The Grass is Singing (4 page)

Passing his hand over his forehead, he tried desperately, and for the last time, to achieve some sort of a vision that would lift the murder above the confusions and complexities of the morning, and make of it, perhaps, a symbol, or a warning. But he failed. It was too hot. He was still exasperated by the attitude of the two men. His head was reeling. It must be over a hundred in this room, he thought angrily, getting up from his chair, and finding that his legs were unsteady. And he had drunk, at the most, two tablespoons of brandy! This damned country, he thought, convulsed with anger. Why should this happen to me, getting

involved with a damned twisted affair like this, when I have only just come; and I really can't be expected to act as judge and jury and compassionate God into the bargain!

He stumbled on to the verandah, where the murder had been committed the night before. There was a ruddy smear on the brick, and a puddle of rainwater was tinged pink. The same big shabby dogs were licking at the edges of the water, and cringed away when Tony shouted at them. He leaned against the wall and stared over the soaked greens and browns of the veld to the kopjes, which were sharp and blue after the rain; it had poured half the night. He realized, as me sound grew loud in his cars, that cicadas were shrilling all about him. He had been too absorbed to hear them. It was a steady, insistent screaming from every bush and tree. It wore on his nerves. 'I am getting out of this place,' he said suddenly. J am getting out of it altogether. I am going to the other end of the country. I wash my hands of the thing. Let the Slatters and the Denhams do as they like. What has it got to do with me?

That morning, he packed his things and walked over to the Slatters' to tell Charlie he would not stay. Charlie seemed indifferent, even relieved; he had been thinking there was no need for a manager now that Dick would not come back.

After that the Turners' farm was run as an overflow for Charlie's cattle. They grazed all over it, even up to the hill where the house stood. It was left empty: it soon fell down.

Tony went back into town, where he hung round the bars and hotels for a while, waiting to hear of some job that would suit him. But his early carefree adaptability was gone. He had grown difficult to please. He visited several farms, but each time went away: farming had lost its glitter for him. At the trial, which was as Sergeant Denham had said it would be, a mere formality, he said what was expected of him. It was suggested that the native had murdered Mary Turner while drunk, in search of money and jewellery.

When the trial was over, Tony loafed about aimlessly until his money was finished. The murder, those few weeks with the Turners, had affected him more than he knew. But his money being gone, he had to do something in order to eat. He met a man from Northern Rhodesia, who told him about the copper mines and the wonderfully high salaries. They sounded fantastic to Tony. He took the next train to the copper belt, intending to save some money and start some business on his own account. But the salaries, once there, did not seem so good as they had from a distance. The cost of living was high, and then, everyone drank so much… Soon he left underground work and was a kind of manager. So, in the end, he sat in an office and did paper work, which was what he had come to Africa to avoid. But it wasn't so bad really. One should take things as they came. Life isn't as one expects it to be – and so on; these were the things he said to himself when depressed, and was measuring himself against his early ambitions.

For the people in `the district', who knew all about him by hearsay, he was the young man from England who hadn't the guts to stand more than a few weeks of farming. No guts, they said. He should have stuck it out.

As the railway lines spread and knotted and ramified all over Southern Africa, along them, at short distances of a few miles, sprang up little dorps that to a traveller appear as insignificant clusters of ugly buildings, but which are the centres of farming districts perhaps a couple of hundred miles across. They contain the station building, the post office, sometimes a hotel, but always a store.

If one was looking for a symbol to express South Africa, the South Africa that was created by-financiers and mine magnates, the South Africa which the old missionaries and explorers who charted the Dark Continent would be horrified to see, one would find it in the store. The store is everywhere. Drive ten miles from one and you come on the next-, poke your head out of the railway carriage, and there it is; every mine has its store, and many farms.

