The Grass is Singing (13 page)

But there was no more talk about rabbits or turkeys. She sold the turkeys, and filled the wire runs with chickens. To make some money to buy herself some clothes, she said. Did he expect her to go about in rags like a kaffir. He did not expect anything, apparently, for he did not even reply to her challenge. He was again preoccupied. There was no hint of apology or defensiveness in his manner when he informed her that he intended to start a kaffir store on his farm.

He simply stated the fact, not looking at her, in a matter-of-fact take-it-or-leave-it voice. Everyone knew that kaffir stores made a pile of money, he said. Charlie Slatter had a store on his farm; a lot of farmers did. They were goldmines of profit. Mary shrank from the word 'goldmines' because she had found a series of crumbling weed covered trenches behind the house one day, which he had told her he had dug years before in an effort to discover the Eldorado he had been convinced was hidden beneath the soil of his farm. She said quietly, 'If there is a store on Slatter's place, only five miles off, there is no point in having another here.'

'I have a hundred natives here always.'

'If they earn fifteen bob a month you are not going to become a Rockefeller on what they spend.'

'There are always natives passing through,' he said stubbornly.

He applied for a wedding licence and got it without difficulty. Then he built a store. It seemed to Mary a terrible thing, an omen and a warning, that the store, the ugly menacing store of her childhood, should follow her here, even to her home.

But it was built a few hundred yards from the house itself, consisting of a small room bisected by a counter, with a bigger room behind to hold the stock. To begin with what stock they needed could be contained on the shelves of the store itself, but as the thing expanded, they would need the second room.

Mary helped Dick lay out the goods, sick with depression, hating the feel of the cheap materials that smelled of chemicals, and the blankets that seemed rough and greasy on the fingers even before they more used. They hung up the jewellery of garish glass and brass and copper, and she set them swinging and tinkling, with a tight-lipped smile, because of her memories of childhood, when it had been her greatest delight to watch the brilliant strings of beads swaying and shimmering. She was thinking that these two rooms added to the house would have made their life comfortable: the money spent on the store, the turkey-runs, the pigsty’s, the beehives, would have put ceilings into the house, would have taken the terror out of the thought of ' the approaching hot season. But what was the use of saying it? She felt like dissolving in hopeless foreboding tears; but she said not a word, and helped Dick with the work till it was finished.

When the store was ready, and filled to the roof with kaffir goods, Dick was so pleased he went into the station and bought twenty cheap bicycles. It was ambitious, because rubber rots; but then, he said, his natives were always asking him for advances to buy bicycles; they could buy them from him. Then the question arose who was to run the store? When it really gets going, he said, we can engage a store man. Mary shut her eyes and sighed. Before they had even started, when it looked as if it would be a long time before they had paid off the capital spent on it, he was talking about a store man who would cost at the very least thirty pounds a month. Why not engage a native? she asked. You can't trust niggers further than you can kick them, he said, as far as money is concerned. He said that he had taken it for granted that she would run the store; she hadn't anything to do in any case. He made this last remark in the harsh resentful voice that was, at this time, his usual way of addressing her.

Mary replied sharply that she would rather die than set foot inside it. Nothing would make her, nothing.

`It wouldn't hurt you,' said Dick. `Are you too good to stand behind a counter, then?’

'Selling kaffir truck to stinking kaffirs,' she said.

But that was not her feeling – not then, before she had started the work. She could not explain to Dick how that store smell made her remember the way she had stood, as a very small girl, looking fearfully up at the rows of bottles on the shelves, wondering which of them her father would handle that night; the way her mother had taken coins out of his pockets at nights, when he had fallen asleep in a chair snoring, mouth open, legs sprawling; and how the next day she would be sent up to the store to buy food that would not appear on the account at the month's end. These things she could not explain to Dick, for the good reason that he was now associated in her mind with the greyness and misery of her childhood, and it would have been like arguing with destiny itself. At last she agreed to serve in the store; there was nothing else she could do.

Now, as she went about her work, she could glance out of the back door and see the new shining roof among the trees; and from time to time she walked far enough along the path to see whether there was anyone waiting to buy. By ten in the morning half a dozen native women and their children were sitting under the trees. If she disliked native men, she loathed the women. She hated the exposed fleshiness of them, their soft brown bodies and soft bashful faces that were also insolent and inquisitive, and their chattering voices that held a brazen fleshy undertone. She could not bear to see them sitting there on the grass, their legs tucked under them in that traditional timeless pose, as peaceful and uncaring as if it did not matter whether the store was opened, Or whether it remained shut all day and they would have to return tomorrow. Above all, she hated the way they suckled their babies, with their breasts hanging down for everyone to see; there was something in their calm satisfied maternity that made her blood boil. 'Their babies hanging on to them like leeches,' she said to herself shuddering, for she thought with horror of suckling a child. The idea of a child's lips on her breasts made her feel quite sick; at the thought of it she would involuntarily clasp her hands over her breasts, as if protecting them from a violation. And since so many white women are like her, turning with relief to the bottle, she was in good company, and did

not think of herself, but rather of these black women, as strange; they were alien and primitive creatures with ugly desires she could not bear to think about.

