Half past nine on the alarm clock. Punctual to the second. From her footfall I can tell that I’ve gone and unleashed something again. Tchi, tchi, tchi, go her soles on the floor as she approaches down the passage, extra emphasis in the heels. Touchy when I want something out of the normal routine. Better not look her in the eye then. I keep my gaze on the white paper on which my hand lies in its splint.
She puts down the tray on the dressing table. She picks up the pen that has fallen from my hand. She grunts as she comes upright.
Ai, ai, she says, ai ai ai, what monkey business is this now?
She pulls out the clipboard from under my hand, turns it upside down, looks at it and tilts it back at me again. She holds out the paper with the wavering line and taps on it with the back of the pen.
L, she sounds, l, so that I can see her tongue in the front of her mouth.
L is for lie, she says. I know you’re lying.
She adjusts three of the bed’s back panels so that I tilt slightly, at a bit more of an angle, my head higher, but still on my back. That’s my best position for breathing.
Lie lady lie, Agaat singspeaks through her teeth on the inhalation, lie lady lie, while she pushes in the pegs and retightens the screws.
A change, she says, is as good as a holiday. Are you lying more comfortably now, Ounooi?
I blink my eyes once very slowly. That means I’m lying more comfortably now, thank you, but you’re missing the point, use your intelligence, say all the letters of the alphabet containing a downstroke, say them: p, h, f, m, n, l, t, i, j, k.
Our telepathy isn’t operating today. I blink once more, a whit faster. That means, let me be then, take it away.
She pulls the splint from my hand. She doesn’t have to loosen it, it’s wide, the whole sleeve and hand, like the arm-guard of a falconer it looks. If only my word would come and perch on it, tame and obedient, if I could pull a hood with little bells over its head. A lesser kestrel with the speckled chest, with the wimpled wingtips, that glides over the land, that hangs in the currents of air, tilting between the horizons, Potberg in the south and Twaalfuurkop in the north, here on the back of my hand, a witness.
It will take time to make clear that the downstroke is the beginning of an m and that m stands for map, that I want to see the maps of Grootmoedersdrift, the maps of my region, of my place. Fixed points, veritable places, the co-ordinates of my land between the Korenlandrivier and the Buffeljagsrivier, a last survey as the crow flies, on dotted lines, on the axes between longitude and latitude. I want to see the distances recorded and certified, between the main road and the foothills, from the stables to the old orchard, I want to hook my eye to the little blue vein with the red bracket that marks the crossing, the bridge over the drift, the little arrow where the water of the drift wells up, the branchings of the river. A plan of the layout of the yard, the plans of the outbuildings, the walls, the roof trusses, the fall of the gutters, the figures and words in clear print. I shall walk along a boundary fence and count the little carcases strung up by the butcher-bird, I shall find an island in the river, overgrown with bramble bushes, I shall duck under the beams of a loft and settle myself on a hessian bag and revel in knowing that nobody knows where I am. Places to clamp myself to, a space outside these chambered systems of retribution, something on which to graft my imagination, my memories, an incision, a notch, an oculation leading away from these sterile planes.
Agaat moves the bridge closer to the bed and places the tray on it.
She puts on the neckbrace.
Headlock, she says, otherwise the old beast will waggle.
She takes the bowl of porridge in the good hand, the teaspoon in the tiny fingertips of the other hand protruding from her sleeve. She spoons the porridge to cool it, blows on it.
Not what goeth into the mouth defileth, she says.
She brings the first spoonful, holds it close, waits until she can see the rhythm of my breathing and puts it into my mouth between the inhaling and the exhaling. I keep the little bit of lukewarm porridge on my tongue until I can swallow it. I can feel that it won’t be long now before I have to start using the swallowing apparatus.
But I postpone. It’s a risk, apparently. What can I lose? This forced feeding? This forced life? This crush pen to eternity?
And then, when the gullet gives in, says Leroux, he will do a tracheotomy and insert a feeding-tube under the epiglottis. The next step is the ventilator plus another pipe in my stomach. With that I’ll then have to go and lie in the hospital in town.
But I don’t want to. I want to stay here, with Agaat, in my place that I know. I have signed, she has signed. Nobody can force us. It’s the two of us who risk each other.
I feel the porridge ooze down both sides of my tongue before I’m ready for it. I close my eyes and picture the sluice in the irrigation furrow, the water damming up, a hand pulling out the locking-peg and lifting the plate in its grooves, letting through the water, and lowering it again, so that it bumps shut in the track of the sluice frame below. That’s how I try to activate my swallowing.
