Going Home - Doris May Lessing [29]
But waking in the house near the railway lines, sweating with heat, half-sick with the sweet smell of the decaying fruit and vegetation outside, it was to see Cynthia and her mother standing together in the corner of the room, hands folded, heads bent in prayer. Then, with a deadly look at her husband Mrs Millar would say in her womanly resigned voice, ‘You can’t have bacon and eggs—not on what you earn.’
I was badly homesick. I hated that house. I longed for my cool, humorous, stoical mother, who might sentimentally play Chopin, but would afterwards slam down the piano lid with a flat: ‘Well, that’s that.’ I wanted, too, to lay certain questions before my father.
When I got home I went in search of him, managed to distract his attention from whatever philosophical problem was engaging him at the time, and remarked that I had had a lovely time at the Millars’.
‘That’s good,’ he said, and gave me a long, sideways look.
‘They have grace before every meal,’ I said.
‘Good Lord,’ he said.
‘Mr Millar goes to the bar every night and comes home drunk, and Mrs Millar prays for his soul.’
‘Does she now?’
There was a pause, for I was very uncomfortable.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘what is it?’
‘Mrs Millar came on to the verandah one morning, and said in a loud voice to Cynthia…’
‘Cynthia? Who’s she?’
‘Of course you know, she’s been here to stay.’
‘Has she? I suppose so. Lord, you don’t mean that girl—very well, go on.’
‘She said in a loud voice to Cynthia, “I’ve been praying, Cynthia. O Cynthia, our horrible, horrible bodies!”’
I was hot all over. Never had anything made me as uncomfortable and wretched as that moment. But my father had shot me a startled look and gone red. He struggled for a moment, then dropped his head on the chair-back and laughed.
I said: ‘It wasn’t funny. It made me sick.’
‘Lord, lord, lord,’ said my father, lifting his head to give me an apologetic, embarrassed look between roars. ‘Lord, I can see the old hen.’
‘Very well,’ I said, and walked away with dignity.
I was furious with him for laughing; I had known he would laugh. I had come home a week earlier than was arranged to hear that laugh. And so I was able to put that unpleasant household behind me and forget it. My father could always be relied on in these matters.
Living down by the railway line, the upper part of the town was represented by three houses where the Millars, mother and daughter, with the painful writhings of inverted snobbery, permitted themselves to be accepted—as they saw it. The inhabitants of the three houses were certainly innocent of the condescension ascribed to them. Living with the Millars, I knew the lower mile of Main Street and its shops, particularly the Indian shops which had cheap cottons and silks from the East. Mrs Millar would send Cynthia and myself up to Shingadia’s for half a yard of satin and a reel of sewing silk, and Cynthia walked proud and slow up Main Street, and into the Indian shop, her eyes busy for signs of the enemy, those girls who bought at the big stores farther up the street, and would certainly despise her if they saw her in Shingadia’s.
And if one of these envied girls came in sight, as likely as not on her way to Shingadia’s, she would turn to face her, head high, dark eyes burning, waiting to say in the voice of an exiled duchess: ‘I have come to buy mother a yard of crêpe de Chine.’ Then, the encounter over, we would walk back, and I waited for that moment when she would sigh and say: ‘It’s so horrible to be poor. It’s horrible to have people despising you.’
Three years later I returned to Umtali to the upper part of the town for a two months’ stay with a childless elderly couple who liked to have young people in the house. And the house by the railway line was part of an old nightmare, for the Millars had gone. White people