The Sun Between Their Feet by Doris Lessing Read Free Book Online Page A

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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜â€œSo you’ve decided to come in?” she complained.
    â€˜â€œI 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 littlestory 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”.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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