July's People (8 page)

The humane creed (Maureen, like anyone else, regarded her own as definitive) depended on validities staked on a belief in the absolute nature of intimate relationships between human beings. If people don’t all experience emotional satisfaction and deprivation in the same way, what claim can there be for equality of need? There was fear and danger in considering this emotional absolute as open in any way; the brain-weighers, the claimants of divine authority to distinguish powers of moral discernment from the degree of frizz in hair and conceptual ability from the relative thickness of lips—they were vigilant to pounce upon anything that could be twisted to give them credence. Yet how was that absolute nature of intimate relationships arrived at? Who decided? ‘We’ (Maureen sometimes harked back) understand the sacred power and rights of sexual love as formulated in master bedrooms, and motels with false names in the register. Here, the sacred power and rights of sexual love are as formulated in a wife’s hut, and a backyard room in a city. The balance between desire and duty is—has to be—maintained quite differently in accordance with the differences in the lovers’ place in the economy. These alter the way of dealing with the experience; and so the experience itself. The
absolute nature
she and her kind were scrupulously just in granting to everybody was no more than the price of the master bedroom and the clandestine hotel tariff.

She had in her hand one of the clay oxen Gina was learning to make, that had been set to dry in the sun. Abstractions hardened into the concrete: even death is a purchase. One of Barn’s senior partners could afford his at the cost of a private plane—in which he crashed. July’s old mother (was she not perhaps his grandmother?) would crawl, as Maureen was watching her now, coming home with wood, and grass for her brooms on her head, bent lower and lower towards the earth until finally she sank to it—the only death she could afford.

Maureen had the keys, kept overnight after she had fetched the rubber mat from the vehicle. She heard his voice, his energetic laugh, and saw him cross from hut to goat-kraal and back. To be seen is not necessarily to be acknowledged, where people’s movements are centred about the same kind of activity in every household, every day. Everyone was everyone else’s witness, and this bred its own discretion. Only the children hung together and moved like the comet’s tail of bees she had seen roll out of the sky the other day and bear down on tree after tree before attaching itself to one. She had never been inside his hut; Bam had. —He has some things from home. It’s smartened-up. He can’t live like the others.—Bam meant the home he and she had provided; he meant the wife and female relatives.

She rehearsed her arrival at the door of his domain. It was only a hundred feet away. His quarters had been only across the yard, she had waved at his friends, his brothers who were eternally visiting, seen through the open door in summer, or heard them in there, round the electric heater she provided, in winter—she came right by his quarters every time she went to the double garage to drive off in her car. But she had never entered unless—rare occasion—he was sick. Then she knocked, and the attendant friends stood up respectfully (accommodated somehow on up-ended boxes, an old table—she provided one decent chair for her servant’s comfort but could not be expected to allow for the reception of half-a-dozen friends), and she would put down on the spotless bed the tray of light food she had prepared for him herself. His hut, here, was apparently something he kept to himself, apart from women. But she was a white woman, someone who had employed him, theirs was a working relationship; surely that was her claim.

She had lived for more than two weeks within steps of that hut and could have lived there for ever without going inside it. She no more wanted to have to see her cast-off trappings here, where they separated him from the way other people lived around him, than she did back there, where they separated him from the way she lived. The old green bedspread with dolphins, mermaids and tritons printed round a fake facsimile of an early map of the world, the framed poster of Málaga—these things themselves (in his room back there) might not be displayed, but others of the same origin. He must have known, when she handed some new object on to him it was because it was shoddy or ugly, to her, and if it were some old object, it was because she no longer valued it. She stopped Royce (his favourite) who kept running past to help himself and the other children to the peanuts that were Victor’s share of the harvest Victor had helped dig up: —See if you can find July.—

Her child came back with his troop. They lay bellydown on their elbows on the damp ground and crowded heads blissfully over their cracking of tiny fibrous shells. —Did you find July?—

—Mmm. There at his house.—

—Is he coming?—

—He says it’s all right, he’s there, you can come.

