Most of the day she sat on the veranda sewing. We did not talk much. She used to make her own dresses, cotton prints and pastel linens, like all the women of the district wore. She made Mr Slatter’s khaki farm shirts and the boys’ shirts. Once she made herself a petticoat that was too small for her to get into, and Mr Slatter saw her struggling with it in front of the mirror, and he said: ‘What size do you think you are, Bluebell?’ in the same way he would say, as we sat down to table, ‘What have you been doing with your lily-white hands today, Primrose?’ To which she would reply, pleasantly, as if he had really asked a question: ‘I’ve made some cakes.’ Or: ‘I got some salt meat from the butcher at the station today fresh out of the pickle.’ About the petticoat she said, ‘Yes, I must have been putting on more weight than I knew.’
When I was twelve or thereabouts, I noticed that the boys had turned against their mother, not in the way of being brutal to her, but they spoke to her as their father did, calling her Bluebell, or the Fat Woman at the Fair. It was odd to hear them, because it was as if they said simply, Mum, or Mother. Not once did I hear her lose her temper with them. I could see she had determined to herself not to make them any part of what she had against Mr Slatter. I knew she was pleased to have me there, during that time, with the five men coming in only for meals.
One evening during a long stay, the boys as usual had gone off to their rooms to play when supper was done, and Mr Slatter said to his wife: ‘I’m off. I’ll be back tomorrow for breakfast.’ He went out into the dark and the wet. It was raining hard that night. The window panes were streaked with rain and shaking with the wind. Mrs Slatter looked across at me and said – and this was the first time it had been mentioned how often he went off after dinner, coming back as the sun rose, or sometimes not for two or three days: ‘You must remember something. There are some men, like Mr Slatter, who’ve got more energy than they know what to do with. Do you know how he started? When I met him and we were courting he was a butcher’s boy at the corner. And now he’s worth as much as any man in the district.’
‘Yes,’ I said, understanding for the first time that she was very proud of him.
She waited for me to say something more, and then said: ‘Yes, we have all kinds of ideas when we’re young. But Mr Slatter’s a man that does not know his own strength. There are some things he doesn’t understand, and it all comes from that. He never understands that other people aren’t as strong as he is.’
We were sitting in the big living-room. It had a stone floor with rugs and skins on it. A boot clattered on the stone and we looked up and there was Mr Slatter. His teeth were showing. He wore his big black boots, shining now from the wet, and his black oilskin glistened. ‘The bossboy says the river’s up,’ he said. ‘I won’t get across tonight.’ He took off his oilskin there, scattering wet on Mrs Slatter’s polished stone floor, tugged off his boots, and reached out through the door to hang his oilskin in the passage and set his boots under it, and came back.
There were two rivers between the Slatters’ farm and the Pritts’ farm, twelve miles off, and when the water came down they could be impassable for hours.
‘So I don’t know my own strength?’ he said to her, direct, and it was a soft voice, more frightening than I had ever heard from him, for he bared grinning teeth as usual, and his big fists hung at his sides.
‘No,’ she said steadily, ‘I don’t think you do.’ She did not lift her eyes, but stayed quiet in the corner of the sofa under the lamp. ‘We aren’t alone,’ she added quickly, and now she did look warningly at him.
He turned his head and looked towards me. I made fast for the door. I heard her say, ‘Please, I’m sorry about the river. But leave me alone, please.’
‘So you’re sorry about the river.’
‘Yes.’
‘And I don’t know my own strength?’
I shut the door. But it was a door that was never shut, and it swung open again and I ran down the passage away from it, as he said: ‘So that’s why you keep your bedroom door locked, Lady Godiva, is that it?’
And she screamed out: ‘Ah, leave me alone. I don’t care what you do. I don’t care now. But you aren’t going to make use of me. I won’t let you make use of me.’
It was a big house, rooms sprawling everywhere. The boys had two rooms and a playroom off at one end of a long stone passage. Dairies and larders and kitchen opened off the passage. Then a dining-room and some offices and a study. Then the living-room. And another passage off at an angle, with the room where I slept and beside it Mrs Slatter’s big bedroom with the double bed and after that a room they called the workroom, but it was an ordinary room and Mr Slatter’s things were in it, with a bed.
I had not thought before that they did not share a bedroom. I knew no married people in the district who had separate rooms and that is why I had not thought about the small room where Mr Slatter slept.
Soon after I had shut the door on myself, I heard them come along the passage outside, I heard voices in the room next door. Her voice was pleading, his loud, and he was laughing a lot.
In the morning at breakfast I looked at Mrs Slatter but she was not taking any notice of us children. She was pale. She was helping Mr Slatter to his breakfast. He always had three or four eggs on thick slats of bacon, and then slice after slice of toast, and half a dozen cups of tea as black as it would come out of the pot. She had some toast and a cup of tea and watched him eat. When he went out to the farm work he kissed her, and she blushed.
When we were on the veranda after breakfast, sewing, she said to me, apologetically and pink-cheeked: ‘I hope you won’t think anything about last night. Married people often quarrel. It doesn’t mean anything.’
My parents did not quarrel. At least, I had not thought of them as quarrelling. But because of what she said I tried to remember times when they disagreed and perhaps raised their voices and then afterwards laughed and kissed each other. Yes, I thought, it is true that married people quarrel, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t happy together.
That night after supper when the boys had gone to their room Mr Slatter said, ‘The rivers are down, I’m off.’ Mrs Slatter, sitting quiet under the lamp, kept her eyes down, and said nothing. He stood there staring at her and she said: ‘Well, you know what that means, don’t you?’
He simply went out, and we heard the lorry start up and the headlights swung up against the window-panes a minute, so that they dazzled up gold and hard, and went black again.
Mrs Slatter said nothing, so that my feeling that something awful had happened slowly faded. Then she began talking about her childhood in London. She was a shop assistant before she met Mr Slatter. She often spoke of her family, and the street she lived in, so I wondered if she were homesick, but she never went back to London so perhaps she was not homesick at all.
Soon after that Emmy Pritt got ill. She was not the sort of woman one thought of as being ill. She had some kind of operation, and they all said she needed a holiday, she needed to get off the altitude. Our part of Central Africa was high, nearly four thousand feet, and we all knew that when a person got rundown they needed a rest from the altitude in the air at sea-level. Mrs Pritt went down to the Cape, and soon after Mr and Mrs Slatter went too, with the four children, and they all had a holiday together at the same hotel.
When they came back, the Slatters brought a farm assistant with them. Mr Slatter could not manage the farm-work, he said. I heard my father say that Slatter was taking things a bit far; he was over at the Pritts every weekend from Friday night to Monday morning and nearly every
