African Stories

by Doris Lessing

  And Kenneth was no help at all. With Tom on the farm she might have been able to drift with the current, to take the conventional attitude towards the war. But Kenneth used to switch on the wireless in the evenings and pungently translate the news of the war into the meaningless chaotic brutality which was how she herself saw it. He spoke with the callous cynicism that means people are suffering, and which she could hear in her own voice.

  “It’s all very well,” she would say to him. “It’s all very well for us. We sit here out of it all. Millions of people are suffering.”

  “People like suffering,” he would retort, angrily. “Look at Tom. There he sits in the desert, bored as hell. Hell be talking about the best years of his life in ten years’ time.”

  Julia could hear Tom’s voice, nostalgically recalling adventure, only too clearly. At the same time Kenneth made her angry, because he expressed what she felt, and she did not like the way she felt. She joined the local women’s groups and started knitting and helping with district functions; and flushed up when she saw Kenneth’s cold angry eyes resting on her. “By God, Julia, you are as bad as Tom . . .”

  “Well, surely, one must be part of it, surely, Kenneth?” She tried hard to express what she was feeling.

  “Just what are you fighting for?” he demanded. “Can you tell me that?”

  “I feel we ought to find out . . .”

  He wouldn’t listen. He flounced off down the farm saying: “I’m going to make a new dam. Unless they bomb it, it’s something useful done in all this waste and chaos. You can go and knit nice woollies for those poor devils who are getting themselves killed and listen to the dear women talking about the dreadful Nazis. My God, the hypocrisy. Just tell them to take a good look at South Africa, from me, will you?”

  The fact was, he missed Tom. When he was approached to subscribe to war charities he gave generously, in Tom’s name, sending the receipts carefully to Tom, with sarcastic intention. As the war deepened and the dragging weight of death and suffering settled in their minds, Julia would listen at night to angry pacing footsteps up and down, up and down the long stone passages of the house, and, going out in her dressing-gown, would come on Kenneth, his eyes black with anger, his face tense and white: “Get out of my way, Julia. I shall kill you or somebody. I’d like to blow the whole thing up. Why not blow it up and be finished with it? It would be good riddance.”

  Julia would gently take him by the arm and lead him back to bed, shutting down her own cold terror at the world. It was necessary for one of them to remain sane. Kenneth at that time was not quite sane. He was working fourteen hours a day; up long before sunrise, hastening back up the road home after sundown, for an evening’s studying: he read scientific stuff about farming. He was building dams, roads, bridges; he planted hundreds of acres of trees; he contour-ridged and drained. He would listen to the news of so many thousands killed and wounded, so many factories blown up, and turn to Julia, his face contracted with hate, saying, “At any rate I’m building not destroying.”

  “I hope it comforts you,” Julia would remark, mildly sarcastic, though she felt bitter and futile.

  He would look at her balefully and stride out again, away on some work for his hands.

  They were quite alone in the house. For a short while after Tom left they discussed whether they would get an assistant, for conventional reasons. But they disliked the idea of a stranger, and the thing drifted. Soon, as the men left the farms to go off to the war, many women were left alone, doing the work themselves, or with assistants who were unfit for fighting, and there was nothing really outrageous in Kenneth and Julia living together by themselves. It was understood in the district, that for the duration of the war, this kind of situation should not be made a subject for gossip.

  It was inevitable they should be lovers. From the moment Tom left they both knew it.

  Tom was away three years. She was exhausted by Kenneth. His mood was so black and bitter and she knew that nothing she could do or say might help him, for she was as bad herself.

  She became the kind of woman he wanted: he did not want a warm, consoling woman. She was his mistress. Their relationship was a complicating fencing game, conducted with irony, tact, and good sense—except when he boiled over into hatred and vented it on her. There were times when suddenly all vitality failed her, and she seemed to sink swiftly, unsupported, to lie helpless in the depths of herself, looking up undesirously at the life of emotion and warmth washing gently over her head. Then Kenneth used to leave her alone, whereas Tom would have gently coaxed her into life again.

