The Grass Is Singing

by Doris Lessing

For they did not discuss the murder; that was the most extraordinary thing about it. It was as if they had a sixth sense which told them everything there was to be known, although the three people in a position to explain the facts said nothing.

that. It’s not something that can be said in black and white, straight off.”

The one fact that remained still to be dealt with was the necessity for preserving appearances. Sergeant Denham understood that: it was part of his job,

The struggle that had been decided in a few brief words—or rather, in the silences between the words—had had nothing to do with the surface meaning of the scene.

For Mary, the store was the real center of her life, even more important to her than to most children.

Dust and chickens; dust and children and wandering natives; dust and the store—always the store.

She was very happy: that was perhaps her only positive quality, for there was nothing else distinctive about her,

His craving for forgiveness, and his abasement before her was the greatest satisfaction she knew, although she despised him for it.

But she did not know that loneliness can be an unnoticed cramping of the spirit for lack of companionship.

She saw on his face that queer grin of his, that was more a baring of the teeth than a smile: self-critical, assessing, defeated. She hated to see it.

Years before he bought the farm,

She thought, now, of nothing but getting away, of becoming again what she had been.

It was a feeling of being out of character that chilled her, not knowledge that she had changed.

This was the beginning of an inner disintegration in her. It began with this numbness, as if she could no longer feel or fight.

he had become accustomed to the double solitude that any marriage, even a bad one, becomes.

He stubbornly went his own way, feeling as if she had encouraged him to swim in deep waters beyond his strength, and then left him to his own devices.

Time passes quickly, rushing upwards, as it does in those periods when the various crises that develop and ripen in each life show like hills at the end of a journey, setting a boundary to an era.

It seemed that something had finally snapped inside of her, and she would gradually fade and sink into darkness. But Dick thought she was better.

And then she was furious with herself for denying something whose possibility should never even be admitted.

Charlie got annoyed. He liked Dick, though he despised him.

the superficial progressiveness of the idealist that seldom survives a conflict with self-interest. He

Always he was there, a torturing reminder of what she had to forget in order to remain herself.

that insistent low screaming seemed to her to be the noise of the sun, whirling on its hot core, the sound of the harsh brazen light, the sound of gathering heat.

She was leaning pressed back against the thin brick wall, her hands extended, palms upwards, warding off the day’s coming. She

And time taking on the attributes of space, she stood balanced in mid-air, and while she saw Mary Turner rocking in the corner of the sofa, moaning, her fists in her eyes, she saw, too, Mary Turner as she had been, that foolish girl traveling unknowingly to this end.

The conflict between her judgment on herself, and her feeling of innocence, of having been propelled by something she did not understand, cracked the wholeness of her vision.

this house would be destroyed. It would be killed by the bush, which had always hated it, had always stood around it silently, waiting for the moment when it could advance and cover it, for ever, so that nothing remained.

And then the bush avenged itself: that was her last thought.

Though what thoughts of regret, or pity, or perhaps even wounded human affection were compounded with the satisfaction of his completed revenge, it is impossible to say.