The two women met in the deafening roar of it. They might have been standing behind the curve of a waterfall. Jessie appeared straight from some mirror; she had found time to push up the wisps of hair that hung from the twist she piled up once a day; over-laying the sheen of effort, haste, the efflorescence of the kitchen, all the self-forgetful attrition of the day, was another face. It superimposed the textureless surface of powder, the painted lips of the woman whose first concern is the presentation of her beauty; it was the sign, if worn any-old-how, that she still belonged to the height of life, the competitive sexual world. The girl saw an untidy, preoccupied woman whose face was beginning to take on the shape of the thoughts and emotions she had lived through, in place of the likeness of heredity with which it had been born.
Ann Davis was a nearly-beautiful girl, saved from prettiness and brought to the brink of beauty by one or two oddities — her eyebrows were thick, for a fairish girl, and she had one small pointed tooth that changed the regularity of her smile. Jessie saw her, so young that her share in the commonest kind of beauty was all the distinction she needed; she even wore with distinction clothes distinguished only by a better cut and material from those of the little gum-chewing girls who hung around the coffee bars. Her neck, flecked with small dark moles, shone living white in the turned-up collar of her black blouse. They exchanged shouted greetings against the excitement of the storm, and the girl’s introduction to the house was brought about at once, because everyone was pressed into service to go dashing from room to room to close windows. Then they settled into the living-room and drank sherry, to keep off the chill that the rain had brought.
“To Ann, who came in like a lion,” proposed Tom.
“But I promise I shall behave like a lamb,” she said.
The three children stood around as if at the scene of an accident. “Don’t mind them,” Jessie explained. “They’ll follow you round gaping for a day or two, and then it’ll be all right. Just don’t think you have to be polite and strike up a conversation, that’s all. Then they’ll never leave you alone.” Boaz Davis was a little embarrassed at such a dispassionate view of children; he remembered them, perhaps, in some sentimental context of the centre of the household. He tried to talk to them, to jolly them along, but they turned away and sought shelter from his attention. His wife chattered easily, but he himself seemed different from the young man who had come to the house without her. He appeared slightly strung-up, and inclined to show off, in his eagerness to fabricate a ready-made intimacy between the four of them. “Annie, you don’t have to eat apricots just because it’s your first night here. You can tell them right away that you loathe apricots.” “I don’t loathe them, they bring me out in bumps.” “She’s not always such a polite little thing, she’s on her best behaviour for you.” And he buttered a roll and put a wedge of cheese on it for her—“Here.” Jessie and Tom accepted the little display calmly; they knew from previous experience of living together with couples that with real familiarity, real intimacy — if it were to come — would come more reticence and a comfortable front that would exclude the nature of the couple’s private relationship, except in moments of crisis.
After dinner Jessie took the girl upstairs. “I’ve got rid of all traces of Morgan in here,” Jessie said, and added, for truthfulness, “There wasn’t much anyway.” She had been surprised to find how little of her son there was in the room; how tenuous his hold on this house was. Part of a cupboard had been enough to take the stained, half-out-grown schoolboy’s suit, the two or three holey pullovers, the cricket bat and the broken bagatelle board that made up his possessions.
Jessie was anxious to make her guest comfortable. “Here — look — there’s at least another shelf going begging. You could put things you don’t need every day in here. And on top of the wall-cupboard in Clem’s room — you can put your empty cases up there.” Ann came running to see. “How marvellous! There’s bags of room. Thanks so much.”
“It’s dreadful not to be able to have order,” said Jessie, her hands dropping to her sides in the manner of a woman between one task and the next. “I long for order.”
“Oh yes!” With careless, social enthusiasm, the girl suggested that she did, too; but she did not even know what chaos was, yet.
She lugged her things cheerfully up and down the room, while Jessie sat on the bed and talked to her. Her ankles, fine as a race-horse’s, took any weight steadily although she wore such high-heeled shoes; she was really very gay and pretty. She gave a thump with her long-fingered hand on a drum that was part of Boaz’s collection of African instruments, and disentangled the belt of a dress from a pair of sandals.
“Do you know anything about all this?” Jessie leaned over to pick up a gourd decorated with an incised design and mounted on a reed. “Look, I can play that!” said the girl. She dropped an armful of dresses back into the suitcase. She took the contraption and blew into it, laughing and struggling with it. She produced a few low, blurred notes, surprisingly sweet. “It’s a chigufe, a special end-blown flute.” Jessie tried it, but nothing came. “I can usually get something out of these things,” said the girl, smiling. “Do you work with Boaz — I never asked him what you did,” said Jessie. “Nothing much.” She was hanging up dresses again. “What sort of work do you do, I mean? What are you going to do while you’re here?” “Oh, I don’t know. I’ll wander about with Boaz quite a bit, I suppose. And I’ll want to get to know what’s going on in Johannesburg. When I go somewhere I haven’t been, I like to get into it up to the neck, don’t you?”
The two women got on pleasantly enough in the feminine preoccupation of making ready a place to live, but each was conscious of reservations about the other. Ann Davis, in her innocent self-absorption, busy making herself comfortable, would never have remarked on this, but when they were alone in their room Boaz said anxiously, “Wonderful pair. I told you.” “Did she really want us to come, I wonder?” said Ann, curious. “I mean, she couldn’t have been kinder, but I had the feeling she wasn’t interested in me.”
“She doesn’t seem to work,” said Jessie to Tom.
“I don’t know what she did in England.”
“Nothing. She has no work of her own.”
“That may be.” Jessie’s feeling of the extraordinariness of the fact did not strike him.
“It seems so odd.”
He gave a sensible laugh. “Why odd?”
“Everyone works,” she said stubbornly.
“Now and then there could be someone who didn’t feel the need.”
Work was an article of faith by which they — Tom, she herself, their friends — lived. How could it become, by the casual word, the mere presence of the girl, a dead letter? Yet it was, it could be. And what was the good of an article of faith that would deny it? There was life beyond life as she had conceived of it for herself; there were freedoms beyond the freedom she understood. She added another word or two to the near incoherent consciousness that had been in the process of coming to birth in her for a year or more, and that perhaps would only be completed at the end of her life, or not at all. How many of the other articles of faith by which she lived were undiscovered dead letters? Is one living, while they remain undiscovered? She felt tired, solitary, and dogged.
She opened the window and hung out. The rain, like a quarrel, was over. The earth breathed warm and damp in its sleep. Clumsy drops fell from the old trees. Suddenly she saw her life as a bird let into a series of cages, each one larger than the last; and each one, because of its comparative freedom, seeming, for a while, to be without limit, without bars. It’s time to get out again; she knew, but told no one. She stared down at the dark and forgot herself. Under the plastered, hammered earth there was a fecund stirring in the old garden. Under stones, out of decay, sticky wings, moving jaws, feeble millipede wavings — they were all coming back to hunger and reproduction, to crawl and swarm and eat their way through the feast.