He’s spent the night in the house quite a few times this summer. There are no sheets but a cushion from the sofa does as a pillow and there is the kaross he once bought in Botswana when there was first talk of a consortium to prospect for nickel deposits, and he flew up for a day. It’s nicely made, well-matched skins of Black-black jackal; but one buys these things when one goes about the world and then doesn’t know what the hell to do with them, or whom to give them to. It didn’t look right in the flat. The mosquitoes are bad in that bedroom. Spraying stinks but doesn’t help much. Yet shaving in the dark little bathroom an hour or more earlier than he would be if he were in town, he is feeling as fresh as if he has had a particularly good night’s sleep. Through the eye-level window that opens upwards like a fanlight he watches the arrival of women and old men who have been taken on by Jacobus to come from the location to weed. Thirty cents a day, Jacobus says he can get them for; but if you see how they’re taking it easy, how they’re strolling up and having a good old gas with Alina, and sitting about against the workshop wall — probably not worth more. He is shaving by feel, not looking into the small foxed mirror at all — good God, what’s going on? Now they’re leisurely unwrapping their babies and their bundles, apparently they bring their bread or mealie-pap along, and now young Izak arrives with a can of milk. So it’s a picnic, before the day’s work begins. Everybody’s squatting on the grass in the yard and being sociable. Some of these old girls are quite characters; one crone with nothing but a big safety pin to hold her rag of a blouse together over her huge old tits, now that she’s shed her blankets, catches him out watching through the window and calls a loud and jaunty greeting, one word in Afrikaans and one in their language: Môre, ‘Nkos’. The borehole water is soft; one gets an exceptionally good shave. Those women are giving Jacobus hell over something but it’s all banter; barefoot, his hands hooked in the braces of new bibbed overalls that stand away from his waist like Chaplin’s trousers, he’s arguing theatrically, but there’s laughter, they shout him down, behind their din there is the hurrying tripping skelter of cattle being driven out of the paddock by Solomon and Phineas — a sound queerly equivalent to that of thousands of feet coming up out of the railway stations, away from the buses, far off in the city. Jacobus pretends to threaten a woman with a fist. So that’s how work gets going on the place. Everyone takes his time, nobody’s developing ulcers out here, you’ve got to grant them that.
At the stove Alina is stirring something that already smells burnt. She looks half asleep and moves reluctantly; spoilt — she’s not used to being required in the house in the mornings. Anyway, he doesn’t want breakfast. He flings up the screeching steel fly-screens on the windows in that airless, lifeless bedroom — the moment he’s gone she’ll close everything again — and emerges through the kitchen door, an apparition (sees himself as) in that light grey summer suit with the back vent, Roman coin cuff-links and red silk tie. The guise or disguise of the city; he was here straight from the office yesterday — the old pair of corduroy jeans he keeps to get into at the farm is lying with the heap of the kaross. As he walks through scattering cats (they’ve been attracted from the roof by dregs of mealie-pap dirtily thrown about the yard) to his car, he comes face to face with the weeding contingent, who have been down to the barn to collect their implements and are now on their way to the fields. He is surrounded by the passage of a ragged army advancing on him with hoes, the grinning, knowing faces of the old women, the younger ones not meeting his eyes, their babies’ heads lolling above their backsides as they pass, the old men in scarecrow coats blindly not seeming to know what they are making for. It is only a few moments: they have him in their midst, so that he cannot go forward. It would be absurd to back away — they are all round him.
Jacobus has a bucket and mop and is sloshing water over the windscreen but he waves him off. He must get into town. — What about the lucerne? —
— That far one, there by the pump? I’m going cut today. Is very good day. —
There could be other opinions on that. The weather report on the radio had predicted thunder storms in the afternoon. How big is that field? — it could be cut and then drenched before it’s dry enough to bale — say, two hundred bales lost. Instead of driving towards the farm gate, which is open for the day (the nightwatchman is drinking tea out of a syrup tin in the yard, and has touched his hand to his red-and-white tea-cosy cap in respectful greeting) he’ll take a quick look at that lucerne first. The road is really bad; there’s not time to see to everything. Children run ahead of the car to open the camp gates but they don’t follow him as he heaves through the last one.
Oh my God. What a crime to wake up morning after morning in that flat. Never mind the huge firm bed and the good coffee. The car door shuts under the slow swing of its own weight behind him. The mechanical two-syllable sound disappears instantly as the substance of the morning closes over it, heavy and clear as the sea. Oh my God. The field dips away before it rises again towards the river. It has drifted into flower since the sun rose two hours ago — yesterday afternoon it was still green, with only a hint of sage to show the bloom was coming. Just touching, floating over its contours, is a nap of blue that brushes across the grain to mauve. There is no wind but the air itself is a constant welling. It is the element of this lush summer. He has plunged down past the pump-house where a big pipe makes a hidden foot-bridge buried in bowed grasses and bulrushes over an irrigation furrow. His shoes and the pale grey pants are wiped by wet muzzles of grasses, his hands, that he lets hang at his sides, are trailed over by the tips of a million delicate tongues. Look at the willows. The height of the grass. Look at the reeds. Everything bends, blends, folds. Everything is continually swaying, flowing rippling waving surging streaming fingering. He is standing there with his damn shoes all wet with the dew and he feels he himself is swaying, the pulsation of his blood is moving him on his own axis (that’s the sensation) as it seems to do to accommodate the human body to the movement of a ship. A high earth running beneath his feet. All this softness of grasses is the susurration of a slight dizziness, hissing in the head.
Fair and lovely place. From where does the phrase come to him? It comes back, tum-te-tum-te-tum, as only something learned by rote survives. It’s not his vocabulary. Fair and lovely. A place in a child’s primer where nothing ugly could possibly be imagined to happen: as if such places exist. No wound to be seen; and simply shovelled under. He looks out over this domain almost with fascination, to think that, somewhere, that particular spot exists, overgrown. No one’ll remember where you are buried.
The shoes are a mess.
There ought to be a yellow duster on the glove shelf — but an old company report serves. He smears off the wet and scraps of grass. There are some early grass-seeds, too. Once on the main road, there’s heavy traffic at this time in the morning. Truck-loads of builders’ supplies, road-making equipment mounted on huge, slow trailers marked ‘Abnormal Load’, haulage of all kinds, although he calculated that factory workers would have gone to work already and the office and shop people would be going a little later. Overtaking and being overtaken, the tread of these vehicles and his Mercedes criss-cross again and again the experience he has just left behind him (half an hour he wandered, stood in the field, or maybe not more than ten minutes): quickly it is covered by a kind of grid. On its tracks are laid down many automatic responses to everyday situations of no importance and one of these is that he does not see people who thumb lifts; he would certainly not have been aware of the pair (even though the old man was dressed so peculiarly) who take courage to come right to the car while he is held up behind two crawling trailers just before the entrance to the freeway. An elderly man in commissionaire’s uniform and a girl or young woman. Difficult to say no, when you can’t drive off, and there’s a whole great empty car. He has told them, shortly, to get in, then. They have both scrambled humbly into the back, just time to bang the door too hard behind them the way people do who are not used to these big cars that respond to the lightest touch, while he suddenly sees the opportunity to get past the trailers, in a fast manoeuvre, and work his way into his lane again.