Sometime, after these long lazy mornings, when it was as if the sea had invaded her, filled her with a soft, blue, murmuring peace, and she returned indoors, to play with the little boy, and to help the coloured girl, Annie, she thought: If I had been able to live like this, been myself, would I have been good and kind, as I am now, instead of turning into a …
Had she had a choice, ever? If her choice of a husband had been no choice at all-as the solid finality of her children, her grandchildren proved, then what choice had she ever had? Of course it was different for all these flighty girls now, they did as they liked, look at Martha, it was certain she was pleasing herself, as she always had, selfish, inconsiderate, immoral … Mrs. Quest’s head ached, she felt sick. These days, girls
did
choose, they were free: but in her young time, girls had that brief moment before they were married, when Plain jane was courted, was free to choose a husband, could say yes, no, I want this one and not that one, before she became a mother, and a nurse and had no choice but to sacrifice herself.
She must be careful never to use that word when she was with Martha: she’d be lucky to get away with embarrassment! No, probably some cold, hard argument-unkindness. An awful kind of commonsense, a logic. Like Jonathan’s. Every word was a trap, one had to watch every syllable as it came out.
Yet in the evenings here with Milly, she spoke as she felt. Milly liked her, Milly was pleased to have her here, with a husband away. Milly reminded her very much of a schoolfriend she once
had. She had timidly said so, and Milly had not minded: old ladies seldom meet new faces, new people. Milly, the daughter of an old friend, with her pale little face, her seriousness, her tendency to headache and lassitude, was
very
like Rosemary. Milly who had asked her to stay for a week while waiting for the boat to sail, had, exactly as Rosemary once would, asked her to stay as long as she liked, ‘to make herself at home.’ Milly’s husband was a journalist, and he was attending some international occasion in America. Milly had a job teaching at the university. The little boy, Mrs. Quest thought, missed his parents, although the coloured girl was quite good. Why did Milly have to work at all? -but she must stop criticizing, it was not her business.
Bringing it up, delicately, with Milly, Mrs. Quest heard that there was a previous wife in Johannesburg, and she was paid alimony. Milly’s salary was necessary to help out. Did Milly mind? Mrs. Quest wondered-but she must not pry. Bringing it up, she found Milly ready to discuss, to be comically dry about it all. With Milly she could talk like a human being, but not with …
On the other farm she hadn’t talked to anyone for years.
By the time the old lady arrived there, there were two small children and another on the way. Both Jonathan and Bessie worked very hard. The farm was a new one. The house was large. There was a great deal for Mrs. Quest to do. ‘If there is one thing I know about, ’ said she to herself, and to them, ‘it is how hard a farmer’s wife does work!’ She busied herself with the children, and was sure Bessie did not mind. When the baby was born, Bessie added to her other duties, the business of looking after the dairy herd. Mrs. Quest thought this wrong: quite enough to be a mother and a farmer’s wife. But Bessie was stubborn. She was pregnant again very soon, and at suggestions it was too soon, said the pregnancy was ‘planned’. The young couple had planned four children, as they had planned to buy this remote raw farm, and build a large stone house on it.
It was all too much, they did too much, they were both worn out, looked pale, were on their feet from six in the morning to nine at night, and then of course there were broken nights with the children.
The whole thing was absurd: Mrs. Quest brooded and grieved and lay awake at night herself, for fear she might miss a baby crying, and not get to it before it woke her son or his wife. Then there was the first of the big rows. Bessie had snapped out one
breakfast-time, Mrs. Quest had defended herself, the young husband, looking impatient, had stayed away from the farmwork, (thus making Mrs. Quest feel guilty) to calm the two women. The ‘row’ went on all morning: afterwards Mrs. Quest could only see the faces of those two, sitting opposite her, irritable, weary-embarrassed. They kept saying:’ You must try and understand that everyone doesn’t see life as you do.’ And, ‘Yes, but you see, we don’t agree with you.’ We! The word ‘we’ used of that unit her son and his wife, cut her every time she heard it. She had complained that’they discussed her behind her back’, and that ‘Jonathan always takes her side’.
