African Stories

by Doris Lessing

  I did not go to the Slatters’ again for some months. For one thing, I was away at school; and for another people were saying that Mrs. Slatter was run down and she should get off the altitude for a bit. My father was not mentioning the Slatters by this time, because he had quarrelled with my mother over them. I knew they had, because whenever Molly Slatter was mentioned, my mother tightened her mouth and changed the subject.

  And so a year went by. At Christmas they had a dance again, and I had my first long dress, and I went to that dance not caring if it was at the Slatters’ or anywhere else. It was my first dance as one of the young people. And so I was on the verandah dancing most of the evening, though sometimes the rain blew in on us, because it was raining again, being the full of the rainy season, and the skies were heavy and dark, with the moon shining out like a knife from the masses of the clouds and then going in again leaving the verandah with hardly light enough to see each other. Once I went down to the steps to say goodbye to some neighbours who were going home early because they had a new baby, and coming back up the steps there was Mr. Slatter and he had Mrs. Slatter by the arm. “Come here, Lady Godiva,” he said. “Give us a kiss.”

  “Oh, go along,” she said, sounding good-humoured. “Go along with you and leave me in peace.”

  He was quite drunk, but not very. He twisted her arm around. It looked like a slight twist but she came up sudden against him, in a bent-back curve, her hips and legs against him, and he held her there. Her face was sick, and she half-screamed, “You don’t know your own strength.” But he did not slacken the grip, and she stayed there, and the big sky was filtering a little stormy moonlight and I could just see their faces, and I could see his grinning teeth. “Your bloody pride, Lady Godiva,” he said. “Who do you think you’re doing in? Who do you think is the loser over your bloody locked door?” She said nothing and her eyes were shut. “And now you’ve frozen out George, too? What’s the matter, isn’t he good enough for you either?” He gave her arm a wrench, and she gasped, but then shut her lips again, and he said: “So now you’re all alone in your tidy bed, telling yourself fairy stories in the dark. Sister Theresa, the little flower.”

  He let her go suddenly, and she staggered, so he put out his other hand to steady her, and held her until she was steady. It seemed odd to me that he should care that she shouldn’t fall to the ground, and that he should put his hand like that to stop her falling.

  And so I left them and went back on to the verandah. I was dancing all the night with the assistant from the farm between the rivers. I was right about the long dress. All those months, at the station or at gymkhanas, he had never seen me at all. But that night he saw me, and I was wanting him to kiss me. But when he did I slapped his face. Because then I knew that he was drunk. I had not thought he might be drunk, though it was natural he was, since everybody was. But the way he kissed me was not at all what I had been thinking. “I beg your pardon I’m sure,” he said, and I walked past him into the passage, and then into the living-room. But there were so many people and my eyes were stinging, so I went through into the other passage, and there, just like last year, as if the whole year had never happened, were Mrs. Slatter and George Andrews. I did not want to see it, not the way I felt.

  “And why not?” he was saying, biting into her neck.

  “Oh, George, that was all ended months ago, months ago!”

  “Oh, come on, Moll, I don’t know what I’ve done. You never bothered to explain.”

  “No.” And then, crying out, “Mind my arm.”

  “What’s the matter with your arm?”

  “I fell and sprained it.”

  So he let go of her, and said, “Well, thanks for the nice interlude, thanks anyway, old girl.” I knew that he had been meaning to hurt her, because I could feel what he said hurting me. He went off into the living-room by himself, and she went off after him, but to talk to someone else, and I went into her bedroom. It was empty. The lamp was on a low table by the bed, turned down; and the sky through the windows was black and wet and hardly any light came from it.

  Then Mrs. Slatter came in and sat on the bed and put her head in her hands. I did not move.

  “Oh my God!” she said. “Oh my God, my God!” Her voice was strange to me. The gentleness was not in it, though it was soft, but it was soft from breathlessness.

