African Stories

by Doris Lessing

  They went to a two-roomed flat in a suburb. It was over a grocery store called Mac’s Golden Emporium. It had canned peaches, dried fruit, dressed dolls and rolls of cotton goods in the window. The flat had new furniture in it. There was a sideboard with bottles and a radio. The radio played: “Or would you like to swing on a star, carry moonbeams home in a jar, and be better off than you are . . .”

  “I like the words,” said Marie to Jansen, listening to them with soft delight. Lilla said, “Excuse me, but I have to phone my friend,” and went out.

  Marie said, “Have a drink.” She said it carefully. She poured brandy, the tip of her tongue held between her teeth, and she spilled the water. She carried the glass to Jansen, and smiled in unconscious triumph as she set it down by him. Then she said: “Wait,” and went into the bedroom. Jansen adjusted himself on the juicy upholstery of a big chair. He was annoyed to find himself here. What for? What was the good of it? He looked at himself in the glass over a sideboard. He saw a middle-aged gentleman, with a worn, indulgent face, dressed in a grey suit and sitting uncomfortably in a very ugly chair. But what did Marie see when she looked at him? She came back soon, with a pair of black shiny shoes on her broad feet, and a tight red dress, and a pretty face painted over her own blunt honest face. She sat herself down opposite him, as she had seen Lilla sit, adjusting the poise of her head and shoulders. But she forgot her legs, which lay loosely in front of her, like a schoolgirl’s.

  “Lilla said I could wear her dresses,” she said, lingering over her sister’s generosity. “She said today I could live here until I earned enough to get my own flat. She said I’d soon have enough.” She caught her breath. “Mom would be mad.”

  “I expect she would,” said Jansen drily, and saw Marie react away from him. She spread her red skirts and faced him politely, waiting for him to make her evening.

  Lilla came in, turning her calculating, good-humoured eyes from her sister to Jansen, smiled, and said: “I’m going out a little. Oh, keep your hair on. I’ll be back soon. My friend is taking me for a walk.”

  The friend came in and took Lilla’s arm; he was a large, handsome sunburnt man who smiled with a good-time smile at Marie. She responded with such a passion of admiration in her eyes that Jansen understood at once what she did not see when she looked at himself. “My, my,” said this young man with easy warmth to Marie. “You’re a fast learner, I can see that.”

  “We’ll be back,” said Lilla to Marie. “Remember what I said.” Then, to Jansen, like a saleswoman: “She’s not bad. Anyhow she can’t get herself into any trouble here at home.” The young man slipped his arm around her and reached for a glass off the sideboard with his free hand. He poured brandy, humming with the radio: “In a shady nook, by a babbling brook. . . .” He threw back his head, poured the brandy down, smiled broadly at Jansen and Marie, winked and said: “Be seeing you. Don’t forget to wind up the clock and put the cat out.” Outside on the landing he and Lilla sang, “Carry moonbeans home in a jar, be better off than you are. . . .” They sang their way down to the street. A car door slammed; an engine roared. Marie darted to the window and said bitterly, “They’ve gone to the pictures.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Jansen. She came back, frowning, preoccupied with responsibility. “Would you like another drink?” she asked, remembering what Lilla had told her. Jansen shook his head and sat still for a moment, weighted with inertia. Then he said, “Marie, I want you to listen to me.” She leaned forward dutifully, ready to listen. But this was not as she had gazed at the other man—the warm, generous, laughing, singing young man. Jansen found many words ready on his tongue, disliked them, and blurted: “Marie, I wish you’d let me send you back home tonight.” Her face dulled. “No, Marie, you really must listen.” She listened politely, from behind her dull resistance. He used words carefully, out of the delicacy of his compassion, and saw how they faded into meaninglessness in the space between him and Marie. Then he grew brutal and desperate, because he had to reach her. He said, “This sort of life isn’t as much fun as it looks”; and “Thousands of girls all over the world choose the easy way because they’re stupid, and afterward they’re sorry.” She dropped her lids, looked at her feet in her new high-heeled shoes, and shut herself off from him. He used the words whore and prostitute; but she had never heard them except as swear words and did not connect them with herself. She began repeating, over and over again: “My sister’s a typist; she’s got a job in an office.”

