The Grandmothers

by Doris Lessing

  She drove until they were on the edge of a little bay where waves frisked among low black rocks. He moved up to put his arm round her. His face … it frightened her, and he was trembling. Not many cars came along this road, but now she saw one approaching.

  ‘James, wait. Let’s just get there.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘You’ll see.’

  She put the car in motion again. She saw his face staring down past her at a postcard sea, gulls swooping, sea noise, bird noise, and the sunlight a moving glitter to the horizon. No ships.

  ‘I hate the sea,’ he said. ‘I hate it. It’s out to get us. And it will.’

  ‘Don’t look at it.’

  So he looked at her, shifting his head a little, but past her head was the glare of the sea.

  They turned inland. There was a broken gate. Scrubby unkept land: you’d never guess the sea was a couple of hundred yards off. Then a turn towards it, through low bushes, and ahead a shack or shed, with the bushes growing close all round it.

  The car stopped. She lifted out the box of provisions, gathered from the party leftovers, and a big enamel can of water, which he took from her. She went ahead along a faint path, the bushes seeming to want to clutch and bring her down, to a door which she opened with a large key. Inside was dark, till she pulled down shutters. Light showed, first, a wide high bed, piled with all kinds of covers, then shelves around wooden walls, with dishes and plates, and a small wooden table in the middle on a plank floor, with two wooden chairs.

  ‘Our holiday home,’ she said. ‘Do you like it?’

  James might have said that he seemed to spend his life now in sheds or huts – this one was called a pondokkie. What’s in a name? A little house, like one in a fairytale, in the woods. But they were scrubby bushes, smelling of salt.

  The sea was a murmur, not too far away, with an occasional splash as a wave broke on a rock. The two stood looking at each other. The feverish state that had enclosed them since his arrival in the setting of fine house and gardens might have dissolved here and now, but it didn’t. They sank on to the two wooden chairs, and, holding each other’s hands across the table, stared, serious, quiet – and oddly, with bitterness, directed, not at each other, but at Fate, the war, something not themselves. She stroked his face with a hand that had pearly pink nails. He thought, those nails wouldn’t survive long if she really lived in this pondokkie, a rough hut. This clean and shiny sweetly-smelling woman, this was just where she played … and was he what she was playing with?

  ‘Wipe that bloody lipstick off.’

  She opened her bag, found a handkerchief and he took it from her and carefully but thoroughly removed the scarlet lips.

  ‘There now,’ he said.

  She said, ‘Let’s go and look at the sea. The tide’s out.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Gravely, he took her hand and led her to the bed. Through the open window, came the smell of salt-stung vegetation. Silence except for the murmur of the sea. Their lovemaking, trembling and hungry, seemed to celebrate not love but tragedy. They fell asleep and she woke to find him screaming, his hands over his ears.

  ‘What is it?’ he shouted.

  ‘The tide’s in.’

  It seemed that the ocean was rolling in to focus on just that stretch of shore so close to their shelter that the next wave would rear and crash down on it, dragging them out to sea. The little house shook, the earth shook, crash crash and then a thundering withdrawal: it was as if they were deep under the sea, buried in it.

  His face was in her breasts and he was crying, not like a child, oh, no, a deep choking sobbing, and he was clutching to her as if they were helplessly rolling in deep surf.

  ‘It’s like this when it’s high tide – this must be an unusually high one.’ Her voice was like a hush within the pounding tumult. ‘I shouldn’t have brought you here. I didn’t think.’

  ‘But I’m with you,’ she heard, as another wave crescendoed and crashed.

  ‘We’ll get up and go and look at it. You’ll see, it’s quite a way off, fifty yards at least.’

  ‘No, no, no.’

  ‘All right, then, get up and we’ll have some supper.’

  ‘I don’t want to eat. I don’t want to waste the time.’

  She slid out, standing naked to smile at him, gravely, for this was the note that had been struck from their first moment, but there was something there, what? – melancholy? Well, that was in order, but surely not this edge of bitterness?