—She sat on in the sun that crisped the skin, a hot iron passing over damp cloth. She was menstruating—since the day before, although by the calculation of the calendar left behind above the telephone it would have been a week too soon. There was another essential she had forgotten. Under her jeans she wore between her legs the wadding of rags that all the women here had to when their days came. Already she had been, with the modesty and sense of privacy that finds the appropriate expression in every community, secretly down to the river to wash a set of bloody rags. She had no thought for the risk of bilharzia as she scrubbed against a stone and watched the flow of her time, measuring off another month, curl like red smoke borne away in the passing of the river.

—Want some?—Her youngest child still needed to share his pleasures with her.

Red earth and bunches of raw peanuts clung to the roots of the plants.

—If you don’t eat them all, I’ll roast the rest. With salt. Then they have some taste.—

—Same as in the packets? In the shops?—

—That’s right.—

—I didn’t know those grew!—

The little boy’s toes drummed at the earth and while he ate he hummed, as he would soon cease to do, becoming too old to find content between his lips, as he had at her nipple. He seemed to understand what the black children said; and at least had picked up the ceremonial or ritual jargon of their games, shouting out what must be equivalent of ‘Beaten you!’ ‘My turn!’ ‘Cheat!’

—Go and say I want to see him.—

The whole formation of children took off. She put out a hand and a black head with the feel of freshly-washed sheep-skin brushed under it. Sometimes she could coax a small child, new on its legs, to come to her, but mostly she was too unfamiliar-looking, to them, to be trusted.

The children did not return. She thought she heard him singing, way up in the bones of his skull, the hymns he breathed while he worked at something that required repetitive, rhythmical effort, polishing or scrubbing. But when he appeared he was merely coming over to her, unhurried, on a sunny day. Nothing sullen or resentful about him; her little triumph in getting him to come turned over inside her with a throb and showed the meanness of something hidden under a stone. These sudden movements within her often changed her from persecutor to victim, with her husband, her children, anyone.

She spoke as she did back there when domestic detail impinged upon the real concerns of her life, which could not be understood by him. But she had got to her feet. —Here are your keys.—

For an instant his hands sketched the gesture of receiving and then were recalled to themselves and the thumb and fingers of his right hand simply hooked the bunch, with a jingle, from her fingers.

His chin was raised, trying to sense rather than see if Bam was in the hut behind. Her silence was the answer: not back; they both knew the third one had gone off, early, to shoot some meat—a family of wart-hogs had been rashly coming to an old wallow within sight of the settlement. He stood there, his stolidity an acceptance that he could not escape her, since she was alone, they were one-to-one; hers an insinuated understanding that she had not refused to come to him but wanted them to meet where no one else would judge them. The subtlety of it was nothing new. People in the relation they had been in are used to having to interpret what is never said, between them.

—You don’t like I must keep the keys. Isn’t it. I can see all the time, you don’t like that.—

She began to shake her head, arms crossed under her breasts, almost laughing; lying, protesting for time to explain—

—No, I can see. But I’m work for you. Me, I’m your boy, always I’m have the keys of your house. Every night I take that keys with me in my room, when you go away on holiday, I’m lock up everything … it’s me I’ve got the key for all your things, isn’t it—

—July, I want to tell you—

The ten fingers of his hands, held up, barred what
she
thought,
she
wanted. —In your house, if something it’s getting lost it’s me who must know. Isn’t it? A-l-l your things is there, it’s me I’ve got the key, always it’s me—

—July, you don’t ask me—

—Your boy who work for you. There in town you are trusting your boy for fifteen years.—His nostrils were stiff dark holes. The absurd ‘boy’ fell upon her in strokes neither appropriate nor to be dodged. Where had he picked up the weapon? The shift boss had used it; the word was never used in
her
house; she priggishly shamed and exposed others who spoke it in her presence. She had challenged it in the mouths of white shopkeepers and even policemen. —Trust you! Of course we trusted you—

They had moved closer together. She put a fist, hard claim, upon his arm.

—No. No. You don’t like I must have these keys.—

—July you don’t ask me—you’re just telling me. Why don’t you let me speak? Why don’t you ask me?—

He drew his head back to his steady neck, to look at her.

