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

‘Mission boy,’ he replied. ‘The only decent one I’ve ever had.’ Like most South Africans, Dick did not like mission boys, they ‘knew too much’. And in any case they should not be taught to read and write: they should be taught the dignity of labour and general usefulness to the white man.

‘Why?’ he asked suspiciously. ‘No trouble again, I hope?’

‘No.’

‘Has he been cheeky?’

‘No.’

But the mission background explained a lot: that irritatingly well-articulated ‘madame’, for instance, instead of the usual ‘missus’, which was somehow in better keeping with his station in life.

That ‘madame’ annoyed her. She would have liked to ask him to drop it. But there was nothing disrespectful in it: it was only what he had been taught by some missionary with foolish ideas. And there was nothing in his attitude towards her she could take hold of. But although he was never disrespectful, he forced her now to treat him as a human being; it was impossible for her to thrust him out of her mind like something unclean, as she had done with all the others in the past. She was being forced into contact, and she never ceased to be aware of him. She realized, daily, that there was something in it that was dangerous, but what it was she was unable to define.

Now she dreamed through her broken nights, horrible, frightening dreams. Her sleep, once an instantaneous dropping of a black curtain, had become more real than her waking. Twice she dreamed directly of the native, and on each occasion she woke in terror as he touched her. On each occasion in her dream he had stood over her, powerful and commanding, yet kind, but forcing her into a position where she had to touch him. And there were other dreams, where he did not enter directly, but which were confused, terrifying, horrible, from which she woke sweating in fear, trying to put them out of her mind. She became afraid to go to sleep. She would lie in the dark, tense beside Dick’s relaxed sleeping body, forcing herself to remain awake.

Often, during the day, she watched him covertly, not like a mistress watching a servant work, but with a fearful curiosity, remembering those dreams. And every day he looked after her, seeing what she ate, bringing her meals without her ordering them, bringing her little gifts of a handful of eggs from the compound fowls, or a twist of flowers from the bush.

Once, when it was long past sundown and Dick had not returned, she said to Moses, ‘Keep the dinner hot, I am going to see what has happened to the boss.’

When she was in the bedroom fetching her coat, Moses knocked at the door, and said he would go and find out; Madame should not walk around in the dark bush by herself.

‘All right,’ she said helplessly, and took her coat off.

But there was nothing wrong with Dick. He had been held up over an ox that had broken its leg. And when, a week later, he was again long after his time in coming, and she was worried, she made no effort to find out what was wrong, fearing that the native might again, quite simply and naturally, take the responsibility for her welfare. It had come to this: that she watched her actions from one point of view only; would they allow Moses to strengthen that new human relationship between them, in a way she could not counter, and which she could only try to avoid.

In February, Dick fell ill again with malaria. As before, it was a short, sudden attack, and bad while it lasted. As before, she reluctantly sent a note by bearer to Mrs Slatter, asking them to fetch the doctor. He looked at the slatternly little house with raised eyebrows, and asked Mary why she had taken no notice of his former prescriptions. She did not answer. ‘Why have you not cut down the bush round the house where mosquitoes can breed?’ ‘My husband could not spare the boys.’ ‘But he can spare the time to be ill, eh?’ The doctor’s manner was bluff, easy, but at bottom indifferent; he had learned after years in a farming district, when to cut his losses as a doctor. Not his money, which he knew he would never see, but the patients themselves. These people were hopeless. The window-curtains faded by the sun to a dingy grey, torn and not mended, proclaimed it. Everywhere there was evidence of breakdown in will. It was a waste of time even coming. But from habit he stood over the shivering, burning Dick and prescribed. He said Dick was worn out, a shell of a man, liable to get any disease going. He spoke as strongly as he could, trying to frighten Mary into action. But her attitude said listlessly, ‘What is the use.’ He left at last with Charlie Slatter, who was sardonically disapproving; but unable to prevent himself from thinking that when he took over this place he would remove the wire from the chicken runs for his own, and that the corrugated iron of the house and buildings might come in useful some time.

