Williams cater to her tenants’ needs, Gemma had felt herself to have been carefree, daring and very modern through it all. She felt in her heart of hearts that she still possessed these qualities at the foot of the Matopos Hills and proved this by donning her red cloche hat and black chiffon and lace drop-waist dress and dancing with abandon at every sundowner on the patch of grass that masqueraded as a lawn and stood where a veranda should have been. The 1930s were not like the 1920S – 1929 had seen to that and sobered the world – but those on the outpost did not have to let go of the heavenly 1920s, not as long as they had Gemma to play the happy, wild and enticing flapper girl.
Gemma’s gesticulations amused the natives to no end because they knew that she considered the enthusiastic flailing of her arms and legs dancing, which it most certainly was not. Nevertheless, as she danced to ‘You’re the Cream in My Coffee’, Gemma’s European audience was enthralled. Sometimes Johan, not much of a dancer himself, became so enraptured by the thrill in Gemma’s movements that he would join her in a foxtrot promenade, a dance that Emil would always remember in beautiful and brilliant Technicolour.
Life on the outpost would have continued uninterrupted on this steady path that showed every sign of leading to only more happiness … if a native girl had not arrived on the patch of grass that masqueraded as a lawn and stood where a veranda should have been. But the native girl had arrived carrying a baby boy with skin the colour of tea with milk in it and a generous spray of curly sand-coloured hair and their arrival changed everything.
The native girl had asked for Walter and this – not the presence of the native girl or the existence of the brown baby in her arms, but the fact that she had simply asked for Walter – was what struck Gemma the most. She had not asked for baas, or Mr Musgrave, or Mr Walter – just Walter. The native girl had not cast her eyes down as she spoke to Gemma, as the short history lived together with the Europeans had taught most natives to do. Uncharacteristically, and rather defiantly, the native girl had looked Gemma in the eye, shifted the baby on her hip and said, ‘I ask to see Walter.’
Instead of responding, Gemma clutched at her throat, which made a gurgling sound as she stifled a primitive and primal scream. The omnipresent heat had, at that moment, become unexpectedly oppressive. Gemma felt the back of her neck grow very hot before she suddenly became light-headed. In the confusion of her light-headedness she became determined. She had been born in Africa; there was no way the unforgiving heat would affect her. She raised her chin rebelliously and tilted it against the heat before falling on her kitchen floor in a fainted heap.
Gemma must have hit her head on the concrete floor because she woke up with a bump on her forehead and a migraine. The now oppressive heat was still there. The native girl and the baby boy were also still there. The only thing new was Walter Musgrave walking towards her carrying a glass of water in one hand and gesturing towards the native girl and the baby boy with the other. ‘I see you have met Lili and my son,’ Walter Musgrave said casually, without the slightest hint of the mortification he surely must have felt on such an occasion and at having been thus discovered. ‘Somewhat incorrigible is our Lili,’ Walter Musgrave went on, offering Gemma the glass of water. The water in the glass was steady, suspiciously so. Gemma examined the hand that carried the glass of water and noticed that it did not tremble. The hand was as steady as the heartbeat of a saint. ‘She does not think that the rules of propriety apply to her,’ Walter Musgrave said with something very much like indulgent affection in his voice. Gemma stared at the mouth that had uttered these words, the very mouth that had told her that she was the epitome of beauty and femininity, and finally understood its treachery.
‘Get out!’ Gemma snarled before hitting the glass of water out of Walter Musgrave’s hand and onto the wall. With a little satisfaction, she watched the glass shatter and then litter the floor with tiny, dangerous pieces that gleamed like diamonds in the dust. That was all she had energy for before she crumpled back into a forlorn heap.
Gemma had been too distraught throughout this entire scene to notice her son watching it unfold from within the shadows of his room. Maybe she would have acted better had she known that she had an audience.
Nothing was the same after that. Walter Musgrave was sent to another outpost and evidently had taken the native girl, Lili, and the light-brown baby boy, his son, with him.
‘While he just refuses to do the proper thing, he says he knows that he is doing the right thing,’ Johan explained to a still dejected Gemma.
‘Somewhat incorrigible is our Walter,’ Gemma replied, trying to sound as nonchalant as she could not feel. ‘He does not think that the rules of propriety apply to him.’ To her deep dismay, she noticed that her hands were trembling uncontrollably as she said this.
Just like that, the roaring sundowners became a thing of the past. Gemma spent most of her days in bed feeling blue and complaining about the oppressive heat, which just would not abate. There goes madam, hiding from the sun again, the natives said, amused, after not having seen Gemma for days on end. She will be out when the rain falls, they collectively conjectured and then carried on with their lives. So, when the rain finally fell and Gemma hid from it too, the natives were not amused. The natives were worried. They had heard stories of madams who had been driven mad or been killed by the very climate that had nurtured them for centuries.
Their madam had appeared to be made of sterner stuff than these storied madams but perhaps she was not and perhaps they should have been wary of the easy way in which she had immediately appeared to be at home amongst them. They began to appreciate that, quite possibly, there was more to the ways of Europeans than there appeared to be on the surface.
For his part, Johan was eager to make Gemma happy again, but all his efforts were in vain because he could not successfully do anything about the heat that she now found stifling. He bought a fan and a refrigerator, both at great expense to himself, but neither ameliorated the situation. He made a request to the BSAP to have extra windows added to the house. Predictably, the request was denied because government-issued homes could not be modified.
Since nothing could be done about the fact that she was baking herself mad in a government-issued oven, Gemma wanted to live elsewhere. She wanted to live in a house that belonged not to the government but to Johan Coetzee, a house that she could modify to suit her needs and tastes, a house that she could make herself comfortable in. The house that belonged to Johan began to take shape in Gemma’s mind. It was a colonial-style house with French windows, a red wraparound veranda and an English rose garden. Gemma spent most afternoons in bed furnishing this imagined house with the best ball-and-claw furniture, the finest delicate china and the most modern kitchen appliances that money could buy. The house was so perfect and so very much theirs that Gemma began to yearn to live in it. She was convinced that the happiness and love they would feel in this house would be everlasting because they would not be government-issued emotions but, rather, the proud property of the Coetzees.
The house of Gemma’s imagination became such a concrete thing that Johan began to see it and long to live in it as well. Still, even in his dreaming, Johan was practical enough to know that they could only live in such a house if he got a promotion, and so he applied for one, a year before he was eligible. Unfortunately, the BSAP, at this particular moment in its history, was being audited and investigated for corruption and thus, having to be seen doing everything by the book, had no choice but to soundly reject Johan’s application.
At the end of his tether, Johan suggested to Gemma that she take Emil to Durban until such a time as he could provide her with the life she so desperately wanted. However, since The Williams Arms was now being run by her mother and Anthony Simons, and Gemma did not relish spending time with people who had not only cheated her of her rightful inheritance but had also always made her feel as unwanted as an unwelcome guest, Johan’s suggestion was not taken up.
Gemma stopped listening to the jazz that had made her so happy and returned to her roots,
