The Sun Between Their Feet: Collected African Stories Volume Two

Then Mrs Slatter came in and sat on the bed and put her head in her hands. I did not move.

‘Oh my God!’ she said. ‘Oh my God, my God!’ Her voice was strange to me. The gentleness was not in it, though it was soft, but it was soft from breathlessness.

‘Oh my God!’ she said, after a long long silence. She took up one of the pillows from the bed, and wrapped her arms around it, and laid her head down on it. It was quiet in this room, although from the big room came the sound of singing, a noise like howling, because people were drunk, or part-drunk, and it had the melancholy savage sound of people singing when they are drunk. An awful sound, like animals howling.

Then she put down the pillow, tidily, in its proper place, and swayed backwards and forwards and said: ‘Oh God, make me old soon, make me old. I can’t stand this, I can’t stand this any longer.’

And again the silence, with the howling sound of the singing outside, the footsteps of the people who were dancing scraping on the cement of the veranda.

‘I can’t go on living,’ said Mrs Slatter, into the dark above the small glow of lamplight. She bent herself up again, double, as if she were hurt physically, her hands gripped around her ankles, holding herself together, and she sat crunched up, her face looking straight in front at the wall, level with the lamp-light. So now I could see her face. I did not know that face. It was stone, white stone, but her eyes gleamed out of it black, and with a flicker in them. And her black shining hair that was not grey at all yet had loosened and hung in streaks around the white stone face.

‘I can’t stand it,’ she said again. The voice she used was strange to me. She might have been talking to someone. For a moment I even thought she had seen me and was talking to me, explaining herself to me. And then, slowly, she let herself unclench and she went out into the dance again.

I took up the lamp and held it as close as I could to the mirror and bent in and looked at my face. But there was nothing to my face.

Next day I told my father I had heard Mrs Slatter say she could not go on living. He said, ‘Oh Lord, I hope it’s not because of what I said about her dress,’ but I said no, it was before he said he didn’t like the dress. “Then if she was upset,’ he said, ‘I expect what I said made her feel even worse.’ And then: ‘Oh poor woman, poor woman!’ He went into the house and called my mother and they talked it over. Then he got on to the telephone and I heard him asking Mrs Slatter to drop in next time she was going past to the station. And it seemed she was going in that morning, and before lunchtime she was on our veranda talking to my father. My mother was not there, although my father had not asked her in so many words not to be there. As for me I went to the back of the veranda where I could hear what they said.

‘Look, Molly,’ he said, ‘we are old friends. You’re looking like hell these days. Why don’t you tell me what’s wrong? You can say anything to me, you know.’

After quite a time she said: ‘Mr Farquar, there are some things you can’t say to anybody. Nobody.’

‘Ah, Molly,’ he said, ‘if there’s one thing I’ve learned and I learned it early on, when I was a young man and I had a bad time, it’s this. Everybody’s got something terrible, Molly. Everybody has something awful they have to live with. We all live together and we see each other all the time, and none of us knows what awful thing the other person might be living with.’

And then she said: ‘But, Mr Farquar, I don’t think that’s true. I know people who don’t seem to have anything private to make them unhappy.’

‘How do you know, Molly? How do you know?’

‘Take Mr Slatter,’ she said. ‘He’s a man who does as he likes. But he doesn’t know his own strength. And that’s why he never seems to understand how other people feel.’

‘But how do you know, Molly? You could live next to someone for fifty years and still not know. Perhaps he’s got something that gives him hell when he’s alone, like all the rest of us?’

‘No, I don’t think so, Mr Farquar.’

‘Molly,’ he said, appealing suddenly, and very exasperated. ‘You’re too hard on yourself, Molly.’ She didn’t say anything.

He said: ‘Listen, why don’t you get away for a while, get yourself down to the sea, this altitude drives us all quietly crazy. You get down off the altitude for a bit.’

She still said nothing, and he lowered his voice, and I could imagine how my mother’s face would have gone stiff and cold had she heard what he said: ‘And have a good time while you’re there. Have a good time and let go a bit.’

‘But, Mr Farquar. I don’t want a good time.’ The words, a good time, she used as if they could have nothing to do with her.

‘If we can’t have what we want in this world, then we should take what we can get.’

‘It wouldn’t be right,’ she said at last slowly. ‘I know people have different ideas, and I don’t want to press mine on anyone.’

‘But Molly -’ he began, exasperated, or so it sounded, and then he was silent.

From where I sat I could hear the grass chair creaking: she was getting out of it. ‘I’ll take your advice,’ she said. ‘I’ll get down to the sea and I’ll take the children with me. The two younger ones.’

‘To hell with the kids for once. Take your old man with you and see that Emmy Pritt doesn’t go with you this time.’

‘Mr Farquar,’ she said, ‘if Mr Slatter wants Emmy Pritt, he can have her. He can have either one or the other of us. But not both. If I took him to the sea he would be over at her place ten minutes after we got back.’

‘Ah, Molly, you women can be hell. Have some pity on him for once.’

