The Sun Between Their Feet Read online

  ‘I don’t know what I’ve said,’ said Greg.

  ‘It doesn’t matter in the slightest,’ said Moira.

  ‘Moira, for crying out aloud!’

  ‘Why did you say that about marrying?’ said Moira, and her voice was shaky. She was going to cry if she didn’t watch out. ‘I thought you thought I meant …’

  ‘You think too much,’ said Moira, tossing her head carefully so that her long tail of hair should come forward and lie on her shoulder. She put up her hand, and stroked the curls smooth.

  ‘Moira, I’ve got another five years at university. I couldn’t say to you, let’s get engaged for five years.’

  ‘I never said you should,’ said Moira, calm and lofty, examining the scratches on her legs.

  The way she was sitting, curled up sideways, with her hair lying forward like syrup on her shoulder, it was pretty, it was as pretty as I’ve ever seen, and I could see his face, sad and almost sick.

  ‘You’re so pretty, Moy,’ he said, jerking it out.

  Moira seemed not to be able to move. Then she turned her head slowly and looked at him. I could see the beginning of something terrible on her face. The shiver had begun under my hair at the back of my neck, and was slowly moving down to the small of my back.

  ‘You’re so beautiful,’ he said, sounding angry, leaning right forward with his eyes almost into her face.

  And now she looked the way she had last night, when I was not awake and said, was it raining outside.

  ‘When you look like that,’ he said, quite desperate about everything, ‘it makes me feel …’

  People were getting up now all around us, the fire had burned right down, it was a low wave of red heat coming out at us. The redness was on our shoulders and legs, but our faces were having a chance to cool off. The moon had come out again full and bright, and the cloud had rolled on, and it was funny the way the light was red to their shoulders, and the white of the moon on their faces, and their eyes glistening. I didn’t like it; I was shivering; it was the most peculiar moment of all my life.

  ‘Well,’ said Moira, and she sounded just too tired even to try to understand, ‘that’s what you said last night, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Don’t you see,’ he said, trying to explain, his tongue all mixed up, ‘I can’t help – I love you, I don’t know …’

  Now she smiled, and I knew the smile at once, it was the way Mom smiled at Dad when if he had any sense he’d shut up. It was sweet and loving, but it was sad, and as if she was saying, Lord, you’re a fool, Dickson Hughes!

  Moira went on smiling like that at Greg, and he was sick and angry and not understanding a thing.

  ‘I love you,’ he said again.

  ‘Well I love you and what of it?’ said Moira.

  ‘But it will be five years.’

  ‘And what has that got to do with anything?’ At this she began to laugh.

  ‘But Moy …’

  ‘My name is Moira,’ she said, once and for all.

  For a moment they were both white and angry, their eyes glimmering with the big white moon over them.

  There was a shout and a hustle, and suddenly all the people were in the big circle around the big low heap of fire, and they were whirling around and around, yelling and screaming. Greg and Moira stayed where they were, just outside the range of the feet, and they didn’t hear a thing.

  ‘You’re so pretty,’ he was saying, in that rough, cross, helpless voice. ‘I love you, Moira, there couldn’t ever be anyone but you.’

  She was smiling, and he went on saying: ‘I love you, I see your face all the time, I see your hair and your face and your eyes.’

  And I wished he’d go on, the poor sap, just saying it, for every minute, it was more like last night when I woke up and I thought it had rained, the feeling of the dry earth with the rain just on it, that was how she was, and she looked as if she would sit there and listen for ever to the words he said, and she didn’t want to hear him saying. Why don’t you say something Moy, you don’t say anything, you do understand don’t you? – it’s not fair, it isn’t right to bind you when we’re so young. But he started on saying it in just a minute, and then she smiled her visiting smile, and she said: Gregory Jackson, you’re a fool.

  Then she got herself off the grass and went across to Mom to help load the car up, and she never once looked at Greg again, not for the rest of the holidays.

