Doris Lessing Three-Book Edition: The Golden Notebook, The Grass is Singing, The Good Terrorist

‘Where’s your old man?’ he asked with brusque jocularity.

‘He’s working…’ stammered Mary.

He grunted, looked suspicious, but lifted her suitcase into his car which was standing under a big tree beside the road. He got into the car, and she climbed in beside him, fumbling with the door, while he stared ahead down the road, whistling between his teeth: Charlie did not believe in pampering women by waiting on them. At last she got herself settled, clutching her suitcase as if it were a passport.

‘Hubby too busy to take you to the station?’ asked Charlie at last, turning to look at her shrewdly. She coloured up, and nodded, feeling guilty; but she did not consciously reflect she was putting him in a false position; her mind was on that train.

He put down the accelerator and the big powerful car tore along the track, closely missing the trees, and skidding badly in the dust. The train was standing in the station, panting and dribbling water, and she had no time to spare. She thanked Charlie briefly, and had forgotten him before the train started. She had just enough money to get her into town: not enough for a taxi.

She walked from the station, carrying her suitcase, through the town she had not entered since she left it after her marriage; on the few occasions Dick had had to make the trip, she had refused to accompany him, shrinking from exposing herself to the chance of meeting people she had known. Her heart lifted as she neared the Club.

It was such a lovely, lovely day, with its gusts of perfumed wind, and its gay glittering sunshine. Even the sky looked different, seen from between the well-known buildings, that seemed so fresh and clean with their white walls and red roofs. It was not the implacable blue dome that arched over the farm, enclosing it in a cycle of unalterable seasons; it was a soft flower-blue, and she felt, in her exaltation, that she could run off the pavement into the blue substance and float there, at ease and peaceful at last. The street she walked along was lined with bauhinea trees, with their pink and white blossoms perched on the branches like butterflies among leaves. It was an avenue of pink and white, with the fresh blue sky above. It was a different world! It was her world.

At the Club she was met by a new matron who told her they did not take married women. The woman looked at her curiously, and that look destroyed Mary’s sudden irresponsible happiness. She had forgotten about the rule against married women; but then, she had not been thinking of herself as married. She came to her senses, as she stood in the hall where she had faced Dick Turner all those years ago, and looked about her at the unchanged setting, which was yet so very strange to her. Everything looked so glossy, and clean and ordered.

Soberly she went to an hotel, and tidied her hair when she reached the room she had been given. Then she walked to the office. None of the girls working there knew her. The furniture had been changed; the desk where she had sat was moved, and it seemed outrageous that her things should have been tampered with. She looked at the girls in their pretty frocks, with their dressed hair, and thought for the first time that she hardly looked the part. But it was too late now. She was being shown into her old employer’s office, and immediately she saw on his face the look of the woman at the Club. She found herself glancing down at her hands, which were crinkled and brown; and hid them under her bag. The man opposite to her was staring at her, looking closely at her face. Then he glanced at her shoes, which were still red with dust, because she had forgotten to wipe them. Looking grieved, but at the same time shocked, even scandalized, he said that the job had been filled already, and that he was sorry. She felt, again, outraged; for all that time she had worked here, it had been part of herself, this office, and now he would not take her back. ‘I am sorry, Mary,’ he said, avoiding her eyes; and she saw that the job had not been filled and that he was putting her off. There was a long moment of silence, while Mary saw the dreams of the last few weeks fade and vanish. Then he asked her if she had been ill.

‘No,’ she said bleakly.

