Doris Lessing Three-Book Edition: The Golden Notebook, The Grass is Singing, The Good Terrorist. Doris Lessing
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features intent and steady. ‘Get fever much these days? Had it since I brought the quack to see you?’
‘I get it quite often these days,’ said Dick. ‘I get it every year. I had it twice last year.’
‘Wife look after you?’
A worried look came on Dick’s face. ‘Yes,’ he said.
‘How is she?’
‘Seems much the same.’
‘Has she been ill?’
‘No, not ill. But she’s not too good. Seems nervy. She’s run down. Been on the farm too long.’ And then, in a rush, as if he could not keep it to himself another moment, ‘I am worried sick about her.’
‘But what’s the trouble?’ Charlie sounded neutral; yet he never took his eyes off Dick’s face. The two men were still standing in the dusk under the tall shape of the barn. A sweetish moist smell came from the open door; the smell of freshly-ground mealies. Dick shut the door, which was half off its hinges, by lifting it into place with his shoulder. He locked it. There was one screw in the triangular flange of the hasp: a strong man could have wrenched it off the frame. ‘Come up to the house?’ he asked Charlie, who nodded, and then inquired, looking around: ‘Where’s your car?’
‘Oh, I walk these days.’
‘Sold it?’
‘Yes. Cost too much to run. I send in the waggon now to the station when I want something.’
They climbed into Charlie’s monster of a car, which balanced and clambered over the rutted tracks too small for it. The grass was growing back over the roads now that Dick had no car.
Between the low, tree-covered rise where the house was, and where the barns stood among bush, were lands which had not been cultivated. It looked as if they had been allowed to lie fallow, but Charlie, looking closely through the dusk, could see that among the grass and low bushes were thin, straggling mealies. He thought at first they had seeded themselves; but they seemed to be regularly planted. ‘What’s this?’ he asked, ‘what’s the idea?’
‘I was trying out a new idea from America.’
‘What idea?’
‘The bloke said there was no need to plough or to cultivate. The idea is to plant the grain among ordinary vegetation and let it grow of itself.’
‘Didn’t work out, hey?’
‘No,’ said Dick, blankly. ‘I didn’t bother to reap it. I thought I might as well leave it to do the soil some good…’ His voice tailed off.
‘Experiment,’ said Charlie briefly. It was significant that he sounded neither exasperated nor angry. He seemed detached; but kept glancing curiously, with an undercurrent of uneasiness, at Dick, whose face was obstinately set and miserable. ‘What was that you were saying about your wife?’
‘She’s not well.’
‘Yes, but why, man?’
Dick did not answer for a while. They passed from the open lands, where the golden evening glow still lingered on the leaves, to the bush, where it was dense dusk. The big car zoomed up the hill, which was steep, its bonnet reaching up into the sky. ‘I don’t know,’ said Dick at last. ‘She’s different lately. Sometimes I think she’s much better. It’s difficult to tell with women how they are. She’s not the same.’
‘But in what way?’ persisted Charlie.
‘Well, for instance. Once, when she first came to the farm she had more go in her. She doesn’t seem to care. She doesn’t care about anything. She simply sits and does nothing. She doesn’t even trouble about the chickens and things like that. You know she used to make a packet out of them every month or so. And she doesn’t care what the boy does in the house. Once she used to drive me mad nagging. Nag, nag, nag, all day. You know how women get when they’ve been too long on the farm. No self-control.’
‘No woman knows how to handle niggers,’ said Charlie.
‘Well, I am quite worried,’ stated Dick, laughing miserably. ‘I should be quite pleased if she did nag.’
‘Look here, Turner,’ said Charlie abruptly. ‘Why don’t you give up this business and get off the place? You are not doing yourself or your wife any good.’
‘Oh, we rub along.’
‘You are ill, man.’
‘I am all right.’
They stopped outside the house. A glimmer of light came from within, but Mary did not appear. A second light sprang up in the bedroom. Dick had his eyes on it. ‘She’s changing her dress,’ he said; and he sounded pleased. ‘No one has been here for so long.’
‘Why don’t you sell out to me? I’ll give you a good price for it.’
‘Where should I go?’ asked Dick in amazement.
‘Get into town. Get off the land. You are no good on the land. Get yourself a steady job somewhere.’
‘I keep my end up,’ said Dick resentfully.
The thin shape of a woman appeared against the light, on the verandah. The two men got out of the car and went inside.
‘Evening, Mrs Turner.’
‘Good evening,’ said Mary.
Charlie examined her closely when they were inside the lighted room, more closely because of the way she had said, ‘Good evening.’ She remained standing uncertainly in front of him, a dried stick of a woman, her hair that had been bleached by the sun into a streaky mass falling round a scrawny face and tied on the top of her head with a blue ribbon. Her thin, yellowish neck protruded out of a dress that she had apparently just put on. It was a frilled raspberry-coloured cotton; and in her ears were long red ear-rings like boiled sweets, that tapped against her neck in short swinging jerks. Her blue eyes, which had once told anyone who really took the trouble to look into them that Mary Turner was not really ‘stuck-up’, but shy, proud, and sensitive, had a new light in them. ‘Why, good evening!’ she said girlishly. ‘Why, Mr Slatter, we haven’t had the pleasure of seeing you for a long time.’ She laughed, twisting her shoulder in a horrible parody of coquetry.
Dick averted his eyes, suffering. Charlie stared at her rudely: stared and stared until at last she flushed and turned away, tossing her head. ‘Mr Slatter doesn’t like us,’ she informed Dick socially, ‘or otherwise, he would come to see us more often.’
She sat herself down in the corner of the old sofa, which had gone out of shape and become a thing of lumps and hollows with a piece of faded blue stuff stretched over it.
Charlie, his eyes on that material, asked: ‘How is the store going?’
‘We gave it up, it didn’t pay.’ said Dick brusquely. ‘We are using up the stock ourselves.’
Charlie looked at Mary’s ear-rings, and at the sofa-cover, which was of the material always sold to natives, an ugly patterned blue that has become a tradition in South Africa, so much associated with ‘kaffir-truck’ that it shocked Charlie to see it in a white man’s house. He looked round the place, frowning. The curtains were torn; a windowpane had been broken and patched with paper; another had cracked and not been mended at all; the room was indescribably broken down and faded. Yet everywhere were little bits of stuff from the store, roughly-hemmed, draping the back of a chair, or tucked in to form a chair seat. Charlie might have thought that this small evidence of a desire to keep up appearances was a good sign; but all his rough and rather brutal good humour was gone; he was silent, his forehead dark.
‘Like to stay to supper?’ asked Dick at last.
‘No thanks,’ said Charlie; then changed his mind out of curiosity. ‘Yes, I will.’
Unconsciously the two men were speaking as if in the presence of an invalid;