African Stories

by Doris Lessing

  I looked at William, sitting opposite to me. He turned his head and smiled. I fell in love.

  He was then fifteen, home for the holidays. He was a silent boy, thoughtful; and the quietness in his deep grey eyes seemed to me like a promise of warmth and understanding I had never known. There was a tightness in my chest, because it hurt to be shut out from the world of simple kindness he lived in. I sat there, opposite to him, and said to myself that I had known him all my life and yet until this moment had never understood what he was. I looked at those extraordinarily clear eyes, that were like water over grey pebbles; I gazed and gazed, until he gave me a slow, direct look that showed he knew I had been staring. It was like a warning, as if a door had been shut.

  After the MacGregors had gone, I went through the bushes to the pomegranate tree. It was about my height, a tough, obstinate-looking thing; and there was a round yellow ball the size of a walnut hanging from a twig.

  I looked at the ugly little tree and thought, Pomegranates I Breasts like pomegranates and a belly like a heap of wheat! The golden pomegranates of the sun, I thought . . . pomegranates like the red of blood.

  I was in a fever, more than a little mad. The space of thick grass and gooseberry bushes between the trees was haunted by William; and his deep, calm, grey eyes looked at me across the pomegranate tree.

  Next day I sat under the tree. It gave no shade, but the acrid sunlight was barred and splotched under it. There was hard, cracked, red earth beneath a covering of silvery dead grass. Under the grass I saw grains of red and half a hard brown shell. It seemed that a fruit had ripened and burst without our knowing it—yes, everywhere in the soft old grass lay the tiny crimson seeds. I tasted one; warm sweet juice flooded my tongue. I gathered them up and ate them until my mouth was full of dry seeds. I spat them out and thought that a score of pomegranate trees would grow from that mouthful.

  As I watched, tiny black ants came scurrying along the roots of the grass, scrambling over the fissures in the earth, to snatch away the seeds. I lay on my elbow and watched. A dozen of them were levering at a still unbroken seed. Suddenly the frail tissue split as they bumped it over a splinter, and they were caught in a sticky red ooze.

  The ants would carry these seeds for hundreds of yards; there would be an orchard of pomegranates. William MacGregor would come visiting with his parents and find me among the pomegranate trees; I could hear the sound of his grave voice mingled with the tinkle of camel bells and the splashing of falling water.

  I went to the tree every day and lay under it, watching the single yellow fruit ripening on its twig. There would come a moment when it must burst and scatter crimson seeds; I must be there when it did; it seemed as if my whole life was concentrated and ripening with that single fruit.

  It was very hot under the tree. My head ached. My flesh was painful with the sun. Yet there I sat all day, watching the tiny ants at their work, letting them run over my legs, waiting for the pomegranate fruit to ripen. It swelled slowly; it seemed set on reaching perfection, for when it was the size that the other had been picked, it was still a bronzing yellow, and the rind was soft. It was going to be a big fruit, the size of both my fists.

  Then something terrifying happened. One day I saw that the twig it hung from was splitting off the branch. The wizened, dry little tree could not sustain the weight of the fruit it had produced. I went to the house, brought down bandages from the medicine chest, and strapped the twig firm and tight to the branch, in such a way that the weight was supported. Then I wet the bandage, tenderly, and thought of William, William, William. I wet the bandage daily, and thought of him.

  What I thought of William had become a world, stronger than anything around me. Yet, since I was mad, so weak, it vanished at a touch. Once, for instance, I saw him, driving with his father on the waggon along the road to the station. I remember I was ashamed that that marvellous feverish world should depend on a half-grown boy in dusty khaki, gripping a piece of grass between his teeth as he stared ahead of him. It came to this—that in order to preserve the dream, I must not see William. And it seemed he felt something of the sort himself, for in all those weeks he never came near me, whereas once he used to come every day. And yet I was convinced it must happen that William and the moment when the pomegranate split open would coincide.

