evolutionary process, but I doubt if such an explanation would lessen my disgust. I avert my eyes when bathing. I forget I am related to the ape. Now the sight of my pale hairy legs prancing about so absurdly filled me with acute embarrassment. I wrapped my dressing-gown about my limbs, and looked for warm water.
The music stopped for a moment. Voices chattered and laughed. The players were speaking in their clicking tribal languages. I could recognise the throaty inflections of my valet … Which instrument did he play? Was it possible to perform upon the pianoforte with a missing little finger?
Then a chill icicle of thought needled its way into the conflicting emotions stirred by the cakewalk. They are rehearsing for the day of the Release, less than two days away now! The day when my soundless birds will soar into pine forests, already fully occupied by winged predators. Something like pity stirred in my cold heart, whether for myself or my small charges I could not say.
A gentle rap on the door interrupted these wretched thoughts. Impatiently I swung the door open, and was confronted by the radiant messenger, Joubert.
‘Good morning, sir. Another telegram for you, I’m afraid. He says he’ll discuss the contents with you this evening.’
‘Thank you, Mr Joubert. I am glad to see your spirits are fully recovered.’
‘Thanks to you, Professor!’ the young man cried. ‘If I hadn’t met you on the bench yesterday … I might even have broken my engagement to Miss Pennyfeather!’ He cocked his head, listening to the sounds from below with obvious pleasure.
‘I can see you enjoy this music’
‘Oh yes, sir!’ he cried. ‘It makes me want to dance!’
‘There will be plenty of opportunity for that when the birds are released, I should imagine.’
‘Miss Pennyfeather is looking forward to meeting you then, Professor.’ The irrepressible young man bade me good morning and withdrew. I moved across to the bedside table to fetch my reading glasses. As before, only a few words were scrawled on the back of the telegram.
‘Thanks, Wills. You’re a good chap. But when are you going to get those damned birds to sing? Come and have a drink with me on the back verandah tonight 6 p.m.’
After my late start, the hot water which Orpheus brought me had become lukewarm but strangely invigorating. I certainly had no thoughts of breakfast as I paid special attention to my toilet, even going so far as to extract certain facial hairs which detracted from the symmetry of my beard. Then it was time to embark on my quest.
Down the avenue of monstrous stone pines – quite the wrong sort of tree to have planted to line a road, in my opinion, with a top-heavy canopy of needles one hundred feet above and nothing but angular tree trunks at eye level – I strolled, in search of Maria’s house. A multitude of grey squirrels raced up and down these trees, undeterred by the total lack of branches from which to leap. The avenue led from the Great Granary down on to a kind of High Street which ran through the village of Rondebosch, yet to be visited by me. I have felt no impulse to move outside the perimeter of the Great Granary estate, though I am assured that a tour of the peninsula on which it is situated would be of great interest.
A narrow-faced peasant of a man pushed his sharpening-stone up the road, flickered his eyes at me with intense dislike, and disappeared into one of the cottages which lined the lower end of the avenue. The redness of his skin and the blueness of his eyes suggested he was a recently arrived immigrant.
I fingered the tiny tooth I had procured in the early hours of the morning. Its sharp edges bit pleasantly into my fingertips, a pleasure enhanced by the memory of the little mouth in which it had once lodged.
Each of the cottages was provided with a large shady verandah surrounding the front door. Strong pillars held aloft the red-and-white-striped corrugated-iron verandah roofs which gave the otherwise gloomy houses a somewhat skittish appearance. One verandah wall was adorned with antlers, horns and stuffed animals’ heads with glassy eyes; another with dried fynbos bouquets hanging upside-down from the beams of the roof.
In which did my Maria dwell? I hovered uncertainly before each front gate, feeling self-conscious; then spotted a large triangle hanging among the dried bouquets. At the same moment the child herself slipped out from behind a hedge of blue plumbago and chanted gleefully: ‘The fairies took my tooth! The fairies took my tooth!’ She was holding a small cardboard box.
I felt my face suffuse with colour as a feeling of most exquisite pleasure rose through my body. ‘Y-your tooth?’ I stammered, and then, controlling the swooning sensation, I said sternly, ‘Good morning, Maria.’
