Yet, when Tom wrote saying he was being demobilized, Kenneth, in a mood of tenderness, asked Julia to marry him. She was shocked and astonished. ‘You know quite well you don’t want to marry me,’ she expostulated. ‘Besides, how could you do that to Tom?’ Catching his quizzical glance, she began laughing helplessly.
‘I don’t know whether I want to marry you or not,’ admitted Kenneth honestly, laughing with her.
‘Well, I know. You don’t.’
‘I’ve got used to you.’
‘I haven’t got used to you. I never could.’
‘I don’t understand what it is Tom gives you that I don’t.’
‘Peace,’ said Julia simply. ‘You and I fight all the time, we never do anything else.’
‘We don’t fight,’ protested Kenneth. ‘We have never, as they say, exchanged a cross word.’ He grimaced. ‘Except when I get wound up, and that’s a different thing.’
Julia saw that he could not imagine a relationship with a woman that was not based on antagonism. She said, knowing it was useless: ‘Everything is so easy with Tom.’
‘Of course it’s easy,’ he said angrily. ‘The whole damn thing is a lie from beginning to end. However, if that’s what you like …’ He shrugged, his anger evaporating. He said drily: ‘I imagined I was qualifying as a husband.’
‘Some men can’t ever be husbands. They’ll always be lovers.’
‘I thought women liked that?’
‘I wasn’t talking about women, I was talking about me.’
‘Well, I intend to get married, for all that.’
After that they did not discuss it. Speaking of what they felt left them confused, angry, puzzled.
Before Tom came back Kenneth said: ‘I ought to leave the farm.’
She did not trouble to answer, it was so insincere.
‘I’ll get a farm over the other side of the district.’
She merely smiled. Kenneth had written long letters to Tom every week of those three years, telling him every detail of what was happening on the farm. Plans for the future were already worked out.
It was arranged that Julia should go and meet Tom in town, where they would spend some weeks before the three began life together again. As Kenneth said, sarcastically, to Julia: ‘It will be just like a second honeymoon.’
It was. Tom returned from the desert toughened, sunburnt, swaggering a little because he was unsure of himself with Julia. But she was so happy to see him that in a few hours they were back where they had been. ‘About Kenneth …’ began Tom warily, after they had edged round this subject for some days.
‘Much better not talk about it,’ said Julia quickly.
Tom’s blue eyes rested on her, not critically, but appealingly. ‘Is it going to be all right?’ he asked after a moment. She could see he was terrified she might say that Kenneth had decided to go away. She said drily: ‘I didn’t want you to go off to the wars like a hero, did I?’
‘There’s something in that,’ he admitted; admitting at the same time that they were quits. Actually, he was rather subdued because of his years as a soldier. He was quick to drop the subject. It would not be just yet that he would begin talking about the happiest years of his life. He had still to forget how bored he had been and how he had missed his farm.
For a few days there was awkwardness between the three. Kenneth was jealous because of the way Julia had gladly turned back to Tom. But there was so much work to do, and Kenneth and Tom were so pleased to be back together, that it was not long before everything was as easy as before. Julia thought it was easier: now that her attraction for Kenneth, and his for her, had been slaked, the restlessness that had always been between them would vanish. Perhaps not quite … Julia and Kenneth’s eyes would meet sometimes in that instinctive, laughing understanding that she could never have with Tom, and then she would feel guilty.
Sometimes Kenneth would ‘take out’ a girl from a near farm; and they would afterwards discuss his getting married. ‘If only I could fall in love,’ he would complain humorously. ‘You are the only woman I can bear the thought of, Julia.’ He would say this before Tom, and Tom would laugh: they had reached such a pitch of complicity.
Very soon there were plans for expanding the farm. They bought several thousands of acres of land next door. They would grow tobacco on a large scale: this was the time of the tobacco boom. They were getting very rich.
There were two assistants on the new farm, but Tom spent most of his days there. Sometimes his nights, too. Julia, after three days spent alone with Kenneth, with the old attraction strong between them, said to him: ‘I wish you would let Kenneth run that farm.’
