still said nothing, and he lowered his voice, and I could imagine how my mother’s face would have gone stiff and cold had she heard what he said: ‘And have a good time while you’re there. Have a good time and let go a bit.’
‘But, Mr Farquar. I don’t want a good time.’ The words, a good time, she used as if they could have nothing to do with her.
‘If we can’t have what we want in this world, then we should take what we can get.’
‘It wouldn’t be right,’ she said at last slowly. ‘I know people have different ideas, and I don’t want to press mine on anyone.’
‘But Molly -’ he began, exasperated, or so it sounded, and then he was silent.
From where I sat I could hear the grass chair creaking: she was getting out of it. ‘I’ll take your advice,’ she said. ‘I’ll get down to the sea and I’ll take the children with me. The two younger ones.’
‘To hell with the kids for once. Take your old man with you and see that Emmy Pritt doesn’t go with you this time.’
‘Mr Farquar,’ she said, ‘if Mr Slatter wants Emmy Pritt, he can have her. He can have either one or the other of us. But not both. If I took him to the sea he would be over at her place ten minutes after we got back.’
‘Ah, Molly, you women can be hell. Have some pity on him for once.’
‘Pity? Mr Slatter’s a man who needs nobody’s pity. But thank you for your good advice, Mr Farquar. You are always very kind, you and Mrs Farquar.’
And she said goodbye to my father, and when I came forward she kissed me and asked me to come and see her soon, and she went to the station to get the stores.
And so Mrs Slatter went on living. George Andrews bought his own farm and married and the wedding was at the Slatters’. Later on Emmy Pritt got sick again and had another operation and died. It was a cancer. Mr Slatter was ill for the first time in his life from grief, and Mrs Slatter took him to the sea, by themselves, leaving the children, because they were grown-up anyway. For this was years later, and Mrs Slatter’s hair had gone grey and she was fat and old, as I had heard her say she wanted to be.
The train left at midnight, not at six. Jansen’s flare of temper at the clerk’s mistake died before he turned from the counter: he did not really mind. For a week he had been with rich friends, in a vacuum of wealth, politely seeing the town through their eyes. Now, for six hours, he was free to let the dry and nervous air of Johannesburg strike him direct. He went into the station buffet. It was a bare place, with shiny brown walls and tables arranged regularly. He sat before a cup of strong orange-coloured tea, and because he was in the arrested, dreamy frame of mind of the uncommitted traveller, he was the spectator at a play which could not hold his attention. He was about to leave, in order to move by himself through the streets, among the people, trying to feel what they were in this city, what they had which did not exist, perhaps, in other big cities – for he believed that in every place there dwelt a daemon which expressed itself through the eyes and voices of those who lived there – when he heard someone ask: Is this place free? He turned quickly, for there was a quality in the voice which could not be mistaken. Two girls stood beside him, and the one who had spoken sat down without waiting for his response: there were many empty tables in the room. She wore a tight short black dress, several brass chains, and high shiny black shoes. She was a tall broad girl with colourless hair ridged tightly round her head, but given a bright surface so that it glinted like metal. She immediately lit a cigarette and said to her companion: ‘Sit down for God’s sake.’ The other girl shyly slid into the chair next to Jansen, averting her face as he gazed at her, which he could not help doing: she was so different from what he expected.
Plump, childish, with dull hair bobbing in fat rolls on her neck, she wore a flowered and flounced dress and flat white sandals on bare and sunburned feet. Her face had the jolly friendliness of a little dog. Both girls showed Dutch ancestry in the broad blunt planes of cheek and forehead; both had small blue eyes, though one pair was surrounded by sandy lashes, and the other by black varnished fringes.
The waitress came for an order. Jansen was too curious about the young girl to move away. ‘What will you have?’ he asked. ‘Brandy,’ said the older one at once. ‘Two brandies,’ she added, with another impatient look at her sister – there could be no doubt that they were sisters.
‘I haven’t never drunk brandy,’ said the younger with a giggle of surprise. ‘Except when Mom gave me some sherry at Christmas.’ She blushed as the older said despairingly, half under her breath: ‘Oh God preserve me from it!’
‘I came to Johannesburg this morning,’ said the little one to Jansen confidingly. ‘But Lilla has been here earning a living for a year.’
‘My God!’ said Lilla again. ‘What did I tell you? Didn’t you hear what I told you?’ Then, making the best of it, she smiled professionally at Jansen and said: ‘Green! You wouldn’t believe it if I told you. I was green when I came, but compared with Marie …’ She laughed angrily.
‘Have you been to Joburg before this day?’ asked Marie in her confiding way.
‘You are passing through,’ stated Lilla, with a glance at Marie. ‘You can tell easy if you know how to look.’
‘You’re quite right,’ said Jansen.
‘Leaving tomorrow perhaps?’ asked Lilla.
‘Tonight,’ said Jansen.
Instantly Lilla’s eyes left Jansen, and began to rove about her, resting on one man’s face and then the next. ‘Midnight,’ said Jansen, in order to see her expression change.
‘There’s plenty time,’ she said, smiling.
‘Lilla promised I could go to the bioscope,’ said Marie, her eyes becoming large. She looked around the station buffet, and because of her way of looking, Jansen tried to see it differently. He could not. It remained for him a bare, brownish, dirty sort of place, full of badly-dressed and dull people. He felt as one does with a child whose eyes widen with terror or delight at the sight of an old woman muttering down the street, or a flowering tree. What hunched black crone from a fairy tale, what celestial tree does the child see? Marie was smiling with charmed amazement.
‘Very well,’ said Jansen, ‘let’s go to the flicks.’
For a moment Lilla calculated, her hard blue glance moving from Jansen to Marie. ‘You take Marie,’ she suggested, direct to Jansen, ignoring her sister. ‘She’s green, but she’s learning.’ Marie half-rose, with a terrified look. ‘You can’t leave me,’ she said.
‘Oh my God!’ said Lilla resignedly. ‘Oh all right. Sit down baby. But I’ve a friend to see. I told you.’
‘But I only just came.’
‘All right, all right. Sit down I said. He won’t bite you.’
‘Where do you come from?’ asked Jansen.
Marie said a name he had never heard.
‘It’s not far from Bloemfontein,’ explained Lilla.
‘I
