Going Home - Doris May Lessing [30]
The elderly couple’s house was large and darkened by cedrilatoona trees that stood in clumps all round it, whose glossy fronds of leaves kept up a perpetual susurration day and night, as if one were on a green and murmuring island on a lake. The golden-shower creeper that draped the roof and the walls filled the rooms with its sweet honey-smell; and blocked out the small light that came through the massed trees. And inside, books darkened every room. I came, then, from the house on the kopje into a warm darkness, where Mr Boles, who was a journalist, lay in bed until lunchtime under a heap of newspapers and books; and Mrs Boles lay in a bed opposite sleeping endlessly under a vast silk eiderdown.
I was not permitted to disturb them until lunchtime; but the night before I’d be given a list of shopping to do by Mrs Boles; and I spent the mornings sauntering up and down Main Street, brilliant with its flame trees and its bordering gardens, visiting all the shops and particularly Shingadia’s, because Mrs Boles who had a thousand cousins, nieces and nephews was always sending them presents; and she would give me an extra pound note and tell me to go and snap up any bargains there might be in town.
When I knocked at the door of that dark room, at one o’clock, she was sitting up in bed, an enormous mass of loose flesh, with her grey hair straggling, exchanging love-talk with her old husband across the room; she would demand to see what I had bought, and as I spilled flowered muslins, bright cottons and sheaves of shining crêpe de Chine all over the bed, she would snatch them up, hold them to her face and cry: ‘Oh, how beautiful! Oh, how clever of you. Oh, no, I can’t send them away. You must call in Miss Betty and she’ll make you some dresses.’
Miss Betty, an old, frail English spinster, lived almost entirely off Mrs Boles’s generosity; and in the afternoons, when Mr Boles had gone to the offices of the newspaper he worked for, the three of us stayed in the dim living-room, discussing the materials that lay glimmering and glowing over the floor and the furniture, and how they should be made, and if that would suit cousin Elizabeth, and this niece Jane.
They were very good to me, that old couple, and I loved them dearly; though it was not until long after that I understood the pathos of Mrs Boles, that gigantic and hideous old woman who had wanted children and could not have them, and who had been beautiful and elegant, and now must direct her passion for pretty clothes and materials towards other people.
Mr Boles always addressed her in the tenderest tones: ‘My little dove, my little heart, my beautiful girl’ and she spoke to him like a spoilt young bride. Once he saw my incredulous, embarrassed face, and, waiting until she had left the room, took out of a drawer beside his bed an old photograph of an exquisite young woman in full trailing skirts, and a big flowered hat, with the face of a cool young angel. After that, my puritan disapproval of the way they lived (for I knew what my parents would have said of them) vanished; and I could see that that photograph justified the way he sheltered her, protected her, inquired after her headaches and her aches and pains, for she was tacitly an invalid. There was nothing wrong with her save that she ate too much. They fussed and pampered each other’s ailments endlessly, in between discussing what they would have for the next meal: I had never heard such expert attention being