This Was the Old Chief's Country

by Doris Lessing

  He was nicer than she had believed possible. There was suddenly no conflict. He listened to her tales about her life with detached interest, as if they could not possibly concern him. He remarked once, in his tender, protective way: ‘You must have been hurt hard at some time. That’s the trouble with you independent women. Actually, you are quite a nice woman, Julia.’ She laughed at him scornfully, as an arrogant male who has to make some kind of a picture of a woman so as to be able to fit her into his life. He treated her laughter tolerantly. When she said things like this he found it merely a sort of piquancy, a sign of her wit. Half-laughingly, half-despairingly, she said to Kenneth: ‘You do realize that Tom hasn’t any idea of what I’m like? Do you think it’s fair to marry him?’

  ‘Well, why not, if he wants to be married?’ returned Kenneth briskly. ‘He’s romantic. He sees you as a wanderer from city to city, and from bed to bed, because you are trying to heal a broken heart or something of the kind. That appeals to him.’

  Tom listened to this silently, smiling with disquiet. But there were times when Julia liked to think she had a broken heart; it certainly felt bruised. It was restful to accept Tom’s idea of her. She said in a piqued way to Kenneth: ‘I suppose you understand perfectly easily why I’ve lived the way I have?’

  Kenneth raised his brows. ‘Why? Because you enjoyed it of course. What better reason?’

  She could not help laughing, even while she said crossly, feeling misunderstood: ‘The fact is, you are as bad as Tom. You make up stories about women, too, to suit yourself. You like thinking of women as hard and decided, cynically making use of men.’

  ‘Certainly,’ said Kenneth. ‘Much better than letting yourself be made use of. I like women to know what they want and get it.’

  This kind of conversation irritated and saddened Julia: it was rather like the froth whipping on the surface of the sea, with the currents underneath dark and unknown.

  She did not like being reminded how much better Kenneth understood her than Tom did. She was pleased to get the business of the ceremony over. Tom married her in a purposeful, unhurrying way; but he remarked that it must be before a certain date because he wanted to start planting soon.

  Kenneth attended as best man with a glint of malice in his eye, and the air of a well-wishing onlooker, interested to see how things would turn out. Julia and he exchanged a glance of pure understanding, very much against their wills, for their attitude towards each other was now one of brisk friendship. From the security of Tom’s arms, she allowed herself to think that if Kenneth were not the kind of man to feel protective towards a woman simply because he enjoyed feeling protective, then it was so much the worse for him. This was slightly vindictive in her; but on the whole good-natured enough – good-nature was necessary; the three of them would be living together in one house, on the same farm, seeing other people seldom.

  It was quite easy, after all. Kenneth did not have to efface himself. Tom effortlessly claimed Julia as his wife, from his magnificent, lazy self-assurance, and she was glad to be claimed. Kenneth and she maintained a humorous understanding. He was given three rooms to himself in one wing of the house; but it was not long before they became disused. It seemed silly for him to retire after dinner by himself. In the evenings, the fact that Julia was Tom’s wife was marked by their two big chairs set side by side, with Kenneth’s opposite. He used to sit there watching them with his observant, slightly sarcastic smile.

  After a while Julia understood she was feeling uneasy; she put it down to the fact that she had expected subtle antagonism between the two men, which she would have to smooth over, while in fact there was no antagonism. It went deeper than that. Those first few nights, when Kenneth tactfully withdrew to his rooms, but looking amused, Tom was restless: he missed Kenneth badly. Julia watched them; and saw with a curious humorous sinking of the heart that they were so close to each other they could not bear to be apart for long. In the evenings it was they who talked, in the odd bantering manner they used even when serious: particularly when serious. Tom liked it when Kenneth sat there opposite, looking shrewd and sceptical about this marriage: they would tease each other in a way that, had they been man and woman, would have seemed positively flirtatious. Listening to them, Julia felt an extraordinary unease, as at a perversity. She chose not to think about it. Better to be affectionately amused at Tom’s elder brother attitude towards Kenneth; there was often something petulant, rebellious, childish, in Kenneth’s attitude towards Tom. Why, Tom was even elder-brotherish to her, who had been managing her own life, so efficiently, for years all over the world. Well, and was not that why she had married him?

