The Sun Between Their Feet (28 page)

About three miles on the track to the station a smaller overgrown road branched to the Manager's House. This house had been built by the Rich Mitchells for their manager. Then they decided to sell a third of their farm, with the house ready for its owner. It stood empty a couple of years, with sacks of grain and ox-hides in it. The case had been discussed and adjudicated on the verandas of the district: no. Rich Mitchell was not right to sell that part of his farm, which was badly watered and poorish soil, except for a hundred acres or so. At the very least he should have thrown in a couple of miles of his long vlei with the lands adjacent to it. No wonder Rich Mitchell was rich (they said); and when they met him their voices had a calculated distance: ‘Sold your new farm yet, Rich?' No, he hadn't sold it, nor did he, for one year, then another. But the rich can afford to wait. (As they said on the verandas.)

The farm was bought by a Mr Rooyen who had already gone broke farming down Que Que way. The Grants went to visit, Mrs Grant in her new silk, Mr Grant grumbling because it was the busy season. The small girl did not go, she refused, she wanted to stay in the kitchen with old Tom the cookboy, where she was happy, watching him make butter.

That evening, listening with half an ear to the parents' talk, it was evident things weren't too good. Mr Rooyen hadn't a penny of his own; he had bought the farm through the Land Bank, and was working on an eight-hundred-pounds loan. What it amounted to was a gamble on the first season. ‘It's all very well,' said Mr Grant, summing up with the reluctant critical note in his voice that meant he knew he
would have to help Mr Rooyen, would do so, but found it all too much. And, sure enough, in the dry season the Rooyen cattle were running on Grant land and using the Grant well. But Mr Rooyen had become ‘the new man in the Manager's House'.

The first season wasn't too bad, so the small girl gathered from the talk on the verandas, and Mr Rooyen might make out after all. But he was very poor. Mrs Grant, when they had too much cheese or butter, or baked, sent supplies over by the cook. In the second year Mr Grant lent Mr Rooyen two hundred pounds to tide him over. The small girl knew that the new neighbour belonged for ever to that category of people who, when parting from the Grants, would wring their hands and say in a low, half-ashamed voice: ‘You've been very good to me and I'll never forget it.'

The first time she saw the new farmer, who never went anywhere, was when the Grants went into the station and gave Mr Rooyen a lift. He could not afford a car yet. He stood on the track waiting for the Grants, and behind him the road to his house was even more overgrown with bushes and grass, like a dry river-bed between the trees. He sat in the back answering Mr Grant's questions about how things were going. She did not notice him much, or rather refused to notice him, because she definitely did not like him, although he was nothing she had not known all her life. A tallish man, dressed in bush khaki, blue eyes inflamed by the sun, he was burned – not a healthy reddish brown – but a mahogany colour, because he was never out of the sun, never stopped working. This colour in a white man, the small girl already knew, meant a desperate struggling poverty and it usually preceded going broke or getting very ill. But the reason she did not like him, or that he scared her, was the violence of his grievance. The hand which lay on the back of the car seat behind Mr Grant trembled slightly; his voice trembled as he spoke of Rich Mitchell, his neighbour, who had a vlei seven miles long and would neither sell nor rent him any of it. ‘It isn't right,' he kept
saying. ‘He doesn't make use of my end. Perhaps his cattle graze there a couple of weeks in the dry season, but that's all.' All this meant that his cattle would be running with the Grants' again when the grass was low. More: that he was appealing, through Mr Grant, for justice, to the unconstituted council of farmers who settled these matters on their verandas.

That night Mr Grant said: It's all very well! a good many times. Then he rang up Mr Matthews (Glasgow Bob) from the Glenisle Farm; and Mr Paynter (Tobacco Paynter) from Bellvue; and Mr Van Doren (The Dutchman) from Blue Hills. Their farms adjoined Rich Mitchell's.

Soon after, the Grants went into the station again. At the last minute they had remembered to ring up and ask Mr Rooyen if he wanted a lift. He did. It wasn't altogether convenient, particularly for the small girl, because two-thirds of the back seat was packed to the roof with plough parts being sent into town for repair. And beside Mrs Grant on the front seat was a great parcel full of dead chickens ready for sale to the hotel. ‘It's no bother,' said Mrs Grant, to Mr Rooyen, ‘the child can sit on your knee.'

