“You’re sure? Some milk? You don’t have to be afraid to drink the milk — it’s from our own cow.”
“I couldn’t manage another thing.” Ann’s assurance seemed to make him more and more aware of the inadequacy of what he could offer, past midnight, to people he had not expected.
“You’re just dead beat, my girl, ay?”—Gideon leant across the table and gently tugged her earlobe, while her smile turned into an uninhibited yawn. James Mapulane saw at once, in this small exchange, what Gideon perhaps meant him to; he and Gideon went out to fetch the things from the car, talking again in their own language.
Ann was not often subjectively aware of places she found herself in. She was one of those people who carry a projection of themselves around as a firefly moves always in its own light. Left alone, she felt the room close around her, in a strange authority. It was like the first room one becomes conscious of in one’s whole life: the room in which one first opens one’s eyes on the world — and sees the bulk and outline and disposition of each piece of furniture as the shape of the world. The houses she paused in, the rooms where she slept, the coffee-bars and youth hostels and hotels and borrowed flats that she used and passed on from — they flickered by, anonymous and interchangeable. In this room the objects were the continuing personality of people who had worked and planned and changed, putting into their acquisition the ardour of much else never attained, so that the pieces of furniture themselves became landmarks towards the attainment, and the difference between the teak sideboard with its bulbous carved legs and the flimsy bookcase leaning askew under the pressure of textbooks, grammars, paper-back classics and newspapers was the death of a generation and the birth and work and aims of another. It was a room that fitted no category; there was the big coal stove in it, and the sofa, squeezed in between the sideboard and the table, was somebody’s bed — grey blankets were thrown back where whoever it was had been hastily pushed out when she and Gideon arrived.
It might have been Mapulane himself; anyway he insisted that he would sleep there now, and give them “the other room”.
“I’ll make myself very cosy here, that’ll be quite O.K.,” he said, ignoring the rumpled bedclothes that showed that someone already had been sleeping in the living-room, and Gideon and Ann ignored this too, out of a polite convention that amused her: in the sort of life she lived, it was taken for granted that you slept wherever there was something to sleep on, and no one would have found it necessary to pretend that there were enough bedrooms to go round. Mapulane went in and out busily, and there were voices; someone must have been sleeping in “the other room” as well, and have been persuaded to quit it; the dark neat little place smelled like a nest, of sleep, when Gideon and Ann were taken into it, though the bed had been freshly made up with sheets as well as blankets.
It was the first time they slept together, in a bed, all night. She woke up in the morning with the happiness of waking in a foreign country; so it was that she had wakened in peasant houses in Italy, in fishermen’s cottages in Spain. Hens were quarrelling hysterically and children’s voices carried from far away. She was alone in the bed and two men were talking in a language she didn’t understand in the room next door: Gideon and his friend. She got up and looped the curtain aside and tried to open the little window, but it couldn’t have been opened for years, and was stuck fast. Outside in the clear sun were the mud and thatch and tin houses of the village, a blue haze of smoke from cooking fires, a dog blinking against the flow of morning warmth. She knocked on the pane with the knuckle of her first finger, and although a woman with a tin basin of mealies on her head passed unnoticing, two little children playing on the bare, stamped ground looked up and changed to swift astonishment. For a moment Ann was surprised, then remembered, and smiled at them, the foreigner’s friendly smile. Everything about the dark cold small house, smelling like a fire gone out, and the activities stirring around her, filled her with the titillating sense of entering this life in a way she had never done before. Because of Gideon it was all invested with the charm of something novel and yet annexed.
The other members of the household had been out of the house since daylight. Later in the morning a strong elderly woman came in from the fields, barefoot, businesslike, her head tied up in a long spotted doek. Mapulane introduced his mother and she stood through the formalities with the face of one already primed for this. Then she plunged into a long harangue with Mapulane’s half-grown sister, full of commands, as they moved about the stove and yard together.
Once the old woman, passing Ann, stopped as if she had just seen her for the first time, and crossed her arms. “All the way from Jo’burg. A long way. Oh yes … a long way, eh?”
“Not so bad.” Ann wanted to make the most of this overture. “It was awful to disturb you like that so late at night.”
But it was not an overture, nor even a conversation, but a set piece, a symbolic politeness to keep her at bay. The good-looking old woman went on with impersonal admiring concern, “Myself I don’t like to journey far. All that way. And cars, cars … Oh yes, a very long way.”
She turned abruptly back to her own affairs.
During the two days the visitors were in the house, the members of the family stopped talking and often even left off whatever it was they were doing when Ann came into their presence. They were polite and courteous; she was made conscious of her clothes, her manner, as if she were seeing them from the outside.
“They’re old country people,” Gideon said, fond of them, of her; bringing them together in his attraction to both. He had spent most of the day talking to James and was alone with her for the first time since morning, walking out over the veld. “They don’t think they have the right to ‘like’ you — I mean, to have personal ordinary feelings about a white”
“I got on fine with the Pedi women. They couldn’t even talk English, but I used to go in and out of their huts and play with their children—”
“—Tribal people.” He was stroking her hair in agreement while she was speaking. “These are mission people; the old man’s a preacher, Sophie goes to mission school. They’re nearer to you and so much further away — understand?”
“When I asked her if the water in that big jug was for drinking she called me ‘madam’.” Ann was accusing, almost annoyed with herself for confessing this.
Gideon laughed. But he was not really interested in the background members of the household, with whom he exchanged passing talk, easy in his masculinity, the naturalness of his manner towards his own people, and the aura he had about him as the clever friend from the political world that the son of the house shared with him in distinction and risk.
The village was beautiful if you put out of mind the usual associations that go with the idea of a beautiful place to live. Apart from Mapulane’s house, that they could see standing out so distinctly from the rest, the houses were square mud ones with grass roofs or tin ones held down by bricks. In some there were windows and painted wooden doors; all were a mixture of the sort of habitation a man makes out of the materials provided by his surroundings and the sort that is standard when his environment becomes nothing more decisive than an interchangeable mise-en-scène of his work. They were a realistic expression of the lives being lived in them, lives strung between town and country, between the pastoral and the industrial; in spite of their poorness, they had the dignity of this.
The village stood on a hill faceted with rocks gleaming in the sun, among other hills like it; they exchanged flashing messages in dry heat and silence and there was no witness but the personages of baobab trees. Ann and Gideon found themselves among these trees as among statues. They did not grow gregariously, in groves, but rose, enormous and distinct, all over the stretch of empty land. Like the single leg of a mastodon, each trunk weighed hugely on the pinkish earth; the smooth bark, with the look of hairless skin, shone copper-mauve where the sun lit up each one in the late afternoon, as it does the windows of distant houses.