Читать книгу The Grass is Singing - Doris Lessing - Страница 12

With her own saved money Mary bought flowered materials, and covered cushions and made curtains; bought a little linen, crockery, and some dress lengths. The house gradually lost its air of bleak poverty, and put on an inexpensive prettiness, with bright hangings and some pictures. Mary worked hard, and looked for Dick’s look of approval and surprise when he came back from work and noted every new change. A month after she had arrived she walked through the house, and saw there was nothing more to be done. Besides, there was no more money.

She had settled easily into the new rhythm. She found the change so embracing that it was as if she were an entirely new person. Every morning she woke with the clanging of the plough disc, and drank tea in bed with Dick. When he had gone down on the lands she put out groceries for the day. She was so conscientious that Samson found things had worsened rather than improved: even his understood one-third allowance had gone, and she wore the store keys tied to her belt. By breakfast time what work she had to do in the house was finished except for light cooking; but Samson was a better cook than she, and after a while she left it to him. She sewed all morning, till lunchtime; sewed after lunch, and went to bed immediately after supper, sleeping like a child all night.

In the first flush of energy and determination she really enjoyed the life, putting things to rights and making a little go a long way. She liked, particularly, the early mornings before the heat numbed and tired her; liked the new leisure; liked Dick’s approval. For his pride and affectionate gratitude for what she was doing (he would never have believed that his forlorn house could look like this) overshadowed his patient disappointment. When she saw that puzzled hurt look on his face, she pushed away the thought of what he must be suffering, for it made him repulsive to her again.

Then, having done all she could to the house, she began on dress materials, finishing an inexpensive trousseau. A few months after her marriage she found there was nothing more to do. Suddenly, from one day to the next, she found herself unoccupied. Instinctively staving off idleness as something dangerous, she returned to her underwear, and embroidered everything that could possibly be embroidered. There she sat all day, sewing and stitching, hour after hour, as if fine embroidery would save her life. She was a good needle-woman, and the results were admirable. Dick praised her work and was amazed, for he had expected a difficult period while she was settling down, thinking she would take the lonely life hard at first. But she showed no signs of being lonely, she seemed perfectly satisfied to sew all day. And all this time he treated her like a brother, for he was a sensitive man, and was waiting for her to turn to him of her own accord. The relief she was unable to hide that his endearments were no more than affectionate, hurt him deeply, but he still thought: It will come right in the end.

There came an end to embroidery; again she was left empty-handed. Again she looked about for something to do. The walls, she decided, were filthy. She would whitewash them all herself, to save money. So, for two weeks, Dick came back to the house to find furniture stacked in the middle of rooms and pails of thick white stuff standing on the floor. But she was very methodical. One room was finished before another was begun; and while he admired her for her capability and self-assurance, undertaking this work she had no experience or knowledge of, he was alarmed too. What was she going to do with all this energy and efficiency? It undermined his own self-assurance even further, seeing her like this, for he knew, deep down, that this quality was one he lacked. Soon, the walls were dazzling blue-white, every inch of them painted by Mary herself, standing on a rough ladder for days at a time.

And now she found she was tired. She found it pleasant to let go a little, and to spend her time sitting with her hands folded, on the big sofa. But not for long. She was restless, so restless she did not know what to do with herself. She unpacked the novels she had brought with her, and turned them over. These were the books she had collected over years from the mass that had come her way. She had read each one a dozen times, knowing it by heart, following the familiar tales as a child listens to his mother telling him a well-known fairy tale. It had been a drug, a soporific, in the past, reading them; now, as she turned them over listlessly, she wondered why they had lost their flavour. Her mind wandered as she determinedly turned the pages; and she realized, after she had been reading for perhaps an hour, that she had not taken in a word. She threw the book aside and tried another, but with the same result. For a few days the house was littered with books in faded dust covers. Dick was pleased: it flattered him to think he had married a woman who read books. One evening he picked up a book called The Fair Lady, and opened it in the middle.

‘…The trekkers trekked North, towards the Land of Promise where never the cold grasping hand of the hated British could reach them. Like a cold snake through the hot landscape the column coiled. Prunella Van Koetzie skirmished lightly on her horse on the perimeter of the column, wearing a white kappie over her dainty sweat pearled face and close clustering ringlets. Piet Van Friesland watched her, his heart throbbing in time to the great blood-stained heart of South Africa itself. Could he win her, the sweet Prunella, who bore herself like a queen among these burghers and mynheers and buxom fraus in their docks and veldschoens? Could he? He stared and stared. Tant’ Anna, putting out the koekies and the biltong for the midday meal, in a red doek the colour of the kaffir-boom trees, shook her fat sides in laughter and said to herself, “That will be a match yet.”’

He put it down, and looked across at Mary, who was sitting with a book in her lap, staring up at the roof.