Back in the hotel bedroom she looked at herself in the glass. Her frock was a faded cotton; and she could see, comparing it with the clothes of the girls in the office, that it was very out of fashion. Still, it was decent enough. True that her skin had become dried and brown, but when she relaxed her face, she could not see much difference in herself. Holding it smoothed and still, there were little white marks raying out from her eyes, like brush strokes. It was a bad habit to get into, she thought, screwing up one’s eyes. And her hair was not very smart. But then, did he think one had hairdressers on farms? She was suddenly viciously, revengefully angry against him, against the matron, against everyone. What did they expect? That she should have gone through all those sufferings and disappointments and yet remain unchanged? But it was the first time that she admitted to herself that she had changed, in herself, not in her circumstances. She thought that she would go to a beauty shop and get at least her appearance restored to normal; then she would not be refused the job that was hers by right. But she remembered she had no money. Turning out her purse she found half a crown and a sixpence. She would not be able to pay her hotel bill. Her moment of panic faded; she sat down stiffly on a chair against the wall, and remained still, wondering what to do. But the effort of thought was too great; she seemed faced by innumerable humiliations and obstacles. She appeared to be waiting for something. After a while, her body slumped into itself, and there was a dogged patient look about her shoulders. When there was a knock on the door, she looked up as if she had been expecting it, and Dick’s entrance did not change her face. For a moment they said nothing. Then he appealed to her, holding out his arms: ‘Mary, don’t leave me.’ She sighed, stood up, automatically adjusted her skirt and smoothed her hair. She gave the impression of starting off for a planned journey. Seeing her pose, and her face, which showed no opposition or hatred, only resignation, Dick dropped his arms. There was to be no scene: her mood forbade it.

In his turn he came to his senses, and, as she had done, glanced at himself in the mirror. He had come in his farm clothes, without stopping even to eat, after reading the note which had seemed to stab him with pain and humiliation. His sleeves flapped over spare burnt arms; his feet were sockless and thrust into hide boots. But he said, as if they had come in together for a trip, that they might go and have lunch and on to a cinema, if she felt like it. He was trying to make her feel as if nothing had happened, she thought; but looking at him she saw it was a response to her acceptance of the situation that made him speak as he did. Seeing her awkwardly, painfully, smooth her dress, he said that she should go and buy herself some clothes.

She replied, speaking for the first time, in her usual tart and offhand way, ‘What shall I use for money?’

They were back together again, not even the tones of their voices changed.

After they had eaten, in a restaurant that Mary chose because it looked too out of the way for any of her old friends to see her there, they went back to the farm, as if everything were quite normal, and her running away a little thing, and one that could be easily forgotten.

But when she got home, and she found herself back in her usual routine, with now not even day-dreams to sustain her, facing her future with a tired stoicism, she found she was exhausted. It was an effort for her to do anything at all. It seemed as if the trip into town had drained her reserves of strength and left her with just enough each day to do what had to be done, but nothing more. This was the beginning of an inner disintegration in her. It began with this numbness, as if she could no longer feel or fight.

And perhaps, if Dick had not got ill when he did, the end would have come quickly after all, one way or another. Perhaps she might have died quite soon, as her mother had done, after a brief illness, simply because she did not want particularly to live. Or she might have run away again, in another desperate impulse towards escape, and this time done it sensibly, and learned how to live again, as she was made to live, by nature and upbringing, alone and sufficient to herself. But there was a sudden and unexpected change in her life, which staved off the disintegration for a little while. A few months after she had run away, and six years after she had married him, Dick got ill, for the first time.

7 (#ulink_73bbe80c-21ca-5cf8-b3af-7aa815b5f22f)

It was a brilliant, cool, cloudless June. This was the time of the year Mary liked best: warm during the day, but with a tang in the air; and several months to go before the smoke from the veld fires thickened into the sulphurous haze that dimmed the colours of the bush. The coolness gave her back some of her vitality: she was tired, yes, but it was not unbearable; she clutched at the cold months as if they were a shield to ward off the dreaded listlessness of the heat that would follow.

