Going Home. Doris Lessing

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ just laugh at you. Max was always laughing at Camellia. The next thing was, my fi-ance came over, and said it was time I came home. But my ideas had changed. I said to him: “Now that I have been around a bit I am not sure that you and I are suited. My mind is much broader than it was.” So we broke it off and he went home.

      ‘Then Camellia and Max came here for a holiday. She said she couldn’t stick it without any sun any longer. She started lying about in the sun. And at home she never goes out without a big hat, and even gloves if the sun is hot, because she is so proud of her skin. I told her: “You are crazy to ruin your skin.” And Max said to her that the way everybody in Europe goes south to get sunburned every summer is an unconscious tribute to the superiority of the dark people over the white people. He said that a hundred years ago no one in Europe got sunburned. Max is very well educated and all that. But Camellia got mad, and they quarrelled badly, and so she and I went home. Camellia tried to settle down. Piet wanted her to marry cousin Tom to keep everything in the family. But Camellia said she wanted to go away to make up her mind about marrying Tom. So we both of us came back to England. Camellia met Max straight away. He is the son of a rich family from the Gold Coast. Did you know there were rich families among the natives in the Gold Coast? There are. He is a lawyer. Then they made it up and came here again for a holiday and when she came to England she might just as well have been born in the location. Just look at her.’

      ‘Luckily,’ I said, ‘there aren’t any locations here, so it doesn’t matter.’

      ‘Yes, but now Uncle Piet has written saying that if she doesn’t go home before Christmas he will no longer consider her one of the family. No money, that means. And so she is going back. I’m taking her. I promised Uncle Piet I would take her. Next month. She and Max have decided that she would not be happy in the Gold Coast. For about one week they decided to get married, believe it or not. Then Max said she has not got the sense of social responsibility he wants in a wife – can you beat it? And she said that as far as she was concerned, he was primitive. They quarrelled, I can tell you!’

      ‘So it has all turned out well in the end,’ I said.

      ‘Yes, but how can I take her back like that? The boat goes in a month. She says she is going to stay here until it goes. Everyone will think she’s a Kaffir, looking like that. I can’t understand her. The magazines used to call her the girl with the skin like petals. Actually Camellia was her christened name, believe it or not, but she was proud of them calling her that, even though she pretended she didn’t give a damn.’

      ‘There are bleaching creams,’ I said.

      Janet began laughing. ‘It’s all very well to laugh,’ she said, and admittedly she sounded not far off tears. ‘But if I take her back like that, Uncle Piet will blame me. And I’m going to marry a nice boy who is one of the family. I said to Camellia, “If you had fair hair,” I said to her, “then it wouldn’t matter. But you’re crazy with your dark hair to have such dark skin.”’

      ‘Perhaps she could bleach her hair,’ I said.

      ‘She won’t listen to anything I say to her.’ She thought for a moment. ‘But perhaps if I talk to Max, and explain it to him, perhaps he’ll talk her into being sensible. He’ll laugh himself sick, but perhaps he’ll help me.’

      And, a year ago, I saw a photograph in a South African magazine of Camellia, flower-like in white satin, being married to a stiff-looking, dark-suited, young South African with a proud, embarrassed grin.

      

      

      On the plane between Lusaka and Salisbury, the misty powder-blue eyes of a large, pink-coloured, middle-aged woman teased my memory. At last, the turn of a heavy red neck on mauve-clad shoulder succeeded in setting those innocent blue eyes in the face of a frisking school-girl.

      In my class at school there were a group of girls, committed to idling away the time until they were allowed to leave for the delights of the bioscope and the boys. The despair of the teachers and the envy of the girls, they set the fashion, which was to wear well-pressed gym tunics about half an inch longer than the bottom of one’s black tights, long uncreased black legs, tight girdle, white blouse smooth as ice cream under the school tie, and the white school hat on the back of the head. No one’s black pleats swung with such panache as those of the girls of this group, or gang; and Jane’s, in particular, filled my heart with despair. She was very slim, and it was not a mode for the plump.

      Several times a term the house-mother summoned us, and gave us a pep-talk which began invariably: ‘Now, gals, I want you to take a pull on yourselves …’ For twenty minutes or so she would deal with the virtues of discipline and obedience; and then turned her whole person, which was whale-shaped and ponderous, in the direction of the intransigent group who sat, bored but bland, in desks at the back of the prep-room, meeting the stare of her full-blooded eyes and the jut of her dark jowl with calm but eager inquiry. ‘There are gals here who are so stoo-pid that they are wasting their valuable school life in playing the fool. Life will never give them another opportunity. In two years’ time they will leave to be shop assistants and clerks. While they are at school they think they are doing very well, because they mix with gals they will never see again once they leave. The system of education in this country unfortunately being what it is, they have a chance to improve themselves by mixing with their superiors. I want to plead with these gals, now, before it is too late, to change their low-class and cheap behaviour. I want them particularly to take a strong pull on themselves.’

      This part of the good woman’s lecture always went over our heads, because class language was no part of our experience. We resented, collectively and individually, all attempts to divide us on these lines, but the resentment was too deep to be vocal. There were teachers we liked, teachers who played the traditional roles of butts and villains; but this woman’s self-satisfied stupidity repelled all myth-making. ‘It was as if a savage spoke.’ We recognized that hers was the voice of the Britain our parents had, in their various ways, escaped from. It was a voice peculiarly refined, holding timbres I did not recognize until I came to Britain and began to learn the game of accent-spotting.

      But Jane’s voice, when I heard it on the plane, was indistinguishable from that of the hostess: the anonymous, immediately recognizable voice of the Southern African female, which is light and self-satisfied, poised on an assured femininity which comes of being the keeper of society’s conscience. It is the voice, in short, of Mom.

      ‘Is that you?’ said she to me, in her indolent voice – and it was really painful to see those pretty eyes unchanged among wads of well-fed flesh. ‘I thought it was you. You’ve been doing well for yourself, I must say.’

      ‘It looks,’ I said, ‘as if we both have.’

      She regarded the solid citizen who was her husband with calm satisfaction. ‘My eldest son,’ she remarked, ‘has just got his degree in law.’

      ‘Jolly good,’ I said.

      ‘Do you remember Shirley? She’s done well for herself; she’s married a High Court Judge.’ Shirley was the most determinedly relaxed of the group.

      ‘And Caroline?’ I asked.

      ‘Well, poor Caroline, she did well for herself, but her old man works with the Native Department, and so she’s stuck in the middle of a Native Reserve. But she’s always gay, in spite of having nothing but Kaffirs all about.’

      ‘And Janet?’

      ‘Janet didn’t do well for herself the first time she got married, but he was killed in the war, and now she’s married to a Civil СКАЧАТЬ