  ‘What is it?’ he asked, a too-ready suspicion flaring.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, defeated, turning to set out bread and butter and ham. ‘I don’t know. Perhaps I am trying to laugh at us.’

  ‘At me!’

  ‘Never you,’ she said. ‘Two days. Two. And I feel …’

  ‘Well, tell me, yes, tell me. I want to know … am I the first bloody soldier you brought here?’

  ‘Well, thank you. If that’s what you think. I think we should leave.’ She was crying; he sat on the edge of the bed, and was about to get up and go to her but then he crouched down with his hands over his ears as a wave crashed, seemingly just above them.

  ‘Why me? Yes, why me? But I don’t care. You’re wonderful – and that’s enough.’ And he ducked down as the little house shook.

  ‘I care,’ and she sat down, laid her head on her arms on the table and wept.

  He left the bed and sat opposite, stroking her hair, watching her cry.

  Then he put out his hand, got up, took her hand and said, ‘This is ridiculous. Let’s get back to bed.’ And he led her weeping on to the bed, and lay down beside her.

  ‘This little house, this pondokkie of yours, I won’t go back on the ship, I’ll just hide here, and you can come and visit me.’

  After the wedding of Joe Wright, bachelor, and Daphne Brent, spinster, they had taken a week of conventional honeymoon in a smart hotel up country, famous as a haven for newlyweds, and then he had brought her here. It was not likely that she failed to think, ‘I bet he brought his girls here when he was a bachelor.’ This did not make her jealous. She rather liked the idea of this frail shelter, that seemed always about to dissolve into the sea, as a place for lovers. In this very room she and Joe, naked and happy, had made love and eaten picnic food and then run exultantly shouting down to the sea at low tide. And now she was here with this man, but she was in a different dimension with him. If Joe walked in now he would come from a sane and healthy world and she would look at him from this dream she was in – a nightmare, was it? – and then disappear, with a shriek, and he’d think he had seen an apparition from a nether world. Such pain, in this young man and in her, and she did not know where hers had come from: she had never envisaged unhappiness in her blueprints for the future. She had not experienced it. She did not know this youth: he was a stranger and this element where she found herself with him was alien. And yet, knowing that soon she would lose him, made her want to do something primitive and brutal, like pulling out her hair, beating her breasts with her fists, sit swaying, sick with grief, a black cloth over her head.

  Soon she was lying with a sleeping man in her arms – if he were asleep, and not in some kind of trance: he trembled, or came to himself in little shuddering spasms. She lay with her eyes shut, holding him, and lived through a memory of something that happened soon after she came to South Africa. She and Joe, Betty and Henry and another couple had driven off into the mountains, following little roads known to the South Africans from boyhood rambles. They stopped the cars, not in a campers’ site, but where baboons had made a cliff their own. All up the face of the cliff, from rocks and holes that were the openings to ancient caves, the baboons perched and clung and barked at them. The humans took no notice. A few yards from the cliff, in the middle of a little plateau formed by slabs of rock split by heat and cold was a little tree. It was dead, a pale spectral thing growing from between the rocks. Dead. It was midday and strong light mad
e the dry leaves hang whiteish, sketched in air, with heat waves shimmering around them like the volatile oils made visible. Bread and wine and fruit were set out, and the women cubed some meat. The men set light to the dead tree. The idea was, it would fall and they would use it as fire for their meat. The tree flared up, it was at once a torch of white-hot flames. The baboons on their cliff barked their fear, the humans fell back, the tree was a river of flame, a rush of white sparks. Daphne was standing too close. The quick flare took her by surprise; she could feel the hairs on her arms frizzle. She was struck by the intensity of the fire into an immobility. She cried out, and Joe leaped to her and pulled her back out of the heat that was now shimmering and oiling for yards around the tree.

  That was how she felt now.

  ‘Too close,’ she was murmuring, eyes closed, holding a naked man lost in his dream. ‘It’s too close.’

  When the light came, the waves began to come close again, and roar and pound, and they held each other, and listened, until the noise abated, and she said, ‘Now, I want you to come out and look.’

