This Was the Old Chief's Country (24 page)

She could not truly care: she knew Mrs Lacey was watching her and did not turn her head; she had paid for this by weeks of humiliation. When she was out of sight of the house she unstrapped the baby and carried it a few paces from the road into the bush. There she sat, under a tree, holding the child against her. She could feel sweat running down her face, and did not lift her hand to find whether tears mingled with it: her eyes were smarting with the effort of keeping her lids apart over the pressure of tears. As for the baby, beads of sweat stood all over his face. He looked vaguely about and reached his hands for the feathery heads of grasses and seemed subdued. Kate held him tight, but did not caress him; she was knotted tight inside with tears and anger. After a while she saw a tick crawl out of the grass on to her leg, and from there to the baby's leg. For a moment she let it crawl; from that dark region of her mind where the laughter spurted, astonishingly, came the thought: He might get tick fever. She could see Mrs Lacey very clearly, standing beside a tiny oblong trench, her head bent under the neat brown hat. She could hear women saying, their admiration and pity heightened by contrition: ‘She was so brave, she didn't give way at all.'

Kate brushed off the tick and stood up. Carefully keeping the sun off the child – his cheek was already beginning to redden – she put him back in the pram, and began wheeling it
back. Whatever it was she had been looking for, satisfaction, whether of pain, or love, she had not been given it. She could see Mrs Lacey standing on the veranda shading her eyes with her hand as she gazed towards them. Another thought floated up: she vividly saw herself pleading with Mrs Lacey: ‘Let me keep the baby, you don't want him, not really.'

When she faced Mrs Lacey with the child, and looked up into the concerned eyes, guilt swept her. She saw that Mrs Lacey's hands fumbled rapidly with the straps; she saw how the child was lifted out, with trembling haste, away from the heat and the glare. Mrs Lacey asked: ‘Did you enjoy the walk?' but although she appeared to want to make Kate feel she had been willingly granted this pleasure, Mrs Lacey could not help putting her hand to the baby's head and saying: ‘He's very hot.'

She sat down beside her sewing table; and for the first time Kate saw her actually hold her child in her arms, even resting her cheek against his head. Then the baby wriggled round towards her and put his arms around her neck and burrowed close, gurgling with pleasure. Mrs Lacey appeared taken aback; she looked down at her own baby with amazement in which there was also dismay. She was accepting the child's cuddling in the way a woman accepts the importunate approaches of someone whose feelings she does not want to hurt. She was laughing and protesting and putting down the baby's clutching arms. Still laughing, she said to Kate: ‘You see, this is all your doing.' The words seemed to Kate so extraordinary that she could not reply. Through her mind floated pictures of women she had known from the district, and they flowed together to make one picture – her idea, from experience, of a mother. She saw a plump smiling woman holding a baby to her face for the pleasure of its touch. She remembered Nan Fowler one mail day at the station, just after the birth of her third child. She sat in the front seat of the car, with the bundled infant on her lap, laughing as it nuzzled to get to her breasts, where appeared two damp patches. Andrew Wheatley stood beside the car talking to her, but her manner indicated a smiling withdrawal from him. ‘Look,' she seemed to be saying – not at all concerned for her stretched loose body and those shameless
patches of milk – ‘as you observe, I can't be really with you for the moment, but I'd like to see you later.'

Kate watched Mrs Lacey pull her baby's arms away from her neck, and then gently place it in the pram. She was frowning. ‘Babies shouldn't be messed about,' she remarked; and Kate saw that her dislike of whatever had just happened was stronger even than her fear of Kate's parents.

Kate got up, saying: ‘I feel funny.' She walked blindly through the house in the direction of the bedroom. The light had got inside her head: that was how it felt; her brain was swaying on waves of light. She got past Mrs Lacey's bed and collapsed on the stool of the dressing-table, burying her face in her arms. When she lifted her eyes, she saw Mrs Lacey standing beside her. She saw that her own shoes had left brownish patches on the carpet, and that along the folds of the crystalline drapery at the windows were yellowish streaks.

