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At thirty nothing had changed. On her thirtieth birthday she felt a vague surprise that did not even amount to discomfort – for she did not feel any different – that the years had gone past so quickly. Thirty! It sounded a great age. But it had nothing to do with her. At the same time she did not celebrate this birthday; she allowed it to be forgotten. She felt almost outraged that such a thing could happen to her, who was no different from the Mary of sixteen.
She was by now the personal secretary of her employer, and was earning good money. If she had wanted, she could have taken a flat and lived the smart sort of life. She was quite presentable. She had the undistinguished, dead-level appearance of South African white democracy. Her voice was one of thousands: flattened, a little sing-song, clipped. Anyone could have worn her clothes. There was nothing to prevent her living by herself, even running her own car, entertaining on a small scale. She could have become a person on her own account. But this was against her instinct.
She chose to live in a girls’ club, which had been started, really, to help women who could not earn much money, but she had been there so long no one thought of asking her to leave. She chose it because it reminded her of school, and she had hated leaving school. She liked the crowds of girls, and eating in a big dining-room, and coming home after the pictures to find a friend in her room waiting for a little gossip. In the Club she was a person of some importance, out of the usual run. For one thing she was so much older than the others. She had come to have what was almost the rôle of a comfortable maiden aunt to whom one can tell one’s troubles. For Mary was never shocked, never condemned, never told tales. She seemed impersonal, above the little worries. The stiffness of her manner, her shyness, protected her from many spites and jealousies. She seemed immune. This was her strength, but also a weakness that she would not have considered a weakness: she felt disinclined, almost repelled, by the thought of intimacies and scenes and contacts. She moved among all those young women with a faint aloofness that said as clear as words: I will not be drawn in. And she was quite unconscious of it. She was very happy in the Club.
Outside the girls’ club, and the office, where again she was a person of some importance, because of the many years she had worked there, she led a full and active life. Yet it was a passive one, in some respects, for it depended on other people entirely. She was not the kind of woman who initiates parties, or who is the centre of a crowd. She was still the girl who is ‘taken out’.
Her life was really rather extraordinary: the conditions which produced it are passing now, and when the change is complete, women will look back on them as on a vanished Golden Age.
She got up late, in time for the office (she was very punctual) but not in time for breakfast. She worked efficiently, but in a leisurely way, until lunch. She went back to the club for lunch. Two more hours’ work in the afternoon and she was free. Then she played tennis, or hockey or swam. And always with a man, one of those innumerable men who ‘took her out’, treating her like a sister: Mary was such a good pal! Just as she seemed to have a hundred women friends, but no particular friend, so she had (it seemed) a hundred men, who had taken her out, or were taking her out, or who had married and now asked her to their homes. She was friend to half the town. And in the evening she always went to sundowner parties that prolonged themselves till midnight, or danced, or went to the pictures. Sometimes she went to the pictures five nights a week. She was never in bed before twelve or later. And so it had gone on, day after day, week after week, year after year. South Africa is a wonderful place: for the unmarried white woman. But she was not playing her part, for she did not get married. The years went past; her friends got married; she had been bridesmaid a dozen times; other people’s children were growing up; but she went on as companionable, as adaptable, as aloof and as heart-whole as ever, working as hard enjoying herself as she ever did in the office, and never for one moment alone, except when she was asleep.
She seemed not to care for men. She would say to her girls, ‘Men! They get all the fun.’ Yet outside the office and the club her life was entirely dependent upon men, though she would have most indignantly repudiated the accusation. And perhaps she was not so dependent upon them really, for when she listened to other people’s complaints and miseries she offered none of her own. Sometimes her friends felt a little put off, and let down. It was hardly fair, they felt obscurely, to listen, to advise, to act as a sort of universal shoulder for the world to weep on, and give back nothing of her own. The truth was she had no troubles. She heard other people’s complicated stories with wonder, even a little fear. She shrank away from all that. She was a most rare phenomenon: a woman of thirty without love troubles, headaches, backaches, sleeplessness or neurosis. She did not know how rare she was.
And she was still ‘one of the girls’. If a visiting cricket team came to town and partners were needed, the organizers would ring up Mary. That was the kind of thing she was good at: adapting herself sensibly and quietly to any occasion. She would sell tickets for a charity dance or act as a dancing partner for a visiting full-back with equal amiability.
And she still wore her hair little-girl fashion on her shoulders, and wore little-girl frocks in pastel colours, and kept her shy, naive manner. If she had been left alone she would have gone on, in her own way, enjoying herself thoroughly, until people found one day that she had turned imperceptibly into one of those women who have become old without ever having been middle-aged: a little withered, a little acid, hard as nails, sentimentally kindhearted, and addicted to religion or small dogs.
They would have been kind to her, because she had ‘missed the best things of life’. But then there are so many people who don’t want them: so many for whom the best things have been poisoned from the start. When Mary thought of ‘home’ she remembered a wooden box shaken by passing trains; when she thought of marriage she remembered her father coming home red-eyed and fuddled; when she thought of children she saw her mother’s face at her children’s funeral – anguished, but as dry and as hard as rock. Mary liked other people’s children but shuddered at the thought of having any of her own. She felt sentimental at weddings, but she had a profound distaste for sex; there had been little privacy in her home and there were things she did not care to remember; she had taken good care to forget them years ago.
