“Hullo,” she said. “Did I startle you?”
“You all right, lady?” He had the slow sober speech of the country Afrikaner speaking English, but his voice was the voice of a man of substance, sensible and sure of himself. He did not come closer but watched her smiling her big smile at him, tucking her shirt into her skirt, a beautiful girl with the long brown legs he associated with the city. There was that immediate pause, filled with the balance of sleep, where before it had been hollow quarter taken and given, between an attractive woman of class and a man old enough and just worldly enough to recognise it. He was a farmer, in a good grey suit, thick shoes and the inevitable felt hat that country Afrikaners wear — on his way to the lawyer or the bank, most probably.
“I’ve just had a lovely snooze, that’s all. You don’t mind, do you?”
He softened into a more personal manner. “It’s not my land, it’s my neighbour’s, see? But I just thought you was in trouble. The car there, and so on.”
“Thank you very much.”
“You’re not on your own here? There’s a lot of drunk boys around on Sunday—”
She snatched the conversation: “No, no, my husband’s here, just gone over the—”
“Oh well, that’s O.K. then, sorry to disturb you—” He was eager to be affable now, specially friendly in that indiscriminate comradeship that white people feel when they meet in the open spaces of a country where they are outnumbered. Her own voice had tipped over in her some vessel filled with fear that she didn’t know was there; it poured into her blood while she smiled at him, brilliantly, smiled at him to go, and was afraid to look anywhere but at him in case she should see Gideon standing there too. Just as the man left and she heard a car start up away on the road, there was the figure, the hieroglyph in the distance that she could read as the quiet, slouching walk, the narrow khaki trousers, the blue shirt that was her present.
The car must have been gone five minutes by the time he came up. As he grew nearer a run of trembling went through her several times; she had the dread of something approaching that couldn’t be stopped. She wanted to run back to the little car. When he stood there, paused as he came through the grass to their little clearing, and looked round it as one does round a room where one senses immediately something has happened in one’s absence, she laughed excitedly, braggingly, and half-whispered, half-wept, “A man was here! A farmer! I’ve had a visitor!”
He looked at her, looked all round him.
Then, “You’re sure he’s gone?”
“Oh he’s gone, yes he’s gone, I heard the car, he’s gone.” She was rocking herself with him, digging her fingers into his arms. He had never seen her so emotional, without a gleam of challenge in her. Suddenly it all came to her as if it had happened: “I wanted to run like mad to you when I saw you but I was terrified he might still be looking. — Any minute, any minute, you might have — He thought it wasn’t safe for me, can you imagine, I couldn’t get rid of him. I wanted to rush to you—” She broke off and began to giggle, holding his hands and moving them in hers in emphasis of her words—”A kind farmer. He was, really. A nice man.”
“Let’s get off his land,” said Gideon.
“Oh no, it’s not his. He told me, it’s his neighbour’s.”
He was pulling up the blanket. They fell into a pantomime of crazy haste, dropping their things, struggling and laughing, tussling.
What she had spilt was like mercury and rolled away into the corners of her being, impossible ever to recover and confine again.
The car surrounded them with the clutter of their inhabitation, enclosing and familiar as an untidy room where one day is not cleared away before another piles on top of it. Already they had a life together, in that car. Like any other life, it was manifest in biscuit crumbs, aspirins, cigarette boxes kept for the notes on the back, broken objects of use (a pair of sunglasses, a sandal without a buckle) and other objects that had become indispensable, not in the function for which they were intended, but in adaptation to a need — the fluffy red towel that was perfect for keeping the draught off Ann’s knees, and the plastic cosmetic bottle that they used to hold lemon juice. Already the inanimate bore witness to and was imbued with whatever had been felt and thought in that car, the love-making, the hours when nothing was said and attention streamed along with the passing road, the talk, the fatigue, the jokes. When Ann settled in and her eyes dropped to the level of the grey dashboard with its tinny pattern of grilles and dials, the dead half-hours were marked there for her: the time when she did not know why she was here rather than anywhere else. If the exciting silent dialogue of her presence and the man beside her ceased for a moment to sound in that place in herself where she had first heard it, she grew restless, pacing the logic of slots, circles and knobs.
Gideon telephoned from a dorp post office to tell his friends in Basutoland that he was coming. The people themselves, who ran a store in the mountains, had no telephone, of course, but a friend in a Government office in Maseru would give a message to his brother, who would pass it on to someone else — Ann did not question the circumlocutory mystery by which the warning of their arrival would reach its destination. She was charmed with and proud of the tightly-interlocking life where Gideon was as free and powerful, in his way, as some white tycoon arranging his life by telex. The call took the best part of the afternoon to come through, and then Gideon came back to the car to say that the man in Maseru knew straight off, without any further enquiry, that Malefetsane was away from home, gone to Vryburg on some family business.
“He said, come to his place in Maseru,” he said, dismissing it. Of course, the man thought he was alone.
They felt flat, cheerful with each other in the slight embarrassment of disappointment.
“I want to buy a tent.”
“Oh Christ,” he said. He ran his hand across the back of his head. “I need a hair-cut. Malefetsane would have cut my hair for me in Basutoland.”
“It looks like the filling of an old mattress. I remember the mattresses at boarding-school being emptied and picked over on the grass. — Let’s get a tent.”
“Who’s going to put it up and take it down.”
“I know all about tents,” she said. Hadn’t she and Boaz lived in them for weeks?
“Yes, I know,” he said quietly.
They decided, quite suddenly, to go on to Basutoland in any case; Gideon knew someone else there, lots of people there; someone would give them a place to sleep. They were driving in the dark again; the days had no recognisable shape, ballooning and extending into unmeasured stretches of time. The car broke down, but they were not far from a dorp and, flashing a torch, Ann waved a passing lorry to a stop. “I’ll get a lift quicker than you will,” she said. Businesslike both of them, he kept out of the way in the dark. She came back within an hour, bringing a new fan-belt and a big polony sausage and some beer. She had got a lift back easily, too; she was in the triumphant good mood which successful escapades always induced. Gideon put on the new belt and they went on. Fifty miles further, before they could cross the border, the car stopped once more, and although she worked beside him with her teeth clenched and her hands transferring their oily dirt to face and hair, neither his fair knowledge nor her bullying, practical flair helped them to get the thing going again. They waited for hours, but no car came by on that lonely road at that hour of the night. Very early in the morning there was a lorry loaded with fruit-boxes, thundering down on them. The Indian driver was friendly, “There’s room for him in the back,” he said, of Gideon, as he helped her into the cab. “Oh it’s all right, there’s room here next to me,” she said, and Gideon climbed in beside her in silence.