This Was the Old Chief's Country

by Doris Lessing

  Life had become easier…but this was only as she saw it, as Dorothy brought home to her.

  Dorothy came back to this household after what she called ‘a rest’ of some weeks, and Harriet could see her mother was preparing for a ‘real talk’ with her.

  ‘Now, girl, would you say that I am interfering? That I give you a lot of unwanted advice?’

  They were sitting at the big table, mid-morning, with cups of coffee. Ben was where they could watch him, as always, Dorothy was trying to make what she said humorous, but Harriet felt threatened. Her mother’s honest pink cheeks were bright with embarrassment, her blue eyes anxious.

  ‘No,’ said Harriet. ‘You aren’t. You don’t.’

  ‘Well, now I’m going to have my say.’

  But she had to stop: Ben began banging a stone against a metal tray. He did this with all his force. The noise was awful, but the women waited until Ben stopped: interrupted, he would have raged and hissed and spat.

  ‘You have five children,’ Dorothy said. ‘Not one. Do you realize that I might just as well be the mother of the others when I’m here? No, I don’t believe you do, you’ve got so taken over by…’

  Ben again banged the tray with his stone, in a frenzy of exulting accomplishment. It looked as if he believed he was hammering metal, forging something: one could easily imagine him, in the mines deep under the earth, with his kind…Again they waited until he stopped the noise.

  ‘It’s not right,’ said Dorothy. And Harriet remembered how her mother’s ‘That’s not right!’ had regulated her childhood.

  ‘I’m getting on, you know,’ said Dorothy. ‘I can’t go on like this, or I’ll get ill.’

  Yes, Dorothy was rather thin, even gaunt. Yes, Harriet thought, full of guilt as usual, she should have noticed.

  ‘And you have a husband, too,’ said Dorothy, apparently not knowing how she was turning the knife in her daughter’s heart. ‘He’s very good, you know, Harriet. I don’t know how he puts up with it.’

  The Christmas after Ben became three only partly filled the house. A cousin of David’s had said, ‘I’ve been inspired by you, Harriet! After all, I’ve got a home, too. It’s not as big as yours, but it’s a nice little house.’ Several of the family went there. But others said they were coming: made a point of coming, Harriet realized. These were the near relations.

  Again a pet was brought. This time it was a big dog, a cheerful boisterous mongrel, Sarah’s children’s friend, but most particularly Amy’s. Of course all the children loved him, but Paul most of all, and this made Harriet’s heart ache, for they could have no dog or cat in their home. She even thought: Well, now Ben is more sensible, perhaps…But she knew it was impossible. She watched how the big dog seemed to know that Amy, the loving little child in the big ugly body, needed gentleness: he moderated his exuberance for her. Amy would sit by the dog with her arm around his neck, and if she was clumsy with him, he lifted his muzzle and gently pushed her away a little, or gave a small warning sound that said, ‘Be careful.’ Sarah said this dog was like a nursemaid to Amy. ‘Just like Nana in Peter Pan,’ the children said. But if Ben was in the room, the dog watched him carefully and went to lie in a corner, his head on his paws, stiff with attention. One morning when people were sitting around having breakfast, Harriet for some reason turned her head and saw the dog, asleep, and Ben going silently up to him in a low crouch, hands held out in front of him…

  ‘Ben!’ said Harriet sharply. She saw those cold eyes turn towards her, caught a gleam of pure malice.

  The dog, alerted, scrambled up, and his hair stood on end. He whined anxiously, and came into the part of the room where they all were, and lay down under the table.

  Everyone had seen this, and sat silent, while Ben came to Dorothy and said, ‘I want milk.’ She poured him some, and he drank it down. Then he looked at them all staring at him. Again he seemed to be trying to understand them. He went into the garden, where they could see him, a squat little gnome, poking with a stick at the earth. The other children were upstairs somewhere.

  Around the table sat Dorothy, with Amy on her lap, Sarah, Molly, Frederick, James and David. Also Angela, the successful sister, ‘the coper’, whose children were all normal.

