The Grass is Singing (5 page)

At thirty nothing had changed. On her thirtieth birthday she felt a vague surprise that did not even amount to discomfort – for she did not feel any different – that the years had gone past so quickly. Thirty! It sounded a great age. But it had nothing to do with her. At the same time she did not celebrate this birthday-, she allowed it to be forgotten. She felt almost outraged that such a thing could happen to her, who was no different from the Mary of sixteen.

She was by now the personal secretary of her employer, and was earning good money. If she had wanted, she could have taken a flat and lived the smart sort of life. She was quite presentable. She had the undistinguished, dead-level appearance of South African white democracy. Her voice was one of thousands: flattened, a little sing-song, clipped.

Anyone could have worn her clothes. There was nothing to prevent her living by herself, even running her own car, entertaining on a small scale. She could have become a person on her own account. But this was against her instinct.

She chose to live in a girls' club, which had been started, really, to help women who could not earn much money, but she had been there so long no one thought of asking her to leave. She chose it because it reminded her of school, and she had hated leaving school., She liked the crowds of girls, and eating in a big dining-room, and coming home after the pictures to find a friend in her room waiting for a little gossip. In the Club she was a person of some importance, out of the usual run. For one thing she was so much older than the others. She had come to have what was almost the role of a comfortable maiden aunt to whom one can tell one's troubles. For Mary was never shocked, never condemned, never told tales. She seemed impersonal, above the little worries. The stiffness of her manner, her shyness, protected her from many spites and jealousies. She seemed immune. This was her strength, but also a weakness that she would not have considered a weakness: she felt disinclined, almost repelled, by the thought of intimacies and scenes and contacts. She moved among all those young women with a faint aloofness that said as clear as words: I will not be drawn in. And she was quite unconscious of it. She was very happy in the Club.

Outside the girls' club, and the office, where again she was a person of some importance, because of the many years she had worked there, she led a full and active life. Yet it was a passive one, in some respects, for it depended on other people entirely. She was not the kind of woman who initiates parties, or who is the centre of a crowd. She was still the girl who is `taken out'.

Her life was really rather extraordinary: the conditions which produced it are passing now, and when the change is complete, women will look back on them as on a vanished Golden Age.

She got up late, in time for the office (she was very punctual) but not in time for breakfast. She worked efficiently, but in a leisurely way, until lunch. She went back to the club for lunch. Two more hours' work in the afternoon and she was free. Then she played tennis, or hockey or swam. And always with a man, one of those innumerable men who `took her out', treating her like a sister: Mary was such a good pal! Just as she seemed to have a hundred women friends, but no particular friend, so she had (it seemed) a hundred men, who had taken her out, or were taking her out, or who had married and now asked her to their homes. She was friend to half the town. And in the evening she always went to sundowner parties that prolonged themselves till midnight, or danced, or went to the pictures. Sometimes she went to the pictures five nights a week. She was never in bed before twelve or later. And so it had gone on, day after day, week after week, year after year. South Africa is a wonderful Place: for the unmarried white woman. But she was not playing her part, for she did not get married. The years went past; her friends got married; she had been bridesmaid a dozen times; other people's children were growing up; but she went on as companionable, as adaptable, as aloof and as heart-whole as ever, working as hard enjoying herself as she ever did in the office, and never for one moment alone, except when she was asleep.

She seemed not to care for men. She would say to her girls, 'Men! They get all the fun.' Yet outside the office and the club her life was entirely dependent upon men, though she would have most indignantly repudiated the accusation. And perhaps she was not so dependent upon them really, for when she listened to other people's complaints and miseries she offered none of her own. Sometimes her friends felt a little put off, and let down. It was hardly fair, they felt obscurely, to listen, to advise, to act as a sort of universal shoulder for the world to weep on, and give back nothing of her own. e truth was she had no troubles. She heard other people's complicated stories with wonder, even a little fear. She shrank away from all that. She was a most rare phenomenon: a woman of thirty without love troubles, headaches, backaches, sleeplessness or neurosis. She did not know how rare she was.

And she was still `one of the girls'. If a visiting cricket team came to town and partners were needed, the organizers would ring up Mary. That was the kind of thing she was good at: adapting herself sensibly and quietly to any occasion. She would sell tickets for a charity dance or act as a dancing partner for a visiting full-back with equal amiability.

And she still wore her hair little-girl fashion on her shoulders, and wore little-girl frocks in pastel colours, and kept her shy, naive manner. If she had been left alone she would have gone on, in her own way, enjoying herself thoroughly, until people found one day that she had turned imperceptibly into one of those women who have become old without ever having been middle-aged: a little withered, a little acid, hard as nails, sentimentally kindhearted, and addicted to religion or small dogs.

They would have been kind to her, because she had `missed the best things of life'. But then there are so many people who don't want them: so many for whom the best things have been poisoned from the start. When Mary thought of `home' she remembered a wooden box shaken by passing trains; when she thought of marriage she remembered her father coming home red-eyed and fuddled; when she thought of children she saw her mother's face at her children's funeral – anguished, but as dry and as hard as rock. Mary liked other people's children but shuddered at the thought of having any of her own. She felt sentimental at weddings, but she had a profound distaste for sex; there had been little privacy in her home and there were things she did not care to remember; she had taken good care to forget them years ago.

