A World of Strangers Read online

  A WORLD OF STRANGERS

  NADINE GORDIMER

  ‘I want the strong air of the most profound night to remove flowers and letters from the arch where you sleep, and a black boy to announce to the gold-minded whites the arrival of the reign of the ear of corn.’

  FEDERICO GARCÍA LORCA

  Contents

  Prologue

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Part Two

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Part Three

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Part Four

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Part Five

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Acknowledgements

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  Prologue

  I hate the faces of peasants.

  I thought that the day the ship anchored at Mombasa, and I saw the Africans for the first time. The whole quayside was alive with them, their faces turned up momentarily from labour as we came in. In the quiet that followed the cessation of the ship’s engines, I saw them clearly. Heavy, mild, and brutish faces, on which emotion settles momentarily, from the outside, like a fly on the face of an ox, and is flicked away as a fly is flicked away, by an involuntary twitch that is nothing more conscious than the reaction of a muscle. I hated them in England, those faces in country lanes, red and smiling at nothing. These down among the crates on the quay shone black instead of red under the sweat, that was all, and the bloodshot eyes were brown instead of that bright vacant blue, appropriately the colour of blankness, space.

  What happens to faces like these if, finally, goaded and pricked as slow beasts must be before anger rises through their turgid patience, they are roused? I could not imagine. I only knew the sharp, jowled, curved, and jutted faces of those shaped by books and doubts and ambitions, which, in anger, take on the splendid horror of Notre-Dame gargoyles. And the only Africans I had ever met with before were a few students at Oxford, and two writers and a painter in London, and they belonged in the gargoyle class, rather magnificently carved by their struggles to get there.

  While I was thinking this, I was sitting in the launch that was taking us from the ship to the shore (our ship was too large to draw right into dock) beside Mrs Turgell and her daughter Rina, responding pleasantly to their exclamations at the beauty of the palm-trees. ‘The greenness! Can you believe it? It makes you thirsty!’ Mrs Turgell was saying, sitting up very straight like an excited child. And for once her daughter was almost like her, twisting her long young neck this way and that, and crying ‘Oh mummy! Do look!’ ‘Exactly like something out of Somerset Maugham!’ said Mrs Turgell, turning to me with that mixture of gaiety and appeal – you felt she so fervently wanted you to experience what she was experiencing that, however romantic and idiotic it might be, she was irresistible.’ Can’t you imagine degenerating most marvellously in one of those thatched huts, with a beautiful native girl, a Polynesian or something, with long black hair?’ ‘Mummy, you ass,’ said the daughter, in matter-of-fact reproach, but her mother put out her hand over mine in my lap for a moment, laughing.

  Mrs Turgell did not flirt with me although she knew and I knew that I liked her better than her daughter. After all, she liked herself better than her daughter; it was one of those small tacit agreements taken for granted between us in our shipboard friendship, then about a week old. I was not quite – that expression beloved of women – young enough to be her son, because she was probably forty and I was twenty-six, but I was only eight years older than her daughter. I saw them both in the ship’s offices at Venice when we were queueing for our embarkation cards, and took a dislike to their familiar high English voices at once. By the time we touched Mombasa they were almost the only people on the ship with whom I had anything like a close acquaintance. I had made up my mind that they would not speak to anyone but the ship’s officers and the few Italians on whom I heard them flaunt their theatrical Italian, but Mrs Turgell slipped on to the stool beside me at the little bar before lunch one day and fell at once into her amiable chatter, apparently quite ready to overlook the fact that she had recognized me as one of the ‘stuffy English’ to whom she belonged and about whom she was often amusing as well as disparaging.