  She accepted it. They all accepted it. They grew into a silent comfortable understanding. Tom, so to speak, was the head of the family, commanding, strong, perhaps a little obtuse, as authority has to be; and Julia and Kenneth deferred to him, with the slightest hint of mockery, to gloss the fact that they were glad to defer: how pleasant to let the responsibility rest on someone else!

  Julia even learned to accept the knowledge that when Tom was busy, and she walked with Kenneth, or swam with Kenneth, or took trips into town with Kenneth, it was not only with Tom’s consent: more, he liked it, even needed it. Sometimes she felt as if he were urging her to be with his brother. Kenneth felt it and rebelled, shying away in his petulant younger-brother manner. He would exclaim: ‘Good Lord, man, Julia’s your wife, not mine.’ And Tom would laugh uneasily and say: ‘I don’t like the idea of being possessive.’ The thought of Tom being possessive was so absurd that Julia and Kenneth began giggling helplessly, like conspiring and wise children. And when Tom had departed, leaving them together, she would say to Kenneth, in her troubled serious fashion: ‘But ‘I don’t understand this. I don’t understand any of it. It flies in the face of nature.’

  ‘So it does,’ Kenneth would return easily. He looked at her with a quizzical glint. ‘You must take things as they come, my dear sister-in-law.’ But Julia felt she had been doing just that: she had relaxed, without thinking, drifting warmly and luxuriously inside Tom’s warm and comfortable grasp: which was also Kenneth’s, and because Tom wanted it that way.

  In spite of Tom, she maintained with Kenneth a slight but strong barrier, because they were people who could be too strongly attracted to each other. Once or twice, when they had been left alone together by Tom, Kenneth would fly off irritably: ‘Really, why I bother to be loyal in the circumstances I can’t think.’

  ‘But what are the circumstances?’ Julia asked, puzzled.

  ‘Oh Lord, Julia …’ Kenneth expostulated irritably.

  Once, when he was brutal with irritability, he made the curious remark: ‘The fact is, it was just about time Tom and I had a wife.’ He began laughing, not very pleasantly.

  Julia did not understand. She thought it sounded ugly.

  Kenneth regarded her ironically and said: ‘Fortunately for Tom, he doesn’t know anything at all about himself.’

  But Julia did not like this said about her husband, even though she felt it to be true. Instinctively this particular frontier in their mutual relations was avoided in future; and she was careful with Kenneth, refusing to discuss Tom with him.

  From time to time during those two years before Tom left for the war, Kenneth investigated (his own word) the girls on surrounding farms, with a view to marrying. They bored him. He had a prolonged affair with a married woman whose husband bored her. To Julia and Tom he made witty remarks about his position as a lover. Sometimes the three of them would become helpless with laughter at this description of himself being gallant: the lady was romantic, and liked being courted. Kenneth was not romantic, and his interest in the lady was confined to an end which he could not prevent himself describing in his pungent, sour, resigned fashion during those long evenings with the married couple. Again, Julia got the uneasy feeling that Tom was really too interested – no, that was not the word; it was not the easygoing interest of an amused outsider that Tom displayed; while he listened
to Kenneth being witty about his affair, it was almost as if he were participating himself, as if he were silently urging Kenneth on to further revelations. On these occasions Julia felt a revulsion from Tom. She said to herself that she was jealous, and repressed the feeling.

  When the war started Tom became restless; Julia knew that he would soon go. He volunteered before there was conscription; and she watched, with a humorous sadness, the scene (an uncomfortable one) between her two men, when it seemed that Tom felt impelled to apologize to Kenneth for taking the advantage of him in grasping a rare chance of happiness. Kenneth was unfit: the two brothers had come to Africa in the first place because of Kenneth’s delicate lungs. Kenneth did not at all want to go to the war. ‘Lord!’ he exclaimed to Tom, ‘there’s no need to sound so apologetic. You’re welcome. I’m not a romantic. I don’t like getting killed unless in a good cause. I can’t see any point in the thing.’ In this way he appeared to dismiss the war and the world’s turmoil. As for Tom, he didn’t really care about the issues of the war, either. It was sufficient that there was a war. For both men it was axiomatic that it was impossible England could ever be beaten in a war; they might laugh at their own attitude (which they did, when Julia, from her liberal travelled internationalism, mocked at them), but that was what they felt, nevertheless.

