She had in her hand one of the clay oxen Gina was learning to make, that had been set to dry in the sun. Abstractions hardened into the concrete: even death is a purchase. One of Barn’s senior partners could afford his at the cost of a private plane — in which he crashed. July’s old mother (was she not perhaps his grandmother?) would crawl, as Maureen was watching her now, coming home with wood, and grass for her brooms on her head, bent lower and lower towards the earth until finally she sank to it — the only death she could afford.
Maureen had the keys, kept overnight after she had fetched the rubber mat from the vehicle. She heard his voice, his energetic laugh, and saw him cross from hut to goat-kraal and back. To be seen is not necessarily to be acknowledged, where people’s movements are centred about the same kind of activity in every household, every day. Everyone was everyone else’s witness, and this bred its own discretion. Only the children hung together and moved like the comet’s tail of bees she had seen roll out of the sky the other day and bear down on tree after tree before attaching itself to one. She had never been inside his hut; Bam had. — He has some things from home. It’s smartened-up. He can’t live like the others. — Bam meant the home he and she had provided; he meant the wife and female relatives.
She rehearsed her arrival at the door of his domain. It was only a hundred feet away. His quarters had been only across the yard, she had waved at his friends, his brothers who were eternally visiting, seen through the open door in summer, or heard them in there, round the electric heater she provided, in winter — she came right by his quarters every time she went to the double garage to drive off in her car. But she had never entered unless — rare occasion — he was sick. Then she knocked, and the attendant friends stood up respectfully (accommodated somehow on up-ended boxes, an old table — she provided one decent chair for her servant’s comfort but could not be expected to allow for the reception of half-a-dozen friends), and she would put down on the spotless bed the tray of light food she had prepared for him herself. His hut, here, was apparently something he kept to himself, apart from women. But she was a white woman, someone who had employed him, theirs was a working relationship; surely that was her claim.
She had lived for more than two weeks within steps of that hut and could have lived there for ever without going inside it. She no more wanted to have to see her cast-off trappings here, where they separated him from the way other people lived around him, than she did back there, where they separated him from the way she lived. The old green bedspread with dolphins, mermaids and tritons printed round a fake facsimile of an early map of the world, the framed poster of Málaga — these things themselves (in his room back there) might not be displayed, but others of the same origin. He must have known, when she handed some new object on to him it was because it was shoddy or ugly, to her, and if it were some old object, it was because she no longer valued it. She stopped Royce (his favourite) who kept running past to help himself and the other children to the peanuts that were Victor’s share of the harvest Victor had helped dig up: —See if you can find July.—
Her child came back with his troop. They lay bellydown on their elbows on the damp ground and crowded heads blissfully over their cracking of tiny fibrous shells. — Did you find July?—
— Mmm. There at his house.—
— Is he coming?—
— He says it’s all right, he’s there, you can come.
— She sat on in the sun that crisped the skin, a hot iron passing over damp cloth. She was menstruating — since the day before, although by the calculation of the calendar left behind above the telephone it would have been a week too soon. There was another essential she had forgotten. Under her jeans she wore between her legs the wadding of rags that all the women here had to when their days came. Already she had been, with the modesty and sense of privacy that finds the appropriate expression in every community, secretly down to the river to wash a set of bloody rags. She had no thought for the risk of bilharzia as she scrubbed against a stone and watched the flow of her time, measuring off another month, curl like red smoke borne away in the passing of the river.
— Want some? — Her youngest child still needed to share his pleasures with her.
Red earth and bunches of raw peanuts clung to the roots of the plants.
— If you don’t eat them all, I’ll roast the rest. With salt. Then they have some taste.—
— Same as in the packets? In the shops?—
— That’s right.—
— I didn’t know those grew!—
The little boy’s toes drummed at the earth and while he ate he hummed, as he would soon cease to do, becoming too old to find content between his lips, as he had at her nipple. He seemed to understand what the black children said; and at least had picked up the ceremonial or ritual jargon of their games, shouting out what must be equivalent of ‘Beaten you!’ ‘My turn!’ ‘Cheat!’
— Go and say I want to see him.—
The whole formation of children took off. She put out a hand and a black head with the feel of freshly-washed sheep-skin brushed under it. Sometimes she could coax a small child, new on its legs, to come to her, but mostly she was too unfamiliar-looking, to them, to be trusted.
The children did not return. She thought she heard him singing, way up in the bones of his skull, the hymns he breathed while he worked at something that required repetitive, rhythmical effort, polishing or scrubbing. But when he appeared he was merely coming over to her, unhurried, on a sunny day. Nothing sullen or resentful about him; her little triumph in getting him to come turned over inside her with a throb and showed the meanness of something hidden under a stone. These sudden movements within her often changed her from persecutor to victim, with her husband, her children, anyone.
She spoke as she did back there when domestic detail impinged upon the real concerns of her life, which could not be understood by him. But she had got to her feet. — Here are your keys.—
For an instant his hands sketched the gesture of receiving and then were recalled to themselves and the thumb and fingers of his right hand simply hooked the bunch, with a jingle, from her fingers.
His chin was raised, trying to sense rather than see if Bam was in the hut behind. Her silence was the answer: not back; they both knew the third one had gone off, early, to shoot some meat — a family of wart-hogs had been rashly coming to an old wallow within sight of the settlement. He stood there, his stolidity an acceptance that he could not escape her, since she was alone, they were one-to-one; hers an insinuated understanding that she had not refused to come to him but wanted them to meet where no one else would judge them. The subtlety of it was nothing new. People in the relation they had been in are used to having to interpret what is never said, between them.