Moira went on smiling like that at Greg, and he was sick and angry and not understanding a thing.
“I love you,” he said again.
“Well, I love you—and what of it?” said Moira.
“But it will be five years.”
“And what has that got to do with anything?” At this she began to laugh.
“But Moy. . . .”
“My name is Moira,” she said, once and for all.
For a moment they were both white and angry, their eyes glimmering in the light of the big white moon over them.
There was a shout and a hustle; and suddenly all the people were in the big circle around the big low heap of fire; and they were whirling around and around, yelling and screaming. Greg and Moira stayed where they were, just outside the range of the feet, and they didn’t hear a thing.
“You’re so pretty,” he was saying, in that rough, cross, helpless voice. “I love you, Moira. There couldn’t ever be anyone but you.”
She was smiling, and he went on saying: “I love you. I see your face all the time; I see your hair and your face and your eyes.”
And I wished he’d go on, the poor sap, just saying it, for every minute it was more like last night when I woke up and I thought it had rained—the feeling of the dry earth with the rain just on it, that was how she was, and she looked as if she would sit there and listen and listen forever to the words he said, and she didn’t want to hear him saying, “Why don’t you say something, Moy? You don’t say anything; you do understand, don’t you?—It’s not fair, it isn’t right to bind you when we’re so young.” But he started saying it in just a minute, and then she smiled her visiting smile, and she said: “Gregory Jackson, you’re a fool.”
Then she got up off the grass and went across to Mom to help load the car, and she never once looked at Greg again, not for the rest of the holidays.
Lucy Grange
THE farm was fifty miles from the nearest town, in a maize-growing district. The mealie lands began at a stone’s throw from the front door of the farmhouse. At the back were several acres of energetic and colourful domestic growth: chicken runs, vegetables, pumpkins. Even on the verandah there were sacks of grain and bundles of hoes. The life of the farm, her husband’s life, washed around the house, leaving old scraps of iron on the front step where the children played wagon-and-driver, or a bottle of medicine for a sick animal on her dressing-table among the bottles of Elizabeth Arden.
One walked straight from the verandah of this gaunt, iron-roofed, brick barracks of a house into a wide drawing-room that was shaded in green and orange Liberty linens.
“Stylish?” said the farmers’ wives when they came on formal calls, asking the question of themselves while they discussed with Lucy Grange the price of butter and servants’ aprons and their husbands discussed the farm with George Grange. They never “dropped over” to see Lucy Grange; they never rang her up with invitations to “spend the day.” They would finger the books on child psychology, politics, art; gaze guiltily at the pictures on her walls, which they felt they ought to be able to recognise; and say: “I can see you are a great reader, Mrs. Grange.”
There were years of discussing her among themselves before their voices held the good-natured amusement of acceptance: “I found Lucy in the vegetable patch wearing gloves full of cold cream.” “Lucy has ordered another dress pattern from town.” And later still, with self-consciously straightened shoulders, eyes directly primly before them, discreet non-committal voices: “Lucy is very attractive to men.”
One can imagine her, when they left at the end of those mercifully short visits, standing on the verandah and smiling bitterly after the satisfactory solid women with their straight tailored dresses, made by the Dutchwoman at the store at seven-and-six a time, buttoned loosely across their well-used breasts; with their untidy hair permanent-waved every six months in town; with their feminity which was asserted once and for all by a clumsy scrawl of red across the mouth. One can imagine her clenching her fists and saying fiercely to the mealie fields that rippled greenly all around her, cream-topped like the sea: “I won’t. I simply won’t. He needn’t imagine that I will!”
“Do you like my new dress, George?”
“You’re the best-looking woman in the district, Lucy.” So it seemed, on the face of it, that he didn’t expect, or even want, that she should. . . .
Meanwhile she continued to order cookbooks from town, to make new recipes of pumpkin and green mealies and chicken, to put skin food on her face at night; she constructed attractive nursery furniture out of packing-cases enameled white—the farm wasn’t doing too well; and discussed with George how little Betty’s cough was probably psychological.
“I’m sure you’re right, my dear.”
Then the rich, over-controlled voice: “Yes, darling. No, my sweetheart. Yes, of course, I’ll play bricks with you, but you must have your lunch first.” Then it broke, hard and shrill: “Don’t make all that noise, darling. I can’t stand it. Go on, go and play in the garden and leave me in peace.”
