‘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 off-hand 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.
They went to a two-roomed flat in a suburb. It was over a grocery store called Mac’s Golden Emporium. It had tinned peaches, dried fruit, dressed dolls and rolls of cotton stuffs in the window. The flat had new furniture in it. There was a sideboard with bottles and a radio. The radio played: ‘Or would you like to swing on a star, carry moonbeams home in a jar, and be better off than you are …’
‘I like the words,’ said Marie to Jansen, listening to them with soft delight. Lilla said: ‘Excuse me, but I have to phone my friend,’ and went out.
Marie said: ‘Have a drink.’ She said it carefully. She poured brandy, the tip of her tongue held between her teeth, and she spilled the water. She carried the glass to Jansen, and smiled in unconscious triumph as she set it down by him. Then she said: ‘Wait,’ and went into the bedroom. Jansen adjusted himself on the juicy upholstery of a big chair. He was annoyed to find himself here. What for? What was the good of it? He looked at himself in the glass over a sideboard. He saw a middle-aged gentleman, with a worn indulgent face, dressed in a grey suit and sitting uncomfortably in a very ugly chair. But what did Marie see when she looked at him? She came back soon, with a pair of black shiny shoes on her broad feet, and a tight red dress, and a pretty face painted over her own blunt honest face. She sat herself down opposite him, as she had seen Lilla sit, adjusting the poise of her head and shoulders. But she forgot her legs, which lay loosely in front of her, like a schoolgirl’s.
‘Lilla said I could wear her dresses,’ she said, lingering over her sister’s generosity. ‘She said today I could live here until I earned enough to get my own flat. She said I’d soon have enough.’ She caught her breath. ‘Mom would be mad.’
‘I expect she would,’ said Jansen drily; and saw Marie react away from him. She spread her red skirts and faced him politely, waiting for him to make her evening.
Lilla came in, turned her calculating, good-humoured eye from her sister to Jansen, smiled, and said: ‘I’m going out a little. Oh, keep your hair on. I’ll be back soon. My friend is taking me for a walk.’
The friend came in and took Lilla’s arm, a large, handsome sunburned man who smiled with a good-time smile at Marie. She responded with such a passion of admiration in her eyes that Jansen understood at once what she did not see when she looked at himself. ‘My, my,’ said this young man with easy warmth to Marie. ‘You’re a fast learner, I can see that.’
‘We’ll be back,’ said Lilla to Marie. ‘Remember what I said.’ Then, to Jansen, like a saleswoman: ‘She’s not bad. Anyhow she can’t get herself into any trouble here at home.’ The young man slipped his arm around her, and reached for a glass off the sideboard with his free hand. He poured brandy, humming with the radio: ‘In a shady nook, by a babbling brook …’ He threw back his head, poured the brandy down, smiled broadly at Jansen and Marie, winked and said: ‘Be seeing you. Don’t forget to wind up the clock and put the cat out.’ Outside on the landing he and Lilla sang: ‘Carry moonbeams home in a jar, be better off than you are …’ They sang their way down to the street. A car door slammed, an engine roared. Marie darted to the window, and said bitterly: “They’ve gone to the pictures.’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Jansen. She came back, frowning, preoccupied with responsibility. ‘Would you like another drink?’ she asked, remembering what Lilla had told her. Jansen shook his head, and sat still for a moment, weighted with inertia. Then he said: ‘Marie, I want you to listen to me.’ She leaned forward dutifully, ready to listen. But this was not as she had gazed at the other man, the warm, generous, laughing, singing young man. Jansen found many words ready on his tongue, disliked them, and blurted: ‘Marie, I wish you’d let me send you back home tonight.’ Her face dulled. ‘No, Marie, you really must listen.’ She listened politely, from behind her dull resistance. He used words carefully, out of the delicacy of his compassion, and saw how they faded into meaninglessness in the space between him and Marie. Then he grew brutal and desperate, because he had to reach her. He said: ‘This sort of life isn’t as much fun as it looks’; and ‘Thousands of girls all over the world choose the easy way because they’re stupid, and afterwards they’re sorry.’ She dropped her lids, looked at her feet in her new high shoes, and shut herself off from him. He used the words whore and prostitute; but she had never heard them except as swearwords, and did not connect them with herself. She began repeating, over and over again: ‘My sister’s a typist; she’s got a job in an office.’
He said angrily: ‘Do you think she can afford to live like this on a typist’s pay?’
‘Her gentleman friend gives her things, he’s generous, she told me so,’ said Marie doubtfully.
‘How old are you, Marie?’
‘Eighteen,’ she said, turning her broad freckled wrist, where Lilla’s bracelet caught the light.
‘When you’re twenty-five you’ll be out on the streets picking up any man you see, taking them to hotels …’
At the word ‘hotel’ her eyes widened; he remembered she had never been in a hotel; they were something lovely on the cinema screen.
