The ferment of the last party had not settled before Mrs Lacey issued invitations for another; there had only been a fortnight’s interval. Mr Cope said, looking helplessly across at his wife: ‘I suppose we ought to go?’ and Mrs Cope replied guardedly: ‘We can’t very well not, when they are our nearest neighbours, can we?’ ‘Oh Lord!’ exclaimed Mr Cope, moving irritably in his chair. Then Kate felt her parents’ eyes come to rest on her; she was not surprised when Mr Cope asked: ‘When does Kate go back to school?’ ‘The holidays don’t end for another three weeks.’
So the Copes all went to Mrs Lacey’s second party, which began exactly as the first had done: everything was the same. The women whisked their children into the improvised dormitory without showing even a formal uneasiness. One of them said: ‘It is nice to be free of them for once, isn’t it?’ and Kate saw Mrs Lacey looking humorous before she turned away her face. That evening Mrs Lacey wore a dress of dim green transparent stuff, as innocent and billowing, though as subtly indiscreet as the white one, and the women – save for Mrs Cope – were in attempts at evening dress.
Mrs Lacey saw Kate standing uncertainly in the passage, grasped her by the shoulder, and pushed her gently into the room where all the people were. ‘I shall find you a boy friend,’ she stated gaily; and Kate looked apprehensively towards her parents, who were regarding her, and everyone else, with helpless disapproval. Things had gone beyond their censure already: Mrs Lacey was so sure of herself that she could defy them about their own daughter before their eyes. But Kate found herself seated next to a young assistant recently come to the district, who at eighteen was less likely to be tolerant of little girls than an older man might have been. Mrs Lacey had shown none of her usual shrewdness in the choice. After a few painful remarks, Kate saw this young man turn away from her, and soon she tried to slip away. Mr Hackett, noticing her, put his arm round her and said, ‘Don’t run away, my dear,’ but the thought of her watching parents stiffened her to an agony of protest. He dropped his arm, remarked humorously to the rest of the room – for everyone was looking over at them and laughing: ‘These girlish giggles!’ and turned his attention to the bottle he was holding. Kate ran to the kitchens. Soon she fled from there, as people came in. She crept furtively to the baby’s cot, but he was asleep; and it was not long before Mrs Lacey glanced in and said: ‘Do leave him alone, Kate,’ before vanishing again. Kate took herself to that set of rooms that Mrs Lacey had not touched at all. They were still roughly whitewashed, and the cement floors, though polished, were bare. Saddles of various patterns hung in rows in one room; another was filled with beautifully patterned belts with heavy silver buckles and engraved holsters. There were, too, rows and rows of guns of all kinds, carved, stamped, twisted into strange shapes. They came from every part of the world, and were worth a fortune, so people said.
These rooms were where Mr Lacey and Mr Hackett liked to sit; and they had heavy leather armchairs, and a cupboard with a private supply of whisky and siphons. Kate sat stiffly on the edge of one of the chairs, and looked at the rows of weapons: she was afraid the men might be angry to find her there. And in fact it was not long before Mr Lacey appeared in the doorway, gave an exclamation, and withdrew. He had not been alone. Kate, wondering who the lady was, and whether Mrs Lacey would mind, left the house altogether and sat in the back of their car. Half asleep, she watched the couples dancing along the veranda, and saw how at one end a crowd of natives gathered outside in the dark, pressing their noses to the wire gauze, in curious admiration at the white people enjoying themselves. Sometimes a man and a woman would come down the steps, their arms about each other, and disappear under the trees; or into the cars. She shrank back invisibly, for in the very next car were a couple who were often visitors at their house, though as members of their own families; and she did not want them to have the embarrassment of knowing she was there. Soon she stuck her fingers in her ears; she felt sick, and she was also very hungry.
But it was not long before she heard shouts from the house, and the shouts were angry. Peering through the back window of the car she could see people standing around two men who were fighting. She saw legs in riding breeches, and then Mrs Lacey came and stood between them. ‘What nonsense,’ Kate heard her exclaim, her voice still high and gay, though strained. Almost immediately Kate heard her name called, and her mother appeared, outlined against the light. Kate slipped from the car so that the couple in the next car might not see her and ran to tug at her mother’s arm.
