Kate slipped away to the kitchens. Here were tables laden with chickens and trifles, certainly; but everything was a little dressed up; this was the district’s party food elaborated to a stage where it could be admired and envied without causing suspicion.
Kate had had no time to do more than look for signs of the fatal aspics, sauces and creams when Mrs. Lacey entered. Kate had to peer twice to make sure it was Mr. Hackett and not Mr. Lacey who came with her: the two men seemed to her so very alike. Mrs. Lacey asked gaily: “Having a good tuck-in?” and then the two passed through into the pantries. Here there was a good deal of laughter. Once Kate heard: “Oh, do be careful . . .” and then Mrs. Lacey looked cautiously into the kitchen. Seeing Kate she assumed a good-natured smile and said, “You’ll burst,” and then withdrew her head. Kate had eaten nothing; but she did what seemed to be expected of her, and left the kitchen, wondering just what this thing was that sprang up suddenly between men and women—no, not what it was, but what prompted it. The word love, which had already stretched itself to include so many feelings, atmospheres and occasions, had become elastic enough for Kate not to astonish her. It included, for instance, Mr. Lacey and Mrs. Lacey helping each other to pour drinks, with an unmistakable good feeling; and Mrs. Lacey flirting with Mr. Hackett in the pantry while they pretended to be looking for something. To look at Mrs. Lacey this evening—that was no problem, for the bright expectancy of love was around her like sunlight. But why Mr. Hackett, or Mr. Lacey; or why either of them? And then Nan Fowler, that fat, foolish, capable dame who flushed scarlet at a word: what drew Andrew Wheatley to her, of all women, through years of parties, and kept him there?
Kate drifted across the intervening rooms to the door of the big living-room, feeling as if someone had said to her: “Yes, this house is yours, go in,” but had forgotten to give her the key, or even to tell her where the door was. And when she reached the room she stopped again; through the hazing cigarette smoke, the hubbub, the leaning, laughing faces, the hands lying along chair-arms, grasping glasses, she could see her parents sitting side by side, and knew at once, from their faces, that they wanted only to go home, and that if she entered now, putting her to bed would be made an excuse for going. She went back to the nurseries; as she passed the kitchen door she saw Mr. Hackett, Mr. Lacey and Mrs. Lacey, arms linked from waist to waist, dancing along between the heaped tables and singing: All I want is a little bit of love, a little bit of love, a little bit of love. Both men were still in their riding things, and their boots thumped and clattered on the floor. Mrs. Lacey looked like a species of fairy who had condescended to appear to cowhands—cowhands who, however, were cynical about fairies, for at the end of the dance Mr. Lacey smacked her casually across her behind and said, “Go and do your stuff, my girl,” and Mrs. Lacey went laughing to her guests, leaving the men raiding the chickens in what appeared to be perfect good fellowship.
In the nurseries Kate was struck by the easy manner in which some twenty infants had been so easily disposed of: they were all asleep. The silence here was deepened by the soft, regular sounds of breathing, and the faint sound of music from beyond the heavy baize doors. Even now, with the extra beds, and the little piles of clothing at the foot of each, everything was so extraordinarily tidy. A great cupboard, with its subdued gleaming paint, presented to Kate an image of Mrs. Lacey herself; and she went to open it. Inside it was orderly, and on the door was a list of its contents, neatly typed; but if a profusion of rich materials, like satin and velvet, had tumbled out as the door opened, she would not have been in the least surprised. On the contrary, her feeling of richness restrained and bundled out of the way would have been confirmed, but there was nothing of the kind, not an article out of place anywhere, and on the floor sat the smiling native nanny, apologizing by her manner for her enforced uselessness, for the baby was whimpering and she was forbidden to touch it.
“Have you told Mrs. Lacey?” asked Kate, looking doubtfully at the fat pink and white creature, which was exposed in a brief vest and napkin, for it was too hot an evening for anything more. The nanny indicated that she had told Mrs. Lacey, who had said she would come when she could.