‘Mornin’,’ she droned. Her large brown eyes shone with a lustrousness I felt I could dive into. ‘They l-left me a tickey, that’s nice of them, hey?’
‘Oh I am pleased!’ I exclaimed in a jolly voice I could scarcely recognise as my own. ‘And what do you think they’ll do with your tooth?’
‘They’ll b-build they houses with it,’ she said. ‘They houses are built out of t-tooths, you see.’
‘How beautiful they must be! Have you ever seen one, Maria!’ (I found myself shamelessly imitating Dodgson’s whimsical cadences.)
She contracted her nostrils in disbelief at my stupidity, a gesture which raised the curtain of her top lip and revealed the delightful gap in her top row of teeth. ‘You can’t see fairies’ houses!’
‘What’s that you’ve got, Maria?’ Out of my depth, I changed the subject.
‘Look.’ She proffered me the cardboard box she had been clasping. Its lid was punctured with a number of slashes. I paused, conscious that a woman’s face was at the window of the house next to which we were standing. The child seemed quite unperturbed about this, her little mind now thoroughly engrossed in her new interest.
Hesitantly, I lifted the lid. Inside the box were a number of mulberry leaves which were being audibly munched by hordes of pale, naked caterpillars. Cocoons of yellow silk had already attached themselves to the corners of the box.
‘They my silkworms. They turn into silk.’ Her curious colonial inflections made the word sound more like ‘sulk’ than rhyme with ‘milk’.
‘And what will you do with the silk, Maria?’ Once I would have given the ignorant child a lesson on metamorphosis. But this was the wrong question.
‘I’ll keep it.’ She was beginning to have doubts about my powers of reasoning, I could see that, and extended her hands for the return of the box. I wished the woman in the window would move away. Maria showed no inclination to take me inside the house.
Studying my face with great intensity, she enquired with her usual suddenness: ‘What’s your bir-bir-birds’ names?’
‘My birds’ names? Do you mean their Latin names or their common names?’ (Alice Liddell would certainly have been able to answer this question.)
A small frown appeared between her dark brows. ‘What they called?’ she said patiently.
‘Well, I have some nightingales, some blackbirds, some chaffinches.’ I decided against the Latin names.
The frown did not disappear. She became helpful. ‘I got a canary called Cecil,’ she explained. ‘And a pussy cat called Chaka Zulu. What’s the birds’ names?’
‘Oh my goodness me!’ I exclaimed as understanding dawned. ‘Do you know how many birds I have, Maria?’
She stared down at her shoes.
‘I have – well, I did have – two hundred birds in my cages. That’s a lot of names to have to make up, don’t you think?’
‘Duzzen matter.’ (Only later did I realise the child had no concept of tens, let alone hundreds.) ‘Poor birds.’
‘Well then –’ I paused, as a delightful thought occurred. ‘Would you like to come up to the cages and name them for me?’
‘I been to the cages.’ She pouted. ‘The Kaffir boys chased me away. They shouted at me. I’m a bit scared of those boys.’
‘Are you indeed?’ I said. ‘I don’t think you need be any more.’
At this moment the woman threw open the window and called out angrily, in strong Dutch accents: ‘Maria, come in now! I’ve told you not to talk to strange men!’
Though I bridled at the deliberate rudeness, I realised action had to be taken at once. Stretching my pink lips into the most charming smile I could muster, I turned to the woman who challenged me thus at the window, and bowed with frigid politeness. ‘Professor Francis Wills, madam, from Oxford University.’
Thank goodness my face never registered my true emotions, for my eyes would have widened with surprise when they settled on the woman’s face. Without doubt this was Maria’s mother: the bright brown eyes, the pouting lips, the small round chin, the robust beauty. But the colour of her skin: Maria’s mother’s skin was nearly as dark as that of my Negro servant (at present thumping his way through minstrel music in preparation for my downfall), though her features were as European as my own. In the full glare of the morning sun which had escaped the feathery grasp of the pine trees, I now realised that Maria’s skin was a glorious golden-brown colour, not unlike that of a Spaniard who has been through a harsh Mediterranean summer.
The mother was unaffected by my charm. ‘What’s an old man like you doing with my little girl?’
