The Grass is Singing (14 page)

`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 waked 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 hit in her exaltation, that she could ran off the pavement into the blue substance and float there, at ease and peaceful at last. The sheet 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. `f am sorry, Mary,' he said, avoiding her eyes; and she saw that the job had not been filled and that be 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 sock-less 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.

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% 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 si

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, god-forsaken 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.