She certainly did feel, at times, a restlessness, a vague dissatisfaction that took the pleasure out of her activities for a while. She would be going to bed, for instance, contentedly, after the pictures, when the thought would strike her, ‘Another day gone!’ And then time would contract and it seemed to her only a breathing space since she left school and came into town to earn her own living; and she would feel a little panicky, as if an invisible support had been drawn away from underneath her. But then, being a sensible person, and firmly convinced that thinking about oneself was morbid, she would get into bed and turn out the lights. She might wonder, before drifting off to sleep, ‘Is this all? When I get to be old will this be all I have to look back on?’ But by morning she would have forgotten it, and the days went round, and she would be happy again. For she did not know what she wanted. Something bigger, she would think vaguely – a different kind of life. But the mood never lasted long. She was so satisfied with her work, where she felt sufficient and capable; with her friends, whom she relied on; with her life at the Club, which was as pleasant and as gregarious as being in a giant twittering aviary, where there was always the excitement of other people’s engagements and weddings: and with her men friends, who treated her just like a good pal, with none of this silly sex business.
But all women become conscious, sooner or later, of that impalpable but steel-strong pressure to get married, and Mary, who was not at all susceptible to atmosphere, or the things people imply, was brought face to face with it suddenly, and most unpleasantly.
She was in the house of a married friend, sitting on the verandah, with a lighted room behind her. She was alone; and heard people talking in low voices, and caught her own name. She rose to go inside and declare herself: it was typical of her that her first thought was, how unpleasant it would be for her friends to know she had overheard. Then she sank down again, and waited for a suitable moment to pretend she had just come in from the garden. This was the conversation she listened to, while her face burned and her hands went clammy.
‘She’s not fifteen any longer: it is ridiculous! Someone should tell her about her clothes.’
‘How old is she?’
‘Must be well over thirty. She has been going strong for years. She was working long before I began working, and that was a good twelve years ago.’
‘Why doesn’t she marry? She must have had plenty of chances.’
There was a dry chuckle. ‘I don’t think so. My husband was keen on her himself once, but he thinks she will never marry. She just isn’t like that, isn’t like that at all. Something missing somewhere.’
‘Oh, I don’t know.’
‘She’s gone off so much, in any case. The other day I caught sight of her in the street and hardly recognized her. It’s a fact! The way she plays all those games, her skin is like sandpaper, and she’s got so thin.’
‘But she’s such a nice girl.’
‘She’ll never set the rivers on fire, though.’
‘She’d make someone a good wife. She’s a good sort, Mary.’
‘She should marry someone years older than herself. A man of fifty would suit her…you’ll see, she will marry someone old enough to be her father one of these days.’
‘One never can tell!’
There was another chuckle, good-hearted enough, but it sounded cruelly malicious to Mary. She was stunned and outraged; but most of all deeply wounded that her friends could discuss her thus. She was so naive, so unconscious of herself in relation to other people, that it had never entered her head that people could discuss her behind her back. And the things they had said! She sat there writhing, twisting her hands. Then she composed herself and went back into the room to join her treacherous friends, who greeted her as cordially as if they had not just that moment driven knives into her heart and thrown her quite off balance; she could not recognize herself in the picture they had made of her!
That little incident, apparently so unimportant, which would have had no effect on a person who had the faintest idea of the kind of world she lived in, had a profound effect on Mary. She who had never had time to think of herself, took to sitting in her room for hours at a time, wondering: ‘Why did they say those things? What is the matter with me? What did they mean when they said that I am not like that?’ And she would look warily, appealingly, into the faces of friends to see if she could find there traces of their condemnation of her. And she was even more disturbed and unhappy because they seemed just as usual, treating her with their ordinary friendliness. She began to suspect double meanings where none were intended, to find maliciousness in the glance of a person who felt nothing but affection for her.
Turning over in her mind the words she had by accident listened to, she thought of ways to improve herself. She took the ribbon out of her hair, though with regret, because she thought she looked very pretty with a mass of curls round her rather long thin face; and bought herself tailor-made clothes, in which she felt ill at ease, because she felt truly herself in pinafore frocks and childish skirts. And for the first time in her life she was feeling uncomfortable with men. A small core of contempt for them, of which she was quite unconscious, and which had protected her from sex as surely as if she had been truly hideous, had melted, and she had lost her poise. And she began looking around for someone to marry. She did not put it to herself like that; but, after all, she was nothing if not a social being, though she had never thought of ‘society’, the abstraction; and if her friends were thinking she should get married, then there might be something in it. If she had ever learned to put her feelings into words, that was perhaps how she would have expressed herself. And the first man she allowed to approach her was a widower of fifty-five with half-grown children. It was because she felt safer with him…because she did not associate ardours and embraces with a middle-aged gentleman whose attitude towards her was almost fatherly.
He knew perfectly well what he wanted: a pleasant companion, a mother for his children and someone to run his house for him. He found Mary good company, and she was kind to his children. Nothing, really, could have been more suitable: since apparently she had to get married, this was the kind of marriage to suit her best. But things went wrong. He underestimated her experience; it seemed to him that a woman who had been on her own so long should know her own mind and understand what he was offering her. A relationship developed which was clear to both of them, until he proposed to her, was accepted, and began to make love to her. Then a violent revulsion overcame her and she ran away; they were in his comfortable drawing room, and when he began to kiss her, she ran out of his house into the night and all the way home through the streets to the club. There she fell on the bed and wept. And his feeling for her was not one to be enhanced by this kind of foolishness, which a younger man, physically in love with her, might have found charming. Next morning, she was horrified at her behaviour. What a way to behave; she, who was always in command of herself, and who dreaded nothing more than scenes and ambiguity. She apologized to him, but that was the end of it.
And now she was left at sea, not knowing what it was she needed. It seemed to her that she had run from him because he was ‘an old man’, that was how the affair arranged itself in her mind. She shuddered, and avoided men over thirty. She was over that age herself; but in spite of everything, she thought of herself as a girl still.
And all the time, unconsciously, without admitting it to herself, she was looking for a husband.
