The Sun Between Their Feet (21 page)

He said angrily: ‘Do you think she can afford to live like this on a typist's pay?'

‘Her gentleman friend gives her things, he's generous, she told me so,' said Marie doubtfully.

‘How old are you, Marie?'

‘Eighteen,' she said, turning her broad freckled wrist, where Lilla's bracelet caught the light.

‘When you're twenty-five you'll be out on the streets picking up any man you see, taking them to hotels …'

At the word ‘hotel' her eyes widened; he remembered she had never been in a hotel; they were something lovely on the cinema screen.

‘When you're thirty you'll be an old woman.'

‘Lilla said she'd look after me. She promised me faithfully,' said Marie, in terror at his coldness. But what he was saying meant nothing to her, nothing at all. He saw that she probably did not know what the word prostitute meant; that the things Lilla had told her meant only lessons in how to enjoy the delights of this city.

He said: ‘Do you know what I'm here for? Your sister expects you to take off your clothes and get into bed and …' He stopped. Her eyes were wide open, fastened on him, not in fear, but in the anxious preoccupation of a
little girl who is worried she is not behaving properly. Her hands had moved to the buckle of her belt, and she was undoing it.

Jansen got up, and without speaking he gathered clothes that were obviously hers from off the furniture, from off the floor. He went into the bedroom and found a suitcase and put her things into it. ‘I'm putting you on to the train tonight,' he said.

‘My sister won't let you,' she cried out. ‘She'll stop you.'

‘Your sister's a bad girl,' said Jansen, and saw, to his surprise, that Marie's face showed fear at last. Those two words, ‘bad girl', had more effect than all his urgent lecturing.

‘You shouldn't say such things,' said Marie, beginning to cry. ‘You shouldn't never say someone's a bad girl.' They were her mother's words, obviously, and had hit her hard, where she could be reached. She stood listless in the middle of the floor, weeping, making no resistance. He tucked her arm inside his, and led her downstairs. ‘You'll marry a nice man soon, Marie,' he promised. ‘You won't always have to live by the railway lines.'

‘I don't never meet no men, except Dad,' she said, beginning to tug at his arm again.

He held her tight until they were in a taxi. There she sat crouched on the edge of the seat, watching the promised city sweep past. At the station, keeping a firm hold on her, he bought her a ticket and gave her five pounds, and put her into a compartment and said: ‘I know you hate me. One day you'll know I'm right and you'll be glad.' She smiled weakly, and huddled herself into her seat, like a cold little animal, staring sadly out of the window.

He left her, running, to catch his own train which already stood waiting on the next platform.

As it drew out of the station he saw Marie waddling desperately on her tall heels along the platform, casting scared glances over her shoulder. Their eyes met; she gave him an apologetic smile, and ran on. With the pound notes
clutched loosely in her hand she was struggling her way through the crowds back to the lights, the love, the joyous streets of the promised city.

There was a boy who lived in a small house in a small town in the centre of Africa.

Until he was about twelve, this house had been the last in the street, so that he walked straight from the garden, across a railway line, and into the veld. He spent most of his time wandering by himself through the vleis and the kopjes. Then the town began to grow, so that in the space of a year a new suburb of smart little houses lay between him and the grass and trees. He watched this happening with a feeling of surprised anger. But he did not go through the raw new streets to the vlei where the river ran and the little animals moved. He was a lethargic boy, and it seemed to him as if some spell had been put on him, imprisoning him for ever in the town. Now he would walk through the new streets, looking down at the hard glittering tarmac, thinking of the living earth imprisoned beneath it. Where the veld trees had been allowed to stay, he stood gazing, thinking how they drew their strength through the layers of rubble and broken brick, direct from the breathing soil and from the invisibly running underground rivers. He would stand there, staring and it would seem to him that he could see those fresh, subtly-running streams of water moving this way and that beneath the tarmac, and he stretched out his fingers like roots towards the earth. People passing looked away uncomfortably. Children called out: ‘Moony, moony, mooning again!' Particularly the children from the house opposite laughed and teased him. They were a large noisy family, solid in the healthy strength of their numbers. He could hardly distinguish one from another: he felt that the house opposite was filled like a box with plump, joyous,
brown-eyed people whose noisy cheerful voices frightened him.