‘So there you are!’ exclaimed Mrs Cope in a relieved voice. ‘We are going home now. Your father is tired.’
In the car Kate asked: ‘What were Mr Hackett and Mr Lacey fighting about?’ There was a pause before Mrs Cope replied: ‘I don’t know, dear.’ ‘Who won?’ insisted Kate. Then, when she got no answer, she said: ‘It’s funny, isn’t it, when in the daytime they are such friends?’ In the silence the sound of her own words tingled in her ears, and Kate watched something unexpected, yet familiar, emerge. Here it was again, the other pattern. It was of Mr Hackett that she thought as the car nosed its way through the trees to their own farm, and her wonder crystallized at last into exclamation: ‘But they are so much alike!’ She felt as she would have done if she had seen a little girl, offered a doll, burst into tears because she had not been given another that was identical in every way. ‘Don’t bother your head about it,’ soothed Mrs Cope. ‘They aren’t very nice people. Forget about it.’
The next Sunday was Church Sunday. The ministers came in rotation: Presbyterian, Church of England, Roman Catholic. Sometimes there was a combined service. The Copes never missed the Church of England Sundays.
The services were held in the district hall, near the station. The hall is a vast barn of a place, and the small group of worshippers crowded at one end, near the platform, where Nan Fowler perched to play the hymns, like a thin flock of birds in a very large tree. The singing rose meagrely over the banging of the piano and dissolved in the air above their heads: even from the door the music seemed to come from a long way off.
The Laceys and Mr Hackett arrived late that day, tiptoeing uncomfortably to the back seats and arranging themselves so that Mrs Lacey sat between the men. This was the first time they had been to church. Kate twisted her neck and saw that for once the men were not in riding things; released, thus, from their uniforms, looking ordinary in brown suits, it was easier to see them as two different people. But even so, they were alike, with the same flat slouching bodies and lean humorous faces. They hummed tunelessly, making a bumblebee noise, and looked towards the roof. Mrs Lacey, who held the hymn book for all three of them, kept her eyes on the print in a manner which seemed to be directing the men’s attention to it. She looked very neat and sober today, and her voice, a pretty contralto, was stronger than anyone’s, so that in a little while she was leading the singing. Again, irresistibly, the subterranean laughter bubbled in Kate, and she turned away, glancing doubtfully at her mother, who hissed in her ear: ‘It’s rude to stare.’
When the service was over, Mrs Lacey came straight to Mrs Cope and held out her hand. ‘How are you?’ she asked winningly. Mrs Cope replied stiffly: ‘It is nice to see you at church.’ Kate saw Mrs Lacey’s face twitch, and sympathy told her that Mrs Lacey, too, was suffering from the awful need to laugh. However, her face straightened, and she glanced at Mr Cope and flushed. She stood quietly by and watched while Mrs Cope issued invitations to everyone who passed to come home to Sunday lunch. She was expecting an invitation too, but none was offered. Mrs Cope finally nodded, smiled, and climbed into the car. There was suddenly a look of brave defiance about Mrs Lacey that tugged at Kate’s heart: if it had not been for the stoic set of her shoulders as she climbed into the car with her two men, Kate would have been able to bear the afternoon better. When lunch was over, things arranged themselves as usual with the men on one side of the room and the women on the other. Kate stood for a while behind her father’s chair; then, with burning cheeks, she moved over to the
women who had their heads together around her mother’s chair. They glanced up at her, and then behaved as grown-up people do when they wish to talk and children are in the way; they simply pretended she was not there. In a few moments Kate sped from the house and ran through the bush to her place of refuge, which was a deep hollow over which bushes knotted and tangled. Here she flung herself and wept.
Nobody mentioned the Laceys at supper. People seemed to have been freed from something. There was a great deal of laughter at the comfortable old jokes at which they had been laughing for years. The air had been cleared: something final had happened, or was going to happen. Later, when these farmers and their wives, carrying their children rolled in blankets, went to find their cars, Kate lifted the curtain and looked over at the cluster of lights on the opposite ridge, and wondered if Mrs Lacey was watching the headlights of the cars swing down the various roads home, and if so, what it was she was thinking and feeling.
