‘I see you have met Lili and my son,’ Walter Musgrave said casually, without the slightest hint of the mortification he surely must have felt on such an occasion and at having been thus discovered. ‘Somewhat incorrigible is our Lili,’ Walter Musgrave went on, offering Gemma the glass of water. The water in the glass was steady, suspiciously so. Gemma examined the hand that carried the glass of water and noticed that it did not tremble. The hand was as steady as the heartbeat of a saint. ‘She does not think that the rules of propriety apply to her,’ Walter Musgrave said with something very much like indulgent affection in his voice. Gemma stared at the mouth that had uttered these words, the very mouth that had told her that she was the epitome of beauty and femininity, and finally understood its treachery.
‘Get out!’ Gemma snarled before hitting the glass of water out of Walter Musgrave’s hand and onto the wall. With a little satisfaction, she watched the glass shatter and then litter the floor with tiny, dangerous pieces that gleamed like diamonds in the dust. That was all she had energy for before she crumpled back into a forlorn heap.
Gemma had been too distraught throughout this entire scene to notice her son watching it unfold from within the shadows of his room. Maybe she would have acted better had she known that she had an audience.
Nothing was the same after that. Walter Musgrave was sent to another outpost and evidently had taken the native girl, Lili, and the light-brown baby boy, his son, with him.
‘While he just refuses to do the proper thing, he says he knows that he is doing the right thing,’ Johan explained to a still dejected Gemma.
‘Somewhat incorrigible is our Walter,’ Gemma replied, trying to sound as nonchalant as she could not feel. ‘He does not think that the rules of propriety apply to him.’ To her deep dismay, she noticed that her hands were trembling uncontrollably as she said this.
Just like that, the roaring sundowners became a thing of the past. Gemma spent most of her days in bed feeling blue and complaining about the oppressive heat, which just would not abate. There goes madam, hiding from the sun again, the natives said, amused, after not having seen Gemma for days on end. She will be out when the rain falls, they collectively conjectured and then carried on with their lives. So, when the rain finally fell and Gemma hid from it too, the natives were not amused. The natives were worried. They had heard stories of madams who had been driven mad or been killed by the very climate that had nurtured them for centuries.
Their madam had appeared to be made of sterner stuff than these storied madams but perhaps she was not and perhaps they should have been wary of the easy way in which she had immediately appeared to be at home amongst them. They began to appreciate that, quite possibly, there was more to the ways of Europeans than there appeared to be on the surface.
For his part, Johan was eager to make Gemma happy again, but all his efforts were in vain because he could not successfully do anything about the heat that she now found stifling. He bought a fan and a refrigerator, both at great expense to himself, but neither ameliorated the situation. He made a request to the BSAP to have extra windows added to the house. Predictably, the request was denied because government-issued homes could not be modified.
Since nothing could be done about the fact that she was baking herself mad in a government-issued oven, Gemma wanted to live elsewhere. She wanted to live in a house that belonged not to the government but to Johan Coetzee, a house that she could modify to suit her needs and tastes, a house that she could make herself comfortable in. The house that belonged to Johan began to take shape in Gemma’s mind. It was a colonial-style house with French windows, a red wraparound veranda and an English rose garden. Gemma spent most afternoons in bed furnishing this imagined house with the best ball-and-claw furniture, the finest delicate china and the most modern kitchen appliances that money could buy. The house was so perfect and so very much theirs that Gemma began to yearn to live in it. She was convinced that the happiness and love they would feel in this house would be everlasting because they would not be government-issued emotions but, rather, the proud property of the Coetzees.
The house of Gemma’s imagination became such a concrete thing that Johan began to see it and long to live in it as well. Still, even in his dreaming, Johan was practical enough to know that they could only live in such a house if he got a promotion, and so he applied for one, a year before he was eligible. Unfortunately, the BSAP, at this particular moment in its history, was being audited and investigated for corruption and thus, having to be seen doing everything by the book, had no choice but to soundly reject Johan’s application.
At the end of his tether, Johan suggested to Gemma that she take Emil to Durban until such a time as he could provide her with the life she so desperately wanted. However, since The Williams Arms was now being run by her mother and Anthony Simons, and Gemma did not relish spending time with people who had not only cheated her of her rightful inheritance but had also always made her feel as unwanted as an unwelcome guest, Johan’s suggestion was not taken up.
Gemma stopped listening to the jazz that had made her so happy and returned to her roots, the blues. The sombre tones of Bessie Smith’s voice travelled through the His Master’s Voice gramophone and enveloped Gemma in a melancholic sadness that gave her purpose. She spent entire days exploring the many byways of her heavy moods and emotions. She did not have to do anything but feel blue and she did so wholeheartedly, minutely examining every emotion for sufficient blueness and heaviness. The byways that she travelled inevitably led back to that first letter she had received, seemingly a lifetime ago now, the letter that had arrived on BSAP stationery, the letter that had been written with a bleeding pen. Gemma saw now what she had not seen then – that the letter had not been written with much care, and that there was something she desperately needed that the letter writer could not provide. She was not altogether sure what that something was but she was sure that the missing of it was making her blue.
She did not stop loving Johan, though – he looked too much like Douglas Fairbanks Jr for any woman in her right mind not to love him. She just saw him with clarity now and that clarity made it near impossible for her to get out of bed every morning.
Not knowing the inner workings of his mother’s mind, Emil, at eight, believed that the reason his parents no longer danced to ‘You’re the green in my coffee; you’re the salt in my shoe’ at sundown on the patch of grass that masqueraded as a lawn and stood where a veranda should have been while he sipped on lukewarm lime cordial had everything to do with the fact that he had ‘gone native’ as his mother now often screamed to him that he had.
Although he kept this to himself, Emil knew that he had grown a little wild because of a recurring dream … a nightmare, really. This nightmare of a dream had regrettably taken the place of his favourite dream, the one about the hunt. In the nightmare he would come home, from the government school for natives that he attended, to find the government-issued, bungalow-style house with whitewashed walls and no veranda empty. Emil would put his rucksack on the kitchen table and the eerie emptiness of the rest of the house would fill his body with apprehension. He would enter and thoroughly check all the rooms of the house and in each room his parents would not be there. When the apprehension turned to fear, he would return to the kitchen to find the native girl and the baby boy with light-brown skin sitting at the very table where his rucksack lay, and the native girl would ask him what he was doing in her house. When he opened his mouth to tell her that he lived in the house with his mother and father, instead of words coming out, the howl of a wounded animal would escape from his throat. The native girl, seeming to perfectly understand the animal sound, would respond and tell him that she and her baby had always lived there. Emil, not knowing what else to do, would howl an apology and run out of the house, instantly regretting that he had left his rucksack behind. He would loiter outside the house waiting for Walter Musgrave to arrive so that he could explain the situation to him. No longer trusting that he would reliably find his voice, he would repeat his name over and over again – Emil … Coetzee … Emil … Coetzee … Emil … Coetzee – until he felt assured that he was still capable of language. But then a question would rudely present itself: what made him so sure that the house belonged to Walter Musgrave?
When Emil woke up from this dream, he struggled to breathe. He was afraid of both the emptiness that his parents created by not being there and the presence that