When she saw there were perhaps ten or twelve of them waiting there, making a bright-coloured group against the green trees and grass, with their chocolate flesh and vivid head-cloths and metal ear-rings, she took the keys off the hook in the wardrobe (they were put there so the native servant should not know where they were and take himself to the store to steal when she was not looking) and shading her eyes with her hand, she marched off along the path to get the unpleasant business finished. She would open the door with a bang, letting it swing back hard against the brick wall, and enter the dark store, her nose delicately crinkled against the smell. Then the women slowly crowded in, fingering the stuffs, and laying the brilliant beads against their dark skins with little exclamations of pleasure, or of horror, because of the price. The children hung to their mothers' backs (like monkeys, Mary thought) or clutched their skirts, staring at the white-skinned Mary, clusters of flies in the corners of their eyes. Mary would stand there for half an hour perhaps, holding herself aloof, drumming with her fingers on the wood, answering questions a bout price and quality briefly. She would not give the women the pleasure of haggling over the price. And after a few moments she felt she could not stay there any longer, shut into the stuffy store with a crowd of these chattering evil smelling creatures. She said sharply, in the kitchen kaffir, 'Hurry up now!' One by one, they drifted away, their gaiety and the pleasure quite subdued, sensing her dislike of them.

'Have I got to stand there for hours just so that one of them can spend sixpence on a string of beads?’ she asked. 'Gives you something to do,' he replied, with that new brutal indifference, without even looking at her.

It was the store that finished Mary: the necessity for serving behind the counter, and the knowledge that it was there, always there, a burden on her, not five minutes' walk down the path where ticks would crawl on her legs from the crowding bushes and grass. But ostensibly she broke down over the bicycles. For some reason they were not sold after all. Perhaps they were not the types the natives wanted; it was difficult to say. One was sold at last, but the rest remained in the back room, propped upside-down like steel skeletons in a welter of rubber tubing. The rubber rotted; when one stretched it, there were grey flakes on the canvas base. So that was another fifty pounds or so gone! And while they were not actually losing on the store, they were not making anything much. Taking the bicycles, and the cost of the building, the venture was a heavy loss, and they could expect to do no more than keep a balance on the goods remaining on the shelves. But Dick would not give it up.

`It's there now,' he said. `We can't lose any more. You can go on with it, Mary. It won't hurt you.'

But she was thinking of the fifty pounds lost on the bicycles. It would have meant ceilings, or a good suite of furniture to replace the gimcrack stuff in their house, or even a week's holiday.

Thinking of that holiday, that she was always planning, but which never seemed to become possible, turned Mary's thoughts in a new direction. Her life, for a while, had a new meaning.

In the afternoons, these days, she always slept. She slept for hours and hours: it was a way to make time pass quickly. At one o'clock she lay down, and it was after four when she woke. But Dick would not be home for two hours yet, so she lay half-clothed on the bed, drugged with sleep, her mouth dry and her head aching. It was during those two hours of half-consciousness that she allowed herself to dream about that beautiful lost time when she worked in an office… and lived as she pleased, before `people made her get married'. That was how she put it to herself. And she began to think, during those grey wastes of time, how it would be when Dick at last made some money and they could go and live in town again; although she knew, in her moments of honesty, that he would never make money.

Then came the thought that there was nothing to prevent her running away and going back to her old life; here the memory of her friends checked her: what would they say, breaking up a marriage like that? The conventionality of her ethics, which had nothing to do with her real life, was restored by the thought of those friends, and the memory of their judgments on other people. It hurt her, the thought of facing them again, with her record of failure; for she was still, at bottom, haunted by a feeling of inadequacy, because `she was not like that'. That phrase had stuck in her mind all these years, and still rankled. But her desire to escape her misery had become so insupportable, that she pushed out of her mind the idea of her friends. She thought, now, of nothing but getting away, of becoming again what she had been. But then, there was such a gulf between what she now was, and that shy, aloof, yet adaptable girl with the crowds of acquaintances. She was conscious of that gulf, but not as unredeemable alteration in herself. She felt, rather, as if she had been lifted from the part fitted to her, in a play she understood, and made suddenly to act one unfamiliar to her. It was a feeling of being out of character that chilled her, not knowledge that she had changed. The soil, the black labourers, always so close to their lives but also so cut off, Dick in his farm clothes with his hands stained with oil – these things did not belong to her, they were not real. It was monstrous that they should have been imposed upon her.

Slowly, slowly, over weeks, she persuaded herself into the belief that she would only need to get into the train and go back into town for that lovely peaceful life, the life she was made for, to begin again.

And, one day, when the boy returned from the station with his heavy sack of groceries and meat and mail, and she took out the weekly newspaper and looked as usual, at the announcements of the births and marriages (to see what her old friends were doing – this was the only part of the pager she read), she noticed that her old firm, the one she had worked for all those years, were advertising for a short hand typist. She was standing in the kitchen, that was lit dimly by a flickering candle and the ruddy glimmer from the stove, beside the table loaded with soap and meat, the cook-boy just behind her, preparing supper – yet, in a moment, she was transported away from the farm back into her old life. All night the illusion persisted, and she lay awake breathless with thoughts of this easily achievable future, that was also her past. And when Dick had gone off to the lands, she dressed, packed a suitcase, and left a note for him, quite in the traditional way, but saying merely that she was going back to her old job: exactly as if Dick had known her mind and approved of her decision.

She walked the five miles between their homestead and the Slatters' farm in just over an hour. She was running half the way, her suitcase swinging heavily in her hand and bumping against her legs, her shoes filling with the soft gritty dust, sometimes stumbling over the sharp ruts. She found Charlie Slatter standing at the gully that marked the boundary between the farms, seemingly doing nothing at all. He was looking down the road along which she came, humming at the back of his throat, his eyes screwed up. It struck her, as she stopped in front of him, that it was odd he should be idle, he who was always busy. She did not imagine he was planning how he would buy up that fool Dick Turner's farm when he went bankrupt; he needed extra grazing for his cattle. Remembering that she had only met him two or three times, and that each time he had not troubled to hide his dislike, she drew herself up, and tried to speak slowly, although she was breathless. She asked him if he would drive her into the station in time to catch the morning train; there would not be another for three days, -and it was urgent. Charlie looked at her shrewdly, and appeared to be calculating.