  “I wish Tom would come back, oh dear Christ, I wish he’d come back,” she would sigh.

  “Do you imagine I don’t?” Kenneth would enquire bitterly. Then, a little piqued, but not much: “Don’t I do?”

  “Well enough, I suppose.”

  “What do you want then?” he enquired briefly, giving what small amount of attention he could spare from the farm to the problem of Julia, the woman.

  “Tom,” Julia replied simply.

  He considered this critically. “The fact is, you and I have far more in common than you and Tom.”

  “I don’t see what In common’ has to do with it.”

  “You and I are the same kind of animal. Tom doesn’t know the first thing about you. He never could.”

  “Perhaps that’s the reason.”

  Dislike began welling between them, tempered, as always, by patient irony. “You don’t like women at all,” complained Julia suddenly. “You simply don’t like me. You don’t trust me.”

  “Oh if it comes to liking . . .” He laughed, resentfully. “You don’t trust me either, for that matter.”

  It was the truth; they didn’t trust each other; they mistrusted the destructive nihilism that they had in common. Conversations like these, which became far more frequent as time went on, left them hardened against each other for days, in a condition of watchful challenge. This was part of their long, exhausting exchange, which was a continual resolving of mutual antagonism in tired laughter.

  Yet, when Tom wrote saying he was being demobilized, Kenneth, in a mood of tenderness, asked Julia to marry him. She was shocked and astonished. “You know quite well you don’t want to marry me,” she expostulated. “Besides, how could you do that to Tom?” Catching his quizzical glance, she began laughing helplessly.

  “I don’t know whether I want to marry you or not,” admitted Kenneth honestly, laughing with her.

  “Well, I know. You don’t.”

  “I’ve got used to you.”

  “I haven’t got used to you. I never could.”

  “I don’t understand what it is Tom gives you that I don’t.”

  “Peace,” said Julia simply. “You and I fight all the time, we never do anything else.”

  “We don’t fight,” protested Kenneth. “We have never, as they say, exchanged a cross word.” He grimaced. “Except when I get wound up, and that’s a different thing.”

  Julia saw that he could not imagine a relationship with a woman that was not based on antagonism. She said, knowing it was useless : “Everything is so easy with Tom.”

  “Of course it’s easy,” he said angrily. “The whole damn thing is a lie from beginning to end. However, if that’s what you like . . .” He shrugged, his anger evaporating. He said drily: “I imagined I was qualifying as a husband.”

  “Some men can’t ever be husbands. They’ll always be lovers.”

  “I thought women liked that?”

  “I wasn’t talking about women, I was talking about me.”

  “Well, I intend to get married, for all that.”

  After that they did not discuss it. Speaking of what they felt left them confused, angry, puzzled.

  Before Tom came back Kenneth said: “I ought to leave the farm.”

  She did not trouble to answer, it was so insincere.

  “I’ll get a farm over the other side of the district.”

  She merely smiled. Ken
neth had written long letters to Tom every week of those three years, telling him every detail of what was happening on the farm. Plans for the future were already worked out.

  It was arranged that Julia should go and meet Tom in town, where they would spend some weeks before the three began life together again. As Kenneth said, sarcastically, to Julia: “It will be just like a second honeymoon.”

  It was. Tom returned from the desert toughened, sunburnt, swaggering a little because he was unsure of himself with Julia. But she was so happy to see him that in a few hours they were back where they had been. “About Kenneth . . .” began Tom warily, after they had edged round this subject for some days.

  “Much better not talk about it,” said Julia quickly.

  Tom’s blue eyes rested on her, not critically, but appealingly. “Is it going to be all right?” he asked after a moment. She could see he was terrified she might say that Kenneth had decided to go away. She said drily: “I didn’t want you to go off to the wars like a hero, did I?”

