That night Mr Grant said: It’s all very well! a good many times. Then he rang up Mr Matthews (Glasgow Bob) from the Glenisle Farm; and Mr Paynter (Tobacco Paynter) from Bellvue; and Mr Van Doren (The Dutchman) from Blue Hills. Their farms adjoined Rich Mitchell’s.
Soon after, the Grants went into the station again. At the last minute they had remembered to ring up and ask Mr Rooyen if he wanted a lift. He did. It wasn’t altogether convenient, particularly for the small girl, because two-thirds of the back seat was packed to the roof with plough parts being sent into town for repair. And beside Mrs Grant on the front seat was a great parcel full of dead chickens ready for sale to the hotel. ‘It’s no bother,’ said Mrs Grant, to Mr Rooyen, ‘the child can sit on your knee.’
The trouble was that the small girl was definitely not a child. She was pretty certain she was no longer a small girl either. For one thing, her breasts had begun to sprout, and while this caused her more embarrassment than pleasure, she handled her body in a proud gingerly way that made it impossible, as she would have done even a season before, to snuggle in on the grown-up’s lap. She got out of the car in a mood of fine proud withdrawal, not looking at Mr Rooyen as he fitted himself into the narrow space on the back seat. Then, with a clumsy fastidiousness, she perched on the very edge of his bare bony knees and supported herself with two hands on the back of the front seat. Mr Rooyen’s arms were about her waist, as if she were indeed a child, and they trembled, as she had known they would – as his voice still trembled, talking about Rich Mitchell. But soon he stopped talking. The car sped forward through the heavy, red-dust-laden trees, rocking and bouncing over the dry ruts, and she was jerked back to fit against the body of Mr Rooyen, whose fierceness was that of a lonely tenderness, as she knew already, though never before in her life had she met it. She longed for the ride to be over, while she sat squeezed, pressed, suffering, in the embrace of Mr Rooyen, a couple of feet behind the Grants. She ignored, so far as was possible, with politeness; was stiff with resistance; looked at the backs of her parents’ heads and marvelled at their blindness. ‘If you only knew what your precious Mr Rooyen was doing to your precious daughter …’
When it was time to come home from the station, she shed five years and became petulant and wilful: she would sit on her mother’s knee, not on Mr Rooyen’s. Because now the car was stacked with groceries, and it was a choice of one knee or the other. ‘Why, my dear child,’ said the fond Mrs Grant, pleased at this rebirth of the charming child in her daughter. But the girl sat as stiffly on her mother’s knee as she had on the man’s, for she felt his eyes continually returning to her, over her mother’s shoulder, in need, or in fear, or in guilt.
When the car stopped at the turning to the Manager’s House, she got off her mother’s knee, and would not look at Mr Rooyen. Who then did something really not allowable, not in the code, for he bent, squeezed her in his great near-black hairy arms and kissed her. Her mother laughed, gay and encouraging. Mr Grant said merely: ‘Goodbye, Rooyen,’ as the tall forlorn fierce man walked off to his house along the grass-river road.
The girl got into the back seat, silent. Her mother had let her down, had let her new breasts down by that gay social laugh. As for her father, she looked at his profile, absorbed in the business of starting the car and setting it in motion, but the profile said nothing. She said, resentful: ‘Who does he think he is, kissing me.’ And Mrs Grant said briskly: ‘My dear child, why ever not?’ At which Mr Grant gave his wife a quick, grave look, but remained silent. And this comforted the girl, supported her.
