The Sun Between Their Feet Page 17

  ‘What’s the matter, Moony?’ she asked, taking his arm. ‘Don’t you like me? Why don’t you take girls out? Why do you always stay around your mother? You aren’t a baby any longer.’

  These words he listened to smiling; they did not make him angry; because she could not understand that they had nothing to do with him.

  He sat in the cinema beside the girl and waited for it to be over. He would not have been in the least surprised if the building and the screen and the girl had vanished, leaving him lying under a tree with not a house in sight, nothing but the veld, the long grasses, the trees, the birds and the little animals. Afterwards they walked home, and he listened to her chattering scolding voice without replying. He did not mind being with her; but he forgot her as soon as she had gone in at her gate; and wandered back across the street to his own gate, and looked at the tree standing in its gulf of shadow with the moonlight on its branches, and took two steps towards it and stopped again; and finally turned with a bolting movement, as if in fear, and shambled quickly in to his mother. She glanced up at him with a tight suspicious face, and he knew she was angry, though she did not speak. Soon he went to bed, unable to bear this unspoken anger. He slept badly and dreamed of the tree. And next night he went to it as soon as it was dark, and stood holding the heavy dark trunk in his arms.

  The girl from opposite was persistent. Soon he knew, because of the opposition of his mother, that he had a girl, as ordinary young men have girls.

  Why did she want him? Perhaps it was just curiosity. She had been brought up in all that noise and warm quarrelling and laughter, and so Frederick, who neither wanted her nor did not want her, attracted her. She scolded him and pleaded with him: Don’t you love me? Don’t you want to marry me?

  At this he gave her his rambling confused grin. The word marriage made him want to laugh. It was ridiculous. But to her there was nothing ridiculous in it. In her home, marriages took place between boys and girls, and there were always festivals and love-making and new babies.

  Now he would take her in his arms beside the tree outside the gate, embracing her as he had embraced the tree, forgetting her entirely, murmuring strangely over her head among the shadows. She hated it and she loved it; for her, it was like being hypnotized. She scolded him, stayed away, returned; and yet he would not say he would marry her.

  This went on for some time; though for Frederick it was not a question of time. He did not mind having her in his arms under the tree, but he could not marry her. He was driven, night after night, to the silent love-making, with the branches of the tree between him and the moon, and afterwards he went straight to his room, so as not to face his mother.

  Then she got ill. Instead of going with the girl at night, he stayed at home, taking his mother drinks, silently sitting beside her, putting wet handkerchiefs on her forehead. In the mornings the girl looked at him over the hedge and said: ‘Baby! Baby!’

  ‘But my mother’s sick,’ he said, finding these words with difficulty from the dullness of his mind. At this she only laughed. Finally she left him. It was like a tight string snapping from him, so that he reeled back into his own house with his mother. He watched the girl going in and out of her house with her sisters, her brothers, her friends, her young men; at nights he watched her dancing on the veranda to the gramophone. But she never looked back at him. His mother was still an invalid and kept to her chair, and he understood she was now getting old, but it did not come into his head that she might die. He looked after her. Before going off to the office at the railways, where he arranged luggage under the supervision of another clerk, he would lift his mother from her bed, turn away from her while she painfully dressed herself, support her into a chair by the window, fetch her food, and leave her for the day. At night he returned directly to her from work, and sat beside her until it was time to sleep. Sometimes, when the desire for the shadowy street outside became too strong, he would go out for a little time and stand beside his tree. He listened to the wind moving in the branches and he thought: It’s an old tree, it’s too old. If a leaf fell in the darkness he thought: The leaves are falling, it’s dying, it’s too old to live.

  When his mother at last died, he could not understand that she was dead. He stood at her graveside in the efficient cared-for cemetery of this new town, with its antiseptic look because of the neatness of the rows of graves and the fresh clean sunlight, and gazed down at the oblong hole in the red earth, where the spades had smoothed the steep sides into shares of glistening hardness, and saw the precisely-fitting black box at the bottom of the hole, and lifted his head to stare painfully at the neighbours, among whom was the girl from opposite, although he did not see her.