Oh dear, these colonials and indigenes do speak their minds. Language here has clearly never developed beyond an unfiltered expression of simple needs and opinions. I cleared my throat in order to stimulate my vocal cords into mellifluous action.
‘I beg your pardon, madam, I fear there is some mistake. I was merely discussing with Maria the possibility of her giving names to the songbirds I have brought with me from England.’ Surely to God there’s no harm in that?
The frown on the woman’s face did not melt away. ‘Maria says you meet her up the Glen.’ Outright hostility was evident in the quick flare of nostril that accompanied this rejoinder.
I became even more magnanimous, more ingenuous. ‘We’ve been teaching each other to whistle. I work with birds, you see, at the University of Oxford.’ Clearly the implications of this hallowed name were quite lost on this harridan.
‘I don’t want my child meeting strange old men up the mountain.’ Though the hostility still flickered round the nostril, her eyes, previously weapons of destruction, now began a wary search of mine.
‘I quite agree,’ I said affably, storing up her unflattering description of me for later analysis. ‘Which is why I’ve come to pay my respects to you – and also to ask you about Maria’s magnificent bird-whistle. She tells me you made it yourself. May I offer you my congratulations? It is a superb instrument.’
My unctuous flattery seemed to be working. Drawing herself away from the window the woman said in resigned tones: ‘You better come in.’
Maria, who had been playing inside the laurel hedge during this exchange, now emerged looking dusty, her clothes and hair covered in leaves and twigs. Though I found her even more enchanting in this state – a leafy nymph escaped from some sprawling Renaissance canvas – her mother burst into a fit of scolding in kitchen-Dutch, which sent the child scuttling into the depths of the house, much to my disappointment.
The house was cool and dark inside, and sparsely furnished. Accustomed to the clutter of English homes, I found the bare walls and uncarpeted floors somewhat startling, though no doubt conducive to clear thinking. I could tell at once that the plain furniture was of the best: the favoured yellow-and-dark-wood combination in the table, bureau and chairs. The occasional stool and bench featured that curious leather-thong loose weave I have noted in the Great Granary. In fact, the interior of the house was a humble microcosm of that of the larger house, and more successful for its lack of pretension. The Great Granary was, in effect, not much more than a great hotel, while this simple house had the welcoming properties of a home.
My general astonishment was compounded by the full appearance of the woman herself. Whilst leaning in the window frame she had presented herself as a person of normal healthy physical proportions, but great indeed was my surprise to discover that from the ribcage downwards her girth expanded suddenly outwards, so much so that as she moved, her hindquarters, clad in fashionable European silks but clearly not encased in the usual stays or corsets, rose and fell in gigantic waves to the rhythms of her movements.
My final surprise awaited me in the room into which she then led me. It was not so much the pretty Broadwood piano and musical instruments – ranging from violin to penny whistles of the type I remember seeing on a visit paid by my father and myself to our relations in Ireland – that made me stop short in the doorway. Over the fireplace, before whose empty grate stood a large, deep, indigo high-glaze pot filled with brilliant sea-blue dried hydrangeas, hung a formal portrait of the Colossus – a photograph upon which had been superimposed the original tints and hues of my host’s benevolent-looking visage; a photograph, I may add, taken some years back, to judge by the firm smoothness of the facial skin, the youthful glow in the grey-blue eyes, the golden streaks in the curly hair. Maria’s mother made no attempt to explain the presence of the portrait; nor indeed would she even have attempted polite conversation with me, had I not myself initiated a vestigial verbal exchange through formal questioning. Nor did she volunteer her own name, and I found myself lacking the courage to ask it.
It seemed that the invitation into her house automatically included refreshments. While she made a pot of tea, I ruminated over her position in the Great Granary hierarchy of servants: probably a cook in the hidden kitchens, as I had certainly never seen her cleaning or serving in the house itself, but then I had seen no female servant in the house. As I waited for her return, and, indeed, for Maria’s reappearance, I took care to preserve a gentle smile on my lips in order to counteract my habitually stern expression. This effort imposed considerable strain on the muscles of my mouth, with the result that a slippery sort of twitch affecting first one then the other corner of my mouth came into effect just as the mother re-entered the room bearing a large tea tray, of which burden I hastily relieved her. Once we were settled I re-introduced the topic of her bird-whistle as she poured me a very pleasant cup of China tea, which quickly subdued the nervous tic in my lips. There was still no sign of Maria.