  “Oh my God!” she said, after a long long silence. She took up one of the pillows from the bed, and wrapped her arms around it, and laid her head down on it. It was quiet in this room, although from the big room came the sound of singing, a noise like howling, because people were drunk, or part-drunk, and it had the melancholy savage sound of people singing when they are drunk. An awful sound, like animals howling.

  Then she put down the pillow, tidily, in its proper place, and swayed backward and forward and said: “Oh God, make me old soon, make me old. I can’t stand this, I can’t stand this any longer.”

  And again the silence, with the howling sound of the singing outside, and the footsteps of the people who were dancing scraping on the cement of the verandah.

  “I can’t go on living,” said Mrs. Slatter, into the dark above the small glow of lamplight. She bent herself up again, double, as if she were hurt physically, her hands gripped around her ankles, holding herself together; and she sat crunched up, her face looking straight in front at the wall, level with the lamplight. So now I could see her face. I did not know that face. It was stone, white stone, but her eyes gleamed out of it black, and with a flicker in them. And her black shining hair that was not grey at all yet had loosened and hung in streaks around the white stone face.

  “I can’t stand it,” she said again. The voice she used was strange to me. She might have been talking to someone. For a moment I even thought she had seen me and was talking to me, explaining herself to me. And then, slowly, she let herself unclench and she went out into the dance again.

  I took up the lamp and held it as close as I could to the mirror and bent in and looked at my face. But there was nothing to my face.

  Next day I told my father I had heard Mrs. Slatter say she could not go on living. He said, “Oh Lord, I hope it’s not because of what I said about her dress”; but I said no, it was before he said he didn’t like the dress. “Then if she was upset,” he said, “I expect what I said made her feel even worse.” And then: “Oh poor woman, poor woman!” He went into the house and called my mother and they talked it over. Then he got onto the telephone and I heard him asking Mrs. Slatter to drop in next time she was going past to the station. And it seemed she was going in that morning, and before lunchtime she was on our verandah talking to my father. My mother was not there, although my father had not asked her in so many words not to be there. As for me, I went to the back of the verandah where I could hear what they said.

  “Look, Molly,” he said, “we are old friends. You’re looking like hell these days. Why don’t you tell me what’s wrong? You can say anything to me, you know.”

  After quite a time she said, “Mr. Farquar, there are some things you can’t say to anybody. Nobody.”

  “Ah, Molly,” he said, “if there’s one thing I’ve learned—and I learned it early on, when I was a young man and I had a bad time—it’s this. Everybody’s got something terrible, Molly. Everybody has something awful they have to live with. We all live together and we see each other all the time, and none of us knows what awful thing the other person might be living with.”

  And then she said, “But Mr. Farquar, I don’t think that’s true. I know people who don’t seem to have anything private to make them unhappy.”

  “How do you know, Molly? How do you know?”

  “Take Mr. Slatter,” she said. “He’s a man who does as he likes. But he doesn’t know his own strength. And that’s why he never seems to understand how other people feel.”

  “But how do you know, Molly? You can live next to someone for fifty years and still not know. Perhaps he’s got something that gives him hell when he�
�s alone, like all the rest of us?”

  “No, I don’t think so, Mr. Farquar.”

  “Molly,” he said, appealing suddenly, and very exasperated. “You’re too hard on yourself, Molly.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  He said, “Listen, why don’t you get away for a while, get yourself down to the sea? This altitude drives us all quietly crazy. You get down off the altitude for a bit.”

  She still said nothing, and he lowered his voice, and I could imagine how my mother’s face would have gone stiff and cold had she heard what he said: “And have a good time while you’re there. Have a good time and let go a bit.”

  “But, Mr. Farquar, I don’t want a good time.” The words, a good time, she used as if they could have nothing to do with her.

  “If we can’t have what we want in this world, then we should take what we can get.”

  “It wouldn’t be right,” she said at last, slowly. “I know people have different ideas, and I don’t want to press mine on anyone.”

  “But Molly—” he began, exasperated, or so it sounded, and then he was silent.