Afterwards she stayed in her room for days, full of that grieving concern for others which she had always called ‘love’. But, also, a nerve of justice had been struck. What they had said was true. Underneath everything she felt, was this: that they ought not to be here on this farm at all. She even felt it as a kind of betrayal.
Throughout the Quest tenancy of that other farm, there had been one consistent note struck. ‘Getting off the farm; when we get off the farm; getting away from all this.’ But young Jonathan, once free from the army, had headed straight back not to the same farm, but to one much worse: it had not been ‘opened up’, it was nothing but hundreds of acres of-nothing. Among mountains. At one point Mrs. Quest had produced figures to prove that with the same amount of money (small, but of course they started on loans like everyone else) they could have bought a developed farm nearer town. At which they had looked-embarrassed. They liked this farm. This is what they liked. And they did not mind borrowing money; they did not have to build a great stone house with far too many rooms, when a smaller one would have done. Stone costs nothing, they said.
Why start a dairy herd, up here: there wasn’t another for miles? That was the point, they said. Why build a dozen tobacco barns when a couple would have done, to start with, anyway? Jonathan evaded, conciliated, Mrs. Quest understood what he was not saying: that he was determined not to be like his father, happily, or at any rate dreamily, content to muddle along hoping for good things another year. The young couple felt themselves pioneers. Mrs. Quest was watching the birth of a really large farm, and a large family. Well, she muttered at last, if they want to kill themselves in the process I suppose it’s their affair.
There started another phase, after that row. Mrs. Quest was avoiding Bessie. Bessie avoided her. The old lady heard, with closed critical lips, that they were employing a couple of black children to act as nurses to the white children: she continued to believe that black flesh should not contact white. She said nothing, though it nearly killed her. She then started a flower garden: the couple hadn’t time for it. If there was one thing she understood, it was gardens. She planted, on a rocky hillside that looked across a vale to the mountains, a garden that became, very soon, all roses, bougainvillaea, Jacarandas, cypress, jasmine, plumbago, and lilies. Then she started a vegetable garden. These under control, and a new windmill being installed, she suggested adding ducks to the chickens. She was already running the chickens. Then she asked if Bessie would like her to supervise the dairy herd? She expected a rebuff but Bessie agreed at once. Had she been waiting for the old lady to suggest it? This started a new nasty suspicion: had Bessie gone out of the house to do farmwork in the first place just to get away from her, her mother-in-law?
She did not know. She thought it was so. At any rate, Bessie spent more time in the house, which is where she ought to be, and Mrs. Quest, an old lady of sixty-five, then sixty-six, then sixty-seven-goodness, she would soon be seventy, rose at six, with relish, made herself a snack of breakfast, got out of the way of the family, and was off around her gardens and livestock while the sun was still new.
She worked. She worked. She had never worked so hard. And in the evenings, just as they did, she was off to bed by nine. Mrs. Quest hardly saw the children. Was Bessie keeping them away from her? They were always in the hands of those dirty black …
Sometimes at meals she studied Bessie’s face, and thought: Why this girl, why this one particularly? Bessie was a short, plump, dark woman, with cheeks that had been rosy but now were pale. She had brown eyes-rather small, Mrs. Quest thought. She was all right, the old lady supposed. Sometimes, as their paths crossed in the day, Mrs. Quest would turn to watch, eyes narrowed under her great shady straw hat, a plump dark woman walk in her brisk determined way to pantry, or storeroom and think: she’s the wife of my son.
Why this one
? Mrs. Quest could not remember ever exchanging more than politeness with her, they had never really talked, or opened to each other.
Lonely, she brooded, over the children, over the past. She worried over Martha, whose letters said nothing, and particularly nothing about getting married.
There was another row if you could use that word for the awful cold, brisk, conciliatory discussions, with the three of them paled by tension and anxiety. Logical-that is what Jonathan was. and his wife. For, when she complained that she was getting on for seventy, and that she worked all day, of course she did not want to stop working, she wanted only to be loved and praised for working.
As a result of this, but not at once, there was a change. Shortly, Jonathan announced he was getting an assistant. He would like the assistant in the house-more convenient, he said. He suggested building the old lady her own house. She listened, bright-eyed, disbelieving. They were kicking her out! That was the truth, but of course, this cold logicality couldn’t allow the truth.
