The Shouting in the Dark by Elleke Boehmer Page B

painting, pressing her front to its breast, speaking into its face. ‘They had their big plans.’ She coughs, swallows, presses on. ‘After the war, it was thought, places like this, South Africa, Australia, remote places, they offered opportunities to Dutch people down on their luck, reduced by all that had happened. The Far East by then was no more. They couldn’t go there. And your father knew about Africa. His Singapore shipping company had seconded him out to Dar es Salaam, then Durban. He knew it was green and prosperous here. It wasn’t a bad idea of Ella’s to establish a trading store somewhere in the Lowveld where lush gardens can be coaxed out of the bush. Ella, your Tante Ella, she loved peonies and magnolia and such like, flowers that grow well in humid places . . .’ She pauses. ‘Her skin was the colour of creamy-white peonies,’ she adds, ‘ Peon-rozen . The painter captured it almost exactly. He painted the portrait around the time she met your father.’
    Ella has stopped listening. Tante Ella ? It was then that she stopped. The more the mother talks, the more distant the lady in the portrait becomes. Her aunt, her father’s wife , second wife, the wife after the Englishwoman – she doesn’t want to hear more. It sounds a scandal, this story. She wants to walk away from it. She herself, named for Mam’s sister Ella, looking like her – like some version of her returned from the dead? Mad. As for the business about her father setting up a home in the African bush, selling blankets and buckets in a place far from proper roads or a library with books by Winston Churchill – it’s crazy. The father says he hates Africa in his gut .
    â€˜I couldn’t bear it if the painting began to crumble.’ The mother scrubs at her glistening cheeks. ‘What would I do without it? Here in the half-light I like to sit and imagine her alive, what she could be telling me. She was always ordering me about, her baby sister, telling me what to do. God knows I needed it. Still do. But I never imagine her reproachful, when, after all, we’re alive and she’s a portrait. See, he wanted someone after his loss, Ella, and not just anyone. Loving her as I did, I was happy to stand in. How could I have known it would be like this, a lifelong walk in her shadow?’
    Ella goes over to the window and looks out. Squinting at the stars through her lashes, she merges the Milky Way into a shimmering scarf of light. ‘What happened to the trading store plan?’ she says. ‘Did it get off the ground?’
    â€˜â€™Course not.’ The mother dabs a finger to the portrait’s face, as if it, too, were weeping. ‘They had no capital, knew nothing about trading. They rented something for a week, perhaps, who knows – then they backed out. There were too many natives in the bush, natives without pay packets. Durban’s good life sidetracked them, I imagine, the bridge clubs, the golf club. Ella got ill . . . Hodgkin’s, the cancer was called. She had to be sent home to Europe for treatment.’
    The mother walks over to the piano. Her eyes move silently over the music on the stand, Chopin’s Nocturnes . She lays her hands on the white keys without depressing them. Here in Braemar, miles from Durban’s City Hall, she often says, unless she plays her beloved music herself, she doesn’t get to hear it. Ella makes her way to the door but her mother doesn’t look round.
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    Ella’s wakefulness begins to come unprompted. Before the conversation beneath the portrait, she went to bed when her father’s vigils ended. Sometimes she slept. Sometimes she heard her mother pace. Now, she’s mainly just awake. She tries to make no movement but still tiny sounds escape her. Her hair rasps on the pillow. Her book thumps across a fold in the sheets. At once the door cracks open, and her heart