During those few months before she married, people were discussing her in a way which would have sickened her, had she suspected it. It seems hard that Mary, whose charity towards other people’s failures and scandals grew out of a genuine, rock-bottom aversion towards the personal things like love and passion, was doomed all her life to be the subject of gossip. But so it was. At this time, too, the shocking and rather ridiculous story of that night when she had run away from her elderly lover was spreading round the wide circle of her friends, though it is impossible to say who could have known about it in the first place. But when people heard it they nodded and laughed as if it confirmed something they had known for a long time. A woman of thirty behaving like that! They laughed, rather unpleasantly; in this age of scientific sex, nothing seems more ridiculous than sexual gaucherie. They didn’t forgive her; they laughed, and felt that in some way it served her right.
She was so changed, they said; she looked so dull and dowdy, and her skin was bad; she looked as if she were going to be ill; she was obviously having a nervous breakdown and at her age it was to be expected, with the way she lived and everything; she was looking for a man and couldn’t get one. And then, her manner was so odd, these days…These were some of the things they said.
It is terrible to destroy a person’s picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction. How can one know he will be able to create another to enable him to go on living? Mary’s idea of herself was destroyed and she was not fitted to recreate herself. She could not exist without that impersonal. casual friendship from other people; and now it seemed to her there was pity in the way they looked at her, and a little impatience, too, as if she were really rather a futile woman after all. She felt as she had never done before; she was hollow inside, empty, and into this emptiness would sweep from nowhere a vast panic, as if there were nothing in the world she could grasp hold of. And she was afraid to meet people, afraid, above all, of men. If a man kissed her (which they did, sensing her new mood), she was revolted; on the other hand she went to the pictures even more frequently than before and came out feverish and unsettled. There seemed no connection between the distorted mirror of the screen and her own life; it was impossible to fit together what she wanted for herself, and what she was offered.
At the age of thirty, this woman who had had a ‘good’ State education, a thoroughly comfortable life enjoying herself in a civilized way, and access to all knowledge of her time (only she read nothing but bad novels) knew so little about herself that she was thrown completely off her balance because some gossiping women had said she ought to get married.
Then she met Dick Turner. It might have been anybody. Or rather, it would have been the first man she met who treated her as if she were wonderful and unique. She needed that badly. She needed it to restore her feeling of superiority to men, which was really, at bottom, what she had been living from all these years.
They met casually at the cinema. He was in for the day from his farm. He very rarely came into town, except when he had to buy goods he could not get at his local store, and that happened perhaps once or twice a year. On this occasion he ran into a man he had not seen for years and was persuaded to stay the night in town and go to the cinema. He was almost amused at himself for agreeing: all this seemed so very remote from him. His farm lorry, heaped with sacks of grain and two harrows, stood outside the cinema, looking out of place and cumbersome; and Mary looked through the back window at these unfamiliar objects and smiled. It was necessary for her to smile when she saw them. She loved the town, felt safe there, and associated the country with her childhood, because of those little dorps she had lived in, and the way they were all surrounded by miles and miles of nothingness – miles and miles of veld.
Dick Turner disliked the town. When he drove in from the veld he knew so well, through those ugly scattered suburbs that looked as if they had come out of housing catalogues; ugly little houses stuck anyhow over the veld, that had no relationship with the hard brown African soil and the arching blue sky, cosy little houses meant for cosy little countries – and then on into the business part of the town with the shops full of fashions for smart women and extravagant imported food, he felt ill at ease and uncomfortable and murderous.
He suffered from claustrophobia. He wanted to run away – either to run away or to smash the place up. So he always escaped as soon as possible back to his farm, where he felt at home.
But there are thousands of people in Africa who could be lifted bodily out of their suburb and put into a town the other side of the world and hardly notice the difference. The suburb is as invincible and fatal as factories, and even beautiful South Africa, whose soil looks outraged by those pretty little suburbs creeping over it like a disease, cannot escape. When Dick Turner saw them, and thought of the way people lived in them, and the way the cautious suburban mind was ruining his country, he wanted to swear and to smash and to murder. He could not bear it. He did not put these feelings into words; he had lost the habit of word-spinning, living the life he did, out on the soil all day. But the feeling was the strongest he knew. He felt he could kill the bankers and the financiers and the magnates and the clerks – all the people who built prim little houses with hedged gardens full of English flowers for preference.
And above all, he loathed the cinema. When he found himself inside the picture-house on this occasion, he wondered what had possessed him that he had agreed to come. He could not keep his eyes on the screen. The long-limbed, smooth-faced women bored him; the story seemed meaningless. And it was hot and stuffy. After a while he ignored the screen altogether, and looked round the audience. In front of him, around him, behind him, rows and rows of people staring and leaning away from each other up at the screen – hundreds of people flown out of their bodies and living in the lives of those stupid people posturing there. It made him feel uneasy.
He fidgeted, lit a cigarette, gazed at the dark plush curtains that masked the exits. And then, looking along the row he was sitting in, he saw a shaft of light fall from somewhere above, showing the curve of a cheek and a sheaf of fairish glinting hair. The face seemed to float, yearning upwards, ruddily gold in the queer greenish light. He poked the man next to him, and said, ‘Who is that?’ ‘Mary,’ was the grunted reply, after a brief look. But ‘Mary’ did not help Dick much. He stared at that lovely floating face and the falling hair, and after the show was over, he looked for her hurriedly in the crush outside the door. But he could not see her. He supposed, vaguely, that she had gone with someone else. He was given a girl to take home whom he hardly glanced at. She was dressed in what seemed to him a ridiculous way, and he wanted to laugh at her high heels, in which she tiptapped beside him across the street. In the car she looked over her shoulder at the piled back of the lorry, and asked in a hurried affected voice: ‘What are those funny things at the back?’
