The Sun Between Their Feet: Collected African Stories Volume Two. Doris Lessing

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СКАЧАТЬ go on like that; and in any case, one should have a sense of proportion. Mr Pritt was never mentioned, though it was not for years that I thought to consider what this might mean. We used to see him about the station, or at gymkhanas. He was an ordinary man, not like a farmer, as we knew farmers, men who could do anything; he might have been anybody, or an office person. He was ordinary in height, thinnish, with his pale hair leaving his narrow forehead high and bony. He was an accountant as well. People used to say that Charlie Slatter helped Emmy Pritt run their farm, and most of the time Mr Pritt was off staying at neighbouring farms doing their accounts.

      The new assistant was Mr Andrews, and as Mrs Slatter said to my mother when she came over for tea, he was a gentleman. He had been educated at Cambridge in England. He came of a hard-up family, though, for he had only a few hundred pounds of capital of his own. He would be an assistant for two years and then start his own farm.

      For a time I did not go to stay with Mrs Slatter. Once or twice I asked if she had said anything to my mother about my coming, and she said in a dry voice, meaning to discourage me, ‘No, she hasn’t said anything.’ I understood when I heard my father say: ‘Well, it might not be such a bad thing. For one thing he’s a nice lad, and for another it might make Slatter see things differently.’ And another time: ‘Perhaps Slatter would give Molly a divorce? After all, he practically lives at the Pritts! And then Molly could have some sort of life at last.’

      ‘But the boy’s not twenty-five,’ said my mother. And she was really shocked, as distinct from her obstinate little voice when she felt him to be wrong-headed or loose in his talk -a threat of some kind. ‘And what about the children? Four children!’

      My father said nothing to this, but after some minutes he came off some track of thought with: ‘I hope Molly’s taking it sensibly. I do hope she is. Because she could be laying up merry hell for herself if she’s not.’

      I saw George Andrews at a gymkhana standing at the rail with Mrs Slatter. Although he was an Englishman he was already brown, and his clothes were loosened up and easy, as our men’s clothes were. So there was nothing to dislike about him on that score. He was rather short, not fat, but broad, and you could see he would be fat. He was healthy-looking above all, with a clear reddish face the sun had laid a brown glisten over, and very clear blue eyes, and his hair was thick and short, glistening like fur. I wanted to like him and so I did. I saw the way he leaned beside Mrs Slatter, with her dust-coat over his arm, holding out his programme for her to mark. I could understand that she would like a gentleman who would open doors for her and stand up when she came into the room, after Mr Slatter. I could see she was proud to be with him. And so I liked him though I did not like his mouth; his lips were pink and wettish. I did not look at his mouth again for a long time. And because I liked him I was annoyed with my father when he said, after that gymkhana, ‘Well, I don’t know. I don’t think I like it after all. He’s a bit of a young pup, Cambridge or no Cambridge.’

      Six months after George Andrews came to the district there was a dance for the young people at the Slatters’. It was the first dance. The older boys were eighteen and seventeen and they had girls. The two younger boys were fifteen and thirteen and they despised girls. I was fifteen then, and all these boys were too young for me, and the girls of the two older boys were nearly twenty. There were about sixteen of us, and the married people thirty or forty, as usual. The married people sat in the living-room and danced in it, and we were on the verandas. Mr Slatter was dancing with Emmy Pritt, and sometimes another woman, and Mrs Slatter was busy being hostess and dancing with George Andrews. I was still in a short dress and unhappy because I was in love with one of the assistants from the farm between the rivers, and I knew very well that until I had a long dress he would not see me. I went into Mrs Slatter’s bedroom latish because it seemed the only room empty, and I looked out of the window at the dark wet night. It was the rainy season and we had driven over the swollen noisy river and all the way the rain-water was sluicing under our tyres. It was still raining and the lamplight gilded streams of rain so that as I turned my head slightly this way and that, the black and the gold rods shifted before me, and I thought (and I had never thought so simply before about these things): ‘How do they manage? With all these big boys in the house? And they never go to bed before eleven or half-past these days, I bet, and with Mr Slatter coming home unexpectedly from Emmy Pritt – it must be difficult. I suppose he has to wait until everyone’s asleep. It must be horrible, wondering all the time if the boys have noticed something …’ I turned from the window and looked from it into the big low-ceilinged comfortable room with its big low bed covered over with pink roses, the pillows propped high in pink frilled covers, and although I had been in that room during visits for years of my life, it seemed strange to me, and ugly. I loved Mrs Slatter. Of all the women in the district she was the kindest, and she had always been good to me. But at that moment I hated her and I despised her.

      I started to leave the bedroom, but at the door I stopped, because Mrs Slatter was in the passage, leaning against the wall, and George Andrews had his arms around her, and his face in her neck. She was saying, ‘Please don’t, George, please don’t, please, the boys might see.’ And he was swallowing her neck and saying nothing at all. She was twisting her face and neck away and pushing him off. He staggered back from her, as though she had pushed him hard, but it was because he was drunk and had no balance, and he said: ‘Oh come on into your bedroom a minute. No one will know.’ She said, ‘No, George. Why should we have to snatch five minutes in the middle of a dance, like – ‘

      ‘Like what?’ he said, grinning. I could see how the light that came down the passage from the big room made his pink lips glisten.

      She looked reproachfully at him, and he said: ‘Molly, this thing is getting a bit much, you know. I have to set my alarm clock for one in the morning, and then I’m dead-beat. I drag myself out of my bed, and then you’ve got your clock set for four, and God knows working for your old man doesn’t leave one with much enthusiasm for bouncing about all night.’ He began to walk off towards the big room where the people were dancing. She ran after him and grabbed at his arm. I retreated backwards towards Mr Slatter’s room, but almost at once she had got him and turned him around and was kissing him. The people in the big room could have seen if they had been interested.

      That night Mrs Slatter had on an electric blue crêpe dress with diamonds on the straps and in flower patterns on the hips. There was a deep V in front which showed her breasts swinging loose under the crêpe, though usually she wore strong corsets. And the back was cut down to the waist. As the two turned and came along, he put his hand into the front of her dress, and I saw it lift out her left breast, and his mouth was on her neck again. Her face was desperate, but that did not surprise me, because I knew she must be ashamed. I despised her, because her white long breast lying in his hand like a piece of limp floured dough, was not like Mrs Slatter who called men Mister even if she had known them twenty years, and was really very shy, and there was nothing Mr Slatter liked more than to tease her because she blushed when he used bad language. ‘What did you make such a fuss for?’ George Andrews was saying in a drunken sort of way. ‘We can lock the door, can’t we?’

      ‘Yes, we can lock the door,’ she answered in the same way, laughing.

      I went back into the crowd of married people where the small children were, and sat beside my mother, and it was only five minutes before Mrs Slatter came back looking as usual, from one door, and then George Andrews, in at another.

      I did not go to the Slatters’ again for some months. For one thing, I was away at school, and for another people were saying that Mrs Slatter was run down and she should get off the altitude for a bit. My father was not mentioning the Slatters by this time, because he had quarrelled with my mother over them. I knew they had, because whenever Molly Slatter was mentioned, my mother tightened her mouth and changed the subject.

      And so a year went by. At Christmas they had a dance again, and I had my first long dress, and I went to that dance not caring if it was at the Slatters’ or anywhere else. СКАЧАТЬ