  He said angrily, “Do you think she can afford to live like this on a typist’s pay?”

  “Her gentleman friend gives her things—he’s generous, she told me so,” said Marie doubtfully.

  “How old are you, Marie?”

  “Eighteen,” she said, turning her broad freckled wrist, where Lilla’s bracelet caught the light.

  “When you’re twenty-five you’ll be out on the streets picking up any man you see, taking them to hotels. . . .”

  At the word “hotel” her eyes widened; he remembered she had never been in a hotel; they were something lovely on the cinema screen.

  “When you’re thirty you’ll be an old woman.”

  “Lilla said she’d look after me. She promised me faithfully,” said Marie, in terror at his coldness. But what he was saying meant nothing to her, nothing at all. He saw that she probably did not know what the word prostitute meant; that the things Lilla had told her meant only lessons in how to enjoy the delights of this city.

  He said, “Do you know what I’m here for? Your sister expects you to take off your clothes and get into bed and. . . .” He stopped. Her eyes were wide open, fastened on him, not in fear, but in the anxious preoccupation of a little girl who is worried she is not behaving properly. Her hands had moved to the buckle of her belt, and she was undoing it.

  Jansen got up, and without speaking he gathered clothes that were obviously hers from off the furniture, from off the floor. He went into the bedroom and found a suitcase and put her things into it. “I’m putting you on the train tonight,” he said.

  “My sister won’t let you,” she cried out. “She’ll stop you.”

  “Your sister’s a bad girl,” said Jansen, and saw, to his surprise, that Marie’s face showed fear at last. Those two words, “bad girl,” had had more effect than all his urgent lecturing.

  “You shouldn’t say such things,” said Marie, beginning to cry. “You shouldn’t never say someone’s a bad girl.” They were her mother’s words, obviously, and had hit her hard where she could be reached. She stood listless in the middle of the floor, weeping, making no resistance. He tucked her arm under his and led her downstairs. “You’ll marry a nice man soon, Marie,” he promised. “You won’t always have to live by the railway lines.”

  “I don’t never meet no men, except Dad,” she said, beginning to tug at his arm again.

  He held her tight until they were in a taxi. There she sat crouched on the edge of the seat, watching the promised city sweep past. At the station, keeping a firm hold on her, he bought her a ticket and gave her five pounds, and put her into a compartment and said: “I know you hate me. One day you’ll know I’m right, and you’ll be glad.” She smiled weakly and huddled herself into her seat, like a cold little animal, staring sadly out of the window.

  He left her, running, to catch his own train, which already stood waiting on the next platform.

  As it drew out of the station he saw Marie waddling desperately on her tall heels along the platform, casting scared glances over her shoulder. Their eyes met; she gave him an apologetic smile and ran on, With the pound notes clutched loosely in her hand she was struggling her way through the crowds back to the lights, the love, the joyous streets of the promised city.

  Flight

  ABOVE the old man’s head was the dovecote, a tall wire-netted shelf on stilts, full of strutting, preening birds. The sunlight broke on their grey breasts into small rainbows. His ears were lulled by their crooning; his hands stretched up towards his f
avourite, a homing pigeon, a young plump-bodied bird, which stood still when it saw him and cocked a shrewd bright eye.

  “Pretty, pretty, pretty,” he said, as he grasped the bird and drew it down, feeling the cold coral claws tighten around his finger. Content, he rested the bird lightly on his chest and leaned against a tree, gazing out beyond the dovecote into the landscape of a late afternoon. In folds and hollows of sunlight and shade, the dark red soil, which was broken into great dusty clods, stretched wide to a tall horizon. Trees marked the course of the valley; a stream of rich green grass the road.

  His eyes travelled homewards along this road until he saw his grand-daughter swinging on the gate underneath a frangipani tree. Her hair fell down her back in a wave of sunlight; and her long bare legs repeated the angles of the frangipani stems, bare, shining brown stems among patterns of pale blossoms.

  She was gazing past the pink flowers, past the railway cottage where they lived, along the road to the village.

