Chapter Three

It was a long way from the town to the farm – well over a hundred miles; and by the time he told her they had crossed the boundary, it was late at night. Mary, who was half asleep, roused herself to look at his farm, and saw the dim shapes of low trees, like great soft birds, flying past; and beyond it a hazy sky that was cracked and seamed with stars. Her tiredness relaxed her limbs, quietened her nerves. Reaction from the strained state of the last few months was a dulled acquiescence, a numbness, that was almost indifference. She thought it would be pleasant to live peacefully for a change; she had not realized how exhausted she was, after those years of living geared to a perpetual demand for the next thing. She said to herself, with determination to face it, that she would `get close to nature'. It was a phrase that took away the edge of her distaste for the veld. 'Getting close to nature', which was sanctioned, after all, by the pleasant sentimentality of the sort of books she read, was a reassuring abstraction. At the week-ends, when she worked in town, she had often gone out for picnics with crowds of young people, to sit all day on hot rocks in the shade, listening to a portable gramophone playing dance music from America, and had thought of that, too, as `getting close to nature'. `It is nice to get out of the town,' she would say. But like most people, the things she said bore no relation at all to the things she felt: she was always profoundly relieved to get back to hot and cold water in taps and the streets and the office.

Still, she would be her own mistress: that was marriage, what her friends had married for – to have homes of their own and no one to tell them what to do. She felt vaguely that she had been right to marry – everyone had been right. For, looking back, it seemed to her that all the people she had met were secretly, silently but relentlessly, persuading her to marry. She was going to be happy. She had no idea of the life she had to lead. Poverty, which Dick had warned her of with a scrupulous humility, was another abstraction, nothing to do with her pinched childhood. She saw it as a rather exhilarating fight against odds.

The car stopped at last and she roused herself. The moon had gone behind a great luminous white cloud, and it was suddenly very dark – miles of darkness under a dimly starlit sky. All around were trees, the squat, flattened trees of the highveld, which seem as if pressure of sun has distorted them, looking now like vague dark presences standing about the small clearing where the car had stopped. There was a small square building whose corrugated roof began to gleam whitely as the moon slowly slid out from behind the cloud and drenched the clearing with brilliance. Mary got out of the car and watched it drive away round the house to the back. She looked round her, shivering a little, for a cold breath blew out of the trees and down in the vlei beyond them hung a cold white vapour. Listening in the complete silence, innumerable little noises rose from the bush, as if colonies of strange creatures had become still and watchful at their coming and were now going about their own business. She glanced round at the house; it looked shut and dark and stuffy, under that wide streaming moonlight. A border of stones glinted whitely in front of her, and she walked along them, away from the house and towards the trees, seeing them grow large and soft as she approached. Then a strange bird called, a wild nocturnal sound, and she turned and ran back, suddenly terrified, as if a hostile breath had blown upon her, from another world, from the trees. And as she stumbled in her high heels over the uneven ground and regained balance, there was a stir and a cackle of fowls that had been waked by the lights of the car, and the homely sound comforted her. She stopped before the house, and put out her hand to touch the leaves of a plant standing in a tin on the wall of the verandah. Her fingers were fragrant with the dry scent of geraniums. Then a square of light appeared in the blank wall of the house, and she saw Dick's tall shape stooping inside, hazed by the candle he held in front of him. She went up the steps to the door, and stood waiting. Dick had vanished again, leaving the candle on the table. In the dim yellow light the room seemed tiny, tiny; and very low; the roof was the corrugated iron she had seen from outside; there was a strong musty smell, almost animal-like. Dick came back holding an old cocoa tin flattened at the rim to form a funnel, and climbed on the chair under the hanging lamp to fill it. The paraffin dripped greasily down and pattered on the floor, and the strong smell sickened her. The light flared up, flickered wildly, then settled into a low yellow flame. Now she could see the skins of animals on the red brick floor: some kind of wildcat, or perhaps a small leopard, and a big fawn-coloured skin of some buck. She sat down, bewildered by the strangeness of it all. Dick was watching her face, she knew, for signs of disappointment, and she forced herself to smile, though she felt weak with foreboding: this tiny stuffy room, the bare brick floor, the greasy lamp, were not what she had imagined. Apparently satisfied, Dick smiled at her gratefully, and said, `I will make some tea.' He disappeared again. When he came back, she was standing by the wall, looking at two pictures that hung there. One was of a chocolate-box lady with a rose in her hand; and the other was of a child of about six, torn off a calendar.

He flushed when he saw her, and stripped the picture from the walls. `I haven't looked at them for years,' he said, tearing them across. `But leave them,' she said, feeling an intruder on this man's intimate life: the two pictures, stuck up roughly on the wall with tintacks, had given her for the first time an insight into his loneliness, and made her understand his hurried courtship and blind need for her. But she felt alien to him, unable to fit herself to his need. Looking to the floor, she saw the pretty childish face, topped with curls, torn across, lying where he had thrown it. She picked it up, thinking "that he must be fond of children. They had never discussed children; there had not been time to discuss much. She looked for a waste-paper basket, for it offended her to see the scraps of paper on the floor, but Dick took it from her, squeezed it into a ball, and flung it into the corner. `We can put up something else,' he said shyly. It was his shyness, his defence towards her, that enabled her to hold her own. Feeling protectively towards him, which she did when he looked like that, bashful and appealing, she need not think of him as the man she had married who had claims on her. She sat herself down, with composure, in front of the tray he had brought in, and watched him pour tea. On a tin tray was a stained, torn cloth, and two enormous cracked cups. Across her wave of distaste came his voice: `But that is your job now'; and she took the teapot from him, and poured, feeling him watching her with proud delight.

Now she was here, the woman, clothing his bare little house with her presence, he could hardly contain himself with pleasure and exaltation. It seemed to him that he had been a fool to wait so long, living alone, planning a future that was so easily attainable. And then he looked at her town clothes,.her high heels, her reddened nails, and was uneasy again. To hide it, he began talking about the house, with diffidence because of his poverty, never taking his eyes off her face. He told her how he had built it himself, laying the bricks, although he had known nothing about building, to save the wages of a native builder; how he had furnished it slowly, at first with only a bed to sleep in and a packing case to eat off; how a neighbour had given him a table, and another a chair, and gradually the place had taken shape. The cupboards were petrol boxes painted and covered with curtains of flowered stuff. There was no door between this room and the next, but a heavy curtain of sacking hung there, which had been embroidered all over in red and black wool by Charlie Slatter's wife, on the next farm. And so on; she heard the history of each thing, and saw that what seemed so pathetic and frail to her represented to him victories over discomfort; and she began to feel, slowly, that it was not in this house she was sitting, with her husband, but back with her mother, watching her endlessly contrive and patch and mend – till suddenly she got to her feet with an awkward scrambling movement, unable to bear it; possessed with the thought that her father, from his grave, had sent out his will and forced her back into the kind of life he had made her mother lead.