for me, I saw that dress again, with its criss-cross of narrow sweat-darkened straps over the ageing white back, and I saw Mrs Slatter’s face when my father criticized her. I might have been there, I saw it so clearly. She coloured, lifted her head, lower her lids so that the tears would not show, and she said: ‘I’m sorry you feel like that, Mr Farquar.’ It was with dignity. Yes. She had put on that dress in order to say something. But my father did not approve. He had said so.
She cared what my father said. They cared very much for each other. She called him Mr Farquar always, and he called her Molly; and when the Slatters came over to tea, and Mr Slatter was being brutal, there was a gentleness and a respect for her in my father’s manner which made even Mr Slatter feel it and even, sometimes, repeat something he had said to his wife in a lower voice, although it was still impatient.
The first time I knew my father felt for Molly Slatter and that my mother grudged it to her was when I was perhaps seven or eight. Their house was six miles away over the veld, but ten by the road. Their house like ours was on a ridge. At the end of the dry season when the trees were low and the leaves thinning, we could see their lights flash out at sundown, low and yellow across the miles of country. My father, after coming back from seeing Mr Slatter about some farm matter, stood by our window looking at their lights, and my mother watched him. Then he said: ‘Perhaps she should stand up to him? No, that’s not it. She does, in her way. But Lord, he’s a tough customer, Slatter.’
My mother said, her head low over her sewing: ‘She married him.’
He let his eyes swing around at her, startled. Then he laughed. ‘That’s right, she married him.’
‘Well?’
‘Oh come off it, old girl,’ he said almost gay, laughing and hard. Then, still laughing angrily he went over and kissed her on the cheek.
‘I like Molly,’ she said, defensive. ‘I like her. She hasn’t got what you might call conversation but I like her.’
‘Living with Slatter, I daresay she’s got used to keeping her mouth shut.’
When Molly Slatter came over to spend the day with my mother the two women talked eagerly for hours about household things. Then, when my father came in for tea or dinner, there was a lock of sympathies and my mother looked ironical while he went to sit by Mrs Slatter, even if only for a minute, saying: ‘Well, Molly? Everything all right with you?’
‘I’m very well, thank you, Mr Farquar, and so are the children.’
Most people were frightened of Mr Slatter. There were four Slatter boys, and when the old man was in a temper and waving the whip he always had with him, they ran off into the bush and stayed there until he had cooled down. All the natives on their farm were afraid of him. Once when he knew their houseboy had stolen some soap he tied him to a tree in the garden without food and water all of one day, and then through the night, and beat him with his whip every time he went past, until the boy confessed. And once, when he had hit a farm-boy, and the boy complained to the police, Mr Slatter tied the boy to his horse and rode it at a gallop to the police station twelve miles off and made the boy run beside, and told him if he complained to the police again he would kill him. Then he paid the ten-shilling fine and made the boy run beside the horse all the way back again.
I was so frightened of him that I could feel myself begin trembling when I saw his car turning to come up the drive from the farm lands.
He was a square fair man, with small sandy-lashed blue eyes, and small puffed cracked lips, and red ugly hands. He used to come up the wide red shining steps of the veranda, grinning slightly, looking at us. Then he would take a handful of tow-hair from the heads of whichever of his sons were nearest, one in each fist, and tighten his fists slowly, not saying a word, while they stood grinning back and their eyes filled slowly. He would grin over their heads at Molly Slatter, while she sat silent, saying nothing. Then, one or other of the boys would let out a sound of pain, and Mr Slatter showed his small discoloured teeth in a grin of triumphant good humour and let them go. Then he stamped off in his big farm boots into the house.
Mrs Slatter would say to her sons: ‘Don’t cry. Your father doesn’t know his own strength. Don’t cry.’ And she went on sewing, composed and pale.
Once at the station, the Slatter car and ours were drawn up side by side outside the store. Mrs Slatter was sitting in the front seat, beside the driver’s seat. In our car my father drove and my mother was beside him. We children were in the back seats. Mr Slatter came out of the bar with Mrs Pritt and stood on the store veranda talking to her. He stood before her, legs apart, in his way of standing, head back on his shoulders, eyes narrowed, grinning, red fists loose at his sides, and talked on for something like half an hour. Meanwhile Mrs Pritt let her weight slump on to one hip and lolled in front of him. She wore a tight shrill green dress, so short it showed the balls of her thin knees.
And my father leaned out of our car window though we had all our stores in and might very well leave for home now, and talked steadily and gently to Mrs Slatter, who was quiet, not looking at her husband, but making conversation with my father and across him to my mother. And so they went on talking until Mr Slatter left Mrs Pritt, and slammed himself into the driver’s seat and started the car.
I did not like Mrs Pritt and I knew neither of my parents did. She was a thin wiry tall woman with black short jumpy hair. She had a sharp knowing face and a sudden laugh like the scream of a hen caught by the leg. Her voice was always loud, and she laughed a great deal.
But seeing Mr Slatter with her was enough to know that they fitted. She was not gentle and kindly like Mrs Slatter. She was as tough in her own way as Mr Slatter. And long before I ever heard it said I knew well enough that, as my mother said primly, they liked each other. I asked her, meaning her to tell the truth, Why does Mr Slatter always go over when Mr Pritt is away, and she said: I expect Mr Slatter likes her.
In our district, with thirty or forty families on the farms spread over a hundred square miles or so, nothing happened privately. That day at the station I must have been ten years old, eleven, but it was not the first or the last time I heard the talk between my parents:
My father: ‘I daresay it could make things easier for Molly.’
She, then: ‘Do you?’
‘But if he’s got to have an affair, he might at least not push it down our throats, for Molly’s sake.’
And she: ‘Does he have to have an affair?’
She said the word, affair, with difficulty. It was not her language. Nor, and that was what she was protesting against, my father’s. For they were both conventional and religious people. Yet at moments of crisis, at moments of scandal and irregularity, my father spoke this other language, cool and detached, as if he were born to it.
‘A man like Slatter,’ he said thoughtfully, as if talking to another man, ‘it’s obvious. And Emmy Pritt. Yes. Obviously, obviously! But it depends on how Molly takes it. Because if she doesn’t take it the right way, she could make it hell for herself.’
‘Take it the right way,’ said my mother, with bright protesting eyes, and my father did not answer.
I used to stay with Mrs Slatter sometimes in the holidays. I went across-country over the kaffir paths, walking or on my bicycle, with some clothes in a small suitcase.
The boys were, from having to stand up to Mr Slatter, tough and indifferent boys, and went about the farm in a closed gang. They did