‘Have you never seen a harrow?’ he asked. He dropped her, without regret, at the place where she lived – a big building, which was full of light and people. He forgot her immediately.
But he dreamed about the girl with the young uptilted face and the wave of loose gleaming hair. It was a luxury, dreaming about a woman, for he had forbidden himself such things. He had started farming five years before, and was still not making it pay. He was indebted to the Land Bank, and heavily mortgaged, for he had had no capital at all, when he started. He had given up drink, cigarettes, all but the necessities. He worked as only a man possessed by a vision can work, from six in the morning till seven at night, taking his meals on the lands, his whole being concentrated on the farm. His dream was to get married and have children. Only he could not ask a woman to share such a life. First he would have to get out of debt, build a house, be able to afford the little luxuries. Having driven himself for years, it was part of his dream to spoil a wife. He knew exactly what sort of a house he would build: not one of those meaningless block-like buildings stuck on top of the soil. He wanted a big thatched house with wide verandahs open to the air. He had even chosen the ant-heaps that he would dig to make his bricks, and had marked the parts of the farm where the grass grew tallest, taller than a big man, for the thatch. But it seemed to him sometimes that he was very far from getting what he wanted. He was pursued by bad luck. The farmers about him, he knew, called him ‘Jonah’. If there was a drought he seemed to get the brunt of it, and if it rained in swamps then his farm suffered most. If he decided to grow cotton for the first time, cotton slumped that year, and if there was a swarm of locusts, then he took it for granted, with a kind of angry but determined fatalism, that they would make straight for his most promising patch of mealies. His dream had become a little less grandiose of late. He was lonely, he wanted a wife, and above all, children; and the way things were it would be years before he had them. He was beginning to think that if he could pay off some of the mortgage, and add an extra room to his house, perhaps get some furniture, then he could think of getting married. In the meantime he thought of the girl in the cinema. She became the focus of his work and imaginings. He cursed himself for it, for he knew thinking about women, particularly one woman, was as dangerous as drink to him, but it was no good. Just over a month after his visit to town, he found himself planning another. It was not necessary and he knew it. He gave up even persuading himself that it was necessary. In town, he did the little business he had to do quickly, and went in search of someone who could tell him ‘Mary’s’ surname.
When he drove up to the big building, he recognized it, but did not connect the girl he had driven home that night with the girl of the cinema. Even when she came to the door, and stood in the hall looking to see who he was, he did not recognize her. He saw a tall, thin girl, with deeply blue, rather evasive eyes that looked hurt. Her hair was in tight ridges round her head; she wore trousers. Women in trousers did not seem to him females at all: he was properly old-fashioned. Then she said, ‘Are you looking for me?’ rather puzzled and shy; and at once he remembered that silly voice asking about the harrows and stared at her incredulously. He was so disappointed he began to stammer and shift his feet. Then he thought that he could not stand there for ever, staring at her, and he asked her to go for a drive. It was not a pleasant evening. He was angry with himself for his self-delusion and weakness; she was flattered but puzzled as to why he had sought her out, since he hardly spoke now he had got her into the car and was driving aimlessly around the town. But he wanted to find in her the girl who had haunted him, and he had done so, by the time he had to take her home. He kept glancing at her sideways as they passed street lamps, and he could see how a trick of light had created something beautiful and strange from an ordinary and not very attractive girl. And then, he began to like her, because it was essential for him to love somebody; he had not realized how very lonely he had been. And when he left her that night, it was with regret, saying he would come again soon.
Back on the farm, he took himself to task. This would end in marriage if he were not careful, and he simply could not afford it. That was the end of it, then; he would forget her, put the whole thing out of his mind. Besides, what did he know about her? Nothing at all! Except that she was obviously, as he put it, ‘thoroughly spoiled’. She was not the kind to share a struggling farmer’s life. So he argued with himself, working harder than he had ever done before, and thinking sometimes, ‘After all, if I have a good season this year I might go back and see her.’ He took to walking ten miles over the veld with his gun after his day’s work to exhaust himself. He wore himself out, grew thin and haunted-looking. He fought with himself for two months, until at last one day he found himself preparing to take the car into town, exactly as if he had decided it long ago, and as if all his exhortations and self-discipline had been nothing but a shield to hide from himself his real intention. As he dressed he whistled jauntily, but with a crestfallen undertone; and his face wore a curious little defeated smile.
As for Mary, those two months were a long nightmare. He had come all the way in from his farm after meeting her once for five minutes, and then, having spent an evening with her, had not thought it worth his while to come back. Her friends were right, she lacked something. There was something wrong with her. But she clung to the thought of him, in spite of the fact that she said to herself she was useless, a failure, a ridiculous creature whom no one wanted. She gave up going out in the evenings, and remained in her room waiting for him to call for her. She sat for hours and hours by herself, her mind numb with misery; and at night she dreamed long grey dreams in which she struggled through sand, or climbed staircases which collapsed as she reached the top, letting her slide back to the bottom again. She woke in the mornings tired and depressed, unable to face the day. Her employer, used to her inevitable efficiency, told her to take a holiday and not to come back till she felt better. She left the office, feeling as if she had been thrown out (though he could not have been nicer about her breakdown) and stayed all day in the club. If she went away for a holiday she might miss Dick. Yet what was Dick to her, really? Nothing. She hardly knew him. He was a spare, sunburnt, slow-voiced, deep-eyed young man who had come into her life like an accident, and that was all she could say about him. And yet, she would have said it was for his sake she was making herself ill. All her restlessness, her vague feelings of inadequacy, centred on him, and when she asked herself, in chilly dismay, why it should be he, rather than any of the other men she knew, there was no satisfactory reply.