She thought about Mr Rooyen. Or rather, she felt him – felt the trembling of his arms, felt as if he were calling to her. One hot morning, saying she was going for a walk, she set off to his house. When she got there she was overheated and tired and needed a drink. Of course there was no one there. The house was two small rooms, side by side under corrugated iron, with a lean-to kitchen behind. In front was a narrow brick veranda with pillars. Plants stood in painted paraffin tins, and they were dry and limp. She went into the first room. It had two old leather armchairs, a sideboard with a mirror that reflected trees and blue sky and long grass from the low window, and an eating table. The second room had an iron bed and a chest-of-drawers. She looked, long and thoughtful, at the narrow bed, and her heart was full of pity because of the lonely trembling of Mr Rooyen’s arms. She went into the tiny kitchen. It had an iron Carron Dover stove, where the fire was out. A wooden table had some cold meat on it with a piece of gauze over it. The meat smelled sourish. Flies buzzed. Up the legs of the table small black ants trickled. There was no servant visible. After getting herself a glass of tepid, tasting water from the filter, she walked very slowly through the house again, taking in everything, then went home.
At supper she said, casual, ‘I went to see Mr Rooyen today.’
Her father looked quickly at her mother, who dropped her eyes and crumbled bread. That meant they had discussed the incident of the kiss. ‘How is he?’ asked Mrs Grant, casual and bright. ‘He wasn’t there.’ Her father said nothing.
Next day she lapsed back into her private listening world. In the afternoon she read, but the book seemed childish. She wept enjoyably, alone. At supper she looked at her parents from a long way off, and knew it was a different place where she had never been before. They were smaller, definitely. She saw them clear: the rather handsome phlegmatic man at one end of the table, brown in his khaki (but not mahogany, he could afford not to spend every second of his waking hours in the sun). And at the other end a brisk, airy, efficient woman in a tailored striped dress. The girl thought: I came out of them; and shrank away in dislike from knowing how she had. She looked at these two strange people and felt Mr Rooyen’s arms call to her across three miles of veld. Before she went to bed she stood for a long time gazing at the small light from his house.
Next morning she went to his house again. She wore a new dress, which her mother had made. It was a childish dress that ignored her breasts, which is why she chose it. Not that she expected to see Mr Rooyen. She wanted to see the small, brick, ant-and fly-ridden house, walk through it, and come home again.
When she got there, there was not a sign of anyone. She fetched water in a half-paraffin tin from the kitchen and soaked the half-dead plants. Then she sat on the edge of the brick veranda with her feet in the hot dust. Quite soon Mr Rooyen came walking up through the trees from the lands. He saw her, but she could not make out what he thought. She said, girlish: ‘I’ve watered your plants for you.’
‘The boy’s supposed to water them,’ he said, sounding angry. He strode on to the veranda, into the room behind, and out at the back in three great paces shouting: ‘Boy! Boy!’
A shouting went on, because the cook had gone to sleep under a tree. The girl watched the man run himself a glass of water from the filter, gulp it down, run another, gulp that. He came back to the veranda. Standing like a great black hot tower over her, he demanded: ‘Does your father know you’re here?’
She shook her head, primly. But she felt he was unfair. He would not have liked her father to know how his arms had trembled and pressed her in the car.
He returned to the room, and sat, knees sprawling apart, his arms limp, in one of the big ugly leather chairs. He looked at her steadily, his mouth tight. He had a thin mouth. The lips were burned and black from the sun, and the cracks in them showed white and unhealthy.
‘Come here,’ he said, softly. It was tentative and she chose not to hear it, remained sitting with her back to him. Over her shoulder she asked, one neighbour to another: ‘Have you fixed up your vlei with Mr Mitchell yet?’ He sat looking at her, his head lowered. His eyes were really ugly, she thought, red with sun-glare. He was an ugly man, she thought. For now she was wishing – not that she had not come – but that he had not come. Then she could have walked, secretly and delightfully, through the house, and gone, secretly. And tomorrow she could have come and watered his plants again. She imagined saying to him, meeting him by
chance somewhere: ‘Guess who was watering your plants all that time?’
‘You’re a pretty little girl,’ he said. He was grinning. The grin had no relationship to the lonely hunger of his touch on her in the car. Nor was it a grin addressed to a pretty little girl – far from it. She looked at the grin, repudiating it for her future, and was glad that she wore this full, childish dress.
