African Stories

by Doris Lessing

  She sat on the verandah for half an hour, looking at the sunset sky without seeing it, and writhing with various emotions, none of which she classified. Eventually she called the houseboy, and gave him a note, asking the two to come to dinner. No sooner had the boy left, and was trotting off down the bushy path to the gate, than she called him back. “I’ll go myself,” she said. This was partly to prove that she made nothing of walking the half mile, and partly from contrition. After all, it was no crime to get married, and they seemed very fond of each other. That was how she put it.

  When she came to the house, the front room was littered with luggage, paper, pots and pans. All the exquisite order she had created was destroyed. She could hear voices from the bedroom.

  “But, Jack, I don’t want you to. I want you to stay with me.” And then his voice, humorous, proud, slow, amorous: “You’ll do what I tell you, my girl. I’ve got to see the old man and find out what’s cooking. I start work tomorrow, don’t forget.”

  “But, Jack . . .”’ Then came sounds of scuffling, laughter, and a sharp slap.

  “Well,” said Mrs. Gale, drawing in her breath. She knocked on the wood of the door, and all sound ceased. “Come in,” came the girl’s voice. Mrs. Gale hesitated, then went into the bedroom.

  Mrs. De Wet was sitting in a bunch on the bed, her flowered frock spread all around her, combing her hair. Mrs. Gale noted that the two beds had already been pushed together. “I’ve come to ask you to dinner,” she said briskly. “You don’t want to have to cook when you’ve just come.”

  Their faces had already become blank and polite.

  “Oh no, don’t trouble, Mrs. Gale,” said De Wet, awkwardly. “We’ll get ourselves something, don’t worry.” He glanced at the girl, and his face softened. He said, unable to resist it: “She’ll get busy with the tin-opener in a minute, I expect. That’s her idea of feeding a man.”

  “Oh Jack,” pouted his wife.

  De Wet turned back to the washstand, and proceeded to swab lather on his face. Waving the brush at Mrs. Gale, he said: “Thanks all the same. But tell the Major I’ll be over after dinner to talk things over.”

  “Very well,” said Mrs. Gale, “just as you like.”

  She walked away from the house. Now she felt rebuffed. After all, they might have had the politeness to come; yet she was pleased they hadn’t; yet if they preferred making love to getting to know the people who were to be their close neighbours for what might be years, it was their own affair . . .

  Mrs. De Wet was saying, as she painted her toenails, with her knees drawn up to her chin, and the bottle of varnish gripped between her heels: “Who the hell does she think she is, anyway? Surely she could give us a meal without making such a fuss when we’ve just come.”

  “She came to ask us, didn’t she?”

  “Hoping we would say no.”

  And Mrs. Gale knew quite well that this was what they were thinking, and felt it was unjust. She would have liked them to come: the man wasn’t a bad sort, in his way; a simple soul, but pleasant enough; as for the girl, she would have to learn, that was all. They should have come; it was their fault. Nevertheless she was filled with that discomfort that comes of having done a job badly. If she had behaved differently they would have come. She was cross throughout dinner; and that meal was not half finished when there was a knock on the door. De Wet stood there, apparently surprised they had not finished, from which it seemed that the couple had, after all, dined off sardines and bread and butter.

  Major Gale left his meal and went out to the verandah to discuss business. Mrs. Gale finished her dinner in state, and then joined the two men. Her husband rose politely at her coming, offered her a chair, sat down and forgot her presence. She listened to them talking for some two hours. Then she interjected a remark (a thing she never did, as a rule, for women get used to sitting silent when men discuss farming) and did not know herself what made her say what she did about the cattle; but when De Wet looked round absently as if to say she should mind her own business, and her husband remarked absently, “Yes, dear,” when a Yes dear did not fit her remark at all, she got up angrily and went indoors. Well, let them talk, then, she did not mind.