Every time a risk, the chance of an enfeebled reflex of imagination.
That’s how Leroux put it to us. Every mouthful a leap in the dark.
On that score, according to him, there should be no misunderstanding between us.
Misunderstanding.
He doesn’t know what he’s saying, the man.
I swallow once more.
That’s it, says Agaat, who dares wins. Concentrate, Ounooi, there’s another one coming. Third time lucky.
The third swallow exhausts me. I close my eyes, bit by bit I manage to filter it through. When at last it’s down, I open my eyes, I open my mouth and I try to say m. I know very well how it’s done. I must close my mouth, take my tongue out of the way, press my lips together and breathe out quickly, abruptly, through my nose, and open my mouth a soft nasal plop. A short, humming sound it must be, unvoiced, a vibration as brief as a second, a whimper of pain, a murmur of assent. M for map.
Gaat rushes to my aid.
Are you choking, Ounooi? Wait, wait, I’ll help you. Calmly now. Just a small breath now and then swallow and breathe out. Swallow, Ounooi, swallow, I’ll rub, come now, swallow just once.
I feel her fingertips on my throat. Lightly she massages, as Leroux demonstrated, only better because she’s fed countless little dying animals in her life.
Fledglings. Nobody who could raise them like Agaat. With bread, with raw wheat-pulp from her mouth, chewed with her spit. From pigeon to bearded vulture. All of them she brought through. Always. And let fly eventually. Out of her hand, into the open skies. Sometimes the more dependent kind kept returning for a while. She’d be flattered, would still put out food for the first few days, every day a little less, to wean them. Later she chased them from the enamel plates that she no longer filled with bread and seed.
Fly! Grow wild again! Look after yourselves now! she called and waved her arms in the air, the powerful left chasing away sternly, the puny little flutter-arm following.
Remove the food bowls, I used to say, otherwise they keep hoping.
Lightly, on the in-breath, all the way up my gullet she rubs in small circular movements, and with the exhaling she rubs down, down, trying to strengthen the last little bit of my swallowing reflex. To swallow, to cross a mountain, up on the one side, with effort, and down on the other, downhill but no easier. How false are the promises of the poets.
Über allen Gipfeln
Ist Ruh’,
In allen Wipfeln
Spürest du
Kaum einen Hauch;
Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde.
Warte nur, balde
Ruhest du auch.
Why am I thinking of this now? The little old poem learnt by heart with Herr Doktor Blumer when I was still a student?
It’s not my time yet, far yet from fledgling-death.
I open my eyes wide, quickly. I’m not a shitling! I want to see a map of my farm! This domain enclosed in chrome railings, this sterile room where you’ve got me by the gullet, I’m more than that! I’m more than a rabbit in a cage!
Agaat takes away her hand quickly.
What now? Is there something in your mouth that bothers you? Let me have a look.
It’s a logical second, a familiar problem, food that can’t be swallowed and gets stuck to the roof of the mouth. That’s the drill.
Agaat presses my tongue flat with an ice-cream stick, she peers into my mouth. I try once again to get out my m, perhaps it’s easier now that the front part of my tongue isn’t clinging to the roof of my mouth.
If you want a nice surprise, open your mouth and shut your eyes, says Agaat.
I keep my eyes wide open to keep her attention. She looks. Like one standing in bright sunshine at the mouth of a cave, she peers into me.
I blink my eyes slowly, regularly, as encouragement.
Find it, Agaat, find the word in my mouth, find the impulse from which it must sprout, fish it out as intention, as yearning. The outlines of Grootmoedersdrift, its beacons, its heights, its valleys. You cannot deny me that.
M, I try again. Agaat’s mouth opens. I flicker rapidly. Now you’re warm, it says, now you’re on the right track. She flickers back. My heart beats faster. Now there’s understanding. Peering into each other’s throats is the name of the game, two throats in search of a word.
Good, good, Agaat, watch my lips shut and open, then you imitate it, then you sound it for me, then you say ‘m’, then you say ‘map’, then you bring the sheaths out from the sideboard there, and then you take out the rolls and unfold them for me so that I can see where I am between heaven and earth, because my bed here is too small for me. My mouth is open, her mouth is open. Try once more. I can see your lips, Agaat, and I will signal when you move them correctly.
Suddenly I smell Agaat’s breath. Of sweet rooibos tea it savours, of an hour ago, of the enamel jug.
