Dancing Lessons

by Olive Senior

  40

  IT WAS MA D who turned me into a farmer, who turned me into something, though she seemed to have failed with her own children. I was such a child that when Sam brought me there, and it became clear to me that he and I were not going to live together—at least not for now, as I told myself—I became quite content to stay alone in the house with her, for her presence was light and she seemed glad of my company. I never went back to school, but she was the best education I had. She had been a schoolteacher. Her house was full of books: novels, dictionaries and encyclopedias, and how-to manuals. I spent much of my time devouring them, not noticing that everything was at least thirty years out of date. At first she tried to quiz me on what I had read, but when she realized I was too shy to say anything, she gave me paper and pen and made me write book reports and essays, which she carefully corrected, giving me high praise from time to time, something I was not used to. She taught me French and Latin, and botany, making me do all the drawings and label them. How to embroider and sew and cook. She taught me a million things. She understood my inability to express myself out loud and she worked around that, never calling me dummy and treating me like a fool as others had.

  She had a kitchen garden that fed her household and the bachelors as well. I marvelled at how this educated woman had slipped so easily into the mould of countrywoman, for apart from the help of an old man and woman—Mass Ephraim and Miss Gem, who lived in a little cottage at the back—she did all the hard work herself. Her skin was like old leather, dry and weathered from the sun. She wore a broad straw hat when she was out in the sun, and she never seemed to take care of herself as Aunt Zena did with her gardening gloves and skin creams and potions.

  Soon my own face, my hands Aunt Zena had made me keep covered with long sleeves, so I wouldn’t get any darker, were black from the sun; my palms coarse and scratched from planting and digging and mulching. We raised chickens and rabbits for food. Mass Ephraim had his flock of goats that seemed to live on nothing but rocks and air and kitchen peelings, though there was strong competition for the latter between them and Ma D’s compost heap that was guarded by a high chicken-wire fence. We worked all the time, but this was work I did willingly, because I wanted to, not like the make-work inside the house that Aunt Zena had forced on me.

  I would hitch up my skirt and tie it at the waist, as the countrywomen did, and show my legs, my hair still in school girl plaits. I would push my hands into this thin and battered soil and learn from Mass Ephraim and Ma D how to make it rich with mulch and compost and manure so it would spring to life again and bear fruit. I thought that year and a half I spent there, learning about soil, the effects of wind, how to conserve moisture, how to conserve everything, from these two country people, one of them unlettered, was the best time of my life. The only thing I could never get up the nerve to handle was extracting honey from the hives, for Ma D kept bees that produced from the fragrant logwood blossoms the most exquisite honey.

  The Samphires had a large spread, hundreds of acres, much bigger than the Richardses, but I could see that the family had come down in the world, for the house was badly in need of repair and the yard, like Ma D, had an air of neglect. Besides the main house and cottage there was a huge barnlike building, with a dry shingle roof and much of the walls caved in, and several outhouses that had been stables, for this had been a livestock pen for several generations. They too had been allowed to fall apart, though enough remained for them to serve as night residences for Mass Ephraim’s goats. Another stable had been crudely patched up and was home to a horse that Ma D kept for the occasional rides she took around the property. She didn’t have a car. The stable was also home to a milk cow Mass Ephraim fed by hand, travelling miles on his donkey to bring back fresh grass. Mass Ephraim and his donkey were in fact our main means of contact with the outside world. He rode off frequently to collect groceries and packages at the railway station or post office and was Ma D’s all-round messenger. He never returned without the hampers on both sides loaded down with goods for Ma D or grass or fruit he’d collected on the way, his small wiry body seeming to fit perfectly with the energetic little animal that always burst into a gallop the minute it sighted its home.

  The land immediately beyond the house was nothing but dry packed red earth, not a blade of grass. It was criss-crossed by a lot of fenced-off areas. Whatever purpose these had once served was no longer apparent; the wires sagged and the fence posts leaned crazily. There were no flowers or plants in front of the house, it was just that hard packed earth right up to the three broad steps of cut-stone that led up to the veranda. The same type of cut-stone blocks were used to raise the house slightly off the ground, the space underneath providing a dark and cool refuge for the mongrel dogs that hid there from the midday sun. The veranda was my favourite place: it was wide and cool and went three-quarters of the way around the house and was well served by deep, comfortable old wicker chairs. At the back there was another porch enclosed in wire mesh to keep the insects out, the coolest part of the house, for against it grew an enormous passion fruit vine. It was at the back, too, that Ma D kept her flourishing garden, where her pumpkins and melons grew rampant and her tomatoes and green peppers and carrots thrived in the thick mulch. There was a large tank to catch rainwater, but there was so little of that we had to conserve every drop and reuse it on the plants.