  As she undressed for bed, she decided she was tired, because of her broken sleep that afternoon. But she could not sleep then, either. She listened to the sound of the men’s voices, drifting brokenly round the corner of the verandah. They seemed to be thoroughly enjoying themselves. It was after twelve when she heard De Wet say, in that slow facetious way of his: “I’d better be getting home. I’ll catch it hot, as it is.” And, with rage, Mrs. Gale heard her husband laugh. He actually laughed. She realized that she herself had been planning an acid remark for when he came to the bedroom; so when he did enter, smelling of tobacco smoke, and grinning, and then proceeded to walk jauntily about the room in his underclothes, she said nothing, but noted that he was getting fat, in spite of all the hard work he did.

  “Well, what do you think of the man?”

  “Hell do very well indeed,” said Major Gale, with satisfaction. “Very well. He knows his stuff all right. He’s been doing mixed farming in the Transvaal for years.” After a moment he asked politely, as he got with a bounce into his own bed on the other side of the room: “And what is she like?”

  “I haven’t seen much of her, have I? But she seems pleasant enough.” Mrs. Gale spoke with measured detachment.

  “Someone for you to talk to,” said Major Gale, turning himself over to sleep. “You had better ask her over to tea.”

  At this Mrs. Gale sat straight up in her own bed with a jerk of annoyance. Someone for her to talk to, indeed! But she composed herself, said good night with her usual briskness, and lay awake. Next day she must certainly ask the girl to morning tea. It would be rude not to. Besides, that would leave the afternoon free for her garden and her mountains.

  Next morning she sent a boy across with a note, which read: “I shall be so pleased if you will join me for morning tea.” She signed it: Caroline Gale.

  She went herself to the kitchen to cook scones and cakes. At eleven o’clock she was seated on the verandah in the green-dappled shade from the creepers, saying to herself that she believed she was in for a headache. Living as she did, in a long, timeless abstraction of growing things and mountains and silence, she had become very conscious of her body’s responses to weather and to the slow advance of age. A small ache in her ankle when rain was due was like a cherished friend. Or she would sit with her eyes shut, in the shade, after a morning’s pruning in the violent sun, feeling waves of pain flood back from her eyes to the back of her skull, and say with satisfaction: “You deserve it, Caroline!” It was right she should pay for such pleasure with such pain.

  At last she heard lagging footsteps up the path, and she opened her eyes reluctantly. There was the girl, preparing her face for a social occasion, walking primly through the bougainvillaea arches, in a flowered frock as vivid as her surroundings. Mrs. Gale jumped to her feet and cried gaily: “I am so glad you had time to come.” Mrs. De Wet giggled irresistibly and said: “But I had nothing else to do, had I?” Afterwards she said scornfully to her husband: “She’s nuts. She writes me letters with stuck-down envelopes when I’m five minutes away, and says Have I the time? What the hell else did she think I had to do?” And then, violently: “She can’t have anything to do. There was enough food to feed ten.”

  “Wouldn’t be a bad idea if you spent more time cooking,” said De Wet fondly.

  The next day Mrs. Gale gardened, feeling guilty all the time, because she could not bring herself to send over another note of invitation. After a few days, she invited the De Wets to dinner, and through the meal made polite conversation with the girl while the men lost themselves in cattle diseases. What could one talk to a girl like that about? Nothing! Her mind, as far as Mrs. Gale was concerned, was a dark continent, which she had no inclination to explore. Mrs. De Wet was not interested in recipes, and when Mrs. Gale gave helpful advice ab
out ordering clothes from England, which was so much cheaper than buying them in the local towns, the reply came that she had made all her own clothes since she was seven. After that there seemed nothing to say, for it was hardly possible to remark that these strapped sun-dresses and bright slacks were quite unsuitable for the farm, besides being foolish, since bare shoulders in this sun were dangerous. As for her shoes! She wore corded beach sandals which had already turned dust colour from the roads.

  There were two more tea parties; then they were allowed to lapse. From time to time Mrs. Gale wondered uneasily what on earth the poor child did with herself all day, and felt it was her duty to go and find out. But she did not.

  One morning she was pricking seedlings into a tin when the houseboy came and said the little missus was on the verandah and she was sick.

  At once dismay flooded Mrs. Gale. She thought of a dozen tropical diseases, of which she had had unpleasant experience, and almost ran to the verandah. There was the girl, sitting screwed up in a chair, her face contorted, her eyes red, her whole body shuddering violently. “Malaria,” thought Mrs. Gale at once, noting that trembling.

