In Pursuit of the English - Doris Lessing [2]
Van Reenan was entirely unmanned. Although this was by no means the first time he had embezzled and swindled, so cleverly that while everyone knew about it the police had not been able to lay a charge against him, he now lost bis head and voluntarily gave himself up to the police. Where he babbled to the effect that the Englishman had found him out. The police telephoned my father. Who, even whiter, more silent, more purposeful than before, strode back across the veld to the mine, pushed aside the police sergeant, and knocked Van Reenan down again. ‘How dare you suggest,’ he demanded, with bitter reproach, ‘how dare you even imagine, that I would be capable of informing on you to the police?’
The third incident implies various levels of motive. The first time I heard about it was, when very young indeed, from my mother, thus; ‘Your governess is not suited to this life here, she is going back to England.’ Pause. ‘I suppose she is going back to the smart set she came from.’ Pause. ‘The sooner she gets married the better.’
Later, from a neighbour who had been confidante to the governess. ‘That poor girl who was so unhappy with your mother and had to go back to England in disgrace.’
Later, from my father: ‘… that time I had to take that swine Baxter to task for making free with Bridget’s name in the bar.’
What happened was this. My mother, for various reasons unwell, and mostly bedridden, had answered en advertisement from ‘Young woman, educated finishing school, prepared to teach young children in return for travel.’ The Lord knows what she, or my mother, expected. It was the mid-twenties. Bridget was twenty-five, and had ‘done’ several London seasons. Presumably she wanted to see a bit of the world before she married, or thought of some smart Maugham-ish colonial plantation society. Later she married an Honourable something or other, but in the meantime she got a lonely maize farm, a sick woman, two spoiled children, and my father, who considered that any woman who wore lipstick or shorts was no better than she ought to be. On the other hand, the district was full of young farmers looking for wives, or at least entertainment. They were not, she considered, of her class, but it seemed she was prepared to have a good time. She had one, and danced and gymkhana’d whenever my parents would let her. This was not nearly as often as she would have liked. She was being courted by a farmer called Baxter, a tough ex-policeman from Liverpool. My father did not like him. He didn’t like any of her suitors. One evening, he went into the bar at the village and Baxter came over and said: ‘How’s Bridget?’ My father instantly knocked him down. When the bewildered man stood up and said: ‘What the f-ing hell’s that for?’ my father said: ‘You will kindly refer, in my presence at least, to an innocent young girl many thousands of miles from her parents and to whom I am acting as guardian, as Miss Fox.’
Afterwards, he said: ‘I must not allow myself to lose my temper so easily. Quite obviously, I don’t know my own strength.’
When stunned by The Times or the Telegraph; when – yes, I think the word is interested, by the Manchester Guardian; when unable to discover the motive behind some dazzlingly stupid stroke of foreign policy; when succumbing to that mood which all of us foreigners are subject to, that we shall ever be aliens in an alien land. I recover myself by reflecting, in depth, on the implications of incidents such as these.
Admittedly at a tangent, but in clear analogy, I propose to admit, and voluntarily at that, that I have been thinking for some time of writing a piece called: In Pursuit