Weeks after she had given up hope, and had gone to the doctor for a prescription because ‘she was feeling tired’ and had been told she must take a holiday at once, if she wanted to avoid complete breakdown; when she had reached a stage of misery that made it impossible for her to meet any of her old friends, because of her obsession that their friendship was a cloak for malicious gossip and real dislike of her, she was called to the door again one evening. She was not thinking about Dick. When she saw him it took all her self-control to greet him calmly; if she had shown her emotion he might after all have given her up. By now he had persuaded himself into believing she was a practical, adaptable, serene person, who would need only a few weeks on the farm to become what he wanted her to be. Tears of hysteria would have shocked him, ruined his vision of her.
It was to an apparently calm, maternal Mary that he proposed. He was adoring, self-abasing, and grateful when she accepted him. They were married by special licence two weeks later. Her desire to get married as quickly as possible surprised him; he saw her as a busy and popular woman with a secure place in the social life of the town, and thought it would take her some time to arrange her affairs: this idea of her was part of her attraction for him. But a quick marriage fell in with his plans, really. He hated the idea of waiting about the town while a woman fussed with clothes and bridesmaids. There was no honeymoon. He explained he was too poor really to afford one, though if she insisted he would do what he could. She did not insist. She was very relieved to escape a honeymoon.
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It was a long way from the town to the farm – well over a hundred miles; and by the time he told her they had crossed the boundary, it was late at night. Mary, who was half asleep, roused herself to look at his farm, and saw the dim shapes of low trees, like great soft birds, flying past; and beyond it a hazy sky that was cracked and seamed with stars. Her tiredness relaxed her limbs, quietened her nerves. Reaction from the strained state of the last few months was a dulled acquiescence, a numbness, that was almost indifference. She thought it would be pleasant to live peacefully for a change; she had not realized how exhausted she was, after those years of living geared to a perpetual demand for the next thing. She said to herself, with determination to face it, that she would ‘get close to nature’. It was a phrase that took away the edge of her distaste for the veld. ‘Getting close to nature’, which was sanctioned, after all, by the pleasant sentimentality of the sort of books she read, was a reassuring abstraction. At the weekends, when she worked in town, she had often gone out for picnics with crowds of young people, to sit all day on hot rocks in the shade, listening to a portable gramophone playing dance music from America, and had thought of that, too, as ‘getting close to nature’. ‘It is nice to get out of the town,’ she would say. But like most people, the things she said bore no relation at all to the things she felt: she was always profoundly relieved to get back to hot and cold water in taps and the streets and the office.
Still, she would be her own mistress: that was marriage, what her friends had married for – to have homes of their own and no one to tell them what to do. She felt vaguely that she had been right to marry – everyone had been right. For, looking back, it seemed to her that all the people she had met were secretly, silently but relentlessly, persuading her to marry. She was going to be happy. She had no idea of the life she had to lead. Poverty, which Dick had warned her of with a scrupulous humility, was another abstraction, nothing to do with her pinched childhood. She saw it as a rather exhilarating fight against odds.
The car stopped at last and she roused herself. The moon had gone behind a great luminous white cloud, and it was suddenly very dark – miles of darkness under a dimly starlit sky. All around were trees, the squat, flattened trees of the highveld, which seem as if pressure of sun has distorted them, looking now like vague dark presences standing about the small clearing where the car had stopped. There was a small square building whose corrugated roof began to gleam whitely as the moon slowly slid out from behind the cloud and drenched the clearing with brilliance. Mary got out of the car and watched it drive away round the house to the back. She looked round her, shivering a little, for a cold breath blew out of the trees and down in the vlei beyond them hung a cold white vapour. Listening in the complete silence, innumerable little noises rose from the bush, as if colonies of strange creatures had become still and watchful at their coming and were now going about their own business. She glanced round at the house; it looked shut and dark and stuffy, under that wide streaming moonlight. A border of stones glinted whitely in front of her, and she walked along them, away from the house and towards the trees, seeing them grow large and soft as she approached. Then a strange bird called, a wild nocturnal sound, and she turned and ran back, suddenly terrified, as if a hostile breath had blown upon her, from another world, from the trees. And as she stumbled in her high heels over the uneven ground and regained balance, there was a stir and a cackle of fowls that had been wakened by the lights of the car, and the homely sound comforted her. She stopped before the house, and put out her hand to touch the leaves of a plant standing in a tin on the wall of the verandah. Her fingers were fragrant with the dry scent of geraniums. Then a square of light appeared in the blank wall of the house, and she saw Dick’s tall shape stooping inside, hazed by the candle he held in front of him. She went up the steps to the door, and stood waiting. Dick had vanished again, leaving the candle on the table. In the dim yellow light the room seemed tiny, tiny; and very low; the roof was the corrugated iron she had seen from outside; there was a strong musty smell, almost animal-like. Dick came back holding an old cocoa tin flattened at the rim to form a funnel, and climbed on the chair under the hanging lamp to fill it. The paraffin dripped greasily down and pattered on the floor, and the strong smell sickened her. The light flared up, flickered wildly, then settled into a low yellow flame. Now she could see the skins of animals on the red brick floor: some kind of wildcat, or perhaps a small leopard, and a big fawn-coloured skin of some buck. She sat down, bewildered by the strangeness of it all. Dick was watching her face, she knew, for signs of disappointment, and she forced herself to smile, though she felt weak with foreboding: this tiny stuffy room, the bare brick floor, the greasy lamp, were not what she had imagined. Apparently satisfied, Dick smiled at her gratefully, and said, ‘I will make some tea.’ He disappeared again. When he came back, she was standing by the wall, looking at two pictures that hung there. One was of a chocolate-box lady with a rose in her hand; and the other was of a child of about six, torn off a calendar.
