The Grass Won't Grow Till Spring

By David Lytton

Few novelists have probed so honestly and deeply into the uneasy confusion of the South African scene as David Lytton. The central character of his powerful new book is Grevil Marais, who works in a Cape Town office and lives in a bungalow a few miles outside, a sophisticated but typically bewildered and angry white liberal. When we meet him he is on his own because his wife Ginny, the spoilt daughter of a rich family, has taken their daughter Jill to England for an operation. It is a relief: Grevil and Ginny, with their widely differing viewpoints, have long been drifting apart.

These new circumstances have a profoundly disturbing effect on Grevil. He at once develops a sexual obsession, almost comic in its solemnity, for his Malay servant Tina. He is made painfully aware of the pressures that lie outside the bungalow by a series of mysterious 'patriotic' messages and threats, culminating in attentions from the Special Branch. Lust and insecurity combine to fill the vacuum of his isolation and he plunges into a debauch of the flesh and spirit, during which he feels an increasing alienation from his own family and kind. Gradually, however, he begins to hear a still, small voice, in whose existence he had not previously believed, which leads him out of the desert represented by a corrupt society and his own incomplete self.

The account of this dark night of the soul is in the form of Grevil Marais' journal, a black comedy about white men and women unnaturally excited by the depravity of their environment.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Sep 28, 2011
• ISBN: 9781448205462

David Lytton

David Lytton was born, and spent his first twenty one years, in South Africa.He chose to leave at the fall of the Smuts government, but periodically returned to report on condition there for the BBC. His novels concern different aspects of the South African condition, covering all levels of social life in the country. This book is complementary to the author's The Paradise People, which presented aspects of the Afrikaner way of life, and completes his design of six works each dealing with a different strata in the strange geology of South African society. The style of each is adapted to the idiom and rhythms of the strata it is set in.

Book preview

THE GRASS

WON’T GROW TILL

SPRING

David Lytton

They shall one day find that these

excuses will not be received

FR ROBERT PARSONS

The Christian Directory

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

1

It is possible that I shall merely erupt. The pressure will mount, find a weak cranny of the skull, the top will spring open and Grevil Marais will be disgorged in a torrid, lubricious jet, stinking of sulphur. I shall cascade down upon the fifteen bungalows crushed against the slope of this little bay and burn a brimstone hole in the roofs to spy at them—yes, you out there, trying so cunningly to spy on me. At number six, where initiative nearly ruptured itself to bestow the name Sea View, they are using binoculars to keep me under observation. I have seen the flash of the lens. Yesterday I took out mine and stared straight back. Lens to lens we met in a brief shock of recognition. The old cow recoiled so fast she knocked the budgie’s cage for four at least. At number eight directly below my big window the newly-marrieds creep into their back bedroom, draw the curtains but for a slit and in between studying their own form, study mine. Number eight is graced with the name Foam Crest. Appropriate. Indeed the whole bay seems to be foaming in its lascivious thoughts, waiting for me to deliver myself into the arms of scandal. Golden syrupy arms I dare not think about. I should not be surprised to learn that the bungalows have opened a book on me. I can hear them figuring the odds.

—Four to one he does not last three days.

—Ten to one he falls on Saturday in the afternoon.

—How shall we know?

—The girl will stay. He’ll close the curtains. Then we’ll know.

—Any odds on him keeping her the night?

—My God, if he does…

My God, if I could. Draw the curtains after Saturday lunch, close out the sea glare and the telescopic lenses. Pour her a drink. Peel off the black frock and leap to collusions. We could lie together on the divan listening to the bungalows beyond gnashing their teeth. Foam Crest, in frustration, would overheat, Sea View throb with the sound of lickerish blood pounding through its varicose veins. Each would reach for the telephone, feverishly dial the number that would set the legal machine churning to mince me and the girl into digestible matter for rabid family reading on every front page in both our official languages. I should take my place beside all the Afrikaner clergymen martyred to the Immorality Act. In the eventual reversal of fortune that follows on every tyranny my name would be part of the new litany, murmured devotionally by mixed couples in their freedom to exercise affection. Grevil Marais and his faithful servant girl Tina. Amen.

I cannot hold out much longer, that much is certain. I could, I suppose, call up Betty.

