'My husband could not spare the boys.'

`But he can spare the time to be ill, eh?' The doctor's manner was bluff, easy, but at bottom indifferent; he had learned, after years in a farming district, when to cut his losses as a doctor. Not his money, which he knew he would never see, but the patients themselves. These people were hopeless.

The window-curtains faded by the sun to a dingy grey, torn and not mended, proclaimed it. Everywhere there was evidence of breakdown in will. It was a waste of time even coming. But from habit he stood over the shivering, burning Dick and prescribed. He said Dick was worn out, a shell of a man, liable to get any disease going. He spoke as strongly as he could, trying to frighten Mary into action. But her attitude said listlessly, `What is the use.' He left at last with Charlie Slatter, who was sardonically disapproving; but unable to prevent himself from thinking that when he took over this place he would remove the wire from the chicken runs for his own, and that the corrugated iron of the house and buildings might come in useful some time.

Mary sat up with Dick the first two nights of his illness, on a hard chair, to keep herself awake, holding the blankets close over the restless limbs. But Dick was not as bad as the last time; he was not afraid now, knowing that the attack would run its course.

Mary made no effort to supervise the farm work; but twice a day, so as to calm him, she drove herself round the farm on a formal and useless inspection. The boys were in the compound loafing. She knew it, and did not care. She hardly looked at the fields: the farm had become something that did not concern her.

In the daytime, when she had finished preparing Dick's cool drinks, which were all that he took, she sat idly by the bed and sank into her usual apathetic state. Her mind wandered incoherently, dwelling on any scene from her past life that might push itself to the surface. But now it was without nostalgia or desire. And she had lost all sense of time. She set the alarm clock in front of her, to remind her of the regular intervals at which she must go and fetch Dick his drinks. Moses brought her the usual trays of food at the usual tames, and she ate mechanically, not noticing what she ate, not noticing, even, that she sometimes put down her knife and fork after a couple of mouthfuls and forgot to finish what was before her.

It was on the third morning that he asked, as she whisked an egg he had brought from the compound as a gift, into milk: `Did Madame go to bed last night?' He spoke with that simple directness that always left her disarmed, not knowing how to reply.

She answered, looking down at the frothing milk, avoiding his eyes: `I must stay up with the boss,'

`Did Madame stay up the other night??

'Yes,' she answered, and quickly went into the bedroom with the drink.

Dick lay still, half delirious with fever, in an uncomfortable doze. His temperature had not dropped. He was taking this bout very hard. The sweat poured off him; and then his skin became dry and harsh and burning hot. Every afternoon the slender rod of quicksilver mounted in a trice up the frail glass tube, so she had hardly to keep it in his mouth at all, higher every time she looked at it, until by six in the evening it stood at 105. There it stayed until about midnight, while he tossed and muttered and groaned. In the early hours it dropped rapidly below normal, and he complained he was cold and needed more blankets. But he had all the blankets in the place piled over him. She heated bricks in the oven and wrapped them in cloth and put them by his feet.

That night Moses came to the bedroom door and knocked on the wood frame as he always did. She confronted him through the parted folds of the embroidered Hessian curtain.

`Yes?' she asked.

`Madame stay in this room tonight. I stay with boss.' `No,' she said, thinking of the long night spent in intimate vigil with this native. 'No, you go back to the compound and sleep. I will stay with the boss.'

He came forward through the curtain, so that she shrank back a little, he was so close to her. She saw that he held a folded mealie sack in one hand, presumably his preparation for the night. `Madame must sleep,' he said. `She is tired, yes?' She could feel the skin round her eyes drawn tight with strain and weariness; but she insisted in a hard nervous voice: `No, Moses. I must stay.' He moved to the wall where he placed his sack carefully in a space between two cupboards. Then he stood up and said, sounding wounded, even reproachful: `Madame not thinks I look after boss right, huh? I too sick sometimes. I keep blankets over boss, yes?' He moved to the bed, but not too close, and looked down at Dick's flushed face. `I give him this drink when he wakes, yes?' And the half-humorous, half reproachful voice left her disarmed against him. She looked at his face once, quickly, avoiding the eyes, then away. But it would not do to seem afraid to look at him; she glanced down at his hand, the big hand with the lighter palm hanging loosely at his side. He insisted again: `Madame think I not look after boss well?'

She hesitated, and then said nervously, `Yes, but I must stay.'

As if her nervousness and hesitation had been answer enough, the man stooped and straightened out the blankets over the sleeping man. `If boss is very sick, I call Madame,' he said.

She saw him standing by the window, blocking the square of star-strewn, bough-crossed sky, waiting for her to go. `Madame will be sick too, if she does not sleep,' he said.

She went to her cupboard, where she took out her big coat. Before she left the roam, she said, in order to assert her authority: `You will call me if he wakes.'

She went instinctively to her refuge, the sofa, next door, where she spent so many of her waking hours, and sat helplessly, squeezed into one corner. She could not bear to think of the black man there all night, next door, so close to her, with nothing but the thin brick wall separating them.

After a while she pushed a cushion to the head of the sofa, and lay down, covering her feet with the coat. It was a close night, and the air in the little room hardly stirred. The dull flame in the hanging lamp burned low, making a little intimate glimmer of light that sent up broken arcs of light into the darkness under the roof, illuminating a slope of corrugated metal, and a beam. In the room itself there was only a small yellow circle on the table beneath. Everything else was dark, there were only vague elongated shapes. She turned her head slightly to see the curtains at the window; they hung quite still; and, listening intently, the tiny night noises from the bush outside sounded suddenly as loud as her own thudding heart. From the trees a few yards away a bird called once, and insects creaked. She heard the movement of branches, as if something heavy were pushing its way through them; and thought with fear of the low crouching trees all about. She had never become used to the bush, never felt at home in it. Still, after all this time, she felt a stirring of alarm when she realized the strangeness of the encircling veld where little animals moved, and unfamiliar birds talked. Often in the night she woke and thought of the small brick house, like a frail shell that might crush inwards under the presence of the hostile bush. Often she thought how, if they left this place, one wet fermenting season would swallow the small cleared space, and send the young trees thrusting up from the floor, pushing aside brick and cement, so that in a few months there would be nothing left but heaps of rubble about the trunks of trees.

She lay tense on the sofa, every sense alert, her mind quivering like a small hunted animal turned to. face its pursuers. She ached all over with the strain: She listened to the night outside; to her own heart, and for sounds from the room next door. She heard the dry sound of horny feet moving over thin matting, a clink of glasses being moved, a low mutter from the sick man. Then she heard the feet move close, and a sliding movement as the native settled himself down on the sack between the cupboards. He was there, just through the thin wall, so close that if it had not been there his back would have been six inches from her face! Vividly she pictured the broad muscular back, and shuddered. So clear was her vision of the native that she imagined she smelled the hot acrid scent of native bodies. She could smell it, lying there in the dark. She turned her head over, and buried her face in a cushion.