Gazing into the mirror, her own face stared back. It was a narrow face, pale and freckled; a serious lanky face, and incongruously above it perched a large blue silk bow from which pale lanky hair straggled. Kate stood up and looked at her body in shame. She was long, thin, bony. The legs were a boy's legs still, flat lean legs set on to a plumping body. Two triangular lumps stood out from her tight child's bodice. Kate turned in agony from this reflection of herself, which seemed to be rather of several different young boys and girls haphazardly mingled, and fixed her attention to Mrs Lacey, who was frowning as she listened to the baby's crying from the veranda: this time he had not liked being put down. ‘There!' she exclaimed angrily, ‘that's what happens if you give in to them.' Something rose in a wave to Kate's head: ‘Why did they say the baby is exactly like Mr Hackett?' she demanded, without knowing she had intended to speak at all. Looking wonderingly up at Mrs Lacey she saw the shadows round her chin deepen into long blue lines that ran from nose to chin; Mrs Lacey had become as pinched and diminished as her room now appeared. She drew in her breath violently: then held herself tight, and smiled. ‘Why, what an extraordinary thing for them to say,' she commented, walking away from Kate to fetch a handkerchief from a drawer, where she stood for a while with her back
turned, giving them both an opportunity to recover. Then, turning, she looked long and closely at Kate, trying to determine whether the child had known what it was she had said.

Kate faced her with wide and deliberately innocent eyes; inside she was gripped with amazement at the strength of her own desire to hurt the beloved Mrs Lacey, who had hurt her so badly: it was this that the innocence was designed to conceal.

They both moved away from the room to the veranda, with the careful steps of people conscious of every step, every action. There was, however, not a word spoken.

As they passed through the big room Mrs Lacey took a photograph album from a bookstand and carried it with her to the chairs. When Kate had seated herself, the album was deposited on her lap; and Mrs Lacey said: ‘Look at these; here are pictures of Mr Lacey when he was a baby; you can see that the baby is the image of him.' Kate looked dutifully at several pages of photographs of yet another fat, smiling, contented baby, feeling more and more surprised at Mrs Lacey. The fact was that whether the baby did or did not look like Mr Hackett was not the point; it was hard to believe that Mrs Lacey did not understand this, had not understood the truth, which was that the remark had been made in the first place as a sort of stick snatched up to beat her with. She put down the album and said: ‘Yes, they do look alike, don't they?' Mrs Lacey remarked casually: ‘For the year before the baby was born I and Mr Lacey were living alone on a ranch. Mr Hackett was visiting his parents in America.' Kate made an impatient movement which Mrs Lacey misinterpreted. She said reproachfully: ‘That was a terrible thing to say, Kate.' ‘But I didn't say it.' ‘No matter who said it, it was a terrible thing.' Kate saw that tears were pouring down Mrs Lacey's cheeks.

‘But …'

‘But what?'

‘It isn't the point.'

‘What isn't the point?'

Kate was silent: there seemed such a distance between what she felt and how Mrs Lacey was speaking. She got up, propelled by the pressure of these unsayable things, and began wandering about the veranda in front of Mrs Lacey. ‘You see,' she said
helplessly, ‘we've all been living together so long. We all know each other very well.”

‘You are telling me,' commented Mrs Lacey, with an unpleasant laugh. ‘Well?'

Kate sighed. ‘Well, we have all got to go on living together, haven't we? I mean, when people have
got
to live together …' She looked at Mrs Lacey to see if she had understood.

She had not.

Kate had, for a moment, a vivid sense of Mrs Sinclair standing there beside her; and from this reinforcement she gained new words: ‘Don't you see? It's not what people do, it's how they do it. It can't be broken up.'

Mrs Lacey's knotted forehead smoothed, and she looked ruefully at Kate: ‘I haven't a notion of what I've done, even now.' This note, the playful note, stung Kate again: it was as if Mrs Lacey had decided that the whole thing was too childish to matter.

She walked to the end of the veranda, thinking of Mrs Sinclair. ‘I wonder who will live here next?' she said dreamily, and turned to see Mrs Lacey's furious eyes. ‘You might wait till we've gone,' she said. ‘What makes you think we are going?'

Kate looked at her in amazement: it was so clear to her that the Laceys would soon go.

Seeing Kate's face, Mrs Lacey grew sober. In a chastened voice she said: ‘You frighten me.' Then she laughed, rather shrilly.

‘Why did you come here?' asked Kate unwillingly.

‘But why on earth shouldn't we?'

‘I mean, why
this
district. Why so far out, away from everything?'

Mrs Lacey's eyes bored cruelly into Kate's. ‘What have they been saying? What are they saying about us?'

‘Nothing,' said Kate, puzzled, seeing that there was a new thing here, that people could have said.

