and knees. By a servant, perhaps; even the poverty-stricken can afford to employ the destitute. Every morning, in the backyards, clothes were slapped and wrung in tin tubs.
But on the fringes of Elim the houses were overflowing. There were families living in sheds, in less space than a farmer would give an animal. Lucy explained all this; rents were high in the neighbouring locations and when families could not pay them and were turned out they came to Elim. And then, relatives came from the bundu all the time, and you couldn’t turn them away, people had to live somehow; perhaps you might build a lean-to at the back, with whatever came to hand, and hope it would withstand the wind and rain; if not, build it again. She indicated dwellings constructed of sheets of tin leaning against a wall. Naked children – naked except for a string of beads around the waist – played in the dust. Lucy stood before them, cajoling till they answered her, her bag matching her shoes, and her Sunday petal hat planted on her close-curled head. Sanitary arrangements? Better not to think about them. Even the Mission House, after all, had only its huts and buckets, emptied every day by Jakob Malajane, also employed as the gardener.
The Indian and Chinese shops were well-stocked and orderly, Lucy pointed out. There were several where she knew the proprietors, they were not bad types all of them, they would sometimes put things under the counter for you till you could pay. Every so often, though, the bad boys with knives and coshes came in, left the proprietor bleeding and took what they wanted. ‘Not all these tsotsis are boys whom you can discipline,’ Lucy said. ‘Some of them are grown men.’ She shrugged; she wanted to warn the Eldreds, whom she thought pitiful children, but she did not want to dwell upon this side of life. There was no need either to mention brothels and shebeens. After all, Mr and Mrs Standish had got by without talking about them.
So she marched them off to meet church-choir contraltos, a saxophonist in Elim’s jazz band, a neat-waisted coloured woman who ran a Girl Guide troop: all good people, she said, all family people. Down the road walked a stately, very black man, robed and bearing a crozier. His wife walked arm in arm with him, her purple frock sweeping the dust; she wore a necklace of bones. ‘Oh, Mr and Mrs Bishop Kwakwa,’ Lucy said. ‘Zionist Mount Carmel Gospel of Africa. Not at all a real church.’
The day in Flower Street began at six o’clock; but they woke earlier. The bedroom curtains were thin. Their background colour was tan, with a design of purple sunbursts. They did not quite meet across the glass. Each morning a shaft of sunlight, thin as an axe-blade, struck across their pillows and their eyes.
Already the kitchen was busy, the mealie-porridge bubbling on the range. Jakob chopped the wood, then ambled to his garden duties. He was a country boy: his face was battered like a boxer’s. He had, Lucy told them, the falling sickness. The people of his village used to throw stones at him when he fell down in a fit, to drive the devil out. They were illiterate people, Lucy explained, in her lofty way.
They would walk to Matins: the church was five minutes away. Father Alfred would shake their hands, though he would be seeing them perhaps twice before lunch, most days, and twice after lunch, and whenever he felt the need. Father Alfred was a little, anxious man. He smiled perpetually. His eyes in his brown face had an air of faded surprise.
After Matins it was time for Anna to talk to the cook, Rosinah, about the day’s meals. Quantities must be approximate, they must stretch to accommodate whoever might come by. No one could say what the day would bring.
There were a large number of servants at the mission, none of them overworked. They were people with spectacular bad-luck stories, and they were engaged on the basis of these, rather than of any aptitude or proficiency for their work. Jakob, who slept under a tree for most of the day, had an assistant, a young boy with no parents, seemingly no kin of any kind except some shadowy relatives in Durban who could not be traced. He passed his day listlessly raking the ground, and manufacturing elaborate besoms. He was permanently in rags, a disgrace to the mission. Whenever Ralph gave him any clothes, he would sell them. It seemed that his ambition was to be a walking sign, a symbol of wretchedness.
The cook Rosinah sat with her chair wedged into a corner near the stove. The back door was always open, so that her cronies could drift in and out. There was a constant procession of them, rolling through the kitchen and out again, squatting on the floor to exchange gossip. When Anna passed, she smiled and greeted them, but she could not help noticing that they were usually eating something. It disturbed her that the half of Elim that claimed acquaintance with Rosinah was better fed than the half that did not.
Rosinah had been known to chase people out of the kitchen and across the yard, with some offensive kitchen weapon: sometimes a thing so relatively benign as a wooden spoon, but once at least a small meat-cleaver. There seemed no reason for these outbursts of hers, nothing especially which brought them on. The victims would be back after a few days, squatting nervously on the threshold, drawn by the chance of a handout of a bowl of porridge or the heel of a loaf.
No one knew Rosinah’s own particular bad-luck story. She never spoke of her past, but something must have soured her temper, something out of the ordinary run of fire and disease and sudden death. Day to day the chief victim of her wrath was a girl called Dearie, her assistant. Dearie was a frail young woman with rickety legs; pregnant, and with a sick baby bound always on her back.
Dearie’s babies died, Anna was told. This was the third or maybe the fourth, and each one was weaker than the last. Anna decided that this current infant would not die on her: she would fathom the mystery, she would keep Dearie under her eye. She suggested the doctor; Dearie, head bowed, suggested in her monosyllabic way that she saw a doctor of her own.
Anna did not dare insist. She provided powdered milk and rusks, peered anxiously at the small wizened face. The babies slipped away in the night, breathed out the last of their lives while everyone else slept. At least, that was how it appeared to be; Rosinah, in her rages, suggested that Dearie murdered them. There was no husband, and it seemed there never had been. Lucy Moyo said, for one slip you can forgive a girl, but that Dearie, she is a walking outrage. Anna said, I thought we were supposed to forgive seventy times seven? Lucy glared at her. Anna thought, perhaps I have got my Scripture wrong. Perhaps it is God who does that.
A woman called Clara cleaned the house and washed the clothes. She was a mission girl, had passed her junior certificate. She was ashamed to do such work, and Ralph and Anna saw that it was demeaning for her. Whenever she asked them, they wrote her a glowing reference, recommending her for some job in a store, or a post as a hospital orderly. But employers turned her away. She came back to the house, stony-eyed, and picked up her brush to sweep the rooms out.
Clara had once had a husband, but he had disappeared, leaving her with four small children. Her expectations of these mild babies were ferociously high: silence, industry, a useful occupation at all times. Each evening she called them to recite Bible verses; if they failed, she told them to bring her the cane. Their little cries, like the mewing of cats, punctuated the evenings. But who could tell Clara not to do it? They must not be like their father; and she believed that only the weals on their legs stood between them and a life of drink and misery, with hell at the end of it.
It was not difficult to understand why employers turned Clara away, but it was difficult to put into words. She had some quality that stirred unease. It was not an overt violence, as in Rosinah’s case. It was an emptiness; you did not care to think how it might be filled up.
Each morning at Flower Street, Ralph went into the cubbyhole he called his office to deal with letters and the accounts – recording minutely, faithfully, the futile expenditure of tiny sums. Anna went to the nursery school to supervise the local helpers. It was not a small enterprise; there were a hundred and fifty children, organized by twenty or thirty volunteers, who came and went by some bewildering rota that they understood and Anna did not.
Each morning they put the children into their blue overalls,