—Bettina, blondy, hi there, mischief. Just got the ice out and opened a bottle.

But perhaps she’s hooked up by now.

—Sorry, darling, just off to Kelvin Grove with George.

Or Johnny or Jack or Samuel J. Filibuster the Second. Besides, she was always that little bit too compliant.

—Bettina, darling, I want to woo you a little.

—My God, Grevil, whatever for? Let’s get on with it, sweety.

Or there is Joyce continually poised for assault. But there again, too easy. No time for the prologue. Act one scene one, Joyce discovered, stripped. I don’t seem to know any nice girls. Perhaps there are no nice girls left in the country. Perhaps we are indeed all going slowly insane, twisting upon ourselves, devouring ourselves and each other like maddened rats. Grace is a possible exception, but everything has to be subsidiary to her concern for the welfare and political prospects of twelve million Africans.

—We shouldn’t really be indulging ourselves, darling, while so many poor natives are sweating out there in the heat.

—I’m sweating too, my sweet.

—Grevil, sometimes you can be disgustingly vulgar.

And I’ve lost touch with so many. Nancy, she’s in Rhodesia, indefatigably spawning. Jenny, journalising in London in a plastic mac and flat shoes, a tireless Protestant. Noelle got drowned or took drugs. We don’t talk about Noelle for one of those reasons. Time does some nasty things to the girls who made your heart bounce in the spring of the blood. When I got married to Ginny I optimistically dumped my little red book in the sea down there. No numbers now to call up and ask for relief to be sent, and anyway none of those backseat playmates had the heat to burn this thing out of my system.

As long as I can preserve some honesty with myself I shall feel justified in despising the bungalows beyond. It is helping already to write, unaccustomed as I am … I can at least arrange my thoughts in review order and carry out a brief inspection. Always good for discipline.

What then are the forces acting upon me?

1. The heat.

2. Too much liquor in the place. (Cut down.)

3. Absence of wife with daughter; liable to be absent another three months.

4. The girl Tina, of course, the mystery of her, the way she moves, the way she looks at me.

5. Lack of purpose, ideals, of any significance or shape in my life. (If a lack can be a force.)

6. No vital companionship, no real friends.

7. The law, which forbids what I want.

8. The lunacies of life in this country which deny us the dignity of adulthood. Reaction to this. Fierce.

9. Fairly honest desire to learn, by the most obvious means, something about the submerged life of our servants.

10. Human bloody nature.

I could, I suppose, prevent any further involvement by giving Tina a month’s wages and telling her not to come back till my wife returns. But she would smile and give a little victory roll on her way out of the door. She would be able to boast that her white master was unable to maintain mastery over the situation. He could not govern himself and his government of her consisted in shoving her out of his sight. When and if she ever came back to service here I’d not be able to look her in the face and her white mistress, my ever-loving Ginny, would certainly sense something and draw, inevitably, a quite wrong conclusion.

—What’s got into that girl? What have you been up to while I’ve been away?

—Nothing.

But Ginny would nurse up the little spark of suspicion until it could give us enough light to have a flaming row by, although, come to think of it, Ginny never flames. She cowers in a tear-stained crumple and reads off the monthly list of negligences. It would be Tina’s triumph, to set white master and white mistress clawing each other.

On the other hand, if I draw the curtains on Saturday, give the girl a drink and order her to strip, I’m still the master if she refuses. She would have to slink away, reduced, unable to meet the challenge of my mastery. I would be able to stare imperiously and say

—Are you then so servile, Tina, you cannot take even this opportunity for equality?

I picture this scene with some relish.

One other way that suddenly occurs to me. Tell her to come mornings only, while I’m at the office. After all there is not much to do in the place. She can take the laundry home or set aside one day for it and still be gone by the time I return at five. It is the three hours in her presence each evening that strain me. The domestic circumstance, the cosiness as evening comes down and she lights the room discreetly, the comfort of my cocktail, the expanse of night stretching out before me with nothing to beguile the time, it is this combination that lures the little lusts out of their hatches. By the time she has cleared away my supper and washed up, they are swarming the bridge in raucous mutiny. As now. The dishes clink and clap in the kitchen. She is humming a self-satisfied little tune with an amorous lilt to it. I have wrapped myself round this pen as Ulysses bound himself to the mast. There is at least a quarter of an hour before she puts on her coat and says, Good night, Master.