Mary sat up with Dick the first two nights of his illness, on a hard chair, to keep herself awake, holding the blankets close over the restless limbs. But Dick was not as bad as the last time; he was not afraid now, knowing that the attack would run its course.

Mary made no effort to supervise the farm work; but twice a day, so as to calm him, she drove herself round the farm on a formal and useless inspection. The boys were in the compound loafing. She knew it, and did not care. She hardly looked at the fields: the farm had become something that did not concern her.

In the daytime, when she had finished preparing Dick’s cool drinks, which were all that he took, she sat idly by the bed and sank into her usual apathetic state. Her mind wandered incoherently, dwelling on any scene from her past life that might push itself to the surface. But now it was without nostalgia or desire. And she had lost all sense of time. She set the alarm clock in front of her, to remind her of the regular intervals at which she must go and fetch Dick his drinks. Moses brought her the usual trays of food at the usual times, and she ate mechanically, not noticing what she ate, not noticing, even, that she sometimes put down her knife and fork after a couple of mouthfuls and forgot to finish what was before her. It was on the third morning that he asked, as she whisked an egg he had brought from the compound as a gift, into milk: ‘Did Madame go to bed last night?’ He spoke with that simple directness that always left her disarmed, not knowing how to reply.

She answered, looking down at the frothing milk, avoiding his eyes: ‘I must stay up with the boss.’

‘Did Madame stay up the other night?’

‘Yes,’ she answered, and quickly went into the bedroom with the drink.

Dick lay still, half delirious with fever, in an uncomfortable doze. His temperature had not dropped. He was taking this bout very hard. The sweat poured off him; and then his skin became dry and harsh and burning hot. Every afternoon the slender rod of quicksilver mounted in a trice up the frail glass tube, so she had hardly to keep it in his mouth at all, higher every time she looked at it, until by six in the evening it stood at 105. There it stayed until about midnight, while he tossed and muttered and groaned. In the early hours it dropped rapidly below normal, and he complained he was cold and needed more blankets. But he had all the blankets in the place piled over him. She heated bricks in the oven and wrapped them in cloth and put them by his feet.

That night Moses came to the bedroom door and knocked on the wood frame as he always did. She confronted him through the parted folds of the embroidered hessian curtain.

‘Yes?’ she asked.

‘Madame stay in room tonight. I stay with boss.’

‘No,’ she said, thinking of the long night spent in intimate vigil with this native. ‘No, you go back to the compound and sleep. I will stay with the boss.’

He came forward through the curtains, so that she shrank back a little, he was so close to her. She saw that he held a folded mealie sack in one hand, presumably his preparation for the night. ‘Madame must sleep,’ he said. ‘She is tired, yes?’ She could feel the skin round her eyes drawn tight with strain and weariness; but she insisted in a hard nervous voice: ‘No, Moses. I must stay.’ He moved to the wall where he placed his sack carefully in a space between two cupboards. Then he stood up and said, sounding wounded, even reproachful: ‘Madame not thinks I look after boss right, huh? I too sick sometimes. I keep blankets over boss, yes?’ He moved to the bed, but not too close, and looked down at Dick’s flushed face. ‘I give him this drink when he wakes, yes?’ And the half-humorous, half-reproachful voice left her disarmed against him. She looked at his face once, quickly, avoiding the eyes, then away. But it would not do to seem afraid to look at him; she glanced down at his hand, the big hand with the lighter palm hanging loosely at his side. He insisted again: ‘Madame think I not look after boss well?’

She hesitated, and then said nervously, ‘Yes, but I must stay.’

As if her nervousness and hesitation had been answer enough, the man stooped and straightened out the blankets over the sleeping man. ‘If boss is very sick, I call Madame,’ he said.

She saw him standing by the window, blocking the square of star-strewn, bough-crossed sky, waiting for her to go. ‘Madame will be sick too, if she does not sleep,’ he said.

She went to the cupboard where she took out her big coat. Before she left the room, she said, in order to assert her authority: ‘You will call me if he wakes.’

She went instinctively to her refuge, the sofa, next door, where she spent so many of her waking hours, and sat helplessly, squeezed into one corner. She could not bear to think of the black man there all night, next door, so close to her, with nothing but the thin brick wall separating them.

