This Was the Old Chief's Country (13 page)

At once dismay flooded Mrs Gale. She thought of a dozen tropical diseases, of which she had had unpleasant experience, and almost ran to the veranda. There was the girl, sitting screwed up in a chair, her face contorted, her eyes red, her whole body shuddering violently. ‘Malaria,' thought Mrs Gale at once, noting that trembling.

‘What is the trouble, my dear?' Her voice was kind. She put her hand on the girl's shoulder. Mrs De Wet turned and flung her arms around her hips, weeping, weeping, her small curly head buried in Mrs Gale's stomach. Holding herself stiffly away from this dismaying contact, Mrs Gale stroked the head and made soothing noises.

‘Mrs Gale, Mrs Gale …'

‘What is it?'

‘I can't stand it. I shall go mad. I simply can't stand it.'

Mrs Gale, seeing that this was not a physical illness, lifted her up, led her inside, laid her on her own bed, and fetched cologne and handkerchiefs. Mrs De Wet sobbed for a long while, clutching the older woman's hand, and then at last grew silent. Finally she sat up with a small rueful smile, and said pathetically: ‘I am a fool.'

‘But what
is
it, dear?'

‘It isn't anything, really. I am so lonely. I wanted to get my mother up to stay with me, only Jack said there wasn't room, and he's quite right, only I got mad, because I thought he might at least have had my mother …'

Mrs Gale felt guilt like a sword: she could have filled the place of this child's mother.

‘And it isn't anything, Mrs Gale, not really. It's not that I'm not happy with Jack. I am, but I never see him. I'm not used to this kind of thing. I come from a family of thirteen counting my parents, and I simply can't stand it.'

Mrs Gale sat and listened, and thought of her own loneliness when she first began this sort of life.

‘And then he comes in late, not till seven sometimes, and I know he can't help it, with the farm work and all that, and then he has supper and goes straight off to bed. I am not sleepy then. And then I get up sometimes and I walk along the road with my dog …'

Mrs Gale remembered how, in the early days after her husband had finished with his brief and apologetic embraces, she used to rise with a sense of relief and steal to the front room, where she lighted the lamp again and sat writing letters, reading old ones, thinking of her friends and of herself as a girl. But that was before she had her first child. She thought: This girl should have a baby; and could not help glancing downwards at her stomach.

Mrs De Wet, who missed nothing, said resentfully: ‘Jack says I should have a baby. That's all he says.' Then, since she had to include Mrs Gale in this resentment, she transformed herself all at once from a sobbing baby into a gauche but armoured young woman with whom Mrs Gale could have no contact. ‘I am sorry,' she said formally. Then, with a grating humour: ‘Thank you for letting me blow off steam.' She climbed off the bed, shook her skirts straight, and tossed her head. ‘Thank you. I am a nuisance.' With painful brightness she added: ‘So, that's how it goes. Who would be a woman, eh?'

Mrs Gale stiffened. ‘You must come and see me whenever you are lonely,' she said, equally bright and false. It seemed to her incredible that this girl should come to her with all her defences down, and then suddenly shut her out with this facetious nonsense. But she felt more comfortable with the distance between them, she couldn't deny it.

‘Oh, I will, Mrs Gale. Thank you so much for asking me.' She lingered for a moment, frowning at the brilliantly polished table in the front room, and then took her leave. Mrs Gale watched her go. She noted that at the gate the girl started whistling gaily, and smiled comically. Letting off steam! Well, she said to herself, well … And she went back to her garden.

That afternoon she made a point of walking across to the other house. She would offer to show Mrs De Wet the garden. The two women returned together, Mrs Gale wondering if the girl regretted her emotional lapse of the morning. If so, she
showed no signs of it. She broke into bright chatter when a topic mercifully occurred to her; in between were polite silences full of attention to what she seemed to hope Mrs Gale might say.

Mrs Gale was relying on the effect of her garden. They passed the house through the shrubs. There were the fountains, sending up their vivid showers of spray, there the cool mats of water lilies, under which the coloured fishes slipped, there the irises, sunk in green turf.

‘This must cost a packet to keep up,' said Mrs De Wet. She stood at the edge of the pool, looking at her reflection dissolving among the broad green leaves, glanced obliquely up at Mrs Gale, and dabbed her exposed red toenails in the water.