  Lucy Grange

  The farm was fifty miles from the nearest town, in a maize-growing district. The mealie lands began at a stone’s throw from the front door of the farm house. At the back were several acres of energetic and colourful domestic growth: chicken runs, vegetables, pumpkins. Even on the veranda were sacks of grain and bundles of hoes. The life on the farm, her husband’s life, washed around the house leaving old scraps of iron on the front step where the children played wagon-and-driver, or a bottle of medicine for a sick animal on her dressing-table among the bottles of Elizabeth Arden.

  One walked straight from the veranda of this gaunt, iron-roofed, brick-barracks of a house into a wide drawing-room that was shaded in green and orange Liberty linens.

  ‘Stylish?’ said the farmers’ wives, when they came on formal calls, asking questions of themselves while they discussed with Lucy Grange the price of butter and servants’ aprons and their husbands discussed the farm with George Grange. They never ‘dropped over’ to see Lucy Grange; they never rang her up with invitations to ‘spend the day’. They would finger the books on child psychology, politics, art; gaze guiltily at the pictures on her walls, which they felt they ought to be able to recognize, and say: ‘I can see you are a great reader, Mrs Grange.’

  There were years of discussing her among themselves before their voices held the good-natured amusement of acceptance: ‘I found Lucy in the vegetable patch wearing gloves full of cold cream.’ ‘Lucy has ordered another dress pattern from town.’ And later still, with self-consciously straightened shoulders, eyes directed primly before them, discreet non-committal voices: ‘Lucy is very attractive to men.’

  One can imagine her, when they left at the end of those mercifully so-short visits, standing on the veranda and smiling bitterly after the satisfactory solid women with their straight ‘tailored’ dresses, made by the Dutchwoman at the store at seven-and-six a time, buttoned loosely across their well-used breasts, with their untidy hair permed every six months in town, with their femininity which was asserted once and for all by a clumsy scrawl of red across the mouth. One can imagine her clenching her fists and saying fiercely to the mealie fields which rippled greenly all around her, cream-topped like the sea: ‘I won’t. I simply won’t. He needn’t imagine that I will!’

  ‘Do you like my new dress, George?’

  ‘You’re the best-looking woman in the district, Lucy.’ So it seemed, on the face of it, that he didn’t expect, or even want, that she should …

  Meanwhile she continued to order cook-books from town, made new recipes of pumpkin and green mealies and chicken, put skin-food on her face at night; constructed attractive nursery furniture out of packing cases enamelled white – the farm wasn’t doing too well; and discussed with George how little Betty’s cough was probably psychological.

  ‘I’m sure you’re right, my dear.’

  Then the rich, over-controlled voice: ‘Yes, darling. No, my sweetheart. Yes, of course, I’ll play bricks with you, but you must have your lunch first.’ Then it broke, hard and shrill: ‘Don’t make all that noise, darling. I can’t stand it. Go on, go and play in the garden and leave me in peace.’

  Sometimes, storms of tears. Afterwards: ‘Really, George, didn’t your mother ever tell you that all women cry sometimes? It’s as good as a tonic. Or a holiday.’ And a lot of high laughter and gay explanations at which George hastened to guffaw. He liked her gay. She usually was. For instance, she was a good mimic. She would ‘take off, deliberately trying to relieve his mind of farm worries, the visiting policemen, who toured the district once a month to see
if the natives were behaving themselves, or the Government agricultural officials.

  ‘Do you want to see my husband?’

  That was what they had come for, but they seldom pressed the point. They sat far longer than they had intended, drinking tea, talking about themselves. They would go away and say at the bar in the village: ‘Mrs Grange is a smart woman, isn’t she?’

  And Lucy would be acting for George’s benefit, how a khaki-clad, sun-raw youth had bent into her room, looking around him with comical surprise, had taken a cup of tea thanking her three times, had knocked over an ashtray, stayed for lunch and afternoon tea, and left saying with awkward gallantry: ‘It’s a real treat to meet a lady like you who is interested in things.’

  ‘You shouldn’t be so hard on us poor Colonials, Lucy.’

  Finally one can imagine how one day, when the house-boy came to her in the chicken-runs to say that there was a baas waiting to see her at the house, it was no sweating policeman, thirsty after fifteen dusty miles on a motor-cycle, to whom she must be gracious.