Kate sat beside the cot to wait, surrendering herself to self-pity: the grownups were rid of her, and she was shut into the nursery with the tiny children. Her tears gathered behind her eyes as the baby’s cries increased. After some moments she sent the nanny again for Mrs. Lacey, and when neither of them returned, she rather fearfully fetched a napkin from the cupboard and made the baby comfortable. Then she held it on her knee, for consolation. She did not much like small babies, but the confiding warmth of this one soothed her. When the nursery door swung open soundlessly, so that Mrs. Lacey was standing over her before she knew it, she could not help wriggling guiltily up and exclaiming: “I changed him. He was crying.” Mrs. Lacey said firmly: “You should never take a child out of bed once it is in. You should never alter a time-table.” She removed the baby and put it back into the cot. She was afloat with happiness, and could not be really angry, but went on: “If you don’t keep them strictly to a routine, they take advantage of you.” This was so like what Kate’s own mother always said about her servants, that she could not help laughing; and Mrs. Lacey said good-humouredly, turning round from the business of arranging the baby’s limbs in an orderly fashion: “It is all very well, but he is perfectly trained, isn’t he? He never gives me any trouble. I am quite certain you have never seen such a well-trained baby around here before.” Kate admitted this was so, and felt appeased: Mrs. Lacey had spoken as if there was at least a possibility of her one day reaching the status of being able to profit by the advice: she was speaking as if to an equal.
Kate watched her move to the window, adjust the angle of a pane so that the starlight no longer gleamed in it, and use it as a mirror: there was no looking-glass in the nurseries. The smooth folds of hair were unruffled, but the usually guarded, observant eyes were bright and reckless. There was a vivid glow about Mrs. Lacey that made her an exotic in the nursery; even her presence there was a danger to the sleeping children. Perhaps she felt it herself, for she smoothed her forefinger along an eyebrow and said: “Are you going to stay here?” Kate hesitated. Mrs. Lacey said swiftly: “I don’t see why you shouldn’t come in. It’s your father, though. He’s such an old . . .” She stopped herself, and smiled sourly. “He doesn’t approve of me. However, I can’t help that.” She was studying Kate. “Your mother has no idea, no idea at all,” she remarked impatiently, turning Kate about between her hands. Kate understood that had Mrs. Lacey been her mother, her clothes would have been graded to suit her age. As it was, she wore a short pink cotton frock, reaching half-way down her thighs, that a child of six might have worn. That frock caused her anguished embarrassment, but loyalty made her say: “I like pink,” very defiantly. Her eyes, though, raised in appeal to Mrs. Lacey’s, gained the dry reply: “Yes, so I see.”
On her way out, Mrs. Lacey remarked briskly: “I’ve got a lot of old dresses that could be cut down for you. I’ll help you with them.” Kate felt that this offer was made because Mrs. Lacey truly loved clothes and materials; for a moment her manner to Kate had not been adjusted with an eye to the ridiculous but powerful Mr. Cope. She said gratefully: “Oh, Mrs. Lacey . . .”
“And that hair of yours . . .” she heard, as the door swung, and went on swinging, soundlessly. There was the crisp sound of a dress moving along the passage, and the sweet homely smell of the nursery had given way to a perfume as unsettling as the music that poured strongly through the house. The Laceys had a gramophone and the newest records. Feet were swishing and sliding, the voices were softer now, with a reckless note. The laughter, on the other hand, swept by in great gusts. Peering through the doors, Kate tried to determine what “stage” the party had reached; she saw there had been no stages; Mrs. Lacey had fused these people together from the beginning, by the force of wanting to do it, and because her manner seemed to take the responsibility for whatever might happe
n. Now her light gay voice sounded above the others; she was flirting with everyone, dancing with everyone. Now there was no criticism; they were all in love with her.