  He went home to the empty house that was full of his mother. He left everything as it was. He did not expand his life to fill the space she had used. He was still a child in the house, while her chair stood empty, and her bed had pillows stacked on it, and her clothes hanging over the foot.

  There was very little money. His affairs were managed by a man at the bank in whose custody he had been left, and he was told how much he could spend. That margin was like a safety-line around his life; and he liked taking his small notebook where he wrote down every penny he spent at each month’s end to the man at the bank.

  He lived on, knowing that his mother was dead, but only because people had said she was. After a time he was driven by his pain down to the cemetery. The grave was a mound of red earth. The flowers of the funeral had died long ago. There was a small headstone of granite. A bougainvillaea creeper had been planted on the grave, which spread its glossy green branches over the stone, in layers of dark shining green and clusters of bleeding purple flowers. The first time he visited the cemetery he stood staring for a long time. Later he would sit by the headstone, fingering the leaves of the plant. Slowly he came to understand that his mother lay beneath where he sat. He saw her folded in the earth, her rough brown forearms crossed comfortably on her breast, her flowered apron pulled down to her fat knees, her spectacles glinting, her wrinkled old face closed in sleep. And he fingered the smooth hard leaves, noting the tiny working veins, thinking: They feed on her. The thought filled him with panic and drove him from the grave. Yet he returned again and again, to sit under the pressure of the heavy yellow sunlight, on the rough warm stone, looking at the red and purple flowers, feeling the leaves between his fingers.

  One day, at the grave, he broke off a branch of the bougainvillaea plant and returned with it to the house, where he set it in a vase by his bed. He sat beside it, touching and smoothing the leaves. Slowly the branch lost its colour and the clusters of flowers grew limp. A spray of stiff dead leaves stood up out of the vase, and his eyes rested on it, brilliant, vague, spectral, while his face contracted with pain and with wonder.

  During the long solitary evenings he began again to stand at his gate, under the stars, looking about him in the darkness. The big tree had been cut down; all the wild trees in that street were gone, because of the danger from the strong old roots to the bricks of the foundations of the houses. The authorities had planted new saplings, domestic and educated trees like bauhinea and jacaranda. Immediately outside his gate, where the old tree had been, was one of these saplings. It grew quickly; one season it was a tiny plant in a little leaning shed of grass; the next it was as high as his head. There was an evening that he went to it, leaning his forehead against it, not thinking, his hands sliding gently and unsurely up and down the long slim trunk. This taut supple thing was nothing he had known; it was strange to him; it was too slight and weak and there was no shadow around it. And yet he stood there night after night, unconscious of the windows about him where people might be looking out, unconscious of passers-by, feeling and fumbling at the tree, letting his eyes stray past to the sky, or to the lines of bushy little saplings along the road, or to the dusty crowding hedges.

  One evening he heard a bright scornful voice say: ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ and he knew it was the girl from oppo
site. But the girl from opposite had married long ago, and was now an untidy handsome matron with children of her own; she had left him so far behind that she could now nod at him with careless kindness, as if to say: ‘Well, well, so you’re still there, are you?’

  He peered and gawked at this girl in his intense ugly way that was yet attractive because of his enormous lit eyes. Then, for him, the young and vigorous creature who was staring at him with such painful curiosity became the girl from opposite. She was in fact the other girl’s sister, perhaps ten years her junior. She was the youngest of that large pulsing family, who were all married and gone, and she was the only one who had known loneliness. When people said with the troubled callousness, the necessary callousness which protects society against its rotten wood: ‘He’s never been the same since the death of his mother, he’s quite crazy now,’ she felt, not merely an embarrassed and fundamentally indifferent pity, but a sudden throb of sympathy. She had been watching Frederick for a long time. She was ready to defend him against people who said, troubled by this attraction of the sick for the healthy: ‘For God’s sake what do you see in him, can’t you do better than that?’

