I went onto the verandah, ignoring the warning of a servant that I would be eaten alive by insects. I did not bother to explain that they did not bite me as they did others, but only troubled me with their irritating whine. It was the same with Mama, and I supposed our blood was too cool or strange for them.
I looked up at the black night and the hard diamond shimmer of stars and tried to fathom what had happened. It seemed to me impossible that Mama could be so upset by the sight of a group of velvet folk, for we had seen many of them since our arrival. Was it the fact that they had been unclothed? Those we saw in town wore the cast-off clothes of the clay people, either by choice or because it was forced upon them by rustic prudishness. It was even possible that Mama had not yet seen the wild velvet people, for I saw them most often in the early mornings when I sat upon the verandah. But no, I could not believe my sophisticated Mama would be troubled by their nakedness, for all her belief in the importance of clothes. It was so obviously the correct attire for them, a symbolic acceptance of the relentless sun and heat.
Was it perhaps the neighbour’s remark about the attitude of the velvet people to the possession of land that had scoured Mama? She had a deed to the land upon which our house sat, and for many acres about it, but no, he had spoken as he had after he had seen the look on Mama’s face.
What had she said? Not here at the end of the earth. The words had rung with incredulity, suggesting that she had seen something she did not expect to see. I remembered how she had then clutched wildly at me and vowed to keep me safe, exactly as she had done during the period of nightmares before she had gone on her quest. The queer notion came to me that Mama had brought us to the end of the earth to keep me safe, only to be reminded by the velvet nomads that we had not escaped.
Mama kept to her room for one week and then a second began. On the thirteenth day of her retreat, I turned eleven. I had looked forward to the day because it seemed the first step out of childhood and that much closer to twenty, which Mama had always said was the age at which one truly became a woman. Papa had laughed at this when Mama said it once in his hearing, saying she was mistaken. One legally became a woman at eighteen. I thought the moment of maturity was not so easy to fix. Some girls were women at fifteen and others still immature at one and twenty.
‘Among my people a girl becomes a woman at twenty,’ Mama told him almost coolly, and to my surprise there was pain in her eyes. That flash of pain and her coolness had fixed the memory in my mind.
Sitting on the verandah, waiting for the sun to set on my eleventh birthday, it occurred to me that this memory was the only one I had of Mama speaking of her people – her people, I thought, not her family.
And suddenly she was there beside me, standing on the porch in glowing white like a radiant ghost, her eyes fixed on a stand of silver-trunked trees grouped on what was sometimes, for a brief period, a lawn, the same trees around which the velvet people had looped two weeks before. The trees were native to this country and the only thing about which Mama had expressed unqualified approval, saying there was power in them. It was true, there was something about them that attracted the eye. I was about to rise when I noticed that Mama’s feet were bare. I gaped at her small perfect toes, struck by the realisation that I had never seen her feet naked before. It seemed a sign of something but I did not know what. I stood up and waited for her to speak.
Mama did not look at me, but when she took my hand, hers felt cool instead of feverishly hot as it had been when I had helped her to her room. I saw with tremendous relief that her expression in the dim light of dusk was tranquil. Whatever storm had seized her had blown