was odd. Letter-writing equipment did not form part of a tramp’s gear. The letter was on blue Croxley writing paper, and in a blue Croxley envelope, and the writing was as neat as a child’s. It was a ‘bread and butter’ letter. He said that he had very much enjoyed our kind hospitality, and the fine cooking of the lady of the house. He was grateful for the opportunity of making our acquaintance. ‘With my best wishes, yours very truly, Johnny Blakeworthy.’
Once he had been a well-brought-up little boy from a small English country town. ‘You must always write and say thank you after enjoying hospitality, Johnny.’
We talked about the letter for a long time. He must have dropped in at the nearest store after leaving our farm. It was twenty miles away. He probably bought a single sheet of paper and a lone envelope. This meant that he had got them from the African part of the store, where such small retailing went on – at vast profit, of course, to the storekeeper. He must have bought one stamp, and walked across to the post office to hand the letter over the counter. Then, due having been paid to his upbringing, he moved back to the African tribe where he lived beyond post offices, letter writing, and other impedimenta that went with being a white man.
The next glimpse I had of the man, I still have no idea where to fit into the pattern I was at last able to make.
It was years later. I was a young woman at a morning tea party. This one, like all the others of its kind, was an excuse for gossip, and most of that was – of course, since we were young married women – about men and marriage. A girl, married not more than a year, much in love, and unwilling to sacrifice her husband to the collective, talked instead about her aunt from the Orange Free State. ‘She was married for years to a real bad one, and then up he got and walked out. All she heard from him was a nice letter, you know, like a letter after a party or something. It said Thank you very much for the nice time. Can you beat that? And later still she found she had never been married to him because all the time he was married to someone else.’
‘Was she happy?’ one of us asked, and the girl said, ‘She was nuts all right, she said it was the best time of her life.’
‘Then what was she complaining about?’
‘What got her was, having to say Spinster, when she was as good as married all those years. And that letter got her goat, I feel I must write and thank you for … something like that.’
‘What was his name?’ I asked, suddenly understanding what was itching at the back of my mind.
‘I don’t remember. Johnny something or other.’
That was all that came out of that most typical of South African scenes, the morning tea party on the deep shady veranda, the trays covered with every kind of cake and biscuit, the gossiping young women, watching their offspring at play under the trees, filling in a morning of their lazy lives before going back to their respective homes where they would find their meals cooked for them, the table laid, and their husbands waiting. That tea party was thirty years ago, and still that town has not grown so wide that the men can’t drive home to take their midday meals with their families. I am talking of white families, of course.
The next bit of the puzzle came in the shape of a story which I read in a local paper, of the kind that gets itself printed in the spare hours of presses responsible for much more renowned newspapers. This one was called the Valley Advertiser, and its circulation might have been ten thousand. The story was headed: Our Prize-winning story, The Fragrant Black Aloe. By our new Discovery, Alan McGinnery. ‘When I have nothing better to do, I like to stroll down the Main Street, to see the day’s news being created, to catch fragments of talk, and to make up stories about what I hear. Most people enjoy coincidences, it gives them something to talk about. But when there are too many, it makes an unpleasant feeling that the long arm of coincidence is pointing to a region where a rational person is likely to feel uncomfortable. This morning was like that. It began in a flower shop. There a woman with a shopping list was saying to the salesman: “Do you sell black aloes?” It sounded like something to eat.
‘“Never heard of them,” said he. “But I have a fine range of succulents. I can sell you a miniature rock garden on a tray.”
‘“No, no, no, I don’t want the ordinary aloes. I’ve got all those. I want the Scented Black Aloe.”
‘Ten minutes later, waiting to buy a toothbrush at the cosmetic counter at our chemist, Harry’s Pharmacy, I heard a woman ask for a bottle of Black Aloe.
‘Hello, I thought, black aloes have suddenly come into my life!
‘“We don’t stock anything like that,” said the salesgirl, offering rose, honeysuckle, lilac, white violets and jasmine, while obviously reflecting that black aloes must make a bitter kind of perfume.
‘Half an hour later I was in a seedshop, and when I heard a petulant female voice ask: “Do you stock succulents?” then I knew what was coming. This had happened to me before, but I couldn’t remember where or when. Never before had I heard of the Scented Black Aloe, and there it was, three times in an hour.
‘When she had gone I asked the salesman, “Tell me, is there such a thing as the Scented Black Aloe?”
‘“Your guess is as good as mine,” he said. “But people always want what’s difficult to find.”
‘And at that moment I remembered where I had heard that querulous, sad, insistent hungry note in a voice before (voices, as it turned out!), the note that means that the Scented Black Aloe represents, for that time, all the heart’s desire.
‘It was before the war. I was in the Cape and I had to get to Nairobi. I had driven the route before, and I wanted to get it over. Every couple of hours or so you pass through some little dorp, and they are all the same. They are hot, and dusty. In the tearoom there is a crowd of youngsters eating icecream and talking about motor cycles and film stars. In the bars men stand drinking beer. The restaurant, if there is one, is bad, or pretentious. The waitress longs only for the day when she can get to the big city, and she says the name of the city as if it was Paris, or London, but when you reach it, two hundred or five hundred miles on, it is a slightly larger dorp, with the same dusty trees, the same tearoom, the same bar, and five thousand people instead of a hundred.
‘On the evening of the third day I was in the Northern Transvaal, and when I wanted to stop for the night, the sun was blood-red through a haze of dust, and the main street was full of cattle and people. There was the yearly Farmers’ Show in progress, and the hotel was full. The proprietor said there was a woman who took in people in emergencies.
‘The house was by itself at the end of a straggling dust street, under a large jacaranda tree. It was small, with chocolate-coloured trellis-work along the veranda, and the roof was sagging under scarlet bougainvillaea. The woman who came to the door was a plump, dark-haired creature in a pink apron, her hands floury with cooking.
‘She said the room was not ready. I said that I had come all the way from Bloemfontein that morning, and she said, “Come in, my second husband was from there when he came here in the beginning.”
‘Outside the house was all dust, and the glare was bad, but inside it was cosy, with flowers and ribbons and cushions and china behind glass. In every conceivable place were pictures of the same man. You couldn’t get away from them. He smiled down from the bathroom wall, and if you opened a cupboard door, there he was, stuck up among the dishes.
‘She spent two hours cooking a meal, said over and over again how a woman has to spend all her day cooking a meal that is eaten in five minutes, enquired after my tastes in food, offered second helpings.