  As before, he did as she wanted. He would accompany her to the pictures. He would come out of his house at her call. He went walking with her through the dark streets at night. And before parting from her he took her into his arms against the sapling that swayed and slipped under their weight, and kissed her with a cold persistence that filled her with horror and with desire, so that she ran away from him sobbing, saying she would never see him again, and returned inevitably the next evening. She never entered his house; she was afraid of the invisibly present old woman. He seemed not to mind what she did. She was driven wild because she knew that if she did not seek him out, the knowledge of loss would never enter him; he would merely return to the lithe young tree, mumbling fierce thick reproachful words to it in the darkness.

  As he grew to understand that she would always return no matter how she strove and protested, he would fold her against him, not hearing her cries, and as she grew still with chilled fear, she would hear through the darkness a dark sibilant whispering: ‘Your hair, your hair, your teeth, your bones.’ His fingers pressed and probed into her flesh. ‘Here is the bone, under is nothing only bone,’ and the long urgent fingers fought to defeat the soft envelope of flesh, fought to make it disappear, so that he could grasp the bones of her arms, the joint of her shoulder; and when he had pressed and probed and always found the flesh elastic against his hands, pain flooded along her as the teeth closed in on her neck, or while his fist suddenly drove inwards, under her ribs, as if the tension of flesh were not there. In the morning she would be bruised. She avoided the eyes of her family and covered up the bruises. She was learning, through this black and savage initiation, a curious strength. She could feel the bones standing erect through her body, a branching undefeatable tree of strength; and when the hands closed in on her, stopping the blood, half-choking her, the stubborn half-conscious thought remained: You can’t do it; you can’t do it, I’m too strong.

  Because of the way people looked in at them, through the darkness, as they leaned and struggled against the tree, she made him go inside the hedge of the small neglected garden, and there they lay together on the lawn, for hour after hour, with the cold high moon standing over them, sucking the warmth from their flesh, so they embraced in a cold lethal ecstasy of pain, knowing only the cold greenish light, feeling the bones of their bodies cleave and knock together while he grasped her so close that she could scarcely draw each breath. One night she fainted, and she came to herself to find him still clasping her, in a cold strong clasp, his teeth bared against her throat, so that a suffocating black pressure came over her brain in wave after wave, and she fought against him, making him tighten his grip and press her into the soil, and she felt the rough grasses driving up into her flesh.

  A flame of self-preservation burnt up into her brain, and she fought until he came to himself and his grip loosened. She said: ‘I won’t. I won’t let you. I won’t come back again.’ He lay still, breathing like a deep sleeper. She did not know if he had heard her. She repeated hurriedly, already uncertain, ‘I won’t let you.’ He got up and staggered away from her, and she was afraid because of the destructive light in the great eyes that glinted at her in the moonlight.

  She ran away and locked herself in her bedroom. For several days she did not return. She watched him from her window as he strode huntedly up and down the street, lurking around the young tree, sometimes shaking it so that the leaves came spinning down around him. She knew she must return, and one evening she drifted across the street, and came on him standing under the lithe young tree that held its fine glinting leaves like a spray of tinted water upwards in the moonlight over the fine slender trunk.

  This time he reached out and grasped her, and carried her inside to the lawn. She murmured helplessly, in a dim panic, ‘You mustn’t, I won’t.’

  She saw the hazy brilliant stars surge up behind his black head, saw the greenish moonlight pour down the thin hollows of his cheeks, saw the great crazy eyes immediately above hers. The cages of their ribs ground together, and she heard: ‘Your hair, dead hair, bones, bones, bones.’

  The bared desperate teeth came down on her throat, and she arched back as the stars swam and went out.

  When people glanced over the hedge in the strong early sunlight of next morning they saw him half-lying over the girl, whose body was marked by blood and by soil and he was murmuring: ‘Your hair, your leaves, your branches, your rivers.’

