The Sun Between Their Feet: Collected African Stories Volume Two. Doris Lessing
And besides, I’ve heard people talk of you.’
She imagined the talk and smiled stiffly. ‘You don’t seem to take your work very seriously.’
‘If I may I’ll come back another time and try again?’
She did not reply. He said: ‘My dear, I’ll tell you a secret: one of the reasons I chose this district was because of you. Surely there aren’t so many people in this country one can really talk to that we can afford not to take each other seriously?’
He touched her cheek with his hand, smiled, and went. She heard the last thing he had said like a parody of the things she often said and felt a violent revulsion.
She went to her bedroom, where she found herself in front of the mirror. Her hands went to her cheeks and she drew in her breath with the shock. ‘Why, Lucy, whatever is the matter with you?’ Her eyes were dancing, her mouth smiled irresistibly. Yet she heard the archness of her Why, Lucy and thought: I’m going to pieces. I must have gone to pieces without knowing it.
Later she found herself singing in the pantry as she made a cake, stopped herself; made herself look at the insurance salesman’s face against her closed eyelids, and instinctively wiped the palms of her hands against her skirt.
He came three days later. Again, in the first shock of seeing him stand at the door, smiling familiarly, she thought: ‘It’s the face of an old animal. He probably chose this kind of work because of the opportunities it gives him.’
He talked of London, where he had lately been on leave; about the art galleries and the theatres.
She could not help warming, because of her hunger for this kind of talk. She could not help an apologetic note in her voice, because she knew that after so many years in this exile she must seem provincial. She liked him because he associated himself with her abdication from her standards by saying: ‘Yes, yes, my dear, in a country like this we all learn to accept the second rate.’
While he talked his eyes were roving. He was listening. Outside the window in the dust the turkeys were scraping and gobbling. In the next room the houseboy was moving; then there was silence because he had gone to get his midday meal. The children had had their lunch and gone off to the garden with the nurse.
No, she said to herself. No, no, no.
‘Does your husband come back for lunch?’
‘He takes it on the lands at this time of the year, he’s so busy.’
He came over and sat beside her. ‘Well, shall we console each other?’ She was crying in his arms. She could feel their impatient and irritable tightening.
In the bedroom, she kept her eyes shut. His hand travelled up and down her back. ‘What’s the matter, little one? What’s the matter?’
His voice was a sedative. She could have fallen asleep and lain there for a week inside the anonymous comforting arms. But he was looking at his watch over her shoulder. ‘We’d better get dressed, hadn’t we?’
‘Of course.’
She sat naked on the bed, covering herself with her arms, looking at his white hairy body in loathing, and then at the creased red neck. She became extremely gay, and in the living-room they sat side by side on the big sofa, being ironical. Then he put his arm around her, and she curled up inside it, and cried again. She clung to him and felt him going away from her, and in a few minutes he stood up saying: ‘Wouldn’t do for your old man to come in and find us like this, would it?’ Even while she was hating him for the ‘old man’ she put her arms around him and said: ‘You’ll come back soon.’
‘I couldn’t keep away.’ The voice purred caressingly over her head, and she said: ‘You know, I’m very lonely.’
‘Darling, I’ll come as soon as I can. I’ve a living to make, you know.’
She let her arms drop, and smiled, and watched him drive away down the rutted red-dust farm road, between the rippling sea-coloured mealies.
She knew he would come again, and next time she would not cry; she would stand again like this watching him go, hating him, thinking of how he had said: In this country we learn to accept the second-rate; and he would come again and again and again; and she would stand here, watching him go and hating him.
The rains that year were good, they were coming nicely just as the crops needed them – or so Margaret gathered when the men said they were not too bad. She never had an opinion of her own on matters like the weather, because even to know about what seems a simple thing like the weather needs experience. Which Margaret had not got. The men were Richard her husband, and old Stephen, Richard’s father, a farmer from way back, and these two might argue for hours whether the rains were ruinous, or just ordinarily exasperating. Margaret had been on the farm three years. She still did not understand how they did not go bankrupt altogether, when the men never had a good word for the weather, or the soil, or the Government. But she was getting to learn the language. Farmer’s language. And they neither went bankrupt nor got very rich. They jogged along, doing comfortably.
Their crop was maize. Their farm was three thousand acres on the ridges that rise up towards the Zambesi escarpment, high, dry windswept country, cold and dusty in winter, but now, being the wet season, steamy with the heat rising in wet soft waves off miles of green foliage. Beautiful it was, with the sky blue and brilliant halls of air, and the bright green folds and hollows of country beneath, and the mountains lying sharp and bare twenty miles off across the river. The sky made her eyes ache, she was not used to it. One does not look so much at the sky in the city she came from. So that evening when Richard said: ‘The Government is sending out warnings that locusts are expected, coming down from the breeding grounds up North,’ her instinct was to look about her at the trees. Insects – swarms of them – horrible! But Richard and the old man had raised their eyes and were looking up over the mountains. ‘We haven’t had locusts in seven years,’ they said. ‘They go in cycles, locusts do.’ And then: ‘There goes our crop for this season!’
But they went on with the work of the farm just as usual, until one day they were coming up the road to the homestead for the midday break, when old Stephen stopped, raised his finger and pointed: ‘Look, look, there they are!’
Out ran Margaret to join them, looking at the hills. Out came the servants from the kitchen. They all stood and gazed. Over the rocky levels of the mountain was a streak of rust-coloured air. Locusts. There they came.
At once Richard shouted at the cook-boy. Old Stephen yelled at the house-boy. The cook-boy ran to beat the old ploughshare hanging from a tree-branch, which was used to summon the labourers at moments of crisis. The house-boy ran off to the store to collect tin cans, any old bit of metal. The farm was ringing with the clamour of the gong, and they could see the labourers come pouring out of the compound, pointing at the hills and shouting excitedly. Soon they had all come up to the house, and Richard and old Stephen were giving them orders – Hurry, hurry, hurry.
And off they ran again, the two white men with them, and in a few minutes Margaret could see the smoke of fires rising from all around the farm-lands. Piles of wood and grass had been prepared there. There were seven patches of bared soil, yellow and ox-blood colour, and pink, where the new mealies were just showing, making a film of bright green, and around each drifted up thick clouds of smoke. They were throwing wet leaves on to the fires now, to make it acrid and black. Margaret was watching the hills. Now there was a long low cloud advancing, rust-colour still, swelling forwards and out as she looked. The telephone was ringing. Neighbours – quick, quick, there come the locusts. Old Smith had had his crop eaten to the ground. Quick, get your fires started. For of course, while every farmer hoped the locusts would overlook his farm and go on to the next, it was only fair to warn each other, one must play fair. Everywhere, fifty miles over the countryside, the smoke was rising from myriads of fires, Margaret answered the telephone calls, and between stood watching