  He was a city man, of perhaps forty or forty-five, dressed in city clothes. At first glance she felt a shudder of repulsion. It was a coarse face, and sensual; and he looked like a patient vulture as the keen heavy-lidded eyes travelled up and down her body.

  ‘Are you looking for my husband perhaps? He’s in the cow-sheds this morning.’

  ‘No, I don’t think I am. I was.’

  She laughed. It was as if he had started playing a record she had not heard for a long time, and which began her feet tapping. It was years since she had played this game. ‘I’ll get you some tea,’ she said hurriedly and left him in her pretty drawing-room.

  Collecting the cups, her hands were clumsy. ‘Why, Lucy!’ she said to herself, archly. She came back very serious and responsible to find him standing in front of the picture which filled half the wall at one end of the room. ‘I should have thought you had sunflowers enough here,’ he said, in his heavy over-emphasized voice, which made her listen for meanings behind his words. And when he turned away from the wall and came to sit down, leaning forward, examining her, she suppressed an impulse to apologize for the picture: ‘Van Gogh is obvious, but he’s rather effective,’ she might have said; and felt that the whole room was that: effective but obvious. But she was pleasantly conscious of how she looked: graceful and cool in her green linen dress, with her corn-coloured hair knotted demurely in her neck. She lifted wide serious eyes to his face and asked: ‘Milk? Sugar?’ and knew that the corners of her mouth were tight with self-consciousness.

  When he left, three hours later, he turned her hand over and lightly kissed the palm. She looked down at the greasy dark head, the red folded neck, and stood rigid, thinking of the raw creased necks of vultures.

  Then he straightened up and said with simple kindliness: ‘You must be lonely here, my dear,’ and she was astounded to find her eyes full of tears.

  ‘One does what one can to make a show of it,’ She kept her lids lowered and her voice light. Inside she was weeping with gratitude. Embarrassed, she said quickly: ‘You know, you haven’t yet said what you came for.’

  ‘I sell insurance. And besides, I’ve heard people talk of you.’

  She imagined the talk and smiled stiffly. ‘You don’t seem to take your work very seriously.’

  ‘If I may I’ll come back another time and try again?’

  She did not reply. He said: ‘My dear, I’ll tell you a secret: one of the reasons I chose this district was because of you. Surely there aren’t so many people in this country one can really talk to that we can afford not to take each other seriously?’

  He touched her cheek with his hand, smiled, and went. She heard the last thing he had said like a parody of the things she often said and felt a violent revulsion.

  She went to her bedroom, where she found herself in front of the mirror. Her hands went to her cheeks and she drew in her breath with the shock. ‘Why, Lucy, whatever is the matter with you?’ Her eyes were dancing, her mouth smiled irresistibly. Yet she heard the archness of her Why, Lucy and thought: I’m going to pieces. I must have gone to pieces without knowing it.

  Later she found herself singing in the pantry as she made a cake, stopped herself; made herself look at the insurance salesman’s face against her closed eyelids, and instinctively wiped the palms of her hands against her skirt.

  He came three days later. Again, in the first shock of seeing him stand at the door, smiling familiarly, she thought: ‘It’s the face of an old animal. He probably chose this kind of work because of the opportunities it gives him.’

  He talked of London, where he had lately been on leave; about the art galleries and the theatres.

  She could not help warming, because of her hunger for this kind of talk. She could not help an apologetic note in her voice, because she knew that after so many years in this exile she must seem provincial. She liked him because he associated himself with her abdication from her standards by saying: ‘Yes, yes, my dear, in a country like this we all learn to accept the second rate.’

  While he talked his eyes were roving. He was listening. Outside the window in the dust the turkeys were scraping and gobbling. In the next room the houseboy was moving; then there was silence because he had gone to get his midday meal. The children had had their lunch and gone off to the garden with the nurse.

  No, she said to herself. No, no, no.

  ‘Does your husband come back for lunch?’

