Дорис Лессинг – The Sun Between Their Feet: Collected African Stories Volume Two (страница 27)
Mrs Slatter would say to her sons: ‘Don’t cry. Your father doesn’t know his own strength. Don’t cry.’ And she went on sewing, composed and pale.
Once at the station, the Slatter car and ours were drawn up side by side outside the store. Mrs Slatter was sitting in the front seat, beside the driver’s seat. In our car my father drove and my mother was beside him. We children were in the back seats. Mr Slatter came out of the bar with Mrs Pritt and stood on the store veranda talking to her. He stood before her, legs apart, in his way of standing, head back on his shoulders, eyes narrowed, grinning, red fists loose at his sides, and talked on for something like half an hour. Meanwhile Mrs Pritt let her weight slump on to one hip and lolled in front of him. She wore a tight shrill green dress, so short it showed the balls of her thin knees.
And my father leaned out of our car window though we had all our stores in and might very well leave for home now, and talked steadily and gently to Mrs Slatter, who was quiet, not looking at her husband, but making conversation with my father and across him to my mother. And so they went on talking until Mr Slatter left Mrs Pritt, and slammed himself into the driver’s seat and started the car.
I did not like Mrs Pritt and I knew neither of my parents did. She was a thin wiry tall woman with black short jumpy hair. She had a sharp knowing face and a sudden laugh like the scream of a hen caught by the leg. Her voice was always loud, and she laughed a great deal.
But seeing Mr Slatter with her was enough to know that they fitted. She was not gentle and kindly like Mrs Slatter. She was as tough in her own way as Mr Slatter. And long before I ever heard it said I knew well enough that, as my mother said primly, they liked each other. I asked her, meaning her to tell the truth, Why does Mr Slatter always go over when Mr Pritt is away, and she said: I expect Mr Slatter likes her.
In our district, with thirty or forty families on the farms spread over a hundred square miles or so, nothing happened privately. That day at the station I must have been ten years old, eleven, but it was not the first or the last time I heard the talk between my parents:
My father: ‘I daresay it could make things easier for Molly.’
She, then: ‘Do you?’
‘But if he’s got to have an affair, he might at least not push it down our throats, for Molly’s sake.’
And she: ‘Does he have to have an affair?’
She said the word, affair, with difficulty. It was not her language. Nor, and that was what she was protesting against, my father’s. For they were both conventional and religious people. Yet at moments of crisis, at moments of scandal and irregularity, my father spoke this other language, cool and detached, as if he were born to it.
‘A man like Slatter,’ he said thoughtfully, as if talking to another man, ‘it’s obvious. And Emmy Pritt. Yes. Obviously, obviously! But it depends on how Molly takes it. Because if she doesn’t take it the right way, she could make it hell for herself.’
I used to stay with Mrs Slatter sometimes in the holidays. I went across-country over the kaffir paths, walking or on my bicycle, with some clothes in a small suitcase.
The boys were, from having to stand up to Mr Slatter, tough and indifferent boys, and went about the farm in a closed gang. They did man’s work, driving tractors and superintending the gangs of boys before they were in their ‘teens. I stayed with Mrs Slatter. She cooked a good deal, and sewed and gardened. Most of the day she sat on the veranda sewing. We did not talk much. She used to make her own dresses, cotton prints and pastel linens, like all the women of the district wore. She made Mr Slatter’s khaki farm shirts and the boys’ shirts. Once she made herself a petticoat that was too small for her to get into, and Mr Slatter saw her struggling with it in front of the mirror, and he said: ‘What size do you think
When I was twelve or thereabouts, I noticed that the boys had turned against their mother, not in the way of being brutal to her, but they spoke to her as their father did, calling her Bluebell, or the Fat Woman at the Fair. It was odd to hear them, because it was as if they said simply, Mum, or Mother. Not once did I hear her lose her temper with them. I could see she had determined to herself not to make them any part of what she had against Mr Slatter. I knew she was pleased to have me there, during that time, with the five men coming in only for meals.
One evening during a long stay, the boys as usual had gone off to their rooms to play when supper was done, and Mr Slatter said to his wife: ‘I’m off. I’ll be back tomorrow for breakfast.’ He went out into the dark and the wet. It was raining hard that night. The window panes were streaked with rain and shaking with the wind. Mrs Slatter looked across at me and said – and this was the first time it had been mentioned how often he went off after dinner, coming back as the sun rose, or sometimes not for two or three days: ‘You must remember something. There are some men, like Mr Slatter, who’ve got more energy than they know what to do with. Do you know how he started? When I met him and we were courting he was a butcher’s boy at the corner. And now he’s worth as much as any man in the district.’
‘Yes,’ I said, understanding for the first time that she was very proud of him.
She waited for me to say something more, and then said: ‘Yes, we have all kinds of ideas when we’re young. But Mr Slatter’s a man that does not know his own strength. There are some things he doesn’t understand, and it all comes from that. He never understands that other people aren’t as strong as he is.’
We were sitting in the big living-room. It had a stone floor with rugs and skins on it. A boot clattered on the stone and we looked up and there was Mr Slatter. His teeth were showing. He wore his big black boots, shining now from the wet, and his black oilskin glistened. ‘The bossboy says the river’s up,’ he said. ‘I won’t get across tonight.’ He took off his oilskin there, scattering wet on Mrs Slatter’s polished stone floor, tugged off his boots, and reached out through the door to hang his oilskin in the passage and set his boots under it, and came back.
There were two rivers between the Slatters’ farm and the Pritts’ farm, twelve miles off, and when the water came down they could be impassable for hours.
‘So I don’t know my own strength?’ he said to her, direct, and it was a soft voice, more frightening than I had ever heard from him, for he bared grinning teeth as usual, and his big fists hung at his sides.
‘No,’ she said steadily, ‘I don’t think you do.’ She did not lift her eyes, but stayed quiet in the corner of the sofa under the lamp. ‘We aren’t alone,’ she added quickly, and now she did look warningly at him.
He turned his head and looked towards me. I made fast for the door. I heard her say, ‘Please, I’m sorry about the river. But leave me alone, please.’
‘So you’re sorry about the river.’
‘Yes.’
‘And I don’t know my own strength?’
I shut the door. But it was a door that was never shut, and it swung open again and I ran down the passage away from it, as he said: ‘So that’s why you keep your bedroom door locked, Lady Godiva, is that it?’
And she screamed out: ‘Ah, leave me alone. I don’t care what you do. I don’t care now. But you aren’t going to make use of me. I
It was a big house, rooms sprawling everywhere. The boys had two rooms and a playroom off at one end of a long stone passage. Dairies and larders and kitchen opened off the passage. Then a dining-room and some offices and a study. Then the living-room. And another passage off at an angle, with the room where I slept and beside it Mrs Slatter’s big bedroom with the double bed and after that a room they called the workroom, but it was an ordinary room and Mr Slatter’s things were in it, with a bed.
I had not thought before that they did not share a bedroom. I knew no married people in the district who had separate rooms and that is why I had not thought about the small room where Mr Slatter slept.
Soon after I had shut the door on myself, I heard them come along the passage outside, I heard voices in the room next door. Her voice was pleading, his loud, and he was laughing a lot.
In the morning at breakfast I looked at Mrs Slatter but she was not taking any notice of us children. She was pale. She was helping Mr Slatter to his breakfast. He always had three or four eggs on thick slats of bacon, and then slice after slice of toast, and half a dozen cups of tea as black as it would come out of the pot. She had some toast and a cup of tea and watched him eat. When he went out to the farm work he kissed her, and she blushed.