  I imagined it in a thousand ways, as the fruit continued to grow. Now, it was a clear bronze yellow with faint rust-coloured streaks. The rind was thin, so soft that the swelling seeds within were shaping it. The fruit looked lumpy and veined, like a nursing breast. The small crown where the stem fastened on it, which had been the sheath of the flower, was still green. It began to harden and turn back into iron-grey thorns.

  Soon, soon, it would be ripe. Very swiftly, the skin lost its smooth thinness. It took on a tough, pored look, like the skin of an old weather-beaten countryman. It was a ruddy scarlet now, and hot to the touch. A small crack appeared, which in a day had widened so that the packed red seeds within were visible, almost bursting out. I did not dare leave the tree. I was there from six in the morning until the sun went down. I even crept down with the candle at night, although I argued it could not burst at night, not in the cool of the night; it must be the final unbearable thrust of the hot sun that would break it.

  For three days nothing happened. The crack remained the same. Ants swarmed up the trunk, along the branches, and into the fruit. The scar oozed red juice in which black ants swarm and struggled. At any moment it might happen. And William did not come. I was sure he would; I watched the empty road helplessly, waiting for him to come striding along, a piece of grass between his teeth, to me and the pomegranate tree. Yet he did not. In one night, the crack split another half-inch. I saw a red seed push itself out of the crack and fall. Instantly it was borne off by the ants into the grass.

  I went up to the house and asked my mother when the MacGregors were coming to tea.

  “I don’t know, dear. Why?”

  “Because. I just thought. . . .”

  She looked at me. Her eyes were critical. In one moment, she would say the name “William.” I struck first. To have William and the moment together, I must pay fee to the family gods. “There’s a pomegranate nearly ripe, and you know how interested Mrs. MacGregor is. . . .”

  She looked sharply at me. “Pick it, and we’ll make a drink of it.”

  “Oh, no, it’s not quite ready. Not altogether. . . .”

  “Silly child,” she said at last. She went to the telephone and said: “Mrs. MacGregor, this daughter of mine, she’s got it into her head—you know how children are.”

  I did not care. At four that afternoon I was waiting by the pomegranate tree. Their car came thrusting up the steep road to the crown of the hill. There was Mr. MacGregor in his khaki, Mrs. MacGregor in her best afternoon dress—and William. The adults shook hands, kissed. William did not turn round and look at me. It was not possible, it was monstrous, that the force of my dream should not have had the power to touch him at all, that he knew nothing of what he must do.

  Then he slowly turned his head and looked down the slope to where I stood. He did not smile. It seemed he had not seen me, for his eyes travelled past me, and back to the grownups. He stood to one side while they exchanged their news and greetings; and then all four laughed, and turned to look at me and my tree. It seemed for a moment they were all coming. At once, however, they went into the house, William trailing after them, frowning.

  In a moment he would have gone in; the space in front of the old house would be empty. I called “William!” I had not known I would call. My voice sounded small in the wide afternoon sunlight.

  He went on as if he had not heard. Then he stopped, seemed to think, and came down the hill towards me while I anxiously examined his face. The low tangle of the gooseberry bushes was around his legs, and he swore sharply.

  “Look at the pomegranate,” I said. He came to a halt beside the tree, and looked. I was searching those clear grey eyes now for a trace of
that indulgence they had shown my mother over the Brussels sprouts, over that first unripe pomegranate. Now all I wanted was indulgence; I abandoned everything else.

  “It’s full of ants,” he said at last.

  “Only a little, only where it’s cracked.”

  He stood, frowning, chewing at his piece of grass. His lips were full and thin-skinned; and I could see the blood, dull and dark around the pale groove where the grass stem pressed.

  The pomegranate hung there, swarming with ants.

  “Now,” I thought wildly, “now—crack now.”

  There was not a sound. The sun came pouring down, hot and yellow, drawing up the smell of the grasses. There was, too, a faint sour smell from the fermenting juice of the pomegranate.

  “It’s bad,” said William, in that uncomfortable, angry voice. “And what’s that bit of dirty rag for?”

  “It was breaking, the twig was breaking off—I tied it up.”

  “Mad,” he remarked, aside, to the afternoon. “Quite mad.” He was looking about him in the grass. He reached down and picked up a stick.