In the early mornings, when Dick had gone to the lands, she would walk gently over the sandy soil in front of the house, looking up into the high blue dome that was fresh as ice crystals, a marvellous clear blue, with never a cloud to stain it, not for months and months. The cold of the night was still in the soil. She would lean down to touch it, and touched, too, the rough brick of the house, that was cool and damp against her fingers. Later, when it grew warm, and the sun seemed as hot as in summer, she would go out into the front and stand under a tree on the edge of the clearing (never far into the bush where she was afraid) and let the deep shade rest her. The thick olive-green leaves overhead let through chinks of clear blue, and the wind was sharp and cold. And then, suddenly, the whole sky lowered itself into thick grey blanket, and for a few days it was a different world, with a soft dribble of rain, and it was really cold: so cold she wore a sweater and enjoyed the sensation of shivering inside it. But this never lasted long. It seemed that from one half hour to the next the heavy grey would grow thin, showing blue behind, and then the sky would seem to lift, with layers of dissolving cloud in the middle air; all at once, there would be a high blue sky again, all the grey curtains gone. The sunshine dazzled and glittered, but held no menace; this was not the sun of October, that insidiously sapped from within. There was a lift in the air, an exhilaration. Mary felt healed – almost. Almost, she became as she had been, brisk and energetic, but with a caution in her face and in her movements that showed she had not forgotten the heat would return. She tenderly submitted herself to this miraculous three months of winter, when the country was purified of its menace. Even the veld looked different, flaming for a few brief weeks into red and gold and russet, before the trees became solid masses of heavy green. It was as if this winter had been sent especially for her, to send a tingle of vitality into her, to save her from her helpless dullness. It was her winter; that was how she felt. Dick noticed it; he was attentively solicitous to her after her running away – for her return had bound him to her in gratitude for ever. If he had been a spiteful sort of man, he might have gone cold against her because it had really been such an easy way to win mastery over him, the sort of trick women use to defeat their men. But it never occurred to him. And after all, her running away had been genuine enough; though it had had the results that any calculating woman could have foreseen. He was gentle and tolerant, curbing his rages; and he was pleased to see her with new life, moving around the house with more zest, a softened, rather pathetic look on her face, as if she were clinging to a friend she knew must leave her. He even asked her again to come down on the farm with him; he felt a need to be near her, for he was secretly afraid she might vanish again one day when he was away. For although their marriage was all wrong, and there was no real understanding between them, he had become accustomed to the double solitude that any marriage, even a bad one, becomes. He could not imagine returning to a house where there was no Mary. And even her rages against her servants seemed to him, during that short time, endearing; he was grateful for the resurgence of vitality that showed itself in an increased energy over the shortcomings and laziness of her houseboy.

But she refused to help him on the farm. It seemed to her a cruelty that he should suggest it. Up here, on the rise, even with the tumbled heap of big boulders behind the house that blocked the sweeping winds, it was cool compared with the fields shut down between ridges of rock and trees. Down there, one would not be able to tell it was winter! Even now, looking down into the hollow one could see the heat shimmering over buildings and earth. No, let her stay where she was: she wouldn’t go down with him. He accepted it, grieved and snubbed as always; but still, happier than he had been for a long time. He liked to see her at night, sitting peacefully with her hands folded, on the sofa, cuddling herself luxuriously inside her sweater, shivering cheerfully with the cold. For these nights the roof cracked and crinkled like a thousand fireworks, because of the sharp alternations between the day’s hot sun and the frosts of night. He used to watch her reaching up her hand to touch the icy-cold iron of the roof, and felt disconsolate and helpless against this mute confession of how much she hated the summer months. He even began to think of putting in ceilings. He secretly got out his farm books and calculated what they would cost. But the last season had been a bad one for him; and the end of his impulse to protect her from what she dreaded was a sigh, and a determination to wait until next year, when things might be better.

Once she did go down with him to the lands. It was when he told her there had been frost. She stood over the cold earth in the vlei one morning before the sun rose, laughing with pleasure, because of the crusty film of white over the earth. ‘Frost!’ she said. ‘Who would believe it, in this baked, godforsaken spot!’ She picked up pieces of the crackling flimsy stuff and rubbed them between blue hands, inviting him to do the same, sharing with him this moment of delight. They were moving gently towards a new relation; they were more truly together than they had ever been. But then it was that he became ill; and the new tenderness between them, which might have grown into something strong enough to save them both, was not yet strong enough to survive this fresh trouble.

