The Sun Between Their Feet Read online

  The sun dropped behind the piled boulders and now this glade rested in a cool, spent light, the black trees and black boulders standing around it, waiting for the rain and for the night. The beetles were again on the mountain. They had the ball tight between their legs, they clung on to the lichens, they clung on to rock-wall and their treasure with the desperation of stupidity.

  Now the hard red glare was gone it was possible to see them clearly. It was difficult to imagine the perfect shining globe the ball had been – it was now nothing more than a bit of refuse. There was a clang of thunder. The grasses hissed and swung as a bolt of wind came fast from the sky. The wind hit the ball of dung, it fell apart into a small puff of dusty grass, and the beetles ran scurrying over the surface of the rock looking for it.

  Now the rain came marching towards us, it reached the boulders in a grey envelopment of wet. The big shining drops, outrunners of the rain-army, reached the beetles’ mountain and one, two! the drops hit the beetles smack, and they fell off the rock into the already seething wet grasses at its foot.

  I ran out of the glade with the rain sniping at my heels and my shoulders, thinking of the beetles lying under the precipice up which tomorrow, after the rain had stopped, and the cattle had come grazing, and the sun had come out, they would again labour and heave a fresh ball of dung.

  The Story of Two Dogs

  Getting a new dog turned out to be more difficult than we thought, and for reasons rooted deep in the nature of our family. For what, on the face of it, could have been easier to find a puppy once it had been decided: ‘Jock needs a companion, otherwise he’ll spend his time with those dirty kaffir dogs in the compound’? All the farms in the district had dogs who bred puppies of the most desirable sort. All the farm compounds owned miserable beasts kept hungry so that they would be good hunters for their meat-starved masters; though often enough puppies born to the cage-ribbed bitches from this world of mud huts were reared in white houses and turned out well. Jacob, our builder, heard we wanted another dog, and came up with a lively puppy on the end of a bit of rope. But we tactfully refused. The thin flea-bitten little object was not good enough for Jock, my mother said; though we children were only too ready to take it in.

  Jock was a mongrel himself, a mixture of Alsatian, Rhodesian Ridgeback, and some other breed – terrier? – that gave him ears too cocky and small above a long melancholy face. In short, he was nothing to boast of, outwardly: his qualities were all intrinsic or bestowed on him by my mother who had given this animal her neart when my brother went off to boarding-school.

  In theory Jock was my brother’s dog. Yet why give a dog to a boy at that moment when he departs for school and will be away from home two-thirds of the year? In fact my brother’s dog was his substitute; and my poor mother, whose children were always away being educated, because we were farmers, and farmers’ children had no choice but to go to the cities for their schooling – my poor mother caressed Jock’s too-small intelligent ears and crooned: ‘There, Jock! There, old boy! There, good dog, yes, you’re a good dog, Jock, you’re such a good dog …’ While my father said, uncomfortably: ‘For goodness’ sake, old girl, you’ll ruin him, that isn’t a house-pet, he’s not a lap-dog, he’s a farm dog.’ To which my mother said nothing, but her face put on a most familiar look of misunderstood suffering, and she bent it down close so that the flickering red tongue just touched her cheek, and she sang to him: ‘Poor old Jock then, yes, you’re a poor old dog, you’re not a rough farm dog, you’re a good dog, and you’re not strong, no, you’re delicate.’

  At this last word my brother protested; my father protested; and so did I. All of us, in our different ways, had refused to be ‘delicate’; had escaped from being ‘delicate’ and we wished to rescue a perfectly strong and healthy young dog from being forced into invalidism, as we all, at different times, had been. Also, of course, we all (and we knew it and felt guilty about it) were secretly pleased that Jock was now absorbing the force of my mother’s pathetic need for something ‘delicate’ to nurse and protect.

