The Sun Between Their Feet: Collected African Stories Volume Two. Doris Lessing
I was dancing all the night with the assistant from the farm between the rivers. I was right about the long dress. All those months, at the station or at gymkhanas, he had never seen me at all. But that night he saw me, and I was wanting him to kiss me. But when he did I slapped his face. Because then I knew that he was drunk. I had not thought he might be drunk, though it was natural he was, since everybody was. But the way he kissed me was not at all what I had been thinking. ‘I beg your pardon I’m sure,’ he said, and I walked past him into the passage and then into the living-room. But there were so many people and my eyes were stinging, so I went through into the other passage, and there, just like last year, as if the whole year had never happened, were Mrs Slatter and George Andrews. I did not want to see it, not the way I felt.
‘And why not?’ he was saying, biting into her neck.
‘Oh George, that was all ended months ago, months ago!’
‘Oh come on, Moll, I don’t know what I’ve done, you never bothered to explain.’
‘No.’ And then, crying out, ‘Mind my arm.’ ‘What’s the matter with your arm?’ ‘I fell and sprained it.’
So he let go of her, and said: ‘Well, thanks for the nice interlude, thanks anyway, old girl.’ I knew that he had been meaning to hurt her, because I could feel what he said hurting me. He went off into the living-room by himself, and she went off after him, but to talk to someone else, and I went into her bedroom. It was empty. The lamp was on a low table by the bed, turned down, and the sky through the windows was black and wet and hardly any light came from it.
Then Mrs Slatter came in and sat on the bed and put her head in her hands. I did not move.
‘Oh my God!’ she said. ‘Oh my God, my God!’ Her voice was strange to me. The gentleness was not in it, though it was soft, but it was soft from breathlessness.
‘Oh my God!’ she said, after a long long silence. She took up one of the pillows from the bed, and wrapped her arms around it, and laid her head down on it. It was quiet in this room, although from the big room came the sound of singing, a noise like howling, because people were drunk, or part-drunk, and it had the melancholy savage sound of people singing when they are drunk. An awful sound, like animals howling.
Then she put down the pillow, tidily, in its proper place, and swayed backwards and forwards and said: ‘Oh God, make me old soon, make me old. I can’t stand this, I can’t stand this any longer.’
And again the silence, with the howling sound of the singing outside, the footsteps of the people who were dancing scraping on the cement of the veranda.
‘I can’t go on living,’ said Mrs Slatter, into the dark above the small glow of lamplight. She bent herself up again, double, as if she were hurt physically, her hands gripped around her ankles, holding herself together, and she sat crunched up, her face looking straight in front at the wall, level with the lamp-light. So now I could see her face. I did not know that face. It was stone, white stone, but her eyes gleamed out of it black, and with a flicker in them. And her black shining hair that was not grey at all yet had loosened and hung in streaks around the white stone face.
‘I can’t stand it,’ she said again. The voice she used was strange to me. She might have been talking to someone. For a moment I even thought she had seen me and was talking to me, explaining herself to me. And then, slowly, she let herself unclench and she went out into the dance again.
I took up the lamp and held it as close as I could to the mirror and bent in and looked at my face. But there was nothing to my face.
Next day I told my father I had heard Mrs Slatter say she could not go on living. He said, ‘Oh Lord, I hope it’s not because of what I said about her dress,’ but I said no, it was before he said he didn’t like the dress. “Then if she was upset,’ he said, ‘I expect what I said made her feel even worse.’ And then: ‘Oh poor woman, poor woman!’ He went into the house and called my mother and they talked it over. Then he got on to the telephone and I heard him asking Mrs Slatter to drop in next time she was going past to the station. And it seemed she was going in that morning, and before lunchtime she was on our veranda talking to my father. My mother was not there, although my father had not asked her in so many words not to be there. As for me I went to the back of the veranda where I could hear what they said.
‘Look, Molly,’ he said, ‘we are old friends. You’re looking like hell these days. Why don’t you tell me what’s wrong? You can say anything to me, you know.’
After quite a time she said: ‘Mr Farquar, there are some things you can’t say to anybody. Nobody.’
‘Ah, Molly,’ he said, ‘if there’s one thing I’ve learned and I learned it early on, when I was a young man and I had a bad time, it’s this. Everybody’s got something terrible, Molly. Everybody has something awful they have to live with. We all live together and we see each other all the time, and none of us knows what awful thing the other person might be living with.’
And then she said: ‘But, Mr Farquar, I don’t think that’s true. I know people who don’t seem to have anything private to make them unhappy.’
‘How do you know, Molly? How do you know?’
‘Take Mr Slatter,’ she said. ‘He’s a man who does as he likes. But he doesn’t know his own strength. And that’s why he never seems to understand how other people feel.’
‘But how do you know, Molly? You could live next to someone for fifty years and still not know. Perhaps he’s got something that gives him hell when he’s alone, like all the rest of us?’
‘No, I don’t think so, Mr Farquar.’
‘Molly,’ he said, appealing suddenly, and very exasperated. ‘You’re too hard on yourself, Molly.’ She didn’t say anything.
He said: ‘Listen, why don’t you get away for a while, get yourself down to the sea, this altitude drives us all quietly crazy. You get down off the altitude for a bit.’
She still said nothing, and he lowered his voice, and I could imagine how my mother’s face would have gone stiff and cold had she heard what he said: ‘And have a good time while you’re there. Have a good time and let go a bit.’
‘But, Mr Farquar. I don’t want a good time.’ The words, a good time, she used as if they could have nothing to do with her.
‘If we can’t have what we want in this world, then we should take what we can get.’
‘It wouldn’t be right,’ she said at last slowly. ‘I know people have different ideas, and I don’t want to press mine on anyone.’
‘But Molly -’ he began, exasperated, or so it sounded, and then he was silent.
From where I sat I could hear the grass chair creaking: she was getting out of it. ‘I’ll take your advice,’ she said. ‘I’ll get down to the sea and I’ll take the children with me. The two younger ones.’
‘To hell with the kids for once. Take your old man with you and see that Emmy Pritt doesn’t go with you this time.’
‘Mr Farquar,’ she said, ‘if Mr Slatter wants Emmy Pritt, he can have her. He can have either one or the other of us. But not both. If I took him to the sea he would be over at her place ten minutes after we got back.’
‘Ah, Molly, you women can be hell. Have some pity on him for once.’
‘Pity? Mr Slatter’s a man who needs nobody’s pity. But thank you for your good advice, Mr Farquar. You are always very kind, you and Mrs Farquar.’
And she said goodbye to my father, and when I came forward she kissed me and asked me to come and see her soon, and she went to the station to get the stores.
And so Mrs Slatter went on living. George Andrews bought his own farm and married and the wedding was at the Slatters’. Later on Emmy Pritt got sick again and had another operation and died. It was a cancer. Mr Slatter was ill for the first