Tom, who was absorbed and fascinated by the new problems, said rather impatiently: ‘Why?’
‘Surely that’s obvious.’
‘That’s up to you, isn’t it?’
‘Perhaps it isn’t, always.’
It was the business of the war over again. He seemed a slow, deliberate man, without much fire. But he liked new problems to solve. He got bored. Kenneth, the quick, lively, impatient one, liked to be rooted in one place, liked to develop what he had.
Julia had the helpless feeling again that Tom simply didn’t care about herself and Kenneth. She grew to accept the knowledge that really, it was Kenneth that mattered to him. Except for the war, they had never been separated. Tom’s father had died, and his mother married Kenneth’s father. Tom had always been with Kenneth, he could not remember a time when he had not been protectively guarding him. Once Julia asked him: ‘I suppose you must have been very jealous of him, that was it, wasn’t it?’ and she was astonished at his quick flare of rage at the suggestion. She dropped the thing: what did it matter now?
The two boys had gone through various schools and to university together. They had started farming in their early twenties, when they hadn’t a penny between them, and had to borrow money to support their mother, for whom they shared a deep love, which was also half-exasperated admiration; she had apparently been a helpless, charming lady with many admirers who left her children to the care of nurses.
When Tom was away one evening, and would not be back till next day, Kenneth said brusquely, with the roughness that is the result of conflict: ‘Coming to my room tonight, Julia?’
‘How can I?’ she protested.
‘Well, I don’t like the idea of coming to the marriage bed,’ he said practically, and they began to laugh. To Julia, Kenneth would always be the laughter of inevitability.
Tom said nothing, though he must have known. When Julia again appealed that he should stay on this farm and send Kenneth to the other, he turned away, frowning, and did not reply. His manner to her did not change. And she still felt: this is my husband, and compared to that feeling, Kenneth was nothing. At the same time a grim anxiety was taking possession of her: it seemed that in some perverse way the two men were brought even closer together, for a time, by sharing the same woman. That was how Julia put it, to herself: the plain and brutal fact.
It was Kenneth who pulled away in the end. Not from Julia: from the situation. There came a time when it was possible for Kenneth to say, as he stood smiling sardonically opposite Julia and Tom, who were sitting like an old married couple on their side of the fire: ‘You know it is quite essential I should get married. Things can’t go on like this.’
‘But you can’t marry without being in love,’ protested Julia; and immediately checked herself with an annoyed laugh – she realized that what she was protesting against was Kenneth going away from her.
‘You must see that I should.’
‘I don’t like the idea,’ said Tom, as if it were his marriage that was under discussion.
‘Look at you and Tom,’ said Kenneth peaceably, but not without maliciousness. ‘A very satisfactory marriage. You weren’t in love.’
‘Weren’t we in love, Julia?’ asked Tom, rather surprised.
‘Actually, I was “in love” with Kenneth,’ said Julia, with the sense that this was an
unnecessary thing to say.
‘You wanted a wife. Julia wanted a husband. All very sensible.’
‘One can be “in love” once too often,’ said Julia, aiming this at Kenneth.
‘Are you in love with Kenneth now?’
Julia did not answer; it annoyed her that Tom should ask it, after virtually handing her over to Kenneth. After a moment she remarked: ‘I suppose you are right. You really ought to get married.’ Then, thoughtfully: ‘I couldn’t be married to you, Kenneth. You destroy me.’ The word sounded heightened and absurd. She hurried on: ‘I didn’t know it was possible to be as happy as I have been with Tom.’ She smiled at her husband and reached over and took his hand: he returned the pressure gratefully.
‘Ergo, I have to get married,’ said Kenneth caustically.
‘But you say so yourself.’
‘I don’t seem to be feeling what I ought to feel,’ said Tom at last, laughing in a bewildered way.
‘That’s what’s wrong with the three of us,’ said Julia; then, feeling as if she were on the edge of that dangerous thing that might destroy them, she stopped and said: ‘Let’s not talk about it. It doesn’t do any good to talk about it.’