  Yet there was something in the whole business that was a reproach to us. When my mother bent her sad face over the animal, stroking him with her beautiful white hands on which the rings had grown too large, and said: ‘There, good dog, yes Jock, you’re such a gentleman -’ well, there was something in all this that made us, my father, my brother and myself, need to explode with fury, or to take Jock away and make him run over the farm like the tough young brute he was, or to go away ourselves for ever so that we didn’t have to hear the awful yearning intensity in her voice. Because it was entirely our fault that note was in her voice at all; if we had allowed ourselves to be delicate, and good, or even gentlemen and ladies, there would have been no need for Jock to sit between my mother’s knees, his loyal noble head on her lap, while she caressed and yearned and suffered.

  It was my father who decided there must be another dog, and for the expressed reason that otherwise Jock would be turned into a ‘sissy’. (At this word, reminder of a hundred earlier battles, my brother flushed, looked sulky, and went right out of the room.) My mother would not hear of another dog until Jock started sneaking off to the farm compound to play with the kaffir dogs. ‘Oh you bad dog, Jock,’ she said sorrowfully, ‘playing with those nasty dirty dogs, how could you, Jock!’ And he would playfully, but in an agony of remorse, snap and lick at her face, while she bent the whole force of her inevitably betrayed self over him, crooning: ‘How could you, oh how could you, Jock?’

  So there must be a new puppy. And since Jock was (at heart, despite his temporary lapse) noble and generous and above all well bred, his companion must also possess these qualities. And which dog, where in the world, could possibly be good enough? My mother turned down a dozen puppies; but Jock was still going off to the compound, slinking back to gaze soulfully into her eyes. This new puppy was to be my dog. I decided this: if my brother owned a dog, then it was only fair that I should. But my lack of force in claiming this puppy was because I was in the grip of abstract justice only. The fact was I didn’t want a good, noble and well-bred dog. I didn’t know what I did want, but the idea of such a dog bored me. So I was content to let my mother turn down puppies, provided she kept her terrible maternal energy on Jock, and away from me.

  Then the family went off for one of our long visits in another part of the country, driving from farm to farm to stop a night, or a day, or for a meal with friends. To the last place we were invited for the weekend. A distant cousin of my father, ‘A Norfolk man’ (my father was from Essex), had married a woman who had nursed in the war (First World War) with my mother. They now lived in a small brick and iron house surrounded by granite kopjes that erupted everywhere from thick bush. They were as isolated as any people I’ve known, eighty miles from the nearest railway station. As my father said, they were ‘not suited’, for they quarrelled or sent each other to Coventry all the weekend. However, it was not until much later that I thought about the pathos of these two people, living alone on a minute pension in the middle of the bush, and ‘not suited’; for that weekend I was in love.

  It was night when we arrived, about eight in the evening, an almost full moon floated heavy and yellow above a stark granite-bouldered kopje. The bush around was black and low and silent, except that the crickets made a small incessant din. The car drew up outside a brick box-like structure whose iron roof glinted off moonlight. As the engine stopped, the sound of crickets swelled up, the moonlight’s cold came in for a breath of fragrance to our faces, and there was the sound of a mad wild yapping. Behold, around the comer of the house came a small black wriggling object that hurled itself towards the car, changed course almost on touching it, and hurtled off again, yapping in a high delirious yammering which while it faded behind the house, continued faintly, our ears, or at least mine, straining after it.

  ‘Take no notice of that puppy,’ said our host, the man from Norfolk. ‘It’s been stark staring mad with the moon every night this last week.’


  We went into the house, were fed, were looked after; I was put to bed so that the grown-ups could talk freely. All the time came the mad high yapping. In my tiny bedroom I looked out on to a space of flat white sand that reflected the moon between the house and the farm buildings, and there hurtled a mad wild puppy, crazy with joy of life, or moonlight, weaving back and forth, round and round, snapping at its own black shadow and tripping over its own clumsy feet – like a drunken moth around a candle-flame, or like … Like nothing I’ve ever seen or heard of since.

  The moon, large and remote and soft, stood up over the trees, the empty white sand, the house which had unhappy human beings in it, and a mad little dog yapping and beating its course of drunken joyous delirium. That, of course, was my puppy; and when Mr Barnes came out from the house saying: ‘Now, now, come now, you lunatic animal …’ finally almost throwing himself on the crazy creature, to lift it in his arms still yapping and wriggling and flapping around like a fish, so that he could carry it to the packing-case that was its kennel, I was already saying, as anguished as a mother watching a stranger handle her child: careful now, careful, that’s my dog.

