refer to tavernas, places you eat, as though the Greek letters should just be read right off as sort of English, so I called them ‘tabepnas.’ I had to stop. Not amusing after all. Well. But every time we would see two women traveling together—this was Crete—he would say, ‘Well, well, they must be on their way to Lesbos, where it all began.’ And I said nothing—not once. Then the fortresses, or ‘fortetsas.’ They are on headlands, very high, walled about, beautiful, overlooking the blue sea. There were sieges lasting generations. Cooped in, but they could look at the Aegean. So beautiful. But I was saying: On the top, there are date palms, old gardens still growing, graves, mosques. All these different conquerors left different artifacts, you see, and I just wanted to wander at will. But Gareth had it that straight off we must walk all round the perimeter to get a ‘sense,’ as he said, and only then could one wander at will. So it was.
Placet
. Drive gently, Gareth, we are tipping.”
“I adore Cape Town,” Tess said. “Botswana is so dry.”
“But Greece! We could organize it, Tess, and it is so much the reverse of life at the mine. I mean, the mine is all right. And Cape Town—All right, you go down there, I accept that it’s beautiful, but it’s far from one hundred per cent the reverse of the mine. I mean, everywhere in South Africa the whites are on compounds, too, but armed and that. One wants something totally unlike—not South Africa!”
“Greece sounds lovely. Would you take the new baby?”
“I forgot.”
Gareth said sharply to the women that someone should please hand the water bottle forward to Tom. It was done.
Nan said to Tess, “Truly, one comes to dislike the medical profession. Now I must deal with them again. Coming back here to Botswana from holiday, it was so strange and nice. We were in the plane, coming low over the land. I was happy to see Botswana again. It was so strange, Tess—the country seemed like a poor relation, someone nice who refuses gifts at first, someone you like. This country is so poor. We were flying low over it. And then all I could think of was our friend the peerless Dr. Hartogs, who said that from the air the country looks as if it has ringworm. He was saying that the brush fencing round the family rondavels and kraals looks like that. It spoiled it.”
“We love the sea,” Tess said. “Give us four days and we make straight for Durban. Durban isn’t nice, but it has the sea to put your feet in.”
“You’ll be singing a different tune about Hartogs when your day comes,” Gareth said over his shoulder.
Tess said, “Nowadays whenever I am on paved road I never take it for granted. Even in U.K. I
enjoy
it, just the being on it. Even here, when you get to the paved roads, bad as they are, I just say thank God to myself. I hate these spoors. And why do they call these tire ruts spoors, does anyone know?”
Tom said, “We put in the roads and they don’t maintain them, do they? They think a road is a thing like your fingernail—chip it and it grows back. Well, they’re wrong, aren’t they?”
Gareth slowed. They were approaching a narrow concrete-slab bridge over a gully. There was no more than a yardof clearance on either side of the vehicle. The stream-bed beneath the slab was baked sand pocked with hoofmarks. They crossed safely. The bushes beside the road were plated with red dust.
They passed a small settlement and the men began to laugh. An imposing thorn tree overhanging a shed at the roadside was clotted with paper refuse—streamers of toilet tissue caught in the spines.
Nan said, “It’s unfair. We bring in all these metal and plastic things and bottles that don’t decay. In the old times, they could leave anything about and it was organic—it would decay or be eaten. Even as it is, the goats eat a lot of the plastic. Look at the courtyards, Tess. They are as neat as you like. They sweep them morning and