African Stories

by Doris Lessing

  “I’ve got to be very fond of her,” protested Kenneth.

  “At bottom, you don’t care tuppence.”

  He did not reply. “You are going to bring her here to me. She’ll feel with her instinct if not with her head that she’s being made use of. And you bring her here to me.” It seemed to her that she had made her sense of outrage clear enough. She turned to face them.

  “The prospect of bringing her ‘to you’ doesn’t seem to me as shocking as apparently it does to you,” said Kenneth drily.

  “Can’t you see?” she said desperately. “She couldn’t compete . . .”

  “You flatter yourself,” said Kenneth briskly.

  “Oh, I don’t mean that. I mean we’ve been together for so long. There’s nothing we don’t know about each other. Have I got to say it . . .”

  “No,” said Kenneth quietly. “Much better not.”

  Through all this Tom, that large, fair, comfortable man, leaned back in his chair, looking from his wife to his half-brother with the air of one suddenly transported to a foreign country.

  He said stubbornly: “I don’t see why you shouldn’t adjust yourself, Julia. After all, both Kenneth and I have had to adjust ourselves to . . .”

  “Quite,” said Kenneth quickly, “quite.”

  She turned on Kenneth furiously. “Why do you always cut the conversation short? Why shouldn’t we talk about it? It’s what’s real, isn’t it, for all of us?”

  “No point talking about it,” said Kenneth, with a sullen look.

  “No,” she said coldly. “No point.” She turned away from them, fighting back tears. “At bottom neither of you really cared tuppence. That’s what it is.” At the moment this seemed to her true.

  “What do you mean by ‘really caring’?” asked Kenneth.

  Julia turned slowly from the window, jerking the light summer curtains across the stars. “I mean, we don’t care. We just don’t care.”

  “I don’t know what you are talking about,” said Tom, sounding bewildered and angry. “Haven’t you been happy with me? Is that what you are saying, Julia?”

  At this both Kenneth and Julia began laughing with an irresistible and painful laughter.

  “Of course I’ve been happy with you,” she said flatly, at last.

  “Well then?” asked Tom.

  “I don’t know why I was happy then and why I’m unhappy now?”

  “Let’s say you’re jealous,” said Kenneth briskly.

  “But I don’t think I am.”

  “Of course you are.”

  “Very well then, I am. That’s not the point, though. What are we going to do to the girl?” she asked suddenly, her feeling finding expression.

  “I shall make her a good husband,” said Kenneth. The three of them looked at each other, with raised brows, with humorous, tightened lips.

  “Very well then,” amended Kenneth. “But she’ll have plenty of nice children. She’ll have you for company, Julia, a nice intelligent woman. And she’ll have plenty of money and pretty clothes and all that sort of nonsense, if she wants them.”

  There was a silence so long it seemed that nothing could break it.

  Julia said slowly and painfully: “I think it is terrible we shouldn’t be able to explain what we feel or what we are.”

  “I wish you’d stop trying to,” said Kenneth. “I find it unpleasant. And quite useless.”

  Tom said: “As for me, I would be most grateful if you’d try to explain what you are feeling, Julia. I haven’t an idea.”

  Julia stood up with her back to the fire and began gropingly: “Look at the way we are. I mean, what do we add up to? What are we doing here, in the first place?”

  “Doing where?” asked Tom kindly.

  “Here, in Africa, in this district, on this land.”

  “Ohhh,” groaned Tom humorously.

  “Oh Lord, Julia,” protested Kenneth impatiently.

  “I feel as if we shouldn’t be here.”

  “Where should we be, then?”

  “We’ve as much right as anybody else.”

  “I suppose so.” Julia dismissed it. It was not her point, after all, it seemed. She said slowly: “I suppose there are comparatively very few people in the world as secure and as rich as we are.”

  “It takes a couple of bad seasons or a change in the international set-up,” said Kenneth. “We could get poor as easily as we’ve got rich. If you want to call it easy. We’ve worked hard enough, Tom and I.”

