African Stories

by Doris Lessing

  Kenneth said resentfully: “Oh, Lord, you are very much a woman, after all, Julia. Must you make a scene?”

  Her quick laugh was equally resentful. “Why shouldn’t I make a scene. I feel entitled to it.”

  Kenneth said: “We all know there’s got to be a change. Can’t we go through with it without this sort of thing?”

  “Surely,” she said helplessly, “everything can’t be changed without some sort of explanation . . .” She could not go on.

  “Well, what sort of explanation do you want?”

  She shrugged hopelessly. After a moment she said, as if continuing an old conversation: “Perhaps I should have had children, after all?”

  “I always said so,” remarked Tom mildly.

  “You are nearly forty,” said Kenneth practically.

  “I wouldn’t make a good mother,” she said. “I couldn’t compete with yours. I wouldn’t have the courage to take it on, knowing I should fail by comparison with your so perfect mother.” She was being sarcastic, but there were tears in her voice.

  “Let’s leave our mother out of it,” said Tom coldly.

  “Of course, we always leave everything important out of it.”

  Neither of them said anything; they were closed away from her in hostility. She went on: “I often wonder, why did you want me at all, Tom? You didn’t really want children particularly.”

  “Yes, I did,” said Tom, rather bewildered.

  “Not enough to make me feel you cared one way or the other. Surely a woman is entitled to that, to feel that her children matter. I don’t know what it is you took me into your life for?”

  After a moment Kenneth said lightly, trying to restore the comfortable surface of flippancy: “I have always felt that we ought to have children.”

  Neither Tom nor Julia responded to this appeal. Julia took a candle from the mantelpiece, bent to light it at the fire, and said: “Well, I’m off to bed. The whole situation is beyond me.”

  “Very well then,” said Kenneth. “If you must have it: I’m getting married soon.”

  “Obviously,” said Julia drily.

  “What did you want me to say?”

  “Who is it?” Tom sounded so resentful that it changed the weight of the conversation: now it was Tom and Kenneth as antagonists.

  “Well, she’s a girl from England. She came out here a few months ago in this scheme for importing marriageable women to the Colonies . . . well, that’s what the scheme amounts to.”

  “Yes, but the girl?” asked Julia, amused in spite of herself at Kenneth’s invincible distaste at the idea of marrying.

  “Well . . .” Kenneth hesitated, his dark bright eyes on Julia’s face, his mouth already beginning to twist into dry amusement. “She’s fair. She’s pretty. She seems capable. She wants to be married . . . what more do I want?” That last phrase was savage. They had come to a dead end.

  “I’m going to bed!” exclaimed Julia suddenly, the tears pouring down her face. “I can’t bear this.”

  Neither of them said anything to prevent her leaving. When she had gone, Kenneth made an instinctive defensive movement towards Tom. After a moment Tom said irritably, but commandingly: “It’s absurd for you to get married when there’s no need.”

  “Obviously there’s a need,” said Kenneth angrily. He rose, taking another candle from the mantelpiece. As he left the room—and it was clear that he left in order to forestall the scene Tom was about to make—he said: “I want to have children before I get an old man. It seems to be the only thing left.”

  When Tom went into the bedroom, Julia was lying dry-eyed on the pillow, waiting for him. She was waiting for him to comfort her into security of feeling. He had never failed her. When he was in bed, she found herself comforting him: it gave her such a perverse, topsy-turvy feeling she could not sleep.

  Soon after breakfast Kenneth left for town. He was dressed smartly: normally he did not care how he looked, and his clothes seemed to have been put on in the spirit of one picking up tools for a job. All three acknowledged his appearance with small, constricted smiles; and Kenneth reddened as he got into the car. “I might not be back tonight,” he called back, driving away without looking back.

  Tom and Julia watched the big car nose its way through the trees, and turned back to face each other. “Like to come down the lands with me?” he asked. “Yes, I would,” she accepted gratefully. Then she saw, and was thrown back on to herself by the knowledge of it, that he was asking her, not for her comfort, but for his own.

  It was a windy, sunlit morning, and very cold; winter had taken possession of the veld overnight.

  The house was built on a slight ridge, with the country falling away on either side. The landscape was dulling for the dry season into olive green and thin yellows; there was that extraordinary contrast of limpid sparkling skies, with sunshine pouring down like a volatile spirit, and dry cold parching the face and hands that made Julia uneasy in winter. It was as if the dryness tightened the cold into rigid fetters on her, so that a perpetual inner shivering had to be suppressed. She walked beside Tom over the fields with hunched shoulders and arms crossed tight over her chest. Yet she was not cold, not in the physical sense. Around the house the mealie fields, now a gentle silvery-gold colour, swept into runnels of light as the wind passed over them, and there was a dry tinkling of parched leaves moving together, like rat’s feet over grass. Tom did not speak; but his face was heavy and furrowed. When she took his hand he responded, but listlessly. She wanted him to turn to her, to say: “Now he’s going to make something of his own, you must come to me, and well build up again.” She wanted him to claim her, heal her, make her whole. But he was uneasy and restless; and she said at last diffidently: “Why should you mind so much. It ought to be me who’s unhappy.”

  “Don’t you?” he asked, sounding like a person angry at dishonesty.

  “Yes, of course,” she said; and tried to find the words to say that if only he could take her gently into his own security, as he had years ago, things would be right for them.

  But that security no longer existed in him.

  All that day they hardly spoke, not because of animosity between them, but because of a deep, sad helplessness. They could not help each other.

  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?”

  “Goodbye,” 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. Wh
en 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 verandah; at this hour she would normally read, or sew, till lunchtime.

  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, unfocussed 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 softheaded 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 lunchtime. 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 hogs’s-back 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. “Well 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 be coming out to the Colonies on a subsidized scheme for importing marriageable women, would she?”

  Tom grimaced. “You two are brutal,” he remarked.

  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.”

  “How many 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 f
rom 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 were 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.”