There was no one upstairs now, but the life of the house, coming into its power, was beating on the door: the servant’s loud argument with a child in the kitchen, the clatter and bang of pots and doors, the nasal rise and fall of a voice on the radio, children’s voices, the telephone persisting with its nagging double ring. He made the effort to keep it shut out, away from her, but it gave a sense of scamping haste to the necessity to understand what she was getting at before the chance was lost. He found it difficult to relate their life to what she had said, and she looked at him with the intensity of helpless deceit, for, of course, she was really talking about herself. The urgency overcame him and he gave up, saying, “Jessie, for God’s sake, don’t let’s have them if it’s going to be a nuisance to you.”
She scrambled back to the level of half-truths on which daily life is conducted. “No, there’s no earthly reason why they should be a nuisance. Of course it’s all right. You’d think we’d never had anyone before.” “Not much chance of that,” he said with a good-natured ironic emphasis; he yawned sympathetically, a yawn that ended in a smile. They had never really lived alone; right from the beginning there had always been her son, Morgan, and ever since, kindness towards periodically homeless friends (of whom they seemed to have a number) or the need of money had made it necessary for them to share their house.
“Let’s go down and get a drink,” said Jessie.
“I’m coming.”
She left him and went through the big, old-fashioned landing and down the stairs. All the house was always full of litter eloquent of interrupted activity; she passed a shoe-box on which a doll’s bath stood, half-filled with scummy water, an empty cornflakes box which was being used as a garage for some small lead cars, and two chairs linked to the dirty brass knob of the bathroom door by a web of hairy red wool. Gestures that ended in midair, interrupted sentences — a house full of growth, the careless and terrifying waste of nature, that propagates in millions, and lets millions die. What did children care about “finishing what is begun”? They lived out of the abundance of things untried; their untidiness was the appalling untidiness of life itself, that had flung away a thousand thousand sperms to bring about the single birth of each of them. She railed against them, threatened and preached, saying, as she had been told in her turn, that she would teach them to be tidy; but the instinct that drove her was not housewifely or even motherly — she was aware that she was frightened, in a way, that she struggled in the hands of an elemental force.
At the elbow of the stairs she met her daughter Elisabeth, trailing up. Snail-trails of tears on her cheeks showed that her anger and sorrow had ended before the tears had had time to fall. “I’ve got a lady-bird,” said Elisabeth. “Clem’s going to give me a box and I’m going to put some nice leaves for him to eat. He’s going to be my pet lady-bird for ever.” She went on up the stairs. Yes, for ever and ever, and tomorrow the beetle will be thrown away dead in the cigarette box.
Jessie passed through the smell of cooking in the hall and went into the living-room. They had papered it themselves, and though it was attractive nothing in it was of good quality. Sometimes when she walked into the room she heard her voice saying, as if she had released a trip-wire, “We don’t see why we should ape Europe …” as she so often did when someone remarked on the curtains made of mammy-cloth from West Africa, or fingered a wooden bowl from Swaziland, or a clay pot. Like all statements of a stand, reiteration tended to make it smug and rhetorical; she must stop saying it. She took a half-full bottle of gin out of a home-made cupboard, and rummaged for a bottle of tonic water. When she went into the kitchen to fetch some ice, her middle daughter, Madge, attached herself to her. In the living-room, while Jessie poured the fizzling water on to the heavy-looking substance of the gin, the six-year-old girl clasped her round the hips. “Hi, I’ll spill.” She writhed free and sat down. Madge came and stood in front of her; vaguely feeling something was expected of her, Jessie blew up her one cheek in a comic invitation for a kiss. The child kissed the cheek, and then flung her arms round her mother’s neck and embraced her passionately. She stood again, her eyes on a level with her mother’s, and, meeting the child’s eyes, Jessie saw them fixed on her, blurred, impassioned, sick with love that would fasten on and suck the life out of her.
Two or three nights later, Tom brought Boaz Davis home to dinner. Jessie had met him once before, briefly, at some convocation cocktail party, but that was all. He was about thirty, eight or nine years younger than the Stilwells, a slender young Jew; his face had the special pallor of mutton-fat jade rather than the hardened shaven monotone of an adult male. There was upon him, curiously at variance with the rest of his manner, the unmistakable mark of mother’s indulgence that touches so many Jewish boys for life. A firm and attractive fruit, Jessie thought, but suddenly your thumb might go right through a soft spot.
He drew the three of them into a quiet huddle over talk of his work, which lasted through dinner and well on towards midnight. When he had left South Africa ten years before, he had gone because he couldn’t get what he wanted then — a training that would equip him to be a composer; his ambitions had changed during the intervening years and now he was returning because Africa could give him what Europe couldn’t — a first-hand study of primitive music and primitive instruments. The confidence of his European studies filled him with an excited, almost proud approach to the field of study he had grown up in, all unknowing. Every now and then, the talk arrived at a point where his knowledge and Tom Stilwell’s met — Tom was a lecturer in history, and there was a record of unrecorded history in the tracing of the introduction, from one tribe to another, of various types of musical instruments. “We might do a paper on it together,” said Tom. “At any rate, I could help you — or you could help me.” He laughed. He had been at work for two years, collecting notes for a history he hoped to write — a history of the African subcontinent that would present the Africans as peoples invaded by the white West, rather than as another kind of fauna dealt with by the white man in his exploration of the world.
“You know Tom’s going to do a history of Africa from the black point of view?” Jessie told Davis.
“Not the black point of view! For God’s sake! The historical point of view!”
“Ah well, you know what I mean,” said Jessie.
“Hell, I couldn’t agree with you more,” said Davis to Tom. Jessie had the feeling that he was relaxed in a special way in their company; he spoke, it seemed with a curious, luxurious pleasure, in the emotional, slangy, drawn-out South African way that so often appears to leave the speaker defeated, even dazed; as if all speech were like a foreign language to him, in which the use of a few lame phrases helped out with repetition and over-emphasis must serve to carry an impossible load of self-expression. He fell into this manner of speech as a man may fall into dialect.
“A-ah, you don’t get me into that trap,” Tom assured. “I’m not getting busy cooking up a glorious past for the blacks in opposition to the glorious past of the whites.”
“It’s like hope-of-heaven, in reverse,” Jessie said. “Don’t you think?”
“How d’you mean?” They did not yet know each other well enough to talk all at once.
“You can assure yourself of glory in the future, in a heaven, but if that seems too nebulous for you — and the Africans are sick of waiting for things — you can assure yourself of glory in the past. It will have exactly the same sort of effect on you, in the present. You’ll feel yourself, in spite of everything, worthy of either your future or your past.”