Doris Lessing - The Grass is Singing

There came an end to embroidery; again she was left empty-handed. Again she looked about for something to do. The walls, she decided, were filthy. She would whitewash them all, herself, to save money. So, for two weeks, Dick came back to the house to find furniture stacked in the middle of rooms and pails of thick white stuff standing on the floor. But she was very methodical. One room was finished before another was begun; and while he admired her for her capability and self-assurance, undertaking this work she had no experience or knowledge of, he was alarmed too. What was she going to do with all this energy and efficiency? It undermined his own self-assurance even further, seeing her like this, for he knew, deep down, that this quality was one he lacked, Soon, the walls were dazzling blue-white, every inch of them painted by Mary her self, standing on a rough ladder for days at a time.

And now she found she was tired. She found it pleasant to let go a little, and to spend her time sitting with her hands folded, on the big sofa. Put not for long. She was restless, so restless she did not know what to do with herself. She unpacked the novels she had brought with her, and turned them over. These were the books she had collected over years from the mass that had come her way. She had read each one a dozen times, knowing it by heart, following the familiar tales as a child listens to his mother telling him a well-known fairy tale. It had been a drug, a soporific, in the past, reading them; now, as she turned them over listlessly, she wondered why they had lost their flavour. Her mind wandered as she determinedly turned the pages; and she realized, after she had been reading for perhaps an hour, that she had not taken in a word. She threw the book aside and tried another, but with the same result. For a few days the house was littered with books in faded dust covers. Dick was pleased: it flattered him to think he had married a woman who read books. One evening he picked up a book called The Fair Lady, and opened it in the middle.

‘ The trekkers trekked North, towards the Land of Promise where never the cold grasping hand of the hated British could reach them. Like a cold snake through the hat landscape the column coiled. Prunella Van Koetzie skirmished lightly on her horse on the perimeter of the column, wearing a white kappie over her dainty sweat pearled face and close clustering ringlets. Piet Van Friesland watched her, his heart throbbing in time to the great blood-stained heart of South Africa itself. Could he win her, the sweet Prunella, who bore herself like a queen among these burghers and mynheers and _buxom fraus' in their doeks and veldschoens? Could he?

He stared and stared. Tant' Anna, putting out the koekies and the biltong for the midday meal, in a red doek the colour of the kafir-boom trees, shook her fat sides in laughter and said to herself, "That will be a match yet."'

He put it down, and looked across at Mary, who was sitting with a book in her lap, staring up at the roof. 'Can't we have ceilings, Dick?' she asked fretfully.

'It would cost so much,' he said doubtfully. 'Perhaps next year, if we do well.'

In a few days Mary gathered up the books and put them away; they were not what she wanted. She took up the handbook on kitchen kaffir again, and spent all her time on it, practicing on Samson in the kitchen, disconcerting him with her ill-humoured criticisms, but behaving with a cold-dispassionate justice.

Samson became more and more unhappy. He had been so used to Dick, and they understood each other very well. Dick swore at him often, but laughed with him afterwards. This woman never laughed. She put out, carefully, so much meal, and so much sugar; and watched the left-overs from their own food with an extraordinary, humiliating capacity for remembering every cold potato and every piece of bread, asking for them if they were missing.

Shaken out of his comparatively comfortable existence, he grew sulky There were several rows in the kitchen, and once Dick found Mary in tears. She knew there had been enough raisins put out for the pudding, but when they came to eat it, there were hardly any. And the boy denied stealing them…

'Good heavens,' said Dick, amused, 'I thought there was something really wrong.'

'But I know he took them,' sobbed Mary.

'He probably did, but he's a good old swine on the whole.'

'I am going to take it out of his wages.'

Dick, puzzled at her emotional state, said: 'If you think it is really necessary.' He reflected that this was the first time he had seen her cry.

So Samson, who earned a pound a month, was docked two shillings. He accepted the information with a shut sullen face, saying nothing to her, but appealing to Dick, who told him that he was to take orders from Mary. Samson gave notice that evening, on the grounds that he was needed in his kraal. Mary began to question him closely as to why he was needed; but Dick touched her arm warningly and shook his head.

'Why shouldn't I ask him?' she demanded. `He's lying, isn't he?

'Of course he's lying,' said Dick irritably. `Of course. That is not the point. You can't keep him against his will.' `Why should I accept a lie?' said Mary. 'Why should I? Why can't he say straight out that he doesn't like working for me, instead of lying about his kraal?'

Dick shrugged, looking at her with impatience; he could not understand her unreasonable insistence: he knew how to get on with natives; dealing with them was a sometimes amusing, sometimes annoying game in which both sides followed certain unwritten rules.

`You would he angry if he did say so,' he remarked ruefully; but with affection still; he could not take her seriously, she seemed to him a child when she behaved like this. And he was genuinely grieved that this old native, who had worked for him all these years, was going now. `Well,' he said at last, philosophically, `I should have expected it. I should have got a new boy right from the beginning. There's always trouble with a change of management.'

Mary watched the farewell scene, that took place on the back steps, from the doorway. She was filled with wonder, and even repulsion. Dick was really sorry to see the end of this nigger! She could not understand any white person feeling anything personal about a native; it made Dick seem really horrible to her. She heard him say, "When your work in the kraal is finished, you will come back and work for us again?' The native answered, `Yes, baas,' but he was already turned to go; and Dick came back into the house silent and glum. `He won't come back,' he said.

`There are plenty of other munts, aren't there?' she asked snappily, disliking him.

`Yes,' he assented, `oh yes.'

It was several days before a new cook offered himself for work, and Mary did the house herself. She found it unexpectedly heavy, although there was not, really, so much to do. Yet she liked the feeling of being alone there all day, responsible for it. She scrubbed and swept and polished; housework was quite a new thing to her; all her life natives had done the work for her, as silently and as unobtrusively as fairies. Because it was new, she really enjoyed it. But when everything was clean and polished, and the pantry was full of food, she used to sit on the old greasy sofa in the front room, suddenly collapsing on it as if her legs had been drained of strength. It was so hot! She had never imagined it could be so hot. The sweat poured off her all day; she could feel it running down her ribs and thighs under her dress, as if ants were crawling over her. She used to sit quite, quite still, her eyes closed, and feel the heat beating down from the iron over her head. Really, it was so bad she should wear a hat even in the house. If Dick had ever really lived in this house, she thought, instead of being down on the lands all day, he would have put in ceilings. Surely they did not cost so much? As the days passed, she found herself thinking fretfully that she had been foolish to spend her little store of money on curtains rather than on ceilings, If she asked Dick again, and explained to him what it meant to her, perhaps he would relent and