Four Gated City (92 page)

At last it all came out, very late one night over cocoa and biscuits and cigarettes, in the kitchen.

Rita had been brought up by her granny until she was ten, in the town that had begun as a mining camp and which had kept the flavour of one when it became one of the Colony’s ‘towns’ - five thousand white inhabitants every one of whom she knew by sight or by name, and a couple of thousand black inhabitants, whom she never saw at all. Everything revolved around the mine and the only entertainments were bars and the cinema. Here Rita went to school and saw her mother only occasionally. Then Maisie had made an extended visit. Presumably the good times were at last wearing thin, or she had discovered she loved her daughter. But she had stayed, and then married an engineer from the mine, and all four, granny, Rita, Maisie and the new husband, had lived in the tiny tin-roofed shanty house where the view was the mining machinery across a sandy road, and a small garden full of zinnias and canna lilies. Then the granny had died; what this had meant to Rita was clear enough from her face as she told it. The marriage was neither successful nor particularly bad. Maisie drank a lot but was good-natured if slatternly. The engineer was given to drunken bouts, but he was kind to Rita, while nagging at Maisie for being fat and so lazy. There was a large picture of Maisie on Rita’s dressing-table: she had had an eye infection, had neglected it, and now wore a pink eye-shade permanently over one eye. Also, she had had a slight stroke, and her mouth dragged slightly, giving her a peevish sour look. But Rita had not spent much time after she was eleven in the mining town; for one day the Maynards appeared and had offered to pay to send Rita to boarding-school with the nuns in the city. Maisie had made no objection. Rita then had been for eight years at the convent, had spent her holidays with her mother, and even one holiday with the Maynards. But she couldn’t stand Mrs. Maynard she said: once was enough.

She was popular and social, did well enough at school not to attract attention, read enormous quantities of love magazines, was
taken out often by Mr Maynard to tea or to the pictures-and about the age of fifteen had understood the obvious fact that Mr Maynard must be her father. She had always felt (she told Martha) that her real father was not the airman McGrew. Maisie, when drunk, sighed and wept and talked of the men she remembered and for a time it sounded to Rita as if ‘a red communist from Greece’ had been her father ‘In vino Veritas-as they say, ’ said Rita; for her mother had once sworn that cross her heart and tell no lies, it wasn’t Andrew.

And when Rita had made the step into a discovery, for she had only to look into the mirror to see the truth, and had said to Maisie: ‘I’m surprised Mrs. Maynard doesn’t mind!’-all Maisie had said was: ‘Blood is thicker than water!’

And it had been left at that.

For years then, Rita had been paid for, been taken out, been given treats and clothes by Mr Maynard, her father-so she had felt it. And she would not again visit the house, out of delicacy, for she did not wish to wound Mrs. Maynard. She was fond of Mr Maynard-dear old sweet man, she said he was. It seemed she imagined the uncontrollable passion of an elderly man saying good-bye to his youth, and herself its lucky fruit. Lucky it had been: her inheritance was the Maynards, and what they stood for, or had stood for. One day a letter, or a message, or a lawyer’s announcement would arrive, a door would open, a road would become clear-and there she would be. And here she was, with her mother’s old friend Martha, and this house was her future.

She did mention Binkie once: he was a bit silly, she thought. Not at all the kind of son for the Maynards. He did not get on with them. It must be terribly hard for them. Of course, men did drink, she knew that: being brought up in a mining town had taught her everything. But there was drinking and drinking. And his wife-did you ever meet her, Martha? Well, she’s one of those civil service types, you know, and really, those two boys of hers-she, Rita, had been out with one of them once, and that was enough. But she didn’t like speaking ill of people.

So she went on. Maisie’s daughter would not like to say straight out: ‘I’m not surprised that he prefers me, the daughter of his joy, to an idiot like Binkie and Binkie’s unsatisfactory stepchildren, ’ but that she fully understood and supported his preference was clear from her happy smile as she told how he, Mr Maynard,
always took her out, but never them, always remembered her birthday, and never let a Christmas go by. At which point Martha produced eight hundred pounds in five-pound notes, to be spent as she wished. Tears filled her eyes: not surprised tears, of course not; she was one, she knew, to whom the good things would naturally come. ‘Oh, he’s so kind, Martha, if you only knew how kind he was!’