  “So do many other people. In the meantime we’ve all the money we want. Why do we never talk about money, never think about it? It’s what we are.”

  “Speak for yourself, Julia,” said Tom. “Kenneth and I spend all our days thinking and talking about nothing else. How else do you suppose we’ve got rich?”

  “How to make it. Not what it all adds up to.”

  The two men did not reply; they looked at each other with resignation. Kenneth lit a cigarette, Tom a pipe.

  “I’ve been getting a feeling of money the last few days. Perhaps not so much money as . . .” She stopped. “I can’t say what I feel. It’s no use. What do our lives add up to? That’s what I want to know.”

  “Why do you expect us to tell you?” asked Kenneth curiously at last.

  This was a new note. Julia looked at him, puzzled. “I don’t know,” she said at last. Then, very drily: “I suppose I should be prepared to take the consequences for marrying the pair of you.” The men laughed uneasily though with relief that the worst seemed to be over. “If I left this place tomorrow,” she said sadly, “you simply wouldn’t miss me.”

  “Ah, you love Kenneth,” groaned Tom suddenly. The groan was so sudden, coming just as the flippant note had been struck, and successfully, that Julia could not bear it. She continued quietly, lightly, to wipe away the naked pain of Tom’s voice: “No, I don’t. I wish you wouldn’t talk about love.”

  “That’s what all this is about,” said Kenneth. “Love.”

  Julia looked at him scornfully. She said: “What sort of people are we? Let’s use bare words for bare facts, just for once.”

  “Must you?” breathed Kenneth.

  “Yes, I must. The fact is that I have been a sort of high-class concubine for the two of you . . .” She stopped at once. Even the beginning of the tirade sounded absurd in her own ears.

  “I hope that statement has cleared your mind for you,” said Kenneth ironically.

  “No, it hasn’t. I didn’t expect it would.” But now Julia was fighting hard against that no-man’s-land of feeling in which she had been living for so long, that under-sea territory where one thing confuses with another, where it is so easy to drift at ease, according to the pull of the tides.

  “I should have had children,” she said at last, quietly. “That’s where we went wrong, Tom. It was children we needed.”

  “Ah,” said Kenneth from his chair, suddenly deeply sincere, “now you are talking sense.”

  “Well,” said Tom, “there’s nothing to stop us.”

  “I’m too old.”

  “Other women of forty have children.”

  “I’m too—tired. It seems to me, to have children, one needs . . .” She stopped.

  “What does one need?” asked Tom.

  Julia’s eyes met Kenneth’s; they exchanged deep, ironic, patient understanding.

  “Thank God you didn’t marry me,” he said suddenly. “You were quite right. Tom’s the man for you. In a marriage it’s necessary for one side to be strong enough to create the illusion.”

  “What illusion?” asked Tom petulantly.

  “Necessity,” said Kenneth simply.

  “Is that the office this girl is going to perform for you?” asked Tom.

  “Precisely. She loves me, God help her. She really does, you know . . .” Kenneth looked at them in a manner of inviting them to share his surprise at this fact. “And she wants children. She knows why she wants them. She’ll make me know it too, bless her. Most of the t
ime,” he could not prevent himself adding.

  Now it seemed impossible to go on. They remained silent, each face expressing tired and bewildered unhappiness. Julia stood against the mantelpiece, feeling the warmth of the fire running over her body, but not reaching the chill within.

  Kenneth recovered first. He got up and said: “Bed, bed for all of us. This doesn’t help. We mustn’t talk. We must get on, dealing with the next thing.” He said good night, and went to the door. There he turned, looked clear and full at Julia with his black, alert, shrewd eyes, and remarked: “You must be nice to that girl, Julia.”

  “You know very well I can be ‘nice’ to her, but I won’t be ‘nice’ for her. You are deliberately submitting her to it. You won’t even move two miles away on to the next farm. You won’t even take that much trouble to make her happy. Remember that.”