Kate could see that while normally at this hour the rooms would be half empty, tonight they were all there. Couples were moving slowly in the subdued light of the verandah, very close together, or sitting at the tables, looking on. Then she suddenly saw someone walking towards her, by herself, in a violent staggering way; and, peering close, saw it was Mrs. Wheatley. She was crying. “I want to go home, I want to go home,” she was saying, her tongue loose in her mouth. She did not see Kate, who ran quickly back to the baby, who was now asleep, lying quite still in its white cot, hands flexed at a level with its head, its fingers curled loosely over. Darling baby, whispered Kate, the tears stinging her cheeks. Darling, darling baby. The painful wandering emotion that had filled her for weeks, even since before the Laceys came, when she had felt held safe in Mrs. Sinclair’s gruff kindliness, spilled now into the child. With a fearful, clutching pounce, she lifted the sleeping child, and cuddled it. Darling, darling baby . . . Later, very much later, she woke to find Mr. Lacey, looking puzzled, taking the baby from her; they had been lying asleep on the floor together. “Your father wants you,” stated Mr. Lacey carefully, the sickly smell of whisky coming strong from his mouth. Kate staggered up and gained the door on his arm; but it was not as strong a support as she needed, for he was holding on to tables and chairs as he passed them.
For a moment Kate’s sleep-dazed eyes could find nothing to hold them, for the big room was quite empty; so, it seemed, was the verandah. Then she saw Mrs. Lacey, dancing by herself down the dim shadowed space, weaving her arms and bending her body, and leaning her head to watch her white reflection move on the polished floor beside her. “Who is going to dance with me?” she crooned. “Who is going to dance?”
“You’ve worn us out,” said a man’s voice from Kate’s feet; and looking hazily round she saw that couples were sitting around the edges of the space, with their arms about each other. Another voice, a woman’s, this time, said: “Oh what a beautiful dress, what a beautiful dress,” repeating it with drunken intensity; and someone answered in a low tone: “Yes, and not much beneath it, either, I bet.”
Suddenly Kate’s world was restored for her by her father’s comment at her shoulder: “So unnecessary!” And she felt herself pushed across the verandah in the path of the dancing Mrs. Lacey, whose dim white skirts flung out and across her legs in a crisp caress. But she took no notice of Kate at all; nor did she answer Mr. Cope when he said stiffly: “Goodbye, Mrs. Lacey. I am afraid we must take this child to bed.” She continued to dance, humming to herself, a drowsy happy look on her face.
In the car Kate lay wrapped in blankets and looked through the windows at the sky moving past. There was a white blaze of moonlight and the stars were full and bright. It could not be so very late after all, for the night still had the solemn intensity of midnight; that feeling of glacial withdrawal that comes into the sky towards dawn was not yet there. But in the hollow of the veld, where the cold lay congealed, she shivered and sat up. Her parents’ heads showed against the stars, and they were being quite silent for her benefit. She was waiting for them to say something; she wanted her confused, conflicting impressions sorted and labelled by them. In her mind she was floating with Mrs. Lacey down the polished floor; she was also in the nursery with the fat and lovable baby; she could feel the grip of Mr. Lacey’s hand on her shoulder. But not a word was said, not a word; though she could almost feel her mother thinking: “She has to learn for herself,” and her father answering it with a “Yes, but how unpleasant!”
The next day Kate waited until her father had gone down to the lands in order to watch his labourers at their work, and her mother was in the vegetable garden. Then she said to the cook: “Tell the missus I have gone to Old John’s Place.” She walked away from her home and down to the river with the feeling that large accusing eyes were fixed on her back, but it was essential that she should see Mrs. Lacey that day: she was feverish with terror that Mr. Lacey had given her away—worse, that the baby had caught cold from lying on the floor beside her, and was ill. She walked slowly, as if dragged by invisible chains: if she left behind her unspoken disapproval, in front of her she sensed cruel laughter and anger.
