The Sun Between Their Feet: Collected African Stories Volume Two

The Captain remembered her saying it. And there sat Michele on his packing-case, saying: ‘It’s a pleasure for the rich, my friend, detectives and the law. Even jealousy is a pleasure I don’t want any more. Ah, my friend, to be together with my wife again, and the children, that is all I ask of life. That and wine and food and singing in the evening.’ And the tears wetted his cheeks and splashed on to his shirt.

That a man should cry, good Lord! thought the Captain. And without shame! He seized the bottle and drank.

Three days before the great occasion, some high-ranking officers came strolling through the dust, and found Michele and the Captain sitting together on the packing-case, singing. The Captain’s shirt was open down the front, and there were stains on it.

The Captain stood to attention with the bottle in his hand, and Michele stood to attention too, out of sympathy with his friend. Then the officers drew the Captain aside – they were all cronies of his – and said, what the hell did he think he was doing? And why wasn’t the village finished? Then they went away.

‘Tell them it is finished,’ said Michele. ‘Tell them I want to go.’

‘No,’ said the Captain, ‘no. Michele, what would you do if your wife …’

‘This world is a good place. We should be happy – that is all.’

‘Michele …’

‘I want to go. There is nothing to do. They paid me yesterday.’

‘Sit down, Michele. Three more days and then it’s finished.’

‘Then I shall paint the inside of the church as I painted the one in the camp.’

The Captain laid himself down on some boards and went to sleep. When he woke, Michele was surrounded by the pots of paint he had used on the outside of the village. Just in front of the Captain was a picture of a black girl. She was young and plump. She wore a patterned blue dress and her shoulders came soft and bare out of it. On her back was a baby slung in a band of red stuff. Her face was turned towards the Captain and she was smiling.

‘That’s Nadya,’ said the Captain. ‘Nadya …’ He groaned loudly. He looked at the black child and shut his eyes. He opened them, and mother and child were still there. Michele was very carefully drawing thin yellow circles around the heads of the black girl and her child.

‘Good God,’ said the Captain, ‘you can’t do that.’

‘Why not?’

‘You can’t have a black Madonna.’

‘She was a peasant. This is a peasant. Black peasant Madonna for black country.’

‘This is a German village,’ said the Captain.

‘This is my Madonna,’ said Michele angrily. ‘Your German village and my Madonna. I paint this picture as an offering to the Madonna. She is pleased – I feel it.’

The Captain lay down again. He was feeling ill. He went back to sleep. When he woke for the second time, it was dark. Michele had brought in a flaring paraffin lamp, and by its light was working on the long wall. A bottle of brandy stood beside him. He painted until long after midnight, and the Captain lay on his side and watched, as passive as a man suffering a dream. Then they both went to sleep on the boards. The whole of the next day Michele stood painting black Madonnas, black saints, black angels. Outside, troops were practising in the sunlight, bands were blaring and motor cyclists roared up and down. But Michele painted on, drunk and oblivious. The Captain lay on his back, drinking and muttering about his wife. Then he would say ‘Nadya, Nadya’, and burst into sobs.

Towards nightfall the troops went away. The officers came back, and the Captain went off with them to show how the village sprang into being when the great lights at the end of the parade-ground were switched on. They all looked at the village in silence. They switched the lights off, and there were only tall angular boards leaning like gravestones in the moonlight. On went the lights – and there was the village. They were silent, as if suspicious. Like the Captain, they seemed to feel it was not right. Uncanny it certainly was, but that was not it. Unfair – that was the word. It was cheating. And profoundly disturbing.

‘Clever chap, that Italian of yours,’ said the General.

The Captain, who had been woodenly correct until this moment, suddenly came rocking up to the General, and steadied himself by laying his hands on the august shoulder. ‘Bloody Wops,’ he said. ‘Bloody kaffirs. Bloody … Tell you what, though, there’s one Itie that’s some good. Yes, there is. I’m telling you. He’s a friend of mine, actually.’

The General looked at him. Then he nodded at his underlings. The Captain was taken away for disciplinary purposes. It was decided, however, that he must be ill, nothing else could account for such behaviour. He was put to bed in his own room with a nurse to watch him.