  Next day, after breakfast, I visited the packing-case. Its white wood oozed out resin that smelled tangy in hot sunlight, and its front was open and spilling out soft yellow straw. On the straw a large beautiful black dog lay with her head on outstretched forepaws. Beside her a brindled pup lay on its fat back, its four paws sprawled every-which-way, its eyes rolled up, as ecstatic with heat and food and laziness as it had been the night before from the joy of movement. A crust of mealie-porridge was drying on its shining black lips that were drawn slightly back to show perfect milk teeth. His mother kept her eyes on him, but her pride was dimmed with sleep and heat.

  I went inside to announce my spiritual ownership of the puppy. They were all around the breakfast table. The man from Norfolk was swapping boyhood reminiscences (shared in place, not time) with my father. His wife, her eyes still red from the weeping that had followed a night-quarrel, was gossiping with my mother about the various London hospitals where they ministered to the wounded of the war they had (apparently so enjoyably) shared.

  My mother at once said: ‘Oh my dear, no, not that puppy, didn’t you see him last night? We’ll never train him.’

  The man from Norfolk said I could have him with pleasure.

  My father said he didn’t see what was wrong with the dog, if a dog was healthy that was all that mattered: my mother lowered her eyes forlornly, and sat silent.

  The man from Norfolk’s wife said she couldn’t bear to part with the silly little thing, goodness knows there was little enough pleasure in her life.

  The atmosphere of people at loggerheads being familiar to me, it was not necessary for me to know why they disagreed, or in what ways, or what criticisms they were going to make about my puppy. I only knew that inner logics would in due course work themselves out and the puppy would be mine. I left the four people to talk about their differences through a small puppy, and went to worship the animal, who was now sitting in a patch of shade beside the sweet-wood-smelling packing-case, its dark brindled coat glistening, with dark wet patches on it from its mother’s ministering tongue. His own pink tongue absurdly stuck out between white teeth, as if he had been too careless or lazy to withdraw it into its proper place under his equally pink wet palate. His brown buttony beautiful eyes … but enough, he was an ordinary mongrel puppy.

  Later I went back to the house to find out how the battle balanced: my mother had obviously won my father over, for he said he thought it was wiser not to have that puppy, ‘bad blood tells you know’.

  The bad blood was from the father, whose history delighted my fourteen-year-old imagination. This district being bush, scarcely populated, full of wild animals, even leopards and lions, the four policemen at the police station had a tougher task than in places nearer town; and they had bought half a dozen large dogs to (a) terrorize possible burglars around the police station itself, and (b) surround themselves with an aura of controlled animal savagery. For the dogs were trained to kill if necessary. One of these dogs, a big Ridgeback, had ‘gone wild’. He had slipped his tether at the station and taken to the bush, living by himself on small buck, hares, birds, even stealing farmers’ chickens. This dog, whose proud lonely shape had been a familiar one to farmers for years, on moonlit nights, or in grey dawns and dusks, standing aloof from human warmth and friendship, had taken Stella, my puppy’s mother, off with him for a week of sport and hunting. She simply went away with him one morning; the Barneses had seen her go; had called after her; she had not even looked back. A week later she returned home at dawn and gave a low whine outside their bedroom window, saying: I’m home; and they woke to see their errant Stella standing erect in the paling moonlight, her nose pointed outwards and away from them towards a great powerful dog who seemed to signal to her with his slightly moving tail before fading into the bush. Mr Barnes fired some futile shots after him. Then they both scolded Stella who in due time produced seven puppies, in all combinations of black, brown and gold. She was no pure-bred herself, though of course her owners thought she was, or ought to be, being their dog. The night the puppies were born, the man from Norfolk and his wife heard a sad wail or cry, and arose from their beds to see the wild police dog bending his head in at the packing-case door. All the bush was flooded with a pinkish-gold dawn light, and the dog looked as if he had an aureole of gold around him. Stella was half-wailing, half-growling her welcome, or protest, or fear at his great powerful reappearance and his thrusting muzzle so close to her seven helpless pups. They called out, and he turned his outlaw’s head to the window where they stood side by side in striped pyjamas and embroidered pink silk. He put back his head and howled, he howled, a mad wild sound that gave them gooseflesh, so they said; but I did not understand it until years later when Bill the puppy ‘went wild’ and I saw him that day on the ant-heap howling his pain of longing to an empty listening world.

