African Stories

by Doris Lessing

  Inside, she forgot him in her own discomfort. It was a truly shocking place. The two small rooms were so made that the inter-leading door was in the centre of the wall. They were more like passages than rooms. She switched on the light in what would be the bedroom, and put her hands to her cheek, for it stung where the sun had caught her unaccustomed skin through the chinks of the straw of her hat. The furniture was really beyond description! Two iron bedsteads, on either side of the door, a vast chocolate-brown wardrobe, whose door would not properly shut, one dingy straw mat that slid this way and that over the slippery boards as one walked on it. And the front room! If possible, it was even worse. An enormous cretonne-covered sofa, like a solidified flower bed, a hard and shiny table stuck in the middle of the floor, so that one must walk carefully around it, and four straight, hard chairs, ranged like soldiers against the wall. And the pictures—she did not know such pictures still existed. There was a desert scene, done in coloured cloth, behind glass; a motto in woven straw, also framed in glass, saying: Welcome all who come in here, Good luck to you and all good cheer.

  There was also a very large picture of highland cattle. Half a dozen of these shaggy and ferocious creatures glared down at her from where they stood knee-deep in sunset-tinted pools. One might imagine that pictures of highland cattle no longer existed outside of Victorian novels, or remote suburban boarding-houses—but no, here they were. Really, why bother to emigrate?

  She almost marched over and wrenched that picture from the wall. A curious inhibition prevented her. It was, though she did not know it, the spirit of the building. Some time later she heard Mrs. Black, who had been living for years in the next flat with her husband and three children, remark grimly: “My front door handle has been stuck for weeks, but Fm not going to mend it. If I start doing the place up, it means Fm here for ever.” Marina recognised her own feeling when she heard these words. It accounted for the fact that while the families here were all respectable, in the sense that they owned cars, and could expect a regular monthly income, if one looked through the neglected hedge it was impossible not to conclude that every person in the building was born sloven or slut. No one really lived here. They might have been here for years, without prospect of anything better, but they did not live here.

  There was one exception, Mrs. Pond, who painted her walls and mended what broke. It was felt she let everyone else down. In front of her steps a narrow path edged with brick led to her segment of yard, which was perhaps two feet across, in which lilies and roses were held upright by trellis work, like a tall, green sandwich standing at random in the dusty yard.

  Marina thought: well, what’s the point? Fm not going to live here. The picture could stay. Similarly, she decided there was no sense in unpacking her nice curtains or her books. And the furniture might remain as it was, for it was too awful to waste effort on it. Her thoughts returned to the servants’ rooms at the back: it was a disgrace. The whole system was disgraceful . . .

  At this point, Mrs. Pond knocked perfunctorily and entered. She was a short, solid woman, tied in at the waist, like a tight sausage, by the string of her apron. She had hard red cheeks, a full, hard bosom, and energetic red hands. Her eyes were small and inquisitive. Her face was ill-tempered, perhaps because she could not help knowing she was disliked. She was used to the disapproving eyes of her fellow-tenants, watching her attend to her strip of “garden”; or while she swept the narrow strip across the back yard that was her path from the back door to her lavatory. There she stood, every morning, among the washing and the woodpiles, wearing a pink satin dressing-gown trimmed with swan’s-down, among the clouds of dust stirred up by her yard broom, returning defiant glances for the disapproving ones; and later she would say: “Two rooms is quite enough for a woman by herself. I’m quite satisfied.”

  She had no right to be satisfied, or at any rate, to say so . . .

  But for a woman contented with her lot, there was a look in those sharp eyes which could too easily be diagnosed as envy; and when she said, much too sweetly: “You are an old friend of Mrs. Skinner, maybe?” Marina recognised, with the exhaustion that comes to everyone who has lived too long in overfull buildings, the existence of conspiracy. “I have never met Mrs. Skinner,” she said briefly. “She said she was coming here this morning, to make arrangements.”

  Now, arrangements had been made already, with Philip; and Marina knew Mrs. Skinner was coming to inspect herself; and this thought irritated her.