  “No,” I cried out, as he hit at the tree. The pomegranate flew into the air and exploded in a scatter of crimson seeds, fermenting juice, and black ants.

  The Cracked empty skin, with its white, clean-looking inner skin faintly stained with juice, lay in two fragments at my feet.

  He was poking sulkily with the stick at the little scarlet seeds that lay everywhere on the earth.

  Then he did look at me. Those clear eyes were grave again, thoughtful, and judging. They held that warning I had seen in them before.

  “That’s your pomegranate,” he said at last.

  “Yes,” I said.

  He smiled, “We’d better go up, if we want any tea.”

  We went together up the hill to the house, and as we entered the room where the grownups sat over the teacups, I spoke quickly, before he could. In a bright, careless voice I said: “It was bad, after all; the ants had got at it. It should have been picked before.”

  Getting Off the Altitude

  THAT night of the dance, years later, when I saw Mrs. Slatter come into the bedroom at midnight, not seeing me because the circle of lamplight was focussed low, with a cold and terrible face I never would have believed could be hers after knowing her so long during the day-times and the visits—that night, when she dragged herself out of the room again, still not knowing I was there, I went to the mirror to see my own face. I held the lamp as close as I could and looked into my face. For I had not known before that a person’s face could be smooth and comfortable, though often sorrowful, like Molly Slatter’s had been all those years, and then hard-set, in the solitude away from the dance and the people (that night they had drunk a great deal and the voices of the singing reminded me of when dogs howl at the full moon), into an old and patient stone. Yes, her face looked like white stone that the rain has trickled over and worn through the wet seasons.

  My face, that night in the mirror, dusted yellow from the lamplight, with the dark watery spaces of the glass behind, was smooth and enquiring, with the pert, flattered look of a girl in her first long dress and dancing with the young people for the first time. There was nothing in it, a girl’s face, empty. Yet I had been crying just before, and I wished then I could go away into the dark and stay there forever. Yet Molly Slatter’s terrible face was familiar to me, as if it were her own face, her real one. I seemed to know it. And that meant that the years I had known her, comfortable and warm in spite of all her troubles, had been saying something else to me about her. But only now I was prepared to listen.

  I left the mirror, set the lamp down on the dressing-table, went out into the passage, and looked for her among the people; and there she was in her red satin dress, looking just as usual, talking to my father, her hand on the back of his chair, smiling down at him.

  “It hasn’t been a bad season, Mr. Farquar,” she was saying. “The rains haven’t done us badly at all.”

  Driving home in the car that night, my mother asked, “What was Molly saying to you?”

  And my father said, “Oh I don’t know, I really don’t know.” His voice was sad and angry.

  She said, “That dress of hers. Her evening dresses look like a cheap night club.”

  He said, troubled and sorrowful, “Yes. Actually I said something to her.”

  “Somebody should.”

  “No,” he said, quick against the cold criticising voice. “No. It’s a—pretty colour. But I said to her, ‘There’s not much to that dress, is there?’ ”

  “What did she say?”

  “She was hurt. I was sorry I said anything.”

  “H’mm,” said my mother, with a little laugh.

  He turned his head from his driving, so that the car lights swung wild over the rutted track for a moment, and said direct at her: “She’s a good woman. She’s a nice woman.”

  But she gave another offended gulp of laughter. As a woman insists in an argument because she won’t give in, even when she knows she is wrong.

  As for me, I saw that dress again, with its criss-cross of narrow, sweat-darkened straps over the ageing white back; and I saw Mrs. Slatter’s face when my father criticised her. I might have been there, I saw it so clearly. She coloured, lifted her head, lowered her lids so that the tears would not show, and she said, “I’m sorry you feel like that, Mr. Farquar.” It was with dignity. Yes. She had put on that dress in order to say something. But my father did not approve. He had said so.

  She cared what my father said. They cared very much for each other. She called him Mr. Farquar always, and he called her Molly; and when the Slatters came over to tea, and Mr. Slatter was being brutal, there was a gentleness and a respect for her in my father’s manner that made even Mr. Slatter feel it and even, sometimes, repeat something he had said to his wife in a lower voice, although it was still impatient.

