Then Moira reached out for a piece of grass, pulled it clean and neat out of the socket, and began nibbling at the soft piece at the end; and it was just the way Mom reached out for her knitting when she was against Dad. But of course Greg did not know the resemblance.
‘Moy,’ he said, ‘I want to talk to you.’
‘My name is Moira,’ said Moira, looking him in the eyes.
‘Oh heck, Moira,’ he said, sounding exasperated just like Dad.
I wriggled back away from the two of them into the crowd that was still singing softly Sarie Marais, and looking at the way the fire was glowing low and soft, ebbing red and then dark as the wind came up from the river. The moon was half-covered with the big soft silvery clouds, and the red light was strong on our faces.
I could just hear what they said, I wasn’t going to move too far off, I can tell you.
‘I don’t know what I’ve said,’ said Greg.
‘It doesn’t matter in the slightest,’ said Moira.
‘Moira, for crying out aloud!’
‘Why did you say that about marrying?’ said Moira, and her voice was shaky. She was going to cry if she didn’t watch out. ‘I thought you thought I meant …’
‘You think too much,’ said Moira, tossing her head carefully so that her long tail of hair should come forward and lie on her shoulder. She put up her hand, and stroked the curls smooth.
‘Moira, I’ve got another five years at university. I couldn’t say to you, let’s get engaged for five years.’
‘I never said you should,’ said Moira, calm and lofty, examining the scratches on her legs.
The way she was sitting, curled up sideways, with her hair lying forward like syrup on her shoulder, it was pretty, it was as pretty as I’ve ever seen, and I could see his face, sad and almost sick.
‘You’re so pretty, Moy,’ he said, jerking it out.
Moira seemed not to be able to move. Then she turned her head slowly and looked at him. I could see the beginning of something terrible on her face. The shiver had begun under my hair at the back of my neck, and was slowly moving down to the small of my back.
‘You’re so beautiful,’ he said, sounding angry, leaning right forward with his eyes almost into her face.
And now she looked the way she had last night, when I was not awake and said, was it raining outside.
‘When you look like that,’ he said, quite desperate about everything, ‘it makes me feel …’
People were getting up now all around us, the fire had burned right down, it was a low wave of red heat coming out at us. The redness was on our shoulders and legs, but our faces were having a chance to cool off. The moon had come out again full and bright, and the cloud had rolled on, and it was funny the way the light was red to their shoulders, and the white of the moon on their faces, and their eyes glistening. I didn’t like it; I was shivering; it was the most peculiar moment of all my life.
‘Well,’ said Moira, and she sounded just too tired even to try to understand, ‘that’s what you said last night, wasn’t it?’
‘Don’t you see,’ he said, trying to explain, his tongue all mixed up, ‘I can’t help – I love you, I don’t know …’
Now she smiled, and I knew the smile at once, it was the way Mom smiled at Dad when if he had any sense he’d shut up. It was sweet and loving, but it was sad, and as if she was saying, Lord, you’re a fool, Dickson Hughes!
Moira went on smiling like that at Greg, and he was sick and angry and not understanding a thing.
‘I love you,’ he said again.
‘Well I love you and what of it?’ said Moira.
‘But it will be five years.’
‘And what has that got to do with anything?’ At this she began to laugh.
‘But Moy …’
‘My name is Moira,’ she said, once and for all.
For a moment they were both white and angry, their eyes glimmering with the big white moon over them.
There was a shout and a hustle, and suddenly all the people were in the big circle around the big low heap of fire, and they were whirling around and around, yelling and screaming. Greg and Moira stayed where they were, just outside the range of the feet, and they didn’t hear a thing.
‘You’re so pretty,’ he was saying, in that rough, cross, helpless voice. ‘I love you, Moira, there couldn’t ever be anyone but you.’
She was smiling, and he went on saying: ‘I love you, I see your face all the time, I see your hair and your face and your eyes.’
And I wished he’d go on, the poor sap, just saying it, for every minute, it was more like last night when I woke up and I thought it had rained, the feeling of the dry earth with the rain just on it, that was how she was, and she looked as if she would sit there and listen for ever to the words he said, and she didn’t want to hear him saying. Why don’t you say something Moy, you don’t say anything, you do understand don’t you? – it’s not fair, it isn’t right to bind you when we’re so young. But he started on saying it in just a minute, and then she smiled her visiting smile, and she said: Gregory Jackson, you’re a fool.
Then she got herself off the grass and went across to Mom to help load the car up, and she never once looked at Greg again, not for the rest of the holidays.
The farm was fifty miles from the nearest town, in a maize-growing district. The mealie lands began at a stone’s throw from the front door of the farm house. At the back were several acres of energetic and colourful domestic growth: chicken runs, vegetables, pumpkins. Even on the veranda were sacks of grain and bundles of hoes. The life on the farm, her husband’s life, washed around the house leaving old scraps of iron on the front step where the children played wagon-and-driver, or a bottle of medicine for a sick animal on her dressing-table among the bottles of Elizabeth Arden.
One walked straight from the veranda of this gaunt, iron-roofed, brick-barracks of a house into a wide drawing-room that was shaded in green and orange Liberty linens.
‘Stylish?’ said the farmers’ wives, when they came on formal calls, asking questions of themselves while they discussed with Lucy Grange the price of butter and servants’ aprons and their husbands discussed the farm with George Grange. They never ‘dropped over’ to see Lucy Grange; they never rang her up with invitations to ‘spend the day’. They would finger the books on child psychology, politics, art; gaze guiltily at the pictures on her walls, which they felt they ought to be able to recognize, and say: ‘I can see you are a great reader, Mrs Grange.’
There were years of discussing her among themselves before their voices held the good-natured amusement of acceptance: ‘I found Lucy in the vegetable
