The Sun Between Their Feet (19 page)

My father said nothing to this, but after some minutes he came off some track of thought with: ‘I hope Molly's taking it sensibly. I do hope she is. Because she could be laying up merry hell for herself if she's not.'

I saw George Andrews at a gymkhana standing at the rail with Mrs Slatter. Although he was an Englishman he was already brown, and his clothes were loosened up and easy, as our men's clothes were. So there was nothing to dislike about him on that score. He was rather short, not fat, but broad, and you could see he would be fat. He was healthy-looking above all, with a clear reddish face the sun had laid
a brown glisten over, and very clear blue eyes, and his hair was thick and short, glistening like fur. I wanted to like him and so I did. I saw the way he leaned beside Mrs Slatter, with her dust-coat over his arm, holding out his programme for her to mark. I could understand that she would like a gentleman who would open doors for her and stand up when she came into the room, after Mr Slatter. I could see she was proud to be with him. And so I liked him though I did not like his mouth; his lips were pink and wettish. I did not look at his mouth again for a long time. And because I liked him I was annoyed with my father when he said, after that gymkhana, ‘Well, I don't know. I don't think I like it after all. He's a bit of a young pup, Cambridge or no Cambridge.'

Six months after George Andrews came to the district there was a dance for the young people at the Slatters'. It was the first dance. The older boys were eighteen and seventeen and they had girls. The two younger boys were fifteen and thirteen and they despised girls. I was fifteen then, and all these boys were too young for me, and the girls of the two older boys were nearly twenty. There were about sixteen of us, and the married people thirty or forty, as usual. The married people sat in the living-room and danced in it, and we were on the verandas. Mr Slatter was dancing with Emmy Pritt, and sometimes another woman, and Mrs Slatter was busy being hostess and dancing with George Andrews. I was still in a short dress and unhappy because I was in love with one of the assistants from the farm between the rivers, and I knew very well that until I had a long dress he would not see me. I went into Mrs Slatter's bedroom latish because it seemed the only room empty, and I looked out of the window at the dark wet night. It was the rainy season and we had driven over the swollen noisy river and all the way the rain-water was sluicing under our tyres. It was still raining and the lamplight gilded streams of rain so that as I turned my head slightly this way and that, the black and the gold rods
shifted before me, and I thought (and I had never thought so simply before about these things): ‘How do they manage? With all these big boys in the house? And they never go to bed before eleven or half-past these days, I bet, and with Mr Slatter coming home unexpectedly from Emmy Pritt – it must be difficult. I suppose he has to wait until everyone's asleep. It must be horrible, wondering all the time if the boys have noticed something …' I turned from the window and looked from it into the big low-ceilinged comfortable room with its big low bed covered over with pink roses, the pillows propped high in pink frilled covers, and although I had been in that room during visits for years of my life, it seemed strange to me, and ugly. I loved Mrs Slatter. Of all the women in the district she was the kindest, and she had always been good to me. But at that moment I hated her and I despised her.

I started to leave the bedroom, but at the door I stopped, because Mrs Slatter was in the passage, leaning against the wall, and George Andrews had his arms around her, and his face in her neck. She was saying, ‘Please don't, George, please don't, please, the boys might see.' And he was swallowing her neck and saying nothing at all. She was twisting her face and neck away and pushing him off. He staggered back from her, as though she had pushed him hard, but it was because he was drunk and had no balance, and he said: ‘Oh come on into your bedroom a minute. No one will know.' She said,
‘No,
George. Why should we have to snatch five minutes in the middle of a dance, like – ‘

‘Like what?' he said, grinning. I could see how the light that came down the passage from the big room made his pink lips glisten.

She looked reproachfully at him, and he said: ‘Molly, this thing is getting a bit much, you know. I have to set my alarm clock for one in the morning, and then I'm dead-beat. I drag myself out of my bed, and then you've got your clock set for four, and God knows working for your old man doesn't leave one with much enthusiasm for bouncing about
all night.' He began to walk off towards the big room where the people were dancing. She ran after him and grabbed at his arm. I retreated backwards towards Mr Slatter's room, but almost at once she had got him and turned him around and was kissing him. The people in the big room could have seen if they had been interested.