  “What is the trouble, my dear?” Her voice was kind. She put her hand on the girl’s shoulder. Mrs. De Wet turned and flung her arms round her hips, weeping, weeping, her small curly head buried in Mrs. Gale’s stomach. Holding herself stiffly away from this dismaying contact, Mrs. Gale stroked the head and made soothing noises.

  “Mrs. Gale, Mrs. Gale . . .”

  “What is it?”

  “I can’t stand it. I shall go mad. I simply can’t stand it.”

  Mrs. Gale, seeing that this was not a physical illness, lifted her up, led her inside, laid her on her own bed, and fetched cologne and handkerchiefs. Mrs. De Wet sobbed for a long while, clutching the older woman’s hand, and then at last grew silent. Finally she sat up with a small rueful smile, and said pathetically: “I am a fool.”

  “But what is it, dear?”

  “It isn’t anything, really. I am so lonely. I wanted to get my mother up to stay with me, only Jack said there wasn’t room, and he’s quite right, only I got mad, because I thought he might at least have had my mother . . .”

  Mrs. Gale felt guilt like a sword: she could have filled the place of this child’s mother.

  “And it isn’t anything, Mrs. Gale, not really. It’s not that I’m not happy with Jack. I am, but I never see him. I’m not used to this kind of thing. I come from a family of thirteen counting my parents, and I simply can’t stand it.”

  Mrs. Gale sat and listened, and thought of her own loneliness when she first began this sort of life.

  “And then he comes in late, not till seven sometimes, and I know he can’t help it, with the farm work and all that, and then he has supper and goes straight off to bed. I am not sleepy then. And then I get up sometimes and I walk along the road with my dog . . .”

  Mrs. Gale remembered how, in the early days after her husband had finished with his brief and apologetic embraces, she used to rise with a sense of relief and steal to the front room, where she lighted the lamp again and sat writing letters, reading old ones, thinking of her friends and of herself as a girl. But that was before she had her first child. She thought: This girl should have a baby; and could not help glancing downwards at her stomach.

  Mrs. De Wet, who missed nothing, said resentfully: “Jack says I should have a baby. That’s all he says.” Then, since she had to include Mrs. Gale in this resentment, she transformed herself all at once from a sobbing baby into a gauche but armoured young woman with whom Mrs. Gale could have no contact. “I am sorry,” she said formally. Then, with a grating humour: “Thank you for letting me blow off steam.” She climbed off the bed, shook her skirts straight, and tossed her head. “Thank you. I am a nuisance.” With painful brightness she added: “So, that’s how it goes. Who would be a woman, eh?”

  Mrs. Gale stiffened. “You must come and see me whenever you are lonely,” she said, equally bright and false. It seemed to her incredible that this girl should come to her with all her defences down, and then suddenly shut her out with this facetious nonsense. But she felt more comfortable with the distance between them, she couldn’t deny it.

  “Oh, I will, Mrs. Gale. Thank you so much for asking me.” She lingered for a moment, frowning at the brilliantly polished table in the front room, and then took her leave. Mrs. Gale watched her go. She noted that at the gate the girl started whistling gaily, and smiled comically. Letting off steam! Well, she said to herself, well . . . And she went back to her garden.

  That afternoon she made a point of walking across to the other house. She would offer to show Mrs. De Wet the garden. The two women returned together, Mrs. Gale wondering if the girl regretted her emotional lapse of the morning. If so, she showed no signs of it. She broke into bright chatter when a topic mercifully occurred to her; in between were polite silences full of attention to what she seemed to hope Mrs. Gale might say.

  Mrs. Gale was relying on the effect of her garden. They passed the house through the shrubs. There were the fountains, sending up their vivid showers of spray, there the cool mats of water lilies, under which the coloured fishes slipped, there the irises, sunk in green turf.

  “This must cost a packet to keep up,” said Mrs. De Wet. She stood at the edge of the pool, looking at her reflection dissolving among the broad green leaves, glanced obliquely up at Mrs. Gale, and dabbled her exposed red toenails in the water.

