African Stories

by Doris Lessing

“With Theresa’s father?”

  Charlie said: “He won’t have Theresa now. He says Theresa can go away. He not want Theresa.”

  Philip said: “Don’t worry, Marina, hell take her back, he’ll take her money all right.” He laughed, and Marina was angry with him for laughing.

  “He very cross, madam,” said Charlie. He even laughed himself, but in a rather anxious way.

  The old man still sat quite motionless, looking past them. There were flies at the corners of his eyes; he did not lift his hand to brush them off.

  “Well . . .” said Marina. “We can give you a lift back if you like.” But it was clear that Theresa was afraid of going back now; Mrs. Black might assume her afternoon off was over and make her work.

  Charlie and Theresa smiled again and said, “Goodbye. Thank you, madam. Thank you, baas.” They went slowly off across the dusty earth, between the hovels, towards the river, where a group of tall brick huts stood like outsize sentry-boxes. There, though neither Marina nor Philip knew it, was sold illicit liquor; there they would find a tinny gramophone playing dance music from America, there would be singing, dancing, a good time. This was the place the police came first if they were in search of criminals. Marina thought the couple were going down to the river, and she said sentimentally: “Well, they have this afternoon together, that’s something.”

  “Yes,” said Philip drily. The two were angry with each other, they did not know why. They walked in silence back to the lorry and drove home, making polite, clear sentences about indifferent topics.

  Next day everything was as usual. Theresa back at work with Mrs. Black, Charlie whistling cheerfully in their own flat.

  Almost immediately Marina bought a house that seemed passable, about seven miles from the centre of town, in a new suburb. Mrs. Skinner would not be returning for two weeks yet, but it was more convenient for them to move into the new home at once. The problem was Charlie. What would he do during that time? He said he was going home to visit his family. He had heard that his first wife had a new baby and he wanted to see it.

  “Then I’ll pay you your wages now,” said Marina. She paid him, with ten shillings over. It was an uncomfortable moment. This man had been working for them for over two months, intimately, in their home; they had influenced each other’s lives—and now he was off, he disappeared, the thing was finished. “Perhaps you’ll come and work for me when you come back from your family?” said Marina.

  Charlie was very pleased. “Oh, yes, madam,” he said. “Mrs. Skinner very bad, she no good, not like you.” He gave a comical grimace, and laughed.

  “I’ll give you our address.” Mariana wrote it out and saw Charlie fold the piece of paper and place it carefully in an envelope which also held his official pass, a letter from her saying he was travelling to his family, and a further letter, for which he had asked, listing various bits of clothing that Philip had given him, for otherwise, as he explained, the police would catch him and say he had stolen them.

  “Well, goodbye, Charlie,” said Marina. “I do so hope your wife and your new baby are all right.” She thought of Theresa, but did not mention her; she found herself suffering from a curious disinclination to offer further advice or help. What would happen to Theresa? Would she simply move in with the first man who offered her shelter? Almost Marina shrugged.

  “Goodbye, madam,” said Charlie. He went off to buy himself a new shirt with the ten shillings, and some sweets for Theresa. He was sad to be leaving Theresa. On the other hand, he was looking forward to seeing his new child and his wife; he expected to be home after about a week’s walking, perhaps sooner if he could get a lift.

  But things did not turn out like this.

  Mrs. Skinner returned before she was expected. She found the flat locked and the key with Mrs. Black. Everything was very clean and tidy, but—where was her favourite picture? At first she saw only the lightish square patch on the dimming paint—then she thought of Charlie. Where was he? No sign of him. She came back into the flat and found the letter Marina had left, enclosing eight pounds for the picture “which she had unfortunately broken.” The thought came to Mrs. Skinner that she would not have got ten shillings for that picture if she had tried to sell it; then the phrase “sentimental value” came to her rescue, and she was furious. Where was Charlie? For, looking about her, she saw various other articles were missing. Where was her yellow earthen vase? Where was the wooden door-knocker that said Welcome Friend? Where was . . . she went off to talk to Mrs. Black, and quite soon all the women dropped in, and she was told many things about Marina. At last she said: “It serves me right for letting to an immigrant. I should have let it to you, dear.” The dear in question was Mrs. Pond. The ladies were again emotionally united; the long hostilities that had led to the flat being let to Marina were forgotten; that they were certain to break out again within a week was not to be admitted in this moment of pure friendship.

