African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [26]
When we got there, the Club was a low brick building in the bush, with tennis courts, a squash court, a bowling green. It seemed the weekend before several cars full of youngsters had come down from Harare for a party, and some were still here, lolling on the verandah. A couple slept flat on their backs under a tree, their arms flung out, faces scarlet. On one sun-inflamed forearm sat a contemplative green grasshopper. The cold-thinned musasa trees of winter laid shifting mottled shadow over them. There was a bleak and dusty wind.
‘Stupid to drink yourself into this state,’ said Harry authoritatively, and shouted: ‘Thomas. Thomas!’
A black man in a servant’s white uniform appeared on the verandah, said calmly to him, ‘Good afternoon, sir,’ and walked slowly over.
‘They shouldn’t be lying here like this, they’ll get pneumonia.’
Thomas looked down at the unconscious pair, and then at Harry, saying with his eyes that it was not part of his job to tell the two young whites how to behave.
‘Is there a blanket? Anything to put over them?’
The servant strolled off, and came back with his arms full of checked tablecloths, which he and my brother placed in layers over the sleepers.
Among the hungover youngsters, and in a quite different style, were the older people, the Club’s real users, mostly farmers. Not many now, and they were putting a good face on things, being brave. They were pitiable.
Harry and I played bowls. He has always been easily good at any physical thing…the first time he was put on a bicycle, the first time he took up a cricket ball…and he would shin up any tree as soon as look at it. It was not that I was bad, but the comparison with him made me the clumsy one, and so I was styled through my childhood. Later I realized I had been nothing of the kind. Such is family life.
When he had beaten me at bowls, someone challenged him, and I retired to the verandah, sat by myself and watched. The rooms of the Club were half empty, full of the ghosts of the departed whites. And would it fill soon with blacks?
At the next table sat a group of middle-aged farmers, talking about the Bush War. Among them sat a man who was silent while they went on about the iniquities of the blacks, and recited versions of The Monologue. He was a farmer of about forty. He was apart from them, just as I was. Yet he had been fighting in the Bush War. His silence was felt, and they began teasing him, trying to be pleasant, but sounding peevish, because he was not about to Take the Gap, as they were. He had decided to stay in Zimbabwe, to stick it out. He had made inner psychological adjustments, and was no longer uncritically one of them. He did not look too happy: these were his neighbours, his tribe.
As the sunset began to fire the sky, my brother took on another challenger: he had beaten the first.
The group at the next table broke up. The odd-man-out sat looking at me for a while, then came over. He knew I was my brother’s sister, and had funny ideas.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’ve been wondering what you’re making of it all.’
His manner was conditionally friendly. I decided not to choose my words. He listened, sitting back in his chair, nodding sometimes, but I could see from his eyes that he was matching what I said with scenes or events he was remembering and the words I used did not fit. ‘Everyone’s entitled to their opinion,’ he summed up. Then I said there were things I would like to ask my brother, but could not: the Bush War, for instance, for he simply clammed up.
‘You should remember there’s a difference between his generation and our lot.’
‘What difference?