  Apart from the garden, everything about the old homestead seemed dispirited and sad, in sharp contrast to the Bull Pen and its noisy occupants and visitors. The boys, as Ma D referred to them, raised beef cattle and horses somewhere on the backlands, but I never saw them. They cut logwood for cash. Outside of Ma D’s plot, no crops were cultivated, and the land as far as the eye could see was just scrub and logwood and dildo cactus. After a while I understood why, for though they lived only about ten miles from where I came from, which was an area of lush vegetation, they were the other side of the mountains, in the rain shadow, so they received hardly any. On these savannas when the rivers and springs dried up, as they sometimes did, there was no water. There were years, Ma D said, when they had to butcher all the cattle and virtually give the beef away. The horses wandered off and died, as they could not keep them alive.

  I only understood the strangeness of this land in which I found myself when I wandered away from the yard one day and kept walking on and on and nearly died of terror when I came across the barbed wire fences with the bleached white skulls of horses and cows staring back at me from the top of every fence post. More than anything else, it made me feel that I had wandered into a territory far more demanding and cruel than the safe, protected haven of the world I had left behind. This was a world that mocked me. I had never seen skulls of large animals before and the sight of so many gave me a feeling of having fallen into a pit. I ran back home as fast as I could, my head spinning. I said nothing to Ma D, but after that I was always afraid to go out of sight of the house on my own. So many worlds out there I didn’t know. So much darkness.

  Ma D never spoke of her husband, but I knew he had died some years back and there was something very strange about the atmosphere of that house, secretive and claustrophobic. The sister and her husband, who had a job on one of the sugar estates and came home on weekends, kept mainly to themselves on one side of the house, hardly speaking to me or Ma D. Fairly soon I realized that Ma D herself was strange, as if two people resided in her. One was the sweet schoolteacher who was kind and careful with me, a woman who without fuss took charge of everything that needed doing, was the model of competence. The other was a woman who seemed at times without warning to sink into a fuzzy haze of forgetfulness, to shrink at the slightest touch or sound, and to not know anyone around her. She had horrible nightmares too, and I would sit up in bed in the room next to hers and pull the pillow over my head to block out the awful sounds of her wrestling with the Devil, as Aunt Zena would have called it. These spells or turns only lasted a day or two, or even hours, and then she would return to normal as if nothing had happen
ed. At first I was worried that she would go mad like my father, but she was never frightening or threatening at those times. Since her two old helpers seemed to take her spells for granted, I learned to do so too.

  But then I noticed that in those times of her distress, for that is the only word I could use to describe the expression on her face, her bodily afflictions seemed to stand out more, for she looked like a battered chicken in a way, like some of the men of our district who had returned from the War. She had one arm slightly bent at the elbow, as if it had been broken and not properly set; she walked with a limp; she had that deep gouge on one cheek which pulled down one eye so that the lower lid always seemed red and exposed; and she had a useless thumb on one hand. She also had various scars on her body that had healed into unsightly lumps. She didn’t try to hide them, as if she no longer noticed them or cared. Maybe it was my imagination or I studied her more at these times as she paid no attention to me, but all these wounds on her body seemed to jump out at me, and I would look at them afresh and wonder.

  Her husband had been a respectable man in the community, I was to learn much later, a justice of the peace and a charmer, if loud and boisterous like his sons, a man’s man, hard riding, hard shooting, hard drinking. So who would have believed what went on inside his house, how he viciously beat his wife and children, raped his own daughter? No one would have talked about any of it if he hadn’t been killed in his own house one night—beaten to death, some said. At that time the boys were all still living at home, the move to the Bull Pen taking place after that event. No one was ever charged, there were no outside witnesses, no evidence that could link any one family member to the crime, and none of them would say more than the story they had all agreed upon, that some stranger had obviously broken in. Rumours and finger-pointing had followed the family for a while, then the hand of guilt was settled alternately on the daughter or the wife. Though why them, I don’t know, except that the boys were men’s men and popular, and drank and went bird shooting with the policemen and lawyers and judges and politicians. I heard this story long after I left there, and so when I saw Ma D in one of her moods, little did I know how close I could have come to emulating her.

  41

  SOMETIMES WHEN I WASN’T too overwhelmed, I would feel sad about my constant sadness, guilt that I was giving in to something soft, rotten even. For, after all, I hadn’t been scarred on my body with beatings from parents or men. Not like Ma D, not like many of the women and girls I knew. I hadn’t been raped by father, uncle, or brother. Up to the time I left home, I had had a soft life, a substantial roof over my head, a room to myself, a comfortable bed to sleep in, three meals at least each day. So much more than the majority of the people who shared my world. So what was there to be sad about? Did I have a right to be sad? How much are you expected to bear before you allow yourself to be weighed down? To abandon yourself to the pain of indignity? The toll of indifference?