Mrs Gale saw that she was thinking of herself as her husband's employer's wife. ‘It does, rather,' she said dryly, remembering that the only quarrels she ever had with her husband were over the cost of pumping water. ‘You are fond of gardens?' she asked. She could not imagine anyone not being fond of gardens.

Mrs De Wet said sullenly: ‘My mother was always too busy having kids to have time for gardens. She had her last baby early this year.' An ancient and incommunicable resentment dulled her face. Mrs Gale, seeing that all this beauty and peace meant nothing to her companion that she would have it mean, said, playing her last card: ‘Come and see my mountains.' She regretted the pronoun as soon as it was out –
so
exaggerated.

But when she had the girl safely on the rocky verge of the escarpment, she heard her say: ‘There's my river.' She was leaning forward over the great gulf, and her voice was lifted with excitement. ‘Look,' she was saying. ‘Look, there it is.' She turned to Mrs Gale, laughing, her hair spun over her eyes in a fine iridescent rain, tossing her head back, clutching her skirts down, exhilarated by the tussle with the wind.

‘Mind, you'll lose your balance.' Mrs Gale pulled her back. ‘You have been down to the river, then?'

‘I go there every morning.'

Mrs Gale was silent. The thing seemed preposterous. ‘But it is four miles there and four back.'

‘Oh, I'm used to walking.'

‘But …' Mrs Gale heard her own sour, expostulating voice and stopped herself. There was after all no logical reason why the girl should not go to the river. ‘What do you do there?'

‘I sit on the edge of a big rock and dangle my legs in the water, and I fish, sometimes. I caught a barble last week. It tasted foul, but it was fun catching it. And I pick water lilies.'

‘There are crocodiles,' said Mrs Gale sharply. The girl was wrong-headed; anyone was who could like that steamy bath of vapours, heat, smells and – what? It was an unpleasant place. ‘A native girl was taken there last year, at the ford.'

‘There couldn't be a crocodile where I go. The water is clear, right down. You can see right under the rocks. It is a lovely pool. There's a kingfisher, and water-birds, all colours. They are so pretty. And when you sit there and look, the sky is a long narrow slit. From here it looks quite far across the river to the other side, but really it isn't. And the trees crowding close make it narrower. Just think how many millions of years it must have taken for the water to wear down the rock so deep.'

‘There's bilharzia, too.'

‘Oh, bilharzia!'

‘There's nothing funny about bilharzia. My husband had it. He had injections for six months before he was cured.'

The girl's face dulled. ‘I'll be careful,' she said irrationally, turning away, holding her river and her long hot dreamy mornings away from Mrs Gale, like a secret.

‘Look at the mountains,' said Mrs Gale, pointing. The girl glanced over the chasm at the foothills, then bent forward again, her face reverent. Through the mass of green below were glimpses of satiny brown. She breathed deeply: ‘Isn't it a lovely smell?' she said.

‘Let's go and have some tea,' said Mrs Gale. She felt cross and put out; she had no notion why. She could not help being brusque with the girl. And so at last they were quite silent together; and in silence they remained on that veranda above the beautiful garden, drinking their tea and wishing it was time for them to part.

Soon they saw the two husbands coming up the garden. Mrs De Wet's face lit up; and she sprang to her feet and was off down the path, running lightly. She caught her husband's arm
and clung there. He put her away from him, gently. ‘Hullo,' he remarked good-humouredly. ‘Eating again?' And then he turned back to Major Gale and went on talking. The girl lagged up the path behind her husband like a sulky small girl, pulling at Mrs Gale's beloved roses and scattering crimson petals everywhere.

On the veranda the men sank at once into chairs, took large cups of tea, and continued talking as they drank thirstily. Mrs Gale listened and smiled. Crops, cattle, disease; weather, crops and cattle. Mrs De Wet perched on the veranda wall and swung her legs. Her face was petulant, her lips trembled, her eyes were full of tears. Mrs Gale was saying silently under her breath, with ironical pity, in which there was also cruelty: You'll get used to it, my dear; you'll get used to it. But she respected the girl, who had courage: walking to the river and back, wandering round the dusty flowerbeds in the starlight, trying to find peace – at least, she was trying to find it.

