African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [17]
I asked him, ‘Do you remember all those books we had on the farm?’
‘Well, you were always a bookworm.’
‘No, you–do you remember all those bookcases and the books?’
‘I suppose so. But what I liked was being out in the bush, you know that.’
‘Do you remember that Mother used to tell us those stories, every night, when we were little?’
‘Did she? No, I don’t remember.’
‘She made up stories about the animals and the birds. Do you remember that long-running serial about the mice in the storeroom and their adventures? What about that story where the mouse knocked a rack of eggs off the shelf and fell into the egg mess and all the other mice came and licked it clean?’
‘No, I don’t remember, sorry to say.’
‘We used to beg her, night after night, more, more, more?’ He looks at me. I look at him.
‘Anyway,’ he says, ‘what could be as interesting in a book as what you see in the bush? An hour in the bush, watching what goes on, has any book in the world beat.’
DO YOU REMEMBER?
All the white farmhouses had, many still have, great security fences around them, because of the War. I stopped the car outside a fence that reminded me of pictures of internment camps, a good twelve feet high, of close mesh. Inside two large Alsatians bounded and barked, their tails all welcome. I got out of the car. About a hundred yards away inside the fence was a stout greying man I did not recognize, coming towards me. When I had last seen my brother he was young and good-looking. He stopped to peer at me. We stood at a distance, gazing, and our faces confessed everything.
‘Gosh,’ he said.
‘Well,’ was what I said.
And so here I was, back in the life of the verandahs. What way of life, anywhere in the world, is more agreeable? The house consisted of rooms set side by side, with kitchen and storerooms behind them, and at one end a tall trellis to keep off the wind and carry creepers. The verandah went right along the front. My brother built his house, working side by side with a black builder, adding to the place as he could afford it. A large garden, full of shrubs, sloped to the fence. We relaxed in deep chairs, looking at the garden, where the gardener was dragging a hose about. At our feet lay the two dogs. At once the tea came, brought by the servant: the life of the verandahs depends on servants. In my time, then, this house would have had three, four, even five servants, all of them underpaid and underemployed. Now the same work is done by one servant, usually a man, who cooks, cleans the house, organizes everything. There is a minimum wage.
We sat exposed in strong afternoon light and examined each other, not concealing it.
‘Well,’ says Harry at last, ‘it does us in, doesn’t it, well, I mean, life does.’
‘You could say that,’ I say cautiously, thinking that my father might have said exactly that, in that tone, humorous, philosophic, but with a satisfaction in the inevitable erosion of good which–for some reason or another–justified him.
‘In one way and another it does us in. And you look the worse for wear.’
‘Fair wear and tear,’ I say.
He nodded. ‘Fair wear and tear is one thing,’ he says, and looked at me in the eyes to make sure I would pay attention. ‘I don’t think I’m going to get over this one.’ His wife had died the year before, and he had taken it hard. ‘I have to warn you,’ says Harry, ‘I’m not the man I was. I feel as if a part of me’s been shot clean away.’
‘All right,’ I say.
Meanwhile I had realized there was something new. Harry became a little deaf when he was not yet twenty. The gunfire in the Mediterranean only made worse what was already bad enough. For a time after the War he was very deaf, in spite of an operation by one of the great ear specialists. You had to shout, and what you said had to be simple. Now he had an efficient hearing-aid. He was talking at his own real pace, in his own style: a cautious man, slow to react, but not cut off by silence from what he saw around him.
‘When you’re young you think you’re going to get over anything that happens to you,’ I say.
‘Did you