The Sun Between Their Feet: Collected African Stories Volume Two. Doris Lessing
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with what seemed like hatred) he made good money at the garage where he was a mechanic. Before she was married, she had earned her living by letting rooms to travellers, which was how she had met her husband. She talked about him while we waited for him to come in to supper. “He does this every night, every night of my life! You’d think it wasn’t much to ask to come in for meals at the right time, instead of letting everything spoil, but once he gets into the bar with the men, there is no getting him out.”
‘There wasn’t a hint in her voice of what I had heard in the voices of the other two women. And I have often wondered since if in her case too absence would make the heart grow fonder. She sighed often and deeply, and said that when you were single you wanted to be married, and when you were married, you wanted to be single, but what got her was, she had been married before, and she ought to have known better. Not that this one wasn’t a big improvement on the last, whom she had divorced.
‘He didn’t come in until the bar closed, after ten. He was not as good-looking as in his photographs, but that was because his overalls were stiff with grease, and there was oil on his face. She scolded him for being late, and for not having washed, but all he said was: “Don’t try to housetrain me.” At the end of the meal she wondered aloud why she spent her life cooking and slaving for a man who didn’t notice what he ate, and he said she shouldn’t bother, because it was true, he didn’t care what he ate. He nodded at me, and went out again. It was after midnight when he came back, with a stardazed look, bringing a cold draught of night air into the hot lamplit room.
‘“So you’ve decided to come in?” she complained.
‘“I walked out into the veld a bit. The moon is strong enough to read by. There’s rain on the wind.” He put his arm around her waist and smiled at her. She smiled back, her bitterness forgotten. The wanderer had come home.’
I wrote to Alan McGinnery and asked him if there had been a model for his story. I told him why I wanted to know, told him of the old man who had walked up to our house through the bush, fifteen years before. There was no reason to think it was the same man, except for that one detail, the letters he wrote, like ‘bread and butter’ letters after a party or a visit.
I got this reply: ‘I am indebted to you for your interesting and informative letter. You are right in thinking my little story had its start in real life. But in most ways it is far from fact. I took liberties with the time of the story, moving it forward by years, no, decades, and placing it in a modern setting. For the times when Johnny Blakeworthy was loving and leaving so many young women – I’m afraid he was a very bad lot! – are now out of the memory of all but the elderly among us. Everything is so soft and easy now. “Civilization” so-called has overtaken us. But I was afraid if I put my “hero” into his real setting, it would seem so exotic to present-day readers that they would read my little tale for the sake of the background, finding that more interesting than my “hero”.
‘It was just after the Boer War. I had volunteered for it, as a young man does, for the excitement, not knowing what sort of war it really was. Afterwards I decided not to return to England. I thought I would try the mines, so I went to Johannesburg, and there I met my wife, Lena. She was the cook and housekeeper in a men’s boarding-house, a rough job, in rough days. She had a child by Johnny, and believed herself to be married to him. So did I. When I made enquiries I found she had never been married, the papers he had produced at the office were all false. This made things easy for us in the practical sense, but made them worse in some ways. For she was bitter and I am afraid never really got over the wrong done to her. But we married, and I became the child’s father. She was the original of the second woman in my story. I describe her as home-loving, and dainty in her ways. Even when she was cooking for all those miners, and keeping herself and the boy on bad wages, living in a room not much larger than a dog’s kennel, it was all so neat and pretty. That was what took my fancy first. I daresay it was what took Johnny’s too, to begin with, at any rate.
‘Much later – very much later, the child was almost grown, so it was after the Great War – I happened to hear someone speak of Johnny Blakeworthy. It was a woman who had been “married” to him. It never crossed our minds to think – Lena and me – that he had betrayed more than one woman. After careful thought, I decided never to tell her. But I had to know. By then I had done some careful field work. The trail began, or at least, began for me, in Cape Province, with a woman I had heard spoken of, and had then tracked down. She was the first woman in my story, a little plump pretty thing. At the time Johnny married her, she was the daughter of a Boer farmer, a rich one. I don’t have to tell you that this marriage was unpopular. It took place just before the Boer War, that nasty time was to come, but she was a brave girl to marry an Englishman, a rionek. Her parents were angry, but later they were kind and took her back when he left her. He did really marry her, in Church, everything correct and legal. I believe that she was his first love. Later she divorced him. It was a terrible thing, a divorce for those simple people. Now things have changed so much, and people wouldn’t believe how narrow and churchbound they were then. That divorce hurt her whole life. She did not marry again. It was not because she did not want to! She had fought with her parents, saying she must get a divorce, because she wanted to be married. But no one married her. In that old-fashioned rural community, in those days, she was a Scarlet Woman. A sad thing, for she was a really nice woman. What struck me was that she spoke of Johnny with no bitterness at all. Even twenty years later, she loved him.
‘From her, I followed up other clues. With my own wife, I found four women in all. I made it three in my little story: life is always much more lavish with coincidence and drama than any fiction writer dares to be. The red-headed woman I described was a barmaid in a hotel. She hated Johnny. But there was little doubt in my mind what would happen if he walked in through that door.
‘I told my wife that I had been big game hunting. I did not want to stir up old unhappiness. After she died I wrote the story of the journey from one woman to another, all now of middle age, all of whom had been “married” to Johnny. But I had to alter the settings of the story. How fast everything has changed! I would have had to describe the Boer family on their farm, such simple and old-fashioned, good and bigoted people. And their oldest daughter – the “bad” one. There are no girls like that now, not even in convents. Where in the world now would you find girls brought up as strictly and as narrowly as those on those Boer farms, fifty years ago? And still she had the courage to marry her Englishman, that is the marvellous thing. Then I would have had to describe the mining camps of Johannesburg. Then the life of a woman married to a storekeeper in the bush. Her nearest neighbour was fifty miles away and they didn’t have cars in those days. Finally, the early days of Bulawayo, when it was more like a shanty town than a city. No, it was Johnny that interested me, so I decided to make the story modern, and in that way the reader would not be distracted by what is past and gone.’
It was from an African friend who had known the village in which Johnny died that I heard of his last years. Johnny walked into the village, asked to see the Chief, and when the Chief assembled with his elders, asked formally for permission to live in the village, as an African, not as a white man. All this was quite correct, and polite, but the elders did not like it. This village was a long way from the centres of white power, up towards the Zambesi. The traditional life was still comparatively unchanged, unlike the tribes near the white cities, whose structure had been smashed for ever. The people of this tribe cherished their distance from the white man, and feared his influence. At least, the older ones did. While they had nothing against this white man as a man – on the contrary, he seemed more human than most – they did not want a white man in their life. But what could they do? Their traditions of hospitality were strong: strangers, visitors, travellers, must be sheltered and fed. And they were democratic; a man was as good as his behaviour, it was against their beliefs to throw a person out for a collective fault. And perhaps they were, too, a little curious. The white men these people had seen were the tax-collectors, the policemen, the Native Commissioners, all coldly official or arbitrary. This white man behaved like a suppliant, sitting quietly on the outskirts of the village, beyond the huts, under a tree, waiting for the council to make up its mind. Finally they let him stay, on condition that he shared the life of the village in every way. This proviso they probably thought would get rid of him. But he lived there until