This Was the Old Chief's Country

by Doris Lessing

  Temporarily Philip turned his mind from thoughts of blossoming deserts, and so on, and tried another approach. Perhaps they could buy a house through one of the Schemes for Immigrants? He would return from this Housing Board or that, and say in a worried voice: ‘There isn’t a hope unless one has three children.’ At this, Marina was likely to become depressed; for she still held the old-fashioned view that before one has children one should have a house to put them in.

  ‘It’s all very well for you,’ said Marina. ‘As far as I can see you’ll be spending half your time gallivanting in your lorry from one end of the country to the other, visiting native reserves, and having a lovely time. I don’t mind, but I have to make some sort of life for myself while you do it.’ Philip looked rather guilty; for in fact he was away three or four days a week, on trips with fellow experts, and Marina would be very often left alone.

  ‘Perhaps we could find somewhere temporary, while we wait for a house to turn up?’ he suggested.

  This offered itself quite soon. Philip heard from a man he met casually that there was a flat available for three months, but he wouldn’t swear to it, because it was only an overheard remark at a sundowner party – Philip followed the trail, clinched the deal, and returned to Marina. ‘It’s only for three months,’ he comforted her.

  138 Cecil John Rhodes Vista was in that part of the town built before the sudden expansion in the ’thirties. These were all old houses, unfashionable, built to no important recipe, but according to the whims of the first owners. On one side of 138 was a house whose roof curved down, Chinese fashion, built on a platform for protection against ants, with wooden steps. Its walls were of wood, and it was possible to hear feet tramping over the wooden floors even in the street outside. The other neighbour was a house whose walls were invisible under a mass of golden shower – thick yellow clusters, like smoky honey, dripped from roof to ground. The houses opposite were hidden by massed shrubs.

  From the street, all but the roof of 138 was screened by a tall and straggling hedge. The sidewalks were dusty grass, scattered with faggots of dogs’ dirt, so that one had to walk carefully. Outside the gate was a great clump of bamboo reaching high into the sky, and all the year round weaverbirds’ nests, like woven-grass cricket balls, dangled there bouncing and swaying in the wind. Near it reached the angled brown sticks of the frangipani, breaking into white and a creamy pink, as if a young coloured girl held armfuls of blossom. The street itself was double-lined with trees, first jacaranda, fine green lace against the blue sky, and behind heavy dark masses of the cedrilatoona. All the way down the street were bursts of colour, a drape of purple bougainvillaea, the sparse scarlet flowers of the hibiscus. It was very beautiful, very peaceful.

  Once inside the unkempt hedge, 138 was exposed as a shallow brick building, tin-roofed, like an elongated barn, that occupied the centre of two building stands, leaving plenty of space for front and back yards. It had a history. Some twenty years back, some enterprising businessman had built the place, ignoring every known rule of hygiene, in the interests of economy. By the time the local authorities had come to notice its unfitness to exist, the roof was on. There followed a series of court cases. An exhausted judge had finally remarked that there was a housing shortage; and on this basis the place was allowed to remain.

  It was really eight semi-detached houses, stuck together in such a way that standing before the front door of any one, it was possible to see clear through the two rooms which composed each, to the back yard, where washing flapped over the woodpile. A veranda enclosed the front of the building: eight short flights of steps, eight front doors, eight windows – but these windows illuminated the front rooms only. The back room opened into a porch that was screened in by dull green mosquito gauze; and in this way the architect had achieved the really remarkable feat of producing, in a country continually drenched by sunlight, rooms in which it was necessary to have the lights burning all day.

  The back yard, a space of bare dust enclosed by parallel hibiscus hedges, was a triumph of individualism over communal living. Eight separate woodpiles, eight clothes-lines, eight short paths edged with brick leading to the eight lavatories that were built side by side like segments of chocolate, behind an enclosing tin screen: the locks (and therefore the keys) were identical, for the sake of cheapness, a system which guaranteed strife among the inhabitants. On either side of the lavatories were two rooms, built as a unit. In these four rooms lived eight native servants. At least officially there were eight, in practice far more.