That conversation had taken place a month ago. Kenneth had not mentioned getting married since; and Julia had secretly hoped he had shelved it. Not long since, during that trip to town, he had spent a day away from Tom and herself – and with whom? Tomorrow he was making the trip again, and for the first time for years, since they had been together, it was not the three of them, close in understanding, but Tom and Julia, with Kenneth deliberately excluding himself and putting up barriers.
Kenneth did not open his mouth the whole evening; though both Tom and Julia waited for him to break the silence. Julia did not read; she moiled over the facts of her life unhappily; and from time to time looked over at Tom, who smiled back affectionately, knowing she wanted this of him.
In spite of the fire, that now roared and crackled in the wall, Julia was cold. The thin frosty air of the high veld was of an electric dryness in the big bare room. The roof was crackling with cold; every time the tin snapped overhead it evoked the arching, myriad-starred, chilly night outside, and the drying, browning leaves, the tan waving grass that was now a dull parched colour. Julia’s skin crinkled and stung with dryness.
Suddenly she said: ‘It won’t do, Kenneth. You can’t behave like this.’ She got up, and stood with her back to the fire, gazing levelly at them. She felt herself to be parching and withering within; she felt no heavier than a twig; the sap did not run in her veins. Because of Kenneth’s betrayal, she was wounded in some place she could not name. She had no substance. That was how she felt.
What they saw was a tall, rather broad woman, big-framed, the bones of her face strongly supporting the flesh. Her eyes were blue and candid, now clouded by trouble, but still humorously troubled. She was forcing them to look at her; to make comparisons; she was challenging them. She was forcing them even to break the habit of loyalty which, blithely tender, continually recreative, blinds the eyes of lovers to change.
They saw this strong, ageing woman, the companion of their lives, standing there in front of them, still formed in the shape of beauty, for she was pleasant to look at, but with the light of beauty gone. They remembered her, perhaps, on that afternoon by the sea when they had first encountered her, or when she was newly arrived at the farm: young, vivid, a slender and rather boyish girl, with sleek, close-cropped hair and quick amused blue eyes.
Now, around the firm and bony face the soft hair fell in dressed waves, she wore a soft flowery dress: they saw a disquieting incongruity between this expression of femininity and what they knew her to be. They were irritated. To stand there, reminding them (when they did not want to be reminded) that she was facing the sorrowful abdication of middle age, and facing it alone, seemed to them irrelevant, even unfair.
Kenneth said resentfully: ‘Oh, Lord, you are very much a woman, after all, Julia. Must you make a scene?’
Her quick laugh was equally resentful. ‘Why shouldn’t I make a scene? I feel entitled to it.’
Kenneth said: ‘We all know there’s got to be a change. Can’t we go through with it without this sort of thing?’
‘Surely,’ she said helplessly, ‘everything can’t be changed without some sort of explanation …’ She could not go on.
‘Well, what sort of explanation do you want?’
She shrugged hopelessly. After a moment she said, as if continuing an old conversation: ‘Perhaps I should have had children, after all?’
‘I always said so,’ remarked Tom mildly.
‘You are nearly forty,’ said Kenneth practically.
‘I wouldn’t make a good mother,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t compete with yours. I wouldn’t have the courage to take it on, knowing I should fail by comparison with your so perfect mother.’ She was being sarcastic, but there were tears in her voice.
‘Let’s leave our mother out of it,’ said Tom coldly.
‘Of course, we always leave everything important out of it.’
Neither of them said anything they were closed away from her in hostility. She went on: ‘I wonder, why did you want me at all, Tom? You didn’t really want children particularly.’
‘Yes, I did,’ said Tom, rather bewildered.
‘Not enough to make me feel you cared one way or the other. Surely a woman is entitled to that, to feel that her children matter. I don’t know what it is you took me into your life for?’
After a moment Kenneth said lightly, trying to restore the comfortable surface of flippancy: ‘I have always felt that we ought to have children.’