They built her a two-roomed house with a large veranda, about a hundred yards from their own, turned towards the mountains, and with windows cut down almost to the floor, so that the rooms admitted mountains, mountains, everywhere you looked. She liked the house. She moved into it with a quiet, grim smile, saying how much she did like it. No, she would prefer to do her own cooking; yes, she would sometimes come for family meals, perhaps on Sundays-no, of course she wouldn’t be formal about it. Yes, she understood that the assistant would look after the dairy herd. Was she to be allowed to keep the chickens and the ducks? The outrageousness of this quiet question in view of her outburst about her exploitation-
I’m nothing but an unpaid servant
-did not strike her as such, because she had never meant it. She did not deserve, she knew, their look of furious exasperation.
They entreated, begged, implored her, not to tire herself, and when she said she was quite capable of doing the ducks and chickens and the gardens, they sent to her, as personal assistant, Steven.
Steven was a child of twelve. His real name she never knew. He had been christened Steven by another farmer where he had been working before he came here. She said she did not want Steven; they did not argue, merely instructed Steven to stay with her. There followed an absurd and painful period when Mrs. Quest went about chickens, ducks, gardens, with a set, angry face,
followed by Steven who tried to help her, and was snubbed every time he asked:’ What shall I do, missus?’
Steven seemed to her a final insult. She lay awake at night raging and storming, talking to herself aloud, that at the end of her life she. May Quest, was being put aside like an old dog with a black keeper, called Steven.
Two years later, when Mrs. Quest left to visit England, she wept, and she knew it was not for her son, or grandchildren she wept for, but for Steven.
For weeks she saw him through a cloud of anger: she saw a young black face, always watching hers. He was a tall child, very thin, obviously under-nourished. She began scolding him about washing himself; and made him eat bread and vegetables from her little kitchen. It had occurred to her that he was a child, that he was three hundred miles from his village, that he had no one but some kind of ‘brother’ near him, and he was on a farm twenty miles away, and that she, May Quest, was the only human being with whom he had any sort of contact. He spent all his time with her-left at ten o’clock at night to go to the compound. When told he could go earlier, he replied simply, that he preferred to stay with her, he had no ‘brothers’ in the compound. He preferred to stay with a cross ugly old woman (Mrs. Quest had seen her face in the glass reflecting the thoughts she had over Steven) rather than be with his own people? She thought, at last, that he was twelve, alone, lonely. She began to talk with him.
They sat on the little veranda, looking towards the mountains. She sat in a grass chair, very upright, knitting. The child sat on the edge of the veranda with his bare feet in the dust, tracing pictures in the dust with his forefinger, or tossing a pebble from one hand to the other. He talked about his village. He said he had a grandmother. He missed his grandmother. Mrs. Quest, being compared to an old black woman in a native village felt a reminiscent surge of anger, but it carried no conviction. She found herself amused. She began to knit him a jersey: he possessed one pair of shorts, one singlet, and a blanket-that was all.
Sometimes they sat quietly, perhaps watching how the four white children played under trees a couple of hundred yards away with the two black children watching them. Mrs. Quest asked if perhaps Steven would like to make friends with them? He said quickly that no, they were not from his tribe, they had no language
in common but English. Anyway, he said, his brows knitting, ‘I like it with you, missus.’ This hurt the old lady. She suffered that she had been so unkind. She was suffering more than that: she had been in the country for thirty years and she had never talked to a black person before-not like this, as she was now. She had not thought before of the hundreds of black people that had been on the old farm and were on this one, that they might not be able to talk to each other because they did not share a language, or that a child might be lonely and miss his old grandmother-or that a black person might be solitary by nature. For it was clear that Steven was. He had, he confided, always liked being by himself in the village. They had teased him about it. They had called him: Go-by-himself. Mrs. Quest told Steven the story about the Cat Who Walked by Himself. He laughed, was delighted. Mrs. Quest, secretly, got hold of a copy of the Kipling tales so that she could refresh her memory of them, and told him others. In return, he told her tales from his village, and he sang her songs.