  When Marina, a woman who took her responsibilities seriously, as has been indicated, looked inside the room which her servant shared with the servant from next door, she exclaimed helplessly: ‘Dear me, how awful!’ The room was very small. The brick walls were unplastered, the tin of the roof bare, focusing the sun’s intensity inwards all day, so that even while she stood on the threshold, she began to feel a little faint because of the enclosed heat. The floor was cement, and the blankets that served as beds lay directly on it. No cupboards or shelves: these were substituted by a string stretching from corner to corner. Two small, high windows, whose glass was cracked and pasted with paper. On the walls were pictures of the English royal family, torn out of illustrated magazines, and of various female film stars, mostly unclothed.

  ‘Dear me,’ said Marina again, vaguely. She was feeling very guilty, because of this squalor. She came out of the room with relief, wiping the sweat from her face, and looked around the yard. Seen from the back, 138 Cecil John Rhodes Vista was undeniably picturesque. The yard, enclosed by low, scarlet-flowering hibiscus hedges, was of dull red earth; the piles of grey wood were each surrounded by a patch of scattered chips, yellow, orange, white. The colourful washing lines swung and danced. The servants, in their crisp white, leaned on their axes, or gossiped. There was a little black nurse-girl seated on one of the logs, under a big tree, with a white child in her arms. A delightful scene, it would have done as it was for the opening number of a musical comedy. Marina turned her back on it; and with her stern reformer’s eye looked again at the end of the yard. In the space between the lavatories and the servants’ rooms stood eight rubbish cans, each covered by its cloud of flies, and exuding a stale sour smell. She walked through them into the sanitary lane. Now if one drives down the streets of such a city, one sees the trees, the gardens, the flowering hedges; the streets form neat squares. Squares (one might suppose) filled with blossoms and greenness, in which the houses are charmingly arranged. But each block is divided down the middle by a sanitary lane, a dust lane, which is lined by rubbish cans, and in this the servants have their social life. Here they go for a quick smoke, in the middle of the day’s work; here they meet their friends, or flirt with the women who sell vegetables. It is as if, between each of the streets of the white man’s city, there is a hidden street, ignored, forgotten. Marina, emerging into it, found it swarming with gossiping and laughing Africans. They froze, gave her a long suspicious stare, and all at once seemed to vanish, escaping into their respective back yards. In a moment she was alone.

  She walked slowly back across the yard to her back door, picking her way among the soft litter from the woodpiles, ducking her head under the flapping clothes. She was watched, cautiously, by the servants, who were suspicious of this sudden curiosity about their way of life – experience had taught them to be suspicious. She was watched, also, by several of the women, through their kitchen windows. They saw a small Englishwoman, with a neat and composed body, pretty fair hair, and a pink and white face under a large straw hat, which she balanced in position with a hand clothed in a white glove. She moved delicately and with obvious distaste through the dust, as if at any moment she might take wings and fly away altogether.

  When she reached her back steps, she stopped and called: ‘Charlie! Come here a moment, please.’ It was a high voice, a little querulous. When they heard the accents of that voice, saw the white glove, and noted that please the watching women found all their worst fears co
nfirmed.

  A young African emerged from the sanitary lane where he had been gossiping (until interrupted by Marina’s appearance) with some passing friends. He ran to his new mistress. He wore white shorts, a scarlet American-style shirt, tartan socks which were secured by mauve suspenders, and white tennis shoes. He stopped before her with a polite smile, which almost at once spread into a grin of pure friendliness. He was an amiable and cheerful young man by temperament. This was Marina’s first morning in her new home, and she was already conscious of the disproportion between her strong pity for her servant, and that inveterately cheerful face.

  She did not, of course, speak any native language, but Charlie spoke English.

  ‘Charlie, how long have you been working here?’