But here again, if I insisted on mornings only, she would smile knowingly, accede with a sly grace and leave me in no doubt she knew the cause of my request. Besides, she knows I loathe eating at the hotel, knows I have no patience providing for myself. I could not accept that smile. It would undermine my confidence in the face of all the servants yet to endure my mastery. I believe most of the white people in this idiotic country are frightened of that smile, of those occasions when the inscrutable dark face gives you a flashing look that seems to say, So you think you are superior, do you?

Come to think of it, the damned government is doing exactly what I would wish to do, solving the problem by shelving it. All you black and half-black issue of our sins, go away, go to your reserves, locations, homelands. You distract us. We find we are not equal to living with you. We do not wish to be daily provoked by your silences, your resentments, your temptings, your way of looking at us. We do not want you around continually testing our claim that we are superior. We are. By divine ordination, so that’s that.

She comes in to tell me she’s broken a glass.

—I can’t put it together again, Tina.

—I’m sorry, Master.

Now, technically, I should stop the price of it out of her wages. She stood there expecting me to tell her that. I turned again to this writing. She hesitated and then repeated that she was sorry, Master, and turned away into the kitchen. It is obvious I am not a man for grasping opportunities. God knows what I could have traded for that broken glass. Or put her across my knee and administered some stimulating corporal punishment on that beautifully moulded bottom. The price of the glass or a spanking, my sweet. (I often reflect whether I look as vile as I am.)

To pick up my thread, I have honestly tried to feel superior to the coloureds and once or twice almost succeeded; but it only requires a coloured carpenter to reduce me to my ordinary incompetence. And it would be a suicidal boast to approach a six-foot specimen of the Zulu race and say, Hey, Jack, I’m superior to you. Nor do I see any benefit for anyone in this ridiculous keeping down of the Joneses. These matters sort themselves out according to individual taste.

It struck me only this afternoon that Tina may be descended from some Balinese royal family or Malayan aristocracy. The manner and movement are bred in the bone. Racially, she is probably more pure than any white man in the country. And some of the most towering geniuses have had no formal education. There is no one criterion for these ludicrous comparisons. But by the present law of the land, if a black man discovered a cure for cancer, no white could have access to it. That is what is meant by separate development. To each his own, with most for us.

Five minutes left. She insists on punctuality. It emphasises our respective positions. She will say

—Anything else Master wants?

—No thank you, Tina, that’s all.

—If Master will say what he wants for lunch tomorrow I can get it on the way in.

What do I want for lunch tomorrow? You, Tina, in a silver dish with crisp wet lettuce enclosing you, a peeled peach between your beautiful red lips, your breasts covered with whipped cream, your navel filled with brandy which I shall light and your long sheer legs encased in a quivering aspic.

My dear Mr Marais,

This is to let you know that we in Foam Crest are most concerned to see you sitting at your table with all that steam pouring out of your head. May we send over some cold water?

Your sniggering, newly wed neighbours.

Oh God, girl, go. I have to sit here till you’ve gone. I must be seen to be sitting here, industriously occupied, hands visible to the binoculared vigilants. My face must be absorbed in chaste thought. There must not be the slightest suspicion that I might have my naked feet rubbing gently to and fro on a naked belly under the desk. They must not be able to deduce, from posture or attitude, the least filthy speculation. Of that I am determined to deprive them. Here she comes.

That passed off quite easily.

—Thank you, Tina, I said loftily. I shall be lunching at the club tomorrow, but if you could get a nice fresh lobster I shall have that for supper.

—Very good, Master. Will Master have salad with it?

—Indeed, Tina, one of your special orange salads. And ice-cream to follow.

—Very good, Master. Good night, Master.

—Good night, Tina. Be careful.

—Yes, Master. Good night.

She always closes the front door as though it were made of egg-shells. I observed the binoculars swivel to try and tell from her face or her walk…

I’m free, at any rate, of the full pressure of temptation. Free to mope. To stew in the rank juice of my sordid desires. I shall steep my head in abstractions, write about ultimates, evolution, philosophy. I shall have a long strong drink first.

She is