  Kenneth flushed, said hastily: “Well, I didn’t say I wouldn’t go to the other farm,” and went out. Julia knew that it would take a lot of unhappiness for the four of them before he would consent to move himself. He thought of this house as his home; and he could not bear to leave Tom, even now.

  “Come here,” said Tom gently, when Kenneth had left the room. She went to him, and slipped down beside him into his chair. “Do you find me stupid?” he asked.

  “Not stupid.”

  “What then?”

  She held him close. “Put your arms round me.”

  He held her; but she did not feel supported: the arms were as light as wind about her, and as unsure.

  In the middle of the night she rose from her bed, slipped on her gown and went along the winding passages to Kenneth’s bedroom, which was at the other end of the house.

  It was filled with the brightness of moonlight. Kenneth was sitting up against his pillows; he was awake; she could see the light glinting on his eyes.

  She sat herself down on the foot of his bed.

  “Well, Julia? It’s no good coming to me, you know.”

  She did not reply. The confusing dimness of the moon, which hung immediately outside the window, troubled her. She held a match to the candle, and watched a warm yellow glow fill the room, so that the moon retreated and became a small hard bright coin high among the stars.

  She saw on the dressing-table a new framed photograph.

  “If one acquires a wife,” she said sarcastically, “one of course acquires a photo to put on one’s dressing-table.” She went over and picked it up and returned to the bed with it. Kenneth watched her, alertly.

  Slowly Julia’s face spread into a compassionate smile.

  “What’s the matter?” asked Kenneth quickly.

  She was not twenty-three, Julia could see that. She was well over thirty. It was a pretty enough face, very English, with flat broad planes and small features. Fair neatly-waved hair fell away regularly from the forehead.

  There was anxiety in those too-serious eyes; the mouth smiled carefully in a prepared sweetness for the photographer; the cheeks were thin. Turning the photograph to the light Julia could see how the neck was creased and furrowed. No, she was by no means a girl. She glanced at Kenneth; and was filled slowly by a sweet irrational tenderness for him, a delicious irresponsible gaiety.

  “Why,” she said, “you’re in love, after all, Kenneth.”

  “Whoever said I wasn’t?” he grinned at her, lying watchfully back in his bed and puffing at his cigarette.

  She grinned back affectionately, still lifted on a wave of delight; then she turned, and felt it ebb as she looked down at the photograph, mentally greeting this other tired woman, coming to the great rich farm, like the poor girl in the fairy story.

  “What are you amused at?” asked Kenneth cautiously.

  “I was thinking of you as a refuge,” she explained drily.

  “I’m quite prepared to be.”

  “You’d never be a refuge for anyone.”

  “Not for you. But you forget she’s younger.” He laughed: “She’ll be less critical.”

  She smiled, without replying, looking at the pictured face. It was such a humourless, earnest, sincere face, the eyes so serious, so searching.

  Julia sighed. “I’m terribly tired,” she said to Kenneth, turning back to him.

  “I know you are. So am I. That’s why I’m marrying.”

  Julia had a clear mental picture of this Englishwoman, who was soon coming to the farm. For a moment she allowed herself to picture her in various situations, arriving with nervous tact, hiding her longing for a home of her own, hoping not to find Julia an enemy. She would find not strife, or hostility, or scenes—none of the situations which she might be prepared to face. She would find three people who knew each other so well that for the most part they found it hardly necessary to speak. She would find indifference to everything she really was, a prepared, deliberate kindness. She would be like a latecomer to a party, entering a room where everyone is already cemented by hours of warmth and intimacy. She would be helpless against Kenneth’s need for her to be something she could not be: a young woman, with the spiritual vitality to heal him.

  Looking at the pretty girl in the frame which she held between her palms, the girl under whose surface prettiness Julia could see the anxious, haunted woman, the knowledge came to her of what word it was she sought: it was as though those carefully smiling lips formed themselves into that word. “Do you know what we are?” she asked Kenneth.

  “Not a notion,” he replied jauntily.

  Julia accepted the word evil from that humourless, homeless girl. Twice in her life it had confronted her; this time she took it gratefully. After all, none other had been offered.