‘Pity? Mr Slatter’s a man who needs nobody’s pity. But thank you for your good advice, Mr Farquar. You are always very kind, you and Mrs Farquar.’

And she said goodbye to my father, and when I came forward she kissed me and asked me to come and see her soon, and she went to the station to get the stores.

And so Mrs Slatter went on living. George Andrews bought his own farm and married and the wedding was at the Slatters’. Later on Emmy Pritt got sick again and had another operation and died. It was a cancer. Mr Slatter was ill for the first time in his life from grief, and Mrs Slatter took him to the sea, by themselves, leaving the children, because they were grown-up anyway. For this was years later, and Mrs Slatter’s hair had gone grey and she was fat and old, as I had heard her say she wanted to be.

A Road to the Big City (#ulink_ac7726bb-cc5a-5302-937f-a4bdc4357c15)

The train left at midnight, not at six. Jansen’s flare of temper at the clerk’s mistake died before he turned from the counter: he did not really mind. For a week he had been with rich friends, in a vacuum of wealth, politely seeing the town through their eyes. Now, for six hours, he was free to let the dry and nervous air of Johannesburg strike him direct. He went into the station buffet. It was a bare place, with shiny brown walls and tables arranged regularly. He sat before a cup of strong orange-coloured tea, and because he was in the arrested, dreamy frame of mind of the uncommitted traveller, he was the spectator at a play which could not hold his attention. He was about to leave, in order to move by himself through the streets, among the people, trying to feel what they were in this city, what they had which did not exist, perhaps, in other big cities – for he believed that in every place there dwelt a daemon which expressed itself through the eyes and voices of those who lived there – when he heard someone ask: Is this place free? He turned quickly, for there was a quality in the voice which could not be mistaken. Two girls stood beside him, and the one who had spoken sat down without waiting for his response: there were many empty tables in the room. She wore a tight short black dress, several brass chains, and high shiny black shoes. She was a tall broad girl with colourless hair ridged tightly round her head, but given a bright surface so that it glinted like metal. She immediately lit a cigarette and said to her companion: ‘Sit down for God’s sake.’ The other girl shyly slid into the chair next to Jansen, averting her face as he gazed at her, which he could not help doing: she was so different from what he expected.

Plump, childish, with dull hair bobbing in fat rolls on her neck, she wore a flowered and flounced dress and flat white sandals on bare and sunburned feet. Her face had the jolly friendliness of a little dog. Both girls showed Dutch ancestry in the broad blunt planes of cheek and forehead; both had small blue eyes, though one pair was surrounded by sandy lashes, and the other by black varnished fringes.

The waitress came for an order. Jansen was too curious about the young girl to move away. ‘What will you have?’ he asked. ‘Brandy,’ said the older one at once. ‘Two brandies,’ she added, with another impatient look at her sister – there could be no doubt that they were sisters.

‘I haven’t never drunk brandy,’ said the younger with a giggle of surprise. ‘Except when Mom gave me some sherry at Christmas.’ She blushed as the older said despairingly, half under her breath: ‘Oh God preserve me from it!’

‘I came to Johannesburg this morning,’ said the little one to Jansen confidingly. ‘But Lilla has been here earning a living for a year.’

‘My God!’ said Lilla again. ‘What did I tell you? Didn’t you hear what I told you?’ Then, making the best of it, she smiled professionally at Jansen and said: ‘Green! You wouldn’t believe it if I told you. I was green when I came, but compared with Marie …’ She laughed angrily.

‘Have you been to Joburg before this day?’ asked Marie in her confiding way.

‘You are passing through,’ stated Lilla, with a glance at Marie. ‘You can tell easy if you know how to look.’

‘You’re quite right,’ said Jansen.

‘Leaving tomorrow perhaps?’ asked Lilla.

‘Tonight,’ said Jansen.

Instantly Lilla’s eyes left Jansen, and began to rove about her, resting on one man’s face and then the next. ‘Midnight,’ said Jansen, in order to see her expression change.

‘There’s plenty time,’ she said, smiling.

‘Lilla promised I could go to the bioscope,’ said Marie, her eyes becoming large. She looked around the station buffet, and because of her way of looking, Jansen tried to see it differently. He could not. It remained for him a bare, brownish, dirty sort of place, full of badly-dressed and dull people. He felt as one does with a child whose eyes widen with terror or delight at the sight of an old woman muttering down the street, or a flowering tree. What hunched black crone from a fairy tale, what celestial tree does the child see? Marie was smiling with charmed amazement.

‘Very well,’ said Jansen, ‘let’s go to the flicks.’

For a moment Lilla calculated, her hard blue glance moving from Jansen to Marie. ‘You take Marie,’ she suggested, direct to Jansen, ignoring her sister. ‘She’s green, but she’s learning.’ Marie half-rose, with a terrified look. ‘You can’t leave me,’ she said.

‘Oh my God!’ said Lilla resignedly. ‘Oh all right. Sit down baby. But I’ve a friend to see. I told you.’

‘But I only just came.’