  His mood shifted. He deliberately held out his wrist for the bird to take flight, and caught it again at the moment it spread its wings. He felt the plump shape strive and strain under his fingers; and, in a sudden access of troubled spite, shut the bird into a small box and fastened the bolt. “Now you stay there,” he muttered and turned his back on the shelf of birds. He moved warily along the hedge, stalking his grand-daughter, who was now looped over the gate, her head loose on her arms, singing. The light happy sound mingled with the crooning of the birds, and his anger mounted.

  “Hey!” he shouted, and saw her jump, look back, and abandon the gate. Her eyes veiled themselves, and she said in a pert, neutral voice, “Hullo, Grandad.” Politely she moved towards him, after a lingering backward glance at the road.

  “Waiting for Steven, hey?” he said, his fingers curling like claws into his palm.

  “Any objection?” she asked lightly, refusing to look at him.

  He confronted her, his eyes narrowed, shoulders hunched, tight in a hard knot of pain that included the preening birds, the sunlight, the flowers, herself. He said, “Think you’re old enough to go courting, hey?”

  The girl tossed her head at the old-fashioned phrase and sulked, “Oh, Grandad!”

  “Think you want to leave home, hey? Think you can go running around the fields at night?”

  Her smile made him see her, as he had every evening of this warm end-of-summer month, swinging hand in hand along the road to the village with that red-handed, red-throated, violent-bodied youth, the son of the postmaster. Misery went to his head and he shouted angrily: “I’11 tell your mother!”

  “Tell away!” she said, laughing, and went back to the gate.

  He heard her singing, for him to hear:

  “I’ve got you under my skin,

  I’ve got you deep in the heart of . . .”

  “Rubbish,” he shouted. “Rubbish. Impudent little bit of rubbish!”

  Growling under his breath, he turned towards the dovecote, which was his refuge from the house he shared with his daughter and her husband and their children. But now the house would be empty. Gone all the young girls with their laughter and their squabbling and their teasing. He would be left, uncherished and alone, with that square-fronted, calm-eyed woman, his daughter.

  He stooped, muttering, before the dovecote, resenting the absorbed, cooing birds.

  From the gate the girl shouted: “Go and tell! Go on, what are you waiting for?”

  Obstinately he made his way to the house, with quick, pathetic, persistent glances of appeal back at her. But she never looked around. Her defiant but anxious young body stung him into love and repentance. He stopped. “But I never meant. . . .” he muttered, waiting for her to turn and run to him. “I didn’t mean. . . .”

  She did not turn. She had forgotten him. Along the road came the young man Steven, with something in his hand. A present for her? The old man stiffened as he watched the gate swing back and the couple embrace. In the brittle shadows of the frangipani tree his grand-daughter, his darling, lay in the arms of the postmaster’s son, and her hair flowed back over his shoulder.

  “I see you!” shouted the old man spitefully. They did not move. He stumped into the little whitewashed house, hearing the wooden verandah creak angrily under his feet. His daughter was sewing in the front room, threading a needle held to the light.

  He stopped again, looking back into the garden. The couple were now sauntering among the bushes, laughing. As he watched he saw the girl escape from the youth with a sudden mischievous movement and run off through the flowers with him in pursuit. He heard shouts, laughter, a scream, silence.

  “But it’s not like that at all,” he muttered miserably. “It’s not like that. Why can’t you see? Running and giggling, and kissing and kissing. You’ll come to something quite different.”

  He looked at his daughter with sardonic hatred, hating himself. They were caught and finished, both of them, but the girl was still running free.

  “Can’t you see?” he demanded of his invisible grand-daughter, who was at that moment lying in the thick green grass with the postmaster’s son.

  His daughter looked at him and her eyebrows went up in tired forbearance.

  “Put your birds to bed?” she asked, humouring him.

  “Lucy,” he said urgently. “Lucy. . . .”

  “Well, what is it now?”

  “She’s in the garden with Steven.”

  “Now you just sit down and have your tea.”

  He stumped his feet alternately, thump, thump, on the hollow wooden floor and shouted: “She’ll marry him. I’m telling you, she’ll be marrying him next!”

