Going Home - Doris May Lessing [11]
‘It seems we are all doing fine,’ I said.
‘Yes, live and let live, that’s what I say. But I think you are forgetting our problems being away from home so long. Do you remember Molly? She was the other swot besides you. Well, she’s got a job on the Star in Johannesburg. She used to be a Kaffir-lover, too, but now she has a balanced point of view. She came up to visit last year, and she gave a lecture on the air about race relations. I listened because I like to keep in touch with the old gang. I think that as we get older we get mature and balanced.’ And with this she gave me a lazy but admonitory smile and rejoined her husband, saying, ‘Goodbye, it was nice seeing you again after all these years. Time is going past, say what you like.’
2
Salisbury was a wide scatter of light over spaces of dark. To fly over it is to see how fast it is growing—not vertically, save for a few tall buildings in its centre, but outwards, in a dozen sprawling suburbs.
I was reminded of the first time I saw Johannesburg from above by night. A few years ago one could not, even at one’s most optimistic, compare Salisbury with Johannesburg: it was only a small patterning of lit streets in a great hollow of darkness. Now the regular arrangements of street-lighting—all these cities are laid out on the American plan, with streets regularly bisecting each other—confine the veld in sparkling nets of light.
The darkness of the earth at night is never complete in Africa, because even the darkest night sky has a glow of light behind it. And so these cities dissolve after sundown, as if points of strong, firm light were strewn wide over a luminous, dark sea.
To drive from the airport to the house I was staying in on the outskirts of the town took seven minutes. I knew that my sense of space, adjusted to sprawling London, was going to take a shock; but I was more confused than I had thought possible. If you live in a small town, you live in all of it, every street, house, garden is palpable all the time, part of your experience. But a big city is a centre and a series of isolated lit points on the darkness of your ignorance. That is why a big city is so restful to live in; it does not press in on you, demanding to be recognized. You can choose what you know.
But it was night; and the town at night was always to me a different place than the candid day-time town. Now the car swept up along avenues of subdued light, for the moon was full and hard, the stars vivid; the trees rippled off light; and the buildings were luminous, their walls thin shells over an inner glow, and the roof plates of shining substance.
The garden of the house was full of roses, pale in the moonlight, and black shadow lay under the bougainvillaea bush.
I stepped from the garden into the creeper-hung verandah and at once into the living-room. It was strange to be in a house again that was pressed close to the earth, with only a thin roof between me and the sky. In London buildings are so heavy and tall and ponderous they are a climate of their own; pavements, streets, walls—even parks and gardens—are an urban shell.
But in Africa the wildness of the country is still much stronger than the towns.
But even so, this house was wrong; it was not this that I had come home to find. For me all houses will always be wrong; all bungalows, cottages, mansions and villas will be uncomfortable and incongruous and confining. I only like blocks of flats, the most direct expression of crammed town-living. I did not understand why this should be so for a long time, until I took to dreaming nightly of the house I was brought up in; and then at last I submitted myself to the knowledge that I am the victim of a private mania that I must humour. I worked out recently that I have lived in over sixty different houses, flats and rented rooms during the last twenty years and not in one of them have I felt at home. In order to find a place I live in tolerable, I have not to see it. Or rather, I work on it until it takes on the colouring