‘I am a musician, you see,’ said the mother with undisguised pride. ‘I play all those instruments you see over there. Those instruments come from overseas, and cost a lot of money, but it is also possible to make your own musical instruments – that is what I learnt when I was a child.’ She leaned over the table and removed a beaded net cover from a bowl of confectionery. ‘Help yourself. There’s a serviette. As a child I made bird-whistles out of the clay we dug up from under the hill, but those whistles imitated the birds of Africa – the hoopoe bird, the hadeda, the bee-eaters, the laughing doves. Go on, eat.’
I stared helplessly at the little plaited cakes soaked in syrup and sprinkled with desiccated coconut. It appeared I was to pick one up in my fingers, holding the table napkin beneath it to catch any dripping syrup.
I do not like getting my fingers sticky. Now I felt myself break out in a cold sweat at the thought of handling this messy food.
My fear communicated itself to her. She said, less harshly, Tick one up with your serviette if you don’t want to dirty your fingers. It’s koeksusters, a local food. You can’t go back to England without eating koeksusters’
Wrapping my table napkin carefully round my hand I did as I was bidden. She could see my hand shaking as I reached for the syrupy cake.
‘You English are a funny lot,’ she remarked, filling my empty cup with tea. ‘Wash, wash, wash, all the time.’ She looked briefly up at the portrait and nodded her head. ‘He’s exactly the same. Even in the middle of the veld, miles away from anywhere, he’s got to be spotlessly clean and shaven. Yet for all that, he never brushes his hair.’
I nibbled at the koeksuster. It was too sweet for my liking and I did not care for the rather soggy texture, but good manners made me chew through it to the end. The woman’s familiarity with the private habits of the Colossus did not surprise me; by now I had decided she must be the widow of some deceased valet. I swallowed the last glutinous crumb with a sip of tea, and felt the moment had arrived for me to reveal the true reason for my visit. ‘Mrs van den Bergh,’ I began, but she interrupted me. ‘Fun!’ she exclaimed with a contemptuous smile. ‘Not “van”!’
My brain, so carefully prepared for the request I was about to make, swivelled on its axis. She began to explain: ‘In our language a “v” is pronounced like an “f”.’
‘Mrs fun den Bergh,’ I continued: ‘I have a favour to ask of you.’
All fun vanished as she tightened her mouth and prepared for refusal.
‘I am an amateur photographer. I have brought my cameras here in order to take pictures of the local environment and birds in particular. It would give me great pleasure to take Maria’s photograph – and yours, of course – to bring back to England, to show the colonial people in their natural habitat. I have had some considerable success with portrait taking.’ This was a complete lie, but nevertheless Dodgson’s famous portraits – Alice as beggarmaid et cetera – sailed before my mind’s eye as if I myself was responsible for their existence.
‘You want to take Maria’s photograph?’
‘Yes. And yours, if you were willing.’
At this moment Maria herself, now clad in a clean pinafore, sidled into the room and headed for the koeksusters.
‘I should be delighted to present you with such a portrait before I leave for England next week,’ I continued. ‘There are excellent dark-room facilities available to me in the big house.’
To my surprise, the woman addressed her daughter. ‘Would you like the Professor to take your photograph, Maria? She’s not looking her best, you know, she’s just recovering from measles, she lost a lot of weight.’
‘The Professor says I can go up to the cages,’ Maria replied.
‘Where would you take these pictures?’ continued the mother. ‘In this house?’
‘Well, ideally I’d like to take them outside – on the mountain slopes – among the wild flowers – that sort of thing.’
‘I tell you where’s nice,’ said Mrs van den Bergh. ‘There’s an old summerhouse up the mountain, with a rose garden and a fountain. That’s a very pretty place, isn’t it, Maria?’
It seemed that the mother was content with this arrangement. We agreed to meet at ten o’clock the next morning; I was given elaborate directions; and finally got away, feeling triumphant. Maria ran after me.
‘M-my mommy says I can come with. To the cages.’
And to my indescribable joy, she placed her small trusting hand inside my own contaminated one.