That night Mrs Slatter had on an electric blue crêpe dress with diamonds on the straps and in flower patterns on the hips. There was a deep V in front which showed her breasts swinging loose under the crêpe, though usually she wore strong corsets. And the back was cut down to the waist. As the two turned and came along, he put his hand into the front of her dress, and I saw it lift out her left breast, and his mouth was on her neck again. Her face was desperate, but that did not surprise me, because I knew she must be ashamed. I despised her, because her white long breast lying in his hand like a piece of limp floured dough, was not like Mrs Slatter who called men Mister even if she had known them twenty years, and was really very shy, and there was nothing Mr Slatter liked more than to tease her because she blushed when he used bad language. ‘What did you make such a fuss for?' George Andrews was saying in a drunken sort of way. ‘We can lock the door, can't we?'

‘Yes, we can lock the door,' she answered in the same way, laughing.

I went back into the crowd of married people where the small children were, and sat beside my mother, and it was only five minutes before Mrs Slatter came back looking as usual, from one door, and then George Andrews, in at another.

I did not go to the Slatters' again for some months. For one thing, I was away at school, and for another people were saying that Mrs Slatter was run down and she should get off the altitude for a bit. My father was not mentioning the Slatters by this time, because he had quarrelled with my mother over them. I knew they had, because whenever
Molly Slatter was mentioned, my mother tightened her mouth and changed the subject.

And so a year went by. At Christmas they had a dance again, and I had my first long dress, and I went to that dance not caring if it was at the Slatters' or anywhere else. It was my first dance as one of the young people. And so I was on the veranda dancing most of the evening, though sometimes the rain blew in on us, because it was raining again, being the full of the rainy season, and the skies were heavy and dark, with the moon shining out like a knife from the masses of the clouds and then going in again leaving the veranda with hardly light enough to see each other. Once I went down the steps to say goodbye to some neighbours who were going home early because they had a new baby, and coming back up the steps there was Mr Slatter and he had Mrs Slatter by the arm. ‘Come here, Lady Godiva,' he said. ‘Give us a kiss.'

‘Oh go along,' she said, sounding good-humoured. ‘Go along with you and leave me in peace.'

He was quite drunk, but not very. He twisted her arm around. It looked like a slight twist but she came up sudden against him, in a bent-back curve, her hips and legs against him, and he held her there. Her face was sick, and she half-screamed: ‘You don't know your own strength.' But he did not slacken the grip, and she stayed there, and the big sky was filtering a little stormy moonlight and I could just see their faces, and I could see his grinning teeth. ‘Your bloody pride, Lady Godiva,' he said, ‘who do you think you're doing in, who do you think is the loser over your bloody locked door?' She said nothing and her eyes were shut. ‘And now you've frozen out George, too? What's the matter, isn't
he
good enough for you either?' He gave her arm a wrench, and she gasped, but then shut her lips again, and he said: ‘So now you're all alone in your tidy bed, telling yourself fairy stories in the dark, Sister Theresa, the little flower.'

He let her go suddenly, and she staggered, so he put out
his other hand to steady her, and held her until she was steady. It seemed odd to me that he should care that she shouldn't fall to the ground, and that he should put his hand like that to stop her falling.

And so I left them and went back on to the veranda. I was dancing all the night with the assistant from the farm between the rivers. I was right about the long dress. All those months, at the station or at gymkhanas, he had never seen me at all. But that night he saw me, and I was wanting him to kiss me. But when he did I slapped his face. Because then I knew that he was drunk. I had not thought he might be drunk, though it was natural he was, since everybody was. But the way he kissed me was not at all what I had been thinking. ‘I beg your pardon I'm sure,' he said, and I walked past him into the passage and then into the living-room. But there were so many people and my eyes were stinging, so I went through into the other passage, and there, just like last year, as if the whole year had never happened, were Mrs Slatter and George Andrews. I did not want to see it, not the way I felt.