Guilt, knowledge of having behaved ridiculously, and defiance churned through her; above the tumult another emotion rose like a full moon over a sky of storm. She was possessed by love; she was in love with the Laceys, with the house and its new luxuries, with Mrs. Lacey and the baby—even with Mr. Lacey and Mr. Hackett, who took lustre from Mrs. Lacey. By the time she neared the place, fear had subsided in her to a small wariness, lurking like a small trapped animal with bared teeth; she could think of nothing but that in a moment she would again have entered the magical circle. The drowsy warmth of a September morning, the cooing of the pigeons in the trees all about, the dry smell of sun-scorched foliage—all these familiar scents and sounds bathed her, sifted through her new sensitiveness and were reissued as it were, in a fresh currency: around Mrs. Lacey’s house the bush was necessarily more exciting than it could be anywhere else.
The picture in her mind of the verandah and the room behind it, as she had seen them the night before, dissolved like the dream it had appeared to be as she stepped through the screen door. Already at ten in the morning, there was not a sign of the party. The long space of floor had been polished anew to a dull gleaming red; the chairs were in their usual circle at one end, against a bank of ferns, and at the other Mrs. Lacey sat sewing, the big circular table beside her heaped with materials and neatly-folded patterns. For a moment she did not notice Kate, who was free to stand and gaze in devoted wonder. Mrs. Lacey was in fresh green linen, and her head was bent over the white stuff in her lap in a charming womanly pose. This, surely, could never have been that wild creature who danced down this same verandah last night? She lifted her head and looked towards Kate; her long eyes narrowed, and something hardened behind them until, for a brief second, Kate was petrified by a vision of a boredom so intense that it was as if Mrs. Lacey had actually said: “What! Not you again?” Then down dropped those lids, so that her face wore the insufferable blank piety of a primitive Madonna, Then she smiled. Even that forced smile won Kate; and she moved towards Mrs. Lacey with what she knew was an uncertain and apprehensive grin. “Sit down,” said Mrs. Lacey cordially, and spoiled the effect by adding immediately: “Do your parents know you are here?” She watched Kate obliquely as she put the question. “No,” said Kate honestly, and saw the lids drop smoothly downwards.
She was stiff with dislike; she could not help but want to accept this parody of welcome as real; but not when the illusion was destroyed afresh every time Mrs. Lacey spoke. She asked timidly: “How is the baby?” This time Mrs. Lacey’s look could not possibly be misinterpreted: she had been told by her husband; she had chosen, for reasons of her own, to say nothing. “The baby’s very well,” she said neutrally, adding after a moment: “Why did you come without telling your mother?” Kate could not give any comfort. “They would be angry if they knew I was here. I left a message.” Mrs. Lacey frowned, laughed with brave, trembling gaiety, and then reached over and touched the bell behind her. Far away in the kitchens of that vast house there was a shrill peal; and soon a padding of bare feet announced the coming of the servant. “Tea,” ordered Mrs. Lacey. “And bring some cakes for the little missus.” She rearranged her sewing, put her hand to her eyes, laughed ruefully and said: “I’ve got such a hang-over I won’t be able to eat for a week. But it was worth it.” Kate could not reply. She sat fingering the materials heaped on the table; and wondered if any of these were what Mrs. Lacey had intended to give her; she even felt a preliminary gratitude, as it were. But Mrs. Lacey seemed to have forgotten her promise. The white stuff was for the baby. They discussed suitable patterns for children’s vests: it went without saying that Mrs. Lacey’s pattern was one Kate had never see
n before, combining all kinds of advantages, so that it appeared that not a binding, a tape or a fastener had escaped the most far-sighted planning.
The long hot morning had to pass at last; at twelve Mrs. Lacey glanced at the folding clock which always stood beside her, and fetched the baby from where he lay in the shade under a big tree. She fed him orange juice, spoon by spoon, without taking him from the pram, while Kate watched him with all the nervousness of one who has betrayed emotion and is afraid it may be unkindly remembered. But the baby ignored her. He was a truly fine child, fat, firm, dimpled. When the orange juice was finished he allowed himself to be wheeled back to the tree without expostulating; and no one could have divined, from his placid look, the baffled affection that Kate was projecting into him.
African Stories Page 21