  Mrs. Pond told Mrs. Skinner that she had seen the famous picture being loaded on to the lorry. Probably Mrs. Giles had sold it—but this thought was checked, for both ladies knew what the picture was worth. No, Marina must have disposed of it in some way connected with her Fabian outlook—what could one expect from these white kaffirs?

  Fuming, Mrs. Skinner went to find Theresa. She saw Charlie, dressed to kill in his new clothes, who had come to say goodbye to Theresa before setting off on his long walk. She flew out, grabbed him by the arm, and dragged him into the flat. “Where’s my picture?” she demanded.

  At first Charlie denied all knowledge of the picture. Then he said Marina had given it to him. Mrs Skinner dropped his arm and stared: “But it was my picture . . .” She reflected rapidly: that eight pounds was going to be very useful; she had returned from her holiday, as people do, rather short of money. She exclaimed instead: “What have you done with my yellow vase? Where’s my knocker?”

  Charlie said he had not seen them. Finally Mrs. Skinner fetched the police. The police found the missing articles in Charlie’s bundle. Normally Mrs. Skinner would have cuffed him and fined him five shillings. But there was this business of the picture—she told the police to take him off.

  Now, in this city in the heart of what used to be known as the Dark Continent, at any hour of the day, women shopping, typists glancing up from their work out of the window, or the business men passing in their cars, may see (if they choose to look) a file of handcuffed Africans, with two policemen in front and two behind, followed by a straggling group of African women who are accompanying their men to the courts. These are the Africans who have been arrested for visiting without passes, or owning bicycles without lights, or being in possession of clothes or articles without being able to say how they came to own them. These Africans are being marched off to explain themselves to the magistrates. They are given a small fine with the option of prison. They usually choose prison. After all, to pay a ten-shilling fine when one earns perhaps twenty or thirty a month, is no joke, and it is something to be fed and housed, free, for a fortnight. This is an arrangement satisfactory to everyone concerned, for these prisoners mend roads, cut down grass, plant trees: it is as good as having a pool of free labour.

  Marina happened to be turning into a shop one morning, where she hoped to buy a table for her new house, and saw, without really seeing them, a file of such handcuffed Africans passing her. They were talking and laughing among themselves, and with the black policemen who herded them, and called back loud and jocular remarks at their women. In Marina’s mind the vision of that ideal table (for which she had been searching for some days, without success) was rather stronger than what she actually saw; and it was not until the prisoners had passed that she suddenly said to herself: “Good heavens, that man looks rather like Charlie—and that girl behind there, the plump girl with the spindly legs, there was something about the back view of that girl that was very like Theresa . . .” The file had in the meantime turned a corner and was out of sight. For a moment Marina thought: Perhaps I should foll
ow and see? Then she thought: Nonsense, I’m seeing things, of course it can’t be Charlie, he must have reached home by now . . . And she went into the shop to buy her table.

  Eldorado

  HUNDREDS of miles south were the gold-bearing reefs of Johannesburg; hundreds of miles north, the rich copper mines. These the two lodestars of the great central plateau, these the magnets which drew men, white and black; drew money from the world’s counting-houses; concentrated streets, shops, gardens; attracted riches and misery—particularly misery.

  But this, here, was farming country, true farming land, a pocket of good, dark, rich soil in the wastes of the light sandveld. A “pocket” some hundreds of miles in depth, and only to be considered in such midget terms by comparison with those eternal sandy wastes which fed cattle, though poorly, and satisfied that shallow weed tobacco. For that is how a certain kind of farmer sees it; a man of the old-fashioned sort will think of farming as the making of food, and of tobacco as a nervous, unsatisfactory crop, geared to centres in London and New York; he will watch the fields fill and crowd with new, bright leaf, and imagine it crushed through factory and warehouse to end in a wisp of pale smoke; he will not like to imagine the substance of his soil dissipating in smoke. And if sensible people argue: Yes, but people must smoke, you smoke yourself, you’re not being reasonable; he is likely to reply (rather irritably perhaps): “Yes, of course, you’re right—but I want to grow food, the others can grow tobacco.”

