“It’s been done before,” George said. “It makes a fine, strong beast, more intelligent than a mule and sturdier than a horse. But I’m not having any success with this pair; they won’t look at each other.”
After a while he said, “Come in for a drink and meet Matilda.”
She was dark brown, with a subservient hollow chest and round shoulders, a gawky woman, very snappy with the houseboys. We said pleasant things as we drank on the porch before dinner, but we found George difficult. For some reason he began to rail at me for breaking off my engagement to Skinny, saying what a dirty trick it was after all those good times in the old days. I diverted attention to Matilda. I supposed, I said, that she knew this part of the country very well?
“No,” said she, “I been a-shellitered my life. I not put out to working. Me nothing to go from place to place is allowed like dirty girls does.” In her speech she gave every syllable equal stress.
George explained, “Her father was a white magistrate in Natal. She had a sheltered upbringing, different from the other coloreds, you realize.”
“Man, me no black-eyed Susan,” said Matilda, “no, no.”
On the whole, George treated her as a servant. She was about four months advanced in pregnancy, but he made her get up and fetch for him, many times. Soap: that was one of the things Matilda had to fetch. George made his own bath soap, showed it proudly, gave us the recipe which I did not trouble to remember; I was fond of nice soaps during my lifetime and George’s smelled of brilliantine and looked likely to soil one’s skin.
“D’yo brahn?” Matilda asked me.
George said, “She is asking if you go brown in the sun.”
“No, I go freckled.”
“I got sister-in-law go freckles.”
She never spoke another word to Skinny nor to me, and we never saw her again.
Some months later, I said to Skinny, “I’m fed up with being a camp follower.”
He was not surprised that I was leaving his unit, but he hated my way of expressing it. He gave me a Presbyterian look. “Don’t talk like that. Are you going back to England or staying?”
“Staying, for a while.”
“Well, don’t wander too far off.”
I was able to live on the fee I got for writing a gossip column in a local weekly, which wasn’t my idea of writing about life, of course. I made friends, more than I could cope with, after I left Skinny’s exclusive little band of archaeologists. I had the attractions of being newly out from England and of wanting to see life. Of the countless young men and go-ahead families who purred me along the Rhodesian roads, hundred after hundred miles, I only kept up with one family when I returned to my native land. I think that was because they were the most representative, they stood for all the rest: people in those parts are very typical of each other, as one group of standing stones in that wilderness is like the next.
I met George once more in a hotel in Bulawayo. We drank highballs and spoke of war. Skinny’s party were just then deciding whether to remain in the country or return home. They had reached an exciting part of their research, and whenever I got a chance to visit Zimbabwe, he would take me for a moonlight walk in the ruined temple and try to make me see phantom Phoenicians flitting ahead of us, or along the walls. I had half a mind to marry Skinny; perhaps, I thought, when his studies were finished. The impending war was in our bones: so I remarked to George as we sat drinking highballs on the hotel veranda in the hard, bright, sunny July winter of that year.
George was inquisitive about my relations with Skinny. He tried to pump me for about half an hour and when at last I said, “You are becoming aggressive, George,” he stopped. He became quite pathetic. He said, “War or no war, I’m clearing out of this.”
“It’s the heat does it,” I said.
“I’m clearing out in any case. I’ve lost a fortune in tobacco. My uncle is making a fuss. It’s the other bloody planters; once you get the wrong side of them, you’re finished in this wide land.”
“What about Matilda?” I asked.
He said, “She’ll be all right. She’s got hundreds of relatives.”
I had already heard about the baby girl. Coal black, by repute, with George’s features. And another on the way, they said.
“What about the child?”
He didn’t say anything to that. He ordered more highballs and when they arrived, he swizzled his for a long time with a stick. “Why didn’t you ask me to your twenty-first?” he said then.
“I didn’t have anything special, no party, George. We had a quiet drink among ourselves, George, just Skinny and the old professors and two of the wives and me, George.”
“You didn’t ask me to your twenty-first,” he said. “Kathleen writes to me regularly.”
This wasn’t true. Kathleen sent me letters fairly often in which she said, “Don’t tell George I wrote to you as he will be expecting word from me and I can’t be bothered actually.”
“But you,” said George, “don’t seem to have any sense of old friendships, you and Skinny.”
“Oh, George!” I said.
“Remember the times we had,” George said. “We used to have times.” His large brown eyes began to water.
“I’ll have to be getting along,” I said.
“Please don’t go. Don’t leave me just yet. I’ve something to tell you.”
“Something nice?” I laid on an eager smile. All responses to George had to be overdone.
“You don’t know how lucky you are,” George said.
“How?” I said. Sometimes I got tired of being called lucky by everybody. There were times when, privately practicing my writings about life, I knew the bitter side of my fortune. When I failed again and again to reproduce life in some satisfactory and perfect form, I was the more imprisoned, for all my carefree living, within my craving for this satisfaction. Sometimes, in my impotence and need I secreted a venom which infected all my life for days on end and which spurted out indiscriminately on Skinny or on anyone who crossed my path.
“You aren’t bound by anyone,” George said. “You come and go as you please. Something always turns up for you. You’re free, and you don’t know your luck.”
“You’re a damn sight more free than I am,” I said sharply. “You’ve got your rich uncle.”
“He’s losing interest in me,” George said. “He’s had enough.”
“Oh well, you’re young yet. What was it you wanted to tell me?”
“A secret,” George said. “Remember we used to have those secrets?”
“Oh, yes we did.”
“Did you ever tell any of mine?”
“Oh no, George.” In reality, I couldn’t remember any particular secret out of the dozens we must have exchanged from our schooldays onward.
“Well, this is a secret, mind. Promise not to tell.”
“Promise.”
“I’m married.”
“Married, George! Oh, who to?”
“Matilda.”
“How dreadful!” I spoke before I could think, but he agreed with me.
“Yes, it’s awful, but what could I do?”
“You might have asked my advice,” I said pompously.
“I’m two years older than you are. I don’t ask advice from you, Needle, little beast.”
“Don’t ask for sympathy then.”
“A nice friend you are,” he said. “I must say, after all these years.”
“Poor George!” I said.
“There are three white men to one white woman in this country,” said George. “An isolated planter doesn’t see a white woman and, if he sees one, she doesn’t see him. What could I do? I needed the woman.”
I was nearly sick. One, because of my Scottish upbringing. Two, because of my horror of corny phrases like, “I needed the woman,” which George repeated twice again.
“And Matilda got tough,” said George, “after you and Skinny came to visit us. She had some friends at the Mission, and she packed up and went to them.”