African Stories

by Doris Lessing

  I did not like Mrs. Pritt and I knew neither of my parents did. She was a thin, wiry, tall woman with black, short, jumpy hair. She had a sharp, knowing face and a sudden laugh like the scream of a hen caught by the leg. Her voice was always loud, and she laughed a great deal.

  But seeing Mr. Slatter with her was enough to know that they fitted. She was not gentle and kindly like Mrs. Slatter. She was as tough in her own way as Mr. Slatter. And long before I ever heard it said I knew well enough that, as my mother said primly, they liked each other. I asked her, meaning her to tell the truth, “Why does Mr. Slatter always go over when Mr. Pritt is away?” And she said, “I expect Mr. Slatter likes her.”

  In our district, with thirty or forty families on the farms spread over a hundred square miles or so, nothing happened privately. That day at the station I must have been ten years old, or eleven; but it was not the first or the last time I heard the talk between my parents:

  My father: “I daresay it could make things easier for Molly.”

  She, then: “Do you?”

  “But if he’s got to have an affair, he might at least not push it down our throats, for Molly’s sake.”

  And she: “Does he have to have an affair?”

  She said the word “affair” with difficulty. It was not her language. Nor, and that was what she was protesting against, my father’s. For they were both conventional and religious people. Yet at moments of crisis, at moments of scandal and irregularity, my father spoke this other language, cool and detached, as if he were born to it.

  “A man like Slatter,” he said thoughtfully, as if talking to another man, “it’s obvious. And Emmy Pritt. Yes. Obviously, obviously! But it depends on how Molly takes it. Because if she doesn’t take it the right way, she could make it hell for herself.”

  “Take it the right way,” said my mother, with bright protesting eyes, and my father did not answer.

  I used to stay with Mrs. Slatter sometimes during the holidays. I went across country over the kaffir paths, walking or on my bicycle, with some clothes in a small suitcase.

  The boys were, from having to stand up to Mr. Slatter, tough and indifferent boys, and went about the farm in a closed gang. They did man’s work, driving tractors and superintending the gangs of boys before they were in their teens. I stayed with Mrs. Slatter. She cooked a good deal and sewed and gardened. Most of the day she sat on the verandah, sewing. We did not talk much. She used to make her own dresses, cotton prints and pastel linens, like all the women of the district wore. She made Mr. Slatter’s khaki farm-shirts and the boys’ shirts. Once she made herself a petticoat that was too small for her to get into, and Mr. Slatter saw her struggling with it in front of the mirror, and he said, “What size do you think you are, Bluebell?” in the same way he would say, as we sat down to table, “What have you been doing with your lily-white hands today, Primrose?” To which she would reply, pleasantly, as if he had really asked a question, “I’ve made some cakes.” Or, “I got some salt meat from the butcher at the station today, fresh out of the pickle.” About the petticoat she said, “Yes, I must have been putting on more weight than I knew.”

  When I was twelve or thereabouts, I noticed that the boys had turned against their mother, not in the way of being brutal to her, but they spoke to her as their father did, calling her Bluebell, or the Fat Woman at the Fair. It was odd to hear them, because it was as if they said, simply, Mum, or Mother. Not once did I hear her lose her temper with them. I could see she had determined to herself not to make them any part of what she had against Mr. Slatter. I knew she was pleased to have me there, during that time, with the five men coming in only for meals.

  One evening during a long stay, the boys as usual had gone off to their rooms to play when supper was done, and Mr. Slatter said to his wife: “I’m off. I’ll be back tomorrow for breakfast.” He went out into the dark and the wet. It was raining hard that night. The window-panes were streaked with rain and shaking with the wind. Mrs. Slatter looked across at me and said—and this was the first time it had been mentioned how often he went off after dinner, coming back as the sun rose, or sometimes not for two or three days: “You must remember something. There are some men, like Mr. Slatter, who’ve got more energy than they know what to do with. Do you know how he started? When I met him and we were courting he was a butcher’s boy at the corner. And now he’s worth as much as any man in the district.”

