at the house of the Johannesburg relatives with whom the Cunninghams were staying. ‘Oh, I’d better go. I suppose it must be Margie; I wonder what she’s gone and done to herself now, the little devil.’
Johnny sat down again. ‘Please yourself.’ And she got up and made her way up the stand. As soon as she got to the entrance she saw her sister Ruth’s car drawn up right at the gates where no one was allowed to park, and before she had seen her sister and her brother-in-law standing there, turned towards her, a throb of dread beat up once, in her throat.
‘What happened? Did she run in the street—’ she cried, rushing up to them. The man and the woman stared at her as if they were afraid of her.
‘Not Margie,’ said the man. ‘It’s not Margie. Come into the car.’
And in the car, outside the cricket ground, still within sound of the plock of the ball and the voice of the crowd rising to it, they told her that a telegram had come saying that Arthur had been drowned that morning, bringing a boatload of goods over the flooded river.
She did not cry until she got all the way back to the hotel on the bank of the river. She left the children behind, with her sister (the two elder girls went to boarding school in Johannesburg, anyway), and Johnny Cunningham drove her home.
Once, in the middle of a silence as vast as the waste of sand they were grinding through, she said, ‘Who would ever have dreamt it would happen to him. The things he’d done in his time, and never come to any harm.’
‘Don’t tell me,’ Johnny agreed, his pipe between his teeth.
In Johannesburg they had all said to one another, ‘It’ll hit her when she gets back.’ But although she had believed the fact of her husband’s death when she was away from the village, in the unreality of the city – once she saw and smelled the village again, once she stepped into the hotel, it all seemed nonsense. Nothing was changed. It was all there, wasn’t it? The wildebeest skins pegged out to tan, the old horns half buried in the sand, the plaster Johnny Walker on the counter in the bar; the river.
Two days later one of the store boys came over to the hotel with some cheques for her to sign, and, standing in the office doorway with his old hat in his hand, said to her in a hoarse low voice, as if he wanted no one, not even the dead, to overhear, ‘He was a good man. Missus, he was a very good man. Oh, missus.’
She cried. While she wrote her name on the cheques and silently handed them back to the elderly black man, it came: strong pity for Arthur, who had been alive, as she was, and was now dead. When she was alone again she sat on at the desk staring at the spikes of invoices and the rubber stamps and the scratched and ink-stained wood, and she wept in pity for the pain of that strong, weathered man, filling his lungs with water with every breath under the weight of the iron bedstead. She wept at the cruel fact of death; perhaps that was not quite what her relatives in Johannesburg had meant when they had said that it would hit her when she got home – but she wept, anyway.
Slowly, in short bursts of confidence that stopped abruptly or tailed off in embarrassment, people began to talk to her about the drowning. This one spared her this detail, another told her it and spared her something else; so it was that she had put together, out of what she had been told, that silent, unreal, orderly picture, scarcely supplemented at all by imagination, since she had very little, that she sometimes saw rise on the river and sink out of sight again.
The facts were simple and horrible. Arthur Cunningham had been doing what he had done dozens of times before; what everyone in the village had done time and again, whenever the river was flooded and the bridge was down. The bridge was either down or under water almost every year, at the height of the rainy season, and when this happened the only way to reach the village was by boat. That December day there was a pack of stuff to get across the river – all the food for the hotel