Martha postponed the truth with the thought: Well I’m sure it doesn’t matter if I tell her later.

‘He’s always so kind to everyone. Caroline-you don’t mind my mentioning her? Well, I saw her at school sometimes, but we weren’t
really
friends, you know, they are civil service types really, it’s not my style. But one afternoon he took me and Caroline out together and then sometimes we saw each other like pals-sort of. He’s good to her, too. But not as much as to me. He visits their house a lot. He spends as much time there as he does at his own home. But I think for a person with a kind heart like him, a house without children must be a sad place. It often makes me sad when I think of him, the way he feels for Caroline and me. But if I say it myself, Martha, I know I’m his favourite. You can’t help feeling these things.’

To the middle-aged who have been dedicated to propositions like: The Truth Will Make You Free-and so on, come very interesting moments, such as, when confronted with Rita. It was not that Maisie’s daughter would be shocked to hear that Mr Maynard, now over seventy, still pursued his life-long liaison with Mrs. Talbot, even when she was an ancient lady confined to bed with a nurse permanently in attendance-she was a bit dotty now, people said. Or that Mr Maynard would have sentimental emotions on two counts for Caroline-Martha’s daughter, his old mistress’s daughter’s stepchild. Of course not. She’d find it all very touching. Probably it was, too; probably it was Martha who was at fault. (She remembered being made to feel like this by Maisie who would be incapable of doubting that the heart is always better than a nasty, critical, carping head.) And what did it matter that it was Binkie and not Mr Maynard who had fathered Rita who almost certainly, like the old Maynards themselves, would be bound to believe that the Blood was the thing. And besides, who else had ever found Mr Maynard sweet and kind? And besides, blood or no blood, who would want Binkie as a father if she could have Judge Maynard?
Thus did the truth not so much go down with trumpets before Rita, as slink away, with something like an embarrassed smile. Martha was able to feel she ought to be shedding a tear or two for Mrs. Maynard, thus cheated so finally out of a granddaughter: but whose fault was it?

What mattered was Rita, who was quite profoundly all right, though for what Martha could not stop wondering: where was this child of good fortune going to find anything to match her expectations?

Meanwhile, she took over the house without being asked: she felt, it seemed, that if a house was there to be run, then obviously it was her place to run it. She attended to those letters of Mark’s which he and Martha found most irksome-for like many authors, he was expected to run a kind of private advice bureau on personal problems. Mark refused to touch them: Martha would sweat and suffer because what could one ever say to people who believed that a few words on a piece of paper could solve such tangles of misery? Rita had no such ridiculous inhibitions: she knew by instinct that what unhappy people needed was for someone to pay attention to them, and she wrote pages and pages of admirable advice to anyone who asked for it. (‘You say you feel depressed when you think of your wasted life? That does no good! You must keep your chin up and think of others!’) She also enjoyed London, but in her own way, which announced to some observers that she regarded all this as a prelude to a destiny. She got on with an extraordinary number of varied people, since Martha’s daughter would be bound to know that Graham Patten’s unkind wit was due, like the old miner Saul Baines’s grouchiness, to life’s wounds. ‘People like that often have a sad heart, when all is said and done.’ Lynda, whom she was taken to visit was ‘just like the wife of the postmaster at Gokwe, she has to go off into the loony-bin sometimes when things get too much for her, like in the Christmas rush.’

She went about with Paul. He was in love with her. She treated him with maternal firmness. He announced to everyone that he would marry Rita who was exactly right for him. He took her to parties, to theatres, to all the new films, and she enjoyed them all: she was incapable of being bored. More, he took her out before she had decided that his taste in clothes was very good, and when she was still wearing her own. Not to mention her own hair. Taken to Madeleine, the genius with the scissors, by Paul, who said that at
least she might
try
, she had said no, she would not have her hair straightened. Sensation! There was probably not one girl in London, apart from Rita, who had short curly hair: much worse than being crippled or ugly. Sitting in front of a mirror clutching her curls (to be fashionable and indeed, almost compulsory a couple of years later), she had demanded why it was that at the dinner the night before there had been seven women aged between seventeen and seventy all with exactly the same haircut, ‘Madeleine’s cut’. Madeleine replied that ‘a hairstyle, like a fashion, must evolve logically from the style before.’ ‘Yes, but I like to be myself, ’ said Rita.