  From where I sat I could hear the grass chair creaking; she was getting out of it. “I’ll take your advice,” she said. “I’ll get down to the sea and I’ll take the children with me. The two younger ones.”

  “To hell with the kids for once. Take your old man with you and see that Emmy Pritt doesn’t go with you this time.”

  “Mr. Farquar,” she said, “if Mr. Slatter wants Emmy Pritt, he can have her. He can have either one or the other of us. But not both. If I took him to the sea he would be over at her place ten minutes after we got back.”

  “Ah, Molly, you women can be hell. Have some pity on him for once.”

  “Pity? Mr. Slatter’s a man who needs nobody’s pity. But thank you for your good advice, Mr. Farquar. You are always very kind, you and Mrs. Farquar.”

  And she said goodbye to my father, and when I came forward she kissed me and asked me to come and see her soon, and she went to the station to get the stores.

  And so Mrs. Slatter went on living. George Andrews bought his own farm and married and the wedding was at the Slatters’. Later on Emmy Pritt got sick again and had another operation and died. It was a cancer. Mr. Slatter was ill for the first time in his life from grief, and Mrs. Slatter took him to the sea, by themselves, leaving the children, because they were grown-up anyway. For this was years later, and Mrs. Slatter’s hair had gone grey and she was fat and old, as I had heard her say she wanted to be.

  A Road to the Big City

  THE train left at midnight, not at six. Jansen’s flare of temper at the clerk’s mistake died before he turned from the counter; he did not really mind. For a week he had been with rich friends, in a vacuum of wealth, politely seeing the town through their eyes. Now, for six hours, he was free to let the dry and nervous air of Johannesburg strike him direct. He went into the station buffet. It was a bare place, with shiny brown walls and tables arranged regularly. He sat before a cup of strong orange-coloured tea; and because he was in the arrested, dreamy frame of mind of the uncommitted traveller, he was the spectator at a play that could not hold his attention. He was about to leave, in order to move by himself through the streets, among the people, trying to feel what they were in this city, what they had which did not exist, perhaps, in other big cities—for he believed that in every place there dwelt a demon that expressed itself through the eyes and voices of those who lived there—when he heard someone ask: “Is this place free?” He turned quickly, for there was a quality in the voice which could not be mistaken. Two girls stood beside him, and the one who had spoken sat down without waiting for his response; there were many empty tables in the room. She wore a tight, short, black dress, several brass chains, and high-heeled, shiny, black shoes. She was a tall, broad girl with colourless hair ridged tightly round her head, but given a bright surface so that it glinted like metal. She immediately lighted a cigarette and said to her companion, “Sit down, for God’s sake.” The other girl shyly slid into the chair next to Jansen, averting her face as he gazed at her, which he could not help doing—she was so different from what he expected. Plump, childish, with dull hair bobbing in fat rolls on her neck, she wore a flowered and flounced dress and flat white sandals on bare and sunburnt feet. Her face had the jolly friendliness of a little dog. Both girls showed Dutch ancestry in the broad blunt planes of cheek and forehead; both had small blue eyes, though one pair was surrounded by sandy lashes and the other by black varnished fringes.

  The waitress came for an order. Jansen was too curious about the young girl to move away. “What will you have?” he asked. “Brandy,” said the older one at once. “Two brandies,” she added, with another impatient look at her sister—there could be no doubt that they were sisters.

  “I haven’t never drunk brandy,” said the younger with a giggle of surprise. “Except when Mom gave me some sherry at Christmas.” She blushed as the older said despairingly, half under her breath: “Oh God preserve me from it!”

  “I came to Johannesburg this morning,” said the little one to Jansen confidingly. “But Lilla has been here earning a living for a year.”

  “My God!” said Lilla again. “What did I tell you? Didn’t you hear what I told you?” Then, making the best of it, she smiled professionally at Jansen and said, “Green! You wouldn’t believe it if I told you. I was green when I came, but compared with Marie. . . .” She laughed angrily.

  “Have you been to Joburg before this day?” asked Marie in her confiding way.