‘Can’t we have ceilings, Dick?’ she asked fretfully.

‘It would cost so much,’ he said doubtfully. ‘Perhaps next year, if we do well.’

In a few days Mary gathered up the books and put them away; they were not what she wanted. She took up the handbook on kitchen kaffir again, and spent all her time on it, practising on Samson in the kitchen, disconcerting him with her ungood-humoured criticisms, but behaving with a cold-dispassionate justice.

Samson became more and more unhappy. He had been so used to Dick, and they understood each other very well. Dick swore at him often, but laughed with him afterwards. This woman never laughed. She put out, carefully, so much meal, and so much sugar; and watched the left-overs from their own food with an extraordinary, humiliating capacity for remembering every cold potato and every piece of bread, asking for them if they were missing.

Shaken out of his comparatively comfortable existence, he grew sulky. There were several rows in the kitchen, and once Dick found Mary in tears. She knew there had been enough raisins put out for the pudding, but when they came to eat it, there were hardly any. And the boy denied stealing them

‘Good heavens,’ said Dick, amused, ‘I thought there was something really wrong.’

‘But I know he took them,’ sobbed Mary.

‘He probably did, but he’s a good old swine on the whole.’

‘I am going to take it out of his wages.’

Dick, puzzled at her emotional state, said: ‘If you think it is really necessary.’ He reflected that this was the first time he had seen her cry.

So Samson, who earned a pound a month, was docked two shillings. He accepted the information with a shut sullen face, saying nothing to her, but appealing to Dick, who told him that he was to take orders from Mary. Samson gave notice that evening, on the grounds that he was needed in his kraal. Mary began to question him closely as to why he was needed; but Dick touched her arm warningly and shook his head.

‘Why shouldn’t I ask him?’ she demanded. ‘He’s lying, isn’t he?’

‘Of course he’s lying,’ said Dick irritably. ‘Of course. That is not the point. You can’t keep him against his will.’

‘Why should I accept a lie?’ said Mary. ‘Why should I? Why can’t he say straight out that he doesn’t like working for me, instead of lying about his kraal?’

Dick shrugged, looking at her with impatience; he could not understand her unreasonable insistence: he knew how to get on with natives; dealing with them was a sometimes amusing, sometimes annoying game in which both sides followed certain unwritten rules.

‘You would be angry if he did say so,’ he remarked ruefully, but with affection still; he could not take her seriously, she seemed to him a child when she behaved like this. And he was genuinely grieved that this old native, who had worked for him all these years, was going now. ‘Well,’ he said at last, philosophically, ‘I should have expected it. I should have got a new boy right from the beginning. There’s always trouble with a change of management.’

Mary watched the farewell scene, that took place on the back steps, from the doorway. She was filled with wonder, and even repulsion. Dick was really sorry to see the end of this nigger! She could not understand any white person feeling anything personal about a native; it made Dick seem really horrible to her. She heard him say, ‘When your work in the kraal is finished, you will come back and work for us again?’ The native answered, ‘Yes, baas,’ but he was already turned to go; and Dick came back into the house silent and glum. ‘He won’t come back,’ he said.

‘There are plenty of other munts, aren’t there?’ she asked snappily, disliking him.

‘Yes,’ he assented, ‘oh yes.’

It was several days before a new cook offered himself for work, and Mary did the house herself. She found it unexpectedly heavy, although there was not, really, so much to do. Yet she liked the feeling of being alone there all day, responsible for it. She scrubbed and swept and polished; housework was quite a new thing to her; all her life natives had done the work for her, as silently and as unobtrusively as fairies. Because it was new, she really enjoyed it. But when everything was clean and polished, and the pantry was full of food, she used to sit on the old greasy sofa in the front room, suddenly collapsing on it as if her legs had been drained of strength. It was so hot! She had never imagined it could be so hot. The sweat poured off her all day; she could feel it running down her ribs and thighs under her dress, as if ants were crawling over her. She used to sit quite, quite still, her eyes closed, and feel the heat beating down from the iron over her head. Really, it was so bad she should wear a hat even in the house. If Dick had ever really lived in this house, she thought, instead of being down on the lands all day, he would have put in ceilings. Surely they did not cost so much? As the days passed, she found herself thinking fretfully that she had been foolish to spend her little store of money on curtains rather than on ceilings. If she asked Dick again, and explained to him what it meant to her, perhaps he would relent and find the money? But she knew she could not easily ask, and bring that heavy tormented look on his face. For by now she had become used to that look. Though really, she liked it: deep down, she liked it very much. When he took her hand endearingly, and kissed it submissively, and said pleadingly, ‘Darling, do you hate me for bringing you here?’ she replied, ‘No, dear, you know I don’t.’ It was the only time she could bring herself to use endearments to him, when she was feeling victorious and forgiving. His craving for forgiveness, and his abasement before her was the greatest satisfaction she knew, although she despised him for it.

