“I’ll drop over and say hello,” said Greg; and I felt peculiar, I can tell you, because what I was thinking was: Well! If this is love.
When we got near our house, Moira and Jordan were side by side on the verandah wall, and Moy was laughing; and I knew she had seen Greg coming because of the way she laughed.
Dad was not on the verandah, so I could see Mom had got him to stay indoors.
“I’ve got you the bread, Moy,” I said, and with this I went into the kitchen, and there was Mom, and she was looking more peculiar than I’ve ever seen her. I could have bet she wanted to laugh; but she was sighing all the time. Because of the sighing I knew she had quarrelled with Dad. “Well, I don’t know,” she said, and she threw the bread I’d fetched into the waste-bucket.
There sat Mom and I in the kitchen, smiling at each other off and on in a peculiar way, and Dad was rattling his paper in the bedroom where she had made him go. He was not at the station that day because the train had come at nine o’clock and there wasn’t another one coming. When we looked out on the verandah in about half an hour Jordan was gone, and Greg and Moira were sitting on the verandah wall. And I can tell you she looked so pretty again—it was peculiar her getting pretty like that so suddenly.
That was about five, and Greg went back to supper at home. Moira did not eat anything; she was in our room curling her hair, because she and Greg were going for a walk.
“Don’t go too far; it’s going to rain,” Mom said, but Moira said, sweet and dainty, “Don’t worry, Mom, I can look after myself.”
Mom and Dad said nothing to each other all the evening.
I went to bed early for a change, so I’d be there when Moy got in, although I was thirteen that season and now my bedtime was up to ten o’clock.
Mom and Dad went to bed, although I could see Mom was worried because there was a storm blowing up; the dry season was due to end, and the lightning kept spurting all over the sky.
I lay awake saying to myself, Sleep sleep, go away, come again another day. But I went to sleep, and when I woke up, the room was full of the smell of rain, of the earth wet with rain, and the light was on and Moira was in the room.
“Have the rains come?” I said, and then I woke right up and saw of course they hadn’t, because the air was as dry as sand, and Moira said, “Oh, shut up and go to sleep.”
She did not look pretty as much as being different from how I’d seen her; her face was soft and smiling, and her eyes were different. She had blue eyes most of the time, but now they seemed quite black. And now that her hair was all curled and brushed, it looked pretty, like golden syrup. And she even looked a bit fatter. Usually when she wasn’t too thin, she was rather fat, and when she was one of the gang we used to call her Pudding. That is, until she passed her J.C., and then she fought everyone, and the boys, too, so that she could be called Moy. So no one had called her Pudding for years now except Dad, to make her cross. He used to say, “You’re going to make a fine figure of a woman like your mother.” That always made Moy cross, I can tell you, because Mom was very fat, and she wore proper corsets these days, except just before the rains when it was so hot. I remember the first time the corsets came from the store, and she put them on. Moy had to lace her in, and Mom laughed so much Moy couldn’t do the laces; and anyway she was cross because Mom laughed, and she said to me afterwards, “It’s disgusting, letting yourself go—I’m not going to let myself go.”
So it would have been more than my life was worth to tell her she was looking a bit fatter already, or to tell her anything at all, because she sat smiling on the edge of her bed, and when I said, “What did he say, Moy?” she just turned her head and made her eyes thin and black at me, and I saw I’d better go to sleep. But I knew something she didn’t know I knew, because she had some dead jacaranda flowers in her hair; that meant she and Greg had been at the water tanks. There were only two jacaranda trees at our station, and they were at the big water tanks for the engines; and if they were at the water tanks, they must have been kissing, because it was romantic at the tanks. It was the end of October, and the jacarandas were shedding, and the tanks looked as if they were standing in pools of blue water.
Well, next morning Moy was already up when I woke, and she was singing, and even before breakfast she began ironing her muslin dress that she had made for last Christmas.