  “She is a nice lady,” said Mrs. Pond. “She’s my friend. We two have been living here longer than anyone else.” Her voice was sour. Marina followed the direction of her eyes, and saw a large white door set into the wall. A built-in cupboard, in fact. She had already noted that cupboard as the only sensible amenity the “flat” possessed.

  “That’s a nice cupboard,” said Mrs. Pond.

  “Have all the flats got built-in cupboards?”

  “Oh, no. Mrs. Skinner had this put in special last year. She paid for it. Not the landlord. You don’t catch the landlord paying for anything.”

  “I see,” said Marina.

  “Mrs. Skinner promised me this flat,” said Mrs. Pond.

  Marina made no reply. She looked at her wrist-watch. It was a beautiful gesture; she even felt a little guilty because of the pointedness of it; but Mrs. Pond promptly said: “It’s eleven o’clock. The clock just struck.”

  “I must finish the unpacking,” said Marina.

  Mrs. Pond seated herself on the flowery sofa, and remarked: “There’s always plenty to do when you move in. That cupboard will save you plenty of space. Mrs. Skinner kept her linen in it. I was going to put all my clothes in. You’re Civil Service, so I hear?”

  “Yes,” said Marina. She could not account for the grudging tone of that last, apparently irrelevant question. She did not know that in this country the privileged class was the Civil Service, or considered to be. No aristocracy, no class distinctions—but alas, one must have something to hate, and the Civil Service does as well as anything. She added: “My husband chose this country rather than the Gold Coast, because it seems the climate is better, even though the pay is bad.”

  This remark was received with the same sceptical smile that she would have earned in England had she been tactless enough to say to her charwoman: Death duties spell the doom of the middle classes.

  “You have to be in the Service to get what’s going,” said Mrs. Pond, with what she imagined to be a friendly smile. “The Service gets all the plums.” And she glanced at the cupboard.

  “I think,” said Marina icily, “that you are under some misapprehension. My husband happened to hear of this flat by chance.”

  “There were plenty of people waiting for this flat,” said Mrs. Pond reprovingly. “The lady next door, Mrs. Black, would have been glad of it. And she’s got three children, too. You have no children, perhaps?”

  “Mrs. Pond, I have no idea at all why Mrs. Skinner gave us this flat when she had promised it to Mrs. Black . . .”

  “Oh, no, she had promised it to me. It was a faithful promise.”

  At this moment another lady entered the room without knocking. She was an ample, middle-aged person, in tight corsets, with rigidly-waved hair, and a sharp, efficient face that was now scarlet from heat. She said peremptorily: “Excuse me for coming in without knocking, but I can’t get used to a stranger being here when I’ve lived here so long.” Suddenly she saw Mrs. Pond, and at once stiffened into aggression. “I see you have already made friends with Mrs. Pond,” she said, giving that lady a glare.

  Mrs. Pond was standing, hands on hips, in the traditional attitude of combat; but she squeezed a smile on to her face and said: “I’m making acquaintance.”

  “Well,” said Mrs. Skinner, dismissing her, “I’m going to discuss business with my tenant.”

  Mrs. Pond hesitated. Mrs. Skinner gave her a long, quelling stare. Mrs. Pond slowly deflated, and went to the door. From the verandah floated back the words: “When people ma
ke promises, they should keep them, that’s what I say, instead of giving it to people new to the country, and civil servants . . .”

  Mrs. Skinner waited until the loud and angry voice faded, and then said briskly: “If you take my advice, you’ll have nothing to do with Mrs. Pond, she’s more trouble than she’s worth.”

  Marina now understood that she owed this flat to the fact that this highly-coloured lady decided to let it to a stranger simply in order to spite all her friends in the building who hoped to inherit that beautiful cupboard, if only for three months. Mrs. Skinner was looking suspiciously around her; she said at last: “I wouldn’t like to think my things weren’t looked after.”

  “Naturally not,” said Marina politely.