  As for Julia, she was more unhappy about the war than either of them. She had grown into security on the farm; now the world, which she had wanted to shut out, pressed in on her again; and she thought of her many friends, in so many countries, in the thick of things, feeling strange partisan emotions which seemed to her absurd. For she thought in terms of people, not of nations or issues; and the war, to her, was a question of mankind gone mad, killing each other pointlessly. Always the pointlessness of everything! And now she was not allowed to forget strong.

  To her credit, all her unhappiness and female resentment at being so lightly abandoned by Tom at the first sound of a bugle calling adventure down the wind was suppressed. She merely said scornfully to him: ‘What a baby you are! As if there hadn’t been the last war! And look at all the men in the district, pleased as punch because something exciting is going to happen. If you really cared two hoots about the war, I might respect you. But you don’t. Nor do most of the people we know.’

  Tom did not like this. The atmosphere of war had stirred him into a superficial patriotism. ‘You sound like a newspaper leader,’ Julia mocked him. ‘You don’t really believe a word you say. The truth is that most people like us, in all the countries I’ve been in, haven’t a notion what we believe about anything. We don’t believe in the slogans and the lies. It makes me sick, to see the way you all get excited the moment war comes.’

  This made Tom angry, because it was true; and because he had suddenly remembered his sentimental attachment to England, in the Rupert Brooke fashion. They were on edge with each other, in the days before he left. He was glad to go, particularly as Kenneth was being no less caustic. This was the first time the two men had ever been separated; and Julia felt that Kenneth was as hurt as she because Tom left them so easily. In fact, they were all pleased when Tom was able to leave the farm, and put an end to the misery of their tormenting each other.

  But after he had gone, Julia was very unhappy. She missed him badly. Marrying had been a greater peace than she had imagined possible for her. To let the restless critical part of one die; to drift; to relax; to enjoy Africa as a country, the way it looked and the way it felt; to enjoy the physical things slowly, without haste – learning all this had, she imagined, healed her. And now, without Tom, she was nothing. She was unsupported and unwarmed; and she knew that marrying had after all cured her of nothing. She was still floating rootlessly, without support; she belonged nowhere; and even Africa, which she had grown to love, meant nothing to her really: it was another country she had visited as lightly as a migrant bird.

  And Kenneth was no help at all. With Tom on the farm she might have been able to drift with the current, to take the conventional attitude towards the war. But Kenneth used to switch on the wireless in the evenings and pungently translate the news of the war into the meaningless chaotic brutality which was how she herself saw it. He spoke with the callous cynicism that means people are suffering, and which she could hear in her own voice.

  ‘It’s all very well,’ she would say to him. ‘It’s all very well for us. We sit here out of it all. Millions of people are suffering.’

  ‘People like suffering,’ he would retort, angrily. ‘Look at Tom. There he sits in the desert, bored as hell. He’ll be talking about the best years of his life in ten years’ time.’

  Julia could hear Tom’s voice, nostalgically recalling adventure, only too clearly. At the same time Kenneth made her angry, because he expressed what she felt, and she did not like the way she felt. She joined the local women’s groups and started knitting and helping with district functions; and flushed up when she saw Kenneth’s cold eyes resting on her. ‘By God, Julia, you are as bad as Tom …’

  ‘Well, surely, one must be part of it, surely, Kenneth?’ She tried hard to express what she was feeling.

  ‘Just what are you fighting for?’ he demanded. ‘Can you tell me that?’