  ‘Two years, madam.’

  ‘Where do you come from?’

  ‘Madam?’

  ‘Where is your home?’

  ‘Nyasaland.’

  ‘Oh.’ For this was hundreds of miles north.

  ‘Do you go home to visit your family?’

  ‘Perhaps this year, madam.’

  ‘I see. Do you like it here?’

  ‘Madam?’ A pause; and he involuntarily glanced back over the rubbish cans at the sanitary lane. He hoped that his friends, who worked on the other side of the town, and whom he did not often see, would not get tired of waiting for him. He hoped, too, that this new mistress (whose politeness to him he did not trust) was not going to choose this moment to order him to clean the silver or do the washing. He continued to grin, but his face was a little anxious, and his eyes rolled continually backwards at the sanitary lane.

  ‘I hope you will be happy working for me,’ said Marina.

  ‘Oh, yes, madam,’ he said at once, disappointedly; for clearly she was going to tell him to work.

  ‘If there is anything you want, you must ask me. I am new to this country, and I may make mistakes.’

  He hesitated, handling the words in his mind. But they were difficult, and he let them slip. He did not think in terms of countries, of continents. He knew the white man’s town – this town. He knew the veld. He knew the village from which he came. He knew, from his educated friends, that there was ‘a big water’ across which the white man came in ships: he had seen pictures of ships in old magazines, but this ‘big water’ was confused in his mind with the great lake in his own country. He understood that these white people came from places called England, Germany, Europe, but these were names to him. Once, a friend of his who had been three years to a mission school had said that Africa was one of several continents, and had shown him a tattered sheet of paper – one half of the map of the world – saying: Here is Africa, here is England, here is India. He pointed out Nyasaland, a tiny strip of country, and Charlie felt confused and diminished, for Nyasaland was what he knew, and it seemed to him so vast. Now, when Marina used the phrase ‘this country’ Charlie saw, for a moment, this flat piece of paper, tinted pink and green and blue – the world. But from the sanitary lane came shouts of laughter – again he glanced anxiously over his shoulder; and Marina was conscious of a feeling remarkably like irritation. ‘Well, you may go,’ she said formally; and saw his smile flash white right across his face. He turned, and ran back across the yard like an athlete, clearing the woodpile, then the rubbish cans, in a series of great bounds, and vanished behind the lavatories. Marina went inside her ‘flat’ with what was, had she known it, an angry frown. ‘Disgraceful,’ she muttered, including in this condemnation the bare room in which this man was expected to fit his life, the dirty sanitary lane bordered with stinking rubbish cans, and also his unreasonable cheerfulness.

  Inside, she forgot him in her own discomfort. It was a truly shocking place. The two small rooms were so made that the inter-leading door was in the centre of the wall. They were more like passages than rooms. She switched on the light in what would be the bedroom, and put her hand to her cheek, for it stung where the sun had caught her unaccustomed skin through the chinks of the straw of her hat. The furniture was really beyond description! Two iron bedsteads, on either side of the door, a vast chocolate-brown wardrobe, whose door would not properly shut, one dingy straw mat that slid this way and that over the slippery boards as one walked on it. And the front room! If possible, it was even worse. An enormous cretonne-covered sofa, like a solidified flower bed, a hard and shiny table stuck in the middle of the floor, so that one must walk carefully around it, and four straight, hard chairs, ranged like soldiers against the wall. And the pictures – she did not know such pictures still existed. There was a desert scene, done in coloured cloth, behind glass; a motto in woven straw, also framed in glass, saying Welcome all who come in here, Good luck to you and all good cheer.

  There was also a very large picture of highland cattle. Half a dozen of these shaggy and ferocious creatures glared down at her from where they stood knee-deep in sunset-tinted pools. One might imagine that pictures of highland cattle no longer existed outside of Victorian novels, or remote suburban boarding-houses – but no, here they were. Really, why bother to emigrate?