He flushed when he saw her, and stripped the pictures from the walls. ‘I haven’t looked at them for years,’ he said, tearing them across. ‘But leave them,’ she said, feeling an intruder on this man’s intimate life: the two pictures, stuck up roughly on the wall with tintacks, had given her for the first time an insight into his loneliness, and made her understand his hurried courtship and blind need for her. But she felt alien to him, unable to fit herself to his need. Looking to the floor, she saw the pretty childish face, topped with curls, torn across, lying where he had thrown it. She picked it up, thinking that he must be fond of children. They had never discussed children; there had not been time to discuss much. She looked for a waste-paper basket, for it offended her to see the scraps of paper on the floor, but Dick took it from her, squeezed it into a ball, and flung it into the corner. ‘We can put up something else,’ he said shyly. It was his shyness, his deference towards her, that enabled her to hold her own. Feeling protectively towards him, which she did when he looked like that, bashful and appealing, she need not think of him as the man she had married who had claims on her. She sat herself down, with composure, in front of the tray he had brought in, and watched him pour tea. On a tin tray was a stained, torn cloth, and two enormous cracked cups. Across her wave of distaste came his voice: ‘But that is your job now’; and she took the teapot from him, and poured, feeling him watching her with proud delight.
Now she was here, the woman, clothing his bare little house with her presence, he could hardly contain himself with pleasure and exaltation. It seemed to him that he had been a fool to wait so long, living alone, planning a future that was so easily attainable. And then he looked at her town clothes, her high heels, her reddened nails, and was uneasy again. To hide it, he began talking about the house, with diffidence because of his poverty, never taking his eyes off her face. He told her how he had built it himself, laying the bricks, although he had known nothing about building, to save the wages of a native builder; how he had furnished it slowly, at first with only a bed to sleep in and a packing-case to eat off; how a neighbour had given him a table, and another a chair, and gradually the place had taken shape. The cupboards were petrol boxes painted and covered with curtains of flowered stuff. There was no door between this room and the next, but a heavy curtain of sacking hung there, which had been embroidered all over in red and black wool by Charlie Slatter’s wife, on the next farm. And so on; she heard the history of each thing, and saw that what seemed so pathetic and frail to her represented to him victories over discomfort; and she began to feel, slowly, that it was not in this house she was sitting, with her husband, but back with her mother, watching her endlessly contrive and patch and mend – till suddenly she got to her feet with an awkward scrambling movement, unable to bear it; possessed with the thought that her father, from his grave, had sent out his will and forced her back into the kind of life he had made her mother lead.
‘Let’s go next door,’ she said abruptly, her voice harsh. Dick rose also, surprised and a little hurt, cut off in the middle of his histories. Next door was the bedroom. There was a hanging cupboard, again of embroidered sacking; a stack of shelves, petrol boxes with a mirror balanced on top; and the bed which Dick had bought for the occasion. It was a proper old-fashioned bed, high and massive: that was his idea of marriage. He had bought it at a sale, feeling, as he put down the money, that he was capturing happiness itself.
Seeing her stand there, looking about her with a lost pathetic face, unconsciously holding her hands to her cheeks as if in pain, he was sorry for her, and left her alone to undress. Undressing himself beyond the curtain he felt again a bitter pang of guilt. He had no right to marry, no right, no right. He said it under his breath, torturing himself with the repetition; and when he knocked timidly on the wall and went in to find her lying in bed with her back turned, he approached her with the timid adoration which was the only touch she could have borne.
It was not so bad, she thought, when it was all over: not as bad as that. It meant nothing to her, nothing at all. Expecting outrage and imposition, she was relieved to find she felt nothing. She was able maternally to bestow the gift of herself on this humble stranger, and remain untouched. Women have an extraordinary ability to withdraw from the sexual relationship, to immunize themselves against it, in such a way that their men can be left feeling let down and insulted without having anything tangible to complain of. Mary did not have to learn this, because it was natural to her, and because she had expected nothing in the first place – at any rate, not from this man, who was flesh and blood, and therefore rather ridiculous – not the creature of her imagination whom she endowed with hands and lips but left bodiless. And if Dick felt as if he had been denied, rebuffed, made to appear brutal and foolish, then his sense of guilt told him that it was no more than he deserved. Perhaps he needed to feel guilty? Perhaps it was not such a bad marriage after all? There are innumerable marriages where two people, both twisted and wrong in their depths, are well matched, making each other miserable in the way they need, in the way the pattern of their lives demands. In any event, when he leaned over to turn out the light, and saw her little spiked shoes tumbled sideways on the skin of the leopard he had shot the year before, he repeated to himself again, but with a thrill of satisfaction in his abasement, ‘I had no right.’
Mary watched the wildly flickering flame of the dying lamp leap over walls and roof and the glittering window panes, and fell asleep holding his hand protectively, as she might have held a child’s whom she had wounded.
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When she woke she found she was alone in the bed, and there was the clanging of a gong somewhere at the back of the house. She could see a tender gold light on the trees through the window, and faint rosy patches of sun lay on the white walls, showing up the rough grain of the whitewash. As she watched they deepened and turned vivid yellow, barring the room with gold, which made it look smaller, lower, and more bare than it had at night, in the dim lamplight. In a few moments Dick came back in pyjamas, and touched her cheek with his hand, so that she felt the chill of early morning on his skin.
‘Sleep well?’
‘Yes, thank you.’
‘Tea is coming now.’
They were polite and awkward with each other, repudiating the contacts of the night. He sat on the edge of the bed eating biscuits. Presently an elderly native brought in the tray, and put it on the table.
‘This is the new missus,’ said Dick to him.
‘This is Samson, Mary.’