Agaat closes her mouth. Her hands press on mine.
Don’t go exciting yourself unnecessarily now, she says. She stands back. Cautiously.
Let’s go through our list, she says, then we see what it is that you want.
…
12 December 1947. The day before your wedding, that was when it happened the first time. Afterwards, the days after, the first weeks, you listened to music to calm yourself. You told yourself that Jak had just been panicky about the wedding, nervous about all the new responsibilities, scared of his mother-in-law.
And then you were nagging away at him as well. That’s how you tried to rationalise it to yourself. The thought of telling Beatrice you banished from your mind. Your father was the other possibility. The evening before your wedding he’d come to stand next to you and put his hand on your shoulder. I’m fretting for you, my child, he said, is something wrong? You looked into his face, grooved and emaciated with his disease. What would happen if you told him? He would do something about it immediately. He would tell Jak a few things straight out. And you couldn’t afford to lose Jak.
You so badly wanted the house quite ready before the great day, because the reception would be on Grootmoedersdrift. The garden was another matter. It was untidy and overgrown. For that you had great dreams, but they’d have to wait. There were more pressing matters. And in any case, you were sentimental about the old-fashioned plants growing there. You’d always want them there. The March lilies and the morning glory and the nasturtiums round the foot of the water tank, the unruly jasmine hedge that had climbed into the old guava trees and the black-eyed Susan, the old-fashioned purple bougainvillea that had colonised the side stoep, the stocks and the fragrant dwarf carnations, the tuberose. Looked at rightly, it was a paradise already.
Pa’s wedding present to the two of you was generous, a brand-new thatch roof for the old homestead, thatched by the foremost thatchers of Suurbraak, and a new floor with a spacious underfloor area with proper air vents broken into the foundations. For the sitting room Pa managed, on his last legs, to get hold of some yellow-wood beams from an old house being restored in Swellendam. The old-fashioned narrow knotty-pine slats he’d collected over the years so that there were enough when the floors had to be laid in the rest of the house. Ma got a whole team of Malays from the Hermityk to do the work. It was in their blood, she said, bricklaying and carpentry. A section of the stoep staircase that had crumbled away they built up neatly and fashioned air vents in the jerkin-head gables so that the new roof could air properly. The two little doves under the overhang of each gable, the secret adornment of which you’d been so fond ever since childhood, were touched up, so that if the afternoon sun was at the right angle, you could see them there, heads towards each other, cooing in white plaster. The front door they sanded down and painted green, and fitted an old copper doorknob and lynx-head knocker from Ma’s heirloom-trunk. They carted out all the rubbish from the cellars and dug the spaces deeper for storage. You can never have enough storage on a farm, said Ma. And Jak will probably want to keep his wine somewhere. She came herself to supervise the work on the cellars and sorted the stuff to be got rid of from that to be put in the storerooms behind the house. There was lots of furniture that you wanted to have fixed in time, she pointed out the most valuable pieces to you and tied labels to the legs. The books she and Jak wanted to get rid of, all of them, but you stopped them. Don’t think that just because Pa is ill you can do as you like with his things, you said. Many of the old books were beautifully bound in leather jackets; encyclopaedias and reference works on insects and animal behaviour and rocks; also dated popular-science works that had belonged to your father. They’ll look good in the sitting room, you said, and you never know when you may need information on unlikely subjects. You packed them in the shelves next to the poetry collections, the novels and dramas you’d read at university, next to T.S. Eliot and Donne and Hopkins and the Complete Shakespeare and the Oxford Collected Poems and Wuthering Heights and Northanger Abbey and Belydenis in die Skemer and The Cherry Orchard and Die Heks by Leipoldt and Kringloop van die Winde and The Soul of the White Ant. The old reference works with which you’d grown up, you would study them too and make them your own. Your father used to read to you from them when you were small, about the soil-flea Collembolla with the spring under its tail that could destroy a lucerne field overnight. It was part of your farming equipment, you said, while carrying in piles of the old volumes.
In addition you had the inside and the outside painted and all the woodwork sanded and varnished. You had a few small cracked panes replaced and assigned carpets and spreads and curtains to their proper places. Everything crucial was done before the wedding date. Your nest was feathered.
It was more than good enough for a start, but you couldn’t leave it at that. You nagged at Jak to help you at the last minute to paint the kitchen cabinets.