‘Come and sit on my knee,’ he tried again, in the way people had been saying through her childhood: Come and sit on my knee. She obligingly went, like a small girl, and balanced herself on a knee that felt all bone under her. His hands came out and gripped her thin arms. His face changed from the ugly grin to the look of lonely hunger. She was sitting upright, using her feet as braces on the floor to prevent herself being pulled into the trembling man’s body. Unable to pull her, he leaned his face against her neck, so that she felt his eyelashes and eyebrows hairy on her skin, and he muttered: ‘Maureen, Maureen, Maureen, my love.’
She stood up, smoothing down her silly dress. He opened his eyes, sat still, hands on his knees. His mouth was half-open, he breathed irregularly, and his eyes stared, not at her, but at the brick floor where tiny black ants trickled.
She sat herself on the chair opposite, tucking her dress well in around her legs. In the silence the roof cracked suddenly overhead from the heat. There was the sound of a car on the main road half a mile off. The car came nearer. Neither the girl nor the man moved. Their eyes met from time to time, frowning, serious, then moved away to the ants, to the window, anywhere. He still breathed fast. She was full of revulsion against his body, yet she remembered the heat of his face, the touch of his lashes on her neck, and his loneliness spoke to her through her dislike of him, so that she longed to assuage him. The car stopped outside the house. She saw, without surprise, that it was her father. She remained where she was as Mr Grant stepped out of the car, and came in, his eyes narrowed because of the glare and the heat under the iron roof. He nodded at his daughter, and said: ‘How do you do, Rooyen?’ There being only two chairs, the men were standing; but the girl knew what she had to do, so she went out on to the veranda, and sat on the hot rough brick, spreading her blue skirts wide so that air could come under them and cool her thighs.
Now the two men were sitting in the chairs.
‘Like some tea, Mr Grant?’
‘I could do with a cup.’
Mr Rooyen shouted: ‘Tea, boy!’ and a shout came back from the kitchen. The girl could hear the iron stove being banged and blown into heat. It was nearly midday and she wondered what Mr Rooyen would have for lunch. That rancid beef?
She thought: If I were Maureen I wouldn’t leave him alone, I’d look after him. I suppose she’s some silly woman in an office in town … But since he loved Maureen, she became her, and heard his voice saying: Maureen, Maureen, my love. Simultaneously she held her thin brown arms into the sun and felt how they were dark dry brown, she felt the flesh melting off hard lank bones.
‘I spoke to Tobacco Paynter last night on the telephone, and he said he thinks Rich Mitchell might very well be in a different frame of mind by now, he’s had a couple of good seasons.’
‘If a couple of good seasons could make any difference to Mr Mitchell,’ came Mr Rooyen’s hot, resentful voice. ‘But thank you, Mr Grant. Thank you.’
‘He’s close,’ said her father. ‘Near. Canny. Careful. Those North Country people are, you know.’ He laughed. Mr Rooyen laughed, too, after a pause – he was a Dutchman, and had to work out the phrase ‘North Country’.
‘If I were you,’ said Mr Grant, ‘I’d get the whole of the lands on either side of the vlei under mealies the first season. Rich has never had it under cultivation, and the soil’d go sixteen bags to the acre for the first couple of seasons.’
‘Yes, I’ve been thinking that’s what I should do.’
She heard the sounds of the tea being brought in.
Mr Rooyen said to her through the door: ‘Like a cup?’ but she shook her head. She was thinking that if she were Maureen she’d fix up the house for him. Her father’s next remark was therefore no surprise to her.
‘Thought of getting married, Rooyen?’
He said bitterly: ‘Take a look at this house, Mr Grant.’
‘Well, you could build on a couple of rooms for about thirty, I reckon, I’ll lend you my building boy. And a wife’d get it all spick-and-span in no time.’
Soon the two men came out, and Mr Rooyen stood on the veranda as she and her father got into the car and drove off. She waved to him, politely, with a polite smile.
She waited for her father to say something, but although he gave her several doubtful looks, he did not. She said: ‘Mr Rooyen’s in love with a girl called Maureen.’