The trouble was that the small girl was definitely not a child. She was pretty certain she was no longer a small girl either. For one thing, her breasts had begun to sprout, and while this caused her more embarrassment than pleasure, she handled her body in a proud gingerly way that made it impossible, as she would have done even a season before, to snuggle in on the grown-up's lap. She got out of the car in a mood of fine proud withdrawal, not looking at Mr Rooyen as he fitted himself into the narrow space on the back seat. Then, with a clumsy fastidiousness, she perched on the very edge of his bare bony knees and supported herself with two hands on the back of the front seat. Mr Rooyen's arms were about her waist, as if she were indeed a child, and they trembled, as she had known they would – as his voice still trembled, talking about Rich Mitchell. But soon he stopped talking. The car sped forward through the heavy, red-dust-laden
trees, rocking and bouncing over the dry ruts, and she was jerked back to fit against the body of Mr Rooyen, whose fierceness was that of a lonely tenderness, as she knew already, though never before in her life had she met it. She longed for the ride to be over, while she sat squeezed, pressed, suffering, in the embrace of Mr Rooyen, a couple of feet behind the Grants. She ignored, so far as was possible, with politeness; was stiff with resistance; looked at the backs of her parents' heads and marvelled at their blindness. ‘If you only knew what your precious Mr Rooyen was doing to your precious daughter …'

When it was time to come home from the station, she shed five years and became petulant and wilful: she would sit on her mother's knee, not on Mr Rooyen's. Because now the car was stacked with groceries, and it was a choice of one knee or the other. ‘Why, my dear child,' said the fond Mrs Grant, pleased at this rebirth of the charming child in her daughter. But the girl sat as stiffly on her mother's knee as she had on the man's, for she felt his eyes continually returning to her, over her mother's shoulder, in need, or in fear, or in guilt.

When the car stopped at the turning to the Manager's House, she got off her mother's knee, and would not look at Mr Rooyen. Who then did something really not allowable, not in the code, for he bent, squeezed her in his great near-black hairy arms and kissed her. Her mother laughed, gay and encouraging. Mr Grant said merely: ‘Goodbye, Rooyen,' as the tall forlorn fierce man walked off to his house along the grass-river road.

The girl got into the back seat, silent. Her mother had let her down, had let her new breasts down by that gay social laugh. As for her father, she looked at his profile, absorbed in the business of starting the car and setting it in motion, but the profile said nothing. She said, resentful: ‘Who does he think he is,
kissing
me.' And Mrs Grant said briskly: ‘My dear child, why ever not?' At which Mr Grant gave his wife a quick, grave look, but remained silent. And this comforted the girl, supported her.

She thought about Mr Rooyen. Or rather, she felt him – felt the trembling of his arms, felt as if he were calling to her. One hot morning, saying she was going for a walk, she set off to his house. When she got there she was overheated and tired and needed a drink. Of course there was no one there. The house was two small rooms, side by side under corrugated iron, with a lean-to kitchen behind. In front was a narrow brick veranda with pillars. Plants stood in painted paraffin tins, and they were dry and limp. She went into the first room. It had two old leather armchairs, a sideboard with a mirror that reflected trees and blue sky and long grass from the low window, and an eating table. The second room had an iron bed and a chest-of-drawers. She looked, long and thoughtful, at the narrow bed, and her heart was full of pity because of the lonely trembling of Mr Rooyen's arms. She went into the tiny kitchen. It had an iron Carron Dover stove, where the fire was out. A wooden table had some cold meat on it with a piece of gauze over it. The meat smelled sourish. Flies buzzed. Up the legs of the table small black ants trickled. There was no servant visible. After getting herself a glass of tepid, tasting water from the filter, she walked very slowly through the house again, taking in everything, then went home.

At supper she said, casual, ‘I went to see Mr Rooyen today.'

Her father looked quickly at her mother, who dropped her eyes and crumbled bread. That meant they had discussed the incident of the kiss. ‘How is he?' asked Mrs Grant, casual and bright. ‘He wasn't there.' Her father said nothing.