  ‘He takes it on the lands at this time of the year, he’s so busy.’

  He came over and sat beside her. ‘Well, shall we console each other?’ She was crying in his arms. She could feel their impatient and irritable tightening.

  In the bedroom, she kept her eyes shut. His hand travelled up and down her back. ‘What’s the matter, little one? What’s the matter?’

  His voice was a sedative. She could have fallen asleep and lain there for a week inside the anonymous comforting arms. But he was looking at his watch over her shoulder. ‘We’d better get dressed, hadn’t we?’

  ‘Of course.’

  She sat naked on the bed, covering herself with her arms, looking at his white hairy body in loathing, and then at the creased red neck. She became extremely gay, and in the living-room they sat side by side on the big sofa, being ironical. Then he put his arm around her, and she curled up inside it, and cried again. She clung to him and felt him going away from her, and in a few minutes he stood up saying: ‘Wouldn’t do for your old man to come in and find us like this, would it?’ Even while she was hating him for the ‘old man’ she put her arms around him and said: ‘You’ll come back soon.’

  ‘I couldn’t keep away.’ The voice purred caressingly over her head, and she said: ‘You know, I’m very lonely.’

  ‘Darling, I’ll come as soon as I can. I’ve a living to make, you know.’

  She let her arms drop, and smiled, and watched him drive away down the rutted red-dust farm road, between the rippling sea-coloured mealies.

  She knew he would come again, and next time she would not cry; she would stand again like this watching him go, hating him, thinking of how he had said: In this country we learn to accept the second-rate; and he would come again and again and again; and she would stand here, watching him go and hating him.

  A Mild Attack of Locusts

  The rains that year were good, they were coming nicely just as the crops needed them – or so Margaret gathered when the men said they were not too bad. She never had an opinion of her own on matters like the weather, because even to know about what seems a simple thing like the weather needs experience. Which Margaret had not got. The men were Richard her husband, and old Stephen, Richard’s father, a farmer from way back, and these two might argue for hours whether the rains were ruinous, or just ordinarily exasperating. Margaret had been on the farm three years. She still did not understand how they did not go bankrupt altogether, when the men never had a good word for the weather, or the soil, or the Gover
nment. But she was getting to learn the language. Farmer’s language. And they neither went bankrupt nor got very rich. They jogged along, doing comfortably.

  Their crop was maize. Their farm was three thousand acres on the ridges that rise up towards the Zambesi escarpment, high, dry windswept country, cold and dusty in winter, but now, being the wet season, steamy with the heat rising in wet soft waves off miles of green foliage. Beautiful it was, with the sky blue and brilliant halls of air, and the bright green folds and hollows of country beneath, and the mountains lying sharp and bare twenty miles off across the river. The sky made her eyes ache, she was not used to it. One does not look so much at the sky in the city she came from. So that evening when Richard said: ‘The Government is sending out warnings that locusts are expected, coming down from the breeding grounds up North,’ her instinct was to look about her at the trees. Insects – swarms of them – horrible! But Richard and the old man had raised their eyes and were looking up over the mountains. ‘We haven’t had locusts in seven years,’ they said. ‘They go in cycles, locusts do.’ And then: ‘There goes our crop for this season!’

  But they went on with the work of the farm just as usual, until one day they were coming up the road to the homestead for the midday break, when old Stephen stopped, raised his finger and pointed: ‘Look, look, there they are!’

  Out ran Margaret to join them, looking at the hills. Out came the servants from the kitchen. They all stood and gazed. Over the rocky levels of the mountain was a streak of rust-coloured air. Locusts. There they came.

  At once Richard shouted at the cook-boy. Old Stephen yelled at the house-boy. The cook-boy ran to beat the old ploughshare hanging from a tree-branch, which was used to summon the labourers at moments of crisis. The house-boy ran off to the store to collect tin cans, any old bit of metal. The farm was ringing with the clamour of the gong, and they could see the labourers come pouring out of the compound, pointing at the hills and shouting excitedly. Soon they had all come up to the house, and Richard and old Stephen were giving them orders – Hurry, hurry, hurry.