  The atmosphere made Harriet say defiantly, ‘All right, then, let’s have it.’

  She thought it not without significance, as they say, that it was Frederick who said, ‘Now look here, Harriet, you’ve got to face it, he’s got to go into an institution.’

  ‘Then we have to find a doctor who says he’s abnormal,’ said Harriet. ‘Dr Brett certainly won’t.’

  ‘Get another doctor,’ said Molly. ‘These things can be arranged.’ The two large haystacky people, with their red well-fed faces, were united in determination, nothing vague about them now they had decided there was a crisis, and one that – even indirectly – threatened them. They looked like a pair of judges after a good lunch, Harriet thought, and glanced at David to see if she could share this criticism with him; but he was staring down at the table, mouth tight. He agreed with them.

  Angela said, laughing, ‘Typical upper-class ruthlessness.’

  No one could remember that note being struck, or at least not so sharply, at this table before. Silence, and then Angela softened it with ‘Not that I don’t agree.’

  ‘Of course you agree,’ said Molly. ‘Anyone sensible would have to.’

  ‘It’s the way you said it,’ said Angela.

  ‘What does it matter how it is said?’ enquired Frederick.

  ‘And who is going to pay for it?’ asked David. ‘I can’t. All I can do is to keep the bills paid, and that is with James’s help.’

  ‘Well, James is going to have to bear the brunt of this one,’ said Frederick, ‘but we’ll chip in.’ It was the first time this couple had offered any financial help. ‘Mean, like all their sort,’ the rest of the family had agreed; and now this judgement was being remembered. They would come for a stay of ten days and contribute a pair of pheasants, a couple of bottles of very good wine. Their ‘chipping in’, everyone knew, wouldn’t amount to much.

  Full of division, the family sat silent.

  Then James said, ‘I’ll do what I can. But things are not as good as they were. Yachts are not everyone’s priority in hard times.’

  Silence again, and everyone was looking at Harriet.

  ‘You are funny people,’ she said, setting herself apart from them. ‘You’ve been here so often and you know –I mean, you really know what the problem is. What are we going to say to the people who run this institution?’

  ‘It depends on the institution,’ said Molly, and her large person seemed full of energy, conviction: as if she had swallowed Ben whole and was digesting him, thought Harriet. She said, mildly enough, though she trembled, ‘You mean, we have to find one of those places that exist in order to take on children families simply want to get rid of?’

  ‘Rich families,’ said Angela, with a defiant little sniff.

  Molly, confronting impertinence, said firmly, ‘Yes. If there is no other kind of place. But one thing is obvious: if something isn’t done, then it’s going to be catastrophic.’

  ‘It is catastrophic,’ said Dorothy, firmly taking her position. ‘The other children…they’re suffering. You’re so involved with it, girl, that you don’t see it.’

  ‘Look,’ said David, impatient and angry because he could not stand this, fibres tangled with Harriet, with his parents, being tugged and torn. ‘Look, I agree. And some time Harriet is going to have to agree. And as far as I am concerned, that time is now. I don’t think I can stick it any longer.’ And now he did look at his wife, and it was a pleading, suffering look. Please, he was saying to Harriet. Please.

  ‘Very well,’ said Harriet. ‘If some place can be found that…’ And she began to cry.

  Ben came in from the garden and stood watching them, in his usual position, which was apart from everyone else. He wore brown dungarees and a brown shirt, both in
strong material. Everything he wore had to be thick, because he tore his clothes, destroyed them. With his yellowish stubbly low-growing hair, his stony unblinking eyes, his stoop, his feet planted apart and his knees bent, his clenched held-forward fists, he seemed more than ever like a gnome.

  ‘She is crying,’ he remarked, of his mother. He took a piece of bread off the table and went out.

  ‘All right,’ said Harriet, ‘what are you going to tell them?’

  ‘Leave it to us,’ said Frederick.

  ‘Yes,’ said Molly.

  ‘My God!’ said Angela, with a kind of bitter appreciation of them. ‘Sometimes when I’m with you, I understand everything about this country.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Molly.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Frederick.