The old boy kept his eyes on the ground and said, ‘Good morning, missus.’ Then he added politely to Dick, as if this was expected of him, ‘Very nice, very nice, boss.’
Dick laughed, saying, ‘He’ll look after you: he is not a bad old swine.’
Mary was rather outraged at this casual stockmarket attitude; then she saw that it was only a matter of form, and calmed herself. She was left with a feeling of indignation, saying to herself. ‘And who does he think he is?’ Dick, however, was unaware, and foolishly happy.
He drank two cups of tea in a rush, and then went out to dress, coming back in khaki shorts and shirt to say goodbye before going down to the lands. Mary got up, too, when he had gone, and looked around her. Samson was cleaning the room into which they had come first the night before, and all the furniture was pushed into the middle, so she stepped past him on to the small verandah which was merely an extension of the iron roof, held up by three brick pillars with a low wall about it. There were some petrol tins painted a dark green, the paint blistered and broken, holding geraniums and flowering shrubs. Beyond the verandah wall was a space of pale sand, and then the low scrubby bush, which sloped down in a vlei full of tall shining grass. Beyond that again stretched bush, undulating vleis and ridges, bounded at the horizon by kopjes. Looking round she saw that the house was built on a low rise that swelled up in a great hollow several miles across, and ringed by kopjes that coiled blue and hazy and beautiful, a long way off in front, but close to the house at the back. She thought, it will be hot here, closed in as it is. But she shaded her eyes and gazed across the vleis, finding it strange and lovely with the dull green foliage, the endless expanses of tawny grass shining gold in the sun, and the vivid arching blue sky. And there was a chorus of birds, a shrilling and cascading of sound such as she had not heard before.
She walked round the house to the back. She saw it was a rectangle: the two rooms she had already seen in the front, and behind them the kitchen, the storeroom and the bathroom. At the end of a short path, screened off with a curving break of grass, was a narrow sentry-box building, which was the lavatory. On one side was a fowlhouse, with a great wire run full of scrawny white chickens, and across the hard bare ground scraped and gobbled a scattering of turkeys. She entered the house from the back through the kitchen, where there was a wood stove and a massive table of scrubbed bush timber, taking up half the floor space. Samson was in the bedroom, making the bed.
She had never come into contact with natives before, as an employer on her own account. Her mother’s servants she had been forbidden to talk to; in the club she had been kind to the waiters; but the ‘native problem’ meant for her other women’s complaints of their servants at tea parties. She was afraid of them, of course. Every woman in South Africa is brought up to be. In her childhood she had been forbidden to walk out alone. and when she had asked why, she had been told in the furtive, lowered, but matter-of-fact voice she associated with her mother, that they were nasty and might do horrible things to her.
And now she had to face it, this business of struggling with natives – she took it for granted it would be a struggle – and felt reluctant, though determined not to be imposed upon. But she was disposed to like Samson, who was a kind-faced respectful old native, who asked her, as she entered the bedroom, ‘Missus like to see the kitchen?’
She had hoped Dick would show her round, but seeing that the native was eager to, she agreed. He padded out of the room in front of her on his bare feet and took her to the back. There he opened the pantry for her – a dim, high-windowed place full of provisions of all kinds, with great metal bins for sugar, flour and meal, standing on the floor.
‘Boss has keys,’ he explained; and she was amused at his matter-of-fact acceptance of a precaution that could only be against his stealing.
Between Samson and Dick there was a perfect understanding. Dick locked up everything, but put out for use a third as much again as was required, which was used by Samson, who did not regard this as stealing. But there was not much to steal in that bachelor household, and Samson hoped for better things now there was a woman. With deference and courtesy he showed Mary the thin supplies of linen, the utensils, the way the stove worked, the wood-pile at the back – all with the air of a faithful caretaker handing over keys to the rightful owner. He also showed her, when she asked, the old plough disc hung on the bough of a tree over the wood-pile, with the rusting iron bolt from a waggon with which it was beaten. It was this that she had heard on waking that morning; it was beaten at half-past five to rouse the boys in the compound close by and again at twelve-thirty and two, to mark the dinner break. It was a heavy, clanging, penetrating noise that carried miles over the bush.
She went back into the house while the boy prepared breakfast; already the song of the birds had been quenched by the deepening heat; at seven in the morning Mary found her forehead damp and her limbs sticky.
Dick came back half an hour later, glad to see her, but preoccupied. He went straight through the house into the back, and she heard him shouting at Samson in kitchen kaffir. She did not understand a word of it. Then he came back and said:
‘That old fool has let those dogs go again. I told him not to.’
‘What dogs?’
He explained: ‘They get restless and go out by themselves, for hunting trips, if I am not here. Sometimes for days. Always when I am not here. He let them out. Then they get into trouble in the bush. Because he is too damned lazy to feed them.’
He sat heavy and silent through the meal, a nervous tension between his eyes. The planter had broken down, a water cart had lost a wheel, the waggon had been driven up a hill with the brake on, in sheer lighthearted carelessness. He was back in it, over his head in it, with the familiar irritations and the usual sense of helplessness against cheerful incompetence. Mary said nothing: this was all too strange for her.
Immediately after breakfast he took his hat off the chair and went off again. Mary looked for a cooking book and took it to the kitchen. Half-way through the morning the dogs returned, two large mongrels, cheerfully apologetic to Samson for their truancy, but ignoring her, the stranger. They drank deeply, slobbering trails of water over the kitchen floor, then went to sleep on the skins in the front room smelling heavily of the kill in the bush.
When her cooking experiments were over – which the native Samson watched with an air of polite forbearance – she settled down on the bed with a handbook on kitchen kaffir. This was clearly the first thing she had to learn: she was unable to make Samson understand her.
