and tending her cattle in company with her
coloured labourers. It was only at odd moments or during the heat of
the day that she painted, and all the money she made with paint was
swallowed up by the farm, which did not pay, but which was the very
core of her heart.

Impossible for April to be in such company and not work too, even if
her thoughts had not demanded occupation. So, first she mended the
clothes of everybody, including Meekie's ragged piccanins; then she
went to the Paarl, bought a pot of green paint, and spent days of sheer
forgetfulness smartening up the rusty paraffin tins and barrels, and
all the bleared and blistered shutters and doors and sills of the farm,
that had not known paint for many years.

At mid-day they bathed in a tree-shaded pool that had formed in the bed
of a stream running across the farm. They had no bathing frocks but
their skins, and sometimes Clive, sitting stark on the bank, palette in
hand, painted the others as they tumbled in the dark brown water,
sporting and splashing like a lot of schoolboys. Afterwards they would
mooch home through the shimmering noontide heat, deliciously tired,
wrapped in reflection and their towels. Ghostie provided a perpetual
jest by wearing a smart Paris hat with a high cerise crown. She said
it had once belonged to the fastest woman in South Africa, who had
given it to her as a joke, but she did not mention the lady's name, nor
say in what her "fastness" consisted. This was characteristic of
visitors at Ho-la-le-la: they sometimes stated facts, but never talked
scandal. When April asked them to call her by her own name, instead of
"Diana," they did so without comment, accepting her as one of
themselves, and asking no questions about England, the voyage, or the
Cape. The scandalous tragedy of the April Fool had never reached them,
and if it had they would have taken little interest except to be sorry
for the girl.

In the evenings when work was put away Clive played to them on the
'cello.

"I was determined to have music in my life," she told April. "And as
you can't lug a piano and musician all over the shop with you, I saw no
way of getting it but to darn well teach myself."

And very well she had done it, though why she had chosen a 'cello,
which also needed some lugging, no one knew but herself. Sitting with
it between her heavy boots and breeched legs, the eternal cigarette
drooping from her mouth, she looked more than ever like