She said sharply, cutting into the men's conversation: ‘Mr De Wet, did you know your wife spends her mornings at the river?'

The man looked at her vaguely, while he tried to gather the sense of her words: his mind was on the farm. ‘Sure,' he said at last. ‘Why not?'

‘Aren't you afraid of bilharzia?'

He said laconically: ‘If we were going to get it, we would have got it long ago. A drop of water can infect you, touching the skin.'

‘Wouldn't it be wiser not to let the water touch you in the first place?' she enquired with deceptive mildness.

‘Well, I told her. She wouldn't listen. It is too late now. Let her enjoy it.'

‘But …'

‘About that red heifer,' said Major Gale, who had not been aware of any interruption.

‘No,' said Mrs Gale sharply. ‘You are not going to dismiss it like that.' She saw the three of them look at her in astonishment. ‘Mr De Wet, have you ever thought what it means to a woman being alone all day, with not enough to do? It's enough to drive anyone crazy.'

Major Gale raised his eyebrows; he had not heard his wife speak like that for so long. As for De Wet, he said with a slack good-humour that sounded brutal: ‘And what do you expect me to do about it?'

‘You don't realize,' said Mrs Gale futilely, knowing perfectly well there was nothing he could do about it. ‘You don't understand how it is.'

‘She'll have a kid soon,' said De Wet. ‘I hope so, at any rate. That will give her something to do.'

Anger raced through Mrs Gale like a flame along petrol. She was trembling. ‘She might be that red heifer,' she said at last.

‘What's the matter with having kids?' asked De Wet. ‘Any objection?'

‘You might ask me first,' said the girl bitterly.

Her husband blinked at her, comically bewildered. ‘Hey, what is this?' he enquired. ‘What have I done? You said you wanted to have kids. Wouldn't have married you otherwise.'

‘I never said I didn't.'

‘Talking about her as if she were …'

‘When, then?' Mrs Gale and the man were glaring at each other.

‘There's more to women than having children,' said Mrs Gale at last, and flushed because of the ridiculousness of her words.

De Wet looked her up and down, up and down. ‘I want kids,' he said at last. ‘I want a large family. Make no mistake about that. And when I married her' – he jerked his head at his wife – ‘I told her I wanted them. She can't turn round now and say I didn't.'

‘Who is turning round and saying anything?' asked the girl, fine and haughty, staring away over the trees.

‘Well, if no one is blaming anyone for anything,' asked Major Gale, jauntily twirling his little moustache, ‘what is all this about?'

‘God knows, I don't,' said De Wet angrily. He glanced sullenly at Mrs Gale, ‘I didn't start it.'

Mrs Gale sat silent, trembling, feeling foolish, but so angry she could not speak. After a while she said to the girl: ‘Shall we go inside, my dear?' The girl, reluctantly, and with a
lingering backward look at her husband, rose and followed Mrs Gale. ‘He didn't mean anything,' she said awkwardly, apologizing for her husband to her husband's employer's wife. This room, with its fine old furniture, always made her apologetic. At this moment, De Wet stooped into the doorway and said: ‘Come on, I am going home.'

‘Is that an order?' asked the girl quickly, backing so that she came side by side with Mrs Gale: she even reached for the other woman's hand. Mrs Gale did not take it: this was going too far.

‘What's got into you?' he said, exasperated. ‘Are you coming or are you not?'

‘I can't do anything else, can I?' she replied, and followed him from the house like a queen who has been insulted.

Major Gale came in after a few moments. ‘Lovers' quarrel,' he said, laughing awkwardly. This phrase irritated Mrs Gale. ‘That man!' she exclaimed. ‘That man!'

‘Why, what is wrong with him?' She remained silent, pretending to arrange her flowers. This silly scene, with its hinterlands of emotion, made her furious. She was angry with herself, angry with her husband, and furious at that foolish couple who had succeeded in upsetting her and destroying her peace. At last she said: ‘I am going to bed. I've such a headache, I can't think.'

‘I'll bring you a tray, my dear,' said Major Gale, with a touch of exaggeration in his courtesy that annoyed her even more. ‘I don't want anything, thank you,' she said, like a child, and marched off to the bedroom.