He was a lanky, thin-boned youth whose face was tall and unfinished-looking, and his eyes were enormous, blue wide, staring, with the brilliance of distance in them.

His mother, when he returned to the house, would say tartly: ‘Why don't you go over and play with the children? Why don't you go into the bush like you used to? Why don't you …'

He was devoted to his mother. He would say vaguely: ‘Oh I don't know,' and kick stones about in the dust, staring away over the house at the sky, knowing that she was watching him through the window as she sewed, and that she was pleased to have him there, in spite of her tart complaining voice. Or he would go into the room where she sat sewing, and sit near her, in silence, for hours. If his father came into the room he began to fidget, and soon went away. His father spoke angrily about his laziness and his unnatural behaviour.

He made the mother fetch a doctor to examine the boy. It was from this time that Frederick took the words ‘not normal' as his inheritance. He was not normal; well, he accepted it. They made a fact of something he had always known because of the way people looked at him and spoke to him. He was neither surprised nor dismayed at what he was. And when his mother wept over him, after the doctor left, he scarcely heard the noise of her tears; he smiled at her with the warm childish grin that no one else had ever seen, for he knew he could always depend on her.

His father's presence was a fact he accepted. On the surface they made an easy trio, like an ordinary family. At meals they talked like ordinary people. In the evenings his father sometimes read to him, for Frederick found it hard to read, although he was now half-way through his teens; but there were moments when the old man fell silent, staring in unconcealable revulsion at this son he had made; and Frederick would let his eyes slide uncomfortably away, but
in the manner of a person who is embarrassed at someone else's shortcomings. His mother accepted him; he accepted himself; that was enough.

When his father died he was sorry, and cried with his fists in his eyes like a baby. At the graveside the neighbours looked at this great shambling child with his colourless locks of hair and the big red fists rubbing at his eyes, and felt relieved at the normal outburst of grief. But afterwards it was he and his mother alone in the small suburban house, and they never spoke of the dead father who had vanished entirely from their lives, leaving nothing behind him. She lived for him, waiting for his return from school, or from his rambles around the streets; and she never spoke of the fact that he was in a class with children five years his junior, that he was always alone at weekends and holidays, never with other children.

He was a good son. He took her tea in the mornings at the time the sun rose; and watched her crinkled old face light up from the pillow as he set down the tray by her knees. But he did not stay with her then. He went out again quickly, shutting the door, his eyes turned from the soft, elderly white shoulders, which were not, for him, his mother. This is how he saw her: in her dumpy flowered apron, her brown sinewy arms setting food before him, her round spectacles shining, her warm face smiling. Yet he did not think of her as an old lady. Perhaps he did not see her at all. He would sometimes put out his great lank hand and stroke her apron. Once he went secretly into her bedroom and took her hairbrush off the dressing-table and brushed the apron which was lying on the bed; and he put the apron on, and laughed out loud at the sight of himself in the mirror.

Later, when he was seventeen, a very tall awkward youth with the strange-lit blue eyes, too old to be put to bed with a story after supper, he wandered about by himself through that area of ugly new houses that seemed to change under the soft brightness of the moon into a shadowy beauty. He walked for hours, or stood still gazing dimly about him at
the deep starry sky, or at the soft shape of trees. There was a big veld tree that stood a short way from their gate in a space between two street lamps, so that there was a well of shadow beneath it which attracted him very much. He stood beneath the tree, listening to the wind moving gently in the leaves, feeling it stir his hair like fingers. He would move slowly in to the tree until his long fingers met the rough bark, and he stroked the tree curiously, learning it, thinking: under this roughness and hardness moves the sap, like rivers under the earth. He came to spend his evenings there, instead of walking among the houses and looking in with puzzled unenvious eyes through the windows at the other kind of people. One evening an extraordinarily violent spasm shook him, so that he found himself locked about that harsh strong trunk, embracing it violently, his arms and thighs knotted about it, sobbing and muttering angry words. Afterwards he slowly went home, entering the small brightly-lit room shamedly; and his great blue eyes sought his mother's, and he was surprised that she did not say anything, but smiled at him as usual. Always there was this assurance from her; and as time went past, and each night he returned to the tree, caressing and stroking it, murmuring words of love, he would come home simply, smiling his wide childish smile, waiting for her to smile back, pleased with him.

