The Sun Between Their Feet: Collected African Stories Volume Two. Doris Lessing
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ants into the grass.
I went up to the house and asked my mother when the MacGregors were coming to tea.
‘I don’t know, dear. Why?’
‘Because. I just thought …’
She looked at me. Her eyes were critical. In one moment, she would say the name William. I struck first. To have William and the moment together, I must pay fee to the family gods. ‘There’s a pomegranate nearly ripe, and you know how interested Mrs MacGregor is …’
She looked sharply at me. ‘Pick it, and we’ll make a drink of it.’
‘Oh no, it’s not quite ready. Not altogether …’
‘Silly child,’ she said at last. She went to the telephone and said: ‘Mrs MacGregor, this daughter of mine, she’s got it into her head – you know how children are.’
I did not care. At four that afternoon I was waiting by the pomegranate tree. Their car came thrusting up the steep road to the crown of the hill. There was Mr MacGregor in his khaki, Mrs MacGregor in her best afternoon dress – and William. The adults shook hands, kissed. William did not turn round and look at me. It was not possible, it was monstrous, that the force of my dream should not have had the power to touch him at all, that he knew nothing of what he must do.
Then he slowly turned his head and looked down the slope to where I stood. He did not smile. It seemed he had not seen me, for his eyes travelled past me, and back to the grownups. He stood to one side while they exchanged their news and greetings; and then all four laughed, and turned to look at me and my tree. It seemed for a moment they were all coming. At once, however, they went into the house, William trailing after them, frowning.
In a moment he would have gone in; the space in front of the old house would be empty. I called ‘William!’ I had not known I would call. My voice sounded small in the wide afternoon sunlight.
He went on as if he had not heard. Then he stopped, seemed to think, and came down the hill towards me while I anxiously examined his face. The low tangle of the gooseberry bushes was around his legs, and he swore sharply.
‘Look at the pomegranate,’ I said. He came to a halt beside the tree, and looked. I was searching those clear grey eyes now for a trace of that indulgence they had shown my mother over the brussels sprouts, over that first unripe pomegranate.
Now all I wanted was indulgence; I abandoned everything else.
‘It’s full of ants,’ he said at last.
‘Only a little, only where it’s cracked.’
He stood, frowning, chewing at his piece of grass. His lips were full and thick-skinned; and I could see the blood, dull and dark around the pale groove where the grass-stem pressed.
The pomegranate hung there, swarming with ants.
Now, I thought wildly. Now – crack now.
There was not a sound. The sun pouring down, hot and yellow, drawing up the smell of the grasses. There was, too, a faint sour smell from the fermenting juice of the pomegranate.
‘It’s bad,’ said William, in that uncomfortable, angry voice. ‘And what’s that bit of dirty rag for?’
‘It was breaking, the twig was breaking off – I tied it up.’
‘Mad,’ he remarked, aside, to the afternoon. ‘Quite mad,’ He was looking about him in the grass. He reached down and picked up a stick.
‘No,’ I cried out, as he hit at the tree. The pomegranate flew into the air and exploded in a scatter of crimson seeds, fermenting juice and black ants.
The cracked empty skin, with its white clean-looking inner skin faintly stained with juice, lay in two fragments at my feet.
He was poking sulkily with the stick at the little scarlet seeds that lay everywhere on the earth.
Then he did look at me. Those clear eyes were grave again, thoughtful, and judging. They held that warning I had seen in them before.
‘That’s your pomegranate,’ he said at last.
‘Yes.’ I said.
He smiled. ‘We’d better go up, if we want any tea.’ We went together up the hill to the house, and as we entered the room where the grown-ups sat over the teacups, I spoke quickly, before he could. In a bright careless voice I said: ‘It was bad, after all, the ants had got at it. It should have been picked before.’
That night of the dance, years later, when I saw Mrs Slatter come into the bedroom at midnight, not seeing me because the circle of lamplight was focused low, with a cold and terrible face I never would have believed could be hers after knowing her so long during the day-times and the visits -that night, when she had dragged herself out of the room again, still not knowing I was there, I went to the mirror to see my own face. I held the lamp as close as I could and looked into my face. For I had not known before that a person’s face could be smooth and comfortable, though often sorrowful, like Molly Slatter’s had been all those years, and then hard-set, in the solitude away from the dance and the people (that night they had drunk a great deal and the voices of the singing reminded me of when dogs howl at the full moon), into an old and patient stone. Yes, her face looked like white stone that the rain has trickled over and worn through the wet seasons.
My face, that night in the mirror, dusted yellow from the lamplight, with the dark watery spaces of the glass behind, was smooth and enquiring, with the pert flattered look of a girl in her first long dress and dancing with the young people for the first time. There was nothing in it, a girl’s face, empty. Yet I had been crying just before, and I wished then I could go away into the dark and stay there for ever. Yet Molly Slatter’s terrible face was familiar to me, as if it were her own face, her real one. I seemed to know it. And that meant that the years I had known her comfortable and warm in spite of all her troubles had been saying something else to me about her. But only now I was prepared to listen.
I left the mirror, set the lamp down on the dressing-table, and went out into the passage and looked for her among the people, and there she was in her red satin dress looking just as usual, talking to my father, her hand on the back of his chair, smiling down at him.
‘It hasn’t been a bad season, Mr Farquar,’ she was saying, ‘the rains haven’t done us badly at all.’
Driving home in the car that night, my mother asked: ‘What was Molly saying to you?’
And my father said: ‘Oh I don’t know, I really don’t know.’ His voice was sad and angry.
She said: ‘That dress of hers. Her evening dresses look like a cheap night-club.’
He said, troubled and sorrowful, ‘Yes. Actually I said something to her.’
‘Somebody should.’
‘No,’ he said, quick against the cold criticizing voice. ‘No. It’s a – pretty colour. But I said to her, There’s not much to that dress, is there?’
‘What did she say?’
‘She was hurt. I was sorry I said anything.’
‘H’mm,’ said my mother, with a little laugh.
He turned his head from his driving, so that the car lights swung wild over the rutted track for a moment, and said direct at her: ‘She’s a good woman. She’s a nice woman.’
But she gave another offended gulp of laughter. As a woman insists in an argument because she won’t give in, even when she knows she is wrong.
As for me, I saw that dress again, with its criss-cross of narrow sweat-darkened straps over the ageing white back, and I saw Mrs Slatter’s face when my father criticized her. I might have been there,