He woke twenty-four hours later, sober for the first time in weeks. He slowly remembered what had happened. Then he sprang out of bed and rushed into his clothes. The nurse was just in time to see him run down the path and leap into his lorry.

He drove at top speed to the parade-ground, which was flooded with light in such a way that the village did not exist. Everything was in full swing. The cars were three deep around the square, with people on the running-boards and even the roofs. The grandstand was packed. Women dressed up as gipsies, country girls, Elizabethan court dames, and so on, wandered about with trays of ginger beer and sausage-rolls and programmes at five shillings each in aid of the war effort. On the square, troops deployed, obsolete machine-guns were being dragged up and down, bands played, and motor cyclists roared through flames.

As the Captain parked the lorry, all this activity ceased, and the lights went out. The Captain began running around the outside of the square to reach the place where the guns were hidden in a mess of net and branches. He was sobbing with the effort. He was a big man, and unused to exercise, and sodden with brandy. He had only one idea in his mind -to stop the guns firing, to stop them at all costs.

Luckily, there seemed to be a hitch. The lights were still out. The unearthly graveyard at the end of the square glittered white in the moonlight. Then the lights briefly switched on, and the village sprang into existence for just long enough to show large red crosses all over a white building beside the church. Then moonlight flooded everything again, and the crosses vanished. ‘Oh, the bloody fool!’ sobbed the Captain, running, running as if for his life. He was no longer trying to reach the guns. He was cutting across a corner of the square direct to the church. He could hear some officers cursing behind him: ‘Who put those red crosses there? Who? We can’t fire on the Red Cross.’

The Captain reached the church as the searchlight burst on. Inside, Michele was kneeling on the earth looking at his first Madonna. ‘They are going to kill my Madonna,’ he said miserably.

‘Come away, Michele, come away.’

‘They’re going to …’

The Captain grabbed his arm and pulled. Michele wrenched himself free and grabbed a saw. He began hacking at the ceiling board. There was a dead silence outside. They heard a voice booming through the loudspeakers: ‘The village that is about to be shelled is an English village, not as represented on the programme, a German village. Repeat, the village that is about to be shelled is …’

Michele had cut through two sides of a square around the Madonna.

‘Michele,’ sobbed the Captain, ‘get out of here.’

Michele dropped the saw, took hold of the raw edges of the board and tugged. As he did so, the church began to quiver and lean. An irregular patch of board ripped out and Michele staggered back into the Captain’s arms. There was a roar. The church seemed to dissolve around them into flame. Then they were running away from it, the Captain holding Michele tight by the arm. ‘Get down,’ he shouted suddenly, and threw Michele to the earth. He flung himself down beside him. Looking from under the crook of his arm, he heard the explosion, saw a great pillar of smoke and flame, and the village disintegrated in a mass of debris. Michele was on his knees gazing at his Madonna in the light from the flames. She was unrecognizable, blotted out with dust. He looked horrible, quite white, and a trickle of blood soaked from his hair down one cheek.

‘They shelled my Madonna,’ he said.

‘Oh, damn it, you can paint another one,’ said the Captain. His own voice seemed to him strange, like a dream voice. He was certainly crazy, as mad as Michele himself … He got up, pulled Michele to his feet, and marched him towards the edge of the field. There they were met by the ambulance people. Michele was taken off to hospital, and the Captain was sent back to bed.

A week passed. The Captain was in a darkened room. That he was having some kind of a breakdown was clear, and two nurses stood guard over him. Sometimes he lay quiet. Sometimes he muttered to himself. Sometimes he sang in a thick clumsy voice bits out of opera, fragments from Italian songs, and – over and over again – There’s a Long Long Trail. He was not thinking of anything at all. He shied away from the thought of Michele as if it were dangerous. When, therefore, a cheerful female voice announced that a friend had come to cheer him up, and it would do him good to have some company, and he saw a white bandage moving towards him in the gloom, he turned sharp over on to his side, face to the wall.

‘Go away,’ he said. ‘Go away, Michele.’

‘I have come to see you,’ said Michele. ‘I have brought you a present.’

The Captain slowly turned over. There was Michele, a cheerful ghost in the dark room. ‘You fool,’ he said. ‘You messed everything up. What did you paint those crosses for?’

