Дорис Лессинг – The Sun Between Their Feet: Collected African Stories Volume Two (страница 26)
‘Look at the pomegranate,’ I said. He came to a halt beside the tree, and looked. I was searching those clear grey eyes now for a trace of that indulgence they had shown my mother over the brussels sprouts, over that first unripe pomegranate.
Now all I wanted was indulgence; I abandoned everything else.
‘It’s full of ants,’ he said at last.
‘Only a little, only where it’s cracked.’
He stood, frowning, chewing at his piece of grass. His lips were full and thick-skinned; and I could see the blood, dull and dark around the pale groove where the grass-stem pressed.
The pomegranate hung there, swarming with ants.
Now, I thought wildly. Now – crack now.
There was not a sound. The sun pouring down, hot and yellow, drawing up the smell of the grasses. There was, too, a faint sour smell from the fermenting juice of the pomegranate.
‘It’s bad,’ said William, in that uncomfortable, angry voice. ‘And what’s that bit of dirty rag for?’
‘It was breaking, the twig was breaking off – I tied it up.’
‘Mad,’ he remarked, aside, to the afternoon. ‘Quite mad,’ He was looking about him in the grass. He reached down and picked up a stick.
‘No,’ I cried out, as he hit at the tree. The pomegranate flew into the air and exploded in a scatter of crimson seeds, fermenting juice and black ants.
The cracked empty skin, with its white clean-looking inner skin faintly stained with juice, lay in two fragments at my feet.
He was poking sulkily with the stick at the little scarlet seeds that lay everywhere on the earth.
Then he did look at me. Those clear eyes were grave again, thoughtful, and judging. They held that warning I had seen in them before.
‘That’s your pomegranate,’ he said at last.
‘Yes.’ I said.
He smiled. ‘We’d better go up, if we want any tea.’ We went together up the hill to the house, and as we entered the room where the grown-ups sat over the teacups, I spoke quickly, before he could. In a bright careless voice I said: ‘It was bad, after all, the ants had got at it. It should have been picked before.’
That night of the dance, years later, when I saw Mrs Slatter come into the bedroom at midnight, not seeing me because the circle of lamplight was focused low, with a cold and terrible face I never would have believed could be hers after knowing her so long during the day-times and the visits -that night, when she had dragged herself out of the room again, still not knowing I was there, I went to the mirror to see my own face. I held the lamp as close as I could and looked into my face. For I had not known before that a person’s face could be smooth and comfortable, though often sorrowful, like Molly Slatter’s had been all those years, and then hard-set, in the solitude away from the dance and the people (that night they had drunk a great deal and the voices of the singing reminded me of when dogs howl at the full moon), into an old and patient stone. Yes, her face looked like white stone that the rain has trickled over and worn through the wet seasons.
My face, that night in the mirror, dusted yellow from the lamplight, with the dark watery spaces of the glass behind, was smooth and enquiring, with the pert flattered look of a girl in her first long dress and dancing with the young people for the first time. There was nothing in it, a girl’s face, empty. Yet I had been crying just before, and I wished then I could go away into the dark and stay there for ever. Yet Molly Slatter’s terrible face was familiar to me, as if it were her own face, her real one. I seemed to know it. And that meant that the years I had known her comfortable and warm in spite of all her troubles had been saying something else to me about her. But only now I was prepared to listen.
I left the mirror, set the lamp down on the dressing-table, and went out into the passage and looked for her among the people, and there she was in her red satin dress looking just as usual, talking to my father, her hand on the back of his chair, smiling down at him.
‘It hasn’t been a bad season, Mr Farquar,’ she was saying, ‘the rains haven’t done us badly at all.’
Driving home in the car that night, my mother asked: ‘What was Molly saying to you?’
And my father said: ‘Oh I don’t know, I really don’t know.’ His voice was sad and angry.
She said: ‘That dress of hers. Her evening dresses look like a cheap night-club.’
He said, troubled and sorrowful, ‘Yes. Actually I said something to her.’
‘Somebody should.’