  Flight

  Above the old man’s head was the dovecote, a tall wire-netted shelf on stilts, full of strutting, preening birds. The sunlight broke on their grey breasts into small rainbows. His ears were lulled by their crooning, his hands stretched up towards his favourite, a homing pigeon, a young plump-bodied bird which stood still when it saw him and cocked a shrewd bright eye.

  ‘Pretty, pretty, pretty,’ he said, as he grasped the bird and drew it down, feeling the cold coral claws tighten around his finger. Content, he rested the bird lightly on his chest, and leaned against a tree, gazing out beyond the dovecote into the landscape of a late afternoon. In folds and hollows of sunlight and shade, the dark red soil, which was broken into great dusty clods, stretched wide to a tall horizon. Trees marked the course of the valley; a stream of rich green grass the road.

  His eyes travelled homewards along this road until he saw his grand-daughter swinging on the gate underneath a frangipani tree. Her hair fell down her back in a wave of sunlight, and her long bare legs repeated the angles of the frangipani stems, bare, shining-brown stems among patterns of pale blossoms.

  She was gazing past the pink flowers, past the railway cottage where they lived, along the road to the village.

  His mood shifted. He deliberately held out his wrist for the bird to take flight, and caught it again at the moment it spread its wings. He felt the plump shape strive and strain under his fingers; and, in a sudden access of troubled spite, shut the bird into a small box and fastened the bolt. ‘Now you stay there,’ he muttered; and turned his back on the shelf of birds. He moved warily along the hedge, stalking his grand-daughter, who was now looped over the gate, her head loose on her arms, singing. The light happy sound mingled with the crooning of the birds, and his anger mounted.

  ‘Hey!’ he shouted; saw her jump, look back, and abandon the gate. Her eyes veiled themselves, and she said in a pert neutral voice: ‘Hullo, Grandad.’ Politely she moved towards him, after a lingering backward glance at the road.

  ‘Waiting for Steven, hey?’ he said, his fingers curling like claws into his palm.

  ‘Any objection?’ she asked lightly, refusing to look at him.

  He confronted her, his eyes narrowed, shoulders hunched tight in a hard knot of pain which included the preening birds, the sunlight, the flowers. He said: ‘Think you’re old enough to go courting, hey?’

  The girl tossed her head at t
he old-fashioned phrase and sulked, ‘Oh, Grandad!’

  ‘Think you want to leave home, hey? Think you can go running around the fields at night?’

  Her smile made him see her, as he had every evening of this warm end-of-summer month, swinging hand in hand along the road to the village with that red-handed, red-throated, violent-bodied youth, the son of the postmaster. Misery went to his head and he shouted angrily: ‘I’ll tell your mother!’

  ‘Tell away!’ she said, laughing, and went back to the gate. He heard her singing, for him to hear:

  ‘I’ve got you under my skin,

  ‘I’ve got you deep in the heart of …’

  ‘Rubbish,’ he shouted. ‘Rubbish. Impudent little bit of rubbish!’

  Growling under his breath he turned towards the dovecote, which was his refuge from the house he shared with his daughter and her husband and their children. But now the house would be empty. Gone all the young girls with their laughter and their squabbling and their teasing. He would be left, uncherished and alone, with that square-fronted, calm-eyed woman, his daughter.

  He stooped, muttering, before the dovecote, resenting the absorbed cooing birds.

  From the gate the girl shouted: ‘Go and tell! Go on, what are you waiting for?’

  Obstinately he made his way to the house, with quick, pathetic persistent glances of appeal back at her. But she never looked around. Her defiant but anxious young body stung him into love and repentance. He stopped. ‘But I never meant …’ he muttered, waiting for her to turn and run to him. ‘I didn’t mean …’

  She did not turn. She had forgotten him. Along the road came the young man Steven, with something in his hand. A present for her? The old man stiffened as he watched the gate swing back, and the couple embrace. In the brittle shadows of the frangipani tree his grand-daughter, his darling, lay in the arms of the postmaster’s son, and her hair flowed back over his shoulder.