  ‘I feel we ought to find out …’

  He wouldn’t listen. He flounced off down the farm saying: ‘I’m going to make a new dam. Unless they bomb it, it’s something useful done in all this waste and chaos. You can go and knit nice woollies for those poor devils who are getting themselves killed and listen to the dear women talking about the dreadful Nazis. My God, the hypocrisy. Just tell them to take a good look at South Africa, from me, will you?’

  The fact was, he missed Tom. When he was approached to subscribe to war charities he gave generously, in Tom’s name, sending the receipts carefully to Tom, with sarcastic intention. As the war deepened and the dragging weight of death and suffering settled in their minds, Julia would listen at night to angry pacing footsteps up and down, up and down the long stone passages of the house, and going out in her dressing-gown, would come on Kenneth, his eyes black with anger, his face tense and white: ‘Get out of my way, Julia. I shall kill you or somebody. I’d like to blow the whole thing up. Why not blow it up and be finished with it? It would be good riddance.’

  Julia would gently take him by the arm and lead him back to bed, shutting down her own cold terror at the world. It was necessary for one of them to remain sane. Kenneth at that time was not quite sane. He was working fourteen hours a day; up long before sunrise, hastening back up the road home after sundown, for an evening’s studying: he read scientific stuff about farming. He was building dams, roads, bridges; he planted hundreds of acres of trees; he contour-ridged and drained. He would listen to the news of so many thousands killed and wounded, so many factories blown up, and turn to Julia, face contracted with hate, saying: ‘At any rate I’m building not destroying.’

  ‘I hope it comforts you,’ Julia would remark, mildly sarcastic, though she felt bitter and futile.

  He would look at her balefully and stride out again, away on some work for his hands.

  They were quite alone in the house. For a short while after Tom left they discussed whether they would get an assistant, for conventional reasons. But they disliked the idea of a stranger, and the thing drifted. Soon, as the men left the farms to go off to the war, many women were left alone, doing the work themselves, or with assistants who were unfit for fighting, and there was nothing really outrageous in Kenneth and Julia living together by themselves. It was understood in the district, that for the duration of the war, this kind of situation should not be made a subject for gossip.

  It was inevitable they should be lovers. From the moment Tom left they both knew it.

  Tom was away three years. She was exhausted by Kenneth. His mood was so black and bitter and she knew that nothing she could do or say might help him, for she was as bad herself. She became the kind of woman he wanted: he did not want a warm, consoling woman. She was his mist
ress. Their relationship was a complicated fencing game, conducted with irony, tact, and good sense – except when he boiled over into hatred and vented it on her. There were times when suddenly all vitality failed her, and she seemed to sink swiftly, unsupported, to lie helpless in the depths of herself, looking up undesirously at the life of emotion and warmth washing gently over her head. Then Kenneth used to leave her alone, whereas Tom would have gently coaxed her into life again.

  ‘I wish Tom would come back, oh dear Christ, I wish he’d come back,’ she would sigh.

  ‘Do you imagine I don’t?’ Kenneth would enquire bitterly. Then, a little piqued, but not much: ‘Don’t I do?’

  ‘Well enough, I suppose.’

  ‘What do you want then?’ he enquired briefly, giving what small amount of attention he could spare from the farm to the problem of Julia, the woman.

  ‘Tom,’ Julia replied simply.

  He considered this critically. ‘The fact is, you and I have far more in common than you and Tom.’

  ‘I don’t see what “in common” has to do with it.’

  ‘You and I are the same kind of animal. Tom doesn’t know the first thing about you. He never could.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s the reason.’

  Dislike began welling between them, tempered, as always, by patient irony. ‘You don’t like women at all,’ complained Julia suddenly. ‘You simply don’t like me. You don’t trust me.’

  ‘Oh if it comes to liking …’ He laughed, resentfully. ‘You don’t trust me either, for that matter.’

  It was the truth; they didn’t trust each other; they mistrusted the destructive nihilism that they had in common. Conversations like these, which became far more frequent as time went on, left them hardened against each other for days, in a condition of watchful challenge. This was part of their long, exhausting exchange, which was a continual resolving of mutual antagonism in tired laughter.