So she used to sit on that sofa, her eyes shut, suffering because of the heat, and feeling at the same time tenderly sorrowful and queenly…because of her willingness to suffer.

And then, suddenly, the heat became intolerable. Outside in the bush the cicadas shrilled incessantly, and her head ached; her limbs were heavy and tense. She would get up and go into the bedroom, and examine her clothes, to see if there was nothing she could do: no bit of embroidery, or an alteration. She looked through Dick’s things for darning and mending; but he wore nothing but shirts and shorts, and if she sometimes found a button off she was lucky. With nothing to do, she would wander on to the verandah, to sit watching the lights change on the distant blue kopjes; or she would go to the back of the house where the little kopje stood, a rough heap of giant boulders, and watch the heat-waves beat up out of the hot stone, where the heat-lizards, vivid red and blue and emerald, darted over the rocks like flames. Until at last her head began to swim, and she had to go back to the house to get a glass of water.

Then came a native to the back door, asking for work. He wanted seventeen shillings a month. She beat him down by two, feeling pleased with herself because of her victory over him. He was a native straight from his kraal, a youth, probably not out of his ’teens, thin with the long, long walk through the bush from his home in Nyasaland, hundreds of miles away. He was unable to understand her, and very nervous. He carried himself stiffly, his shoulders rigid, in a hunched attentive attitude, never taking his eyes off her, afraid to miss her slightest look. She was irritated by this subservience and her voice was hard. She showed him all over the house, corner by corner, cupboard by cupboard, explaining to him how things should be done in her by now fluent kitchen kaffir. He followed her like a scared dog. He had never seen forks and knives and plates before, though he had heard legends of these extraordinary objects from friends returning from service in the white men’s houses. He did not know what to do with them; and she expected him to know the difference between a pudding plate and a dinner plate. She stood over him while he laid the table; and all the afternoon she kept him at it, explaining, exhorting and spurring him on. That night, at supper, he laid the table badly, and she flew at him, in a frenzy of annoyance, while Dick sat and watched her uneasily. When the native had gone out, he said: ‘You have to take things easy, you know, with a new boy.’

‘But I told him! If I have told him once I have told him fifty times!’

‘But this is probably the first time he has ever been in a white man’s house!’

‘I don’t care. I told him what to do. Why doesn’t he do it?’

He looked at her attentively, his forehead contracted, his lips tight. She seemed possessed by irritation, not herself at all.

‘Mary, listen to me for a moment. If you get yourself into a state over your boys, then you are finished. You will have to let go your standards a little. You must go easy.’

‘I won’t let go my standards. I won’t! Why should I? It’s bad enough…’ She stopped herself. She had been going to say. ‘It is bad enough living in a pigsty like this…’

He sensed that was what she had been going to say, and he dropped his head and stared at his plate. But this time he did not appeal to her. He was angry; he did not feel submissive and in the wrong; and when she went on : ‘I told him how to lay this table,’ speaking in a hot, blind, tired voice, he got up from the meal and went outside; and she could see the spurt of a match and the rapid glowing of a cigarette. So! He was annoyed, was he? So annoyed that he broke his rule about never smoking until after dinner! Well, let him be annoyed.

The next day at lunch, the servant dropped a plate through nervousness, and she dismissed him at once. Again she had to do her own work, and this time she felt aggrieved, hating it, and blaming it on the offending native whom she had sacked without payment. She cleaned and polished tables and chairs and plates, as if she were scrubbing skin off a black face. She was consumed with hatred. At the same time, she was making a secret resolution not to be quite so pernickety with the next servant she found.

The next boy was quite different. He had had years of experience working for white women who treated him as if he were a machine; and he had learned to present a blank, neutral surface, and to answer in a soft neutral voice. He replied gently, to everything she said, ‘Yes, missus; yes, missus,’ not looking at her. It made her angry that he would never meet her eyes. She did not know it was part of the native code of politeness not to look a superior in the face; she thought it was merely further evidence of their shifty and dishonest nature. It was simply as if he were not really there, only a black body ready to do her bidding. And that enraged her too. She felt she would like to pick up a plate and throw it in his face so as to make it human and expressive, even with pain. But she was icily correct this time; and though she never for a moment took her eye off him, and followed him round after the work was finished, calling him back for every speck of dust or smear of grease, she was careful not to go too far. This boy she would keep: so she said to herself. But she never relaxed her will; her will that he would do as she said, as she wanted, in every tiny thing.

Dick saw all this with increasing foreboding. What was the matter with her? With him she seemed at ease, quiet, almost maternal. With the natives she was a virago. He asked her – in order to get her away from the house – to come down on the lands with him to see how he worked. He felt that if she could be really close to him in his problems and worries, they would be drawn closer together. Besides, it was lonely for him, all those hours and hours of walking, walking round the lands by himself, watching the labourers work.