Sometimes, storms of tears. Afterwards: “Really, George, didn’t your mother ever tell you that all women cry sometimes? It’s as good as a tonic. Or a holiday.” And a lot of high laughter and gay explanations at which George hastened to guffaw. He liked her gay. She usually was. For instance, she was a good mimic. She would “take off,” deliberately trying to relieve his mind of farm worries, the visiting policemen, who toured the district once a month to see if the natives were behaving themselves, or the Government agricultural officials.
“Do you want to see my husband?”
That was what they had come for, but they seldom pressed the point. They sat far longer than they had intended, drinking tea, talking about themselves. They would go away and say at the bar in the village: “Mrs. Grange is a smart woman, isn’t she?”
And Lucy would be acting, for George’s benefit, how a khaki-clad, sun-raw youth had bent into her room, looking around him with comical surprise; had taken a cup of tea, thanking her three times; had knocked over an ashtray, stayed for lunch and afternoon tea, and left saying with awkward gallantry: “It’s a real treat to meet a lady like you who is interested in things.”
“You shouldn’t be so hard on us poor Colonials, Lucy.”
Finally one can imagine how one day, when the houseboy came to her in the chicken runs to say that there was a baas waiting to see her at the house, it was no sweating policeman, thirsty after fifteen dusty miles on a motorcycle, to whom she must be gracious.
He was a city man, of perhaps forty or forty-five, dressed in city clothes. At first glance she felt a shudder of repulsion. It was a coarse face, and sensual; and he looked like a patient vulture as the keen, heavy-lidded eyes travelled up and down her body.
“Are you looking for my husband, perhaps? He’s in the cowsheds this morning.”
“No, I don’t think I am. I was.”
She laughed. It was as if he had started playing a record she had not heard for a long time, and which started her feet tapping. It was years since she had played this game. “I’ll get you some tea,” she said hurriedly and left him in her pretty drawing-room.
Collecting the cups, her hands were clumsy. Why, Lucy! she said to herself, archly. She came back, very serious and responsible, to find him standing in front of the picture that filled half the wall at one end of the room. “I should have thought you had sunflowers enough here,” he said, in his heavy, over-emphasised voice, which made her listen for meanings behind his words. And when he turned away from the wall and came to sit down, leaning forward, examining her, she suppressed an impulse to apologise for the picture: Van Gogh is obvious, but he’s rather effective, she might have said; and she felt that the whole room was that: effective but obvious. But she was pleasantly conscious of how she looked: graceful and cool in her green linen dress, with her corn-coloured hair knotted demurely on her neck. She lifted wide, serious eyes to his face and asked, “Milk? Sugar?” and knew
that the corners of her mouth were tight with self-consciousness.
When he left, three hours later, he turned her hand over and lightly kissed the palm. She looked down at the greasy dark head, the red folded neck, and stood rigid, thinking of the raw, creased necks of vultures.
Then he straightened up and said with simple kindliness, “You must be lonely here, my dear”; and she was astounded to find her eyes full of tears.
“One does what one can to make a show of it.” She kept her lids lowered and her voice light. Inside she was weeping with gratitude. Embarrassed, she said quickly, “You know, you haven’t yet said what you came for.”
“I sell insurance. And besides, I’ve heard people talk of you.”
She imagined the talk and smiled stiffly. “You don’t seem to take your work very seriously.”
“If I may, I’ll come back another time and try again?”
She did not reply. He said, “My dear, I’ll tell you a secret: one of the reasons I chose this district was because of you. Surely there aren’t so many people in this country one can really talk to that we can afford not to take each other seriously?”
He touched her cheek with his hand, smiled, and went.
She heard the last thing he had said like a parody of the things she often said and felt a violent revulsion.
She went to her bedroom, where she found herself in front of the mirror. Her hands went to her cheeks and she drew in her breath with the shock. “Why, Lucy, whatever is the matter with you?” Her eyes were dancing, her mouth smiled irresistibly. Yet she heard the archness of her “Why, Lucy,” and thought: I’m going to pieces. I must have gone to pieces without knowing it.
Later she found herself singing in the pantry as she made a cake, stopped herself; made herself look at the insurance salesman’s face against her closed eyelids; and instinctively wiped the palms of her hands against her skirt.
