African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [42]
Towards midnight, having spent some hours saying Dear me and Tut tut, I cracked and asked how many people in the world did they suppose lived on the level they did? This cruel question did not at once reach them. They sat blinking, unable to believe I could be so treacherous. ‘In Britain you’d have to be rich to live like this. Even in America, to have two servants, you’d be rich. Your way of life is an unreachable dream to ninety-nine point nine per cent of the world’s people.’ Silence. What they could not credit was such a degree of disloyalty to the white cause. Loyalties, particularly those confirmed by war, have never had anything to do with reason, commonsense–nothing of that boring sort.
It was already late when the two young people came in I had seen at the hotel that first morning in Mutare. Their son and their daughter. Two different generations, two kinds of people. How did they manage to talk to each other? With difficulty, is the answer. The young couple had begun work with the Swedes, and had rung up their parents to tell them. This was the first physical encounter. The two elderly people sat there in their neat, correct clothes, she with her newly waved silvery hair, he with his buttoned-in tidiness–and gazed with hurt eyes at their careless, casually dressed offspring who were helping those enemies, the Terrorists. The young ones had come in so late because it meant less time in this atmosphere of accusation. ‘We would have dropped in earlier but we don’t get much time off,’ said the daughter, and her father said at once, ‘Of course they’re going to exploit you for what they can get out of you.’
‘Look,’ said his son, his voice already angry, ‘this is a Swedish relief organization. They can’t afford to pay us much.’
‘Of course they aren’t going to pay you,’ said the mother, brisk and in the right. ‘All they are ever interested in is getting everything they can.’ They here meant the blacks, though the attack might as easily have been against the Swedes, who were supporting the ‘terrs’ against the whites.
‘Look, Mum,’ said the young woman. ‘I keep trying to explain it to you. We want to do something to help the country. It’s our country too now, and we want…’
‘It’s not our country, it’s their country,’ was the bitter reply.
At this, the two young people exchanged glances. The young woman shook her head slightly, but was noticed, and her father said, ‘That’s right, just treat us like fools. We are too stupid to understand anything.’
The mother said, ‘Oh Paul, don’t quarrel with them, or we won’t ever see them at all.’
‘I’m sorry, Mum,’ said the daughter. ‘But it’s hard work, and everyone works till all hours. It’s not just an eight-to-four job, but we’ll come when we can.’
‘Oh yes, we know! We’re too old to change, we’re no use.’
‘I never said that,’ said the girl, for this was too unprogressive a thought for her to own. ‘Of course you aren’t. No one ever is.’
‘But,’ said her mother, ‘your fiancé didn’t like it either, did he?’ She tittered and went red, because she knew this was below the belt.
The girl also reddened, but from anger, and said, ‘It’s just as well I found out what he is like in good time.’
‘Her fiancé didn’t like all this living with the Terrorists,’ said the father, triumphant.
‘He’s gone south,’ said the young woman to me. ‘He’s Taken the Gap. Well, it’s the right place for him, isn’t it?’
‘If we could take our pensions out we would Take the Gap too,’ grumbled the father.
‘You wouldn’t be living like this in The Republic,’ said the son. ‘I had a letter from Rob, and he’s earning half what he did and there’s no question of servants.