For one thing, Dick had never been ill before, although this was a malaria district and he had lived in it so long. Perhaps he had had malaria in his blood for years and never known it? He always took quinine, every night, during the wet season, but not when it grew cold. Somewhere on the farm there must be, he said, a tree trunk filled with stagnant water, in a warm enough spot for mosquitoes to breed; or perhaps an old rusting tin in a shady place where the sun could not reach the water to evaporate it. In any event, weeks after one could expect fever in the usual way, Mary saw Dick come up from the lands one evening, pale and shivering. She offered him quinine and aspirin, which he took, and afterwards fell into bed, without eating his supper. The next morning, angry with himself and refusing to believe he was ill, he was off to work as usual, wearing a heavy leather jacket as a futile prophylactic against violent shivering fits. At ten in the morning, with the fever sweat pouring down his face and neck and soaking his shirt, he crawled up the hill and got between blankets, half-unconscious already.

It was a very sharp attack, and because he was not used to illness, he was querulous and difficult. Mary sent a letter over to Mrs Slatter – though she hated having to ask favours of her – and later that day Charlie brought the doctor in his car; he had driven thirty miles to fetch him. The doctor made the usual pronouncements, and when he had finished with Dick, told Mary the house was dangerous as it was, and should be wired for mosquitoes. Also, he said, the bush should be cut back for another hundred yards about the house. Ceilings should be put in at once, otherwise there was danger of their both getting sunstroke. He looked shrewdly at Mary, informed her she was anaemic, run down and in bad nervous condition and she should go for at least three months to the coast at once. He then left, while Mary stood on the verandah and watched the car drive off, with a grim little smile on her face. She was thinking, with hate, that it was all very well for rich professionals to talk. She hated that doctor, with his calm way of shrugging off their difficulties; when she had said they could not afford a holiday, he had said sharply, ‘Nonsense! Can you afford to be really ill?’ And he had asked how long it had been since she had been to the coast? She had never seen the sea! But the doctor had understood their position better than she imagined, for the bill she awaited with dread, did not come. After a while she wrote to know how much they owed, and the answer came back: ‘Pay me when you can afford it.’ She was miserable with frustrated pride; but let it go – they literally did not have the money.

Mrs Slatter sent over a sack of citrus from her orchard for Dick, and many offers of assistance. Mary was grateful for her presence there, only five miles away, but decided not to call her save in an emergency. She wrote one of those dry little notes of hers in thanks for the citrus, and said that Dick was better. But Dick was not at all better. There he lay, in all the helpless terror of a person suffering his first bad illness, with his face turned to the wall and a blanket over his head. ‘Just like a nigger!’ said Mary in sharp scorn over his cowardice; she had seen sick natives lie just like that, in a kind of stoical apathy. But from time to time Dick roused himself to ask about the farm. Every conscious moment he worried about the things that would be going wrong without his supervision. Mary nursed him like a baby for a week, conscientiously, but with impatience because of his fear for himself. Then the fever left him, and he was weak and depressed, hardly able to sit up. He now tossed and kicked and fretted, talking all the time about his farm-work.

She saw that he wanted her to go down and see to things, but did not like to suggest it. For a while she did not respond to the appeal she saw in his weakened and querulous face; then, realizing he would get out of bed before he was fit to walk, she said she would go.

She had to crush down violent repugnance to the idea of facing the farm natives herself. Even when she had called the dogs to her and stood on the verandah with the car keys in her hand, she turned back again to the kitchen for a glass of water; sitting in the car with her foot resting on the accelerator, she jumped out again, on an excuse that she needed a handkerchief. Coming out of the bedroom she noticed the long sjambok that rested on two nails over the kitchen door, like an ornament: it was a long time since she had remembered its existence. Lifting it down, looping it over her wrist, she went to the car with more confidence. Because of it, she opened the back door of the car and let out the dogs; she hated the way they breathed down the back of her neck as she drove. She left them whining with disappointment outside the house, and drove herself down to the lands where the boys were supposed to be working. They knew of Dick’s illness, and were not there, having dispersed, days before, to the compound. She took the car along the rough and rutted road as near as she could get to the compound, and then walked towards it along the native path that was trodden hard and smooth, but with a soft littering of glinting slippery grass over it, so that she had to move carefully to save herself from sliding. The long pale grass left sharp needles in her skirts, and the bushes shook red dust into her face.