At this act of rebellion Madeleine had brooded, while her scissors as it were meditated among Rita’s curls. Then she had summoned a young man from the end of the
salon
. ‘Carlos, ’ she had said decisively, ‘from now on you will be doing Miss … er-what did you say your name was? -hair.”

Rita then found herself before another mirror, with Carlos, his scissors poised to start work. ‘Just do what I’ve got now only better-after all, it stands to reason you’d do better than they do in Gokwe!’ His scissors remained immobilized for minutes, while he struggled with himself, at last crying out that ‘it was impossible for him to cut out of the current style-his scissors simply would
not
bring themselves to do it.’ Therefore, every time Rita entered a room, shocked or intrigued eyes turned to look at her curly head, and she instantly earned a reputation for great strength of character.

‘Yes, ’ she said modestly, ‘but then I’m a Zambesian, we are independent by nature, though I can see that in London everybody has to be like everybody else, I mean, you’re all brought up like that, aren’t you? ’ This kind of thing caused furores of annoyance, but she was well able to deal with it. Politics were not, as she said, her concern, though she had given the colour question her attention early on in life. It was a pity that the blacks and the whites couldn’t get to know each other as people, because then they would be bound to like each other, people did when they really knew each other, didn’t they? Sometimes she did feel like smacking certain people’s bottoms for them, she wasn’t going to say whose, but where there was a will there was a way, and she was sure good would out in the end.

On the basis that she was very original, she and Paul were invited everywhere. At last he proposed, formally, on an occasion
prepared for and worked up to. She refused, saying that her heart belonged to another.

Paul took this very badly: probably nothing worse had happened to him since his mother had died. He put a good face on it, but was rather ill, and went away by himself to recover.

Yet Rita’s refusal, and its manner, did in fact hold its own cure.

The thing was that Paul had been living for years in a sexual or romantic mirage. Many men do, and this is due entirely to women’s kind hearts (or their cowardice, what you will), because they can so seldom bring themselves to say: No, no, you’re ugly; you’re unsubtle; you snore; you’ve bad breath; you can’t make love; or I don’t like the way you talk about your wife. Now Paul was very handsome. Sex, above all in this London (and he’d never known another), where everyone was young and everyone made love or sex, was something that he had known he must do, or at least appear to do. (The girl with whom he spent, still, most of his time and to whom he always returned, was Zena, whom he never took out, but in whose arms he might spend chaste nights.) Otherwise a thousand women had been to bed with him once, but had discovered they loved their husbands or former lovers; or had just that week decided on monogamy or a regular love, or were unfortunately not feeling well, or felt towards him like a sister. Or if they knew other women who had been to bed with him would not go to bed with him at all-no, no, it was not that he wasn’t as attractive as twenty sheikhs rolled into one, but appearances were deceptive and gossip a liar-actually they were virgins.

Rita said to him: ‘But, Paul, you and I wouldn’t be suited, you see, because I wouldn’t marry a man who didn’t like a lot of kissing and cuddling.’

‘But how do you know what I like? ’ said Paul. ‘You won’t go to bed with me!’

‘Oh, now don’t be so silly, Paul. Why do you put on an act with me? I feel really hurt about that, I do, honestly.’

‘But I don’t see why you say that.’

Oh, Paul, do stop it. Your trouble is, you aren’t being realistic, I mean, it’s silly, isn’t it? Because nothing but unhappiness will come of it. No, what you have to do is to find a nice warm-hearted girl-older than you would be a good idea, but she shouldn’t be too keen on that kind of thing, I mean, a lot of girls aren’t, they just pretend to be, because they want people to think well of them. But
you aren’t passionate, Paul, you see. You are affectionate, you’ve got a warm heart, but you aren’t a passionate person. So that’s what you have to do. You want to find a girl who wants a man to be very kind, so that she can be kind back, but she shouldn’t want to make love much, because you wouldn’t like that, not really.’