well, there are love affairs but they take time. You have to sort of build them up with a woman. In England, a man of Chakata’s importance might feel sorry for a slut if she started to cry, but he wouldn’t just make love to her on the spot. The climate’s cooler there, you see, and there are a lot more girls.”
“Oh, I see,” said Daphne. “What did Uncle Chakata do next?”
“Well, as soon as he had played the fool with Mrs Tuys he felt sorry. He told her it was a moment of weakness and it would never occur again. But it did.”
“Did Tuys find out?”
“Tuys found out. He went to Mrs Chakata and tried to rape her.”
“Didn’t it come off?”
“No, it didn’t come off.”
“It must have been the whisky in her breath. It must have put him off,” said Daphne.
“In England,” said Donald, “girls your age don’t know very much about these things.”
“Oh, I see,” said Daphne.
“It’s all different there. Well, Mrs Chakata complained to Chakata, and wanted him to shoot Tuys. He refused, of course, and he gave Tuys a rise and made him manager. And from that day he wouldn’t look at Mrs Tuys, wouldn’t even look at her. Whenever he caught sight of her about the farm, he looked the other way. In the end she wrote to Chakata to say she was mad in love with him and if she couldn’t have him she would shoot herself. The note was written in block letters, in Afrikaans.”
“Chakata would never answer it, then,” Daphne said.
“You are right,” said Donald. “And Mrs Tuys shot herself. Old Tuys has sworn to be revenged on Chakata some day. That’s why Mrs Chakata has a gun at her bedside. She has implored Chakata to get rid of Old Tuys. So he should, of course.”
“He can’t, very well, when you think of it,” said Daphne.
“It’s only his remorse,” said Donald, “and his English honour. If Old Tuys was an Englishman, Daphne, he would have cleared off the farm long ago. But no, he remains, he has sworn on the Bible to be revenged.”
“It must be our climate,” said Daphne. “I have never liked the way Old Tuys looks at me.”
“The Colony is a savage place,” he said. He rose and poured himself a whisky. “I grant you,” he said, “we have the natives under control. I grant you we have the leopards under control –”
“Oh, remember Moses,” said Daphne. Her former playmate, Moses, had been got by a leopard two years ago.
“That was exceptional. We are getting control over malaria. But we haven’t got the savage in ourselves under control. This place brings out the savage in ourselves.” He finished his drink and poured another. “If you go to England,” he said, “don’t come back.”
“Oh, I see,” said Daphne.
She was ten minutes late when she arrived at the car. The party had been anxious about her.
“Where did you get to? You slipped away … we asked everywhere …”
John Coates said in a mock-girlish tone, “Oh, she’s been listening to the go-away bird out on the lone wide veldt.”
“Five more years and then I go to England. Four years … three …”
Meanwhile, life in the Colony seemed to become more exciting every year. In fact, it went on as usual, but Daphne’s capacity for excitement developed as she grew into her teens.
She had a trip to Kenya to stay with a married cousin, another trip to Johannesburg with Mrs Coates to buy clothes.
“Typical English beauty Daphne’s turning out to be,” said Chakata. In reality she was too blonde to be typically English; she took after her father’s family, the Cape du Toits, who were a mixture of Dutch and Huguenot stock.
At sixteen she passed her matric and her name was entered for a teachers’ training college in the Capital. During the holidays she flirted with John Coates, who would drive her round the countryside in the little German Volkswagen which his father had obtained for him. They would go on Sunday afternoons to the Williams Hotel on the great main road for tea and a swim in the bathing-pool with all the district who converged there weekly from farms and towns.
“In England,” Daphne would tell him, “you can bathe in the rivers. No bilharzia there, no crocs.”
“There’s going to be a war in Europe,” said John.
Daphne would sit on the hotel stoep in her smart new linen slacks, sipping her gin and lime, delighted and amazed to be grown-up, to be greeted by her farming neighbours.
“’Lo, Daphne, how are your mealies?”
“Not too bad, how are yours?”
“Hallo, Daphne, how’s the tobacco?”
“Rotten, Old Tuys says.”
“I hear Chakata’s sold La Flèche.”
“Well, he’s had an offer, actually.”
She had been twice to a dance at Williams Hotel. Young Billy Williams, who was studying medicine at Cape Town, proposed marriage to her, but as everyone knew, she was to go to college in the Capital and then to England to stay with the English Pattersons for a couple of years before she could decide about marriage.
War broke out at the beginning of her first term at the training college. All her old young men, as well as her new, became important and interesting in their uniforms and brief appearances on leave.
She took up golf. Sometimes, after a hole, when she was following her companions to the next tee, she would lag behind or even stop in her tracks.
“Feeling all right, Daphne?”
“Oh, I was only listening to the go-away bird.”
“Interested in ornithology?”
“Oh yes, fairly, you know.”
When she returned to the farm after her first term at the college Chakata gave her a revolver.
“Keep it beside your bed,” he said.
She took it without comment.
Next day, he said, “Where did you go yesterday afternoon?”
“Oh, for a trek across the veldt, you know.”
“Anywhere special?”
“Only to Makata’s kraal. He’s quite determined to hang on to that land the Beresfords are after. He’s got a wife for his son, he paid five head.” Makata was the local chief. Daphne enjoyed squatting in the shade of his great mud hut