She assented, rather dubiously, for she did not really want to go. When she thought of him down there in the heat mirage close to the heavy steaming red soil, beside the reeking bodies of the working natives, it was as if she thought of a man in a submarine, someone who voluntarily descended into a strange and alien world. But she fetched her hat and dutifully accompanied him in the car.

For the whole of one morning she followed him around, from field to field, from one gang of boys to the next; and all the time, at the back of her mind, was the thought that the new servant was alone in the house and probably getting up to all sorts of mischief. He was certainly stealing while her back was turned: he might be handling her clothes, looking through her personal things! While Dick was patiently explaining about soils and drains and native wages, she was thinking with half her mind about that native alone with her things. When she got back at lunchtime the first thing she did was to go round the house, looking for what he had left undone, and examining her drawers, which looked untouched. But then, one never knew – they were such cunning swine! Next day, when Dick asked her if she would come again, she said nervously, ‘No, Dick, if you don’t mind. It is so hot down there. You are used to it.’ And really it seemed to her that she could not stand another morning with the hot sun on her neck, with the dazzle of heat in her eyes, although she felt sick with the heat when she stayed in the house. But then, she had something to do in the house, supervising that native.

As time passed, the heat became an obsession. She could not bear the sapping, undermining waves that beat down from the iron roof. Even the usually active dogs used to lie all day on the verandah, moving from place to place as the bricks grew warm under them, their tongues lolling wetly, so that the floor was covered by small pools. Mary could hear them panting softly, or whining with exasperation because of the flies. And when they came to put their heads on her knee, pleading for sympathy because of the heat, she would shoo them off crossly: the enormous, rank-smelling animals were an irritation to her, getting under her feet as she moved about the little house, leaving hairs on the cushions, snuffling noisily for fleas when she was trying to rest. She would lock them out of the house, and in the middle of the morning she would tell the boy to carry a petrol tin full of lukewarm water into the bedroom, and, having made sure he was out of the house, she stripped herself and stood in a basin on the brick floor, pouring it over her. The scattering drops fell on the porous brick, which hissed with dryness.

‘When is it going to rain?’ she asked Dick.

‘Oh, not for another month yet,’ he answered easily, but looking surprised at her question. Surely she knew when the rains were likely to fall? She had been in the country longer than he had. But it seemed to her that in the town there had been no seasons, really, not as there were here. She had been out of the rhythm of cold and heat and rain. It had been hot, it had rained, the cold weather had come – yes, certainly; but it was something extraneous to her, something happening independent of her. Here body and mind were subservient to the slow movement of the seasons; she had never in her life watched an implacable sky for signs of rain, as she did now, standing on the verandah, and screwing up her eyes at the great massed white clouds, like blocks of glittering crystal quartz sailing through the blue.

‘The water is going very quickly,’ said Dick, one day, frowning.

It was fetched twice a week from the bottom of the hill where the well was. Mary would hear shouting and yelling, as if someone were in agonized pain, and going out to the front of the house, she watched the water-cart come through the trees, drawn by two slow-moving beautiful oxen, straining with their hindquarters up the slope. The cart was two petrol drums lashed to a frame, and in front the disselboom rested on yokes on the necks of the big powerful beasts. She watched the thick muscles surging under the hide, and saw how branches of trees had been laid over the drums to keep the water cool. Sometimes it splashed up and made a fine sparkling spray falling through the sunshine, and the oxen tossed their heads and blew out their nostrils, smelling the water. And all the time the native driver yelled and howled, dancing beside his beasts and lashing with his long whip that coiled and hissed in the air, but never touched them.

‘What are you using it for?’ asked Dick. She told him. His face darkened, and he looked at her in incredulous horror, as if she had committed a crime.

‘What, wasting it like that?’

‘I am not wasting it,’ she said coldly. ‘I am so hot I can’t stand it. I want to cool myself.’

Dick swallowed, trying to keep calm. ‘Listen to me,’ he said angrily, in a voice he had never before used to her. ‘Listen to me! Every time I order the watercart to fetch water for the house, it means a driver, and two waggon boys, and two oxen off other work for a whole morning. It costs money to fetch water. And then you go and throw it away! Why don’t you fill the bath with water and get into it, instead of wasting it and throwing it away each time?’

She was furious. This seemed the last straw. Here was she, living here uncomplainingly, suffering these hardships; and then she could not use a couple of gallons of water! She opened her mouth to shout at him, but before she could, he had become suddenly contrite because of the way he had spoken to her; and there was another of those little scenes which comforted and soothed her: he apologizing, abasing himself, and she forgiving him.

