Hannah uncrossed her legs and stretched them out on the kitchen floor. She met his gaze. ‘I’m sorry I caused trouble, Alistair. Kathryn warned me and I just barged ahead anyway. I was so convinced the De Jagers hold the key to unlock Rachel’s story.’
He stayed where he was, looking too wrung out to react as he had earlier. ‘Why are you so determined to keep going? Did you come to Leliehoek for this?’
Hannah sighed. ‘I really didn’t. I ran away from my life. Came here on a complete whim and the minute I drove out of Cape Town, I felt a weight lifting off me. All the expectations of my parents and my supervisor and…’ She was about to mention Todd but changed her mind, not wanting to bring him into the room. ‘It all lifted. I was on my own with my destiny in my own hands for the first time.’ She smiled. ‘That sounds so clichéd.’ She looked down at her hands. ‘When I found Rachel’s journal, an excitement lit in me. I haven’t felt that in years.’ Pausing, she tilted her head before saying, ‘Actually, I can’t remember ever feeling it.’
‘How is that possible?’ he asked.
‘How is what possible?’
‘That you, of all people, haven’t been passionate about anything?’
Hannah shrugged. ‘People in my life have always made decisions for me and I went with the flow. I followed the academic path my parents had chosen for themselves. I got involved with someone before I had even figured out who I was for myself. Instead, I became what he wanted.’ She smiled at him. ‘So all this… passion… is new.’
‘As much as it irritates me, it suits you.’
Hannah pushed herself up off the floor and crossed to him, offering him a hand up. ‘I’ll remind you next time you get angry with me.’
Taking her hand, his eyes serious, he said, ‘Can we be friends, Hannah?’
She smiled up at him, liking that her hand felt small in his, liking it perhaps too much. ‘We can try. But you must know first that Rachel has her hooks in me and I won’t give her up.’
He dropped her hand, shoving his fingers into the back pockets of his jeans. ‘What will you do if you discover that this camp really did exist?’
Hannah leant back against the counter. ‘I don’t know. I haven’t actually thought that far. I suppose we’d have to get some experts in.’
His face darkened immediately. ‘No people on the farm. I don’t want cars and strangers. No.’
Hannah took a step towards him and put a hand on his arm. ‘What if we keep it really quiet? No fanfare. Just an historian?’
‘We don’t,’ he amended it quickly, ‘you don’t even know if the journal is true. You prove that Rachel was a real person and then I’ll think about it.’
Hannah felt the immediate conflict. She had gained ground with him; he was going to consider the possibility. But what if she couldn’t prove that Rachel was real? She had found nothing so far. More than a little dismayed, she nodded.
CHAPTER TWELVE
By the time Hannah arrived home, it was dark outside. She drew the curtains and then stopped in the passage, hovering over the phone. Should she call the De Jagers or not? Putting Alistair’s and Kathryn’s warnings aside, she pulled a sticky note from her pocket and dialled the farm number, holding her breath while the phone rang. Please let it be Karl. Please let it be Karl.
‘Yes?’ Esme’s tight voice cracked across the line and Hannah’s heart sank.
‘Hello, Mrs De Jager. I’m phoning to apologise for upsetting you this afternoon. I was out of line, I’m sorry.’ The silence on the other end unnerved her and she blurted out, ‘It’s Hannah Harrison, from the bookshop?’
Esme’s voice, though muffled to a whisper, spat bitterly, ‘I saw you go to Goshen today. You’re hunting my daughter’s husband, aren’t you? You move quickly, bitch—’
Hannah slammed down the phone. Her chest tight with shock, she pressed trembling hands into her solar plexus, trying to breathe.
Her evening was restless after that. She couldn’t settle to anything. When she realised she had been staring at the computer screen for half an hour without registering a thing, she eventually gave up on the movie she had started. Changing into her pyjamas, she crawled into bed, picking up Rachel’s journal and opening it to where she had left off a week previously.
I write to take my mind off this place, as if I can write a different world into being. I wish I could. I would write away this camp, this war. All the hatred and misery and death. I want things which I do not know if I will ever have again. My family. I do not want to just be with them; I want to be on the farm. I want all the things of the past. The talking, the laughing, the playing, the singing. Ma always said, ‘I want does not get.’ I don’t care any more about manners – I want it all. I always thought war bred heroes, but it doesn’t. It breeds selfishness. I am the best example.
At its harshest, it strips life of normality. I watch the soldiers stationed at this camp. I’m sure at home they are normal people with mothers and sisters and grandmothers. They must do normal things like kiss their children goodnight. Like go to church and sing hymns with their wives. Here, they are strapped into uniforms and helmets. They look at us like we are a species foreign to them.
Even the medical officer, when he comes, does not like to touch us. He snaps at the mothers, telling them if they keep their children clean and feed them properly, they won’t get sick. Like it is our choice to be dirty. Like it is our choice to starve. He tells them to stop using the old medicines their mothers taught them, and their mothers before them. But there is never enough British medicine, just stories about supplies and rations. What do they expect us to do? He says blame the commandos for blowing up the railways. But did the Boers start this war? Did the commandos burn our homes and herd us off the land into these places?
Hannah awoke in the middle of the night, unsettled, as thoughts and emotions gathered and shifted around her. She knew her brain was trying to process the day, but that clean, rational explanation didn’t lighten her mind’s stumbling from one thing to another. Her bedside light glowed next to her, throwing shadows onto the walls. She had always hated this time. This weird, lost time, when everyone else was asleep and she lay alone. Todd had teased her – made fun of having to close the cupboard doors on the black caverns they became in the night. As a little girl, she had been stranded in her bed. The terror wouldn’t allow her body to leave the safety of the sheets. So she had to lie there, paralysed by gut-twisting fear. Reading had been the only way through it. Now she reached for the journal again.
It is so cold. Our rough shelters do little to ward off the wind. I think of you all the time, Wolf. Where are you? I hear stories about the prisoners of war. That the British are sending burghers to far-flung places, to Bermuda and Ceylon. To India? Is this true? Are you still here? I would rather think of you hunched against the wind in the lee of a rock than setting sail for a place from which you might never return.
How I long for the house with its thick stone walls. We lay in our beds listening to the wind raging around the house, loving the sound because inside we were warm and safe. Our home has been lost, Wolf. There is no thatch house, no stable, no horses, no fields. Even if we all could meet back there again, so much has gone.
I am changed too. Not lost yet, but almost.
Hannah must have fallen asleep for a few hours because she awoke as the light began to creep under the heavy curtains of her room. Her head thumped, her tongue thick with a metallic taste. She kicked the wretched iron doorstop on her way to the kitchen for a glass of water. That thing has to go, she promised herself.