‘It was a hospital,’ said Michele. ‘In a village there is a hospital, and on the hospital the Red Cross, the beautiful Red Cross – no?’

‘I was nearly court-martialled.’

‘It was my fault,’ said Michele. ‘I was drunk.’

‘I was responsible.’

‘How could you be responsible when I did it? But it is all over. Are you better?’

‘Well, I suppose these crosses saved your life.’

‘I did not think,’ said Michele. ‘I was remembering the kindness of the Red Cross people when we were prisoners.’

‘Oh shut up, shut up, shut up.’

‘I have brought you a present.’

The Captain peered through the dark. Michele was holding up a picture. It was of a native woman with a baby on her back, smiling sideways out of the frame.

Michele said: ‘You did not like the haloes. So this time, no haloes. For the Captain – no Madonna.’ He laughed. ‘You like it? It is for you. I painted it for you.’

‘God damn you!’ said the Captain.

‘You do not like it?’ said Michele, very hurt.

The Captain closed his eyes. ‘What are you going to do next?’ he asked tiredly.

Michele laughed again. ‘Mrs Pannerhurst, the lady of the General, she wants me to paint her picture in her white dress. So I paint it.’

‘You should be proud to.’

‘Silly bitch. She thinks I am good. They know nothing -savages. Barbarians. Not you, Captain, you are my friend. But these people, they know nothing.’

The Captain lay quiet. Fury was gathering in him. He thought of the General’s wife. He disliked her, but he had known her well enough.

‘These people,’ said Michele. ‘They do not know a good picture from a bad picture. I paint, I paint, this way, that way. There is the picture – I look at it and laugh inside myself.’ Michele laughed out loud. ‘They say, he is a Michelangelo, this one, and try to cheat me out of my price. Michele -Michelangelo – that is a joke, no?’

The Captain said nothing.

‘But for you I painted this picture to remind you of our good times with the village. You are my friend. I will always remember you.’

The Captain turned his eyes sideways in his head and stared at the black girl. Her smile at him was half innocence, half malice.

‘Get out,’ he said suddenly.

Michele came closer and bent to see the Captain’s face. ‘You wish me to go?’ He sounded unhappy. ‘You saved my life. I was a fool that night. But I was thinking of my offering to the Madonna – I was a fool, I say it myself. I was drunk, we are fools when we are drunk.’

‘Get out of here,’ said the Captain again.

For a moment the white bandage remained motionless. Then it swept downwards in a bow. Michele turned towards the door.

‘And take that bloody picture with you.’

Silence. Then, in the dim light, the Captain saw Michele reach out for the picture, his white head bowed in profound obeisance. He straightened himself and stood to attention, holding the picture with one hand, and keeping the other stiff down his side. Then he saluted the Captain.

‘Yes, sir,’ he said, and he turned and went out of the door with the picture.

The Captain lay still. He felt – what did he feel? There was a pain under his ribs. It hurt to breathe. He realized he was unhappy. Yes, a terrible unhappiness was filling him, slowly, slowly. He was unhappy because Michele had gone. Nothing had ever hurt the Captain in all his life as much as that mocking Yes, sir. Nothing. He turned his face to the wall and wept. But silently. Not a sound escaped him, for the fear the nurses might hear.

The Trinket Box

Yes, but it was only recently, when it became clear that Aunt Maud really could not last much longer, that people began to ask all those questions which should have been asked, it seems now, so long ago.

Or perhaps it is the other way about: Aunt Maud, suddenly finding that innumerable nieces and nephews and cousins were beginning to take an interest in her, asking her to meet interesting people, was so disturbed to find herself pushed into the centre of the stage where she felt herself to be out of place, that she took to her bed where she could tactfully die?

Even here, lying on massed pillows, like a small twig that has been washed up against banks of smooth white sand, she is not left in peace. Distant relations who have done no more than send her Christmas cards once a year come in to see her, sit by her bed for hours at a time, send her flowers. But why? It is not merely that they want to know what London in the Nineties was like for a young woman with plenty of money, although they wake her to ask: ‘Do tell us, do you remember the Oscar Wilde affair?’ Her face puckers in a worried look, and she says: ‘Oscar Wilde? What? Oh yes, I read such an interesting book, it is in the library.’