She certainly did feel, at times, a restlessness, a vague dissatisfaction that took the pleasure out of her activities for a while. She would be going to bed, for instance, contentedly, after the pictures, when the thought would strike her, `Another day gone!' And then time would contract and it seemed to her only a breathing space since she left school and came into town to earn her own living; and she would feel a little panicky, as if an invisible support had been drawn away from underneath her. But then, being a sensible person, and firmly convinced that thinking about oneself was morbid, she would get into bed and turn out the lights. She might wonder, before drifting off to sleep, `Is this all? When I get to be old will this be all I have to look back on?' But by morning she would have forgotten it, and the days went round, and she would be happy again. For she did not know what she wanted. Something bigger, she would think vaguely – a different kind of life. But the mood never lasted long. She was so satisfied with her work, where she felt sufficient and capable; with her friends, whom she relied on; with her life at the Club, which was as pleasant and as gregarious as being in a giant twittering aviary, where there was always the excitement of other people's engagements and weddings; and with her men friends, who treated her just like a good pal, with none of this silly sex business.

But all women become conscious, sooner or later, of that impalpable, but steel-strong pressure to get married, and Mary, who was not at all susceptible to atmosphere, or the things people imply, was brought face to face with it suddenly, and most unpleasantly.

She was in the house of a married friend, sitting on the verandah, with a lighted room behind her. She was alone; and heard people talking in low voices, and caught her own name. She rose to go inside and declare herself: it was typical of her that her first thought was, how unpleasant it would be for her friends to know she had overheard. Then she sank down again, and waited for a suitable moment to pretend she had just come in from the garden. This was the conversation she listened to, while her face burned and her hands went clammy.

`She's not fifteen any longer: it is ridiculous! Someone should tell her about her clothes.' `How old is she?'

`Must be well over thirty. She has been going strong for years. She was working long before I began working, and that was a good twelve years ago.'

`Why doesn't she marry? She must have had plenty of chances.'

There was a dry chuckle. `I don't think so. My husband was keen on her himself once, but he thinks she will never marry. She just isn't like that, isn't like that at all. Something missing somewhere.'

`Oh, I don't know.'

`She's gone off so much, in any case. The other day I caught sight of her in the street and hardly recognized her. It's a fact! The way she plays all those games, her skin is like sandpaper, and she's got so thin.'

'But she's such a nice girl.'

`She'll never set the rivers on fire, though.'

`She'd make someone a good wife. She's a good sort, Mary.'

`She should marry someone years older than herself. A man of fifty would suit her… you'll see, she will marry someone old enough to be her father one of these days.' 'One never can tell!

There was another chuckle, good-hearted enough, but it sounded cruelly malicious to Mary. She was stunned and outraged; but most of all deeply wounded that her friends could discuss her thus. She was so naive, so unconscious of herself in relation to other people, that it had never entered her head that people could discuss her behind her back. And the things they had said! She sat there writhing, twisting her hands. Then she composed herself and went back into the room to join her treacherous friends, who greeted her as cordially as if they had not just that moment driven knives into her heart and thrown her quite off balance; she could not recognize herself in the picture they had made of her!

That little incident, apparently so unimportant, which would have had no effect on a person who had the faintest idea of the kind of world she lived in, had a profound effect on Mary. She who had never had time to think of herself, took to sitting in her room for hours at a time, wondering: `Why did they say those things? What is the matter with me? What did they mean when they said that I am not lake that?' And she would look warily, appealingly, into the faces of friends to see if she could find there traces of their condemnation of her. And she was even more disturbed and unhappy because they seemed just as usual, treating her with their ordinary friendliness. She begun to suspect double meanings where none were intended, to find maliciousness in the glance of a person who felt nothing but affection for her.

Turning over in her mind the words she had by accident listened to, she thought of ways to improve herself. She took the ribbon out of her hair, though with regret, because she thought she looked very pretty with a mass of curls round her rather long thin face; and bought herself tailor-made clothes, in which she felt ill at ease, because she felt truly herself in pinafore frocks and childish skirts. And for the first time in her life she was feeling uncomfortable with men. A small core of contempt for them, of which she was quite unconscious, and which had protected her from sex as surely as if she had been truly hideous, had melted, and she had lost her poise. And she began looking around for someone to marry. She did not put it to herself like that; but, after all, she was nothing if not a social being, though she had never thought of `society', the abstraction; and if her friends were thinking she should get married, then there might be something in it. If she had ever learned to put her feelings into words, that was perhaps how she would have expressed herself. And the first man she allowed to approach her was a widower of fifty-five with half-grown children. It was because she felt safer with him… because she did not associate ardours and embraces with a middle-aged gentleman whose attitude towards her was almost fatherly.

He knew perfectly well what he wanted: a pleasant companion, a mother for his children and someone to run his house for him. He found Mary good company, and she was kind to the children. Nothing, really, could have been more suitable: since apparently she had to get married, this was the kind of marriage to suit her best. But things went wrong. He underestimated her experience; it seemed to him that a woman who had been on her own so long should know her own mind and understand what he was offering her. A relationship developed which was clear to both of them, until he proposed to her, was accepted, and began to make love to her. Then a violent revulsion overcame her and she ran away; they were in his comfortable drawing room, and when he began to kiss her, she ran out of his house into the night and all the way home through the streets to the club. There she fell on the bed and wept. And his feeling for her was not one to be enhanced by this kind of foolishness, which a younger man, physically in love with her, might have found charming. Next morning, she was horrified at her behaviour. What a way to behave: she, who Was always in command of herself, and who dreaded nothing more than scenes, and ambiguity. She apologized to bin, but that was the end of it.

And now she was left at sea, not knowing what it was she needed. It seemed to her that she had run from him because he was 'an old man', that was how the affair arranged itself in her mind. She shuddered, and avoided men over thirty. She was over that age herself; but in spite of everything, she thought of herself as a girl still.