Going Home - Doris May Lessing [28]
But the difference between the Millars and ourselves that made me most uneasy was this insistence on being gentlefolk. It was a word that I had never heard before out of novels.
Once again, it was the fortunate clash of temperaments between my parents that saved us from it, for while my mother was nothing if not conscious of having come down in the world, my father was oblivious to all such things, and had, in fact, emigrated from England to be rid of the whole business of being respectable. And so, when she was in one of her organizing moods, he would merely listen, with irritable patience, until she had finished, and say: ‘O Lord, old girl, do as you like, but leave me alone.’
But the little house near the railway lines, which was shaken day and night by the shunting trains, almost under the great water-tanks which dripped and splashed over the mango trees—that house which would have been a perfect setting for one of Somerset Maugham’s tropical dramas was, in fact, saturated with the atmosphere of coy, brave, decaying gentility that finds its finest expression in Louisa Alcott’s Little Women. Yet there were two women in that house to, I think, five males.
Mother and daughter would sew, knit, patch, darn, sitting together on the verandah, a unit of intense femininity, exchanging confidences in a low voice, while father and sons would hastily slip out of the house, father to the bar, sons to their friends’ houses.
And when the father returned, fuddled and apologetic, mother and daughter would raise their eyes from their sewing, exchange understanding glances, and let out in unison a deep, loud sigh, before dropping them again to their work, while the little man slunk past.
I was appalled and fascinated by the talk of the two females, for such confidences were not possible in our house. I would sit, listening, burning with shame, for I was not yet in a position to contribute anything of my own.
I was there six weeks. At night I used to lie in bed across the tiny room from Cynthia and listen while father and mother argued about money in the room next door. One could hear everything through the wooden wall.
‘Poor, poor, poor mother,’ Cynthia would say in a burning passionate whisper.
I would fall off to sleep, and wake to see her in the light that fell through the window past the moonflowers and the mango trees, leaning up in bed on her elbow, listening, listening. Listening for what? It reminded me of how I used to listen avidly to her talk with her mother. Then a train rumbled in, and stood panting on the rails outside, the water rushed in the tanks, and Cynthia lay down again. ‘Go to sleep, ‘she would hiss in a cross, low voice. ‘Go to sleep at once.’
Before I slept I would think of my home, the big mud-walled, grass-roofed house on the kopje where the winds came battering and sweeping, and where I would fall asleep to the sound of my mother playing Chopin and Grieg two rooms off, against the persistent thudding of the tom-tom from the native village down the hill. When I woke the piano would still be sending out its romantic, nostalgic music and the drums still playing. I would imagine how in the compound the people were dancing around the big fire between the little grass-roofed huts while the drummers sat making their interminably repeated and varied rhythms on and on. But the other picture in my mind was not of my mother as she was now, middle-aged and tired, but of an early memory: her long, dark hair knotted low on her neck, bare-shouldered under the light of the candles set at either end of the piano, playing with shut eyes as she, in her turn, remembered something far off and unreachable. And the drums were beating, even then, as long ago as that.
The drums beat through all the nights of my childhood stronger even than the frogs and the crickets,