‘No,’ he said, quick against the cold criticizing voice. ‘No. It’s a – pretty colour. But I said to her, There’s not much
‘What did she say?’
‘She was hurt. I was sorry I said anything.’
‘H’mm,’ said my mother, with a little laugh.
He turned his head from his driving, so that the car lights swung wild over the rutted track for a moment, and said direct at her: ‘She’s a good woman. She’s a nice woman.’
But she gave another offended gulp of laughter. As a woman insists in an argument because she won’t give in, even when she knows she is wrong.
As for me, I saw that dress again, with its criss-cross of narrow sweat-darkened straps over the ageing white back, and I saw Mrs Slatter’s face when my father criticized her. I might have been there, I saw it so clearly. She coloured, lifted her head, lower her lids so that the tears would not show, and she said: ‘I’m sorry you feel like that, Mr Farquar.’ It was with dignity. Yes. She had put on that dress in order to say something. But my father did not approve. He had said so.
She cared what my father said. They cared very much for each other. She called him Mr Farquar always, and he called her Molly; and when the Slatters came over to tea, and Mr Slatter was being brutal, there was a gentleness and a respect for her in my father’s manner which made even Mr Slatter feel it and even, sometimes, repeat something he had said to his wife in a lower voice, although it was still impatient.
The first time I knew my father felt for Molly Slatter and that my mother grudged it to her was when I was perhaps seven or eight. Their house was six miles away over the veld, but ten by the road. Their house like ours was on a ridge. At the end of the dry season when the trees were low and the leaves thinning, we could see their lights flash out at sundown, low and yellow across the miles of country. My father, after coming back from seeing Mr Slatter about some farm matter, stood by our window looking at their lights, and my mother watched him. Then he said: ‘Perhaps she should stand up to him? No, that’s
My mother said, her head low over her sewing: ‘She married him.’
He let his eyes swing around at her, startled. Then he laughed. ‘That’s right, she married him.’
‘Oh come off it, old girl,’ he said almost gay, laughing and hard. Then, still laughing angrily he went over and kissed her on the cheek.
‘I like Molly,’ she said, defensive. ‘I like her. She hasn’t got what you might call conversation but I like her.’
‘Living with Slatter, I daresay she’s got used to keeping her mouth shut.’
When Molly Slatter came over to spend the day with my mother the two women talked eagerly for hours about household things. Then, when my father came in for tea or dinner, there was a lock of sympathies and my mother looked ironical while he went to sit by Mrs Slatter, even if only for a minute, saying: ‘Well, Molly? Everything all right with you?’
‘I’m very well, thank you, Mr Farquar, and so are the children.’
Most people were frightened of Mr Slatter. There were four Slatter boys, and when the old man was in a temper and waving the whip he always had with him, they ran off into the bush and stayed there until he had cooled down. All the natives on their farm were afraid of him. Once when he knew their houseboy had stolen some soap he tied him to a tree in the garden without food and water all of one day, and then through the night, and beat him with his whip every time he went past, until the boy confessed. And once, when he had hit a farm-boy, and the boy complained to the police, Mr Slatter tied the boy to his horse and rode it at a gallop to the police station twelve miles off and made the boy run beside, and told him if he complained to the police again he would kill him. Then he paid the ten-shilling fine and made the boy run beside the horse all the way back again.
I was so frightened of him that I could feel myself begin trembling when I saw his car turning to come up the drive from the farm lands.
He was a square fair man, with small sandy-lashed blue eyes, and small puffed cracked lips, and red ugly hands. He used to come up the wide red shining steps of the veranda, grinning slightly, looking at us. Then he would take a handful of tow-hair from the heads of whichever of his sons were nearest, one in each fist, and tighten his fists slowly, not saying a word, while they stood grinning back and their eyes filled slowly. He would grin over their heads at Molly Slatter, while she sat silent, saying nothing. Then, one or other of the boys would let out a sound of pain, and Mr Slatter showed his small discoloured teeth in a grin of triumphant good humour and let them go. Then he stamped off in his big farm boots into the house.