This Was the Old Chief's Country

by Doris Lessing

  That night Kenneth did not come back from town. Next day Tom went off by himself to the second farm, leaving her with a gentle apologetic look, as if to say: ‘Leave me alone, I can’t help it.’

  Kenneth telephoned in the middle of the morning from town. His voice was offhand; it was also subtly defensive. That small voice coming from such a distance down the wires, conjured up such a clear vision of Kenneth himself, that she smiled tenderly.

  ‘Well?’ she asked warily.

  ‘I’ll be back sometime. I don’t know when.’

  ‘That means it’s definite?’

  ‘I think so.’ A pause. Then the voice dropped into dry humour. ‘She’s such a nice girl that things take a long time, don’t you know.’ Julia laughed. Quickly he added: ‘But she really is, you know, Julia. She’s awfully nice.’

  ‘Well, you must do as you think,’ she said cautiously.

  ‘How’s Tom?’ he asked.

  ‘I suddenly don’t know anything about Tom,’ she answered.

  There was such a long silence that she clicked the telephone.

  ‘I’m still here,’ said Kenneth. ‘I was trying to think of the right things to say.’

  ‘Has it come to the point where we have to think of the right things?’

  ‘Looks like it, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Good-bye,’ she said quickly, putting down the receiver. ‘Let me know when you’re coming and I’ll get your things ready.’

  As usual in the mornings, she passed on a tour of inspection from room to room of the big bare house, where the windows stood open all day, showing blocks of blue crystal round the walls, or views of veld, as if the building, the very bricks and iron, were compounded with sky and landscape to form a new kind of home. When she had made her formal inspection, and found everything cleaned and polished and arranged, she went to the kitchen. Here she ordered the meals, and discussed the state of the pantry with her cook. Then she went back to the veranda; at this hour she would normally read, or sew, till lunch-time.

  The thought came into her mind, with a destroying force, that if she were not in the house, Tom would hardly notice it, from a physical point of view: the servants would create comfort without her. She suppressed an impulse to go into the kitchen and cook, or tidy a cupboard to find some work for the hands: that was not what she sought, a temporary salve for feeling useless. She took her large light straw hat from the nail in the bare, stone-floored passage, and went out into the garden. As she did not care for gardening, the ground about the house was arranged with groups of shrubs, so that there would be patches of blossom at any time of the year. The garden boy kept the lawns fresh and green. Over the vivid emerald grass spread the flowers of dryness, the poinsettias, loose scattering shapes of bright scarlet, creamy pink, light yellow. On the fine, shiny-brown stems fluttered light green leaves. In a swift gusty wind the quickly moving blossoms and leaves danced and shook; they seemed to her the very essence of the time of year, the essence of dry cold, of light thin sunshine, of high cold-blue skies.

  She passed quietly down the path through the lawns and flowers to the farm road, and turned to look back at the house. From the outside it appeared such a large, assertive, barn of a place, with its areas of shiny tin roof, the hard pink of the walls, the glinting angled shapes of the windows. Although shrubs grew sparsely around it, and it was shaded by a thick clump of trees, it looked naked, raw, crude. ‘That is my home,’ said Julia to herself, testing the word. She rejected it. In that house she had lived ten years – more. She turned away from it, walking lightly through the sifting pink dust of the roads like a stranger. There had always been times when Africa rejected her, when she felt like a critical ghost. This was one of those times. Through the known and loved scenes of the veld she saw Buenos Aires, Rome, Cape Town – a dozen cities, large and small, merging and mingling as the country rose and fell about her. Perhaps it is not good for human beings to live in so many places? But it was not that. She was suffering from an unfamiliar dryness of the senses, an unlocated, unfocused ache that, if she were young, would have formed itself about a person or place, but now remained locked within her. ‘What am I?’ she kept saying to herself as she walked through the veld, in the moving patch of shade that fell from the large drooping hat. On either side the long grass moved and whispered sibilantly; the doves throbbed gently from the trees; the sky was a flower-blue arch over her – it was, as they say, a lovely morning.