It looks bad, you said, what will the other women think of you with such kitchen cabinets? They look dirty. What will your mother think of the two of you that you can’t even do a little thing like that for yourselves? That was what he couldn’t stand. That you were threatening him with the opinions of other people. Not what you thought of him, but how others would judge him. Because that mattered greatly to him.
Then it happened. The day before the wedding. Dragged you by the hair across the back stoep of the homestead of Grootmoedersdrift. Pushed and shoved you in the chest so that you fell on the cement. Left you lying just there and walked away.
That evening you examined yourself naked in the mirror in the room of your mother’s town house in Barrydale where you were staying over before the wedding. You pulled your hair back with your hands so that the shape of your head showed. You examined your body, your features. You were not a pretty woman in the ordinary sense of the word. Your mouth was crooked, your eyes out of line, your body did not have the regularity and proportions that the magazines held up as models. Your hair was inclined to fly out in points, bat-like. It formed crowns in the wrong places.
You felt the scrapes and bruises. There was a large bump on your head. You had trouble bending one knee. You sat on your bed and cried. Stopped later. You wouldn’t appear in front of the pulpit with swollen eyes, not you.
You washed your face and put Pa’s old 78 rpm with Frauenliebe und -leben on the turntable in your room. When lovely woman stoops to folly. Kathleen Ferrier could cry on your behalf. You sewed long voile sleeves and a stand-up collar of stiff lace to your wedding dress so that nobody would notice a thing. The wedding dress was made of the finest damask from your mother’s trousseau, originally meant as a bedspread, too good for a bedspread. Between stitches you looked up into the mirror. Battered bride, you thought. Nun hast du mir den ersten Schmerz getan.
You were spoiling your wedding dress, it was starting to look like a fancy nightgown. You told your mother that the dress was too revealing. She narrowed her eyes to slits, she didn’t believe you. She knew how you dressed, revealing had never been a problem for you. Perhaps, she said, you’re not too taken with the idea of getting married in a bedspread, but as far as that’s concerned you’ll just have to get rid of your finickiness, because from now on you’re the bed.
The properly made-up wife, you thought, the squared-off, the folded-back, the freshly covered wife. A wife with inner springs and a solid headboard, a wife with copper mounting.
You worked the fine stitches, carefully pulled the thread through, stitch for stitch you sewed yourself in, into the concealing sleeves, into the collar that had to cover the bruises on your neck.
And as you worked, you sat and thought of the first time. The first time was before your wedding, that day when you almost had the accident with the watermelon lorry.
You neither of you wanted to wait, you were just as passionate, as reckless as Jak. But there where you sat sewing camouflage onto your wedding dress, you gained another perspective on that afternoon.
He carried you over the threshold and threw you onto the old bed in Ma and Pa’s sleeping-over room and had his way with you. Without ceremony or softness, nothing.
Wait, you still asked, wait a bit Jakop, slowly at first, but he couldn’t hear you.
The mites drifted from the broken ceiling and the floorboards creaked under the squeaking bedstead. You were dismayed. You thought, no, not like this, but you gathered yourself into yourself. From inside you protected yourself while he drove home his will. It will come right, you thought. You would get to know each other in time.
You were taken aback at the quantity of blood on the spread afterwards, but he shrugged it off.
It’s natural, he said with his back to you, you’re a boer woman, aren’t you? Now you’re well broken-in. A little crash course. Don’t be so namby-pamby. What did your mother say? An Afrikaner woman makes her way in silence and forbearance.
When you’d done finishing-off your dress, you were a different person. You thought you understood what you’d let yourself in for. You thought: It’s better that I should understand it now rather than later. You experimented in front of the mirror with your hairstyle so as to hide the damage. You could not share your new insight even with your mother.
Your cousins were all there, but you trusted nobody there enough to tell them. Beatrice, your friend from schooldays, looked at you enquiringly a few times. But you gave no quarter. You smiled and did everything right for the whole day of the wedding. It would not happen again. It was nobody else’s business. And you did love Jak and you were sorry for him amongst all your people, your father shaking his hand all too solemnly and your cousins slapping him on the back too hard.
Pretty Jak, they called him, Jak with the woman’s face.
They admired him for his way with words. Because he made a thunderous bridegroom’s speech, your Jak, as you’d known he would. You’d got to know his style. His toastmaster club at Stellenbosch to which he dragged you as student. You didn’t enjoy it much, but it was in exchange for the lieder evenings he in turn had to sit through in the little Conservatorium Hall. He always had the people at his feet, liked you to hear it. Just as with the wedding speech.