  His daughter rose swiftly, brought him a cup, set him a plate.

  “I don’t want any tea. I don’t want it, I tell you.”

  “Now, now,” she crooned. “What’s wrong with it? Why not?”

  “She’s eighteen. Eighteen!”

  “I was married at seventeen, and I never regretted it.”

  “Liar,” he said. “Liar. Then you should regret it. Why do you make your girls marry? It’s you who do it. What do you do it for? Why?”

  “The other three have done fine. They’ve three fine husbands. Why not Alice?”

  “She’s the last,” he mourned. “Can’t we keep her a bit longer?”

  “Come, now, Dad. She’ll be down the road, that’s all. She’ll be here every day to see you.”

  “But it’s not the same.” He thought of the other three girls, transformed inside a few months from charming, petulant, spoiled children into serious young matrons.

  “You never did like it when we married,” she said. “Why not? Every time, it’s the same. When I got married you made me feel like it was something wrong. And my girls the same. You get them all crying and miserable the way you go on. Leave Alice alone. She’s happy.” She sighed, letting her eyes linger on the sunlit garden. “She’ll marry next month. There’s no reason to wait.”

  “You’ve said they can marry?” he said incredulously.

  “Yes, Dad. Why not?” she said coldly and took up her sewing.

  His eyes stung, and he went out on to the verandah. Wet spread down over his chin, and he took out a handkerchief and mopped his whole face. The garden was empty.

  From around the corner came the young couple; but their faces were no longer set against him. On the wrist of the postmaster’s son balanced a young pigeon, the light gleaming on its breast.

  “For me?” said the old man, letting the drops shake off his chin. “For me?”

  “Do you like it?” The girl grabbed his hand and swung on it. “It’s for you, Grandad. Steven brought it for you.” They hung about him, affectionate, concerned, trying to charm away his wet eyes and his misery. They took his arms and directed him to the shelf of birds, one on each side, enclosing him, petting him, saying wordlessly that nothing would be changed, nothing could change, and that they would be with him always. The bird was proof of it, they said, from their lying happy eyes,
as they thrust it on him. “There, Grandad, it’s yours. It’s for you.”

  They watched him as he held it on his wrist, stroking its soft, sun-warmed back, watching the wings lift and balance.

  “You must shut it up for a bit,” said the girl intimately, “until it knows this is its home.”

  “Teach your grandmother to suck eggs,” growled the old man.

  Released by his half-deliberate anger, they fell back, laughing at him. “We’re glad you like it.” They moved off, now serious and full of purpose, to the gate, where they hung, backs to him, talking quietly. More than anything could, their grown-up seriousness shut him out, making him alone; also, it quietened him, took the sting out of their tumbling like puppies on the grass. They had forgotten him again. Well, so they should, the old man reassured himself, feeling his throat clotted with tears, his lips trembling. He held the new bird to his face, for the caress of its silken feathers. Then he shut it in a box and took out his favourite.

  “Now you can go,” he said aloud. He held it poised, ready for flight, while he looked down the garden towards the boy and the girl. Then, clenched in the pain of loss, he lifted the bird on his wrist and watched it soar. A whirr and a spatter of wings, and a cloud of birds rose into the evening from the dovecote.

  At the gate Alice and Steven forgot their talk and watched the birds.

  On the verandah, that woman, his daughter, stood gazing, her eyes shaded with a hand that still held her sewing.

  It seemed to the old man that the whole afternoon had stilled to watch his gesture of self-command, that even the leaves of the trees had stopped shaking.

  Dry-eyed and calm, he let his hands fall to his sides and stood erect, staring up into the sky.

  The cloud of shining silver birds flew up and up, with a shrill cleaving of wings, over the dark ploughed land and the darker belts of trees and the bright folds of grass, until they floated high in the sunlight, like a cloud of motes of dust.

  They wheeled in a wide circle, tilting their wings so there was flash after flash of light, and one after another they dropped from the sunshine of the upper sky to shadow, one after another, returning to the shadowed earth over trees and grass and field, returning to the valley and the shelter of night.