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With her own saved money Mary bought flowered materials, and covered cushions and made curtains; bought a little linen, crockery, and some dress lengths. The house gradually lost its air of bleak poverty, and put on an inexpensive prettiness, with bright hangings and some pictures. Mary worked hard, and looked for Dick’s look of approval and surprise when he came back from work and noted every new change. A month after she had arrived she walked through the house, and saw there was nothing more to be done. Besides, there was no more money.
She had settled easily into the new rhythm. She found the change so embracing that it was as if she were an entirely new person. Every morning she woke with the clanging of the plough disc, and drank tea in bed with Dick. When he had gone down on the lands she put out groceries for the day. She was so conscientious that Samson found things had worsened rather than improved: even his understood one-third allowance had gone, and she wore the store keys tied to her belt. By breakfast time what work she had to do in the house was finished except for light cooking; but Samson was a better cook than she, and after a while she left it to him. She sewed all morning, till lunchtime; sewed after lunch, and went to bed immediately after supper, sleeping like a child all night.
In the first flush of energy and determination she really enjoyed the life, putting things to rights and making a little go a long way. She liked, particularly, the early mornings before the heat numbed and tired her; liked the new leisure; liked Dick’s approval. For his pride and affectionate gratitude for what she was doing (he would never have believed that his forlorn house could look like this) overshadowed his patient disappointment. When she saw that puzzled hurt look on his face, she pushed away the thought of what he must be suffering, for it made him repulsive to her again.
Then, having done all she could to the house, she began on dress materials, finishing an inexpensive trousseau. A few months after her marriage she found there was nothing more to do. Suddenly, from one day to the next, she found herself unoccupied. Instinctively staving off idleness as something dangerous, she returned to her underwear, and embroidered everything that could possibly be embroidered. There she sat all day, sewing and stitching, hour after hour, as if fine embroidery would save her life. She was a good needle-woman, and the results were admirable. Dick praised her work and was amazed, for he had expected a difficult period while she was settling down, thinking she would take the lonely life hard at first. But she showed no signs of being lonely, she seemed perfectly satisfied to sew all day. And all this time he treated her like a brother, for he was a sensitive man, and was waiting for her to turn to him of her own accord. The relief she was unable to hide that his endearments were no more than affectionate, hurt him deeply, but he still thought: It will come right in the end.
There came an end to embroidery; again she was left empty-handed. Again she looked about for something to do. The walls, she decided, were filthy. She would whitewash them all herself, to save money. So, for two weeks, Dick came back to the house to find furniture stacked in the middle of rooms and pails of thick white stuff standing on the floor. But she was very methodical. One room was finished before another was begun; and while he admired her for her capability and self-assurance, undertaking this work she had no experience or knowledge of, he was alarmed too. What was she going to do with all this energy and efficiency? It undermined his own self-assurance even further, seeing her like this, for he knew, deep down, that this quality was one he lacked. Soon, the walls were dazzling blue-white, every inch of them painted by Mary herself, standing on a rough ladder for days at a time.
And now she found she was tired. She found it pleasant to let go a little, and to spend her time sitting with her hands folded, on the big sofa. But not for long. She was restless, so restless she did not know what to do with herself. She unpacked the novels she had brought with her, and turned them over. These were the books she had collected over years from the mass that had come her way. She had read each one a dozen times, knowing it by heart, following the familiar tales as a child listens to his mother telling him a well-known fairy tale. It had been a drug, a soporific, in the past, reading them; now, as she turned them over listlessly, she wondered why they had lost their flavour. Her mind wandered as she determinedly turned the pages; and she realized, after she had been reading for perhaps an hour, that she had not taken in a word. She threw the book aside and tried another, but with the same result. For a few days the house was littered with books in faded dust covers. Dick was pleased: it flattered him to think he had married a woman who read books. One evening he picked up a book called The Fair Lady, and opened it in the middle.
‘…The trekkers trekked North, towards the Land of Promise where never the cold grasping hand of the hated British could reach them. Like a cold snake through the hot landscape the column coiled. Prunella Van Koetzie skirmished lightly on her horse on the perimeter of the column, wearing a white kappie over her dainty sweat pearled face and close clustering ringlets. Piet Van Friesland watched her, his heart throbbing in time to the great blood-stained heart of South Africa itself. Could he win her, the sweet Prunella, who bore herself like a queen among these burghers and mynheers and buxom fraus in their docks and veldschoens? Could he? He stared and stared. Tant’ Anna, putting out the koekies and the biltong for the midday meal, in a red doek the colour of the kaffir-boom trees, shook her fat sides in laughter and said to herself, “That will be a match yet.”’
He put it down, and looked across at Mary, who was sitting with a book in her lap, staring up at the roof.
‘Can’t we have ceilings, Dick?’ she asked fretfully.
‘It would cost so much,’ he said doubtfully. ‘Perhaps next year, if we do well.’
In a few days Mary gathered up the books and put them away; they were not what she wanted. She took up the handbook on kitchen kaffir again, and spent all her time on it, practising on Samson in the kitchen, disconcerting him with her ungood-humoured criticisms, but behaving with a cold-dispassionate justice.
Samson became more and more unhappy. He had been so used to Dick, and they understood each other very well. Dick swore at him often, but laughed with him afterwards. This woman never laughed. She put out, carefully, so much meal, and so much sugar; and watched the left-overs from their own food with an extraordinary, humiliating capacity for remembering every cold potato and every piece of bread, asking for them if they were missing.
Shaken out of his comparatively comfortable existence, he grew sulky. There were several rows in the kitchen, and once Dick found Mary in tears. She knew there had been enough raisins put out for the pudding, but when they came to eat it, there were hardly any. And the boy denied stealing them
‘Good heavens,’ said Dick, amused, ‘I thought there was something really wrong.’