But when he had gone, she went into the bathroom, and stared down at the bath, still hating him for what he had said. The bathroom had been built on after the house was finished. It was a lean-to with mud walls (mud plastered over bush poles) and a tin roof. Where the rain had run through the joins in the roof, the whitewash was discoloured and the mud cracked. The bath itself was of zinc, a shallow zinc shape set into a dried mud base. The metal had been dazzling once; she could see how it had been because the scratches on the dull surface glittered brightly. Over many years a patina of grease and dirt had formed, and now, when it was scrubbed, it wore thin in patches only. It was filthy, filthy! Mary stared down at it, stiff with distaste. When she bathed, which was only twice a week because of the trouble and cost of fetching water, she sat gingerly at the extreme end of the bath, trying to touch it as little as possible, and getting out as soon as she could. Here a bath was like medicine, which had to be taken, not a luxury to be enjoyed.

The arrangements for the bath were unbelievable, she cried, tearing herself to pieces with her own anger. On bath nights two petrol tins of water were heated on the stove, and carried into the bathroom and set down on the floor. They were covered over with thick farm sacks to keep the water hot, and the sacks were hot and steamy and sent up a musty smell. Across the tops of the tins pieces of bushwood had been wedged, to carry them by, and the wood was greasy with much handling. She just would not put up with it, she said at last, turning to leave the bathroom in angry distaste. She called the boy and told him to scrub the bath, to scrub it until it was clean. He thought she meant the usual scrubbing, and in five minutes had finished. She went to examine it: it was just the same. Stroking her fingers over the zinc, she could feel the crust of dirt. She called him back and told him to clean, to clean it properly, to go on scrubbing till it shone, every inch of it.

That was about eleven in the morning.

It was an unfortunate day for Mary. It was on that day that she made her first contact with ‘the district’, in the shape of Charlie Slatter and his wife. It is worthwhile explaining in detail what happened that day, because so many things can be understood by it: she went from mistake to mistake, with her head held high and her mouth set tight, rigid with pride and the determination not to show weakness. When Dick returned to lunch, he found her cooking in the kitchen, looking positively ugly with anger, her face flushed and her hair untidy.

‘Where is the boy?’ he asked, surprised to find her doing his work.

‘Cleaning the bath,’ she said shortly, snapping out the words angrily.

‘Why now?’

‘It’s dirty,’ she said.

Dick went into the bathroom, from where he could hear the sluish, sluish of a scrubbing brush, and found the native bent over the bath, rubbing away, but making little impression. He returned to the kitchen.

‘Why start him on it now?’ he asked. ‘It’s been like that for years. A zinc bath goes like that. It’s not dirt, Mary, not really. It changes colour.’

Without looking at him she piled a tray with food and marched into the front room. ‘It’s dirt,’ she said. ‘I will never get into that bath again until it is really clean. How you can allow your things to be so filthy I cannot understand.’

‘You have used it yourself for some weeks without complaining,’ he said drily, automatically reaching for a cigarette and sticking it between his lips. But she did not reply.

He shook his head when she said the food was ready and went off to the fields again, calling for the dogs. When she was in this mood, he could not bear to be near her. Mary cleared the table, without eating herself, and sat down to listen to the sound of the scrubbing brush. She remained there for two hours, her head aching, listening with every muscle of her tensed body. She was determined he should not scamp his work. At half-past three there was sudden silence, and she sat up, alertly ready to go to the bathroom and make him begin again. But the door opened and he entered. Without looking at her, addressing her invisible double that stood to one side of her, he said that he was going to his hut for some food, and would go on with the bath when he came back. She had forgotten about his food. She never thought of natives as people who had to eat or sleep: they were either there, or they were not, and what their lives were when they were out of her sight she had never paused to think. She nodded, feeling guilty. Then she smothered her guilt, thinking, ‘It’s his fault for not keeping it properly clean in the first place.’

The tension of listening to his working relaxed, she went out to look at the sky. There were no clouds at all. It was a low dome of sonorous blue, with an undertone of sultry sulphur-colour, because of the smoke that dimmed the air. The pale sandy soil in front of the house dazzled up waves of light, and out of it curved the gleaming stems of the poinsettia bushes, bursting into irregular slashes of crimson. She looked away over the trees, which were dingy and brownish, over the acres of shining wavy grass to the hills. They were hazy and indistinct. The veld fires had been burning for weeks, all round, and she could taste the smoke on her tongue. Sometimes a tiny fragment of charred grass fell on her skin, and left a greasy black smudge. Columns of smoke rose in the distance, heavy bluish coils hanging motionless, making a complicated architecture in the dull air.