  We spent the day ashore in Mombasa together, Mrs Turgell, Rina, and I; or rather Stella (as Mrs Turgell insisted I call her) and I were together, alternately losing and finding Rina the way one progresses when in the company of an unleashed puppy. When we got out of the docks, I wanted to get a taxi to take us into the town, but Stella insisted that it would be more fun to walk and ‘explore as we go’. (‘Explore’ was one of the bright schoolgirl words which abounded in Stella’s conversation.) We had not gone far up a wide road spattered with shade, fallen flowers, and seed-pods from brilliant trees when Rina disappeared into some sort of warehouse, her badly-fitting green slacks flapping against her long legs, her cheap sandals, bought in Port Said, with pictures of palm-trees painted on them in red and green, slapping against her thin bare feet. She wore a boy’s American shirt with a design of film-stars’ faces hanging outside the pants, and it was by this garment that her mother, charmingly dressed in some sort of full dress that showed her small pretty figure and bared the delicate flesh of her shoulders and the top of her breasts, recognized her in the gloom of the warehouse.

  We went in after the girl and found some other passengers from the ship, the consul and his mother and wife, standing about and prodding at bundles of elephant tusks, tusks of all sizes, hanging from the roof and piled on the floor. With the knowledgeable eagerness with which people love to impart information of which they themselves were ignorant until a few minutes before, Rina and the rest of the little group passed on to us, interrupting and correcting each other, what the attendant of the warehouse had just told them about the prices of elephant tusks. The consul, although he had never before been stationed in Africa – he was on his way to take up an appointment in the Belgian Congo – murmured about the ivory market with the matter-of-fact acceptance of one accustomed to the exotic He had lived for years in the Balkans and in Turkey, I gathered. ‘The poor little things,’ said Rina, sliding her sandal over the short curve of a baby elephant’s tusk; and I could see that she was going to be another of those English women who can love only animals: the weak, dumb, and dependent.

  We all struggled out into the sun again together, an untidy group, undecided about our destination. The consul’s wife said nothing but looked eloquently, and I guessed that she must have timidly expressed a wish aside to Rina in the dim warehouse, because Rina, slopping gawkily along, said, ‘Let’s find Kalindini Road. That’s the place where the shops are where you can buy topaz. Mummy, I want a big oblong topaz for my little finger.’ ‘They’re Indian jewellers, I believe,’ said the consul’s wife, politely, as if repeating something of no interest to herself. ‘Oh and I’d like to find the sandal-makers,’ said Stella; and the whole sight-seeing excursion threatened to fizzle out into one of those wearisome foreign shopping expeditions where the men trail around patiently behind the women.

  The consul had joined the ship at Port Said. He had all the distinguishing physical characteristics of the ideal upper-middle-class Englishman which I had not. My appearance was such a thorough debunking of the wistful popular conception of what my sort of breeding and background ought to produce that it seemed deliberate, the gleeful contrivance of bored genes; th
ough I didn’t delude myself with the consolation that by this fact I had escaped the insular Britannic stamp, prime on my rump, as it were. I have brown eyes and brown hair which is not as straight as an Anglo-Saxon’s should be, but my large features and too-big head set on my stocky body come straight out of Dickens and nowhere else. (Not one of Dickens’s slim Copperfields, but a friend of one of the heroes, one of those staunch friends with large, intelligent dark eyes to make up for their unattractiveness, etc. This was pointed out to me at Oxford, but I confirm it for myself.) The consul was tall – inevitably – sharp-kneed, large-footed, and broad-shouldered, and he had a long patrician face with thick eyebrows over fine grey eyes which looked blue when he was looking at the sea or the sky. He had all his hair and it was straight and grey. He was a Celtic type and I suppose was once dark-haired. His mother was exactly like him (I let the situation rather than biological correctness decide precedent here), almost as tall, every bit as distinguished. They used each other’s names all the time, like people in a play: ‘Mother, would you like your tea now?’ ‘Yes, Hugh, I think so.’ They never called the wife anything at all: ‘Where is she?’ ‘Down in the cabin, I suppose.’ Sometimes when the consul was forced, as he seemed to feel himself to be, to answer for her in her presence, he referred to her as ‘my wife’, giving a curiously legal ring to the designation, as a judge might speak of the defendant or the plaintiff. For the first few days, when we were passing through the Red Sea and lived in a spell of heat anyway, as if the world had stopped turning, so that recollection of whom we saw or what we did was dreamlike, she did not appear at all, so far as I knew. Heat or seasickness must have kept her to her cabin. The consul and his mother were alone at meals, and I played bridge with them several times in the air-conditioned card-room, where we sat around numbly like so much refrigerated food, and if our hands touched accidentally, recoiled at the fish-like contact of chilled flesh.

