The Grass is Singing (8 page)

He drank two cups of tea in a rush, and then went out to dress, coming back in khaki shorts and shirt to say good bye before going down to the lands. Mary got up, too, when he had gone, and looked around her. Samson was cleaning the room into which they had come first the night before, and all the furniture was pushed into the middle, so she stepped past him on to the small verandah which was merely an extension of the iron roof, held up by three brick pillars with a low wall about it. There were some petrol tins painted a dark green, the paint blistered and broken, holding geraniums and flowering shrubs. Beyond the verandah wall was a space of pale sand, and then the low scrubby bush, which sloped down in a vlei full of tall shining grass. Beyond that again stretched bush, undulating vleis and ridges, bounded at the horizon by kopjes. Looking round she saw that the house was built on a low rise that swelled up in a great hollow several miles across, and ringed by kopjes that coiled blue and hazy and beautiful, a long way off in front, but close to the house at the back. She thought, it will be hot here, closed in as it is. But she shaded her eyes and gazed across the vleis, finding it strange and lovely with the dull green foliage, the endless expanses of tawny grass shining gold in the sun, and the vivid arching blue sky. And there was a chorus of birds, a shrilling and cascading of sound such as she had not heard before.

She walked round the house to the back. She saw it was a rectangle: the two rooms she had already seen in the front, and behind them the kitchen, the storeroom and the bathroom. At the end of a short path, screened off with a curving break of grass, was a narrow sentry-box building, which was the lavatory. On one side was a fowl house, with a great wire run full of scrawny white chickens, and across the hard bare ground scraped and gobbled a scattering of turkeys. She entered the house from the back through the kitchen, where there was a wood stove and a massive table of scrubbed bush timber, taking up half the floor space. Samson was in the bedroom, making the beds.

She had never come into contact with natives before, as an employer on her own account. Her mother's servants, she had been forbidden to talk to; in the club she had been kind to the waiters; but the `native problem' meant for her other women's complaints of their servants at tea parties. She was afraid of them, of course. Every woman in South Africa is brought up to be. In her childhood she had been forbidden to walk out alone, and when she had asked why, she had been told in the furtive, lowered, but matter-of-fact voice she associated with her mother, that they were nasty and might do horrible things to her.

And now she had to face it, this business of struggling with natives – she took it for granted it would be a struggle – and felt reluctant, though determined not to be imposed upon. But she was disposed to like Samson, who was a kind-faced respectful old native, who asked her, as she entered the bedroom, `Missus like to see the kitchen?'

She had hoped Dick would show her round, but seeing that the native was eager to, she agreed. He padded out of the room in front of her on his bare feet and took her to the back. There he opened the pantry for her – a dim, high windowed place full of provisions of all kinds, with great metal bins for sugar, flour and meal, standing on the floor.

`Boss has keys,' he explained; and she was amused at his matter-of-fact acceptance of a precaution that could only be against his stealing.

Between Samson and Dick there was a perfect understanding. Dick locked up everything, but put out for use a third as much again as was required, which was used by Samson, who did not regard this as stealing. But there was not much to steal in that bachelor household, and Samson hoped for better things now there was a woman. With deference and courtesy he showed Mary the thin supplies of linen, the utensils, the way the stove worked, the wood-pile at the back – all with the air of a faithful caretaker handing over keys to the rightful owner. He also showed her, when she asked, the old plough disc hung on the bough of a tree over the wood-pile, with the rusting iron bolt from a wagon with which it was beaten. It was this that she had heard on waking that morning; it was beaten at half-past five to rouse the boys in the compound close by and again at twelve-thirty and two, to mark the dinner break. It was a heavy, clanging, penetrating noise that carried miles over the bush.

She went back into the house while the boy prepared breakfast; already the song of the birds had been quenched by the deepening heat; at seven in the morning Mary found her forehead damp and her limbs sticky.

