Doris Lessing Three-Book Edition: The Golden Notebook, The Grass is Singing, The Good Terrorist. Doris Lessing
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No one really believes in the malignancy of gossip, save those who know how they themselves have suffered from it; and the Slatters would have cried, had they been challenged: ‘We have told people nothing but the truth’ – but with that self-conscious indignation that confesses guilt. Mrs Slatter would have had to be a most extraordinary woman to remain perfectly impartial and fair to Mary, after having been snubbed so many times. For she had made repeated attempts to ‘get Mary out of herself’, as she put it. Sensing Mary’s fierce pride (she had plenty of her own), she had asked her time and time again to a party, or a tennis afternoon, or an informal dance. Even after the second of Dick’s illnesses she had tried to make Mary break her isolation: the doctor had been frighteningly cynical about the Turner ménage. But always came back those curt little notes from Mary (the Turners had not had a telephone installed when everyone else did, because of the expense) that were like the deliberate ignoring of an offered hand. When Mrs Slatter came across Mary in the store on post-days, she had always asked her, with unfailing kindness, to come over some time. And Mary had always replied stiffly that she would like to, but that ‘Dick was so busy just now’. But it was a long time now since anyone had seen Mary or Dick at the station.
‘What did they do?’ people asked. At the Slatters’ people always asked what the Turners did. And Mrs Slatter, whose good humour and patience had at long last given out, was prepared to tell them. There was that time Mary ran away from her husband – but that must be a good six years ago now. And Charlie Slatter would chip in, telling his story how Mary had arrived hatless and shabby, after having walked alone over the veld (although she was a woman), and asked him to drive her in to the station. ‘How was I to know she was running off from Turner? She didn’t tell me. I thought she was going in for a day’s shopping, and Turner was too busy. And when Turner came over, half-batty with worry, I had to tell him I had taken her in. She shouldn’t have done it. It was not the right thing to do.’ The story had by now become monstrously distorted. Mary had run away from her husband in the middle of the night because he had locked her out, had found refuge with the Slatters, had borrowed money from them to leave. Dick had come after her next morning and promised never to illtreat her again. That was the story, told all over the district to the accompaniment of headshaking and tongue-clickings. But when people started saying that Slatter had horsewhipped Turner, it was too much: Charlie got annoyed. He liked Dick, though he despised him. Dick he was sorry for. He began to put people right about the affair. He repeated continually that Dick should have let Mary go. It was good riddance. He had been well out of it and didn’t know when he was lucky. So, slowly, because of Charlie, the thing was reversed. Mary was execrated; Dick exonerated. But of all this interest and talk, Mary and Dick remained ignorant. Necessarily so, since for years they had been confined to the farm.
The real reason why the Slatters, particularly Charlie, maintained their interest in the Turners, was that they wanted Dick’s farm still: more even than they had. And, since it was Charlie’s intervention that precipitated the tragedy, though he cannot be blamed for it, it is necessary to explain about his farming. Just as World War II produced its fabulously wealthy tobacco barons, so the First World War enriched many farmers because of the sharp rise in the price of maize. Until World War I, Slatter had been poor; after it, he found himself rich. And once a man is rich, when he has the temperament of a Slatter, he gets richer and richer. He was careful not to invest his money in farming: farming he did not trust as an investment. Any surplus went into mining shares; and he did not improve his farm more than was essential for the purpose of making money from it. He had five hundred acres of the most beautiful rich dark soil, which in the old days had produced twenty-five and thirty bags of mealies to the acre. Year after year he had squeezed that soil, until by now he got five bags an acre if he was lucky. He never dreamed of fertilizing. He cut down his trees (such as remained when the mining companies had done) to sell as firewood. But even a farm as rich as his was not inexhaustible; and while he no longer needed to make his thousands every year, his soil was played out, and he wanted more. His attitude to the land was fundamentally the same as that of the natives whom he despised; he wanted to work out one patch of country and move on to the next. And he had cultivated all the cultivable soil. He needed Dick’s farm badly, because the farms that bounded his on the other sides were taken up. He knew exactly what he wanted to do with it. Dick’s farm consisted of a little bit of everything. He had a hundred acres of that wonderful dark soil; and it was not played out, because he had looked after it. He had a little soil suitable for tobacco. And the rest was good for grazing.
