1999 - Ladysmith by Giles Foden Page A

things he cared about in the world, she believed, were his daughters and his hotel. Now all three were in jeopardy.
    He turned round. “You go on back. I’m going to the Commissariat to see what I can squeeze out of them. Perhaps you might clean up the stoep this morning. I notice it has become very dusty.”
    It was a strange way of referring to the near miss that had thrown a shower of debris on to the porch of the Royal on the first day of shelling. Bella had already swept most of it away, but there was still a fine coating of red dust all across the wooden boards.
    “Very well,” she said.
    She watched him try to cross the road, waiting for a gap to appear in the khaki and brown thicket of horse and man that filled the street.
    Back at the hotel, Bella took out a mop and bucket and set to work, dragging the little tails of the mop across the wood and then curling them up in the bucket drainer. Lifted out, the mop head would hold its moulded shape for a second, and then collapse again into a hundred dull grey strings.
    “The mountains look pretty, don’t they, Miss Kiernan?”
    She had been so absorbed that she didn’t think the voice was addressing her.
    “Don’t you think?”
    She looked up, surprised, to see Tom Barnes on his horse.
    “I was saying,” he called down, “that you have a nice view from here.” He gestured out above the town, towards Bulwan and the other hills, stretching green and blue into the bright, mid-morning sky.
    “Why, yes ., .” She stopped mopping and leant against the mop handle. The soldier’s horse stamped and moved to one side, uneasy at having to wait while the rest of the squadron passed by.
    “Shame them Boer guns are up there, or I’d take the liberty of asking you for a hill walk one afternoon.”
    Bella blushed and pulled the mop handle into her chest.
    “I suppose it is a shame,” she said, trying to compose herself in view of the massed eyes of the body of men, as they moved behind the soldier.
    “I would say so,” he said, and smiled. “Perhaps I might come by some time, and my friend Foster too, to see you and your sister.”
    “Perhaps you might,” she replied, a little bolder.
    His mates were laughing at him now, and when he raised his helmet in farewell, several others did the same in mockery. Bella blushed again, lifted four fingers from the mop handle to offer a modest wave, and then stood back to watch the rest of the column pass by. As she watched, her eyes slowly focused on something else beyond them: the stout figure of her father approaching from the other side of the street. He came up the steps and stared at her hard as he went through into the bar.
    The afternoon brought shelling—already it had become a matter of course—and, once the bar had closed, the night found Bella sitting in the parlour mending a blouse. She could hear the clatter of bottles and crates from next door as her father cleared up.
    Later he came in, and sat down next to her.
    “It frightening you, Bel, this shelling?”
    She looked up, surprised. He rarely addressed her with this pet name, which was one mainly used by Jane.
    “Not so much, Father.”
    “Don’t let the soldiers talk coarsely to you.”
    “I won’t, Father.”
    “Good girl.”
    He got up and made his way to the door. Reaching it, he paused with his hand upon the knob. Her eyes took in his thickset body and clothes—his laced-up heavy boots, his legs in brown corduroy, the auburn hairs on his strong forearms (his shirt-sleeves were rolled up), and the way his head, with its close-cropped red hair, sat low, like a ball of lichen-covered stone, upon his broad shoulders.
    “Sleep tight,” he said, without turning round.
    Her father passed through the doorway then, and she heard his feet upon the stairs, and was happy. For there was a bond between them, after all. The thought ran through her head that she should run after him and throw her arms around him on the landing, but she felt as if she had been