But opposite was still that other house full of people; the children were growing up; and one evening when he was leaning against the tree in deep shadow, his arm loosely about it, as if around a tender friend, someone stopped outside the space of shadow and peered in saying: ‘Why, Moony, what are you doing here by yourself?' It was one of the girls from that house, and when he did not reply she came towards him, finally putting out her hand to touch his arm. The touch struck cruelly through him and he moved away, and she said with a jolly laugh: ‘What's the matter? I won't eat you.' She pulled him out into the yellowy light from the street lamp and examined him. She was a fattish,
untidy, bright girl, one of the middle children, full of affection for everything in the world; and this odd silent youth standing there quite still between her hands affected her with amused astonishment, so that she said: ‘Well, you are a funny boy, aren't you?' She did not know what to do with him, so at last she took him home over the street. He had never been inside her house before, and it was like a foreign country. There were so many people, so much noise and laughter and the wireless was shouting out words and music. He was silent and smiling in this world which had nothing to do with himself.

His passive smile piqued the girl, and later when he got up saying: ‘My mother's waiting for me,' she replied, ‘Well, at any rate you can take me to the pictures tomorrow.'

He had never taken a girl out; had never been to the pictures save with his parents, as a child is taken; and he smiled as at a ridiculous idea. But next evening she came and made him go with her.

‘What's the matter, Moony?' she asked, taking his arm. ‘Don't you like me? Why don't you take girls out? Why do you always stay around your mother? You aren't a baby any longer.'

These words he listened to smiling; they did not make him angry; because she could not understand that they had nothing to do with him.

He sat in the cinema beside the girl and waited for it to be over. He would not have been in the least surprised if the building and the screen and the girl had vanished, leaving him lying under a tree with not a house in sight, nothing but the veld, the long grasses, the trees, the birds and the little animals. Afterwards they walked home, and he listened to her chattering scolding voice without replying. He did not mind being with her; but he forgot her as soon as she had gone in at her gate; and wandered back across the street to his own gate, and looked at the tree standing in its gulf of shadow with the moonlight on its branches, and took two steps towards it and stopped again; and finally turned with a
bolting movement, as if in fear, and shambled quickly in to his mother. She glanced up at him with a tight suspicious face, and he knew she was angry, though she did not speak. Soon he went to bed, unable to bear this unspoken anger. He slept badly and dreamed of the tree. And next night he went to it as soon as it was dark, and stood holding the heavy dark trunk in his arms.

The girl from opposite was persistent. Soon he knew, because of the opposition of his mother, that he had a girl, as ordinary young men have girls.

Why did she want him? Perhaps it was just curiosity. She had been brought up in all that noise and warm quarrelling and laughter, and so Frederick, who neither wanted her nor did not want her, attracted her. She scolded him and pleaded with him: Don't you love me? Don't you want to marry me?

At this he gave her his rambling confused grin. The word marriage made him want to laugh. It was ridiculous. But to her there was nothing ridiculous in it. In her home, marriages took place between boys and girls, and there were always festivals and love-making and new babies.

Now he would take her in his arms beside the tree outside the gate, embracing her as he had embraced the tree, forgetting her entirely, murmuring strangely over her head among the shadows. She hated it and she loved it; for her, it was like being hypnotized. She scolded him, stayed away, returned; and yet he would not say he would marry her.