  42

  ONCE SAM TOOK ME and left me with his mother, I hardly ever saw him, and when he did come to the house it was for the briefest of visits, usually with some request, some matter to do with the property, and he usually spoke to her standing on the steps leading up to the veranda, hat in hand. I noticed that neither he nor any of his brothers ever came inside that house if they could help it. Ma D would go out to meet him, with me like some shadow at her back, smiling shyly at him, and he would lift his hat and smile broadly at both of us, but he never took any further notice of me. I would lurk then, first on the veranda, then, as I was ignored, retreat until I was at the doorway, backing off until I was fully inside the dark hall. Sometimes Ma D followed him out into the yard and they would talk. I could hear the murmur of their voices but not what was said. When they were finished, he would mount his horse and ride away. I would stand there with my head pressed against the wall until I heard him go, trying not to cry, trying to force down the lump in my throat so that when Ma D came back inside and found me by the doorway, I would be looking not at all concerned.

  She never said anything, but I knew she understood my pain, for those were always the times that she kept me most busy, usually finding something new and complicated to teach me.

  “Come,” she would say, “Ephraim brought us lots of lemons. Let me show you how to make lemon meringue pie.”

  Or it would be cutwork embroidery. Or how to debone and stuff a chicken. I would go and apply myself to the complicated task at hand, for it kept the pain at bay, and it compressed time, so that another day of my life would pass without my noticing the emptiness. It was as if the pastry that I rolled out, the bread dough I thumped down, the cutting of an intricate pattern for a dress, the carving up of a chicken the proper way, provided solace. It was only later, looking back, that I realized how Ma D had worked out these ways of coping for herself, and I was always thankful that she had taught me not just the intricacies of domesticity, but how to use them as a way of smoothing over the hurt.

  I wonder now about my own children, how they could have been sending out distress signals all the time that I was too ignorant to read. For I never seemed to have passed down to them the strategies for survival that Ma D taught me.

  43

  WHEN I MOVED BACK to live in the district, a married woman, I was a different person from the one who had flown away in that scandalous fashion. I was now a woman of accomplishment, a woman capable of coping with whatever life threw at her. A woman of strategy. Or so I thought. But what is the use of knowing how to debone and stuff chickens if there are no chickens to stuff? Still, I would have made it, you know, I would have opened up to the world, become my grown-up self, if only I knew that he loved me. But finding out so soon into our married life that he didn’t care one bit drained me of whatever confidence I had managed to gain under Ma D’s tutelage. Drained me so quickly that by the time I came to take up residence in our own house I had turned back into that silent, withdrawn girl. Hopeless.

  44

  ONCE MR. BRIDGES AND Winston and I got our garden going—and within weeks it was already a beautiful sight—you would have thought that everyone at Ellesmere Lodge had once been a farmer. Even Ruby came tottering out in her high-heeled gilt sandals, with matching toenail polish, not to praise but to announce that Winston’s next task would be to dig a bed for roses, the planting of which she would supervise, for her rose garden had been such a showplace, rose growers from all over the world had come to admire it. And then like a poem she proceeded to reel off the names of the roses she had grown—Etoile de France, Paul Neyron, La Tosca, Else Poulson, Gertrude Jekyll, Queen Elizabeth. It went on and on, with her flashing her cigarette like a conductor’s baton. Between puffs and French pronunciation she told us how difficult it was to grow roses here in the tropics, unless one had the expertise. The performance was so impressive that even Winston, who made a point of putting on his surliest face in the presence of any of the residents unless they were asking him to do a paid favour, stopped what he was doing and gazed at her open-mouthed, nodding his head to the cadence of the rose call.

  Ruby was an impressive if incongruous sight in the garden, the gold chains around her freckled and wattled neck glinting through the V-neck of her cream silk blouse with the billowy sleeves, her wrists and fingers flashing with jewellery, her fake fingernails long and ruby red, her stork-like legs emerging from her too-short linen skirt to totter on the heels. Her make-up was bold and already running, masking the strong features of what must have once been a beautiful face, the forehead high, the nose straight, the mouth a natural Cupid’s bow. Ruby probably didn’t know that all this had changed into caricature. Ruby was then well over eighty.

  Fortunately, she never visited too often, she was such a distraction, but garden talk more and more did come to occupy our table in the dining room, and that of the others. Although not one of them knew what it was to put their hands into the ground or dirty them in any form of manual labour, it turned out that they had all had gardens. Except for Heathcliff, who had alway
s occupied a house provided by his school and left that sort of thing up to the agricultural teacher, and Mr. Levy, who said he left it all up to his wife. Miss Loony’s contribution was that music was the food not only of love but of plants and she would come and sing to ours.

  A nice garden, as opposed to gardening, I discovered, was another mark of the social elite, the kemptness of their acreage a source of judgment and competitiveness as much as the grandeur of the house or the size of the husband’s car and investments. This came out even among the best of friends, the Pancake Sisters, who began to argue now about the respective merits of their ginger lilies and Ixora, the rarity of their orchids and the size of their bird’s nest ferns. Until it finally came down to the nitty-gritty: who had had the better gardener. I discovered too that a good gardener, one who really knew what he was doing, was a priceless acquisition, and that these folks were not above poaching each other’s. Everyone rated a gardener with Indian blood as the best.