  When Alec Barnes came searching for a farm, he chose the rich maize soil, though cleverer, experienced men told him the big money was to be found only in tobacco. Tobacco and gold, gold and tobacco—these were the money-makers. For this country had gold too, a great deal of it; but perhaps there is only room in one’s mind for one symbol, one type; and when people say “gold” they think of the Transvaal, and so it was with Alec. There were many ways of seeing this new country, and Alec Barnes chose to see it with the eye of the food producer. He had not left England, he said, to worry about money and chase success. He wanted a slow, satisfying life, taking things easy.

  He bought a small farm, about two thousand acres, from a man who had gone bankrupt. There was a house already built. It was a pleasant house, in the style of the country, of light red brick with a corrugated iron roof, big, bare rooms and a wide verandah. Shrubs and creepers, now rather neglected, showed scarlet against the dull green scrub, or hung in showers of gold and purple from the trees. The rainy season had sprung new grass high and thick over paths, over flower beds. When the Barnes family came in they had to send an African ahead with a scythe to cut an opening through thickets of growth; and in the front room the bricks of the floor were being tumbled aside by the shoots from old tree-roots. There was a great deal to do before the place could be comfortable, and Maggie Barnes set herself to work. She was the daughter of a small Glasgow shopkeeper, and it might be thought that everything would be strange to her; but her grandparents had farmed, and she remembered visiting the old people as a child, playing with a shaggy old cart-horse, feeding the chickens. That way of farming could hardly be compared to this, but in a sense it was like returning to her roots. At least, that was how she thought of it. She would pause in her work, duster in hand, at a window or on the verandah, and look over the scrub to the mealie fields, and it did not seem so odd that she should be here, in this big house, with black servants to wait on her, not so outlandish that she might walk an hour across country and call the soil underfoot her soil. There was no domesticated carthorse to take sugar from her hand, only teams of sharp-horned and wild-eyed oxen; but there were chickens and turkeys and geese—she had no intention of paying good money for what she could grow herself, not she who knew the value of money! Besides, a busy woman has no time for fainthearted comparisons, and there was so much to do; and she intended that all this activity should earn its proper reward. She had gone beyond her grandparents, with their tight, frugal farm, which earned a living but no more; had gone beyond her parents, counting their modest profits in the back rooms of the grocery shop. In a sense she included both generations, could see the merits and failings of both, but—she and her husband would “get on,” they would be prosperous as the farmers around them were prosperous. It was true that when the neighbours made doubtful faces at their growing small-scale maize, and said there could be no “taking it easy” on that farm, she felt a little troubled. But she approved her husband’s choice; the growing of food satisfied her ideas of what was right, and connected her with her religious and respectable grandparents. Besides, many of the things Alec said she simply did not take seriously. When he said, fiercely, how glad he was to be out of England, out of the fight for success and the struggle to be better than one’s neighbours, she merely smiled: what was the matter with getting on, and bettering oneself? They were just words to her. She would say, in her bluff, affectionate way, of Alec: “He’s a queer man, being English, I canna get used to the way of him.” For she put down his high-flown notions to his being English. Also, he was strange to her because of his gentleness: the men of her people were outspoken and determined and did not defer to their women. Alec deferred to her. Sometimes she could not understand him; but she was happy with him, and with her son, who was still a small child.