Next morning a basket arrived at the back door, full of fresh vegetables and roses. There was also a note addressed to Miss Catherine Cope. It said: ‘If you have nothing better to do, come and spend the day. I have been looking over some of my old dresses for you.’ Kate read this note, feeling her mother’s reproachful eyes fixed on her, and reluctantly handed it over. ‘You are not going, surely!’ exclaimed Mrs Cope, ‘I might as well, for the last time,’ said Kate. When she heard what it was she had said, the tears came into her eyes, so that she could not turn round to wave good-bye to her mother.
That last day she missed nothing of the four miles’ walk: she felt every step.
The long descent on their side was through fields which were now ploughed ready for the wet season. A waste of yellow clods stretched away on either side, and over them hung a glinting haze of dust. The road itself was more of a great hogsback, for the ditches on either side had eroded into cracked gullies fifteen feet deep. Soon, after the rains, this road would have to be abandoned and another cut, for the water raced turbulently down here during every storm, swirling away the soil and sharpening the ridge. At the vlei, which was now quite dry, the gullies had cut down into a double pothole, so that the drift was unsafe even now. This time next year the old road to the Laceys would be a vivid weal down the slope where no one could walk.
On the other side the soil changed: here it was pale and shining, and the dews of each night hardened it so that each step was a small crusty subsidence. Because the lands had not been farmed for years and were covered with new vegetation, the scars that had been cut down this slope, too, were healing, for the grasses had filmed over them and were gripping the loose soil.
Before Kate began to ascend this slope she took her cretonne hat that her mother had made to ‘go’ with her frock, and which stuck up in angles round her face, and hid it in an antbear hole, where she could find it on the way home; she could not bear Mrs Lacey to see her in it.
Being October, it was very hot, and the top of her head began to feel as if a weight were pressing on it. Soon her shoulders ached too, and her eyes dazzled. She could hardly see the bright swift horses in the bushy paddock for glare, and her tight smile at Mr Hackett and Mr Lacey was more like a grimace of pain. When she arrived on the veranda, Mrs Lacey, who was sewing, gave her a concerned glance, and exclaimed: ‘What have you done with your hat?’ ‘I forgot it,’ said Kate.
On the sewing table were piles of Mrs Lacey’s discarded frocks. She said kindly: ‘Have a look at these and see which you would like.’ Kate blinked at the glare outside and slid thankfully into a chair; but she did not touch the frocks. After a while her head cleared and she said: ‘I can’t take them. My mother wouldn’t like it. Thank you all the same.’ Mrs Lacey glanced at her sharply, and went on sewing for a while in silence. Then she said lightly: ‘I don’t see why you shouldn’t, do you?’ Kate did not reply. Now that she had recovered, and the pressure on her head had gone, she was gazing about her, consciously seeing everything for the last time, and wondering what the next lot of people would be like.
‘Did you have a nice time yesterday?’ asked Mrs Lacey, wanting to be told who had spent the day with the Copes, what they had done, and – most particularly – what they had said. ‘Very nice, thank you,’ said Kate primly; and saw Mrs Lacey’s face turn ugly with annoyance before she laughed and asked: ‘I am in disgrace, am I?’
But Kate could not now be made an ally. She said cautiously: ‘What did you expect?’
Mrs Lacey said, with amused annoyance: ‘A lot of hypocritical old fogeys.’ The word ‘hypocrite’ isolated itself and stood fresh and new before Kate’s eyes, and it seemed to her all at once that Mrs Lacey was wilfully misunderstanding.
She sat quietly, watching the sun creep in long warm streaks towards her over the shining floor, and waited for Mrs Lacey to ask what she so clearly needed to ask. There would be some question, some remark, that would release her, so that she could go home, feeling a traitor no longer: she did not know it, but she was waiting for some kind of an apology, something that would heal the injustice that burned in her: after all, for Mrs Lacey’s sake she had let her own parents dislike her.