  I had no idea of the existence of the wife until, on the first day on which we woke up in the Indian Ocean and the streaming, flapping, gusty life of the monsoon, I was attracted to a remote upper deck by the yapping of a dog, and found that there was indeed, not one dog, but three, housed in special kennels up there. All three were out of their kennels and were fawning in joy over a dumpy, lumpy little woman with tiny features buried in a big, round face. Bunches of curly brown hair, to which some sort of reddish dye gave a bright nimbus, made her face seem even bigger, and even I, who know nothing about the subtleties of women’s make-up, could see that there was something very wrong with the way she had applied hers. Her florid cheeks had rounds of another tone of red overlaying them. It was an astonishingly innocent face, in all its coarse crudity. She introduced me to the dogs and squatted, bunched up, on the deck, her arms round the neck and her cheek against the ears of the biggest one, a brown retriever. Like Rina, I supposed, she must be one of those women who love only dogs; but somehow I felt that this was in a different way and for different reasons – the woman hung round that retriever’s neck the first day I saw her the way a child communes in silent love with an animal when humans fail him. With her I should say it was not that she could not love anything other than animals, but that animals were all she had to love.

  She certainly did look grotesquely out of place beside the consul and his mother. She always wore a great assortment of varied jewellery, as if in nervous confusion, not knowing which piece to choose, and that day in Mombasa, perhaps in honour of the jaunt ashore, she was even more recklessly adorned than usual. A tourist’s Egyptian necklace made after the style of the huge fringed bead collars from Tutankhamen’s tomb warred with a violently patterned dress, and there was a diamond fox-head with ruby eyes pinned on her bosom, and plastic cornflowers under the gay hair curling round her ear-lobes. In the Indian jeweller’s she sidled timidly and excitedly up to her husband and his mother where they stood, very tall and cool and pastel, near the door. In her little plump beringed hand she held cupped, like a drop of rain-water faintly tinged with rust, a large topaz. The consul looked down at her, his hands crossed on the walking-stick held in front of his white tropical suit. His mother held her white parasol similarly at rest. ‘Please to remember your size,’ he said. His voice, like his eyes, was fixed somewhere above the frizz of the reddish head. His wife went back to the counter, carefully keeping her hand level. I don’t know whether or not he bought her a topaz, in keeping with her stature or not, because, to my surprise and relief, Stella came up to me at that moment and whispered -‘Let’s go. It’s a pity to waste the morning haggling in here. I don’t suppose they’re genuine anyway.’

  The shop was full of people from the ship now – they kept coming in, as, in passing, they saw fellow passengers already inside, and soon every woman was fired with the desire to own a topaz. Some were arguing over carats and price, and one man, proud of his ability to deal with ‘the natives’ of any country, was informing the jeweller that if an expert in Johannesburg pronounced the stones synthetic, he would sue the Indian jeweller. Rina, long hip jutting as she leaned against the counter, was giving her opinion of each purchase in her loudest, highest English voice, and swooping about from group to group. ‘What?’ she called, looking up over the huddled bargaining heads. ‘No, I’m not coming. Mummy, you are frightfully mean! Can’t I have even a weeny one? Look at this smoky little thing.’ Her mother went over to her and they spoke in the low voices of controlled argument for a moment, but Stella joined me at the door, without her. ‘Come. Let’s be off,’ she said, shortly, because she was angry. But her good manners and the pleasing facade of even temperament she had been taught as a girl immediately gave cover to irritation. She said lightly, ‘I wonder what the story is behind the consul and that poor little creature?’

  ‘Well, she is rather awful, isn’t she? I mean you feel annoyed at his being so obviously ashamed of her, and at the same time you wouldn’t really care to have a wife like that for yourself.’

  ‘Oh she’s vulgar, all right,’ said Stella. ‘But so are they in their way – don’t you think? – Such official-looking impeccability, such diplomatic immunity from life itself! And that dragonish queenly old lady, with china tea in her veins and venom in her heart, I’m sure. Have you looked at their nostrils, those two? Positively curled back.’