Dick came back half an hour later, glad to see her, but preoccupied. He went straight through the house into the back, and she heard him shouting at Samson in kitchen kaffir. She did not understand a word of it. Then he came back and said:

'That old fool has let those dogs go again. I told him not to.'

'What dogs?'

He explained: 'They get restless and go out by themselves, for hunting trips, if I am not here. Sometimes for days. Always when I am not here. He let them out. Then they get into trouble in the bush. Because he is too damned. lazy to feed them.'

He sat heavy and silent through the meal, a nervous tension between his eyes. The planter had broken down, a water cart had lost a wheel, the wagon had been driven up a hill with the brake on, in sheer lighthearted carelessness. He was back in it, over his head in it, with the familiar irritations and the usual sense of helplessness against cheerful incompetence. Mary said nothing: this was all too strange for her.

Immediately after breakfast he took his hat off the chair and went off again. Mary looked for a cooking book and took it to the kitchen. Half-way through the morning the dogs returned, two large mongrels, cheerfully apologetic to Samson for their truancy, but ignoring her, the stranger. They drank deeply, slobbering trails of water over the kitchen floor, then went to sleep on the skins in the front room smelling heavily of the kill in the bush.

When her cooking experiments were over – which the native Samson watched with an air of polite forbearance – she settled down on the bed with a handbook on kitchen kaffir. This was clearly the first thing she had to learn: she was unable to make Samson understand her.

With her own saved money Mary bought flowered materials, and covered cushions and made curtains; bought a little linen, crockery, and some dress lengths. The house gradually lost its air of bleak poverty, and put on an inexpensive prettiness, with bright hangings and some pictures. Mary worked hard, and looked for Dick's look of approval and surprise when he came back from work and – noted every new change. A month after she had arrived she walked through the house, and saw there was nothing more to be done. Besides, there was no more money.

She had settled easily into the new rhythm. She found the change so embracing that it was as if she were an entirely new person. Every morning she woke with the clanging of the plough disc, and drank tea in bed with Dick. When he had gone down on the lands she put out groceries for the day. She was so conscientious that Samson found things had worsened rather than improved: even his understood one-third allowance had gone, and she wore the store keys tied to her belt. By breakfast time what work she had to do in the house was finished except for light cooking; but Samson was a better cook than she, and after a while she left it to him. She sewed all morning, till lunchtime; sewed after lunch, and went to bed immediately after supper, sleeping like a child all night.

In the first flush of energy and determination she really enjoyed the life, putting things to rights and making a little go a long way. She liked, particularly, the early mornings before the heat numbed and tired her; liked the new leisure; liked Dick's approval. For his pride and affectionate gratitude for what she was doing (he would never have believed that his forlorn house could look like this) overshadowed his patient disappointment. When she saw that puzzled hurt look on his face, she pushed away the thought of what he must be suffering, for it made him repulsive to her again. Then, having done all she could to the house, she began on dress materials, finishing an inexpensive trousseau. A few months after her marriage she found there was nothing more to do. Suddenly, from one day to the next, she found herself unoccupied. Instinctively staving off idleness as something dangerous, she returned to her underwear, and embroidered everything that could possibly be embroidered. There she sat all day, sewing and stitching, hour after hour, as if fine embroidery would save her life. She was a good needle-woman, and the results were admirable. Dick praised her work and was amazed, for he had expected a difficult period while she was settling down, thinking she would take the lonely life hard at first. But she showed no sins of being lonely, she seemed perfectly satisfied to sew all day. And all this time he treated her like a brother, for he was a sensitive man, and was waiting for her to turn to him of her own accord. The relief she was unable to hide that his endearments were no more than affectionate, hurt him deeply, but he still thought: It will come right in the end.