Once upon a time there was a most beautiful little farm, he started, and winked at you.
At the foot of a mountain, close to a stream, with a thatched house between the trees. But the yard was silent and deserted. In the evenings the trees sighed and the house creaked and the mountain whispered to the river: Now when are we getting an owner, a man and his wife who will bring life and laughter to the yard and will love each other above all?
Were you the only one who heard an undertone of mockery? You caught your father’s eye. He didn’t like it, that you could see, but he composed his face and smiled.
Perhaps Jak intercepted the glance. The mockery disappeared from his voice. He charmed himself and all the others, roused them even. In the end he had all two hundred wedding guests singing. O farm of my blood, o soil of my birth, it thundered over the yard of Grootmoedersdrift, yours I will be till the end of the earth.
When he had done, everybody believed fairy tales could come true.
Only after midnight, when the guests were starting to take their leave, you withdrew into your own space, but you did not cry, you pondered and planned and mustered your wits. Jak came to look for you. He was tipsy, full of talk, and amorousness itself after the commotion of the marriage feast.
He came and stood behind you in front of the mirror where you were sitting in your petticoat, caressed your neck.
Sweetheart sweetheart sweetheart, he sang to you, will you love me ever.
You hummed along for the occasion.
I could never marry a beautiful woman, he said, it would cost me too many a sleepless night.
You smiled. My dear husband, you said, what more could a boer woman ever wish for than a husband who leaps out of bed in the morning fresh and rested for his day’s duties.
…
how long do wild peas lie before they mould? how long does a sheep suffer a sick tongue before it turns blue? how long in my symphyses did the midges multiply? in what creases or folds of the collar and the crotch the invisible mite of the mange? how many years the incubation of terror? in what subterranean seams does history precipitate? a catchment of rain does not elect itself the mountains choose and a mouth for the stream is gifted by the sea how was I then reservoired so wrongly such a still mephitic pool?
…
Wednesday 12 May 1960
Everything is starting to seem more real now that I’m making the lists. Two processes (three!) they keep each other on track but there are many things to think of at the same time. As long as I think of the things and not of the reasons. Heaven help me sometimes it feels too much.
Kriel & Co. list 1
Baby (a little girl or a little boy?!)
Nappies & pins
Blankets (holding and covering, woolsey) (5)
Vests (long-sleeved it will be winter) (7) Ma says you can never have enough of them.
Crawlers (button-front)
Nappy covers (waterproof)
Cradle (perhaps after all get my old white cot from Ma? Or is it still down in the cellar here?)
Push-chair (Dunlop adjustable)
Pillows & covers
2 baths (thick plastic)
Towels (4 large & 4 small)
Baby shampoo & soap
Bath oil
Baby powder
Cotton wool
Earbuds
Small scissors
2 × 4 bottles + rings + teats
Bottle-brushes 2 (Saw a little frame with coloured balls that rattle & twirly things full of angels & birds to hang over the cradle)
Kriel & Co. list 2
7 Long-sleeved uniform dresses (black—could probably make them myself but don’t have time now)
7 Aprons (high bib backstraps crossed cf. Royal Hotel)
7 White caps with elastic bands (try Good Hope Café if Kriel & Co don’t have the coloured girls wear them there ask Georgie’s wife)
Hairpins (2 × 24 large)
Bloomers (strong black woolsey school section)
Scholl shoes (rubber soles)
White socks (dozen)
Flannel nightgowns (2)
Nylon nightgowns (2)
4 bras 32 A (will just have to grow into them I see the titties are pushing fast)
Towels & washcloths (curtains?) I can make up from the odds drawer of the linen cupboard. Bedding & pillows enough. Off-cuts!—phone Needle’s Eye—will have to run up a Sunday dress or two for her quickly needlework she can enough already she’ll just have to jump in herself & muck on I won’t have time can really not buy everything new
Dr White’s 4 dozen (Facts-of-life talk! When will the right time be?)
Elastic with loops
Mum (rub-on kind)
Lacto Calamine Lotion
Lifebuoy soap × 6
Johnson’s baby powder (will have to teach her how to keep lace-up shoes fresh!)
Pepsodent × 6
Black polish (& brush & buffing cloths)
Three small black irons & ironing board (she mustn’t use those in the house in the mornings must emerge fresh as a daisy from the outside rm finished & ready for the day)
Vim
Scoop & brush
Omo
Washboard
Starch (write down recipe for her: cold water and ordinary)
Reckitt’s Blue
2 Tin buckets
Sunlight soap (X4)
Zinc bath
No water as yet in outside rm electricity one point?