After a while she pushed a cushion to the head of the sofa, and lay down, covering her feet with the coat. It was a close night, and the air in the little room hardly stirred. The dull flame in the hanging lamp burned low, making a little intimate glimmer of light that sent up broken arcs of light into the darkness under the roof, illuminating a slope of corrugated metal, and a beam. In the room itself there was only a small yellow circle on the table beneath. Everything else was dark, there were only vague elongated shapes. She turned her head slightly to see the curtains at the window; they hung quite still; and listening intently, the tiny night noises from the bush outside sounded suddenly as loud as her own thudding heart. From the trees a few yards away a bird called once, and insects creaked. She heard the movement of branches, as if something heavy was pushing its way through them; and thought with fear of the low crouching trees all about. She had never become used to the bush, never felt at home in it. Still, after all this time, she felt a stirring of alarm when she realized the strangeness of the encircling veld where little animals moved, and unfamiliar birds talked. Often in the night she woke and thought of the small brick house, like a frail shell that might crush inwards under the presence of the hostile bush. Often she thought how, if they left this place, one wet fermenting season would swallow the small cleared space, and send the young trees thrusting up from the floor, pushing aside brick and cement, so that in a few months there would be nothing left but heaps of rubble about the trunks of trees.

She lay tense on the sofa, every sense alert, her mind quivering like a small hunted animal turned to face its pursuers. She ached all over with the strain. She listened to the night outside, to her own heart, and for sounds from the room next door. She heard the dry sound of horny feet moving over thin matting, a clink of glasses being moved, a low mutter from the sick man. Then she heard the feet move close, and a sliding movement as the native settled himself down on the sack between the cupboards. He was there, just through the thin wall, so close that if it had not been there his back would have been six inches from her face! Vividly she pictured the broad muscular back, and shuddered. So clear was her vision of the native that she imagined the hot acrid scent of native bodies. She could smell it, lying there in the dark. She turned her head over, and buried her face in a cushion.

For a long time she could hear nothing, only the soft noise of steady breathing. She wondered, was it Dick? But then he muttered again, and as the native rose to adjust the coverings, the sound of breathing ceased. Moses returned, and again she heard the sliding of his back down the wall; and the regular breathing began again: it was he! Several times she heard Dick stir and call out, in that thick voice which was not his, but which came from his sick delirium, and each time the native roused himself to cross to the bed. In between she listened intently for the soft breathing which seemed, as she turned restlessly, to come from all over the room, first from just near her beside the sofa, then from a dark corner opposite. It was only when she turned and faced the wall that she could localize the sound. She fell asleep in that position, bent against the wall as if listening to a keyhole.

It was a troubled, unrestful sleep, visited by dreams. Once she started awake at a movement, and saw the dark bulk of the man part the curtains. She held her breath, but at the sound of her movement he turned his eyes quickly towards her, and away; then he passed soundlessly out of the other door into the kitchen. He was only going out for a few minutes on his own business. Her mind followed him as he crossed the kitchen, opened the door and vanished into the dark alone. Then she turned her head to the cushion again, shuddering, as she had when she imagined that native smell. She thought: soon he will be coming back. She lay still, so as to seem asleep. But he did not come immediately, and after a few minutes’ waiting she went to the dim bedroom where Dick lay motionless, in a tormented jumble of limbs. She felt his forehead: it was damp and cold, so she knew it must be well after midnight. The native had taken all the blankets off a chair, and heaped them over the sick man. Now the curtains moved behind her, and a cool breeze struck her neck. She shut the pane nearest the bed, and stood still, listening to the suddenly loud ticking of the clock. Leaning down to gaze at its faintly illuminated dial, she saw it was not yet two o’clock, but she felt that the night had been continuing for a very long time. She heard a noise from the back and quickly, as if guilty, went to lie down. Then she heard again the hard feet on the floor as Moses passed her to his station on the other side of the wall, and saw him looking at her to see if she was asleep. Now she felt she was wide awake, and could not sleep. She was chilly, but did not want to rise to look for further coverings. Again she imagined she smelt the warm odour, and to dispel the sensation turned her head softly to see the curtains blowing as the fresh night air poured in. Dick was quite still now; there was no sound from the other room except that faint rhythm of breathing.

