Doris Lessing Three-Book Edition: The Golden Notebook, The Grass is Singing, The Good Terrorist. Doris Lessing
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instead of the usual ‘missus’, which was somehow in better keeping with his station in life.
That ‘madame’ annoyed her. She would have liked to ask him to drop it. But there was nothing disrespectful in it: it was only what he had been taught by some missionary with foolish ideas. And there was nothing in his attitude towards her she could take hold of. But although he was never disrespectful, he forced her now to treat him as a human being; it was impossible for her to thrust him out of her mind like something unclean, as she had done with all the others in the past. She was being forced into contact, and she never ceased to be aware of him. She realized, daily, that there was something in it that was dangerous, but what it was she was unable to define.
Now she dreamed through her broken nights, horrible, frightening dreams. Her sleep, once an instantaneous dropping of a black curtain, had become more real than her waking. Twice she dreamed directly of the native, and on each occasion she woke in terror as he touched her. On each occasion in her dream he had stood over her, powerful and commanding, yet kind, but forcing her into a position where she had to touch him. And there were other dreams, where he did not enter directly, but which were confused, terrifying, horrible, from which she woke sweating in fear, trying to put them out of her mind. She became afraid to go to sleep. She would lie in the dark, tense beside Dick’s relaxed sleeping body, forcing herself to remain awake.
Often, during the day, she watched him covertly, not like a mistress watching a servant work, but with a fearful curiosity, remembering those dreams. And every day he looked after her, seeing what she ate, bringing her meals without her ordering them, bringing her little gifts of a handful of eggs from the compound fowls, or a twist of flowers from the bush.
Once, when it was long past sundown and Dick had not returned, she said to Moses, ‘Keep the dinner hot, I am going to see what has happened to the boss.’
When she was in the bedroom fetching her coat, Moses knocked at the door, and said he would go and find out; Madame should not walk around in the dark bush by herself.
‘All right,’ she said helplessly, and took her coat off.
But there was nothing wrong with Dick. He had been held up over an ox that had broken its leg. And when, a week later, he was again long after his time in coming, and she was worried, she made no effort to find out what was wrong, fearing that the native might again, quite simply and naturally, take the responsibility for her welfare. It had come to this: that she watched her actions from one point of view only; would they allow Moses to strengthen that new human relationship between them, in a way she could not counter, and which she could only try to avoid.
In February, Dick fell ill again with malaria. As before, it was a short, sudden attack, and bad while it lasted. As before, she reluctantly sent a note by bearer to Mrs Slatter, asking them to fetch the doctor. He looked at the slatternly little house with raised eyebrows, and asked Mary why she had taken no notice of his former prescriptions. She did not answer. ‘Why have you not cut down the bush round the house where mosquitoes can breed?’ ‘My husband could not spare the boys.’ ‘But he can spare the time to be ill, eh?’ The doctor’s manner was bluff, easy, but at bottom indifferent; he had learned after years in a farming district, when to cut his losses as a doctor. Not his money, which he knew he would never see, but the patients themselves. These people were hopeless. The window-curtains faded by the sun to a dingy grey, torn and not mended, proclaimed it. Everywhere there was evidence of breakdown in will. It was a waste of time even coming. But from habit he stood over the shivering, burning Dick and prescribed. He said Dick was worn out, a shell of a man, liable to get any disease going. He spoke as strongly as he could, trying to frighten Mary into action. But her attitude said listlessly, ‘What is the use.’ He left at last with Charlie Slatter, who was sardonically disapproving; but unable to prevent himself from thinking that when he took over this place he would remove the wire from the chicken runs for his own, and that the corrugated iron of the house and buildings might come in useful some time.
Mary sat up with Dick the first two nights of his illness, on a hard chair, to keep herself awake, holding the blankets close over the restless limbs. But Dick was not as bad as the last time; he was not afraid now, knowing that the attack would run its course.
Mary made no effort to supervise the farm work; but twice a day, so as to calm him, she drove herself round the farm on a formal and useless inspection. The boys were in the compound loafing. She knew it, and did not care. She hardly looked at the fields: the farm had become something that did not concern her.
In the daytime, when she had finished preparing Dick’s cool drinks, which were all that he took, she sat idly by the bed and sank into her usual apathetic state. Her mind wandered incoherently, dwelling on any scene from her past life that might push itself to the surface. But now it was without nostalgia or desire. And she had lost all sense of time. She set the alarm clock in front of her, to remind her of the regular intervals at which she must go and fetch Dick his drinks. Moses brought her the usual trays of food at the usual times, and she ate mechanically, not noticing what she ate, not noticing, even, that she sometimes put down her knife and fork after a couple of mouthfuls and forgot to finish what was before her. It was on the third morning that he asked, as she whisked an egg he had brought from the compound as a gift, into milk: ‘Did Madame go to bed last night?’ He spoke with that simple directness that always left her disarmed, not knowing how to reply.
She answered, looking down at the frothing milk, avoiding his eyes: ‘I must stay up with the boss.’
‘Did Madame stay up the other night?’
‘Yes,’ she answered, and quickly went into the bedroom with the drink.
Dick lay still, half delirious with fever, in an uncomfortable doze. His temperature had not dropped. He was taking this bout very hard. The sweat poured off him; and then his skin became dry and harsh and burning hot. Every afternoon the slender rod of quicksilver mounted in a trice up the frail glass tube, so she had hardly to keep it in his mouth at all, higher every time she looked at it, until by six in the evening it stood at 105. There it stayed until about midnight, while he tossed and muttered and groaned. In the early hours it dropped rapidly below normal, and he complained he was cold and needed more blankets. But he had all the blankets in the place piled over him. She heated bricks in the oven and wrapped them in cloth and put them by his feet.
That night Moses came to the bedroom door and knocked on the wood frame as he always did. She confronted him through the parted folds of the embroidered hessian curtain.
‘Yes?’ she asked.
‘Madame stay in room tonight. I stay with boss.’
‘No,’ she said, thinking of the long night spent in intimate vigil with this native. ‘No, you go back to the compound and sleep. I will stay with the boss.’
He came forward through the curtains, so that she shrank back a little, he was so close to her. She saw that he held a folded mealie sack in one hand, presumably his preparation for the night. ‘Madame must sleep,’ he said. ‘She is tired, yes?’ She could feel the skin round her eyes drawn tight with strain and weariness; but she insisted in a hard nervous voice: ‘No, Moses. I must stay.’ He moved to the wall where he placed his sack carefully in a space between two cupboards. Then he stood up and said, sounding wounded, even reproachful: ‘Madame not thinks I look after boss right, huh? I too sick sometimes. I keep blankets over boss, yes?’ He moved to the bed, but not too close, and looked down at Dick’s flushed face. ‘I give him this drink when he wakes, yes?’ And the half-humorous, half-reproachful voice left her disarmed against him. She looked at his face once, quickly, avoiding the eyes, then away. But it would not do to seem afraid to look at him; she glanced down at his hand, the big hand with the lighter palm hanging loosely at his side. He insisted again: ‘Madame think I not look after boss well?’
She hesitated, and then said nervously, ‘Yes, but I must stay.’
As if her nervousness and hesitation had been answer enough, the man stooped and straightened out the blankets over the sleeping man. ‘If boss is very sick, I call Madame,’ he said.
She saw him standing by the window, blocking the square