  ‘I told you I wish I need never see the ocean again.’

  ‘I know, but come on.’

  It was late morning. The sea was in retreat. She took him through the push and clutch of the salty bushes to a little patch of sand, still wet, but drying pale on its surface, and beyond were tall black rocks, where seaweed clung. The sea was rough today, jumping and leaping about among the rocks.

  ‘Do you ever swim here?’ he asked.

  ‘Over there is a pool in the rocks. It’s safe, when the tide’s out.’ She stopped herself asking if he’d like to go in, just in time.

  They stood with their arms about each other allowing themselves to be hypnotised by the sea’s noise, but she could feel him tense, discouraged.

  ‘It’s only sea,’ she said, though she knew he was rejecting the moment, and probably, her. ‘There it is, kept in its place, it can’t get us.’ And wished she could unsay it; she had forgotten he would be back on the ship.

  ‘When the war’s over I’ll never go near a ship again.’

  She began to cry. She was forlorn and rejected. Why was she? She did not know herself. Her emotional extremes, sorrow, exultation, grief, passion, were leaving her rather like that fish she could see, flapping in the sand. That James should hate the sea so much: she could not bear it. She had often thought that when she came to marry Joe, it was to the sea she had come, the ocean surrounding her always, never out of sight, or out of mind. Joe’s gift to her had been the sea, so she had told him she felt.

  He said, ‘I’m not going back on that ship, I won’t.’

  ‘Oh, God,’ she said, ‘you don’t love me.’

  ‘What?’

  Why had she said that? She felt as if she had tripped a switch, moved a gear, was in an uncoordinated helpless condition, and anything she said must come out inept, tactless, even brutal.

  She clutched him by the shoulders and saw him wince: she let him go. His singlet, which he had put on to leave the hut, was stuck here and there in ruddy patches.

  ‘Oh, God,’ she said.

  ‘The sea spray,’ he said, ‘it’s getting to me.’

  She should not have brought him out here, she should have thought, everything had gone wrong.

  ‘Come on, let’s go in,’ he said.

  The tide was turning, beginning to thunder and crash; she felt he was estranged from her; he felt he had failed her.

  She took his hand and led him back to the hut. As they went through the bushes, a Coloured lad came with a note in his hand. He was from the local shop a mile away where there was a telephone.

  The note said: ‘Daphne, he’s got to be back on board by tomorrow, midday. Betty.’

  She said to the youth, whom she knew, from previous trips here, with her husband, ‘Come to the hut, I’ll give you some money.’ This was done. He was giving her odd looks, as well he might: would he think this money a bribe?

  Then she said to James, ‘Deadline for you – twelve tomorrow.’

  ‘I’m not going.’

  ‘We’ve got another afternoon and night.’

  ‘We’ve got all our lives.’

  Back inside the hut, they were together again in feeling: the emptiness that had claimed them by the sea had gone.

  ‘I’ll come for you, after the war.’

  She held him close, her head on his shoulder, and felt the rough skin under her cheek.

  ‘You don’t believe me,’ he said gently, tenderly, as to a child, ‘but it’s true.’

  The afternoon and then the night went past, while the tide came in, and thundered over them, and went out, came in. It was low tide when she got off the bed and began packing up. She was afraid he was not going to move, but at last he did.

  ‘We should have something to eat.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  They sat with some bread and jam between them and looked at each other.

  ‘I’ll think of you like this. You’re like a little girl, your hair all over the place. And your face needs washing.’

  When they walked back through the bushes to the car, clumps of white spume were flying in on a cold wind, and spattered the bushes.

  She drove in silence. He watched her all the way; she received that long look like a prolonged embrace.

  At the house, Betty came running. ‘Our lads have gone. I took them down. They’re already on the ship.’

  Her two maids, and her gardener, Daphne’s maids and her gardener, stood on the respective steps, watching, as the soldier went in to Daphne’s house, Daphne staying outside, by the car. He came out in his uniform.