It is always a low single-storied building divided into segments like a strip of chocolate, with grocery, butchery and bottle-store under one corrugated iron roof. It has a high dark wooden counter, and behind the counter shelves hold anything from distemper mixture to toothbrushes, an mixed together. There are a couple of racks holding cheap cotton dresses in brilliant colours, and perhaps a stack of shoe-boxes, or a glass case for cosmetics or sweets. There is the unmistakable smell, a smell compounded of varnish, dried blood from the killing yards behind, dried hides, dried fruit and strong yellow soap. Behind the, counter is a Greek, or a Jew, or an Indian. Sometimes the children of this man, who is invariably hated by the whole district as a profiteer and an alien, are playing among the vegetables because the living quarters are just behind the shop.

For thousands of people up and down Southern Africa the store is the background to their childhood. So many things centered round it. It brings back, for instance, memories of those nights when the car, after driving endlessly through a chilly, dusty darkness, stopped unexpectedly in front of a square of light where men lounged with glasses in their hands, and one was carried out into the brilliantly lit bar for a sip of searing liquid 'to keep the fever away'. Or it might be the place where one drove twice a week to collect mail, and to see all the farmers from miles around buying their groceries, and reading letters from Home with one leg propped on the running-board of the car, momentarily oblivious to the sun, the square of red dust where the dogs lay scattered like flies on meat and the groups of staring natives – momentarily transported back to the country for which they were so bitterly homesick, but where they would not choose to live again: 'South Africa gets into you,' these self-exiled people would say, ruefully.

For Mary, the word 'Home' spoken nostalgically, meant England, although both her parents were South Africans and had never been to England. It meant ' England ' because of those mail-days, when she slipped up to the store to watch the cars come in, and drive away again laden with stores and letters and magazines from overseas

For Mary, the store was the real centre of her life, even more important to her than to most children. To begin with, she always lived within sight of it, in one of those little dusty dorps. She was always having to run across to bring a pound of dried peaches or a tin of salmon for her mother, or to find out whether the weekly newspaper had arrived. And she would linger there for hours, staring at the piles of sticky coloured sweets, letting the fine grain stored in the sacks round the walls trickle through her fingers, looking covertly at the little Greek girl whom she was not allowed to play with, because her mother said her parents were dagos. And later, when she grew older, the store came to have another significance: it was the place where her father bought his drink, Sometimes her mother worked herself into a passion of resentment, and walked up to the barman, complaining that she could not make ends

meet, while her husband squandered his salary in drink. Mary knew, even as a child, that her mother complained for the sake of making a scene and parading her sorrows: that she really enjoyed the luxury of standing there in the bar while the casual drinkers looked on, sympathetically; she enjoyed complaining in a hard sorrowful voice about her husband. `Every night he comes home from here,' she would say, `every night! And I am expected to bring up three children on the money that is left over when he chooses to come home.' And then she would stand still; waiting for the condolences of the man who pocketed the money which was rightly hers to spend for the children. But he would say at the end, `But what can I do? I can't refuse to sell him drink, now can I?' And at last, having played out her scene and taken her fill of sympathy, she would slowly walk away across the expanse of red dust to her house, holding Mary by the hand -, a tall, scrawny woman with angry, unhealthy brilliant eyes. She made a confidante of Mary early. She used to cry over her sewing while Mary comforted her miserably, longing to get away, but feeling important too, and hating her father.

This is not to say that he drank himself into a state of brutality. He was seldom drunk as some men were, whom Mary saw outside the bar, frightening her into a real terror of the place. He drank himself every evening into a state of cheerful fuddled good humour, coming home late to a cold dinner, which he ate by himself. His wife treated him with a cold indifference. She reserved her scornful ridicule of him for when her friends came to tea. It was as if she did not wish to give her husband the satisfaction of knowing that she cared anything for him at all, or felt anything for him, even contempt and derision. She behaved as if he were simply not there for her. And for all practical purposes he was not. He brought home the money, and not enough of that. Apart from that he was a cipher in the house, and knew it. He was a little man, with dull ruffled hair, a baked apple face, and an air of uneasy though aggressive jocularity. He called visiting petty officials 'sir'; and shouted at the natives under him; he was on the railway, working as a pump man.