  “There’s something in that,” he admitted; admitting at the same time that they were quits. Actually, he was rather subdued because of his years as a soldier. He was quick to drop the subject. It would not be just yet that he would begin talking about the happiest years of his life. He had still to forget how bored he had been and how he had missed his farm.

  For a few days there was awkwardness between the three. Kenneth was jealous because of the way Julia had gladly turned back to Tom. But there was so much work to do, and Kenneth and Tom were so pleased to be back together, that it was not long before everything was as easy as before. Julia thought it was easier: now that her attraction for Kenneth, and his for her, had been slaked, the restlessness that had always been between them would vanish. Perhaps not quite . . . Julia’s and Kenneth’s eyes would meet sometimes in that instinctive, laughing understanding that she could never have with Tom, and then she would feel guilty.

  Sometimes Kenneth would “take out” a girl from a near farm; and they would afterwards discuss his getting married. “If only I could fall in love,” he would complain humorously. “You are the only woman I can bear the thought of, Julia.” He would say this before Tom, and Tom would laugh: they had reached such a pitch of complicity.

  Very soon there were plans for expanding the farm. They bought several thousands of acres of land next door. They would grow tobacco on a large scale: this was the time of the tobacco boom. They were getting very rich.

  There were two assistants on the new farm, but Tom spent most of his days there. Sometimes his nights, too. Julia, after three days spent alone with Kenneth, with the old attraction strong between them, said to him: “I wish you would let Kenneth run that farm.”

  Tom, who was absorbed and fascinated by the new problems, said rather impatiently: “Why?”

  “Surely that’s obvious.”

  “That’s up to you, isn’t it?”

  “Perhaps it isn’t, always.”

  It was the business of the war over again. He seemed a slow, deliberate man, without much fire. But he liked new problems to solve. He got bored. Kenneth, the quick, lively, impatient one, liked to be rooted in one place, liked to develop what he had.

  Julia had the helpless feeling again that Tom simply didn’t care about herself and Kenneth. She grew to accept the knowledge that really, it was Kenneth that mattered to him. Except for the war, they had never been separated. Tom’s father had died, and his mother married Kenneth’s father. Tom had always been with Kenneth, he could not remember a time when he had not been protectively guarding him. Once Julia asked him: “I suppose you must have been very jealous of him, that was it, wasn’t it?” and she was astonished at his quick flare of rage at the suggestion. She dropped the thing: what did it matter now?

  The two boys had gone through various schools and to university together. They had started farming in their early twenties, when they hadn’t a penny between them, and had to borrow money to support their mother, for whom they shared a deep love, which was also half-exasperated admiration; she had apparently been a helpless, charming lady with many admirers who left her children to the care of nurses.

  When Tom was away one evening, and would not be back till next day, Kenneth said brusquely, with the roughness that is the result of conflict: “Coming to my room tonight, Julia?”

  “How can I?” she protested.

  “Well, I don’t like the idea of coming to the marriage bed,” he said practically, and they began to laugh. To Julia, Kenneth would always be the laughter of inevitability.

  Tom said nothing, though he must have known. When Julia again appealed that he should stay on this farm and send Kenneth to the other, he turned away, frowning, and did not reply. His manner to her did not change. And she still felt: this is my husband, and compared to that feeling, Kenneth was nothing. At the same time a grim anxiety was taking possession of her: it seemed that in some perverse way the two men were brought even closer together, for a time, by sharing the same woman. That was how Julia put it, to herself: the plain and brutal fact.

  It was Kenneth who pulled away in the end. Not from Julia: from the situation. There came a time when it was possible for Kenneth to say, as he stood smiling sardonically opposite Julia and Tom, who were sitting like an old married couple on their side of the fire: “You know that it is quite essential I should get married. Things can’t go on like this.”

  “But you can’t marry without being in love,” protested Julia; and immediately checked herself with an annoyed laugh—she realized that what she was protesting against was Kenneth going away from her.