Next day she lapsed back into her private listening world. In the afternoon she read, but the book seemed childish. She wept enjoyably, alone. At supper she looked at her parents from a long way off, and knew it was a different place where she had never been before. They were smaller, definitely. She saw them clear: the rather handsome phlegmatic man at one end of the table, brown in his khaki (but not mahogany, he could afford not to spend every second of his waking hours in
the sun). And at the other end a brisk, airy, efficient woman in a tailored striped dress. The girl thought: I came out of them; and shrank away in dislike from knowing how she had. She looked at these two strange people and felt Mr Rooyen's arms call to her across three miles of veld. Before she went to bed she stood for a long time gazing at the small light from his house.

Next morning she went to his house again. She wore a new dress, which her mother had made. It was a childish dress that ignored her breasts, which is why she chose it. Not that she expected to see Mr Rooyen. She wanted to see the small, brick, ant-and fly-ridden house, walk through it, and come home again.

When she got there, there was not a sign of anyone. She fetched water in a half-paraffin tin from the kitchen and soaked the half-dead plants. Then she sat on the edge of the brick veranda with her feet in the hot dust. Quite soon Mr Rooyen came walking up through the trees from the lands. He saw her, but she could not make out what he thought. She said, girlish: ‘I've watered your plants for you.'

‘The boy's supposed to water them,' he said, sounding angry. He strode on to the veranda, into the room behind, and out at the back in three great paces shouting: ‘Boy! Boy!'

A shouting went on, because the cook had gone to sleep under a tree. The girl watched the man run himself a glass of water from the filter, gulp it down, run another, gulp that. He came back to the veranda. Standing like a great black hot tower over her, he demanded: ‘Does your father know you're here?'

She shook her head, primly. But she felt he was unfair. He would not have liked her father to know how his arms had trembled and pressed her in the car.

He returned to the room, and sat, knees sprawling apart, his arms limp, in one of the big ugly leather chairs. He looked at her steadily, his mouth tight. He had a thin mouth. The lips were burned and black from the sun, and the cracks in them showed white and unhealthy.

‘Come here,' he said, softly. It was tentative and she chose not to hear it, remained sitting with her back to him. Over her shoulder she asked, one neighbour to another: ‘Have you fixed up your vlei with Mr Mitchell yet?' He sat looking at her, his head lowered. His eyes were really ugly, she thought, red with sun-glare. He was an ugly man, she thought. For now she was wishing – not that she had not come – but that he had not come. Then she could have walked, secretly and delightfully, through the house, and gone, secretly. And tomorrow she could have come and watered his plants again. She imagined saying to him, meeting him by chance somewhere: ‘Guess who was watering your plants all that time?'

‘You're a pretty little girl,' he said. He was grinning. The grin had no relationship to the lonely hunger of his touch on her in the car. Nor was it a grin addressed to a pretty little girl – far from it. She looked at the grin, repudiating it for her future, and was glad that she wore this full, childish dress.

‘Come and sit on my knee,' he tried again, in the way people had been saying through her childhood: Come and sit on my knee. She obligingly went, like a small girl, and balanced herself on a knee that felt all bone under her. His hands came out and gripped her thin arms. His face changed from the ugly grin to the look of lonely hunger. She was sitting upright, using her feet as braces on the floor to prevent herself being pulled into the trembling man's body. Unable to pull her, he leaned his face against her neck, so that she felt his eyelashes and eyebrows hairy on her skin, and he muttered: ‘Maureen, Maureen, Maureen, my love.'

She stood up, smoothing down her silly dress. He opened his eyes, sat still, hands on his knees. His mouth was half-open, he breathed irregularly, and his eyes stared, not at her, but at the brick floor where tiny black ants trickled.

She sat herself on the chair opposite, tucking her dress well in around her legs. In the silence the roof cracked suddenly overhead from the heat. There was the sound of a
car on the main road half a mile off. The car came nearer. Neither the girl nor the man moved. Their eyes met from time to time, frowning, serious, then moved away to the ants, to the window, anywhere. He still breathed fast. She was full of revulsion against his body, yet she remembered the heat of his face, the touch of his lashes on her neck, and his loneliness spoke to her through her dislike of him, so that she longed to assuage him. The car stopped outside the house. She saw, without surprise, that it was her father. She remained where she was as Mr Grant stepped out of the car, and came in, his eyes narrowed because of the glare and the heat under the iron roof. He nodded at his daughter, and said: ‘How do you do, Rooyen?' There being only two chairs, the men were standing; but the girl knew what she had to do, so she went out on to the veranda, and sat on the hot rough brick, spreading her blue skirts wide so that air could come under them and cool her thighs.