African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [65]
Coming towards us came a flock or flight of girls, ten or so of them, returning from an afternoon’s tennis at the Club. They dawdled or skipped about or made little runs out of excess energy. They giggled and their high excited voices rang out over the steep slopes of the mountain. They wore their little shorts and their little shirts; they were all long pale frail limbs, but one had new jeans which she had carefully torn to be fashionable, so her plump knees showed. Their shining tresses blew about, and pretty eyes and pink mouths were lightly sketched on plump faces. They were like an Impressionist’s little girls caught in a moment of self-absorbed pleasure.
The old man strode straight past them, and now his cudgel was held out in front of him, at the ready.
It is not often one sees oneself as others see one.
That night all the girls were in front of the great fire, occupying chairs, the sofa, or lolling on the floor with Annie. Two of them were wrapping her around with green paper streamers left over from a party at the Club. She sat, with her head slightly lowered, looking at them as she had at the old man, a measured patience and control.
‘Annie, silly old dog Annie…’ They collapsed, laughing, and rolled about the floor, while the servant carefully stepped past them with the tray loaded with supper. Annie stood up, burst her bonds, and went to lie nose to the fire, decorated with frilly green bits like seaweed or lettuce.
RAIN
One night, not on the verandah, but inside, with the fire roaring up, the rain began to bang down on the corrugated iron roof, and the company applauded. The long drought…dry dams…the coffee plants standing with slightly wilted leaves, the dogs coming all day panting to the water bowls–and now, unexpectedly, rain. At once everyone’s spirits revived. Happiness. An intoxication.
THE ASSISTANT
One afternoon, when the verandah was full of guests, some of them girls from down the hill, there was an apparition in the sky: Zimbabwe’s champion parachute jumper was floating down from a tiny aeroplane, a neighbouring farmer’s. He floated slowly, for the new parachutes allow plenty of adjustment, and it can take five minutes to make a descent. He’d better not land over in Portuguese East, cried somebody, and a Swedish girl visiting at a near farm said fiercely, ‘Really, it’s Mozambique!’ ‘Renamo or Frelimo, they’ll have his guts for garters,’ said the offender. The girl has been, is, silent, observant, and shocked, because she thought that after Liberation, everything, everyone, would at once be different. ‘I suppose you find us very strange?’ she has been asked, by a visiting old-style white from a tea plantation. ‘I find you very strange,’ she said fiercely. ‘You, the white people.’ ‘That’s because you don’t understand us,’ came the amused, impervious-to-criticism reply. ‘It takes time, you know.’ She had burst into tears and then everyone was very kind to her. ‘They patronize me,’ she said fiercely. ‘How dare they!’
Down, down, floated the handsome hero, over the mountains and the bush, while the little girls and the not so little girls sighed…he disappeared into the trees, and appeared an hour or so later walking up the mountain carrying his parachute. Frowning, modest, and–as usual–inarticulate, he subsided in a chair, grabbing up a beer, blushing because of his many admirers.
The Farm Assistant…The Tutor appears plentifully in literature, but where is The Assistant? He is very young, an object of sympathy because he has no money, and is lonely in this house so full of family and their friends. He works like