It was the grazing Charlie wanted. He did not believe in pampering cattle by feeding them in winter. He turned them out to fend for themselves, which was all very well when the grass was good, but he had so many cattle and the grazing was thin and poor. So Dick provided the only outlet. For years Charlie had been planning for when Dick would be bankrupt. But then Dick obstinately refused to go bankrupt. ‘How does he do it?’ people asked irritably; for everyone knew that he never seemed to make any money, always had bad seasons, was always in debt. ‘Because they live like pigs and they never buy anything,’ said Mrs Slatter tartly; by now she felt that Mary could go and drown herself, for all she cared.
Perhaps they would not have been so indignant and as irritated if Dick had been suitably conscious of his failure. If he had come to Charlie and asked for advice, and pleaded incapacity, it would have been different. But he did not. He sat tight on his debts and his farm, and ignored Charlie. To whom it occurred one day that he had not seen Dick at all for over a year. ‘How time flies!’ said Mrs Slatter, when he pointed this out; but after working it out, they agreed it was nearer two years; time, on a farm, has a way of prolonging itself unnoticed. That same afternoon Charlie drove over to the Turners. He was feeling a little guilty. He had always considered himself as Dick’s mentor, as a man with much longer experience and greater knowledge. He felt responsible for Dick, whom he had watched right from the time he first began to farm. As he drove, he kept a sharp eye for signs of neglect. Things seemed neither better nor worse. The fireguards along the boundary were there, but they would protect the farm from a small slow-burning fire, not a big one with the wind behind it. The cowsheds, while not actually falling down, had been propped up by poles, and the thatched roofs were patched like darned stockings, the grass all different colours and stages of newness, reaching untidily to the ground in untrimmed swathes. The roads needed draining: they were in a deplorable state. The big plantation of gum trees past which the road went had been burnt by a veld-fire in one corner; they stood pale and spectral in the strong yellow afternoon sunlight, their leaves hanging stiffly down, their trunks charred black.
Everything was just the same: ramshackle, but not exactly hopeless.
He found Dick sitting on a big stone by the tobacco barns, which were now used as store-sheds, watching his boys stack the year’s supply of meal out of reach of the ants on strips of iron supported by bricks. Dick’s big floppy farm hat was pulled over his face, and he looked up to nod at Charlie, who stood beside him, watching the operations, his eyes narrowed; he was noting that the sacks in which the meal was held were so rotten with age that they were unlikely to last out the season.
‘What can I do for you?’ asked Dick, with his usual defensive politeness. But his voice was uncertain; it sounded unused. And his eyes, peering painfully out of the shadow of the hat, were bright and anxious.
‘Nothing,’ said Charlie curtly, giving him a slow, irritated look. ‘Just came to see how you were doing. Haven’t seen you for months.’
To which there came no reply. The natives were finishing work. The sun had gone down, leaving a wake of sultry red over the kopjes, and the dusk was creeping over the fields from the edges of the bush. The compound, visible among the trees half a mile away as a group of conical shapes, was smoking gently, and there was a small glow of fire behind dark trunks. Someone was beating a drum; the monotonous tom-tom noise sounded the end of the day. The boys were swinging their tattered jackets over their shoulders and filing away along the edge of the lands. ‘Well,’ said Dick, getting up with a painful stiff movement, ‘that’s another day finished.’ He shivered sharply. Charlie examined him: big trembling hands as thin as spines; thin hunched shoulders set in a steady shiver. And it was very hot: the ground was glowing out warmth and the red flush in the sky was fiery. ‘Got fever?’ asked Charlie.
‘No, don’t