  The father of her puppies did not come near Stella again; but a month later he was shot dead at another farm, fifty miles away, coming out of a chicken-run with a fine white Leghorn in his mouth; and by that time she had only one pup left, they had drowned the rest. It was had blood, they said, no point in preserving it, they had only left her that one child out of pity.

  I said not a word as they told this cautionary tale, merely preserved the obstinate calm of someone who knows she will get her own way. Was right on my side? It was. Was I owed a dog? I was. Should anybody but myself choose my dog? No, but … Very well then, I had chosen. I chose this dog. I chose it. Too late, I had chosen it.

  Three days and three nights we spent at the Barneses’ place. The days were hot and slow and full of sluggish emotions; and the two dogs slept in the packing-case. At nights, the four people stayed in the living-room, a small brick place heated unendurably by the paraffin lamp whose oily yellow glow attracted moths and beetles in a perpetual whirling halo of small moving bodies. They talked, and I listened for the mad far yapping, and then I crept out in the cold moonlight. On the last night of our stay the moon was full, a great perfect white ball, its history marked on a face that seemed close enough to touch as it floated over the dark cricket-singing bush. And there on the white sand yapped and danced the crazy puppy, while his mother, the big beautiful animal, sat and watched, her intelligent yellow eyes slightly anxious as her muzzle followed the erratic movements of her child, the child of her dead mate from the bush. I crept up beside Stella, sat on the still-warm cement beside her, put my arm around her soft furry neck, and my head beside her alert moving head. I adjusted my breathing so that my rib-cage moved up and down beside hers, so as to be closer to the warmth of her barrelly fury chest, and together we turned our eyes from the great staring floating moon to the tiny black hurtling puppy who shot in circles from near us, so near he nearly crashed into us, to two hundred yards away where he just missed the wheels of the farm wagon. We watched, and I felt the c
hill of moonlight deepen on Stella’s fur, and on my own silk skin, while our ribs moved gently up and down together, and we waited until the man from Norfolk came to first shout, then yell, fling himself on the mad little dog and shut him up in the wooden box where yellow bars of moonlight fell into black dog-smelling shadow. ‘There now, Stella girl, you go with your puppy,’ said the man, bending to pat her head as she obediently went inside. She used her soft nose to push her puppy over. He was so exhausted that he fell and lay, his four legs stretched out and quivering like a shot dog’s, his breath squeezed in and out of him in small regular wheezy pants like whines. And so I left them, Stella and her puppy, to go to my bed in the little brick house which seemed literally crammed with hateful emotions. I went to sleep, thinking of the hurtling little dog, now at last asleep with exhaustion, his nose pushed against his mother’s breathing black side, the slits of yellow moonlight moving over him through boards of fragrant wood.

  We took him away next morning, having first locked Stella in a room so that she could not see us go.

  It was a three-hundred-mile drive, and all the way Bill yapped and panted and yawned and wriggled idiotically on his back on the lap of whoever held him, his eyes rolled up, his big paws lolling. He was a full-time charge for myself and my mother, and, after the city, my brother, whose holidays were starting. He, at first sight of the second dog, reverted to the role of Jock’s master, and dismissed my animal as altogether less valuable material. My mother, by now Bill’s slave, agreed with him, but invited him to admire the adorable wrinkles on the puppy’s forehead. My father demanded irritably that both dogs should be ‘thoroughly trained’.

  Meanwhile, as the nightmare journey proceeded, it was noticeable that my mother talked more and more about Jock, guiltily, as if she had betrayed him. ‘Poor little Jock, what will he say?’