Even though it was winter there were flies here (one settled lovingly on me again, this time bumbling my ear) and above the gusts of strong sweet putrescence enveloping suddenly from the eating house, the smoke of burned mealies and the rotten sweetness of discarded oranges squashed everywhere underfoot, there was the high, strong, nostril-burning smell of stale urine. It had eaten the grass of the veld away, it had soured the earth with a crude animal foulness. I could not place it (a faint whiff, overlaid with disinfectant, came out of the public cloakroom near the bus terminus where my mother would not let me go); but my lip twitched up in distaste. The shouting seemed part of the smell and the twirl of flies; I felt suddenly that I wanted to bat at my clothes and brush myself down and feel over my hair in case something had settled on me — some horrible dirt, something alive, perhaps. — A child had once crammed a locust down my back at school, and for days afterward I had sudden attacks of shuddering all over the surface of my body so that I had wanted to tear off my clothes and examine every inch of my skin.
I looked at these dark brown faces — the town natives were somehow lighter — dark as teak and dark as mahogany, shining with the warm grease of their own liveness lighting up their skin; wondering, receptive, unthinking, taking in with their eyes as earth takes water; close-eyed, sullen with the defensive sullenness of the defenseless; noisy and merry with the glee of the innocent. And to me, in my kilts and my hand-knitted socks and my hair tied with neat ribbon, they were something to look at with a half-smile, as I had watched the chameleon in the window.
I crunched to the path and the road over burned veld that dissolved crisply in puffs of black dust round my shoes and I passed a Mine boy standing with his back to me and his legs apart. I had vaguely noticed them standing that curious way before, as I whisked past in the car. But as I passed this one — he was singing, and the five or six yards he had put between himself and the vendors was simply a gesture — I saw a little stream of water curving from him. Not shock but a sudden press of knowledge, hot and unwanted, came upon me. A question that had waited inside me but had never risen into words or thoughts because there were no words for it — no words with myself, my mother, with Olwen even. I began to run, very fast, along the tar, the smooth straight road. And presently the run slackened and calmed, and I skipped along, jerking my hair over my ears, one foot catching behind the other.
I did not go back to the house but across the Recreation Hall grounds under the trees and round to the tennis courts where, before I could see the wires sparkling filaments of silver, I heard beyond the pines and the clipped hedge and the deep cooing of doves the pomp! pomp! of the balls.
Round the dark hedge in the clear sun I saw them suddenly as a picture, the white figures with turning pink faces running on the courts, the striped blazers lying on the pale grass, the bare pink legs and white sand shoes sitting in the log house. They were having tea. The young men sat on the grass. Alec Finlay panted, one leg stretched, resting on his elbows. He saw me and waved. Then my mother looked up over a big enamel urn, a little puzzled, as if she had heard a familiar sound. I smiled at her. “Well, young lady?” said Alec, screwing up his eyes and his smile. I walked into the shade, the smell of hot tea, lavender water, and fresh white clothes. “Are you going to join us, Helen?” a pretty grown-up girl asked me. “New blood for the second league!” said someone, and they all laughed, because they had just lost their match. “Just in time for tea, I’d say.” My mother was in the grown-up conspiracy of banter, nodding her head mockingly as she smiled. They all laughed again. My mother’s hand felt over my damp forehead, lifting the hair back. “D’you want some tea, darling?” Her head was on one side, smiling down into my face, the little springs of red hair escaping. She was pleased to be able to ignore the argument, the vague anxiousness that had ended up satisfactorily in a loneliness that had sent me tailing after her, after all.
I sat beside her, thirstily gulping tea, feet not quite reaching the ground. “No, no, you don’t,” said a fat fair man, waving back the crumpets. “Do you want to weigh me down and give yourself an advantage?”—They laughed helplessly again; he was the comedian of the crowd, he was always coming out with something. In fact, he had such a reputation for being amusing that they laughed, found their mouths twitching in reflex every time he opened his, no matter what he said. I laughed with them. Soon I was handing round the crumpets, helping with fresh cups of tea. They teased me and talked to me playfully; I blushed when the young men chaffed me in a way that seemed to deepen some secret between them and their girls. But recklessly, I could answer them back, teasing too, I could make them laugh. They said: “Listen to her! — Did you hear that—?” I stood bridling with pleasure, looking wide out of my eyes in the face of applause.
I went there often on Saturday afternoons after that, accepted as one of them, but with the distinction of being the only child in the party. It was easy to be one of them because I soon knew their jokes as well as they did themselves and, beside my mother, sat a little forward as they did, waiting for each to come out with his famous remark. Then when they rocked and shook their heads at getting just what they had expected, I would jump up and down, clutching at my mother’s arm in delight.
I was quite one of them.
Chapter 2
The road on which I had hesitated before going down to the Concession Stores that Saturday afternoon was the road between Mine and town. I passed along it going to school every morning. I came back along it at two o’clock every afternoon in the bus which had shaken past first the Town Hall in its geometrical setting of flower beds and frostbitten lawn and municipal coat-of-arms grown in tight fleshy cactus; the dirty shopblinds of the main street making a chalky dazzle; the native delivery boys sitting in the gutters, staring at their broken shoes; the buildings, like a familiar tune picked out silently on a keyboard: one, one, two-story, two, one, one-story — then the houses of the township, long rows of corrugated iron roofs behind bullet-headed municipal trees shorn regularly to keep them free of the telephone wires, the Greek shop with its pyramid of crude pink coconut buns and frieze of spotted bananas, the doctor’s house with a tiled roof and a tennis court; and out at last, past the last row of houses turning their back yards — a patchwork of washing, a broken dog kennel, the little one-eyed room where the servant lived — to the veld.