And then, as well as being the focus of the district, and the source of her father's drunkenness, the store was the powerful, implacable place that sent in bills at the end of the month. They could never be fully paid: her mother was always appealing to the owner for just another month's grace. Her father and mother fought over these bills twelve times a year. They never quarreled over anything but money; sometimes, in fact, her mother remarked dryly that she might have done worse: she might, for instance, be like Mrs Howman, who had seven children; she had only three mouths to fill, after all. It was a long time before Mary saw the connection between these phrases, and by then there was only one mouth to feed, her own; for her brother and sister both died of dysentery one very dusty year. Her parents were good friends because of this sorrow for a short while: Mary could remember thinking that it was an ill wind that did no one good; because the two dead children were both so much older than she that they were no good to her as playmates, and the loss was more than compensated by the happiness of living in a house where there were suddenly no quarrels, with a mother who wept, but who had lost that terrible hard indifference. That phase did not last long, however. She looked back on it as the happiest time of her childhood.

The family moved three times before Mary went to school; but afterwards she could not distinguish between the various stations she had lived in. She remembered an exposed dusty village that was backed by a file of bunchy gum trees, with a square of dust always swirling and settling because of passing ox-wagons; with hot sluggish air that sounded several times a day with the screaming and coughing of trains. Dust and chickens; dust and children and wandering natives; dust and the store – always the store.

Then she was sent to boarding school and her life changed. She was extremely happy, so happy that she dreaded going home at holiday-times to her fuddled father, her bitter mother, and the fly-away little house that was like a small wooden box on stilts.

At sixteen she left school and took a job in an office in town: one of those sleepy little towns scattered like raisins in a dry cake over the body of South Africa. Again, she was very happy. She seemed born for typing and shorthand and book-keeping and the comfortable routine of an office. She liked things to happen safely one after another in a pattern, and she liked, particularly, the friendly impersonality of it. By the time she was twenty she had a good job, her own friends, a niche in the life of the town. Then her mother died and she was virtually alone in the world, for her father was five hundred miles away, having been transferred to yet another station. She hardly saw him: he was proud of her, but (which was more to the point) left her alone. They did not even write; they were not the writing sort. Mary was pleased to be rid of him. Being alone in the world had no terrors for her at all, she liked it. And by dropping her father she seemed in some way to be avenging her mother's sufferings. It had never occurred to her that her father, too, might have suffered. `About what?' she would have retorted, had anyone suggested it. `He's a man, isn't he? He can do as he likes.' She had inherited from her mother an arid feminism, which had no meaning in her own life at all, for she was leading the comfortable carefree existence of a single woman in South Africa, and she did not know how fortunate she was. How could she know? She understood nothing of conditions in other countries, had no measuring rod to assess herself with.

It had never occurred to her to think, for instance, that she, the daughter of a petty railway official and a woman whose life had been so unhappy because of economic pressure that she had literally pined to death, was living in much the same way as the daughters of the wealthiest in South Africa, could do as she pleased – could marry, if she wished, anyone she wanted. These things did not enter her head. `Class' is not a South African word; and its equivalent, 'race', meant to her the office boy in the firm where she worked, other women's servants, and the amorphous mass of natives in the streets, whom -she hardly noticed. She knew (the phrase was in the air) that the natives were getting 'cheeky'. But she had nothing to do with them really. They were outside her orbit.

Till she was twenty-five nothing happened to break the smooth and comfortable life she led. Then her father died. That removed the last link that bound her to a childhood she hated to remember. There was nothing left to connect her with the sordid little house on stilts, the screaming of trains, the dust, and the strife between her parents. Nothing at all! She was free. And when the funeral was over, and she had returned to the office, she looked forward to a life that would continue as it had so far been. She was very happy: that was perhaps her only positive quality, for there was nothing else distinctive about her, though at twenty-five she was at her prettiest. Sheer contentment put a bloom on her: she was a thin girl, who moved awkwardly, with a fashionable curtain of light-brown hair, serious blue eyes, and pretty clothes. Her friends would have described her as a slim blonde: she modeled herself on the more childish looking film stars.