  She almost marched over and wrenched that picture from the wall. A curious inhibition prevented her. It was, though she did not know it, the spirit of the building. Some time later she heard Mrs Black, who had been living for years in the next flat with her husband and three children, remark grimly: ‘My front door handle has been stuck for weeks, but I’m not going to mend it. If I start doing the place up, it means I’m here for ever.’ Marina recognized her own feeling when she heard these words. It accounted for the fact that while the families here were all respectable, in the sense that they owned cars, and could expect a regular monthly income, if one looked through the neglected hedge it was impossible not to conclude that every person in the building was born sloven or slut. No one really lived here. They might have been here for years, without prospect of anything better, but they did not live here.

  There was one exception, Mrs Pond, who painted her walls and mended what broke. It was felt she let everyone else down. In front of her steps a narrow path edged with brick led to her segment of yard, which was perhaps two feet across, in which lilies and roses were held upright by trellis work, like a tall, green sandwich standing at random in the dusty yard.

  Marina thought: Well, what’s the point? I’m not going to live here. The picture could stay. Similarly, she decided there was no sense in unpacking her nice curtains or her books. And the furniture might remain as it was, for it was too awful to waste effort on it. Her thoughts returned to the servants’ rooms at the back: it was a disgrace. The whole system was disgraceful.

  At this point, Mrs Pond knocked perfunctorily and entered. She was a short, solid woman, tied in at the waist, like a tight sausage, by the string of her apron. She had hard red cheeks, a full hard bosom, and energetic red hands. Her eyes were small and inquisitive. Her face was ill-tempered, perhaps because she could not help knowing she was disliked. She was used to the disapproving eyes of her fellow tenants, watching her attend to her strip of ‘garden’; or while she swept the narrow strip across the back yard that was her path from the back door to her lavatory. There she stood, every morning, among the washing and the woodpiles, wearing a pink satin dressing-gown trimmed with swansdown, among the clouds of dust stirred up by her yard broom, returning defiant glances for the disapproving ones; and later she would say: ‘Two rooms is quite enough for a woman by herself. I’m quite satisfied.’

  She had no right to be satisfied, or at any rate, to say so …

  But for a woman contented with her lot, there was a look in those sharp eyes which could too easily be diagnosed as envy; and when she said, much too sweetly: ‘You are an old friend of Mrs Skinner, maybe?’ Marina recognized, with the exhaustion that comes to everyone who has lived too long in overfull buildings, the existence of conspiracy. ‘I have never met Mrs Skinner,’ she said briefly. ‘She said she was coming here this morning to make arrangements.’

  Now, arrangements had been made a
lready, with Philip; and Marina knew Mrs Skinner was coming to inspect herself; and this thought irritated her.

  ‘She is a nice lady,’ said Mrs Pond. ‘She’s my friend. We two have been living here longer than anyone else.’ Her voice was sour. Marina followed the direction of her eyes, and saw a large white door set into the wall. A built-in cupboard, in fact. She had already noted that cupboard as the only sensible amenity the ‘flat’ possessed.

  ‘That’s a nice cupboard,’ said Mrs Pond.

  ‘Have all the flats got built-in cupboards?’

  ‘Oh, no. Mrs Skinner had this put in special last year. She paid for it. Not the landlord. You don’t catch the landlord paying for anything.’

  ‘I see,’ said Marina.

  ‘Mrs Skinner promised me this flat,’ said Mrs Pond.

  Marina made no reply. She looked at her wrist-watch. It was a beautiful gesture; she even felt a little guilty because of the pointedness of it; but Mrs Pond promptly said: ‘It’s eleven o’clock. The clock just struck.’

  ‘I must finish the unpacking,’ said Marina.

  Mrs Pond seated herself on the flowery sofa, and remarked: ‘There’s always plenty to do when you move in. That cupboard will save you plenty of space. Mrs Skinner kept her linen in it. I was going to put all my clothes in. You’re Civil Service, so I hear?’