‘When you’re thirty you’ll be an old woman.’
‘Lilla said she’d look after me. She promised me faithfully,’ said Marie, in terror at his coldness. But what he was saying meant nothing to her, nothing at all. He saw that she probably did not know what the word prostitute meant; that the things Lilla had told her meant only lessons in how to enjoy the delights of this city.
He said: ‘Do you know what I’m here for? Your sister expects you to take off your clothes and get into bed and …’ He stopped. Her eyes were wide open, fastened on him, not in fear, but in the anxious preoccupation of a little girl who is worried she is not behaving properly. Her hands had moved to the buckle of her belt, and she was undoing it.
Jansen got up, and without speaking he gathered clothes that were obviously hers from off the furniture, from off the floor. He went into the bedroom and found a suitcase and put her things into it. ‘I’m putting you on to the t
rain tonight,’ he said.
‘My sister won’t let you,’ she cried out. ‘She’ll stop you.’
‘Your sister’s a bad girl,’ said Jansen, and saw, to his surprise, that Marie’s face showed fear at last. Those two words, ‘bad girl’, had more effect than all his urgent lecturing.
‘You shouldn’t say such things,’ said Marie, beginning to cry. ‘You shouldn’t never say someone’s a bad girl.’ They were her mother’s words, obviously, and had hit her hard, where she could be reached. She stood listless in the middle of the floor, weeping, making no resistance. He tucked her arm inside his, and led her downstairs. ‘You’ll marry a nice man soon, Marie,’ he promised. ‘You won’t always have to live by the railway lines.’
‘I don’t never meet no men, except Dad,’ she said, beginning to tug at his arm again.
He held her tight until they were in a taxi. There she sat crouched on the edge of the seat, watching the promised city sweep past. At the station, keeping a firm hold on her, he bought her a ticket and gave her five pounds, and put her into a compartment and said: ‘I know you hate me. One day you’ll know I’m right and you’ll be glad.’ She smiled weakly, and huddled herself into her seat, like a cold little animal, staring sadly out of the window.
He left her, running, to catch his own train which already stood waiting on the next platform.
As it drew out of the station he saw Marie waddling desperately on her tall heels along the platform, casting scared glances over her shoulder. Their eyes met; she gave him an apologetic smile, and ran on. With the pound notes clutched loosely in her hand she was struggling her way through the crowds back to the lights, the love, the joyous streets of the promised city.
Plants and Girls
There was a boy who lived in a small house in a small town in the centre of Africa.
Until he was about twelve, this house had been the last in the street, so that he walked straight from the garden, across a railway line, and into the veld. He spent most of his time wandering by himself through the vleis and the kopjes. Then the town began to grow, so that in the space of a year a new suburb of smart little houses lay between him and the grass and trees. He watched this happening with a feeling of surprised anger. But he did not go through the raw new streets to the vlei where the river ran and the little animals moved. He was a lethargic boy, and it seemed to him as if some spell had been put on him, imprisoning him for ever in the town. Now he would walk through the new streets, looking down at the hard glittering tarmac, thinking of the living earth imprisoned beneath it. Where the veld trees had been allowed to stay, he stood gazing, thinking how they drew their strength through the layers of rubble and broken brick, direct from the breathing soil and from the invisibly running underground rivers. He would stand there, staring and it would seem to him that he could see those fresh, subtly-running streams of water moving this way and that beneath the tarmac, and he stretched out his fingers like roots towards the earth. People passing looked away uncomfortably. Children called out: ‘Moony, moony, mooning again!’ Particularly the children from the house opposite laughed and teased him. They were a large noisy family, solid in the healthy strength of their numbers. He could hardly distinguish one from another: he felt that the house opposite was filled like a box with plump, joyous, brown-eyed people whose noisy cheerful voices frightened him.
He was a lanky, thin-boned youth whose face was tall and unfinished-looking, and his eyes were enormous, blue wide, staring, with the brilliance of distance in them.
His mother, when he returned to the house, would say tartly: ‘Why don’t you go over and play with the children? Why don’t you go into the bush like you used to? Why don’t you …’
He was devoted to his mother. He would say vaguely: ‘Oh I don’t know,’ and kick stones about in the dust, staring away over the house at the sky, knowing that she was watching him through the window as she sewed, and that she was pleased to have him there, in spite of her tart complaining voice. Or he would go into the room where she sat sewing, and sit near her, in silence, for hours. If his father came into the room he began to fidget, and soon went away. His father spoke angrily about his laziness and his unnatural behaviour.