  “Yes,” I said, understanding for the first time that she was very proud of him.

  She waited for me to say something more, and then said: “Yes, we have all kinds of ideas when we’re young. But Mr. Slatter’s a man that does not know his own strength. There are some things he doesn’t understand, and it all comes from that. He never understands that other people aren’t as strong as he is.”

  We were sitting in the big living-room. It had a stone floor with rugs and skins on it. A boot clattered on the stone and we looked up and there was Mr. Slatter. His teeth were showing. He wore his big black boots, shining now from the wet, and his black oilskin glistened. “The boss-boy says the river’s up,” he said. “I won’t get across tonight.” He took off his oilskin there, scattering wet on Mrs. Slatter’s polished stone floor; tugged off his boots; and reached out through the door to hang his oilskin in the passage and set his boots under it; and came back.

  There were two rivers between the Slatters’ farm and the Pritts’ farm, twelve miles off; and when the water came down they could be impassable for hours.

  “So I don’t know my own strength?” he said to her, direct, and it was a soft voice, more frightening than I had ever heard from him, for he bared grinning teeth as usual, and his big fists hung at his sides.

  “No,” she said steadily, “I don’t think you do.” She did not lift her eyes, but stayed quiet in the corner of the sofa under the lamp. “We aren’t alone,” she added quickly, and now she did look warningly at him.

  He turned his head and looked towards me. I made fast for the door. I heard her say, “Please. I’m sorry about the river. But leave me alone, please.”

  “So you’re sorry about the river?”

  “Yes.”

  “And I don’t know my own strength?”

  I shut the door. But it was a door that was never shut, and it swung open again and I ran down the passage away from it, as he said: “So that’s why you keep your bedroom door locked, Lady Godiva, is that it?”

  And she screamed out: “Ah, leave me alone. I don’t care what you do. I don’t care now. But you aren’t going to make use of me. I won’t let you make use of me.”

  It was a big house, rooms sprawling everywhere. The boys had two rooms and a playroom off at one end of a long stone passage. Dairies and larders and kitchen opened off the passage. Then a dining-room and some offices and a study. Then the living-room. And another passage off at an angle, with the room where I slept and beside it Mrs. Slatter’s big bedroom with the double bed and after that a room they called the workroom, but it was an ordinary room and Mr. Slatter’s things were in it, with a bed.

  I had not thought before that they did not share a bedroom. I knew no married people in the district who had separate rooms, and that is why I had not thought about the small room where Mr. Slatter slept.

  Soon after I had shut the door on myself, I heard them come along the passage outside, I heard voices in the room next door. Her voice was pleading, his loud; and he was laughing a lot.

  In the morning at breakfast I looked at Mrs. Slatter, but she was not taking any notice of us children. She was pale. She was helping Mr. Slatter to his breakfast. He always had three or four eggs on thick slabs of bacon, and then slice after slice of toast, and half a dozen cups of tea as black as it would come from the pot. She had some toast and a cup of tea and watched him eat. When he went out to the farm-work he kissed her, and she blushed.

  When we were on the verandah after breakfast, sewing, she said to me, apologetically and pink-cheeked: “I hope you won’t think anyth
ing about last night. Married people often quarrel. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  My parents did not quarrel. At least, I had not thought of them as quarrelling. But because of what she said I tried to remember times when they disagreed and perhaps raised their voices and then afterwards laughed and kissed each other. Yes, I thought, it is true that married people quarrel, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t happy together.

  That night after supper, when the boys had gone to their room, Mr. Slatter said, “The rivers are down; I’m off.” Mrs. Slatter, sitting quiet under the lamp, kept her eyes down and said nothing. He stood there staring at her, and she said: “Well, you know what that means, don’t you?”

  He simply went out, and we heard the lorry start up; and the headlights swung up against the window-panes a minute, so that they dazzled up gold and hard and went black again.