  The first time I knew my father felt for Molly Slatter and that my mother grudged it to her was when I was perhaps seven or eight. Their house was six miles away over the veld, but ten by the road. Their house, like ours, was on a ridge. At the end of the dry season, when the trees were low and the leaves thinning, we could see their lights flash out at sundown, low and yellow across the miles of country. My father, after coming back from seeing Mr. Slatter about some farm matter, stood by our window looking at their lights, and my mother watched him. Then he said, “Perhaps she should stand up to him? No, that’s not it. She does, in her way. But Lord, he’s a tough customer—Slatter.”

  My mother said, her head low over her sewing: “She married him.”

  He let his eyes swing around at her, startled. Then he laughed. “That’s right, she married him.”

  “Well?”

  “Oh, come off it, old girl,” he said, almost gay, laughing and hard? Then, still laughing angrily, he went over and kissed her on the cheek.

  “Hike Molly,” she said, defensive. “I like her. She hasn’t got what you might call conversation, but I like her.”

  “Living with Slatter, I daresay she’s got used to keeping her mouth shut.”

  When Molly Slatter came over to spend the day with my mother the two women talked eagerly for hours about household things. Then, when my father came in for tea or dinner, there was a lock of sympathies and my mother looked ironical while he went to sit by Mrs. Slatter, even if only for a minute, saying: “Well, Molly? Everything all right with you?”

  “I’m very well, thank you, Mr. Farquar, and so are the children.”

  Most people were frightened of Mr. Slatter. There were four Slatter boys, and when the old man was in a temper and waving the whip he always had with him, they ran off into the bush and stayed there until he had cooled down. All the natives on their farm were afraid of him. Once when he knew their houseboy had stolen some soap he tied him to a tree in the garden without food and water all of one day, and then through the night, and beat him with his whip every time he went past, until the boy confessed. And
once, when he had hit a farm boy, and the boy complained to the police, Mr. Slatter tied the boy to his horse and rode it at a gallop to the police station twelve miles off and made the boy run beside, and told him if he complained to the police again he would kill him. Then he paid the ten-shilling fine and made the boy run beside the horse all the way back again.

  I was so frightened of him that I could feel myself begin trembling when I saw his car turning to come up the drive from the farmlands.

  He was a square, fair man, with small sandy-lashed blue eyes and small puffed cracked lips and red ugly hands. He used to come up the wide red shining steps of the verandah, grinning slightly, looking at us. Then he would take a handful of towhair from the heads of whichever of his sons were nearest, one in each fist, and tighten his fists slowly, not saying a word, while they stood grinning back and their eyes filled slowly. He would grin over their heads at Molly Slatter, while she sat silent, saying nothing. Then, one or the other of the boys would let out a sound of pain, and Mr. Slatter showed his small discoloured teeth in a grin of triumphant good humour and let them both go. Then he stamped off in his big farm boots into the house.

  Mrs. Slatter would say to her sons, “Don’t cry. Your father doesn’t know his own strength. Don’t cry.” And she went on sewing, composed and pale.

  Once, at the station, the Slatter car and ours were drawn up side by side outside the store. Mrs. Slatter was sitting in the front seat, beside the driver’s seat. In our car my father drove and my mother was beside him. We children were in the back seats. Mr. Slatter came out of the bar with Mrs. Pritt and stood on the store verandah talking to her. He stood before her, legs apart, in his way of standing, head back on his shoulders, eyes narrowed, grinning, red fists loose at his sides, and talked on for something like half an hour. Meanwhile Mrs. Pritt let her weight slump on to one hip and lolled in front of him. She wore a light, shrill green dress, so short it showed the balls of her thin knees.

  And my father leaned out of our car window, though we had all our stores in and might very well leave for home now, and talked steadily and gently to Mrs. Slatter, who was quiet, not looking at her husband, but making conversation with my father and across him to my mother. And so they went on talking until Mr. Slatter left Mrs. Pritt and slammed himself into the driver’s seat and started the car.