Yet even had Mark and Nora seen the crowd, or heard the strident voices, would they have understood, noticed the little leaves gathering force on a growing stream? Liliesleaf was one thing, but they both laughed at the joke about how the natives were revolting. For Nora, okay, so black people worked hard and got a raw deal, but as her husband said, wasn’t that because basically they were (not to be blunt or anything) still so bladdy bush, more or less raw themselves? And if there were pass laws, he explained, you knew they were there, like all laws, for a reason. It was logical. A ruling party had to rule, otherwise it was only a party, and things would get out of hand.
Hell, but Mark knew how to make a person laugh! When she thought quietly, Mark’s gregarious buzz absent from her head, even then the best Nora could do was a pretty tight tautology: Wouldn’t things improve as they improved, meaning black people and things, if they could only be more patient?
So perhaps the Murphys succumbed to the belief that history was only a way of time passing. Passing time. Time came and went, the days rolling around and away, but history was theirs, wasn’t it, because people like them were the ones who were making history happen.
And of the knot in the stomach, the thorn in the sole, oh what is that sound that so fills the ear . . . ? Perhaps they preferred to know nothing, indifferent to the growing body except for Mark’s pleasure in his beautiful darling, and she with the joy of his six-pack voice so resonant upon his flat, firm belly.
Reasonable rent and convenient location aside, the couple had chosen their flat because of the small enclosed balcony which jutted towards the distant water across the leafy canopy of the Berea. Though because of the buildings in front of the block, and the hilly slope beginning its slide down the back of the Ridge into the tangled subtropical bush, you couldn’t properly see the sea. Not unless you went onto the balcony and craned your neck, tilting the balance in order to catch a glimpse of the city’s one certainty, the constantly changeable water.
Before her birth, Halley had sensed the sea, floating in her watery sac, felt the beacon tug a body when the woman ought to have been indoors, making ready. But Nora was always on the balcony look-out, hoping to find the foetus’s father.
Oh, she’d found her man and they were married, but now she needed to know where he was. Was there a device for this, Nora wondered silently, something similar to a fish finder? She’d give her eyeteeth for such a convenience, but nope, not that she’d heard. And actually, who’d have the resources to waste on tracking down a wanderer like Mark? It made no sense to throw good money after bad, and when he didn’t give a continental about being found.
Some mornings, with the wind cutting off the sea, slicing sharply through the centre of town up to where they lived for those short months, the air was brisk with salt. The wind blew in through the open window, whipping the lace curtain, blurring the glass where Nora stood, drawing hearts and arrowing them with a cynical, dismissive finger. The wind stung her eyes, left faint, crusted traces on her cheeks. Made her sniff.
Endless blasted wind, she sighed, repeatedly washing the windows with water and vinegar, buffing a shine using the week’s old news, keeping at it until the glass was clear. Never crying, not exactly. Not Nora. Though there were reasons aplenty for tears.
Where was he this time, her husband? There was no one to ask. She was new to Durban from Bloem, without family, and the only friends she had were his, men who covered his tracks with sleek or tumbled stories, and lied to her face.
How Durban people laughed when Nora said she was from Bloemfontein, the very thought of it! They looked down on her, and mocked openly with calls of Vrystaat! Shame, they said, Flower Fountain! And obviously thinking volkspele, outydse tiekiedraai and vastrap to some fat oom’s piano accordion.
And she had nothing to counter them. What could she say, must she declare proudly that Bloemfontein was the most centrally positioned city in the whole of South Africa, so that if you lived there your life was equally close to every opportunity? That Bloemfontein had elegant culture such as these coastal types could not imagine?
No, she wasn’t stupid by a long shot, so she kept her mouth shut, knowing what a laugh this defence would raise among all the tanned, comfortable carousers, confident of their important lives in the country’s premier holiday destination.
Nora felt nostalgic about Bloem, the peaceful, orderly city of her youth. Tough times, she certainly wouldn’t deny, very, but still her old familiar. The smart, handsome boys from Grey College, walking past St Faith’s, their eyes politely averted, but clearly wondering whether; the uppity girls from Eunice. Summertimes, free to feast on a glut of fallen fruit. And once she was free herself, out of the home, Sundays after church, piekniek at Maselspoort, the willows swaying. And long evenings looking over the rooftops from Naval Hill with Roger, her sweetheart, swept off her feet with love but also thinking about the silliness of names.
Naval Hill! With not a ship in sight, only the old British naval guns mounted on the crest. The sign on the flat-topped kopje which announced that Here Lord Roberts had stationed his Boer War regiment, and the accompanying naval brigade.
All that skill lubbered uselessly inland! Nora smiled to herself, Roger’s arm around her cool, uncertain shoulders.
Sometimes she wore him like a heavy overcoat, she knew, but it was often chilly up this part of the country, and bitterly cold in winter. So she had to have something.
On Naval Hill, the air clear as pure atmosphere, there was also the university observatory. A huge dome like a cranium centrally cleft by a precise, expert axe. And inside the eyeball, though you couldn’t see, was an enormous, powerful telescope trained upon the skies, gathering celestial information. Just knowing that the telescope was there made Nora want to do something crazy, like wish upon a childish star and keep it secret in the hope of luck.
Which wasn’t like her. She had no time for the magazine frippery of horoscopes and star signs. I ask you, she would have said, and What next! Though she was a Libra, that much leeway she was willing to grant, and Roger a Pisces. You had to know, since people asked.
But the telescope had caught her imagination, enclosed and protected in its scientific skull, and she’d wondered, looking up at the building from where she stood, whether astronomy could chart a future. Whether its earthly eye might help a person to see where she was in the world and where she was going, beyond where she’d already been.
When she’d learned of her pregnancy, and once she and Mark had reconciled and gone hunting for a place to stay, she’d thought of the balcony as a pleasant spot for a nursery.
Here, she could nurse the child, once it came, she’d thought, seeing herself settled into a rocking chair, with a cup of tea, a book. And a likkle baybee.
Though Mark put paid to all that. Her husband was even then stretching his neck in an impossible straining to catch a glimpse of the harbour glowing at night. That was the problem with the sea. It was alluring. In some shapes it promised change, in others constancy. It could be the force that brought you, or carried you away. Whichever one you wanted, assuming that you knew what made you happy.
She knew about the grass always being greener, but sailors afflicted by calenture envisage the seas as green fields, she thought bitterly. Who knows but that men stranded on land might manifest an inversion of the same tropical delirium.
Who can say what Mark was after? Though he was not, judging by the past, a man in a hurry to settle.
He’d bunked all the time from technical high the year he’d started, preferring to hang around at home taking pot shots at people’s closely guarded laying hens. Once, the head clean off a prize rooster. Fishing belly-up with home-made bombs, the used tins packed with dynamite nicked from a nearby factory and lobbed into the harbour. Wheeling and dealing with the Indian fellows by the Clairwood betting shop.
The last escapade, police had collared the boy way down the South Coast where he was following the sardine