The week before a fire had swept over part of their farm, destroying two cowsheds and acres of grazing. Where it had burnt, lay black expanses of desolation, and still, here and there, fallen logs smoked in the blackness, faint tendrils of smoke showing grey against the charred landscape. She turned her eyes away, because she did not want to think of the money that had been lost, and saw in front of her, where the road wound, clouds of reddish dust. The course of that road could always be marked, because the trees along it were rust-coloured as if locusts had settled on them. She watched the dust spurt up as if a beetle were burrowing through the trees, and thought, ‘Why, it is a car!’ And a few minutes later she realized it was coming to them, and felt quite panicky. Callers! But Dick had said she must expect people to come. She ran into the back of the house, to tell the boy to get tea. He wasn’t there. It was then four: she remembered that half an hour before she had told him he could go. She ran out over the shifting mass of chips and bark-strips of the wood-pile, and, drawing the rusty wooden bolt from the crotch of the tree, beat the plough disc. Ten resonant clanging beats were the signal that the houseboy was wanted. Then she returned to the house. The stove was out; she found it difficult to light; and there was nothing to eat. She did not bother to cook cakes when Dick was never there for tea. She opened a packet of store biscuits and looked down at her frock. She could not possibly be seen in such a rag! But it was too late. The car was droning up the hill. She rushed out into the front, wringing her hands. She might have been isolated for years, and unused to people, from the way she behaved, rather than a woman who for years and years had never, not for a minute, been alone. She saw the car stop, and two people get out. They were a short, powerfully-built, sandy-coloured man, and a dark full-bodied woman with a pleasant face. She waited for them, smiling shyly to answer their cordial faces. And then, with what relief she saw Dick’s car coming up the hill! She blessed him for his consideration, coming to help her out on this first visit. He had seen the dust-trail over the trees, too, and had come as soon as he could.

The man and the woman shook her hand, and greeted her. But it was Dick who asked them inside. The four of them sat in the tiny room, so that it appeared even more crowded than ever. Dick and Charlie Slatter talked on one side, and she and Mrs Slatter on the other. Mrs Slatter was a kindly soul, and sorry for Mary who had married a good-for-nothing like Dick. She had heard she was a town girl, and knew herself what hardship and loneliness was, though she was long past the struggling state herself. She had, now, a large house, three sons at university, and a comfortable life. But she remembered only too well the sufferings and humiliations of poverty. She looked at Mary with real tenderness, remembering her own past, and was prepared to make friends. But Mary was stiff with resentment, because she had noticed Mrs Slatter looking keenly round the room, pricing every cushion, noticing the new whitewash and the curtains.

‘How pretty you have made it,’ she said, with genuine admiration, knowing what it was to use dyed flour sacks for curtains and painted petrol boxes for cupboards. But Mary misunderstood her. She would not soften at all. She would not discuss her house with Mrs Slatter, who was patronizing her. After a few moments Mrs Slatter looked closely at the girl’s face, flushed, and in a changed voice that was formal and distant, began to talk of other things. Then the boy brought in the tea, and Mary suffered fresh agonies over the cups and the tin tray. She tried to think of something to discuss that was not connected with the farm. Films? She cast her mind over the hundreds she had seen in the last few years, and could not remember the names of more than two or three. Films, which had once been so important to her, were now a little unreal; and in any case Mrs Slatter went to the pictures perhaps twice a year, when she was in town on her rare shopping trips. The shops in town? No, that was a question of money again, and she was wearing a faded cotton frock she was ashamed of. She looked across to Dick for help, but he was absorbed in conversation with Charlie, discussing crops, prices, and – above all – native labour. Whenever two or three farmers are gathered together, it is decreed that they should discuss nothing but the shortcomings and deficiencies of their natives. They talk about their labourers with a persistent irritation sounding in their voices: individual natives they might like, but as a genus, they loathe them to the point of neurosis. They never cease complaining about their unhappy lot, having to deal with natives who are so exasperatingly indifferent to the welfare of the white man, working only to please themselves. They had no idea of the dignity of labour, no idea of improving themselves by hard work.

Mary listened to the male conversation with wonder. It was the first time she had heard men talk farming, and she began to see that Dick was hungry for it, and felt a little mean that she knew so little, and could not help relieve his mind by discussing the farm with him. She turned back to Mrs Slatter, who was silent, feeling wounded because Mary would not accept her sympathy and her help. At last the visit came to an end, with regret on Dick’s side, but relief from Mary. The two Turners went out to say good-bye, and watched the big expensive car slide down the hill, and away into the trees amid puffs of red dust.

Dick said, ‘I am glad they came. It must be lonely for you.’

‘I am not lonely,’ said Mary truthfully. Loneliness, she thought, was craving for other people’s company. But she did not know that loneliness can be an unnoticed cramping of the spirit for lack of companionship.

‘But you must talk women’s talk sometimes,’ said Dick, with awkward jocularity.