  ‘You aren’t being fair, girl,’ said Dorothy.

  ‘Fair,’ said Angela, and Harriet, and Sarah, her daughters, almost all at once.

  And then everyone but Harriet laughed. In this way was Ben’s fate decided.

  A few days later, Frederick rang to say that a place had been found and a car was coming for Ben. At once. Tomorrow.

  Harriet was frantic: the haste of it, the – yes, ruthlessness! And the doctor who had authorized this? Or would? A doctor who had not even seen Ben? She said all this to David, and knew from his manner that a good deal had gone on behind her back. His parents had talked to him at his office. David had said something like ‘Yes, I’ll see to it’ when Molly, whom suddenly Harriet hated, had said, ‘You’ll have to be firm with Harriet.’

  ‘It’s either him or us,’ said David to Harriet. He added, his voice full of cold dislike for Ben, ‘He’s probably just dropped in from Mars. He’s going back to report on what he’s found down here.’ He laughed – cruelly, it seemed to Harriet, who was silently taking in the fact – which of course she had half known already – that Ben was not expected to live long in this institution, whatever it was.

  ‘He’s a little child,’ she said, ‘He’s our child.’

  ‘No, he’s not,’ said David, finally. ‘Well, he certainly isn’t mine.’

  They were in the living-room. Children’s voices rose sharp and distant from the dark winter garden. On the same impulse, David and Harriet went to the window and pulled back the heavy curtains. The garden held dim shapes of tree and shrub, but the light from this warm room reached across the lawn to a shrub that was starkly black with winter, lit twiggy growths that showed a glitter of water, and illuminated the white trunk of a birch. Two small figures, indistinguishably unisex in their many-coloured padded jackets, trousers, woollen caps, emerged from the black under a holly thicket, and came forward. They were Helen and Luke, on some adventure. Both held sticks and were prodding them here and there into last year’s leaves.

  ‘Here it is!’ Helen’s voice rose in triumph, and the parents saw, emerging into the light on the end of the stick, the summer’s lost red-and-yellow plastic ball. It was dirtied and squashed, but whole. The two children began a fast stamping dance around and around, the rescued ball held aloft in triumph. Then, suddenly, for no obvious reason, they came racing up to the french doors. The parents sat down on a sofa, facing the doors, which burst inwards, and there they were, two slight, elegant little creatures, with flaring red, frost-burned cheeks and eyes full of the excitements of the dark wilderness they had been part of. They stood breathing heavily, their eyes slowly adjusting to reality, the warm, lit family room and their parents sitting there looking at them. For a moment it was the meeting of two alien forms of life: the children had been part of some old savagery, and their blood still pounded with it; but now they had to let their wild selves go away while they rejoined their family. Harriet and David shared this with them, were with them in imagination and in memory, from their own childhoods: they could see themselves clearly, two adults, sitting there, tame, domestic, even pitiable in their distance from wildness and freedom.

  Seeing their parents there alone, no other children around, and above all, no Ben, Helen came to her father, Luke to his mother, and Harriet and David embraced their two adventurous little children, their children, holding them tight.

  Next morning the car, which was a small black van, came for Ben. Harriet had known it was coming, because David had not gone to work. He had stayed so as to ‘handle’ her! David went upstairs, and brought down suitcases and holdalls that he had packed quietly while she was giving the children breakfast.

  He flung these into the van. Then, his face set hard, so that Harriet hardly knew him, he picked Ben up from where he sat on the floor in the living-room, carried him to the van, and put him in. Then he came fast to Harriet, with the same hard set face, and put his arm around her, turned her away from the sight of the van, which was already on its way (she could hear yells and shouts coming from inside it), and took her to the sofa, where – still holding her tight – he said, over and over again, ‘We have to do it, Harriet. We have to.’ She was weeping with the shock of it, and with relief, and with gratitude to him, who was taking all the responsibility.

  When the children came home, they were told Ben had gone to stay with someone.

  ‘With Granny?’ asked Helen, anxious.

  ‘No.’