Mom said nothing; Dad kept rustling his newspaper; and I wouldn’t have dared open my mouth. Besides, I wanted to find out what Greg had said. After breakfast, we sat around, because of its being Sunday; Dad didn’t have to be at the station office because there weren’t any trains on Sundays. And Dad kept grinning at Moira and saying: “I think it’s going to rain,” and she pretended she didn’t know what he meant, until at last she jumped when he said it and turned herself and looked at him just the way she had the day before. That was when he got red in the face and said: “Can’t you take a joke these days?” and Moira looked away from him with her eyebrows up, and Mom sighed, and then he said, very cross, “I’ll leave you all to it, just tell me when you’re in a better temper,” and with this he took the newspaper inside to the bedroom.
Anybody could see it wasn’t going to rain properly that day, because the clouds weren’t thunderheads, but great big white ones, all silver and hardly any black in them.
Moy didn’t eat any dinner, but went on sitting on the verandah, wearing her muslin dress, white with red spots and big puffed sleeves and a red sash around her waist.
After dinner, time went very slowly, and it was a long time before Greg came down off the Jacksons’ verandah and came walking slowly along the gum-tree avenue. I was watching Moy’s face, and she couldn’t keep the smile off it. She got paler and paler until he got underneath our verandah, and she was looking at him so that I had gooseflesh all over.
Then he gave a jump up our steps to the verandah and said, “Hoy, Moy, how’s it?” I thought she was going to fall right off the verandah wall, and her face had gone all different again.
“How are you, Gregory?” said Moira, all calm and proud.
“Oh, skidding along,” he said; and I could see he felt awkward, because he hadn’t looked at her once, and his skin was all red around the freckles. She didn’t say anything, and she was looking at him as if she couldn’t believe it was him.
“I hope the rain will keep off for the braavleis,” said Mom, in her visiting voice; and she looked hard at me, and I had to get up and go inside with her. But I could see Greg didn’t want us to go at all, and I could see Moy knew it; her eyes were blue again, a pale thin blue, and her mouth was small.
Well, Mom went into the kitchen to make the sausage rolls; and I went into our bedroom, because I could see what went on on the verandah from behind the curtains.
Greg sat on the verandah wall and whistled. He was whistling “I Love You, Yes I Do”; and Moira was gazing at him as if he were a Christmas beetle she had just noticed. And then he began whistling “Three Little Words”; and suddenly Moira got down off the wall and stretched herself like a cat when it’s going to walk off somewhere, and Greg said, “Skinny!”
At this she made her eyebrows go up, and I’ve never seen such a look.
And he was getting redder in the face, and he said: “You’d better not wear that dress to the braavleis; it’s going to rain.”
Moira didn’t say a word for what seemed about half an hour, and then she said, in that lazy sort of voice, “Well, Greg Jackson, if you’ve changed your mind, it’s O.K. with me.”
“Changed my mind?” he said, very quickly, and he looked scared; and she looked scared, and she asked: “What did you say all those things for last night?”
“Say what?” he asked, more scared than ever; and I could see he was trying to remember what he’d said.
Moira was just looking at him, and I wouldn’t have liked to be Greg Jackson just then, I can tell you. Then she walked off the verandah, letting her skirt swish slowly, and through the kitchen, and into our room, and then s
he sat on the bed.
“I’m not going to the braavleis, Mom,” she said, in that sweet, slow voice like Mom uses when she’s got visitors and she wishes they’d go.
Mom just sighed and slapped the dough about on the kitchen-table. Dad made the springs of the bed creak, and he said half aloud, “Oh, my God, preserve me!”
Mom left the pastry and glared through the door of their bedroom at Dad, and then came into our room. There was Moira sitting all lumped up on her bed as if she had a pain, and her face was like pastry dough. Mom said nothing to Moira, but went on to the verandah. Greg was still sitting there, looking sick.
“Well, son,” Mom said, in her easy voice, the voice she has when she was tired of everything, but keeping up, “well, son, I think Moy’s got a bit of a headache from the heat.”