‘And why not?' he was saying, biting into her neck.

‘Oh George, that was all ended months ago, months ago!'

‘Oh come on, Moll, I don't know what I've done, you never bothered to explain.'

‘No.' And then, crying out,
‘Mind my arm.'
‘What's the matter with your arm?' ‘I fell and sprained it.'

So he let go of her, and said: ‘Well, thanks for the nice interlude, thanks anyway, old girl.' I knew that he had been meaning to hurt her, because I could feel what he said hurting me. He went off into the living-room by himself, and she went off after him, but to talk to someone else, and I went into her bedroom. It was empty. The lamp was on a low table by the bed, turned down, and the sky through the windows was black and wet and hardly any light came from it.

Then Mrs Slatter came in and sat on the bed and put her head in her hands. I did not move.

‘Oh my God!' she said. ‘Oh my God, my God!' Her voice was strange to me. The gentleness was not in it, though it was soft, but it was soft from breathlessness.

‘Oh my God!' she said, after a long long silence. She took up one of the pillows from the bed, and wrapped her arms around it, and laid her head down on it. It was quiet in this room, although from the big room came the sound of singing, a noise like howling, because people were drunk, or part-drunk, and it had the melancholy savage sound of people singing when they are drunk. An awful sound, like animals howling.

Then she put down the pillow, tidily, in its proper place, and swayed backwards and forwards and said: ‘Oh God, make me old soon, make me old. I can't stand this, I can't stand this any longer.'

And again the silence, with the howling sound of the singing outside, the footsteps of the people who were dancing scraping on the cement of the veranda.

‘I can't go on living,' said Mrs Slatter, into the dark above the small glow of lamplight. She bent herself up again, double, as if she were hurt physically, her hands gripped around her ankles, holding herself together, and she sat crunched up, her face looking straight in front at the wall, level with the lamp-light. So now I could see her face. I did not know that face. It was stone, white stone, but her eyes gleamed out of it black, and with a flicker in them. And her black shining hair that was not grey at all yet had loosened and hung in streaks around the white stone face.

‘I can't stand it,' she said again. The voice she used was strange to me. She might have been talking to someone. For a moment I even thought she had seen me and was talking to me, explaining herself to me. And then, slowly, she let herself unclench and she went out into the dance again.

I took up the lamp and held it as close as I could to the
mirror and bent in and looked at my face. But there was nothing to my face.

Next day I told my father I had heard Mrs Slatter say she could not go on living. He said, ‘Oh Lord, I hope it's not because of what I said about her dress,' but I said no, it was before he said he didn't like the dress. “Then if she was upset,' he said, ‘I expect what I said made her feel even worse.' And then: ‘Oh poor woman, poor woman!' He went into the house and called my mother and they talked it over. Then he got on to the telephone and I heard him asking Mrs Slatter to drop in next time she was going past to the station. And it seemed she was going in that morning, and before lunchtime she was on our veranda talking to my father. My mother was not there, although my father had not asked her in so many words not to be there. As for me I went to the back of the veranda where I could hear what they said.

‘Look, Molly,' he said, ‘we are old friends. You're looking like hell these days. Why don't you tell me what's wrong? You can say anything to me, you know.'

After quite a time she said: ‘Mr Farquar, there are some things you can't say to anybody. Nobody.'

‘Ah, Molly,' he said, ‘if there's one thing I've learned and I learned it early on, when I was a young man and I had a bad time, it's this. Everybody's got something terrible, Molly. Everybody has something awful they have to live with. We all live together and we see each other all the time, and none of us knows what awful thing the other person might be living with.'

And then she said: ‘But, Mr Farquar, I don't think that's true. I know people who don't seem to have anything private to make them unhappy.'

‘How do you know, Molly? How do you know?'

‘Take Mr Slatter,' she said. ‘He's a man who does as he likes. But he doesn't know his own strength. And that's why he never seems to understand how other people feel.'