  Four pairs of suspicious, apprehensive eyes became suddenly full of relief. Hysterical relief. The children danced about, unable to help themselves, and then pretended it was a game they had thought up then and there.

  At supper they were overbright, giggling, hysterical. But in a quiet moment Jane asked shrilly, ‘Are you going to send us away, too?’ She was a stolid, quiet little girl, Dorothy in miniature, never saying anything unnecessary. But now her large blue eyes were fixed in terror on her mother’s face.

  ‘No, of course we aren’t,’ said David, sounding curt.

  Luke explained, ‘They are sending Ben away because he isn’t really one of us.’

  In the days that followed, the family expanded like paper flowers in water. Harriet understood what a burden Ben had been, how he had oppressed them all, how much the children had suffered; knew that they had talked about it much more than the parents had wanted to know, had tried to come to terms with Ben. But now Ben was gone their eyes shone, they were full of high spirits, and they kept coming to Harriet with little gifts of a sweet or a toy, ‘This is for you, Mummy.’ Or they rushed up to kiss her, or stroke her face, or nuzzle to her like happy calves or foals. And David took days off from work to be with them all – to be with her. He was careful with her, tender. As if I were ill, she decided rebelliously. Of course she thought all the time of Ben, who was a prisoner somewhere. What kind of a prisoner? She pictured the little black van, remembered his cries of rage as he was taken away.

  The days went by, and normality filled the house. Harriet heard the children talking about the Easter holidays. ‘It will be all right now that Ben isn’t here,’ said Helen.

  They had always understood so much more than she had wanted to acknowledge.

  While she was part of the general relief, and could hardly believe she had been able to stand such strain, and for so long, she could not banish Ben from her mind. It was not with love, or even affection, that she thought of him, and she disliked herself for not being able to find one little spark of normal feeling: it was guilt and horror that kept her awake through the nights. David knew she was awake, though she did try to hide it.

  Then one morning she started up out of sleep, out of a bad dream, though she did not know what, and she said, ‘I’m going to see what they are doing to Ben.’

  David opened his eyes, and lay silent, staring over his arm at the window. He had been dozing, not asleep. She knew he had feared this, and there was something about him then that said to her: Right, then that’s it, it’s enough.

  ‘David, I’ve got to.’

  ‘Don’t,’ he said.

  ‘I simply have to.’

  Again she knew from the way he lay there, not looking at her, and did not say anything more than that one sylla
ble, that it was bad for her, that he was making decisions as he lay there. He stayed where he was for a few minutes, and then got out of bed, and went out of the room and downstairs.

  When she had got her clothes on, she rang Molly, who was at once coldly angry. ‘No, I’m not going to tell you where it is. Now you’ve done it, then leave it alone.’

  But at last she did give Harriet the address.

  Again Harriet was wondering why she was always treated like a criminal. Ever since Ben was born it’s been like this, she thought. Now it seemed to her the truth, that everyone had silently condemned her. I have suffered a misfortune, she told herself; I haven’t committed a crime.

  Ben had been taken to a place in the North of England; it would be four or five hours’ drive – perhaps more, if she was unlucky with traffic. There was bad traffic, and she drove through grey wintry rain. It was early afternoon when she approached a large solid building of dark stone, in a valley high among moors she could hardly see for grey drifting rain. The place stood square and upright among dismal dripping evergreens, and its regular windows, three rows of them, were barred.

  She entered a small entrance lobby that had a handwritten card tacked on the inner door: ‘Ring for Attendance.’ She rang, and waited, and nothing happened. Her heart was beating. She still surged with the adrenalin that had given her the impetus to come, but the long drive had subdued her, and this oppressive building was telling her nerves, if not her intelligence – for, after all, she had no facts to go on – that what she had feared was true. Yet she did not know exactly what that was. She rang again. The building was silent: she could hear the shrill of a bell a long way off in its interior. Again, nothing, and she was about to go around to the back when the door abruptly opened to show a slatternly girl wearing jerseys, cardigans, and a thick scarf. She had a pale little face under a mass of curly yellow hair that had a blue ribbon holding a queue like a sheep’s tail. She seemed tired.