‘I suppose that old story about the money? It isn't true. It isn't true. Kate.' Once again tears poured down Mrs Lacey's face and her shoulders shook.

‘No one has said anything about money. Except that you must have a lot.' said Kate. Mrs Lacey wiped her eyes dry and
peered at Kate to see if she were telling the truth. Then her face hardened. ‘Well, I suppose they'll start saying it now,' she said bitterly.

Kate understood that there was something ugly in this, and directed at her, but not what it could be. She turned away from Mrs Lacey, filled again with the knowledge of injustice.

‘Aren't I ever to have a home? Can't I ever have a home?' wept Mrs Lacey.

‘Haven't you ever had one?'

‘No, never. This time I thought I would be settled for good.'

‘I think you'll have to move again,' said Kate reasonably. She looked around her, again trying to picture what would happen to Old John's Place when the new people came. Seeing that look, Mrs Lacey said quickly: ‘That's superstition. It isn't possible that places can affect people.'

‘I didn't say they did.'

‘What are you saying, then?'

‘But you get angry when I do say. I was just thinking that …'

‘Well?'

Kate stammered: ‘You ought to go somewhere where … that has your kind of people.' She saw this so clearly.

Mrs Lacey glared at her and snapped: ‘When I was your age I thought of nothing but hockey.' Then she picked up her sewing as she might have swallowed an aspirin tablet, and sat stitching with trembling, angry fingers.

Kate's lips quivered. Hockey and healthy games were what her own mother constantly prescribed as prophylactics against the little girl she did not want to be.

Mrs Lacey went on: ‘Don't you go to school?'

‘Yes.'

‘Do you like it?'

Kate replied: Yes, knowing it was impossible to explain what school meant to her: it was a recurring episode in the city where time raced by, since there was nothing of importance to slow it. School had so little to do with this life, on the farm, and the things she lived by, that it was like being taken to the pictures as a treat. One went politely, feeling grateful, then sat back and let what happened on the screen come at you and flow over you. You left with relief, to resume a real life.

She said slowly to Mrs Lacey, trying to express that injustice that was corroding her: ‘But if I had been – like you want – you wouldn't have been able to – find out what you wanted, would you?'

Mrs Lacey stared, ‘If you were mine I'd …' She bit off her thread angrily.

‘You'd dress me properly,' said Kate sarcastically, quivering with hate, and saw Mrs Lacey crimson from throat to hairline.

‘I think I'd better be going home,' she remarked, sidling to the door.

‘You must come over again sometime,' remarked Mrs Lacey brightly, the fear lying deep in her eyes.

‘You know I can't come back,' said Kate awkwardly.

‘Why not?' said Mrs Lacey, just as if the whole conversation had never happened.

‘My parents won't let me. They say you are bad for me.'

‘Do you think I am bad for you?' asked Mrs Lacey, with her high gay laugh.

Kate stared at her incredulously. ‘I'm awfully glad to have met you,' she stammered finally, with embarrassment thick in her tongue. She smiled politely, through tears, and went away down the road to home.

George Chester did not earn his title for some years after he first started farming. He was well into middle age when people began to greet him with a friendly clout across the shoulders and the query: ‘Well, what's the score now?' Their faces expressed the amused and admiring tolerance extorted by a man who has proved himself in other ways, a man entitled to eccentricities. But George's passion for hunting leopards was more than a hobby. There was a period of years when the District Notes in the local paper were headed, Friday after Friday, by a description of his week-end party: ‘The Four Winds' Hunt Club bag this Sunday was four jackals and a leopard' – or a wild dog and two leopards, as the case might be. All kinds of game make good chasing; the horses and dogs went haring across the veld every week after whatever offered itself. As for George, it was a recognized thing that if there was a chance of a leopard, the pack must be called off its hare, its duiker, its jackal, and directed after the wily spotted beast, no matter what the cost in time or patience or torn dogs. George had been known to climb a kopje alone, with a wounded leopard waiting for him in the tumbled chaos of boulder and tree; they told stories of how he walked once into a winding black cave (his ammunition finished and his torch smashed) and finally clouted the clawing spitting beast to death with the butt of his rifle. The scars of that fight were all over his body. When he strode into the post office or store, in shorts, his sleeves rolled up, people looked at the flesh that was raked from shoulder to knuckle and from thigh to ankle with great white weals, and quickly turned their eyes away. Behind his back they might smile, their lips compressed forbearingly.