The compound was built on a low rise above the vlei, about half a mile from the house. The system was that a new labourer presenting himself for work was given a day without pay to build a hut for himself and his family before taking his place with the workers. So there were always new huts, and always empty old ones that slowly collapsed and fell down unless somebody thought of burning them. The huts were closely clustered over an acre or two of ground. They looked like natural growths from the ground, rather than man-made dwellings. It was as though a giant black hand had reached down from the sky, picked up a handful of sticks and grass, and dropped them magically on the earth in the form of huts. They were grass-roofed, with pole walls plastered with mud, and single low doors, but no windows. The smoke from the fires inside percolated through the thatch or drifted in clouds from the doorways, so that each had the appearance of smouldering slowly from within. Between the huts were irregular patches of ill-cultivated mealies, and pumpkin vines trailed everywhere through plants and bushes and up over the walls and roofs, with the big amber-coloured pumpkins scattered among the leaves. Some of them were beginning to rot, subsiding into a sour festering ooze of pinky stuff, covered with flies. Flies were everywhere. They hummed round Mary’s head in a cloud as she walked, and they were clustered round the eyes of the dozen small black children who were pot-bellied and mostly naked, staring at her as she picked her way through the vines and mealies past the huts. Thin native mongrels, their bones ridging through their hides, bared their teeth and cringed. Native women, draped in dirty store-stuff, and some naked above the waist with their slack black breasts hanging down, gazed at her from doorways with astonishment at her queer appearance, commenting on her among themselves, laughing, and making crude remarks. There were some men: glancing through doorways she could see bodies huddled asleep; some sat on their haunches on the ground in groups, talking. But she had no idea which were Dick’s labourers, which were merely visiting here, or perhaps passing through the place on their way somewhere else. She stopped before one of them and told him to fetch the headboy, who soon came stooping out of one of the better huts that were ornamented on the walls with patterns of daubed red and yellow clay. His eyes were inflamed: she could see he had been drinking.

She said in kitchen kaffir: ‘Get the boys on to the lands in ten minutes.’

‘The boss is better?’ he asked with hostile indifference.

She ignored the question, and said, ‘You can tell them that I will take two and six off the ticket of every one of them that isn’t at work in ten minutes.’ She held out her wrist and pointed to the watch, showing him the time interval.

The man slouched and stooped in the sunshine, resenting her presence; the native women stared and laughed; the filthy, underfed children crowded around, whispering to each other; the starved dogs slunk in the background among the vines and mealies. She hated the place, which she had never entered before. ‘Filthy savages!’ she thought vindictively. She looked straight into the reddened, beer-clouded eyes of the headman, and repeated, ‘Ten minutes.’ Then she turned and walked off down the winding path through the trees, listening for the sounds of the natives turning out of the huts behind her.

