Doris Lessing Three-Book Edition: The Golden Notebook, The Grass is Singing, The Good Terrorist. Doris Lessing
one leg stretching from the wall into the room, an enormous, more than life-size leg, the limb of a giant. She went forward a little; now she could see him properly. Dreaming, she felt irritated and let down, for the native was asleep, crouched against the wall, exhausted after long wakefulness. He sat as she had seen him sit sometimes in the sun, with one knee up, his arm resting on it loosely, so that the palm turned over and the fingers curled limply. The other leg, the one she had first seen, stretched almost to where she stood, and at her feet she saw the thick skin of the sole, cracked and horny. His head was bent forward on his chest, showing his thick neck. She felt as she sometimes did when, awake, she expected to find that he had left undone something he was paid to do, and taking herself to look, found everything in order. Her annoyance with herself turned into anger against the native; and now she looked towards the bed again where Dick lay stretched and motionless. She stepped over the giant leg lying over the floor, and moved silently round the bed with her back to the window. Bending over Dick she felt the night air coolly on her shoulders, and with sharp anger said to herself that the native had opened the window again, and had caused Dick’s death through chill. Dick looked ugly. He was dead, yellow-faced, his mouth fallen open and his eyes staring. In her dream she put out her hand to touch his skin. It was cold, and she felt only relief and exultation. At the same time she felt guilty because of her gladness, and tried to arouse in herself the sorrow she ought to feel. As she stood, bending forward over Dick’s stillness, she knew the native had silently awakened and was watching her. Without turning her head, she saw at the edge of her vision the great leg softly withdrawn, and she knew he was standing in the shadow. Then he was coming towards her. It seemed as if the room were very big, and he was approaching her slowly from an immense distance. She stood rigid with fear, the chill sweat running down her body, waiting. He approached slowly, obscene and powerful, and it was not only he, but her father who was threatening her. They advanced together, one person, and she could smell, not the native smell, but the unwashed smell of her father. It filled the room, musty, like animals; and her knees went liquid as her nostrils distended to find clean air and her head became giddy. Half-conscious, she leaned back against the wall for support, and nearly fell through the open window. He came near and put his hand on her arm. It was the voice of the African she heard. He was comforting her because of Dick’s death, consoling her protectively; but at the same time it was her father menacing and horrible, who touched her in desire.
She screamed, knowing suddenly she was asleep and in nightmare. She screamed and screamed desperately, trying to wake herself from the horror. She thought: my screams must be waking Dick; and she struggled in the sands of sleep. Then she was awake and sitting up, panting. The African was standing beside her, red-eyed and half-asleep, holding out to her a tray with tea. The room was filled with a thick grey light, and the still burning lamp sent a thin beam to the table. Seeing the native, with the terror of the dream still in her, she shrank back into the corner of the sofa, breathing fast and irregularly, watching him in a paroxysm of fright. He put the tray down, clumsily, because of his weariness, and she struggled in her mind to separate dream from reality.
The man said, watching her curiously, ‘The boss is asleep.’ And her knowledge that Dick lay dead next door faded. But still she watched the black man, warily, unable to speak. She saw in his face surprise at her posture of fear, and she watched grow there that look she had so often seen lately, half sardonic, speculative, brutal, as if he were judging her. Suddenly he said softly: ‘Madame afraid of me, yes?’ It was the voice of the dream, and as she heard it, her body went weak and she trembled. She fought to control her voice, and spoke after a few minutes in a half whisper: ‘No, no, no. I am not afraid.’ And then she was furious with herself for denying something whose possibility should never even be admitted.
She saw him smile, and watched his eyes drop to her hands, which lay on her lap trembling. His eyes travelled up her body slowly to her face, taking in the hunched shoulders, the way her body was pressed into the cushions for support.
He said easily, familiarly, ‘Why is Madame afraid of me?’
She said half-hysterically, in a high-pitched voice, laughing nervously: ‘Don’t be ridiculous. I am not afraid of you.’ She spoke as she might have done to a white man, with whom she was flirting a little. As she heard the words come from her mouth, and saw the expression on the man’s face, she nearly fainted. She saw him give her a long, slow, imponderable look; then turn, and walk out of the room.
When he had gone, she felt released from an inquisition. She sat weak and shaking, thinking of the dream, trying to clear away the fog of horror.
After a while she poured out some tea, spilling it into the saucer. Again, as she had done in her dream, she forced herself to stand up and walk into the room next door. Dick was sleeping quietly, and looked better. Without touching him she left him, passing to the verandah, where she leant forward against the chilly bricks of the balustrade, breathing in drafts of cool morning air. It was not sunrise yet. All the sky was clear and colourless, flushed with rosy streaks of light, but there was darkness still among the silent trees. She could see faint smoke rising in drifts from the small clustering huts of the compound, and knew that she must go and beat the gong for the day’s work to begin.
All that day she sat in the bedroom as usual, watching Dick grow better hourly, although he was very weak still, and not yet well enough to be irritable.
She did not go around the farm at all that day. And she avoided the native; she felt that she was too unsure of herself, had not the strength to face him. When he had left after lunch for his time off, she went hastily to the kitchen, almost furtively, made cold drinks for Dick, and returned looking behind her as if pursued.
That night she locked all the doors of the house, and went to bed beside Dick, thankful, perhaps for the first time in their marriage, for his closeness.
He was back at work in a week.
Again, falling swiftly, one after the other, the days passed, the long days spent alone in the house while Dick was on the lands, alone with the African. She was fighting against something she did not understand. Dick became to her, as time went by, more and more unreal; while the thought of the African grew obsessive. It was a nightmare, the powerful black man always in the house with her, so that there was no escape from his presence. She was possessed by it, and Dick was hardly there to her.
From the time she woke in the morning to find the native bending over them with the tea, his eyes averted from her bare shoulders, until the time he was out of the house altogether, she could never relax. Fearfully, she did her work in the house, trying to keep out of his way; if he was in one room she went to another. She would not look at him; she knew it would be fatal to meet his eyes, because now there was always the memory of her fear, of the way she had spoken to him that night. She used to give her orders hurriedly, in a strained voice, then hastily leave the kitchen. She dreaded hearing him speak, because now there was a new tone in his voice: familiar, half-insolent, domineering. A dozen times she was on the point of saying to Dick, ‘He must go.’ But she never dared. Always she stopped herself, unable to bear the anger that would follow. But she felt as if she were in a dark tunnel, nearing something final, something she could not visualize, but which waited for her inexorably, inescapably. And in the attitude of Moses, in the way he moved or spoke, with that easy, confident, bullying insolence, she could see he was waiting too. They were like two antagonists, silently sparring. Only he was powerful and sure of himself, and she was undermined with fear, by her terrible dream-filled nights, her obsession.
People who live to themselves, whether from necessity or choice, and who do not trouble themselves about their neighbours’ affairs, are always disquieted and uneasy if by some chance they come to know that other people discuss them. It is as though a sleeping man should wake and find round his bed a circle of strangers staring at him. The Turners, who might have been living on the moon for all the thought they gave to ‘the district’, would have been astonished if they had known that for years they had provided the staple of gossip among the farmers round about. Even people they knew by name only, or those they had never heard of, discussed them with an intimate knowledge