  “You must see that I should.”

  “I don’t like the idea,” said Tom, as if it were his marriage that was under discussion.

  “Look at you and Tom,” said Kenneth peaceably, but not without maliciousness. “A very satisfactory marriage. You weren’t in love.”

  “Weren’t we in love, Julia?” asked Tom, rather surprised.

  “Actually, I was In love’ with Kenneth,” said Julia, with the sense that this was an unnecessary thing to say.

  “You wanted a wife. Julia wanted a husband. All very sensible.”

  “One can be ‘in love’ once too often,” said Julia, aiming this at Kenneth.

  “Are you in love with Kenneth now?”

  Julia did not answer; it annoyed her that Tom should ask it, after virtually handing her over to Kenneth. After a moment she remarked: “I suppose you are right. You really ought to get married.” Then, thoughtfully: “I couldn’t be married to you, Kenneth. You destroy me.” The word sounded heightened and absurd. She hurried on: “I didn’t know it was possible to be as happy as I have been with Tom.” She smiled at her husband and reached over and took his hand: he returned the pressure gratefully.

  “Ergo, I have to get married,” said Kenneth caustically.

  “But you say so yourself.”

  “I don’t seem to be feeling what I ought to feel,” said Tom at last, laughing in a bewildered way.

  “That’s what’s wrong with the three of us,” said Julia; then, feeling as if she were on the edge of that dangerous thing that might destroy them, she stopped and said: “Let’s not talk about it. It doesn’t do any good to talk about it.”

  That conversation had taken place a month ago. Kenneth had not mentioned getting married since; and Julia had secretly hoped he had shelved it. Not long since, during that trip to town, he had spent a day away from Tom and herself—and with whom? Tomorrow he was making the trip again, and for the first time for years, since they had been together, it was not the three of them, close in understanding, but Tom and Julia, with Kenneth deliberately excluding himself and putting up barriers.

  Kenneth did not open his mouth the whole evening; though both Tom and Julia waited for him to break the silence. Julia did not read; she moiled over the facts of her life unhappily; and from time to time looked over at Tom, who smiled back affectionately, knowing she wanted this of him.

 
; In spite of the fire, that now roared and crackled in the wall, Julia was cold. The thin frosty air of the high veld was of an electric dryness in the big bare room. The roof was crackling with cold; every time the tin snapped overhead it evoked the arching, myriad-starred, chilly night outside, and the drying, browning leaves, the tall waving grass that was now a dull parched colour. Julia’s skin crinkled and stung with dryness.

  Suddenly she said: “It won’t do, Kenneth. You can’t behave like this.” She got up, and stood with her back to the fire, gazing levelly at them. She felt herself to be parching and withering within; she felt no heavier than a twig; the sap did not run in her veins. Because of Kenneth’s betrayal, she was wounded in some place she could not name. She had no substance. That was how she felt.

  What they saw was a tall, rather broad woman, big-framed, the bones of her face strongly supporting the flesh. Her eyes were blue and candid, now clouded by trouble, but still humorously troubled. She was forcing them to look at her; to make comparisons; she was challenging them. She was forcing them even to break the habit of loyalty which, blithely tender, continually recreative, blinds the eyes of lovers to change.

  They saw this strong, ageing woman, the companion of their lives, standing there in front of them, still formed in the shape of beauty, for she was pleasant to look at, but with the light of beauty gone. They remembered her, perhaps, on that afternoon by the sea when they had first encountered her, or when she was newly arrived at the farm: young, vivid, a slender and rather boyish girl, with sleek, close-cropped hair and quick amused blue eyes.

  Now, around the firm and bony face the soft hair fell in dressed waves, she wore a soft flowery dress: they saw a disquieting incongruity between this expression of femininity and what they knew her to be. They were irritated. To stand there, reminding them (when they did not want to be reminded) that she was facing the sorrowful abdication of middle age, and facing it alone, seemed to them irrelevant, even unfair.