  “When I spoke to your husband we were rather in a hurry. I hope you will make yourself comfortable, but I don’t want to have anything altered.”

  Marina maintained a polite silence.

  Mrs. Skinner marched to the inbuilt cupboard, opened it, and found it empty. “I paid a lot of money to have this fitted,” she said in an aggrieved voice.

  “We only came in yesterday,” said Marina. “I haven’t unpacked yet.”

  “You’ll find it very useful,” said Mrs. Skinner. “I paid for it myself. Some people would have made allowances in the rent.”

  “I think the rent is quite high enough,” said Marina, joining battle at last.

  Clearly, this note of defiance was what Mrs. Skinner had been waiting for. She made use of the familiar weapon: “There are plenty of people who would have been glad of it, I can tell you.”

  “So I gather.”

  “I could let it tomorrow.”

  “But,” said Marina, in the high formal voice, “you have in fact let it to us, and the lease has been signed, so there is no more to be said, is there?”

  Mrs. Skinner hesitated, and finally contented herself by repeating: “I hope my furniture will be looked after. I said in the lease nothing must be altered.”

  Suddenly Marina found herself saying: “Well, I shall of course move the furniture to suit myself, and hang my own pictures.”

  “This flat is let furnished, and I’m very fond of my pictures.”

  “But you will be away, won’t you?” This, a sufficiently crude way of saying: “But it is we who will be looking at the pictures, and not you,” misfired completely, for Mrs. Skinner merely said: “Yes, I like my pictures, and I don’t like to think of them being packed.”

  Marina looked at the highland cattle and, though not half an hour before she had decided to leave it, said now: “I should like to take that one down.”

  Mrs. Skinner clasped her hands together before her, in a pose of simple devotion, compressed her lips, and stood staring mournfully up at the picture. “That picture means a lot to me. It used to hang in the parlour when I was a child, back Home. It was my granny’s picture first. When I married Mr. Skinner, my mother packed it and sent it especial over the sea, knowing how I was fond of it. It’s moved with me everywhere I’ve been. I wouldn’t like to think of it being treated bad, I wouldn’t really.”

  “Oh, very well,” said Marina, suddenly exhausted. What, after all, did it matter?

  Mrs. Skinner gave her a doubtful look: was it possible she had won her point so easily? “You must keep an eye on Charlie,” she went on. “The number of times I’ve told him he’d poke his broom-handle through that picture . . .”

  Hope flared in Marina. There was an extraordinary amount of glass. It seemed that the entire wall was surfaced by angry, shaggy cattle. Accidents did happen . . .

  “You must keep an eye on Charlie, anyway. He never does a stroke more than he has to. He’s bred bone lazy. You’d better keep an eye on the food too. He steals. I had to have the police to him only last month, when I lost my garnet brooch. Of course he swore he hadn’t taken it, but I’ve never laid my hands on it since. My husband gave him a good hiding, but Master Charlie came up smiling, as usual.”

  Marina, revolted by this tale, raised her eyebrows disapprovingly. “Indeed?” she said, in her coolest voice.

  Mrs. Skinner looked at her, as if to say: “What are you making that funny face for?” she remarked: “They’re all born thieves and liars. You shouldn’t trust them further than you can kick them. I’m warning you. Of course, you’re new here. Only last week a friend was saying, I’m surprised at you letting to people just from England, they always spoil the servants, with their ideas, and I said: ‘Oh, Mr. Giles is a sensible man, I trust him.’ ” This last was said pointedly.

  “I don’t think,” remarked Marina coldly, “that you would be well-advised to trust my husband to give people ‘hidings.’ ” She delicately isolated this word. “I rather feel, in similar circumstances, that even if he did, he would first make sure whether the man had, in fact, stolen the brooch.”

  Mrs. Skinner disentangled this sentence and in due course gave Marina a distrustful stare. “Well,” she said, “it’s too late now, and everyone has his way, but of course this is my furniture, and if it is stolen or damaged, you are responsible.”

  “That, I should have thought, went without saying,” said Marina.