He came three days later. Again, in the first shock of seeing him stand at the door, smiling familiarly, she thought, It’s the face of an old animal. He probably chose this kind of work because of the opportunities it gives him.
He talked of London, where he had lately been on leave; about the art galleries and the theatres.
She could not help warming, because of her hunger for this kind of talk. She could not help an apologetic note in her voice, because she knew that after so many years in this exile she must seem provincial. She liked him because he associated himself with her abdication from her standards by saying: “Yes, yes, my dear, in a country like this we all learn to accept the second-rate.”
While he talked his eyes were roving. He was listening. Outside the window the turkeys were scraping in the dust and gobbling. In the next room the houseboy was moving; then there was silence because he had gone to get his midday meal. The children had had their lunch and gone off to the garden with the nurse.
No, she said to herself. No, no, no.
“Does your husband come back for lunch?”
“He takes it on the lands at this time of the year, he’s so busy.”
He came over and sat beside her. “Well, shall we console each other?” She was crying in his arms. She could feel their impatient and irritable tightening.
In the bedroom she kept her eyes shut. His hand travelled up and down her back. “What’s the matter, little one? What’s the matter?”
His voice was a sedative. She could have fallen asleep and lain there for a week inside the anonymous, comforting arms. But he was looking at his watch over her shoulder. “We’d better get dressed, hadn’t we?”
“Of course.”
She sat naked on the bed, covering herself with her arms, looking at his white hairy body in loathing, and then at the creased red neck. She became extremely gay; and in the living-room they sat side by side on the big sofa, being ironical. Then he put his arm around her, and she curled up inside it and cried again. She clung to him and felt him going away from her; and in a few minutes he stood up, saying, “Wouldn’t do for your old man to come in and find us like this, would it?” Even while she was hating him for the “old man,” she put her arms around him and said, “You’ll come back soon.”
“I couldn’t keep away.” The voice purred caressingly over her head, and she said: “You know, I’m very lonely.”
“Darling, I’ll come as soon as I can. I’ve a living to make, you know.”
She let her arms drop, and smiled, and watched him drive away down the rutted red-rust farm road, between the rippling sea-coloured mealies.
She knew he would come again, and next time she would not cry; she would stand again like this, watching him go, hating him, thinking of how he had said: In this country we learn to accept the second-rate. And he would come again and again and again; and she would stand here, watching him go and hating him.
A Mild Attack of Locusts
THE rains that year were good; they were coming nicely just as the crops needed them—or so Margaret gathered when the men said they were not too bad. She never had an opinion of her own on matters like the weather, because even to know about what seems a simple thing like the weather needs experience. Which Margaret had not got. The men were Richard her husband, and old Stephen, Richard’s father, a farmer from way back; and these two might argue for hours whether the rains were ruinous or just ordinarily exasperating. Margaret had been on the farm three years. She still did not understand how they did not go bankrupt altogether, when the men never had a good word for the weather, or the soil, or the Government. But she was getting to learn the language. Farmers’ language. And they neither went bankrupt nor got very rich. They jogged along doing comfortably.
Their crop was maize. Their farm was three thousand acres on the ridges that rise up toward the Zambesi escarpment—high, dry windswept country, cold and dusty in winter, but now, in the wet season, steamy with the heat rising in wet soft waves off miles of green foliage. Beautiful it was, with the sky blue and brilliant halls of air, and the bright green folds and hollows of country beneath, and the mountains lying sharp and bare twenty miles off across the rivers. The sky made her eyes ache; she was not used to it. One does not look so much at the sky in the city she came from. So that evening when Richard said: “The Government is sending out warnings that locusts are expected, coming down from the breeding grounds up North,” her instinct was to look about her at the trees. Insects—swarms of them—horrible! But Richard and the old man had raised their eyes and were looking up over the mountain. “We haven’t had locusts in seven years,” they said. “They go in cycles, locusts do.” And then: “There goes our crop for this season!”
But they went on with the work of the farm just as usual until one day they were coming up the road to the homestead for the midday break, when old Stephen stopped, raised his finger and pointed: “Look, look, there they are!”
Out ran Margaret to join them, looking at the hills. Out came the servants from the kitchen. They all stood and gazed. Over the rocky levels of the mountain was a streak of rust-coloured air. Locusts. There they came.