  “I know what evil is,” she said to Kenneth.

  “How nice for you,” he returned impatiently. Then he added: “I suppose, like most women who have lived their own lives, whatever that might mean, you are now beginning to develop an exaggerated conscience. If so, we shall both find you very tedious.”

  “Is that what I’m doing?” she asked, considering it. “I don’t think so.”

  He looked at her soberly. “Go to bed, my dear. Do stop fussing. Are you prepared to do anything about it? You aren’t, are you? Then stop making us all miserable over impossibilities. We have a pleasant enough life, taking it for what it is. It’s not much fun being the fag-end of something, but even that has its compensations.”

  Julia listened, smiling, to her own voice speaking. “You put it admirably,” she said, as she went out of the room.

  A Home for the Highland Cattle

  THESE days, when people emigrate, it is not so much in search of sunshine, or food, or even servants. It is fairly safe to say that the family bound for Australia, or wherever it may be, has in its mind a vision of a nice house, or a flat, with maybe a bit of garden. I don’t know how things were a hundred or fifty years ago. It seems, from books, that the colonizers and adventurers went sailing off to a new fine life, a new country, opportunities, and so forth. Now all they want is a roof over their heads.

  An interesting thing, this: how is it that otherwise reasonable people come to believe that this same roof, that practically vanishing commodity, is freely obtainable just by packing up and going to another country? After all, headlines like World Housing Shortage are common to the point of tedium; and there is not a brochure or pamphlet issued by immigration departments that does not say (though probably in small print, throwing it away, as it were) that it is undesirable to leave home, without first making sure of a place to live.

  Marina Giles left England with her husband in just this frame of mind. They had been living where they could, sharing flats and baths, and kitchens, for some years. If someone remarked enviously: “They say that in Africa the sky is always blue,” she was likely to reply absent-mindedly: “Yes, and won’t it be nice to have a proper house after all these years.”

  They arrived in Southern Rhodesia, and there was a choice of an immigrants’ camp, consisting of mud huts with a communal water supply, or a hotel; and they chose the h
otel, being what are known as people of means. That is to say, they had a few hundred pounds, with which they had intended to buy a house as soon as they arrived. It was quite possible to buy a house, just as it is in England, provided one gives up all idea of buying a home one likes, and at a reasonable price. For years Marina had been inspecting houses. They fell into two groups, those she liked, and those she could afford. Now Marina was a romantic, she had not yet fallen into that passive state of mind which accepts (as nine-tenths of the population do) that one should find a corner to live, anywhere, and then arrange one’s whole life around it, schooling for one’s children, one’s place of work, and so on. And since she refused to accept it, she had been living in extreme discomfort, exclaiming: “Why should we spend all the capital we are ever likely to have tying ourselves down to a place we detest!” Nothing could be more reasonable, on the face of it.

  But she had not expected to cross an ocean, enter a new and indubitably romantic-sounding country, and find herself in exactly the same position.

  The city, seen from the air, is half-buried in trees. Sixty years ago, this was all bare veld; and even now it appears not as if the veld encloses an area of buildings and streets, but rather as if the houses have forced themselves up, under and among the trees. Flying low over it, one sees greenness, growth, then the white flash of a high building, the fragment of a street that has no beginning or end, for it emerges from trees, and is at once reabsorbed by them. And yet it is a large town, spreading wide and scattered, for here there is no problem of space: pressure scatters people outwards, it does not force them perpendicularly. Driving through it from suburb to suburb, is perhaps fifteen miles—some of the important cities of the world are not much less; but if one asks a person who lives there what the population is, he will say ten thousand, which is very little. Why do so small a number of people need so large a space? The inhabitant will probably shrug, for he has never wondered. The truth is that there are not ten thousand, but more likely 150,000, but the others are black, which means that they are not considered. The blacks do not so much live here, as squeeze themselves in as they can—all this is very confusing for the newcomer, and it takes quite a time to adjust oneself.