She glanced at him in surprise: this tone was new to her. He was staring after the departing car, his face regretful. He was not regretting Charlie Slatter, whom he did not like, but the talk, the masculine talk which gave him self-assurance in his relations with Mary. He felt as though he had been given an injection of new vigour, because of that hour spent in the little room, the two men on one side, discussing their own concerns, and the two women on the other, talking, presumably, about clothes and servants. For he had not heard a word of what Mrs Slatter and Mary had said. He had not noticed how awkward it had been for both of them.

‘You must go and see her, Mary,’ he announced. ‘I’ll give you the car one afternoon when work is slack, and you can go and have a good gossip.’ He spoke quite jauntily and freely, his face clear from that load of worry, his hands in his pockets.

Mary did not understand why he seemed alien and hostile to her, but she was piqued at this casual summing up of her needs. And she had no desire for Mrs Slatter’s company. She did not want anyone’s company.

‘I don’t want to,’ she said childishly.

‘Why not?’

But at this point the servant came out on to the verandah behind them, and held out, without speaking, his contract of service. He wanted to leave: he was needed by his family in the kraal. Mary immediately lost her temper; her irritation found a permissible outlet in this exasperating native. Dick simply pulled her back, as if she were a thing of no account, and went out to the kitchen with the native. She heard the boy complain that he had been working since five o’clock that morning with no food at all, because he was only in the compound a few moments before he had been summoned back by the gong. He could not work like that; his child in his kraal was ill; he wanted to go at once. Dick replied, ignoring the unwritten rules for once, that the new missus did not know much about running a house yet, and that she would learn and that it would not happen again. Speaking like this to a native, appealing to him, was contrary to Dick’s ideas of relationship between white and black, but he was furious with Mary for her lack of consideration and tact.

Mary was quite stupefied with rage. How dare he take the native’s part against her! When Dick returned she was standing on the verandah with her hands clenched and her face set.

‘How dare you!’ she said, her voice stifled.

‘If you must do these things, then you must take the consequences,’ said Dick wearily. ‘He’s a human being, isn’t he? He’s got to eat. Why must that bath be done all at once? It can be done over several days, if it means all that to you.’

‘It’s my house,’ said Mary. ‘He’s my boy, not yours. Don’t interfere.’

‘Listen to me,’ said Dick curtly. ‘I work hard enough, don’t I? All day I am down on the lands with these lazy black savages, fighting them to get some work out of them. You know that. I won’t come back home to this damned fight, fight, fight in the house. Do you understand? I will not have it. And you should learn sense. If you want to get work out of them you have to know how to manage them. You shouldn’t expect too much. They are nothing but savages after all.’ Thus Dick, who had never stopped to reflect that these same savages had cooked for him better than his wife did, had run his house, had given him a comfortable existence, as far as his pinched life could be comfortable, for years.

Mary was beside herself. She said, wanting to hurt him, really wanting to hurt him for the first time, because of this new arrogance of his. ‘You expect a lot from me, don’t you?’ On the brink of disaster, she pulled herself up, but could not stop completely, and after a hesitation went on, ‘You expect such a lot! You expect me to live like a poor white in this pokey little place of yours. You expect me to cook myself every day because you won’t put in ceilings…’ She was speaking in a new voice for her, a voice she had never used before in her life. It was taken direct from her mother, when she had had those scenes over money with her father. It was not the voice of Mary, the individual (who after all really did not care so much about the bath or whether the native stayed or went), but the voice of the suffering female, who wanted to show her husband she just would not be treated like that. In a moment she would begin to cry, as her mother had cried on these occasions, in a kind of dignified, martyred rage.

Dick said curtly, white with fury, ‘I told you when I married you what you could expect. You can’t accuse me of telling you lies. I explained everything to you. And there are farmers’ wives all over the country living no better, and not making such a fuss. And as for ceilings, you can whistle for them. I have lived in this house for six years and it hasn’t hurt me. You can make the best of it.’

She gasped in astonishment. Never had he spoken like that to her. And inside she went hard and cold against him, and nothing would melt her until he said he was sorry and craved her forgiveness.

‘That boy will stay now, I’ve seen to that. Now treat him properly and don’t make a fool of yourself again,’ said Dick.

She went straight into the kitchen, gave the boy the money he was owed, counting out the shillings as if she grudged them, and dismissed him. She returned cold and victorious. But Dick did not acknowledge her victory.

‘It is not me you are hurting, it is yourself,’ he said. ‘If you go on like this, you’ll never get any servants. They soon learn the women who don’t know how to treat their boys.’

