Doris Lessing Three-Book Edition: The Golden Notebook, The Grass is Singing, The Good Terrorist. Doris Lessing
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once in her whole life, touched the flesh of a native. As they approached the bed, the soft touch still on her shoulder, she felt her head beginning to swim and her bones going soft. ‘Madame lie down,’ he said again, and his voice was gentle this time, almost fatherly. When she dropped to a sitting position on the bedside, he gently held her shoulder and pushed her down. Then he took her coat off the door where it hung, and placed it over her feet. He went out, and the horror retreated; she lay there numbed and silent, unable to consider the implications of the incident.
After a while she slept, and it was late afternoon when she woke. She could see the sky outside the square of window, banked with thunderous blue clouds, and lit with orange light from the sinking sun. For a moment she could not remember what had happened; but when she did the fear engulfed her again, a terrible dark fear. She thought of herself weeping helplessly, unable to stop; of drinking at that black man’s command; of the way he had pushed her across the two rooms to the bed; of the way he had made her lie down and then tucked the coat in round her legs. She shrank into the pillow with loathing, moaning out loud, as if she had been touched by excrement. And through her torment she could hear his voice, firm and kind, like a father commanding her.
After a while, when the room was quite dark, and only the pale walls glimmered, reflecting the light that still glowed in the tops of the trees, though their lower boughs held the shadows of dusk, she got up, and put a match to the lamp. It flared up, steadied, glowed quietly. The room was now a shell of amber light and shadows, hollowed out of the wide tree-filled night. She powdered her face, and sat a long time before the mirror, feeling unable to move. She was not thinking, only afraid, and of what she did not know. She felt she could not go out till Dick returned and supported her against the presence of the native. When Dick came, he said, looking at her with dismay, that he had not woken her at lunch-time, and that he hoped she was not ill. ‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘Only tired. I am feeling…’ Her voice tailed off, the blank look settled on her face. They were sitting in the dim arc of light from the swinging lamp, the boy quietly moving about the table. For a long time she kept her eyes lowered, though an alertness came back to her features with his entrance. When she made herself look up, and peer hurriedly into his face, she was reassured, for there was nothing new in his attitude. As always, he behaved as if he were an abstraction, not really there, a machine without a soul.
Next morning she made herself go into the kitchen and speak normally; and waited fearfully for him to say again that he wanted to leave. But he did not. For a week things went on until she realized he was not going; he had responded to her tears and appeal. She could not bear to think she had got her way by these methods; and because she did not want to remember it, she slowly recovered. Relieved, released from the torturing thought of Dick’s anger, with the memory of her shameful collapse gone from her mind, she began again to use that cold biting voice to make sarcastic comments on the native’s work. One day he turned to her in the kitchen, looked at her straight in the face and said in a voice that was disconcertingly hot and reproachful: ‘Madame asked me to stay. I stay to help Madame. If Madame cross, I go.’
The note of finality checked her; she felt helpless. Particularly as she had been forced to remember why he was here at all. And then, the resentful heat of his voice said that he considered she was unjust. Unjust! She did not see it like that.
He was standing beside the stove, waiting for something to finish cooking. She did not know what to say. He moved over to the table, while he waited for her reply, he picked up a cloth with which to grasp the hot iron of the oven door-handle. Without looking at her, he said: ‘I do the work well, yes?’ he spoke in English, which as a rule she would have flamed into temper over; she thought it impertinence. But she answered in English, ‘Yes.’
‘Then why Madame always cross?’
He spoke, this time, easily, almost familiarly, good-humouredly, as if he were humouring a child. He bent to open the oven, with his back to her, and took out a tray of the crisp light scones, that were so much better than she could make herself. He began turning them out, one by one, on to a wire tray to cool. She felt as if she should go at once, but did not move. She was held, helpless, watching his big hands flip those little scones on to the tray. And she said nothing. She felt the usual anger rise within her, at the tone he used to her; at the same time she was fascinated, and out of her depth; she did not know what to do with this personal relation. So, after a while, since he did not look at her, and moved quietly about his work, she went away without replying.
When the rains broke in late October, after six weeks of destroying heat, Dick, as always at this time of the year stayed away for the midday meal because of the pressure of work. He left about six in the morning and returned at six at night, so there was only one meal to be cooked: breakfast and lunch were sent to him on the fields. As she had done before in previous years, Mary told Moses that she would not take lunch, and that he could bring her tea: she felt she could not be troubled to eat. On the first day of Dick’s long absences, instead of the tray of tea, Moses brought her eggs, jam and toast. These he set carefully down on the small table beside her.
‘I told you I only wanted tea,’ she said sharply.
He answered quietly: ‘Madame ate no breakfast, she must eat.’ On the tray there was even a handleless cup with flowers in it: crude yellows and pinks and reds, bush flowers, thrust together clumsily, but making a strong burst of colour on the old stained cloth.
As she sat there, her eyes bent down, and he straightened himself after setting down the tray, what troubled her most was this evidence of his desire to please her, the propitiation of the flowers. He was waiting for a word of approval and pleasure from her. She could not give it; but the rebuke that sprang to her lips remained unspoken, and she pulled the tray to her and began to eat, without a word.
There was now a new relation between them. For she felt helplessly in his power. Yet there was no reason why she should. Never ceasing for one moment to be conscious of his presence about the house, or standing silently at the back against the wall in the sun, her feeling was one of a strong and irrational fear, a deep uneasiness, and even – though this she did not know, would have died rather than acknowledge – of some dark attraction. It was as though the act of weeping before him had been an act of resignation – resignation of her authority; and he had refused to hand it back. Several times the quick rebukes had come to her lips, and she had seen him look at her deliberately, not accepting it, but challenging her. Only once, when he had really forgotten to do something and was in the wrong, had he worn his old attitude of blank submissiveness. Then he accepted, because he was at fault. And now she began to avoid him. Whereas before she had made herself follow up his work, and had inspected everything he did, now she hardly went to the kitchen and left the care of the house to him. Even the keys she left on a shelf in the storeroom, where he could find them to open the grocery cupboard as he needed. And she was held in balance, not knowing what this new tension was that she could not break down.
Twice he asked her questions, in that new familiar friendly voice of his.
Once it was about the war. ‘Did Madame think it would be over soon?’ She was startled. To her, living out of contact with everything, not even reading the weekly newspaper, the war was a rumour, something taking place in another world. But she had seen him poring over the old newsprint spread on the kitchen table as covering. She answered stiffly that she did not know. And again, some days later, as if he had been thinking in the interval, he asked: ‘Did Jesus think it right that people should kill each other?’ This time she was angry at the implied criticism, and she answered coldly that Jesus was on the side of the good people. But all day she burned with her old resentment, and at night asked Dick: ‘Where does Moses come from?’
‘Mission boy,’ he replied. ‘The only decent one I’ve ever had.’ Like most South Africans, Dick did not like mission boys, they ‘knew too much’. And in any case they should not be taught to read and write: they should be taught the dignity of labour and general usefulness to the white man.
‘Why?’ he asked suspiciously. ‘No trouble again, I hope?’
‘No.’
‘Has he been cheeky?’
‘No.’
But