But there was no sound from Mrs Lacey, and when Kate looked up, she saw that her face had changed. It was peaked, and diminished, with frail blue shadows around the mouth and eyes. Kate was looking at an acute, but puzzled fear, and could not recognize it; though if she had been able to search inside herself, now, thinking of how she feared to return home, she would have found pity for Mrs Lacey.
After a while she said: ‘Can I take the baby for a walk?’ It was almost midday, with the sun beating directly downwards; the baby was never allowed out at this hour; but after a short hesitation Mrs Lacey gave her an almost appealing glance and said: ‘If you keep in the shade.’ The baby was brought from the nursery and strapped into the pram. Kate eased the pram down the steps, but instead of directing her steps towards the avenue, where there might possibly have been a little shade, even at this hour, went down the road to the river. On one side, where the bushes were low, sun-glare fell about the grassroots. On the other infrequent patches of shade stood under the trees. Kate dodged from one patch to the next, while the baby reclined in the warm airless cave under the hood.
She could not truly care: she knew Mrs Lacey was watching her and did not turn her head; she had paid for this by weeks of humiliation. When she was out of sight of the house she unstrapped the baby and carried it a few paces from the road into the bush. There she sat, under a tree, holding the child against her. She could feel sweat running down her face, and did not lift her hand to find whether tears mingled with it: her eyes were smarting with the effort of keeping her lids apart over the pressure of tears. As for the baby, beads of sweat stood all over his face. He looked vaguely about and reached his hands for the feathery heads of grasses and seemed subdued. Kate held him tight, but did not caress him; she was knotted tight inside with tears and anger. After a while she saw a tick crawl out of the grass on to her leg, and from there to the baby’s leg. For a moment she let it crawl; from that dark region of her mind where the laughter spurted, astonishingly, came the thought: He might get tick fever. She could see Mrs Lacey very clearly, standing beside a tiny oblong trench, her head bent under the neat brown hat. She could hear women saying, their admiration and pity heightened by contrition: ‘She was so brave, she didn’t give way at all.’
Kate brushed off the tick and stood up. Carefully keeping the sun off the child – his cheek was already beginning to redden – she put him back in the pram, and began wheeling it back. Whatever it was she had been looking for, satisfaction, whether of pain, or love, she had not been given it. She could see Mrs Lacey standing on the veranda shading her eyes with her hand as she gazed towards them. Another thought floated up: she vividly saw herself pleading with Mrs Lacey: ‘Let me keep the baby, you don’t want him, not really.’
When she faced Mrs Lacey with the child, and looked up into the concerned eyes, guilt swept her. She saw that Mrs Lacey’s hand
s fumbled rapidly with the straps; she saw how the child was lifted out, with trembling haste, away from the heat and the glare. Mrs Lacey asked: ‘Did you enjoy the walk?’ but although she appeared to want to make Kate feel she had been willingly granted this pleasure, Mrs Lacey could not help putting her hand to the baby’s head and saying: ‘He’s very hot.’
She sat down beside her sewing table; and for the first time Kate saw her actually hold her child in her arms, even resting her cheek against his head. Then the baby wriggled round towards her and put his arms around her neck and burrowed close, gurgling with pleasure. Mrs Lacey appeared taken aback; she looked down at her own baby with amazement in which there was also dismay. She was accepting the child’s cuddling in the way a woman accepts the importunate approaches of someone whose feelings she does not want to hurt. She was laughing and protesting and putting down the baby’s clutching arms. Still laughing, she said to Kate: ‘You see, this is all your doing.’ The words seemed to Kate so extraordinary that she could not reply. Through her mind floated pictures of women she had known from the district, and they flowed together to make one picture – her idea, from experience, of a mother. She saw a plump smiling woman holding a baby to her face for the pleasure of its touch. She remembered Nan Fowler one mail day at the station, just after the birth of her third child. She sat in the front seat of the car, with the bundled infant on her lap, laughing as it nuzzled to get to her breasts, where appeared two damp patches. Andrew Wheatley stood beside the car talking to her, but her manner indicated a smiling withdrawal from him. ‘Look,’ she seemed to be saying – not at all concerned for her stretched loose body and those shameless patches of milk – ‘as you observe, I can’t be really with you for the moment, but I’d like to see you later.’
This Was the Old Chief's Country Page 18