—What you going to say? Hay? What you can say? You tell everybody you trust your good boy. You are good madam, you got good boy.—

—Stop saying that.—

—She speak nice always, she pay fine for me when I’m getting arrested, when I’m sick one time she call the doctor.—He gave a laugh like a cry. —You worry about your keys. When you go away I’m leave look after your dog, your cat, your car you leave in the garage. I mustn’t forget water your plants. Always you are telling me even last minute when I’m carry your suitcase, isn’t it? Look after everything, July. And you bringing nice present when you come back. You looking everywhere, see if everything it’s still all right. Myself, I’m not say you’re not a good madam—but you don’t say you trust for me.—It was a command. —You walk behind. You looking. You asking me I must take all your books out and clean while you are away. You frightened I’m not working enough for you?—

—If you felt I shouldn’t have asked you to clean out the bookshelves that time, why didn’t you say so? What were you afraid of? You could always tell me. You had only to say so. I’ve never made you do anything you don’t think it was your job to do. Have I?
Have I?
I make mistakes, too. Tell me. When did we treat you inconsiderately—badly? I’d like to know, I really want to know.—

—The master he think for me. But you, you don’t think about me, I’m big man, I know for myself what I must do. I’m not thinking all the time for your things, your dog, your cat.—

—The master.
Bam’s not your master. Why do you pretend? Nobody’s ever thought of you as anything but a grown man. My god, I can’t believe you can talk about me like that … Bam’s had damn all to do with you, in fifteen years. That’s it. You played around with things together in the tool shed. You worked for me every day. I got on your nerves. So what. You got on mine. That’s how people are.—She flowered into temper. —But we’re not talking about that. That’s got nothing to do with now. That’s over—

He flickered his eyes. —How you say it’s over—

—Over and done with. You don’t work for me any more, do you.—

—You not going pay me, this month?—

—Pay you!—She glowed and flashed. He continued a kind of fastidious pretence of insensitivity to a coarse and boring assault. —You know we can pay you what you used to get, but we can’t pay you for—

—African people like money.—The insult of refusing to meet her on any but the lowest category of understanding.

—You know quite well what I mean … For what’s happened. It’s different here. You’re not a servant.—

—I’m the boy for your house, isn’t it?—He made a show of claiming a due.

—What’s the good of going on about that? It’s six hundred kilometres over there—her arm flung across before his face the useless rope of a gesture that would fall short of what had disappeared into the bush. —If I offended you, if I hurt your dignity, if what I thought was my friendliness, the feeling I had for you—if that hurt your feelings … I know I don’t know, I didn’t know, and I should have known—The same arm dangled; she didn’t know, either, if he understood the words; she dropped fifteen years of the habit of translation into very simple, concrete vocabulary. If she had never before used the word ‘dignity’ to him it was not because she didn’t think he understood the concept, didn’t have any—it was only the term itself that might be beyond his grasp of the language. —If I ask you for the keys now it’s not the key of the kitchen door! It’s not as a servant you’ve got them. Is it? But a friend—he asks, he asks … and he gives back … and when he wants something again, he asks again.—

He produced the keys in his palm. —Take it. It’s not the keys for your kitchen. Fifteen years I’m work for your kitchen, your house, because my wife, my children, I must work for them. Take it.—

—If all you can think about is what happened back there, what about Ellen?—

The name of his town woman fell appallingly between them, something neither should dare take up.

—What is happening to Ellen? Your wife and your children were here, and all those years Ellen was with you. Where is she, in the fighting there? Has she got something to eat, somewhere to sleep? You were so concerned about your wife—and what does she think about Ellen?—

He had stopped instantly the blinking pantomime of derision. He might take her by the shoulders; they stepped across fifteen years of no-man’s-land, her words shoved them and they were together, duellists who will feel each other’s breath before they turn away to the regulation number of paces, or conspirators who will never escape what each knows of the other. Her triumph dissembled in a face at once open, submissive, eyes emptied for a vision to come, for them both.