The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing Page B

one side, discussing their own concerns, and the two women on the other, talking, presumably, about clothes and servants. For he had not heard a word of what Mrs Slatter and Mary had said. He had not noticed how awkward it had been for both of them.
    'You must go and see her, Mary,' he announced. I’ll give you the car one afternoon when work is slack, and you can go and have a good gossip.' He spoke quite jauntily and freely, his face clear from that load of worry, his hands in his pockets.
    Mary did not understand why he seemed alien and hostile to her, but she was piqued at this casual summing up of her needs. And she had no desire for Mrs Slatter's company. She did not want anyone's company.
    'I don't want to,' she said childishly. 'Why not?’
    But at this point the servant came out on to the verandah behind them, and held out, without speaking, his contract of service. He wanted to leave: he was needed by his family in the kraal. Mary immediately lost her temper; her irritation found a permissible outlet in this exasperating native. Dick simply pulled her back, as if she were a thing of no account, and went out to the kitchen with the native.
    She heard the boy complain that he had been working since five o'clock that morning with no food at all, because he was only in the compound a few moments before he had been summoned back by the gong. He could not work like that-, his child in his kraal was ill; he wanted to go at once. Dick replied, ignoring the unwritten rules for once, that the new missus did not know much about running a house yet, and that she would learn and that it would not happen again Speaking like this to a native, appealing to him, was contrary to Dick's ideas of the relationship between white and black, but he was furious with Mary for her lack of consideration and tact.
    Mary was quite stupefied with rage. How dare he take the native’s part against her! When Dick returned she was standing on the verandah with her hands clenched and her face set.
    'How dare you!' she said, her voice stifled.
    'If you must do these things, then you must take the consequences,' said Dick wearily. 'He's a human being, isn’t he? He's got to eat Why must everything be done all at once? It can be done over several days, if it means all that to you.'
    'It's my house,' said Mary. 'He's my boy, not yours. Don't interfere.'
    'Listen to me,' said Dick curtly. 'I work hard enough, don't I? All day I am down on the lands with these lazy black savages, fighting them to get some work out of them. You know that. I won't come back home to this damned fight, fight, fight in the house. Do you understand? I will not have it. And you should learn sense. If you want to get work out of them you have to know how to manage them. You shouldn't expect too much. They are nothing but savages after all.' Thus Dick, who had never stopped to reflect that these same savages had cooked for him better than his wife did, bad run his house, had given him a comfortable existence, as far as his pinched life could be comfortable, for years.
     
    Mary was beside herself. She said, wanting to hurt him, really wanting to hurt him for the first time, because of this new arrogance of his, 'You expect a lot from me, don't you?’
    On the brink of disaster, she pulled herself up, but could not stop completely, and after a hesitation went on, 'You expect such a lot! You expect me to live like a poor white in this pokey little place of yours. You expect me to cook myself every day because you won't put in ceilings…' She was speaking in a new voice for her, a voice she had never used before in her life. It was taken direct from her mother, when she had had those scenes over money with her father. It was not the voice of Mary, the individual (who after all really did not care so much about the bath or whether the native stayed or went), but the voice of the suffering female, who wanted to show her husband she just would not be treated like that. In a moment she