(Two-plate stove?)
Tin kettle
Big pot for heating washing water
Jug
Rooibos tea
Frisco
Powdered milk
Sugar (tin)
(NB for her needlework basket: extra buttons for the uniform & darning mushroom needles pins scissors crochet hook crochet yarn oddments of wool for more of the jerseys she wears she will start knitting them herself now)
Bible
FAK (old one)
Cook & Enjoy?
Farmer’s Handbook (Pa’s old copy, A. must learn the principles old & new methods you never know & it’s good discipline)
Embroidery book
Optional:
Tin of ginger biscuits
Tin of rusks
Marie biscuits
Acid drops
Peppermint humbugs
Just a little something to suck on & something to enjoy with hr tea in the evening before going to bed. So much to do still. Quite ill with thinking of it. I ask J. doesn’t he feel anything about everything happening now he says it’s not necessary for him to feel anything I’ve got enough feelings for two. Next thing I see he’s gone & bought himself a whole box of new clothes. A new noise on Gdrift he says & after all he can’t appear without costume for the next act. I say why don’t you rather go & read something to improve yourself your whiplash repartee no longer impresses me. Since I’ve been pregnant, he’s at least more careful. Doesn’t seem as if he wants to as much as touch me, never mind beat me. But the language he utters. Comes along just now & grabs the diary from under me. Blessed is the maker of lists creator of heaven and earth he exclaims. Blessed are the poor in spirit I snap back. What must become of us?
13 May 1960
Everything goes as if preordained. Three rooms furnished at the same time nursery & A.’s room & the gable room of the left wing for J’s office. He’s sleeping there most of the time now anyway & with the baby it will definitely be better he says so himself.
Now quite exhausted after the whole day’s organising. Scared all the time that I’m forgetting something important. Anxious. What a disruption it is! I know it’s right but I nevertheless hold my heart about it all.
Had cradle & chest of drawers put into the nursery with hole in top in which the washbasins fit & enough space next to it to attend to the child. Under the bath space for nappies & bath things. Had single bed carried in there & an easy chair so that I can lie there if necessary & a place to sit for feedings & chest of drawers with enough drawers so that at one glance I can put my hand on everything.
Bought curtaining with half-moons & stars the windows open into the backyard so that A. can help listen at night.
Had linoleum nailed to the scrubbing table for hr kettle to stand on. OuKarel has fixed cross-planks between the legs of the table for hr tin bath & hr suitcase. Had a plank screwed down on iron brackets over the table on which she can keep hr coffee & tea & mugs & soap & cleaning material & hammered a nail into the wall for mirror one corner cracked but perfectly usable. Had a copper pipe inserted in the wall between the two partitions where shelves of the storeroom were to hang hr uniforms & dresses (look for old wire hangers NB) devised a two-strip curtain on a cord so that hr stuff needn’t be so exposed to view next to the bed a crate with a cloth over it for hr Bible & hr glass of water for the night & hr candle almost forgot about the candle add to list 2 (Inside crate she can keep hr other reading matter.) Got Dawid to nail 4 apple boxes together & painted two coats of white & screwed in two hooks & and made a curtain for that as well for hr shoes & shoe polish below & hr wool & cloths & her needlework basket.
Little old yellow vase for a bit of homeliness with nasturtiums inside should look pretty there. Walls still bare & light-bulb without shade but there’s no point in having her think this is a hotel old bathmat in front of the bed so that she won’t stand on cold linoleum with the getting-up & hung old kitchen curtains a bit skimpy had to undo the pleats but still quite serviceable.
What can she think of it all? Will just have to be good enough. Fortunately nice & sensible.
J.’s office now in stoep room. Desk & filing cabinet & farm papers that used to be in second pantry carried over & his exercise apparatus out of the bedroom thank Heaven. Photos & trophies & things that stood & hung all over the place. Ma’am’s on the rampage baas on the stoep maid’s in her hovel & all’s right with the world sings Jak. Lord the man. At least he’ll be able to face people again now he says. And at a glance see what’s happening in the yard. As if the yard mattered a whit to him. Just as long as he’s satisfied now don’t have time for his nonsense too on top of everything. Expect Beatrice Pulpit-Polish will also want to come & do inspection some time. Missing a brain-bobbin, as Pa would say.