At once Richard shouted at the cookboy. Old Stephen yelled at the houseboy. The cookboy ran to beat the old ploughshare hanging from a tree branch, which was used to summon the labourers at moments of crisis. The houseboy ran off to the store to collect tin cans, any old bit of metal. The farm was ringing with the clamour of the gong; and they could see the labourers come pouring out of the compound, pointing at the hills and shouting excitedly. Soon they had all come up to the house, and Richard and old Stephen were giving them orders—Hurry, hurry, hurry.
And off they ran again, the two white men with them, and in a few minutes Margaret could see the smoke of fires rising from all around the farmlands. Piles of wood and grass had been prepared there. There were seven patches of bared soil, yellow and oxblood color and pink, where the new mealies were just showing, making a film of bright green; and around each drifted up thick clouds of smoke. They were throwing wet leaves on to the fires now, to make it acrid and
black. Margaret was watching the hills. Now there was a long, low cloud advancing, rust-colour still, swelling forward and out as she looked. The telephone was ringing. Neighbours—quick, quick, there come the locusts. Old Smith had had his crop eaten to the ground. Quick, get your fires started. For of course, while every farmer hoped the locusts would overlook his farm and go on to the next, it was only fair to warn each other; one must play fair. Everywhere, fifty miles over the countryside, the smoke was rising from myriads of fires. Margaret answered the telephone calls, and between calls she stood watching the locusts. The air was darkening. A strange darkness, for the sun was blazing—it was like the darkness of a veld fire, when the air gets thick with smoke. The sunlight comes down distorted, a thick, hot orange. Oppressive it was, too, with the heaviness of a storm. The locusts were coming fast. Now half the sky was darkened. Behind the reddish veils in front, which were the advance guards of the swarm, the main swarm showed in dense black cloud, reaching almost to the sun itself.
Margaret was wondering what she could do to help. She did not know. Then up came old Stephen from the lands. “We’re finished, Margaret, finished! Those beggars can eat every leaf and blade off the farm in half an hour! And it is only early afternoon—if we can make enough smoke, make enough noise till the sun goes down, they’ll settle somewhere else perhaps. . . .” And then: “Get the kettle going. It’s thirsty work, this.”
So Margaret went to the kitchen, and stoked up the fire, and boiled the water. Now, on the tin roof of the kitchen she could hear the thuds and bangs of falling locusts, or a scratching slither as one skidded down. Here were the first of them. From down on the lands came the beating and banging and clanging of a hundred gasoline cans and bits of metal. Stephen impatiently waited while one gasoline can was filled with tea, hot, sweet and orange-coloured, and the other with water. In the meantime, he told Margaret about how twenty years back he was eaten out, made bankrupt, by the locust armies. And then, still talking, he hoisted up the gasoline cans, one in each hand, by the wood pieces set cornerwise across each, and jogged off down to the road to the thirsty labourers. By now the locusts were falling like hail on to the roof of the kitchen. It sounded like a heavy storm. Margaret looked out and saw the air dark with a criss-cross of the insects, and she set her teeth and ran out into it—what the men could do, she could. Overhead the air was thick, locusts everywhere. The locusts were flopping against her, and she brushed them off, heavy red-brown creatures, looking at her with their beady old-men’s eyes while they clung with hard, serrated legs. She held her breath with disgust and ran through into the house. There it was even more like being in a heavy storm. The iron roof was reverberating, and the clamour of iron from the lands was like thunder. Looking out, all the trees were queer and still, clotted with insects, their boughs weighed to the ground. The earth seemed to be moving, locusts crawling everywhere, she could not see the lands at all, so thick was the swarm. Towards the mountains it was like looking into driving rain—even as she watched, the sun was blotted out with a fresh onrush of them. It was a half-night, a perverted blackness. Then came a sharp crack from the bush—a branch had snapped off. Then another. A tree down the slope leaned over and settled heavily to the ground. Through the hail of insects a man came running. More tea, more water was needed. She supplied them. She kept the fires stoked and filled cans with liquid, and then it was four in the afternoon, and the locusts had been pouring across overhead for a couple of hours. Up came old Stephen again, crunching locusts underfoot with every step, locusts clinging all over him; he was cursing and swearing, banging with his old hat at the air. At the doorway he stopped briefly, hastily pulling at the clinging insects and throwing them off, then he plunged into the locust-free living-room.
African Stories Page 69