She drifted off to sleep, and this time dreamed immediately, horribly.

She was a child again, playing in the small dusty garden in front of the raised wood-and-iron house, with playmates who in her dream were faceless. She was first in the game, a leader, and they called her name and asked her how they should play. She stood by the dry-smelling geranium plants, in the sun, with the children all about her. She heard her mother’s sharp voice call for her to come in, and went slowly out of the garden up on to the verandah. She was afraid. Her mother was not there, so she went to the room inside. At the bedroom door she stopped, sickened. There was her father, the little man with the plump juicy stomach, beer-smelling and jocular, whom she hated, holding her mother in his arms as they stood by the window. Her mother was struggling in mock protest, playfully expostulating. Her father bent over her mother, and at the sight, Mary ran away.

Again, she was playing, this time with her parents and her brother and sister, before she went to bed. It was a game of hide-and-seek, and it was her turn to cover her eyes while her mother hid herself. She knew that the two older children were standing on one side watching; the game was too childish for them, and they were losing interest. They were laughing at her, who took the game so seriously. Her father caught her head and held it in his lap with his small hairy hands, to cover up her eyes, laughing and joking loudly about her mother hiding. She smelt the sickly odour of beer, and through it she smelt too – her head held down in the thick stuff of his trousers – the unwashed masculine smell she always associated with him. She struggled to get her head free, for she was half-suffocating, and her father held it down, laughing at her panic. And the other children laughed too. Screaming in her sleep she half-woke, fighting off the weight of sleep on her eyes, filled with the terror of the dream.

She thought she was still awake and lying stiffly on the sofa listening intently for the breathing next door. It continued for a long time, while she waited for each soft expulsion of breath. Then there was silence. She gazed in growing terror round the room, hardly daring to move her head for fear of disturbing the native through the wall, seeing the dull light fall in a circle on the table, illuminating its rough surface. In her dream the conviction grew that Dick was dead – that Dick was dead, and that the black man was waiting next door for her coming. Slowly she sat up. disentangling her feet from the clinging weight of the coat, trying to control her terror. She repeated to herself that there was nothing to fear. At last she gathered her legs close, and let them down over the edge of the sofa, very quietly, not daring to make a sound. Again she sat trembling, trying to calm herself, until she forced her body to raise itself and stand in the middle of the room, measuring the distance between herself and the bedroom, seeing the shadows in the skins on the floor with terror, because they seemed to move up at her in the swaying of the lamplight. The skin of a leopard near the door seemed to take shape and fill out, its little glassy eyes staring at her. She fled to the door to escape it. She stood cautiously, putting out a hand to part the heavy curtain. Slowly she peered through. All she could see was the shape of Dick lying still under the blankets. She could not see the African, but she knew he was waiting for her there in the shadow. She parted the curtains a little more. Now she saw one leg stretching from the wall into the room, an enormous, more than life-size leg, the limb of a giant. She went forward a little; now she could see him properly. Dreaming, she felt irritated and let down, for the native was asleep, crouched against the wall, exhausted after long wakefulness. He sat as she had seen him sit sometimes in the sun, with one knee up, his arm resting on it loosely, so that the palm turned over and the fingers curled limply. The other leg, the one she had first seen, stretched almost to where she stood, and at her feet she saw the thick skin of the sole, cracked and horny. His head was bent forward on his chest, showing his thick neck. She felt as she sometimes did when, awake, she expected to find that he had left undone something he was paid to do, and taking herself to look, found everything in order. Her annoyance with herself turned into anger against the native; and now she looked towards the bed again where Dick lay stretched and motionless. She stepped over the giant leg lying over the floor, and moved silently round the bed with her back to the window. Bending over Dick she felt the night air coolly on her shoulders, and with sharp anger said to herself that the native had opened the window again, and had caused Dick’s death through chill. Dick looked ugly. He was dead, yellow-faced, his mouth fallen open and his eyes staring. In her dream she put out her hand to touch his skin. It was cold, and she felt only relief and exultation. At the same time she felt guilty because of her gladness, and tried to arouse in herself the sorrow she ought to feel. As she stood, bending forward over Dick’s stillness, she knew the native had silently awakened and was watching her. Without turning her head, she saw at the edge of her vision the great leg softly withdrawn, and she knew he was standing in the shadow. Then he was coming towards her. It seemed as if the room were very big, and he was approaching her slowly from an immense distance. She stood rigid with fear, the chill sweat running down her body, waiting. He approached slowly, obscene and powerful, and it was not only he, but her father who was threatening her. They advanced together, one person, and she could smell, not the native smell, but the unwashed smell of her father. It filled the room, musty, like animals; and her knees went liquid as her nostrils distended to find clean air and her head became giddy. Half-conscious, she leaned back against the wall for support, and nearly fell through the open window. He came near and put his hand on her arm. It was the voice of the African she heard. He was comforting her because of Dick’s death, consoling her protectively; but at the same time it was her father menacing and horrible, who touched her in desire.