  “You are passing through,” stated Lilla, with a glance at Marie. “You can tell easy if you know how to look.”

  “You’re quite right,” said Jansen.

  “Leaving tomorrow perhaps?” asked Lilla.

  “Tonight,” said Jansen.

  Instantly Lilla’s eyes left Jansen and began to rove about her, resting on one man’s face and then the next. “Midnight,” said Jansen, in order to see her expression change.

  “There’s plenty time,” she said, smiling.

  “Lilla promised I could go to the bioscope,” said Marie, her eyes becoming large. She looked around the station buffet, and because of her way of looking, Jansen tried to see it differently. He could not. It remained for him a bare, brownish, dirty sort of place, full of badly-dressed and dull people. He felt as one does with a child whose eyes widen with terror or delight at the sight of an old woman muttering down the street, or a flowering tree. What hunched black crone from a fairy tale, what celestial tree does the child see? Marie was smiling with charmed amazement.

  “Very well,” said Jansen, “let’s go to the movies.”

  For a moment Lilla calculated, her hard blue glance moving from Jansen to Marie. “You take Marie,” she suggested, direct to Jansen, ignoring her sister. “She’s green, but she’s learning.” Marie half-rose, with a terrified look. “You can’t leave me,” she said.

  “Oh my God!” said Lilla resignedly. “Oh, all right. Sit down, baby. But I’ve a friend to see. I told you.”

  “But I only just came.”

  “All right, all right. Sit down, I said. He won’t bite you.”

  “Where do you come from?” asked Jansen.

  Marie said a name he had never heard.

  “It’s not far from Bloemfontein,” explained Lilla.

  “I went to Bloemfontein once,” said Marie, offering Jansen this experience. “The bioscope there is big. Not like near home.”

  “What is home like?”

  “It’s small,” said Marie.

  “What does your father do?”

  “He works on the railway,” Lilla said quickly.

  “He’s a ganger,” said Marie, and Lilly rolled her eyes up and sighed.

  Jansen had seen the gangers’ cottages, the frail little shacks along the railway lines, miles from any place, where the washing flapped whitely on the lines over patches of garden, and the children ran out to wave to the train that passed s
hrieking from one wonderful fabled town to the next.

  “Mom is old-fashioned,” said Marie. She said the word old-fashioned carefully; it was not hers, but Lilla’s; she was tasting it, in the way she sipped at the brandy, trying it out, determined to like it. But the emotion was all her own; all the frustration of years was in her, ready to explode into joy. “She doesn’t want us to be in Joburg. She says it is wrong for girls.”

  “Did you run away?” asked Jansen.

  Wonder filled the child’s face. “How did you guess I ran away?” she said, with a warm admiring smile at Lilla. “My sister sent me the money. I didn’t have none at all. I was alone with Mom and Dad, and my brothers are working on the copper mines.”

  “I see.” Jansen saw the lonely girl in the little house by the railway lines, helping with the chickens and the cooking, staring hopelessly at the fashion papers, watching the trains pass, too old now to run out and wave and shout, but staring at the fortunate people at the windows with grudging envy, and reading Lilla’s letters week after week: “I have a job in an office. I have a new dress. My young man said to me . . .” He looked over the table at the two fine young South African women, with their broad and capable look, their strong bodies, their health, and he thought: Well, it happens every day. He glanced at his watch and Marie said at once: “There’s time for the bioscope, isn’t there?”

  “You and your bioscope,” said Lilla. “I’ll take you tomorrow afternoon.” She rose, said to Jansen in an offhand way: “Coming?” and went to the door. Jansen hesitated, then followed Marie’s uncertain but friendly smile.

  The three went into the street. Not far away shone a large white building with film stars kissing between thin borders of coloured shining lights. Streams of smart people went up the noble marble steps where splendid men in uniform welcomed them. Jansen, watching Marie’s face, was able to see it like that. Lilla laughed and said: “We’re going home, Marie. The pictures aren’t anything much. There’s better things to do than pictures.” She winked at Jansen.