As I’ve said, I wasn’t sweet on Greg that vacation; but if I was Moy I would have been, the way he looked just then—all sad, but grown-up, like a man—when he said: “Mrs. Hughes, I don’t know what I’ve done.” Mom just smiled and sighed. “I can’t marry, Mrs. Hughes. I’ve got five years’ training ahead of me.”
Mom smiled and said, “Of course, son, of course.”
I was lying on my bed with my stamps; and Moira was on her bed, listening, and the way she smiled gave me a bad shiver.
“Listen to him,” she said, in a loud slow voice. “Marry? Why does everyone go on about marrying? They’re nuts. I wouldn’t marry Greg Jackson, anyway, if he were the last man on a desert island.”
Outside, I could hear Mom sigh hard; then her voice, quick and low; and then the sound of Greg’s feet crunching off over the cinders of the path.
Then Mom came back into our room, and Moira said, all despairing, “Mom, what made you say that about marrying?”
“He said it, my girl, I didn’t.”
“Marrying!” said Moira, laughing hard.
Mom said, “What did he say then—you talked about him saying something?”
“Oh, you all make me sick,” said Moira, and she lay down on her bed, turned away from us. Mom hitched her head at me, and we went out. By then it was five in the afternoon and the cars would be leaving at six, so Mom finished the sausage rolls in the oven, and packed the food, and then she took off her apron and went across to Jordan’s house. Moira did not see her go, because she was still lost to the world in her pillow.
Soon Mom came back and put the food into the car. Then Jordan came over with Beth from the store and said to me, “Betty, my mom says, will you and Moy come in our car to the braavleis, because your car’s full of food?”
“I will,” I said, “but Moira’s got a headache.”
But at this moment Moira called out from our room, “Thanks, Jordan, I’d like to come.”
So Mom called to Pop, and they went off in our car together, and I could see she was talking to him all the time, and he was just pulling the gears about and looking resigned to life.
Moira and I went with Jordan and Beth in their car. I could see Jordan was cross because he wanted to be with Beth; and Beth kept smiling at Moira with her eyebrows up, to tell her she knew what was going on; and Moira smiled back and talked a lot in her visiting voice.
The braavleis was at a high place at the end of a vlei, where it rose into a small hill full of big boulders. The grass had been cut that morning by natives of the farmer who always let us use his farm for the braavleis. It was pretty, with the hill behind and the moon coming up over it, and then the cleared space, and the vlei sweeping down to the river, and the trees on either side. The moon was just over the trees when we got there, so the trees looked black and big, and the boulders were big and looked as if they might topple over, and the grass was silvery; but the great bonfire was roaring up twenty feet, and in the space around the fire it was all hot and red. The trench of embers where the spits were for the meat was on one side, and as soon as she arrived Moira went there and helped with the cooking.
Greg was not there, and I thought he wouldn’t come; but much later, when we were all eating the meat, and laughing because it burned our fingers it was so hot, I saw him on the other side of the fire talking to Mom. Moira saw him talking, and she didn’t like it, but she pretended not to see.
By then we were seated in a half-circle on the side of the fire the wind was blowing, so that the red flames were sweeping off away from us. There were about fifty people from the station and some farmers from round about. Moira sat by me, quiet, eating grilled ribs and sausage rolls; and for once she was pleased I was there, so that she wouldn’t seem to be by herself. She had changed her dress again, and it was the dress she had worn last year for the braavleis; it was blue with pleats, and it was the dress she had for best the last year at school, so it wasn’t very modern any more. Across the fire, I could see Greg. He did not look at Moira, and she did not look at him. Except that this year Jordan did not want to sit by Moira but by Beth, I kept feeling peculiar, as if this year were really last year, and in a minute Greg would walk across past the fire, and say: “Moira Hughes? I wouldn’t have known you.”
But he stayed where he was. He was sitting on his legs, with his hands on his knees. I could see his legs and knees and his big hands all red from the fire and the yellow hair glinting in the firelight. His face was red, too, and wet with the heat.
Then everyone began singing. We were singing “Sarie Marais,” and “Sugar Bush,” and “Henrietta’s Wedding” and “We don’t want to go home.” Moira and Greg were both singing as hard as they could.