She screamed, knowing suddenly she was asleep and in nightmare. She screamed and screamed desperately, trying to wake herself from the horror. She thought: my screams must be waking Dick; and she struggled in the sands of sleep. Then she was awake and sitting up, panting. The African was standing beside her, red-eyed and half-asleep, holding out to her a tray with tea. The room was filled with a thick grey light, and the still burning lamp sent a thin beam to the table. Seeing the native, with the terror of the dream still in her, she shrank back into the corner of the sofa, breathing fast and irregularly, watching him in a paroxysm of fright. He put the tray down, clumsily, because of his weariness, and she struggled in her mind to separate dream from reality.

The man said, watching her curiously, ‘The boss is asleep.’ And her knowledge that Dick lay dead next door faded. But still she watched the black man, warily, unable to speak. She saw in his face surprise at her posture of fear, and she watched grow there that look she had so often seen lately, half sardonic, speculative, brutal, as if he were judging her. Suddenly he said softly: ‘Madame afraid of me, yes?’ It was the voice of the dream, and as she heard it, her body went weak and she trembled. She fought to control her voice, and spoke after a few minutes in a half whisper: ‘No, no, no. I am not afraid.’ And then she was furious with herself for denying something whose possibility should never even be admitted.

She saw him smile, and watched his eyes drop to her hands, which lay on her lap trembling. His eyes travelled up her body slowly to her face, taking in the hunched shoulders, the way her body was pressed into the cushions for support.

He said easily, familiarly, ‘Why is Madame afraid of me?’

She said half-hysterically, in a high-pitched voice, laughing nervously: ‘Don’t be ridiculous. I am not afraid of you.’ She spoke as she might have done to a white man, with whom she was flirting a little. As she heard the words come from her mouth, and saw the expression on the man’s face, she nearly fainted. She saw him give her a long, slow, imponderable look; then turn, and walk out of the room.

When he had gone, she felt released from an inquisition. She sat weak and shaking, thinking of the dream, trying to clear away the fog of horror.

After a while she poured out some tea, spilling it into the saucer. Again, as she had done in her dream, she forced herself to stand up and walk into the room next door. Dick was sleeping quietly, and looked better. Without touching him she left him, passing to the verandah, where she leant forward against the chilly bricks of the balustrade, breathing in drafts of cool morning air. It was not sunrise yet. All the sky was clear and colourless, flushed with rosy streaks of light, but there was darkness still among the silent trees. She could see faint smoke rising in drifts from the small clustering huts of the compound, and knew that she must go and beat the gong for the day’s work to begin.

All that day she sat in the bedroom as usual, watching Dick grow better hourly, although he was very weak still, and not yet well enough to be irritable.

She did not go around the farm at all that day. And she avoided the native; she felt that she was too unsure of herself, had not the strength to face him. When he had left after lunch for his time off, she went hastily to the kitchen, almost furtively, made cold drinks for Dick, and returned looking behind her as if pursued.

That night she locked all the doors of the house, and went to bed beside Dick, thankful, perhaps for the first time in their marriage, for his closeness.

He was back at work in a week.