  She sent Paul out with a native servant to play in the veld, while she worked, whitewashing the house, even climbing the roof herself to see to the guttering. Paul learned a new way of playing. He spread himself, ranging over the farm, so that the native youth who had the care of him found himself kept running. His toys, the substitutes for the real thing, mechanical lorries and bricks and dolls, were left in cupboards; and he made dams in the mud of the fields, plunged fearfully on the plough behind the oxen, rode high on the sacks of the waggons. He lost the pretty, sheltered look of the child from “home,” who must be nervous of streets and traffic, always conscious of the pressure of the neighbours. He grew fast and tall, big-boned and muscular, and lean and burnt. Sometimes Maggie would say, with that good-natured laugh: “Well, and I don’t know myself with this change-child!” Perhaps the laugh was a little uneasy, too. For she was not as thick-fibred as she looked. She was that Scots type, rather short, but finely made, even fragile, with the great blue eyes and easily-freckling fair skin and a mass of light black curls. Even after the hard work and the sunlight, which thickened her into a sturdy, energetic body of a woman, she kept, under the appearance of strength, that fine-boned delicacy and a certain shy charm. And here was her son shooting up into a lanky, bony youngster, the whites of his eyes always a little reddened by glare, his dark hair tumbling rough over his head with rusty bleached locks where the sun had struck. She looked at him in the bath, showing smooth dark-brown all over, save for the tender, milky skin like a loincloth where the strong khaki shorts kept the sun off. She felt a little perturbed, as if in some way he was most flagrantly betraying her by growing so, away from the fair, clear, open looks of her good Scots ancestors. There was something stubborn and secretive about him—perhaps even something a little coarse. But then—she reminded herself—he was half-English, too, and Alec was tall, long-headed, with a closed English face, and slow English speech which concealed more than it said. For a time she tried to change the child, to make him more dependent, until Alec noticed it and was angry. She had never seen him so angry before. He was a mild, easy man, who noticed very little, content to work at the farm and leave the rest to her. But now they fought. “What are you coddling him for?” Alec shouted. “What’s the good of bringing him here to a country where he can grow up a man if you’re going to fuss and worry all the time?” She gave him back as good; for to her women friends she would expound her philosophy of men: “You’ve got to stand against them once in a way, it doesnae do to be too sweet to them.” But these remarks, she soon understood, sounded rather foolish; for when did she need to “stand against” Alec? She had her own way over everything. Except in this, for the very country was against her. Soon she left the boy to do as he liked on the v
eld. He was at an age when children at “home” would be around their mothers, but at seven and eight he was quite independent, had thrown off the attendant servant, and would spend all day on the fields, coming in for meals as if—so Maggie complained in that soft, pretty, Scots voice: “As if I’m no better than a restaurant!” But she accepted it, she was not the complaining sort; it was only a comfortable grumble to her woman friends. Besides, living here had hardened her a little. Perhaps hardened was not the right word? It was a kind of fatalism, the easy atmosphere of the country, which might bring in Paul and her husband an hour late for a meal, looking at her oddly if she complained of the time. What’s an hour? they seemed to be asking; even: “What’s time at all?” She could understand it, she was beginning to feel a little that way herself. But in her heart she was determined that Paul would not grow up lax and happy-go-lucky, like a Colonial. Soon he would be going to school and he would “have it knocked out of him.” She had that good sturdy Scottish attitude towards education. She expected children to work and win scholarships. And indeed, it would be necessary, for the farm could hardly support a son through the sort of schooling she visualised for him. She was beginning to understand that it never would. At the end of the first five years she understood that their neighbours had been right: this farm would never do more than make a scanty living.

  When she spoke to Alec he seemed to turn against her, not noisily, in a healthy and understandable quarrel, but in a stubborn, silent way. Surely he wanted Paul to make something of himself? she demanded. Put like that, of course, Alec had to agree, but he agreed vaguely. It was this vagueness that upset Maggie, for there was no way of answering it. It seemed to be saying: All these things are quite irrelevant; I don’t understand you.

  Alec had been a clerk in a bank until the First World War. After the upheaval he could not go back into an office. He married Maggie and came to this new country. There were farmers in his family, too, a long way back, though he had only come to remember this when he felt a need to explain, even excuse, that dissident streak which had made a conventional English life impossible. He would talk of a certain great-uncle, who had ridden a wild black horse around the shires, fathering illegitimate children and drinking and behaving so that he ended in prison for smuggling. Yes, this was all very well, thought Maggie, but what has that old rascal got to do with Alec, and what with my son? For Alec would talk of this unsatisfactory ancestor with pride and his eyes would rest speculatively on Paul—it gave Maggie gooseflesh to see him.