  Mrs. Slatter said nothing, so that my feeling that something awful had happened slowly faded. Then she began talking about her childhood in London. She was a shop assistant before she met Mr. Slatter. She often spoke of her family, and the street she lived in, so I wondered if she were homesick, but she never went back to London so perhaps she was not homesick at all.

  Soon after that Emmy Pritt got ill. She was not the sort of woman one thought of as being ill. She had some kind of operation; and they all said she needed a holiday, she needed to get off the altitude. Our part of Central Africa was high, nearly four thousand feet; and we all knew that when a person got run down they needed a rest from the altitude in the air at sea level. Mrs. Pritt went down to the Cape; and soon after Mr. and Mrs. Slatter went, too, with the four children, and they all had a holiday together at the same hotel.

  When they came back, the Slatters brought a farm assistant with them. Mr. Slatter could not manage the farm-work, he said. I heard my father say that Slatter was taking things a bit far; he was over at the Pritts’ every week-end from Friday night to Monday morning and nearly every night from after supper until morning. Slatter, he said, might be as strong as a herd of bulls, but no one could go on like that; and in any case, one should have a sense of proportion. Mr. Pritt was never mentioned, though it was not for years that I thought to consider what this might mean. We used to see him about the station, or at gymkhanas. He was an ordinary man, not like a farmer, as we knew farmers—men who could do anything; he might have been anybody, or an office person. He was ordinary in height, thinnish, with his pale hair leaving his narrow forehead high and bony. He was an accountant as well. People used to say that Charlie Slatter helped Emmy Pritt run their farm, and most of the time Mr. Pritt was off staying at neighbouring farms doing their accounts.

  The new assistant was Mr. Andrews; and, as Mrs. Slatter said to my mother when she came over for tea, he was a gentleman. He had been educated at Cambridge in England. He came of a hard-up family, though, for he had only a few hundred pounds of capital of his own. He would be an assistant for two years and then start his own farm.

  For a time I did not go to stay with Mrs. Slatter. Once or twice I asked if she had said anything to my mother about my coming, and she said in a dry voice, meaning to discourage me, “No, she hasn’t said anything.” I understood when I heard my father say: “Well, it might not be such a bad thing. For one thing, he’s a nice lad; and for another, it might make Slatter see things differently.” And another time: “Perhaps Slatter would give Molly a divorce? After all, he practically lives at the Pritts’! And then Molly could have some sort of a life at last.”

  “But the boy’s not twenty-five,” said my mother. And she was really shocked, as distinct from her obstinate little voice when she felt him to be wrong-headed or loose in his talk—a threat of some kind. “And what about the children? Four children!”

  My father said nothing to this, but after some minutes he came off some track of thought with: “I hope Molly’s taking it sensibly. I do hope she is. Because she could be laying up merry hell for herself if she’s not.”

  I saw George Andrews at a gymkhana, standing at the rail with Mrs. Slatter. Although he was an Englishman he was already brown; and his clothes were loosened up and easy, as our men’s clothes were. So there was nothing to dislike about him on that score. He was rather short, not fat, but broad, and you could see he would be fat. He was healthy-looking above all, with a clear, reddish face the sun had laid a brown glisten over; and very clear blue eyes; and his hair was thick and short, glistening like fur. I wanted to like him and so I did. I saw the way he leaned beside Mrs. Slatter, with her dust coat over his arm, holding out his programme for her to mark. I could understand that, after Mr. Slatter, she would like a gentleman who would open doors for her and stand up when she came into the room. I could see she was proud to be with him. And so I liked him, though I did not like his mouth; his lips were pink and wettish. I did not look at his mouth again for a long time. And because I liked him I was annoyed with my father when he said, after that gymkhana, “Well, I don’t know. I don’t think I like it after all. He’s a bit of a young pup, Cambridge or no Cambridge.”