  Mrs. Gale saw that she was thinking of herself as her husband’s employer’s wife. “It does, rather,” she said drily, remembering that the only quarrels she ever had with her husband were over the cost of pumping up water. “You are fond of gardens?” she asked. She could not imagine anyone not being fond of gardens.

  Mrs. De Wet said sullenly: “My mother was always too busy having kids to have time for gardens. She had her last baby early this year.” An ancient and incommunicable resentment dulled her face. Mrs. Gale, seeing that all this beauty and peace meant nothing to her companion that she would have it mean, said, playing her last card: “Come and see my mountains.” She regretted the pronoun as soon as it was out—so exaggerated.

  But when she had the girl safely on the rocky verge of the escarpment, she heard her say: “There’s my river.” She was leaning forward over the great gulf, and her voice was lifted with excitement. “Look,” she was saying. “Look, there it is.” She turned to Mrs. Gale, laughing, her hair spun over her eyes in a fine iridescent rain, tossing her head back, clutching her skirts down, exhilarated by the tussle with the wind.

  “Mind, you’ll lose your balance.” Mrs. Gale pulled her back. “You have been down to the river, then?”

  “I go there every morning.”

  Mrs. Gale was silent. The thing seemed preposterous. “But it is four miles there and four back.”

  “Oh, I’m used to walking.”

  “But . . .” Mrs. Gale heard her own sour, expostulating voice and stopped herself. There was after all no logical reason why the girl should not go to the river. “What do you do there?”

  “I sit on the edge of a big rock and dangle my legs in the water, and I fish, sometimes. I caught a barble last week. It tasted foul, but it was fun catching it. And I pick water lilies.”

  “There are crocodiles,” said Mrs. Gale sharply. The girl was wrong-headed; anyone was who could like that steamy bath of vapours, heat, smells and—what? It was an unpleasant place. “A native girl was taken there last year, at the ford.”

  “There couldn’t be a crocodile where I go. The water is clear, right down. You can see right under the rocks. It is a lovely pool. There’s a kingfisher, and water-birds, all colours. They are so pretty. And when you sit there and look, the sky is a long narrow slit. From here it looks quite far across the river to the other side, but really it isn’t. And the trees crowding close make it narrower. Just think how many millions of years it must have taken for the water to wear down the rock so deep.”

  “There
’s bilharzia, too.”

  “Oh, bilharzia!”

  “There’s nothing funny about bilharzia. My husband had it. He had injections for six months before he was cured.”

  The girl’s face dulled. “I’ll be careful,” she said irrationally, turning away, holding her river and her long hot dreamy mornings away from Mrs. Gale, like a secret.

  “Look at the mountains,” said Mrs. Gale, pointing. The girl glanced over the chasm at the foothills, then bent forward again, her face reverent. Through the mass of green below were glimpses of satiny brown. She breathed deeply: “Isn’t it a lovely smell?” she said.

  “Let’s go and have some tea,” said Mrs. Gale. She felt cross and put out; she had no notion why. She could not help being brusque with the girl. And so at last they were quite silent together; and in silence they remained on that verandah above the beautiful garden, drinking their tea and wishing it was time for them to part.

  Soon they saw the two husbands coming up the garden. Mrs. De Wet’s face lit up; and she sprang to her feet and was off down the path, running lightly. She caught her husband’s arm and clung there. He put her away from him, gently. “Hullo,” he remarked good-humouredly. “Eating again?” And then he turned back to Major Gale and went on talking. The girl lagged up the path behind her husband like a sulky small girl, pulling at Mrs. Gale’s beloved roses and scattering crimson petals everywhere.

  On the verandah the men sank at once into chairs, took large cups of tea, and continued talking as they drank thirstily. Mrs. Gale listened and smiled. Crops, cattle, disease; weather, crops and cattle. Mrs. De Wet perched on the verandah wall and swung her legs. Her face was petulant, her lips trembled, her eyes were full of tears. Mrs. Gale was saying silently under her breath, with ironical pity, in which there was also cruelty: You’ll get used to it, my dear; you’ll get used to it. But she respected the girl, who had courage: walking to the river and back, wandering round the dusty flowerbeds in the starlight, trying to find peace—at least, she was trying to find it.