  She passed like a revenant along the edges of the mealie fields, watching the working gangs of natives; at the well she paused to see the women with their groups of naked children; at the cattle sheds she leaned to touch the wet noses of the thrusting soft-headed calves which butted and pushed at her legs. There she stayed for some time, finding comfort in these young creatures. She understood at last that it was nearly lunch-time. She must go home, and preside at the lunch-table for Tom, in case he should decide to return. She left the calves thinking: Perhaps I ought to have children? She knew perfectly well that she would not.

  The road back to the house wound along the high hogsback between two vleis that fell away on either side. She walked slowly, trying to recover that soft wonder she had felt when she first arrived on the farm and learned how living in cities had cheated her of the knowledge of the shapes of sky and land. Above her, in the great bright bell of blue sky, the wind currents were marked by swirls of cloud, the backwaters of the air by heavy sculptured piles of sluggish white. Around her the skeleton of rock showed under the thin covering of living soil. The trees thickened with the fall or rise of the ground, with the running of underground rivers; the grass – the long blond hair of the grass – struggled always to heal and hold whatever wounds were made by hoof of beast or thoughtlessness of man. The sky, the land, the swirling air, closed around her in an exchange of water and heat, and the deep multitudinous murmuring of living substance sounded like a humming in her blood. She listened, half-passively, half-rebelliously, and asked: ‘What do I contribute to all this?’

  That afternoon she walked again, for hours; and throughout the following day; returning to the house punctually for meals, and greeting Tom across the distance that puts itself between people who try to support themselves with the mental knowledge of a country, and those who work in it. Once Tom said, with tired concern, looking at her equally tired face: ‘Julia, I didn’t know you would mind so much. I suppose it was conceit. I always thought I came first.’

  ‘You do,’ she said quickly, ‘believe me, you do.’

  She went to him, so that he could put his arms about her. He did, and there was no warmth in it for either of them. ‘We’ll come right again,’ he promised her. But it was as though he listened to the sound of his own voice for a message of assurance.

  Kenneth came back unexpectedly on the fourth evening. He was alone; and he appeared purposeful and decided. During dinner no one spoke much. After dinner, in the bare, gaunt, firelit room, the three waited for someone to speak.

  At last Julia said: ‘Well, Kenneth?’

  ‘We are getting married next month.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In church,’ he said. He smiled constrictedly. ‘She wants a proper wedding. I don’t mind, if she likes it.’ Kenneth’s attitude was altogether brisk, down-to-earth and hard. At the same time he looked at Julia and Tom uneasily: he hated his position.

  ‘How old is she?’ asked Julia.

  ‘A baby. Twenty-three.’

  This shocked Julia. ‘Kenneth, you can’t do that.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Julia could not really see why not.

  ‘Has she money of her own?’ asked Tom practically, causing the other two to look at him in surprise. ‘After all,’ he said quickly, ‘we must know about her, before she comes?’

  ‘Of course she hasn’t,’ said Kenneth coldly. ‘She wouldn’t coming out to the Colonies on a subsidized scheme for importing marriageable women, would she?’

  Tom grimaced. ‘You two are brutal,’ he remarke
d.

  Kenneth and Julia glanced at each other; it was like a shrug. ‘I didn’t mention money in the first place,’ he pointed out. ‘You did. Anyway, what’s wrong with it? If I were a surplus woman in England I should certainly emigrate to find a husband. It’s the only sensible thing to do.’

  ‘What is she living on now?’ asked Julia.

  ‘She has a job in an office. Some such nonsense.’ Kenneth dismissed this. ‘Anyway, why talk about money? Surely we have enough?’

  ‘How much have we got?’ asked Julia, who was always rather vague about money.

  ‘A hell of a lot,’ said Tom, laughing. ‘The last three years we’ve made thousands.’

  ‘Difficult to say, there’s so much going back into the farms. Fifty thousand perhaps. We’ll make a lot more this year.’

  Julia smiled. The words ‘fifty thousand’ could not be made to come real in her mind. She thought of how she had earned her living for years, in offices, budgeting for everything she spent. ‘I suppose we could be described as rich?’ she asked wonderingly at last, trying to relate this fact to the life she lived, to the country around them, to their future.

  ‘I suppose we could,’ agreed Tom, snorting with amused laughter. He liked it when Julia made it possible for him to think of her as helpless. ‘Most of the credit goes to Kenneth,’ he added. ‘All the work he did during the war is reaping dividends now.’