It was getting late. The natives were damping down the cooking trench with earth and looking for scraps of meat and bits of sausage roll, and the big fire was sinking down. It would be time in a minute for the big dance in a circle around the fire.
Moira was just sitting. Her legs were tucked under her sideways, and they had got scratched from the grass—I could see the white dry scratches across the sunburn—and I can tell you it was a good thing she hadn’t worn her best muslin because there wouldn’t have been much left of it. Her hair, that she had curled yesterday, was tied back in a ribbon, so that her face looked small and thin.
I said, “Here, Moy, don’t look like your own funeral”; and she said, “I will if I like.” Then she gave me a bit of a grin, and she said: “Let me give you a word of warning for when you’re grown-up: Don’t believe a word men say, I’m telling you.”
But I could see she was feeling better just then.
At that very moment the red light of the fire on the grass just in front of us went out and someone sat down. I hoped it was Greg, and it was. They were looking at each other again; but my skin didn’t tingle at all, so I looked at his face and at her face, and they were both quiet and sensible.
Then Moira reached out for a piece of grass, pulled it clean and neat out of the socket, and began nibbling at the soft piece at the end; and it was just the way Mom reached out for her knitting when she was against Dad. But of course Greg did not know the resemblance.
“Moy,” he said, “I want to talk to you.”
“My name is Moira,” said Moira, looking him in the eyes.
“Oh heck, Moira,” he said, sounding exasperated, just like Dad.
I wriggled back away from the two of them into the crowd that was still singing softly “Sarie Marais” and looking at the way the fire was glowing low and soft, ebbing red and then dark as the wind came up from the river. The moon was half-covered with the big, soft, silvery clouds, and the red light was strong on our faces.
I could just hear what they said. I wasn’t going to move too far off, I can tell you.
“I don’t know what I’ve said,” said Greg.
“It doesn’t matter in the slightest,” said Moira.
“Moira, for crying out loud!”
“Why did you say that about marrying?” said Moira, and her voice was shaky. She was going to cry if she didn’t watch out.
“I thought you thought I meant. . . .”
“You think too much,” said Moira, tossin
g her head carefully so that her long tail of hair should come forward and lie on her shoulder. She put up her hand and stroked the curls smooth.
“Moira, I’ve got another five years at university. I couldn’t ask you to be engaged for five years.”
“I never said you should,” said Moira, calm and lofty, examining the scratches on her legs.
The way she was sitting, curled up sideways, with her hair lying forward like syrup on her shoulder—it was pretty, it was as pretty as I’ve ever seen, and I could see his face, sad and almost sick.
“You’re so pretty, Moy,” he said, jerking it out.
Moira seemed not to be able to move. Then she turned her head slowly and looked at him. I could see the beginning of something terrible on her face. The shiver had begun under my hair at the back of my neck and was slowly moving down to the small of my back.
“You’re so beautiful,” he said, sounding angry, leaning forward with his face almost against hers.
And now she looked the way she had last night, when I was not awake and asked was it raining outside.
“When you look like that,” he said, quite desperate about everything, “it makes me feel. . . .”
People were getting up now all around us. The fire had burned right down; it was a low wave of red heat coming out at us. The redness was on our shoulders and legs, but our faces were having a chance to cool off. The moon had come out again, full and bright, and the cloud had rolled on. It was funny the way the light was red to their shoulders, and the white of the moon on their faces, and their eyes glistening. I didn’t like it; I was shivering; it was the most peculiar moment of all my life.
“Well,” said Moira, and she sounded just too tired even to try to understand, “that’s what you said last night, wasn’t it?”
“Don’t you see,” he said, trying to explain, his tongue all mixed up, “I can’t help—I love you, I don’t know. . . .”
Now she smiled, and I knew the smile at once, it was the way Mom smiled at Dad when if he had any sense he’d shut up. It was sweet and loving, but it was sad, and as if she were saying, Lord, you’re a fool, Dickson Hughes!
African Stories Page 68