He made the mother fetch a doctor to examine the boy. It was from this time that Frederick took the words ‘not normal’ as his inheritance. He was not normal; well, he accepted it. They made a fact of something he had always known because of the way people looked at him and spoke to him. He was neither surprised nor dismayed at what he was. And when his mother wept over him, after the doctor left, he scarcely heard the noise of her tears; he smiled at her with the warm childish grin that no one else had ever seen, for he knew he could always depend on her.
His father’s presence was a fact he accepted. On the surface they made an easy trio, like an ordinary family. At meals they talked like ordinary people. In the evenings his father sometimes read to him, for Frederick found it hard to read, although he was now half-way through his teens; but there were moments when the old man fell silent, staring in unconcealable revulsion at this son he had made; and Frederick would let his eyes slide uncomfortably away, but in the manner of a person who is embarrassed at someone else’s shortcomings. His mother accepted him; he accepted himself; that was enough.
When his father died he was sorry, and cried with his fists in his eyes like a baby. At the graveside the neighbours looked at this great shambling child with his colourless locks of hair and the big red fists rubbing at his eyes, and felt relieved at the normal outburst of grief. But afterwards it was he and his mother alone in the small suburban house, and they never spoke of the dead father who had vanished entirely from their lives, leaving nothing behind him. She lived for him, waiting for his return from school, or from his rambles around the streets; and she never spoke of the fact that he was in a class with children five years his junior, that he was always alone at weekends and holidays, never with other children.
He was a good son. He took her tea in the mornings at the time the sun rose; and watched her crinkled old face light up from the pillow as he set down the tray by her knees. But he did not stay with her then. He went out again quickly, shutting the door, his eyes turned from the soft, elderly white shoulders, which were not, for him, his mother. This is how he saw her: in her dumpy flowered apron, her brown sinewy arms setting food before him, her round spectacles shining, her warm face smiling. Yet he did not think of her as an old lady. Perhaps he did not see her at all. He would sometimes put out his great lank hand and stroke her apron. Once he went secretly into her bedroom and took her hairbrush off the dressing-table and brushed the apron which was lying on the bed; and he put the apron on, and laughed out loud at the sight of himself in the mirror.
Later, when he was seventeen, a very tall awkward youth with the strange-lit blue eyes, too old to be put to bed with a story after supper, he wandered about by himself through that area of ugly new houses that seemed to change under the soft brightness of the moon into a shadowy beauty. He walked for hours, or stood still gazing dimly about him at the deep starry sky, or at the soft shape of trees. There was a big veld tree that stood a short way from their gate in a space between two street lamps, so that there was a well of shadow beneath it which attracted him very much. He stood beneath the tree, listening to the wind moving gently in the leaves, feeling it stir his hair like fingers. He would move slowly in to the tree until his long fingers met the rough bark, and he stroked the tree curiously, learning it, thinking: under this roughness and hardness moves the sap, like rivers under the earth. He came to spend his evenings there, instead of walking among the houses and looking in with puzzled unenvious eyes through the windows at the other kind of people. One evening an extraordinarily violent spasm shook him, so that he found himself locked about that harsh strong trunk, embracing it violently, his arms and thighs knotted about it, sobbing and muttering angry words. Afterwards he slowly went home, entering the small brightly-lit room shamedly; and his great blue eyes sought
his mother’s, and he was surprised that she did not say anything, but smiled at him as usual. Always there was this assurance from her; and as time went past, and each night he returned to the tree, caressing and stroking it, murmuring words of love, he would come home simply, smiling his wide childish smile, waiting for her to smile back, pleased with him.
But opposite was still that other house full of people; the children were growing up; and one evening when he was leaning against the tree in deep shadow, his arm loosely about it, as if around a tender friend, someone stopped outside the space of shadow and peered in saying: ‘Why, Moony, what are you doing here by yourself?’ It was one of the girls from that house, and when he did not reply she came towards him, finally putting out her hand to touch his arm. The touch struck cruelly through him and he moved away, and she said with a jolly laugh: ‘What’s the matter? I won’t eat you.’ She pulled him out into the yellowy light from the street lamp and examined him. She was a fattish, untidy, bright girl, one of the middle children, full of affection for everything in the world; and this odd silent youth standing there quite still between her hands affected her with amused astonishment, so that she said: ‘Well, you are a funny boy, aren’t you?’ She did not know what to do with him, so at last she took him home over the street. He had never been inside her house before, and it was like a foreign country. There were so many people, so much noise and laughter and the wireless was shouting out words and music. He was silent and smiling in this world which had nothing to do with himself.
His passive smile piqued the girl, and later when he got up saying: ‘My mother’s waiting for me,’ she replied, ‘Well, at any rate you can take me to the pictures tomorrow.’
He had never taken a girl out; had never been to the pictures save with his parents, as a child is taken; and he smiled as at a ridiculous idea. But next evening she came and made him go with her.
The Sun Between Their Feet Page 16