Neither Tom nor Julia responded to this appeal. Julia took a candle from the mantelpiece, bent to light it at the fire, and said: ‘Well, I’m off to bed. The whole situation is beyond me.’
‘Very well then,’ said Kenneth. ‘If you must have it: I’m getting married soon.’
‘Obviously,’ said Julia drily.
‘What did you want me to say?’
‘Who is it?’ Tom sounded so resentful that it changed the weight of the conversation: now it was Tom and Kenneth as antagonists.
‘Well, she’s a girl from England. She came out here a few months ago on this scheme for importing marriageable women to the Colonies … well, that’s what the scheme amounts to.’
‘Yes, but the girl?’ asked Julia, amused in spite of herself at Kenneth’s invincible distaste at the idea of marrying.
‘Well …’ Kenneth hesitated, his dark bright eyes on Julia s face, his mouth already beginning to twist into dry amusement. ‘She’s fair. She’s pretty. She seems capable. She wants to be married … what more do I want?’ That last phrase was savage. They had come to a dead end.
‘I’m going to bed!’ exclaimed Julia suddenly, the tears pouring down her face. ‘I can’t bear this.’
Neither of them said anything to prevent her leaving. When she had gone, Kenneth made an instinctive defensive movement towards Tom. After a moment Tom said irritably, but commandingly: ‘It’s absurd for you to get married when there’s no need.’
‘Obviously there’s a need,’ said Kenneth angrily. He rose, taking another candle from the mantelpiece. As he left the room – and it was clear that he left in order to forestall the scene Tom was about to make – he said: ‘I want to have children before I get an old man. It seems to be the only thing left.’
When Tom went into the bedroom, Julia was lying dry-eyed on the pillow, waiting for him. She was waiting for him to comfort her into security of feeling. He had never failed her. When he was in bed, she found herself comforting him: it gave her such a perverse, topsy-turvy feeling she could not sleep.
Soon after breakfast Kenneth left for town. He was dressed smartly: normally he did not care how he looked, and his clothes seemed to have been put on in the spirit of one picking up tools for a job. All three acknowledged his appearance with small, constricted smiles; and Kenneth reddened as he got into
the car. ‘I might not be back tonight,’ he called back, driving away without looking back.
Tom and Julia watched the big car nose its way through the trees, and turned back to face each other. ‘Like to come down the lands with me?’ he asked. ‘Yes, I would,’ she accepted gratefully. Then she saw, and was thrown back on to herself by the knowledge of it, that he was asking her, not for her comfort, but for his own.
It was a windy, sunlit morning, and very cold; winter had taken possession of the veld overnight.
The house was built on a slight ridge, with the country falling away on either side. The landscape was dulling for the dry season into olive green and thin yellows; there was that extraordinary contrast of limpid sparkling skies, with sunshine pouring down like a volatile spirit, and dry cold parching the face and hands that made Julia uneasy in winter. It was as if the dryness tightened the cold into rigid fetters on her, so that a perpetual inner shivering had to be suppressed. She walked beside Tom over the fields with hunched shoulders and arms crossed tight over her chest. Yet she was not cold, not in the physical sense. Around the house the mealie fields, now a gentle silvery-gold colour, swept into runnels of light as the wind passed over them, and there was a dry tinkling of parched leaves moving together, like rat’s feet over grass. Tom did not speak; but his face was heavy and furrowed. When she took his hand he responded, but listlessly. She wanted him to turn to her, to say: Now he’s going to make something of his own, you must come to me, and we’ll build up again. She wanted him to claim her, heal her, make her whole. But he was uneasy and restless; and she said at last diffidently: ‘Why should you mind so much? It ought to be me who’s unhappy.’
‘Don’t you?’ he asked, sounding like a person angry at dishonesty.
‘Yes, of course,’ she said; and tried to find the words to say that if only he could take her gently into his own security, as he had years ago, things would be right for them.
But that security no longer existed in him.
All that day they hardly spoke, not because of animosity between them, but because of a deep, sad helplessness. They could not help each other.
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