Doris Lessing Three-Book Edition: The Golden Notebook, The Grass is Singing, The Good Terrorist
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 pictures 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 deference 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.
‘Let’s go next door,’ she said abruptly, her voice harsh. Dick rose also, surprised and a little hurt, cut off in the middle of his histories. Next door was the bedroom. There was a hanging cupboard, again of embroidered sacking; a stack of shelves, petrol boxes with a mirror balanced on top; and the bed which Dick had bought for the occasion. It was a proper old-fashioned bed, high and massive: that was his idea of marriage. He had bought it at a sale, feeling, as he put down the money, that he was capturing happiness itself.
Seeing her stand there, looking about her with a lost pathetic face, unconsciously holding her hands to her cheeks as if in pain, he was sorry for her, and left her alone to undress. Undressing himself beyond the curtain he felt again a bitter pang of guilt. He had no right to marry, no right, no right. He said it under his breath, torturing himself with the repetition; and when he knocked timidly on the wall and went in to find her lying in bed with her back turned, he approached her with the timid adoration which was the only touch she could have borne.
It was not so bad, she thought, when it was all over: not as bad as that. It meant nothing to her, nothing at all. Expecting outrage and imposition, she was relieved to find she felt nothing. She was able maternally to bestow the gift of herself on this humble stranger, and remain untouched. Women have an extraordinary ability to withdraw from the sexual relationship, to immunize themselves against it, in such a way that their men can be left feeling let down and insulted without having anything tangible to complain of. Mary did not have to learn this, because it was natural to her, and because she had expected nothing in the first place – at any rate, not from this man, who was flesh and blood, and therefore rather ridiculous – not the creature of her imagination whom she endowed with hands and lips but left bodiless. And if Dick felt as if he had been denied, rebuffed, made to appear brutal and foolish, then his sense of guilt told him that it was no more than he deserved. Perhaps he needed to feel guilty? Perhaps it was not such a bad marriage after all? There are innumerable marriages where two people, both twisted and wrong in their depths, are well matched, making each other miserable in the way they need, in the way the pattern of their lives demands. In any event, when he leaned over to turn out the light, and saw her little spiked shoes tumbled sideways on the skin of the leopard he had shot the year before, he repeated to himself again, but with a thrill of satisfaction in his abasement, ‘I had no right.’
Mary watched the wildly flickering flame of the dying lamp leap over walls and roof and the glittering window panes, and fell asleep holding his hand protectively, as she might have held a child’s whom she had wounded.
When she woke she found she was alone in the bed, and there was the clanging of a gong somewhere at the back of the house. She could see a tender gold light on the trees through the window, and faint rosy patches of sun lay on the white walls, showing up the rough grain of the whitewash. As she watched they deepened and turned vivid yellow, barring the room with gold, which made it look smaller, lower, and more bare than it had at night, in the dim lamplight. In a few moments Dick came back in pyjamas, and touched her cheek with his hand, so that she felt the chill of early morning on his skin.
‘Sleep well?’
‘Yes, thank you.’
‘Tea is coming now.’
They were polite and awkward with each other, repudiating the contacts of the night. He sat on the edge of the bed eating biscuits. Presently an elderly native brought in the tray, and put it on the table.
‘This is the new missus,’ said Dick to him.
‘This is Samson, Mary.’
The old boy kept his eyes on the ground and said, ‘Good morning, missus.’ Then he added politely to Dick, as if this was expected of him, ‘Very nice, very nice, boss.’
Dick laughed, saying, ‘He’ll look after you: he is not a bad old swine.’
Mary was rather outraged at this casual stockmarket attitude; then she saw that it was only a matter of form, and calmed herself. She was left with a feeling of indignation, saying to herself. ‘And who does he think he is?’ Dick, however, was unaware, and foolishly happy.
He drank two cups of tea in a rush, and