Perhaps Aunt Maud herself sees that pretty vivacious girl (there is a photograph of her in an album somewhere) as a character in a historical play. But what is that question which it seems everyone comes to ask, but does not ask, leaving at length rather subdued, even a little exasperated – perhaps because it is not like Aunt Maud to suggest unanswerable questions?

Where did it all begin? Some relation returned from a long holiday, and asking casually after the family, said: ‘What! Aunt Maud still alive? Isn’t she gone yet?’ Is that how people began asking: ‘Well, but how old is she? Eighty? Ninety?’ ‘Nonsense, she can’t be ninety.’

‘But she says she remembers …’ And the names of old ‘incidents’ crop up, the sort of thing one finds in dusty books of memoirs. They were another world. It seems impossible that living people can remember them, especially someone we know so well.

‘She remembers earlier than that. She told me once – it must be twenty years ago now – of having left home years before the Boer War started. You can work that out for yourself.’

‘Even that only makes her seventy – eighty perhaps. Eighty is not old enough to get excited about.’

‘The Crimean War …’ But now they laugh. ‘Come, come, she’s not a hundred!’

No, she cannot be as much as that, but thirty years ago, no less, an old frail lady climbed stiffly but jauntily up the bank of a dried-up African river, where she was looking after a crowd of other people’s children on a picnic, and remarked: ‘My old bones are getting creaky.’ Then she bought herself an ancient car. It was one of the first Ford models, and she went rattling in it over bad corrugated roads and even over the veld, if there were no roads. And no one thought it extraordinary. Just as one did not think of her as an old maid, or a spinster, so one did not think of her as an old lady.

And then there was the way she used to move from continent to continent, from family to family, as a kind of unpaid servant. For she had no money at all by then: her brother the black sheep died and she insisted on giving up all her tiny capital to pay his debts. It was useless of course; he owed thousands, but no one could persuade her against it. ‘There are some things one has to do,’ she said. Now, lying in bed she says: ‘One doesn’t want to be a nuisance,’ in her small faded voice; the same voice in which she used to announce, and not so very long ago: ‘I am going to South America as companion to Mrs Fripp – she is so very very kind.’ For six months, then, she was prepared to wait hand and foot on an old lady years younger than herself simply for the sake of seeing South America? No, we can no longer believe it. We are forced to know that the thought of her aches and pains put warmth into Mrs Fripp’s voice when she asked Aunt Maud to go with her.

And from the Andes or the Christmas Islands, or some place as distant and preposterous as the Russian-Japanese war or the Morocco scramble seem to be in time, came those long long letters beginning: ‘That white dressing-jacket you gave me was so useful when I went to the mountains.’ She got so many presents from us all that now we feel foolish. They were not what she wanted after all.

Then, before we expected it, someone would write and say: ‘By the way, did you know I have had Aunt Maud with me since Easter?’ She had come back from the Andes, or wherever it was? But why had she gone there? Was Anne having another baby perhaps?

Sitting up in bed surrounded by the cushions and photographs that framed her in the way other people’s furniture frames them, always very early in the morning – she wrote letters from five to seven every day of her life – she answered in her tiny precise handwriting: ‘Jacko’s leg is not quite healed yet, although I think he is well on the way to recovery. And then I shall be delighted to avail myself of your kind offer. I will be with you by the middle of …’ Punctually to the hour she would arrive; the perfect guest. And when she left, because of the arrival of a baby or a sudden illness perhaps five hundred miles away or in another country, with what affectionate heart-warming gratitude she thanked us, until it was easy to forget the piles of mending, the delicious cooking, the nights and nights of nursing. A week after she had left would arrive the inevitable parcel, containing presents so apt that it was with an uneasy feeling that we sat down to write thanks. How did she come to know our most secret wants? And, imperceptibly, the unease would grow to resentment. She had no right, no right at all, to give such expensive presents when she was dependent on relations for her support.

So it was that after every visit a residue of spite and irritation remained. And perhaps she intended that the people she served should never have to feel the embarrassment of gratitude? Perhaps she intended us – who knows? -to think as we sat writing our thank-yous: But after all, she has to live on us, it is after all a kindness to feed and house her for a few weeks.