She sat in the car waiting, beside the land where she knew they were supposed to be reaping maize. After half an hour a few stragglers arrived, the headboy among them. At the end of an hour not more than half of the labourers were present: some had gone visiting to neighbouring compounds without permission, some lay drunk in their huts. She called the headboy to her, and took down the names of those who were absent, writing them in her big awkward hand on a scrap of paper, spelling the unfamiliar names with difficulty. She remained there the whole morning, watching the straggling line of working boys, the sun glaring down through the old canvas hood on to her bare head. There was hardly any talking among them. They worked reluctantly, in a sullen silence; and she knew it was because they resented her, a woman, supervising them. When the gong rang for the lunch interval, she went up to the house and told Dick what had happened, but toning it down so that he would not worry. After lunch she drove down again, and curiously enough without repugnance for this work from which she had shrunk so long. She was exhilarated by the unfamiliar responsibility, the sensation of pitting her will against the farm. Now she left the car standing on the road, as the gang of natives moved into the middle of the field where the pale gold maize stood high above their heads, and where she could not see them from outside. They were tearing off the heavy cobs, and putting them into the halfsacks tied round their waists, while others followed cutting down the pillaged stalks and leaning them in small pyramids that regularly dotted the field. She moved steadily along the land with them, standing in the cleared part among the rough stubble, and watched them ceaselessly. She still carried the long thong of leather looped round one wrist. It gave her a feeling of authority, and braced her against the waves of hatred that she could feel coming from the gang of natives. As she walked steadily along beside them, with the hot yellow sunlight on her head and neck, making her shoulders ache, she began to understand how it was that Dick could stand it, day after day. It was difficult to sit still in the car with the heat filtering through the roof; it was another thing to move along with the workers, in the rhythm of their movement, concentrated on the work they were doing. As the long afternoon passed, she watched, in a kind of alert stupor, the naked brown backs bend, steady and straighten, the ropes of muscle sliding under the dusty skin. Most of them wore pieces of faded stuff as loincloths; some, khaki shorts; but nearly all were naked above the waist. They were a short thin crowd of men, stunted by bad feeding, but muscular and tough. She was oblivious to anything outside of this field, the work to be done, the gang of natives. She forgot about the heat, the beating sun, the glare. She watched the dark hands stripping cobs, and leaning the ragged gold stems together, and thought of nothing else. When one of the men paused for a moment in his work to rest, or to wipe the running sweat from his eyes, she waited one minute by her watch, and then called sharply to him to begin again. He would look slowly round at her, then bend back to the mealies, slowly, as if in protest. She did not know that Dick made a habit of calling a general rest of five minutes each hour; he had learned they worked better for it; it seemed to her an insolence directed against her authority over them when they stopped, without permission, to straighten their backs and wipe off the sweat. She kept them at it until sundown, and went back to the house satisfied with herself, not even tired. She was exhilarated and light-limbed, and swung the sjambok jauntily on her wrist.

Dick was lying in bed in the low-roofed room that was as chilly in the cool months as soon as the sun went down as it was hot in summer, anxious and restless, resenting his helplessness. He did not like to think of Mary close to those natives all day; it was not a woman’s job. And besides, she was so bad with natives, and he was short of labour. But he was relieved and rested when she told him how the work was progressing. She said nothing of how she disliked the natives, of how the hostility that she could feel as something palpable coming from them against her, affected her; she knew he could be in bed for days yet, and that she would have to do it whether she liked it or not. And, really, she liked it. The sensation of being boss over perhaps eighty black workers gave her new confidence; it was a good feeling, keeping them under her will, making them do as she wanted.

At the week’s end it was she who sat behind the small table set out on the verandah among the pot plants while the gangs of boys stood outside, under dark overshadowing trees waiting to be paid. This was the monthly ritual.

It was already dusk, the first stars coming out in the sky; and on the table was set a hurricane lamp, whose low dull flame looked a doleful bird caught in a glass cage. The bossboy beside her called out the names as she turned them up on her list. As she came to those who had not obeyed her summons that first day, she deducted half a crown, handing over the balance in silver; the average wage was about fifteen shillings, for the month. There were sullen murmurings amongst the natives; and as there was a small storm of protest brewing, the bossboy moved to the low wall and began arguing with them in his own language. She could only understand an odd word here or there, but she disliked the man’s attitude and tone; he seemed, from his manner, to be telling them to accept an unalterable evil fate, not scolding them, as she would have liked to do, for their negligence and laziness. After all, for several days they had done no work at all. And if she did what she had threatened, the whole lot of them would be docked two and sixpence, because none had obeyed her and appeared on the lands within the specified ten minutes. They were in the wrong; she was in the right; and the bossboy should be telling them so, not persuasively arguing with them and shrugging his shoulders – and even, once, laughing. At last he turned back to her, told her they were dissatisfied and demanded what was due. She said shortly and finally that she had said she would deduct that amount and she intended to keep her word. She would not change her mind. Suddenly angry, she added, without reflecting, that those who did not like it could leave. She went on with the business of arranging the little piles of notes and silver, taking no notice of the storm of talk outside. Some of them walked off to the compound, accepting the position. Others waited in groups till she had finished the paying, and then came up to the wall. One after another spoke to the bossboy, saying they wanted to leave. She felt a little afraid, because she knew how hard it was to get labour, and how this was Dick’s most persistent worry. Nevertheless, even while she turned her head to listen for Dick’s movements in the bed that was behind her through one thickness of wall, she was filled with determination and resentment, because they expected to be paid for work they had not done, and had gone visiting when Dick was ill; above all, that they had not come to the lands in that interval of ten minutes. She turned to the waiting group and told them that those of them who were contracted natives could not leave.