  Six months after George Andrews came to the district there was a dance for the young people at the Slatters’. It was the first dance. The two older boys were eighteen and seventeen and they had girls. The two younger boys were fifteen and thirteen and they despised girls. I was fifteen then, and all these boys were too young for me, and the girls of the two older boys were nearly twenty. There were about sixteen of us, and the married people thirty or forty, as usual. The married people sat in the living-room and danced in it, and we were on the verandahs. Mr. Slatter was dancing with Emmy Pritt, and sometimes another woman; and Mrs. Slatter was busy being a hostess and dancing with George Andrews. I was still in a short dress and unhappy because I was in love with one of the assistants from the farm between the rivers; and I knew very well that until I had a long dress he would not see me. I went into Mrs. Slatter’s bedroom latish because it seemed the only room empty, and I looked out of the window at the dark wet night. It was the rainy season, and we had driven over the swollen noisy river and all the way the rainwater was sluicing under our tires. It was still raining, and the lamplight gilded streams of rain so that as I turned my head slightly this way and that, the black and the gold rods shifted before me, and I thought (and I had never thought so simply before about these things): “How do they manage? With all these big boys in the house? And they never go to bed before eleven or half-past these days, I bet, and with Mr. Slatter coming home unexpectedly from Emmy Pritt—it must be difficult. I suppose he has to wait until everyone’s alseep. It must be horrible, wondering all the time if the boys have noticed something. . . .” I turned from the window and looked from it into the big, low-ceilinged, comfortable room with its big low bed covered over with pink roses, the pillows propped high in pink frilled covers; and although I had been in that room during visits for years of my life, it seemed strange to me, and ugly. I loved Mrs. Slatter. Of all the women in the district she was the kindest, and she had always been good to me. But at that moment I hated her and I despised her.

  I started to leave the bedroom, but at the door I stopped, because Mrs. Slatter was in the passage, leaning against the wall, and George Andrews had his arms around her, and his face in her neck. She was saying, “Please don’t, George, please don’t, please; the boys might see.” And he was swallowing her neck and saying nothing at all. She was twisting her face and neck away and pushing him off. He staggered back from her, as though she had pushed him hard, but it was because he was drunk and had no balance, and he said: “Oh, come on into your bedroom a minute. No one will know.” She said, “No, George. Why should we have to snatch five minutes in the middle of a dance, like—”

  “Like what?” he said, grinning. I could see how the light that came down the passage from the big room made his pink lips glisten.

  She looked reproachfully at him, and he said: “Molly, this thing is getting a bit much, you know. I have to set my alarm clock for one in the morning, and then I’m
dead beat. I drag myself out of my bed, and then you’ve got your clock set for four, and God knows working for your old man doesn’t leave one with much enthusiasm for bouncing about all night.” He began to walk off towards the big room where the people were dancing. She ran after him and grabbed at his arm. I retreated backward towards Mr. Slatter’s room, but almost at once she had got him and turned him around and was kissing him. The people in the big room could have seen if they had been interested.

  That night Mrs. Slatter had on an electric blue crepe dress with diamonds on the straps and in flower patterns on the hips. There was a deep V in front which showed her breasts swinging loose under the crepe, though usually she wore strong corsets. And the back was cut down to the waist. As the two turned and came along, he put his hand into the front of her dress, and I saw it lift out her left breast, and his mouth was on her neck again. Her face was desperate; but that did not surprise me, because I knew she must be ashamed. I despised her, because her white, long breast, lying in his hand like a piece of limp, floured dough, was not like Mrs. Slatter who called men Mister even if she had known them twenty years, and was really very shy, and there was nothing Mr. Slatter liked more than to tease her because she blushed when he used bad language.

  “What did you make such a fuss for?” George Andrews was saying in a drunken sort of way. “We can lock the door, can’t we?”

  “Yes, we can lock the door,” she answered in the same way, laughing.

  I went back into the crowd of married people, where the small children also were, and sat beside my mother; and it was only five minutes before Mrs. Slatter came back looking as usual, from one door, and then George Andrews, in at another.