  Julia looked at him; then sardonically at Kenneth, who was shifting uncomfortably in his chair. Tom persisted with good-natured sarcasm, getting his own back for Kenneth’s gibes over the war: ‘This is getting quite a show-place; I got a letter from the Government asking me if they could bring a collection of distinguished visitors from Home to see it, next week. You’ll have to act as hostess. They’re coming to see Kenneth’s war effort.’ He laughed. ‘It’s also been very profitable.’

  Kenneth shut his mouth hard; and kept his temper. ‘We are discussing my future wife,’ he said coldly.

  ‘So we are,’ said Julia.

  ‘Well, let’s finish with the thing. I shall give the girl a thumping, expensive honeymoon in the most glossy and awful hotels in the sub-continent,’ continued Kenneth grimly. ‘She’ll love it.’

  ‘Why shouldn’t she?’ asked Julia. ‘I should have loved it too, at her age.’

  ‘I didn’t say she shouldn’t.’

  ‘And then?’ asked Julia again. She was wanting to hear what sort of plans Kenneth had for another farm. He looked at her blankly. ‘And then what?’

  ‘Where will you go?’

  ‘Go?’

  It came to her that he did not intend to leave the farm. This was such a shock she could not speak. She collected herself at last, and said slowly: ‘Kenneth, surely you don’t intend to live here?’

  ‘Why not?’ he asked quickly, very much on the defensive.

  The atmosphere had tightened so that Julia saw, in looking from one man to the other, that this was the real crisis of the business, something she had not expected, but which they had both been waiting, consciously or unconsciously, for her to approach.

  ‘Good God,’ she said slowly, in rising anger. ‘Good God.’ She looked at Tom, who at once averted his eyes. She saw that Tom was longing uneasily for her to make it possible for Kenneth to stay.

  She understood at last that, if it had occurred to either of them that another woman could not live here, it was a knowledge neither of them was prepared to face. She looked at these two men and hated them, for the way they took their women into their lives, without changing a thought or a habit to meet them.

  She got up, and walked away from them slowly, standing with her back to them, gazing out of the window at the heavily-starred winter’s night. She said: ‘Kenneth, you are marrying this girl because you intend to have a family. You don’t care tuppence for her, really.’

  ‘I’ve got to be very fond of her,’ protested Kenneth.

  ‘At bottom, you don’t care tuppence.’

  He did not reply. ‘You are going to bring her here to me. She’ll feel with her instinct if not with her head that she’s being made use of. And you bring her here to me.’ It seemed to her that she had made her sense of outrage clear enough. She turned to face them.

  ‘The prospect of bringing her “to you” doesn’t seem to me as shocking as apparently it does to you,’ said Kenneth dryly.

  ‘Can’t you see?’ she said desperately. ‘She couldn’t compete …’

  ‘You flatter yourself,’ said Kenneth briskly.

  ‘Oh, I don’t mean that. I mean we’ve been together for so long. There’s nothing we don’t know about each other. Have I got to say it …’

  ‘No,’ said Kenneth quietly. ‘Much better not.’

  Through all this Tom, that large, fair, comfortable man, leaned back in his chair, looking from his wife to his half-brother with the air of one suddenly transported to a foreign country.

  He said stubbornly: ‘I don’t see why you shouldn’t adjust yourself, Julia. After all, both Kenneth and I have had to adjust ourselves to …’

  ‘Quite,’ said Kenneth quickly, ‘quite.’

  She turned on Kenneth furiously. ‘Why do you always cut the conversation short? Why shouldn’t we talk about it? It’s what’s real, isn’t it, for all of us?’

  ‘No point talking about it,’ said Kenneth, with a sullen look.

  ‘No,’ she said coldly. ‘No point.’ She turned away from them, fighting back tears. ‘At bottom neither of you really cared tuppence. That’s what it is.’ At the moment this seemed to her true.

  ‘What do you mean by “really caring”?’ asked Kenneth.