It is all intolerable, intolerable; and it seems now that we must march into that bedroom to ask: ‘Aunt Maud, how did you bear it? How could you stand, year in and year out, pouring out your treasures of affection to people who hardly noticed you? Do you realize, Aunt Maud, that now, thirty years or more after you became our servant, it is the first time that we are really aware you were ever alive? What do you say to that, Aunt Maud? Or did you know it all the time …’ For that is what we want to be sure of: that she did not know it, that she never will.

We wander restlessly in and out of her room, watching that expression on her face which – now that she is too ill to hide what she feels – makes us so uneasy. She looks impatient when she sees us; she wishes we would go away. Yesterday she said: ‘One does not care for this kind of attention.’

All the time, all over the house, people sit about, talking, talking, in low urgent anxious voices, as if something vital and precious is leaking away as they wait.

‘She can’t be exactly the same, it is impossible!’

‘But I tell you, I remember her, on the day the war started -the old war, you know. On the platform, waving good-bye to my son. She was the same, wrinkle for wrinkle. That little patch of yellow on her cheek – like an egg-stain. And those little mauvish eyes, and that funny voice. People don’t talk like that now, each syllable sounding separately.’

‘Her eyes have changed though.’ We sneak in to have a look at her. She turns them on us, peering over the puffs of a pink bedjacket – eyes where a white film is gathering. Unable to see us clearly, afraid – she who has sat by so many deathbeds – of distressing us by her unsightliness, she turns away her head, lies back, folds her hands, is silent.

When other people die, it is a thing of horror, swellings, gross flesh, smells, sickness. But Aunt Maud dies as a leaf shrivels. It seems that a little dryish gasp, a little shiver, and the papery flesh will crumble and leave beneath the bedclothes she scarcely disturbs a tiny white skeleton. That is how she is dying, giving the least trouble to the niece who waited sharp-sightedly for someone else to use the phrase ‘a happy release’ before she used it herself. ‘She might not eat anything, but one has to prepare the tray all the same. And then, there are all these people in the house.’

‘Before she retired, what did she do?’

‘Taught, didn’t you know? She was forty when her father married again, and she went out and took a post in a school. He never spoke one word to her afterwards.’

‘But why, why?’

‘He was in the wrong of course. She didn’t marry so as to look after him.’

‘Oh, so she might have married? Who was he?’

‘Old John Jordan, do you remember?’

‘But he died before I left school – such a funny old man!’

Impossible to ask why she never married. But someone asks it. A great-niece, very young, stands beside the bed and looks down with shivering distaste at such age, such death: ‘Aunt Maud, why did you never marry?’

‘Marry! Marry! Who is talking about marrying?’ she sounds angered and sullen; then the small eyes film over and she says: ‘Who did you say is getting married?’

The niece is banished and there are no more questions.

No more visitors either, the doctor says. A question of hours. A few hours, and that casket of memories and sensations will have vanished. It is monstrous that a human being who has survived miraculously and precariously so many decades of wars, illnesses and accidents should die at last, leaving behind nothing.

Now we sit about the bed where she lies and wait for her to die. There is nothing to do. No one stirs. We are all sitting, looking, thinking, surreptitiously touching the things that belonged to her, trying to catch a glimpse, even for a moment, of the truth that will vanish in such a little while.

And if we think of the things that interested her, the enthusiasms we used to laugh at, because it seemed so odd that such an old lady should feel strongly about these great matters, what answer do we get? She was a feminist, first and foremost. The Pankhursts, she said, ‘were so devoted’. She was a socialist; she had letters from Keir Hardie. There had been no one like him since he died. She defended vegetarians, but would not be one herself, because it gave people so much trouble in the kitchen. Madame Curie, Charles Lindbergh, Marie Corelli, Lenin, Clara Butt – these were her idols, and she spoke of them in agitated defiance as if they were always in need of defence. Inside that tiny shrivelled skull what an extraordinary gallery of heroes and heroines. But there is no answer there. No matter how hard we try, fingering her handkerchief sachet, thinking of the funny flat hats she wore, draped with bits of Liberty cottons, remembering how she walked, as if at any moment she might be called upon to scale a high wall, she eludes us. Let us resign ourselves to it and allow her to die.