These had been recruited by what is the South African equivalent of the old press gang: white men who lie in wait for the migrating bands of natives on their way along the roads to look for work, gather them into large lorries, often against their will (sometimes chasing them through the bush for miles if they try to escape), lure them by the fine promises of good employment and finally sell them to the white farmers at five pounds or more per head for a year’s contract.

Of these boys she knew that some would be found to have run away from the farm during the next few days; and some would not be recovered by the police, for they would escape through the hills to the border and so out of reach. But she was not going to be swayed now by fear of their going and Dick’s labour troubles; she would rather die than show weakness. She dismissed them, using the police as a threat. The others, who were working on a monthly basis, and whom Dick kept with him by a combination of coaxing and good-humoured threats, she said could leave at the month’s end. She spoke to them directly – not through the medium of the bossboy – in cold clear tones, explaining with admirable logic how they were in the wrong, and how she was justified in acting as she did. She ended with a short homily on the dignity of work, which is a doctrine bred into the bones of every white South African. They would never be any good, she said (speaking in kitchen kaffir which some of them did not understand, being fresh from their kraals) until they learned to work without supervision, for the love of it, to do as they were told, to do a job for its own sake, not thinking about the money they would be paid for it. It was this attitude towards work that had made the white man what he was: the white man worked because it was good to work, because working without reward was what proved a man’s worth.

The phrases of this little lecture came naturally to her lips: she did not have to look for them in her mind. She had heard them so often from her father, when he was lecturing his native servants, that they welled up from the part of her brain that held her earliest memories.

The natives listened to her with what she described to herself as ‘cheeky’ faces. They were sullen and angry, listening to her (or what they could understand of her speech) with inattention, simply waiting for her to finish.

Then, brushing away their protests, which broke out as soon as her voice stopped, she got up with an abrupt dismissing gesture, lifted the little table with the paper bags of money stacked on it, and carried it inside. After a while she heard them moving off, talking and grumbling among themselves, and looking through the curtains saw their dark bodies mingling with the shadows of the trees before they disappeared. Their voices floated back: angry shouts now and imprecations against her. She was filled with vindictiveness and a feeling of victory. She hated them all, every one of them, from the headboy whose subservience irritated her, to the smallest child; there were some children working among the others who could be no more than seven or eight years old.

She had learned, standing in the sun watching them all day, to hide her hatred when she spoke to them, but she did not attempt to hide it from herself. She hated it when they spoke to each other in dialects she did not understand, and she knew they were discussing her and making what were probably obscene remarks against her – she knew it, though she could only ignore it. She hated their half-naked, thick-muscled black bodies stooping in the mindless rhythm of their work. She hated their sullenness, their averted eyes when they spoke to her, their veiled insolence: and she hated more than anything, with a violent physical repulsion, the heavy smell that came from them, a hot, sour animal smell.

‘How they stink,’ she said to Dick, in an explosion of anger that was the reaction from setting her will against theirs.

Dick laughed a little. He said, ‘They say we stink.’

‘Nonsense!’ she exclaimed, shocked that these animals should so presume.

‘Oh yes,’ he said, not noticing her anger. ‘I remember talking to old Samson once. He said: “You say we smell. But to us there is nothing worse than a white man’s smell.”’

‘Cheek!’ she began indignantly; but then she saw his still pale and hollowed face, and restrained herself. She had to be very careful, because he was liable to be touchy and irritable in his present stage of weakness.

‘What were you talking to them about?’ he asked.

‘Oh, nothing much,’ she said warily, turning away. She had decided not to tell him about the boys that were leaving until later, when he was really well.

‘I hope you are being careful with them,’ he said anxiously. ‘You have to go slow with them these days, you know. They are all spoilt.’