  Julia turned slowly from the window, jerking the light summer curtains across the stars. ‘I mean, we don’t care. We just don’t care.’ ‘I don’t know what you are talking about,’ said Tom, sounding bewildered and angry. ‘Haven’t you been happy with me? Is that what you are saying, Julia?’

  At this both Kenneth and Julia began laughing with an irresistible and painful laughter.

  ‘Of course I’ve been happy with you,’ she said flatly, at last.

  ‘Well then?’ asked Tom.

  ‘I don’t know why I was happy then and why I’m unhappy now.’

  ‘Let’s say you’re jealous,’ said Kenneth briskly.

  ‘But I don’t think I am.’

  ‘Of course you are.’

  ‘Very well then, I am. That’s not the point. What are we going to do to the girl?’ she asked suddenly, her feeling finding expression.

  ‘I shall make her a good husband,’ said Kenneth. The three of them looked at each other, with raised brows, with humorous, tightened lips.

  ‘Very well then,’ amended Kenneth. ‘But she’ll have plenty of nice children. She’ll have you for company, Julia, a nice intelligent woman. And she’ll have plenty of money and pretty clothes and all that sort of nonsense, if she wants them.’

  There was a silence so long it seemed that nothing could break it.

  Julia said slowly and painfully: ‘I think it is terrible we shouldn’t be able to explain what we feel or what we are.’

  ‘I wish you’d stop trying to,’ said Kenneth. ‘I find it unpleasant. And quite useless.’

  Tom said: ‘As for me, I would be most grateful if you’d try to explain what you are feeling, Julia. I haven’t an idea.’

  Julia stood up with her back to the fire and began gropingly: ‘Look at the way we are. I mean, what do we add up to? What are we doing here, in the first place?’

  ‘Doing where?’ asked Tom kindly.

  ‘Here, in Africa, in this district, on this land.’

  ‘Ohhh,’ groaned Tom humorously.

  ‘Oh Lord, Julia,’ protested Kenneth impatiently.

  ‘I feel as if we shouldn’t be here.’

  ‘Where should we be then?’

  ‘We’ve as much right as anybody else.’

  ‘I suppose so.’ Julia dismissed it. It was not her point, after all, it seemed. She said slowly: ‘I
suppose there are comparatively very few people in the world as secure and as rich as we are.’

  ‘It takes a couple of bad seasons or a change in the international set-up,’ said Kenneth. ‘We could get poor as easily as we’ve got rich. If you want to call it easy. We’ve worked hard enough, Tom and I.’

  ‘So do many other people. In the meantime we’ve all the money we want. Why do we never talk about money, never think about it? It’s what we are.’

  ‘Speak for yourself, Julia,’ said Tom. ‘Kenneth and I spend all our days thinking and talking about nothing else. How else do you suppose we’ve got rich?’

  ‘How to make it. Not what it all adds up to.’

  The two men did not reply; they looked at each other with resignation. Kenneth lit a cigarette, Tom a pipe.

  ‘I’ve been getting a feeling of money the last few days. Perhaps not so much money as …’ She stopped. ‘I can’t say what I feel. It’s no use. What do our lives add up to? That’s what I want to know.’

  ‘Why do you expect us to tell you?’ asked Kenneth curiously at last.

  This was a new note. Julia looked at him, puzzled. ‘I don’t know,’ she said at last. Then, very dryly: ‘I suppose I should be prepared to take the consequences for marrying the pair of you.’ The men laughed uneasily though with relief that the worst seemed to be over. ‘If I left this place tomorrow,’ she said sadly, ‘you simply wouldn’t miss me.’

  ‘Ah, you love Kenneth,’ groaned Tom suddenly. The groan was so sudden, coming just as the flippant note had been struck, and successfully, that Julia could not bear it. She continued quietly, lightly, to wipe away the naked pain of Tom’s voice: ‘No, I don’t. I wish you wouldn’t talk about love.’

  ‘That’s what all this is about,’ said Kenneth. ‘Love.’

  Julia looked at him scornfully. She said: ‘What sort of people are we? Let’s use bare words for bare facts, just for once.’

  ‘Must you?’ breathed Kenneth.

  ‘Yes, I must. The fact is that I have been a sort of high-class concubine for the two of you …’ She stopped at once. Even the beginning of the tirade sounded absurd in her own ears.