  They shook hands, with formality, and Mrs. Skinner went out. She returned from the verandah twice, first to say that Marina must not forget to fumigate the native quarters once a month if she didn’t want livestock brought into her own flat . . . (“Not that I care if they want to live with lice, dirty creatures, but you have to protect yourself . . .”); and the second time to say that after you’ve lived in a place for years, it was hard to leave it, even for a holiday, and she was really regretting the day she let it at all. She gave Marina a final accusing and sorrowful look, as if the flat had been stolen from her, and this time finally departed. Marina was left in a mood of defiant anger, looking at the highland cattle picture, which had assumed, during this exchange, the look of a battleground. “Really,” she said aloud to herself. “Really! One might have thought that one would be entitled to pack away a picture, if one rents a place . . .”

  Two days later she got a note from Mrs. Skinner, saying that she hoped Marina would be happy in the flat, she must remember to keep an eye on Mrs. Pond, who was a real trouble-maker, and she must remember to look after the picture—Mrs. Skinner positively could not sleep for worrying about it.

  Since Marina had decided she was not living here, there was comparatively little unpacking to be done. Things were stored. She had more than ever the appearance of a migrating bird who dislikes the twig it has chosen to alight on, but is rather too exhausted to move to another.

  But she did read the advertisement columns every day, which were exactly like those in the papers back home. The accommodation wanted occupied a full column, while the accommodation offered usually did not figure at all. When houses were advertised they usually cost between five and twelve thousand—Marina saw some of them. They were very beautiful; if one had five thousand pounds, what a happy life one might lead—but the same might be said of any country. She also paid another visit to one of the new suburbs, and returned shuddering. “What!” she exclaimed to Philip. “Have we emigrated in order that I may spend the rest of life gossiping and taking tea with women like Mrs. Black and Mrs. Skinner?”

  “Perhaps they aren’t all like that,” he suggested absent-mindedly. For he was quite absorbed in his work. This country was fascinating! He was spending his days in his Government lorry, rushing over hundreds of miles of veld, visiting native reserves and settlements. Never had soil been so misused! Thousands of acres of it, denuded, robbed, fit for nothing, cattle and human beings crowded together—the solution, of course, was perfectly obvious. All one had to do was—and if the Government had any sense—

  Marina understood that Philip was acclimatized. One does not speak of the “Government” with that particular mixture of affection and exasperation unless one feels at home. But she was not at all at home. She found herself playing with the idea of buying one of those revolting little houses. Afte
r all, one has to live somewhere . . .

  Almost every morning, in 138, one might see a group of women standing outside one or other of the flats, debating how to rearrange the rooms. The plan of the building being so eccentric, no solution could possibly be satisfactory, and as soon as everything had been moved around, it was bound to be just as uncomfortable as before. “If I move the bookcase behind the door, then perhaps . . .” Or: “It might be better if I put it into the bathroom . . .”

  The problem was: Where should one eat? If the dining-table was in the front room, then the servant had to come through the bedroom with the food. On the other hand, if one had the front room as bedroom, then visitors had to walk through it to the living-room. Marina kept Mrs. Skinner’s arrangement. On the back porch, which was the width of a passage, stood a collapsible card-table. When it was set up, Philip sat crouched under the window that opened inwards over his head, while Marina shrank sideways into the bathroom door as Charlie came past with the vegetables. To serve food, Charlie put on a starched white coat, red fez, and white cotton gloves. In between courses he stood just behind them, in the kitchen door, while Marina and Philip ate in state, if discomfort.

  Marina found herself becoming increasingly sensitive to what she imagined was his attitude of tolerance. It seemed ridiculous that the ritual of soup, fish, and sweet, silver and glass and fish-knives, should continue under such circumstances. She began to wonder how it all appeared to this young man, who, as soon as their meal was finished, took an enormous pot of mealie porridge off the stove and retired with it to his room, where he shared it (eating with his fingers and squatting on the floor) with the servant from next door, and any of his friends or relatives who happened to be out of work at the time.