Read The Sun Between Their Feet for Free Online Page A

letter writing, and other impedimenta that went with being a white man.
    The next glimpse I had of the man, I still have no idea where to fit into the pattern I was at last able to make.
    It was years later. I was a young woman at a morning tea party. This one, like all the others of its kind, was an excuse for gossip, and most of that was – of course, since we were young married women – about men and marriage. A girl, married not more than a year, much in love, and unwilling to sacrifice her husband to the collective, talked instead about her aunt from the Orange Free State. ‘She was married for years to a real bad one, and then up he got and walked out. All she heard from him was a nice letter, you know, like a letter after a party or something. It said Thank you very much for the nice time. Can you beat that? And later still she found she had never been married to him because all the time he was married to someone else.’
    â€˜Was she happy?’ one of us asked, and the girl said, ‘She was nuts all right, she said it was the best time of her life.’
    â€˜Then what was she complaining about?’
    â€˜What got her was, having to say Spinster, when she was as good as married all those years. And that letter got her goat, I feel I must write and thank you for … something like that.’
    â€˜What was his name?’ I asked, suddenly understanding what was itching at the back of my mind.
    â€˜I don’t remember. Johnny something or other.’
    That was all that came out of that most typical of South African scenes, the morning tea party on the deep shady veranda, the trays covered with every kind of cake and biscuit, the gossiping young women, watching their offspring at play under the trees, filling in a morning of their lazy lives before going back to their respective homes where they would find their meals cooked for them, the table laid, and their husbands waiting. That tea party was thirty years ago, and still that town has not grown so wide that the men can’t drive home to take their midday meals with their families. I am talking of white families, of course.
    The next bit of the puzzle came in the shape of a story which I read in a local paper, of the kind that gets itself printed in the spare hours of presses responsible for much more renowned newspapers. This one was called the
Valley Advertiser,
and its circulation might have been ten thousand. The story was headed: Our Prize-winning story, The Fragrant Black Aloe. By our new Discovery, Alan McGinnery. ‘When I have nothing better to do, I like to stroll down the Main Street, to see the day’s news being created, to catch fragments of talk, and to make up stories about what I hear. Most people enjoy coincidences, it gives them something to talk about. But when there are too many, it makes an unpleasant feeling that the long arm of coincidence is pointing to a region where a rational person is likely to feel uncomfortable. This morning was like that. It began in a flower shop. There a woman with a shopping list was sayingto the salesman: “Do you sell black aloes?” It sounded like something to eat.
    â€˜â€œNever heard of them,” said he. “But I have a fine range of succulents. I can sell you a miniature rock garden on a tray.”
    â€˜â€œNo, no, no, I don’t want the ordinary aloes. I’ve got all those. I want the Scented Black Aloe.”
    â€˜Ten minutes later, waiting to buy a toothbrush at the cosmetic counter at our chemist, Harry’s Pharmacy, I heard a woman ask for a bottle of Black Aloe.
    â€˜Hello, I thought, black aloes have suddenly come into my life!
    â€˜â€œWe don’t stock anything like that,” said the salesgirl, offering rose, honeysuckle, lilac, white violets and jasmine, while obviously reflecting that black aloes must make a bitter kind of perfume.
    â€˜Half an hour later I was in a seedshop, and when I heard a petulant female