There came an end to embroidery; again she was left empty-handed. Again she looked about for something to do. The walls, she decided, were filthy. She would whitewash them all, herself, to save money. So, for two weeks, Dick came back to the house to find furniture stacked in the middle of rooms and pails of thick white stuff standing on the floor. But she was very methodical. One room was finished before another was begun; and while he admired her for her capability and self-assurance, undertaking this work she had no experience or knowledge of, he was alarmed too. What was she going to do with all this energy and efficiency? It undermined his own self-assurance even further, seeing her like this, for he knew, deep down, that this quality was one he lacked, Soon, the walls were dazzling blue-white, every inch of them painted by Mary her self, standing on a rough ladder for days at a time.

And now she found she was tired. She found it pleasant to let go a little, and to spend her time sitting with her hands folded, on the big sofa. Put not for long. She was restless, so restless she did not know what to do with herself. She unpacked the novels she had brought with her, and turned them over. These were the books she had collected over years from the mass that had come her way. She had read each one a dozen times, knowing it by heart, following the familiar tales as a child listens to his mother telling him a well-known fairy tale. It had been a drug, a soporific, in the past, reading them; now, as she turned them over listlessly, she wondered why they had lost their flavour. Her mind wandered as she determinedly turned the pages; and she realized, after she had been reading for perhaps an hour, that she had not taken in a word. She threw the book aside and tried another, but with the same result. For a few days the house was littered with books in faded dust covers. Dick was pleased: it flattered him to think he had married a woman who read books. One evening he picked up a book called The Fair Lady, and opened it in the middle.

‘ The trekkers trekked North, towards the Land of Promise where never the cold grasping hand of the hated British could reach them. Like a cold snake through the hat landscape the column coiled. Prunella Van Koetzie skirmished lightly on her horse on the perimeter of the column, wearing a white kappie over her dainty sweat pearled face and close clustering ringlets. Piet Van Friesland watched her, his heart throbbing in time to the great blood-stained heart of South Africa itself. Could he win her, the sweet Prunella, who bore herself like a queen among these burghers and mynheers and _buxom fraus' in their doeks and veldschoens? Could he?

He stared and stared. Tant' Anna, putting out the koekies and the biltong for the midday meal, in a red doek the colour of the kafir-boom trees, shook her fat sides in laughter and said to herself, "That will be a match yet."'

He put it down, and looked across at Mary, who was sitting with a book in her lap, staring up at the roof. 'Can't we have ceilings, Dick?' she asked fretfully.

'It would cost so much,' he said doubtfully. 'Perhaps next year, if we do well.'

In a few days Mary gathered up the books and put them away; they were not what she wanted. She took up the handbook on kitchen kaffir again, and spent all her time on it, practicing on Samson in the kitchen, disconcerting him with her ill-humoured criticisms, but behaving with a cold-dispassionate justice.

Samson became more and more unhappy. He had been so used to Dick, and they understood each other very well. Dick swore at him often, but laughed with him afterwards. This woman never laughed. She put out, carefully, so much meal, and so much sugar; and watched the left-overs from their own food with an extraordinary, humiliating capacity for remembering every cold potato and every piece of bread, asking for them if they were missing.

Shaken out of his comparatively comfortable existence, he grew sulky There were several rows in the kitchen, and once Dick found Mary in tears. She knew there had been enough raisins put out for the pudding, but when they came to eat it, there were hardly any. And the boy denied stealing them…

'Good heavens,' said Dick, amused, 'I thought there was something really wrong.'

'But I know he took them,' sobbed Mary.

'He probably did, but he's a good old swine on the whole.'

'I am going to take it out of his wages.'

Dick, puzzled at her emotional state, said: 'If you think it is really necessary.' He reflected that this was the first time he had seen her cry.

So Samson, who earned a pound a month, was docked two shillings. He accepted the information with a shut sullen face, saying nothing to her, but appealing to Dick, who told him that he was to take orders from Mary. Samson gave notice that evening, on the grounds that he was needed in his kraal. Mary began to question him closely as to why he was needed; but Dick touched her arm warningly and shook his head.