Doris Lessing Three-Book Edition: The Golden Notebook, The Grass is Singing, The Good Terrorist. Doris Lessing
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was by chance that Mary picked up a pamphlet on beekeeping from the counter of the store one day, and took it home with her; but even if she had not, no doubt it would have happened some other way. But it was that chance which gave her her first glimpse into Dick’s real character: that, and a few words she overheard the same day.
They seldom went into the station seven miles away; but sent in a native twice a week to fetch their post and groceries. He left at about ten in the morning, with an empty sugar sack swung over his shoulders, and returned after dusk with the sack bulging, and oozing blood from the parcel of meat. But a native, although conveniently endowed by nature with the ability to walk long distances without feeling fatigue, cannot carry sacks of flour and mealiemeal; and once a month the trip was made by car.
Mary had given her order, seen the things put into the car, and was standing on the long verandah of the store among piled crates and sacks, waiting for Dick to finish his business. As he came out, a man she did not know stopped him and said, ‘Well, Jonah, your farm flooded again this season, I suppose?’ She turned sharply to look: a few years ago she would not have noticed the undertone of contempt in the lazy rallying voice. Dick smiled and said, ‘I have had good rains this year, things are not too bad.’
‘Your luck changed, eh?’
‘Looks like it.’
Dick came towards her, the smile gone, his face strained.
‘Who was that?’ she asked.
‘I borrowed two hundred pounds from him three years ago, just after we were married.’
‘You didn’t tell me?’
‘I didn’t want to worry you.’
After a pause she asked, ‘Have you paid it back?’
‘All but fifty pounds.’
‘Next season, I suppose?’ Her voice was too gentle, too considerate.
‘With a bit of luck.’
She saw on his face that queer grin of his, more a baring of the teeth than a smile: self-critical, assessing, defeated. She hated to see it.
They finished what they had to do: collecting mail from the post office and buying meat for the week. Walking over caked dried mud, which showed where puddles lay from the beginning of the rainy season to its end, shading her eyes with her hand, Mary refrained from looking at Dick, and made sprightly remarks in a strained voice. He attempted to reply, in the same tone; which was so foreign to them both that it deepened the tension between them. When they returned to the verandah of the store, which was crowded with sacks and packing-cases, he knocked his leg against the pedal of a leaning bicycle, and began to swear with a violence out of proportion to the small accident. People turned to look; and Mary walked on, her colour deepening. In complete silence they got into the car and drove away over the railway lines and past the post office on the way home. In her hand she had the pamphlet on bees. She picked it up from the counter because most days, at about lunch-time, she heard a soft swelling roar over the house, and Dick had told her it was swarming bees passing. She had thought she might make some pocket money from bees. But the pamphlet was written for English conditions, and was not very helpful. She used it as a fan, waving away the flies that buzzed round her head and clustered at last on the canvas roof. They had come in from the butchery with the meat. She was thinking uneasily of that note of contempt in the man’s voice, which contradicted all her previous ideas of Dick. It was not even contempt, more amusement. Her own attitude towards him was fundamentally one of contempt, but only as a man; as a man she paid no attention to him, she left him out of account altogether. As a farmer she respected him. She respected his ruthless driving of himself, his absorption in his work. She believed that he was going through a necessary period of struggle before achieving the moderate affluence enjoyed by most farmers. In her feeling for him, in relation to his work, was admiration, even affection.
She who had once taken everything at its face value, never noticing the inflection of a phrase, or the look on a face which contradicted what was actually being said, spent the hour’s drive home considering the implications of that man’s gentle amusement at Dick. She wondered for the first time, whether she had been deluding herself. She kept glancing sideways at Dick, noticing little things about him she blamed herself for not noticing before. As he gripped the steering wheel, his lean hands, burnt coffee-coloured by the sun, shook perpetually, although almost imperceptibly. It seemed to her a sign of weakness, that trembling; the mouth was too tight-set. He was leaning forward, gripping the wheel, gazing down the narrow winding bush track as if trying to foresee his own future.
Back in the house, she flung the pamphlet down on the table and went to unpack the groceries. When she came back, Dick was absorbed in the pamphlet. He did not hear her when she spoke. She was used to this absorption of his: he would sometimes sit through a meal without speaking, not noticing what he ate, sometimes laying down his knife and fork before the plate was empty, thinking about some farm problem, his brow heavy with worry. She had learned not to trouble him at these times. She took refuge in her own thoughts; or, rather, she lapsed into her familiar state, which was a dim mindlessness. Sometimes they hardly spoke for days at a time.
After supper, instead of going to bed as usual at about eight, he sat himself down at the table under the gently-swaying, paraffin-smelling lamp, and began making calculations on a piece of paper. She sat and watched him, her hands folded. This was now her characteristic pose: sitting quietly, as though waiting for something to wake her into movement. After an hour or so, he pushed away the scraps of paper, and hitched up his trousers with a gay, boyish movement she had not seen before.
‘What do you say about bees, Mary?’
‘I don’t know anything about them. It’s not a bad idea.’
‘I’ll go over tomorrow to see Charlie. His brother-in-law kept bees in the Transvaal, he told me once.’ He spoke with new energy; he seemed to have new life.
‘But this book is for England,’ she said, turning it over dubiously. It seemed to her a flimsy foundation for such a change in him; a flimsy basis for even a hobby like bees.
But after breakfast next day Dick drove off to see Charlie Slatter. He returned frowning, his face obstinate but whistling jauntily. Mary was struck by that whistle: it was so familiar. It was a trick of his; he stuck his hands in his pockets, little-boy fashion, and whistled with a pathetic jauntiness when she lost her temper and raged at him because of the house, or because of the clumsiness of the water arrangements. It always made her feel quite mad with irritation, because he could not stand up to her and hold his own.
‘What did he say?’ she asked.
‘He’s wet-blanketing the whole thing. Because his brother-in-law failed it’s no reason I will.’
He went off to the farm instinctively making his way to the tree plantation. This was a hundred acres of some of the best ground on his farm, which he had planted with young gums a couple of years before. It was this plantation that had so annoyed Charlie Slatter – perhaps because of an unacknowledged feeling of guilt that he himself never put back in his soil what he took from it.
Dick often stood at the edge of the field, watching the wind flow whitely over the tops of the shining young trees, that bent and swung and shook themselves all day. He had planted them apparently on an impulse; but it was really the fruition of a dream of his. Years before he bought the farm, some mining company had cut out every tree on the place, leaving nothing but coarse scrub and wastes of grass. The trees were growing up again, but over the whole three thousand acres of land there was nothing to be seen but stunted second growth: short, ugly little trees from mutilated trunks. There wasn’t a good tree left on the farm. It wasn’t much, planting a hundred acres of good trees that would grow into straight white-stemmed giants; but it was a small retribution; and this was his favourite place on the farm. When he was particularly worried, or had quarrelled with Mary, or wanted to think clearly, he stood and looked at his trees; or strolled down the long aisles between light swaying branches that glittered with small polished leaves like coins. Today he considered bees; until, quite late, he realized he had not been near the farm-work all day,