  ‘I’ll take you,’ said Betty. ‘No, you stay, Daphne.’ Daphne was not fit to drive down to the docks: she was trembling, and had to hold on to the car.

  Betty ran back to her house, drove her car to outside Daphne’s, hooted and sat waiting.

  Daphne and the soldier stood face to face, not touching, looking. Betty hooted again. The soldier broke away, and ran, pulling his kitbag bumping along behind him. From the car he sent one look back and then, oddly, saluted. He got in. Betty’s car shot off down into the town.

  The scene broke. Daphne moved slowly up to the stoep and sat on the end of a wicker lounger as if she might fall through it.

  The four maids went back to their duties, the gardeners to their plants.

  Mid-afternoon. The great ship stood in its nest of white frills. From here would be seen the activity of embarking; ants crawled everywhere over the ship.

  Daphne did not move. Sarah came from inside the house with a tray of tea, which she had not ordered. When her mistress took no notice, Sarah poured a cup of tea, sugared it, held it out to Daphne and said, ‘Your tea, medem.’ Daphne shook her head. The black woman lifted Daphne’s limp arm, and put the cup in her hand.

  ‘You must have some tea, medem.’

  Daphne sat still, her eyes on the docks, and then at last she did drink.

  ‘That’s right, medem.’

  The maid left the tray and went in.

  Late afternoon. Betty’s car was nosing up the street, and then she was beside Daphne. ‘He made it. Just.’

  Daphne motioned leave me with her hand.

  Was the distance between the ship and the dock widening?

  ‘Joe rang. I told him you were ill.’

  No reply.

  ‘He said the ship was leaving so as to get out of Cape Town while it is light – in case there’s a sub about.’

  Daphne let out a cry and then slammed her fist against her mouth. She said, ‘I’m a very wicked woman, do you know that? I don’t love Joe. I never did. I married him under false pretences. I should be punished for that.’

  ‘You had better lie down.’

  Daphne began to cry. She stared down after the ship, her hands tugging at her hair tangled with salt spray and wind. Her face had forgotten make-up: her husband would recognise that English girl with her baby mouth, now woeful; as she looked now she wo
uld not easily be recognised by her admiring guests. Dreadful, deep sobs, and she was swaying as she sat.

  ‘Do you have any sedatives? Daphne?’

  Daphne did not move or respond.

  Betty went to call Sarah, who was in the room just behind, keeping an eye on what went on. ‘Help me get Mrs Wright to her bed. Then I’m going to the chemist for medicine.’

  It took the two of them to lift Daphne: she did not want to go in till the ship had disappeared. The three women stood, the maid and Betty holding Daphne, while the ship dwindled over the horizon. They walked her to her bed, laid her down and Betty said, ‘Hold the fort, I’ll be quick.’ And in a few minutes she was back. Daphne lay on her bed, staring. Betty put an arm around her, lifted her, and made her swallow two tablets.

  Daphne collapsed: her eyes closed.

  And now Betty and Sarah stood together: slowly, carefully, their eyes met, and held.

  When Daphne had arrived in South Africa she had criticised Betty, the South African born and bred, for behaving in front of her staff as if they did not exist. One day Betty had come out of her bathroom naked and walked across her bedroom in full sight of the gardener who was at work just outside the french windows. She had stood there and talked, brushing her hair, and turned about, as if the man were not there, and when Daphne told her off, she realised for the first time that her servants had become as invisible as mechanical servitors. They were paid well – for this was liberal Cape Town (‘We pay our people much better than they do in Joburg’), fed, taken to the doctor, given generous hours off. But they were not there for Betty, as human beings. Remorse, if that was the word, had adjusted her behaviour and her thoughts, and she became noticing and on guard, watching what she did and what she said. But she could not think of anything apt for this situation. The four maids, hers and Daphne’s, were friends and knew the other maids along the street: this went for the gardeners. By now all of them would be discussing Daphne and the soldier. Any one of them might tell Joe.

  ‘Mrs Wright is very sick,’ said Betty at last, knowing she was blushing because of the feebleness of it. And it had sounded like a plea, which she didn’t like.