He said to her, 'Sylvia, you must learn not to take things so hard. '
She burst out, ‘I can't bear it, Father. I can't endure what I see. Nine-tenths of it is unnecessary.'
‘Yes, yes, yes. But that is how things are. It is. How they are now. They will change, I am sure. Yes, surely they will change. But, Sylvia, I see in you the stuff of martyrs, and that is not good. Would you go to the stake with a smile, Sylvia? Yes, I believe you would. You are burning yourself up. And now I am going to prescribe for you, just as you do for these poor people. You must eat three proper meals a day. You must sleep longer – I see the light under your door at eleven or twelve, or later. And you must take yourself off for a walk every evening into the bush. Or go and visit. You can take my car and see the Pynes. They are good people. '
‘But I don't have anything in common with them. '
‘But, Sylvia, aren't they good enough for you? Did you know they sat the war out in that house – under siege they were. Their house was set on fire over their heads. They are brave people.'
‘But in the wrong cause. '
'Yes, that is so, yes surely it was, but they aren't devils just because the new newspapers say all white farmers are.'
'I'll do my best to be better. I know I get too involved.'
'You and Rebecca – both of you are like little rock rabbits in a drought year. But in her case she has six children and none of them get enough to eat. You don't feed yourself out of some sort of...’
' I've never eaten that much. I don't seem to care about food.'
' A pity we couldn't share out some characteristics between us. I like my food, God forgive me, I do. '
Sylvia's life had become the circuit from her little room to the table in the main room, down to the hospital, then back, around and around. She had scarcely even been in the kitchen, Rebecca's domain, had never entered Father McGuire's room, and knew that Aaron slept somewhere at the back. When the priest was not at the supper table, and Rebecca said he was sick – yes, he often got sick – Sylvia went into his room for the first time. There was a strong smell of fresh and stale sweat, the sour odours of sickness. He was up on his pillows, but sliding sideways, his head loose on his shoulders. He was very still, though his chest heaved. Malaria. This was the quiescent part of the cycle.
Small windows, one cracked, stood open above wet earth, from where came freshness, to compete with the smells. Father McGuire was cold, he was damp, his sweaty nightshirt clung to him, his hair was matted. Hot season or not, he could catch cold. Sylvia called Rebecca and the two women heaved the protesting man to a chair, a grass one, which settled under his weight. Rebecca said, ‘I want to change the bed when Father is sick but he always says No, no, leave me. '
‘Well, I am going to change it. '
The change was accomplished, the patient lay back, and then, while he complained his head ached, Sylvia gave him a blanket bath. Rebecca averted her eyes from the evidence of the Father's manhood and kept muttering that she was sorry. 'I am so so sorry, Father, I am so so sorry. '
A fresh nightshirt. Lemonade. A new cycle began, with the savage shakings and sweats of malaria, while he clenched his teeth and clutched at the iron rails at the top of his bed. The ague, the quartan fever, the tertian fever, the shakes, the rigours, the seizures, the trembles, of the disease that not so long ago had bred in the London marshes, in the Italian marshes, and had been brought home from anywhere in the world where there were swampy places, had not been witnessed by Sylvia until she had come here, though she had read it up on the plane. And now it seemed there was never a day when some wan depleted person did not collapse on the reed mats under the grass roofs and lie shaking.
'Are you taking your pills?' Sylvia shouted – it makes you deaf, malaria does, or the pills do – and Father McGuire said he took them but, since he had the shakes three or four times a year, believed he had gone past the help of pills.
When he had finished with this bout, he was newly soaked, and the bed was changed again. Rebecca showed her weariness as she carried out the sheets. Sylvia asked if there was not a woman in the village who could help with the washing? Rebecca said they were busy. ' Then what about your sisters?’ she said to the sick man. He said, ‘I don't think Rebecca would like that. ' Rebecca was jealous of her position, and did not want to share it. Sylvia had given up trying to understand these complicated rivalries, so now suggested Aaron. The priest attempted a jest, that Aaron was an intellectual now and could not be asked to do such work: he was at the beginning of a study with Father McGuire that would make him a priest.
Would Aaron be too good to go through and around the trees and shrubs to look for mosquito larvae? 'I think you will find he is too good for that. ' 'Then, why not the nuns?' Sylvia refrained from saying that they did not seem to do much, but Father McGuire said they wouldn't know larvae when they saw some. 'Our good sisters are not all that keen on the bush.'
Mosquitoes lay their eggs in any water they can find. The black wrigglers, as energetic in this phase of their lives as they will be when seeking whom they may devour, can be in the furl of an old dried pawpaw leaf, or in a rusted biscuit tin lid hidden under a bush. Yesterday Sylvia had seen the wrigglers in a tiny hollow excavated by a rivulet escaping from a flood, under the arching roots of a maize plant. The sun was sucking up the water as she watched, the wrigglers were doomed, so she did not kill them, but two hours later there was a downpour, and if they had not been washed out on to the earth to die, they were triumphantly completing their cycle.
Father McGuire seemed semi-conscious. She thought that he was worse than he knew – long term; he would get over this attack soon. Because he was ruddy-faced, a certain underlying pallor, even yellowness, was not easily seen. He was anaemic. Malaria does that. He should take iron pills. He should take a holiday. He should...
Outside in the night white shapes swirled in the wind from approaching rain: the big wash Rebecca had done earlier. Sylvia sat by the dozing man, waiting for the next paroxysm, and looked round the room, her attention free.
Brick walls, like hers, the same split-reed ceiling, the brick floor. In a corner a statue of the Virgin. On the walls the Virgin again, conventional representations inspired, if distantly, by the Italian Renaissance, blue and white and with downcast eyes, and surely out of place here in the bush? But wait, on a stool of dark wood, and of the same dark wood, a native Mary, a vigorous young woman, was nursing a baby. That was better. Hanging from a nail on the wall near the bed, where the priest could reach it, was a rosary of ebony.
In the Sixties, the tumults of ideology that afflicted the world had taken a local shape in the Catholic Church, in a bubbling unrest that had attempted to dethrone the Virgin Mary. The Holy Mother was out, and with her went rosaries. Sylvia had not had a Catholic childhood, had never dipped her fingers into the Holy Water stoups, or wound pretty rosaries around them, or crossed herself or swapped Holy cards with other little girls. ('I'll give you three St Jeromes for one Holy Mother.') She had never prayed to the Virgin, only to Jesus. Therefore, when she joined the Church, she did not miss what she had never known, and only slowly, when meeting older priests or nuns or church members, had learned that a revolution had taken place which had left many in mourning, and particularly for the Virgin. (She would be reinstated, decades later.) Meanwhile, in places of the world where eyes vigilant for heresy or backsliding did not reach, priests and nuns kept their rosaries and their Holy Water, their statues and pictures of the Virgin, hoping that no one would notice.