She got the supper herself, struggling with the stove, and afterwards when Dick had gone to bed early, as he always did, she remained alone in the little front room. After a while, feeling caged, she went out into the dark outside the house, and walked up and down the path between the borders of white stones which gleamed faintly through the dark, trying to catch a breath of cool air to soothe her hot cheeks. Lightning was flickering gently over the kopjes; there was a dull red glow where the fire burned; and overhead it was dark and stuffy. She was tense with hatred. Then she began to picture herself walking there up and down in the darkness, with the hated bush all around her, outside that pigsty he called a house, having to do all her own work – while only a few months ago she had been living her own life in town, surrounded by friends who loved her and needed her. She began to cry, weakening into self-pity. She cried for hours, till she could walk no more. She staggered back into bed, feeling bruised and beaten. The tension between them lasted for an intolerable week, until at last the rains fell, and the air grew cool and relaxed. And he had not apologized. The incident was simply not mentioned. Unresolved and unacknowledged, the conflict was put behind them, and they went on as if it had not happened. But it had changed them both. Although his assurance did not last long, and he soon lapsed back into his old dependence on her, a faint apology always in his voice, he was left with a core of resentment against her. For the sake of their life together she had to smother her dislike of him because of the way he had behaved, but then, it was not so easy to smother; it was put against the account of the native who had left, and, indirectly, against all natives.

Towards the end of that week a note came from Mrs Slatter, asking them both for an evening party.

Dick was really reluctant to go, because he had got out of the way of organized jollification; he was ill at ease in crowds. But he wanted to accept for Mary’s sake. She, however, refused to go. She wrote a formal note of thanks, saying she regretted, etc.

Mrs Slatter had asked them on an impulse of real friendliness, for she was still sorry for Mary, in spite of her stiff angular pride. But the note offended her: it might have been copied out of a letter-writing guide. This kind of formality did not fit in with the easy manners of the district, and she showed the note to her husband with raised eyebrows, saying nothing.

‘Leave her,’ said Charlie Slatter. ‘She’ll come off her high horse. Got ideas into her head, that’s what’s wrong with her. She’ll come to her senses. Not that she’s much loss. The pair of them need some sense shaken into them. Turner is in for trouble. He is so up in the air that he doesn’t even burn fireguards! And he is planting trees. Trees! He is wasting money planting trees while he is in debt.’

Mr Slatter’s farm had hardly any trees left on it. It was a monument to farming malpractice, with great gullies cutting through it, and acres of good dark earth gone dead from misuse. But he made the money, that was the thing. It enraged him to think it was so easy to make money, and that damned fool Dick Turner played the fool with trees. On a kindhearted impulse, that was half exasperation, he drove over one morning to see Dick, avoiding the house (because he did not want to meet that stuck-up idiot Mary) looking for him on the lands. He spent three hours trying to persuade Dick to plant tobacco, instead of mealies and little crops. He was very sarcastic about those ‘little crops’, the beans and cotton and sunhemp that Dick liked. And Dick steadily refused to listen to Charlie. He liked his crops, the feeling of having his eggs in several baskets. And tobacco seemed to him an inhuman crop: it wasn’t farming at all, it was a sort of factory thing, with the barns and the grading sheds and the getting up at nights to watch barn temperatures.

‘What are you going to do when the family starts coming along?’ asked Charlie brusquely, his matter-of-fact little blue eyes fixed on Dick.

‘I’ll get out of the mess my own way,’ said Dick obstinately.

‘You are a fool.’ said Charlie. ‘A fool. Don’t say I didn’t tell you. Don’t come to me for loans when your wife’s belly begins to swell and you need cash.’

‘I have never asked you for anything,’ replied Dick, wounded, his face dark with pride. There was a moment of sheer hatred between the two men. But somewhere, somehow, they respected each other, in spite of their difference in temperament – perhaps because they shared the same life, after all? And they parted cordially enough, although Dick could not bring himself to match Charlie’s bluff good-humour.

When Charlie had gone he went back to the house, sick with worry. Sudden strain and anxiety always went to the nerves of his stomach, and he wanted to vomit. But he concealed it from Mary, because of the cause of his worry. Children were what he wanted now that his marriage was a failure and seemed impossible to right. Children would bring them close together and break down this invisible barrier. But they simply could not afford to have children. When he had said to Mary (thinking she might be longing for them) that they would have to wait, she had assented with a look of relief. He had not missed that look. But perhaps when he got out of the wood, she would be pleased to have children.

He drove himself to work harder, so that things could be better and children would be possible. He planned and schemed and dreamed all day, standing on his land watching the boys work. And in the meantime matters in the house did not improve. Mary just could not get on with natives, and that was the end of it. He had to accept it; she was made like that, and could not be altered. A cook never lasted longer than a month, and all the time there were scenes and storms of temper. He set his teeth to bear it, feeling obscurely that it was in some way his fault, because of the hardships of her life; but sometimes he would rush from the house, inarticulate with irritation. If only she had something to fill her time – that was the trouble.