  I laughed. ‘What’s that significant of?’

  ‘I’m always afraid of those nostrils,’ she said wisely. Of course, Stella was just the sort of woman to believe in physiognomy and signs and portents, too.

  ‘Oh I do think people are fascinating! Don’t you?’ She was instantly buoyant again at the thought; she paused as we walked, overcome with an urgency of eagerness. I had noticed in her these very real moments of excitement and relief, when as now, by the pronouncement afresh of some commonplace generality, she reaffirmed or rediscovered for herself some concept of life that was important to her and which she sometimes lost or feared to lose.

  As I have said, there was something about this woman which made one feel surly if one did not respond, as it was so easy to do, to the mood generated by her enthusiasms, even if one did not happen to share the enthusiasms themselves. I don’t think I find people ‘fascinating’ in quite the way she meant, but, just the same, we talked and laughed in a shared inconsequential lightheartedness all the way in the taxi that took us to Nyali Beach.

  She was undressed before I was – I suppose she must have had her swimming suit on under her dress – and by the time I came out from behind my clump of bushes, clutching the rolled-up bundle of my shirt and trousers, she was already in the pale turquoise, transparent sea. Although (I calculated) she would be of the generation of the Twenties, when girls ‘did everything’ perhaps even more determinedly than they do now, her demeanour in the water immediately set her apart from the generation of the girls I knew and with whom I had swum at home, or on holidays in Italy or France. She did not swim at all, but floated gently, tamely, and conversationally, close in-shore. She did not wear a bathing cap, and her short
, pretty blonde hair, like the make-up on her pretty face, remained perfect. You could see that all her life her body had been carefully shielded from the sun, and in place of the tanned legs and arms and the yellowish-brown necks I was used to associating with women, all her flesh shone pale and pearly under the shallow water and against the swimming suit which was a darker tone of the water colour. It was a remarkably youthful and pretty body (I’m afraid forty seemed old to me, for a woman), though not like a girl’s, softer than a young girl’s, and I admired it, though oddly enough I didn’t find I desired it I felt sorry I didn’t desire it; I supposed I was conditioned for ever to firm-fleshed girls with the limits of carefully-cultivated sunburn imposing a pattern counter to the pattern of their bodies.

  I swam about a bit and then floated in the tepid calm with her for nearly an hour. After the dreary wet summer and the cold wet autumn at home – after a whole lifetime of dreary English winters and wet English springs – I was enchanted with the slack, warm beauty of the place. I seemed to feel an actual physical melting, as if some component of my blood that had remained insoluble for twenty-six years of English climate had suddenly, wonderfully, dissolved into free-flowing. I gazed in lazy physical joy at the lovely, smooth-patterned boles of the coconut palms, waving their far-off bouquets of green away above our heads, the water, and the white beach. I lifted an arm out of the water to feel the air, warm as the water. I dug my feet into the clean sand, so soft its substance was soft as the water. The last jagged crystal in my English blood melted away.

  But Stella Turgell talked of Italy. Warmth and beauty and physical happiness meant Italy to her, though they might be experienced on a beach on the East Coast of Africa. She and her daughter had just spent nearly two months in Florence, and apparently Stella spent several months of each year somewhere in Italy – in Rome, Perugia, Venice, Garda, and, always, Florence. They did not seem to me to be really rich people, and I wondered what circumstances in their background gave them this freedom. Stella’s passion for Italy was nineteenth-century, Byronic – the nearest I can possibly bring it to the present day is to say that when it came to Italy and all things Italian, she saw everything like one of those young girls in Forster’s early novels about the English in Italy, girls who marry the libertine sons of dentists in places with names like Poggibonsi, or whose lives are changed irrevocably after being spectator to an Italian quarrel in an Italian square. The Italy of Moravia and the realist films did not exist for her. Her way of talking about Italy embarrassed me, even when we confined ourselves to discussing paintings and churches, though my mood that day when we were floating in the sea was such that nothing could irritate or embarrass me more than mildly.