This was how it was for her.
Mornings were quiet (shadow quiet) and usually cold. Even in the summer the house did not hold heat well.
She ate two things at breakfast, and he ate five. She toast and grapefruit, he toast, eggs, bacon, sausage, tomatoes. They did not speak, at least not to each other. Instead they spoke around each other, to the kettle or the stove, the plate or the window. It had been this way for some time now.
‘I’ll be home late today.’
‘Careful, the coffee is strong.’
‘My mother is coming for dinner. You will cook the lamb for her.’
‘More wet days like this and the dams will burst.’
And then he left.
She would stay in the kitchen, and with her eyes she would trace the empty patch he left behind each morning. Some mornings it was to her the empty space of a church nave, or a field. Still, so that even her breathing became slow and gentle.
Then she got up. She dressed, she tidied the kitchen and the bedroom. She took the dogs out, over the kopjie behind the house. Even when it rained she took the dogs out. Especially when it rained. There on the kopjie when it rained hard enough she could not see the house or the town or even the mountain on the horizon. She could never see the city beneath the mountain, not in the day. Only at night could she see the smudge of orange. It made her think of a stain on a sheet.
Today it rained hard and she could see nothing, and almost (if she raised her palms up) feel nothing. Only the water.
Back inside the house the clock ticked and the dogs lay down by the stove. Their bodies let off steam as they watched her. She didn’t mind them watching.
Today, she did not brew more coffee as she always did in winter. Nor did she sweep or fetch the meat for dinner. She did not write to her mother or check the postbox for letters or magazines. Instead she walked up to her bedroom and through the side door into the empty room that once had been a study. An almost empty room: a desk, shelves. Boxes. They had gone through the boxes when they had moved in, after his grandmother died. Old photographs, some letters. Most of the people she did not recognise. At the beginning, she had sat staring at them for hours. She did not learn their names but she knew that they had been at this wedding, or that hunting trip, or that they had a pet steenbok when they were six. He never looked at the photographs, had wanted to throw them out.
Today she went into the room and looked at the boxes of photographs but did not open them. She opened the curtains and switched on the light. Rain fell against the window in bursts but she did not listen to it.
One of the boxes was marked MISC in wide permanent letters. She sat on the desk and pulled it off the shelf. It rested on her lap, the corners pressed into her thighs. In it were three bundles of paper, two of which she ignored. She lifted out the third and untied the string. On top was a blank page, and beneath it, printed in tall letters (the kind that made her think of London or Cecil Rhodes, gin and sugarcane), the words:
THE DIARIES OF THOMAS LEASK
HUNTER.
SOUTH AFRICA, 1860 - .
Yesterday, when she had found this, she had let he name play in her mind while she sat with closed eyes. Thomas Leask, Thomas Leask, Thomas Leask. Her Thomas Leask, who at that moment stood behind the counter (or amongst the stacks of wood and the nails, sorting) at the hardware shop in the town, had ignored this pile of papers with his name on it.
Her name too, now.
She looked down.
HUNTER.
What did he hunt? Then (in 1860 - .) there must have been much to hunt. She thought of the springbok she sometimes saw from the kopjie. She imagined thousands of them walking, like termites, covering the land in a flood of tawny pelts and small, inky horns. They would eddy around the house and flow over the hill, fill the streets of the town. They would pass the mountain without slowing up but every now and then one would look up, and would fall, and by the time his companions had passed on he would be ground to dust.
The rain had stopped. The larger of the two dogs walked in. It whined, a low sound, and sat down below her.
Thinking still of the springbok she lifted the page. Beneath it, a place, a date (blurred):
Orkney, Scotland. June 12, 1860.
Today I leave. My ticket is paid in full and the ferry to the mainland leaves in an hour. Here I sit by the docks. My mother and sisters have said their goodbyes—they are headed home now. I cannot think of missing them, not yet
She turned the page over. The dog whined again, but she did not hear it. She carried on reading, page after page (dust collecting on her jeans with each turn). She forgot the dog, the rain.
She forgot that she had not defrosted the lamb for dinner, and that his mother was expected. She forgot that tomorrow was payday, and that he would not come home until the next morning. She forgot the crunch of his boots on the path to the house and the sound he made coming down the stairs each morning. She forgot how that morning he had come down early and she had not been ready, had jerked her hand in fright so that she knocked the frying pan off the stove and had to catch it in her bare palms. (He must not see her drop, waste or break things. He must not see her cry.) She forgot the lines on her skin where the metal had burnt her, how she had noticed them when she put the bacon on his plate. She even forgot that the bacon had been perfect that morning.
A crash at the window jerked her upright, onto her feet. Papers scattered around her, the box hit the dog and it yelped and ran from the room. She pushed her hair from her eyes and looked at the glass.
A bird had flown into the window. Sooty feathers swirled on the sill and a fine pattern of dust lay against the glass (feathers, wings spread, a beak). Her heart was beating fast but she kept her body very still. Hair fell across her face and she left it there. The silence felt to her like china broken and swept up.
A sheet of the manuscript lay on the inside ledge of the window sill, beneath the lines left by the bird. She reached for it. It was the last few lines of a chapter:
and there again I met the hunter, whom I had not seen since he left town some years ago. He would not tell where he has been, only that he rode over the first hills and carried on, and crossed much of the country before finding his way back. He said that he suffered much, and had been always alone, and had learned much from it: he could track anything over land or water, shoot any beast he chose, ride wheresoever he wished.
I must say I envy the man. So today, having packed, I will leave.
She looked at the window. Through the smudge of the bird she saw the veld and beyond it the blue of the stormclouds. She thought of the bus that went north every morning, towards those clouds.
The next morning, after breakfast, she began to pack. By the time he came home on Saturday (eyes red and feet clumsy) she was gone. On the kitchen table lay a single piece of paper.
I must say I envy the man.
