liked taking in single men, for she was a widow living alone, but she did like the look of him, and a week later they were married. For eleven months they lived in a dream of happiness. Then he walked out and she hadn’t heard of him since, except for one letter, thanking her for all her kindness. That letter was like a slap in the face, she said. You don’t thank a wife for being kind, like a hostess, do you? Nor do you send her Christmas cards. But he had sent her one the Christmas after he left, and there it was, on the mantelpiece, With Best Wishes for a Happy Christmas. But he was so good to me, she said. He gave me every penny he ever earned, and I didn’t need it, because my first hubby left me provided for. He got a job as a ganger on the railways. She could never look at another man after him. No woman who knew anything about life would. He had his faults of course, like everyone. He was restless and moody, but he loved her honestly, she could see that, and underneath it all, he was a family man.
‘That went on until the cocks began to crow and my face ached with yawning.
‘Next morning I continued my drive North, and that night, in Southern Rhodesia, I drove into a small town full of dust and people standing about in their best clothes among milling cattle. The hotel was full. It was Show time.
‘When I saw the house, I thought time had turned back twenty-four hours, for there were the creepers weighing down the roof, and the trellised veranda, and the red dust heaped all around it. The attractive woman who came to the door was fair-haired. Behind her, through the door, I saw a picture on the wall of the same handsome blond man with his hard grey eyes that had sunmarks raying out from around them into the sunburn. On the floor was playing a small child, obviously his.
‘I said where I had come from that morning, and she said wistfully that her husband had come from there three years before. It was all just the same. Even the inside of the house was like the other, comfortable and frilly and full. But it needed a man’s attention. All kinds of things needed attention. We had supper and she talked about her “husband” – he had lasted until the birth of the baby and a few weeks beyond it – in the same impatient, yearning, bitter, urgent voice of her sister of the evening before. As I sat there listening, I had the ridiculous feeling that in hearing her out so sympathetically I was being disloyal to the other deserted “wife” four hundred miles South. Of course he had his faults, she said. He drank too much sometimes, but men couldn’t help being men. And sometimes he went into a daydream for weeks at a stretch and didn’t hear what you said. But he was a good husband, for all that. He had got a job in the Sales Department of the Agricultural Machinery Store, and he had worked hard. When the little boy was born he was so pleased … and then he left. Yes, he did write once, he wrote a long letter saying he would never forget her “affectionate kindness”. That letter really upset her. It was a funny thing to say, wasn’t it?
‘Long after midnight I went to sleep under such a large tinted picture of the man that it made me uncomfortable. It was like having someone watching you sleep.
‘Next evening, when I was about to drive out of Southern Rhodesia into Northern Rhodesia, I was half looking for a little town full of clouds of reddish dust and crowding cattle, the small house, the waiting woman. There seemed no reason why this shouldn’t go on all the way to Nairobi.
‘But it was not until the day after that, on the Copper Belt in Northern Rhodesia, that I came to a town full of cars and people. There was going to be a dance that evening. The big hotels were full. The lady whose house I was directed to was plump, red-haired, voluble. She said she loved putting people up for the night, though there was no need for her to do it since while her husband might have his faults (she said this with what seemed like hatred) he made good money at the garage where he was a mechanic. Before she was married, she had earned her living by letting rooms to travellers, which was how she had met her husband. She talked about him while we waited for him to come in to supper. “He does this every night, every night of my life! You’d think it wasn’t much to ask to come in for meals at the right time, instead of letting everything spoil, but once he gets into the bar with the men, there is no getting him out.”
‘There wasn’t a hint in her voice of what I had heard in the voices of the other two women. And I have often wondered since if in her case too absence would make the heart grow fonder. She sighed often and deeply, and said that when you were single you wanted to be married, and when you were married, you wanted to be single, but what got her was, she had been married before, and she ought to have known better. Not that this one wasn’t a big improvement on the last, whom she had divorced.
‘He didn’t come in until the bar closed, after ten. He was not as good-looking as in his photographs, but that was because his overalls were stiff with grease, and there was oil on his face. She scolded him for being late, and for not having washed, but all he said was: “Don’t try to housetrain me.” At the end of the meal she wondered aloud why she spent her life cooking and slaving for a man who didn’t notice what he ate, and he said she shouldn’t bother, because it was true, he didn’t care what he ate. He nodded at me, and went out again. It was after midnight when he came back, with a stardazed look, bringing a cold draught of night air into the hot lamplit room.
‘“So you’ve decided to come in?” she complained.
‘“I walked out into the veld a bit. The moon is strong enough to read by. There’s rain on the wind.” He put his arm around her waist and smiled at her. She smiled back, her bitterness forgotten. The wanderer had come home.’
I wrote to Alan McGinnery and asked him if there had been a model for his story. I told him why I wanted to know, told him of the old man who had walked up to our house through the bush, fifteen years before. There was no reason to think it was the same man, except for that one detail, the letters he wrote, like ‘bread and butter’ letters after a party or a visit.
I got this reply: ‘I am indebted to you for your interesting and informative letter. You are right in thinking my little story had its start in real life. But in most ways it is far from fact. I took liberties with the time of the story, moving it forward by years, no, decades, and placing it in a modern setting. For the times when Johnny Blakeworthy was loving and leaving so many young women – I’m afraid he was a very bad lot! – are now out of the memory of all but the elderly among us. Everything is so soft and easy now. “Civilization” so-called has overtaken us. But I was afraid if I put my “hero” into his real setting, it would seem so exotic to present-day readers that they would read my little tale for the sake of the background, finding that more interesting than my “hero”.
‘It was just after the Boer War. I had volunteered for it, as a young man does, for the excitement, not knowing what sort of war it really was. Afterwards I decided not to return to England. I thought I would try the mines, so I went to Johannesburg, and there I met my wife, Lena. She was the cook and housekeeper in a men’s boarding-house, a rough job, in rough days. She had a child by Johnny, and believed herself to be married to him. So did I. When I made enquiries I found she had never been married, the papers he had produced at the office were all false. This made things easy for us in the practical sense, but made them worse in some ways. For she was bitter and I am afraid never really got over the wrong done to her. But we married, and I became the child’s father. She was the original of the second woman in my story. I describe her as home-loving, and dainty in her ways. Even when she was cooking for all those miners, and keeping herself and the boy on bad wages, living in a room not much larger than a dog’s kennel, it was all so neat and pretty. That was what took my fancy first. I daresay it was what took Johnny’s too, to begin with, at any rate.
‘Much later – very much later, the child was almost grown, so it was after the Great War – I happened to hear someone speak of Johnny Blakeworthy. It was a woman who had been “married” to him. It never crossed our minds to think – Lena and me – that he had betrayed more than one woman. After careful thought, I decided never to tell her. But I had to know. By then I had done some careful field work. The trail began,
