Winter in July. Doris Lessing

drily, ‘this is a surprise.’

      They fell apart, their faces changing. They became at once what they had been during the first moments: two hostile strangers. They looked at her across the barrier that seemed to shut the world away from them. They saw a middle-aged English lady, in a shapeless old-fashioned blue silk dress, with a gold locket sliding over a flat bosom, smiling at them coldly, her blue, misted eyes critically narrowed.

      ‘I’ll take you to your house,’ she said energetically. ‘I’ll walk, and you go in the car – no, I walk it often.’ Nothing would induce her to get into the bouncing rattle-trap that was bursting with luggage and half-suppressed intimacies.

      As stiff as a twig, she marched before them along the road, while the car jerked and ground along in bottom gear. She knew it was ridiculous; she could feel their eyes on her back, could feel their astonished amusement; but she could not help it.

      When they reached the house, she unlocked it, showed them briefly what arrangements had been made, and left them. She walked back in a tumult of anger, caused mostly because of her picture of herself walking along that same road, meekly followed by the car, and refusing to do the only sensible thing, which was to get into it with them.

      She sat on her verandah for half an hour, looking at the sunset sky without seeing it, and writhing with various emotions, none of which she classified. Eventually she called the houseboy, and gave him a note, asking the two to come to dinner. No sooner had the boy left, and was trotting off down the bushy path to the gate, than she called him back. ‘I’ll go myself,’ she said. This was partly to prove that she made nothing of walking the half mile, and partly from contrition. After all, it was no crime to get married, and they seemed very fond of each other. That was how she put it.

      When she came to the house, the front room was littered with luggage, paper, pots and pans. All the exquisite order she had created was destroyed. She could hear voices from the bedroom.

      ‘But, Jack, I don’t want you to. I want you to stay with me.’ And then his voice, humorous, proud, slow, amorous: ‘You’ll do what I tell you, my girl. I’ve got to see the old man and find out what’s cooking. I start work tomorrow, don’t forget.’

      ‘But, Jack …’ Then came sounds of scuffling, laughter, and a sharp slap.

      ‘Well,’ said Mrs Gale, drawing in her breath. She knocked on the wood of the door, and all sound ceased. ‘Come in,’ came the girl’s voice. Mrs Gale hesitated, then went into the bedroom.

      Mrs De Wet was sitting in a bunch on the bed, her flowered frock spread all around her, combing her hair. Mrs Gale noted that the two beds had already been pushed together. ‘I’ve come to ask you to dinner,’ she said briskly. ‘You don’t want to have to cook when you’ve just come.’

      Their faces had already become blank and polite.

      ‘Oh no, don’t trouble, Mrs Gale,’ said De Wet awkwardly. ‘We’ll get ourselves something, don’t worry.’ He glanced at the girl, and his face softened. He said, unable to resist it: ‘She’ll get busy with the tin-opener in a minute, I expect. That’s her idea of feeding a man.’

      ‘Oh, Jack,’ pouted his wife.

      De Wet turned back to the washstand, and proceeded to swab lather on his face. Waving the brush at Mrs Gale, he said: ‘Thanks all the same. But tell the Major I’ll be over after dinner to talk things over.’

      ‘Very well,’ said Mrs Gale, ‘just as you like.’

      She walked away from the house. Now she felt rebuffed. After all, they might have had the politeness to come: yet she was pleased they hadn’t; yet if they preferred making love to getting to know the people who were to be their close neighbours for what might be years, it was their own affair…

      Mrs De Wet was saying, as she painted her toenails, with her knees drawn up to her chin, and the bottle of varnish gripped between her heels: ‘Who the hell does she think she is, anyway? Surely she could give us a meal without making such a fuss when we’ve just come.’

      ‘She came to ask us, didn’t she?’

      ‘Hoping we would say no.’

      And Mrs Gale knew quite well that this was what they were thinking, and felt it was unjust. She would have liked them to come: the man wasn’t a bad sort, in his way: a simple soul, but pleasant enough; as for the girl, she would have to learn, that was all. They should have come; it was their fault. Nevertheless she was filled with that discomfort that comes of having done a job badly. If she had behaved differently they would have come. She was cross throughout dinner; and that meal was not half finished when there was a knock on the door. De Wet stood there, apparently surprised they had not finished, from which it seemed that the couple had, after all, dined off sardines and bread and butter.

      Major Gale left his meal and went out to the verandah to discuss business. Mrs Gale finished her dinner in state, and then joined the two men. Her husband rose politely at her coming, offered her a chair, sat down and forgot her presence. She listened to them talking for some two hours. Then she interjected a remark (a thing she never did, as a rule, for women get used to sitting silent when men discuss farming) and did not know herself what made her say what she did about the cattle; but when De Wet looked round absently as if to say she should mind her own business, and her husband remarked absently, ‘Yes, dear,’ when a Yes dear did not fit her remark at all, she got up angrily and went indoors. Well, let them talk, then, she did not mind.

      As she undressed for bed, she decided she was tired, because of her broken sleep that afternoon. But she could not sleep then, either. She listened to the sound of the men’s voices, drifting brokenly round the corner of the verandah. They seemed to be thoroughly enjoying themselves. It was after twelve when she heard De Wet say, in that slow facetious way of his: ‘I’d better be getting home. I’ll catch it hot, as it is.’ And, with rage, Mrs Gale heard her husband laugh. He actually laughed. She realized that she herself had been planning an acid remark for when he came to the bedroom; so when he did enter, smelling of tobacco smoke, and grinning, and then proceeded to walk jauntily about the room in his underclothes, she said nothing, but noted that he was getting fat, in spite of all the hard work he did.

      ‘Well, what do you think of the man?’

      ‘He’ll do very well indeed,’ said Major Gale, with satisfaction. ‘Very well. He knows his stuff all right. He’s been doing mixed farming in the Transvaal for years.’ After a moment he asked politely, as he got with a bounce into his own bed on the other side of the room: ‘And what is she like?’

      ‘I haven’t seen much of her, have I? But she seems pleasant enough.’ Mrs Gale spoke with measured detachment.

      ‘Someone for you to talk to,’ said Major Gale, turning himself over to sleep. ‘You had better ask her over to tea.’

      At this Mrs Gale sat straight up in her own bed with a jerk of annoyance. Someone for her to talk to, indeed! But she composed herself, said good night with her usual briskness, and lay awake. Next day she must certainly ask the girl to morning tea. It would be rude not to. Besides, that would leave the afternoon free for her garden and her mountains.

      Next morning she sent a boy across with a note, which read: ‘I shall be so pleased if you will join me for morning tea.’ She signed it: Caroline Gale.

      She went herself to the kitchen to cook scones and cakes. At eleven o’clock she was seated on the verandah in the green-dappled shade from the creepers, saying to herself that she believed she was in for a headache. Living as she did, in a long, timeless abstraction of growing things and mountains and silence, she had become very conscious of her body’s responses to weather and to the slow advance of age. A small ache in her ankle when rain was due was like a cherished friend. Or she would sit with her eyes shut, in the shade, after a morning’s pruning in the violent sun, feeling waves of pain flood back from her eyes to the back of her skull, and say with satisfaction: ‘You deserve it, Caroline!’ It was right she should pay for such pleasure with such pain.

      At last she heard lagging footsteps