‘Did he say so?’
‘Yes, he did.’
‘Well,’ he said, talking to her, as was his habit, one grown person to another, ‘I’d say it was time he got married.’
‘Yes.’
‘Everything all right?’ he enquired, having worked out exactly the right words to use.
‘Yes, thank you.’
‘Good.’
That season Rich Mitchell leased a couple of miles of his big vlei to Mr Rooyen, with a promise of sale later. Tobacco Paynter’s wife got a governess from England, called Miss Betty Blunt, and almost at once Mr Rooyen and she were engaged. Mrs Paynter complained that she could never keep a governess longer than a couple of months, they always got married, but she couldn’t have been too angry about it, because she laid on a big wedding for them, and all the district was there. The girl was asked if she would be a bridesmaid, but she very politely refused. On the track to the station there was a new signpost pointing along a well-used road which said: ‘The Big Vlei Farm. C. Rooyen.’
A Letter from Home
… Ja, but that isn’t why I’m writing this time. You asked about Dick. You’re worrying about him? – man! but he’s got a poetry Scholarship from a Texas University and he’s lecturing the Texans about letters and life too in Suid Afrika, South Africa to you (forgive the hostility) and his poems are read, so they tell me, wherever the English read poetry. He’s fine, man, but I thought I’d tell you about Johannes Potgieter, remember him? Remember the young poet, The Young Poet? He was around that winter you were here, don’t tell me you’ve forgotten those big melting brown eyes and those dimples. About ten years ago (ja, time flies,) he got a type of unofficial grace-gift of a job at St – University on the strength of those poems of his, and God they were good. Not that you or any other English-speaking domkop will ever know, because they don’t translate out of Afrikaans. Remember me telling you and everyone else (give me credit for that, at least, I give the devil his due, when he’s a poet) what a poet he was, how blerry good he was – but several people tried to translate Hans’s poems, including me, and failed. Right. Goed. Meanwhile, a third of the world’s population or is it a fifth, or to put it another way. X5Y59 million people speak English (and it’s increasing by six births a minute) but one million people speak Afrikaans, and though I say it in a whisper, man, only a fraction of them can read it, I mean to read it. But Hans is still a great poet. Right.
He wasn’t all that happy about being a sort of unofficial Laureate at that University, it’s no secret some poets don’t make Laureates. At the end of seven months he produced a book of poems which had the whole God-fearing place sweating and sniffing out heresy of all kinds, sin, sex, liberalism, brother-love, etc., and so on; but, of course, in a civilized country (I say this under my breath, or I’ll get the sack from my University, and I’ve got four daughters these days, had you forgotten?) no one would see anything in them but good poetry. Which is how Hans saw them, poor innocent soul, he was surprised at what people saw in them, and he was all upset. He didn’t like being called all those names, and the good country boys from their fine farms and the smart town boys from their big houses all started looking sideways and making remarks, and our Hans, he was reduced to pap, because he’s not a fi
ghter, Hans, he was never a taker of positions on the side of justice, freedom and the rest, for to tell you the truth, I don’t think he ever got round to defining them. Goed. He resigned, in what might be called a dignified silence, but his friends knew it was just plain cowardice or if you like incomprehension about what the fuss was over, and he went to live in Blagspruit in the Orange Free, where his Tantie Gertrude had a house. He helped her in her store. Ja, that’s what he did. What did we all say to this? Well, what do you think? The inner soul of the artist (etcetera) knows what is best, and he probably needed the Orange Free and his Auntie’s store for his development. Well, something like that. To tell the truth, we didn’t say much, he simply dropped out. And time passed. Ja. Then they made me editor of Onwards, and thinking about our indigenous poets I remembered Johannes Potgieter, and wrote What about a poem from you? – feeling bad because when I counted up the years it was eight since I’d even thought of him, even counting those times when one says drunk at dawn: Remember Hans? Now, there was a poet …
The Sun Between Their Feet Page 22