A World of Strangers Read online

  ‘Have some.’ I felt happily solicitous toward this pixie, strayed out of a Barrie play. He got his soup, and I helped myself to a plateful of risotto – like most arty women of her type, this Sylvia cooked very well, but overdid the garlic in the salad and on the hot bread – and we went back to the party together. He went up to the tall woman with the Bloomsbury elegance, and she looked down and spoke to him with the half-attention of connubial familiarity.

  The record planged and faded; was lifted off and replaced with a tango. Suddenly, Steven Sitole and the little old man’s wife, Dorothea, were dancing. She was as tall as he was, and they danced perfectly: like professionals, giving an exhibition, unaware of and uninterested in each other, his drunken face in a courteous trance, as if transfixed by the graceful and precise pattern through which his feet were guiding him, her abashed and broken, wilted body recalled to discipline. She danced as she spoke: as if everything were over, for her. Presently he returned her to her coffee.

  At some point during the evening, Anna Louw had done something to her make-up and acquired – I suppose from the hostess – a shawl of red silk over the business-like dress she had been wearing when she walked into my office five or six hours earlier. I danced with her; she had the air of distinctness that a sober person has in a room where everyone else’s aura is quickened and blurred by euphoria – as if their souls were in motion while hers was still. ‘Good party,’ I said.

  ‘I’m glad.’

  I felt sorry I’d wished her someone else in the bar in the town.

  Steven Sitole had been standing over the solitary African girl, one arm on the wall behind her, his back screening her from the room, in the other hand, the glass that was never empty. Yet this show of attention had the perfunctoriness of a joke; it reminded me, somehow, of the absent-minded attentions of the twin to the American beauty at Marion Alexander’s lunch.

  ‘Steven’s a charmer,’ I said.

  She glanced at him a moment, but said nothing. ‘Have you had a chance to talk to Sam, Sam Mofokenzazi?’

  ‘Not really. That’s the little one?’

  ‘He writes well – I think. I don’t mean his job – he’s a journalist on a paper for Africans that’s published in English. His own stuff, stories and so on. And he writes music.’

  ‘And Sitole? What’s he do?’

  ‘Insurance agent. He used to be a newspaper man, too. He spent a year in England after the war.’

  ‘Is that the important thing about him?’

  ‘Yes.’ She looked at me in my innocence. ‘That’s rather like returning from that bourne whence no traveller returns. Africans can’t pop in and out of Africa.’

  The African girl had been persuaded, giggling, away from the wall, and now she sat awkwardly on a table, among the bottles, disposing her head and her hands in the manner of someone who is about to sing. The gramophone was stopped. In the hastily assembled silence (a voice cried out: What’s happened to the music, damn it? – a group of talkers were shushed, Sylvia crept grandly about refilling glasses with wine) she assumed a professional coquetry. She sang a popular torch song, in the innocent, sensual voice that I have always enjoyed in American Negro singers, the pagan voice in which sex is not suggestive and guilty, but overt and fine. She tried to imitate the vocal titillations of white singers she must have heard on records, but the strange shrill of her high notes and the gentleness of her low notes escaped artifice: all the warm, continuous gamut of sensuality was there, from the mother’s breast to the lover’s bed. Delight was like a sudden, simple happiness in the room; the catalyst that I have sometimes seen come upon the isolated units of an audience at a concert. She sang on; another torch song – a piece of wild, ritualistic swing that sent the young Peter off dancing to himself in a corner, panting and jerking – even a sentimental ballad in Yiddish, and then songs in her own tongue and others that sounded the same to me. Sometimes, from across the room, Sam and Peter would come in like the toll of two big bells, or the low accent of the big bass. Sylvia, who had tiptoed up beside Anna Louw, whispered, ‘Thank God she sings, at least. Their women never utter. One simply c-can’t have them.’

  ‘How did she get here?’ I asked, since it was obviously not by invitation. ‘The way I did?’

  Anna laughed, ‘Steven must have brought her. Quite a triumph; she’s very popular. She’s Betty Ntolo. She sings with their best band.’

  When her songs were over, the African girl was danced round once by the untidy young man who had talked about painting, and then returned to the chair in which she had been sitting all evening. Once she was not performing, an insurmountable naïveté cast her, so to speak, underfoot; it was impossible to rescue her from it, because the moment anyone, with a polite word or an invitation to dance, made an attempt, they threatened to go down with her in the threshing ineptness of her giggling unresponse. I danced with her, for three or four interminable minutes. I had gone up to her to tell her how much I liked her songs, but once I had said this, and she had giggled as if she were going to bring out something paralysingly funny, and then said the single word: ‘Yes,’ I was aware that I couldn’t simply walk away, and couldn’t carry the conversation one monosyllable further. So I asked her to dance, a request to which she could, and did, respond by getting to her feet, tittering, and saying nothing.

  She had a pretty, golden-brown face powdered dull, and a sooty beauty-spot was drawn next to her left eye; her ears, like Peter’s, were smaller and neater than any adult ears I had ever seen, and in them hung large gilt hoops. She wore a kind of turban of black chiffon that covered her hair, and was secured with gilt-nobbed hatpins. Every now and then, as she followed me, her pink tongue came out to touch her top lip and looked pleasing against her white teeth. She had large, round, prominent eyes, bovine and rather yellowed. They were quite blank; as if, here, she was frightened to think.

  The top half of her body was slight and her waist small, but she was weighted down with great solid hams, monumental calves, and feet that made trumpery out of the high-heeled sandals strapped round them.

  I said to her, ‘I hear you sing with a band.’

  ‘Yes.’ Like a child trapped in the kindly interrogation of a well-meaning uncle.

  ‘What’s the band called?’

  She answered something unintelligible; her brown hand with its meaningless armour of red-painted nails was cold with pride and misery.

  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t quite catch it.’ I bent my head to her.

  Like many singers, who successfully manage half a dozen languages in as many songs, she was not so good when she spoke. ‘The Township Ten,’ she said, with a strong accent.

  The Indians were going; the wife stood at the door with a camel-hair coat over her sari, patient and bored, while the husband made his conscientious round of farewells. Anna was dancing with the Englishman with the baby teeth, and the redhead, suddenly before me, blew a cloud of smoke between her face and mine. When I had led the African girl to a chair, I went back to the redhead. ‘About time,’ she said.

  ‘You’ve been much occupied.’

  As we danced, she leant her head back to talk and her two breasts touched my chest firmly and distinctly, buttonholing me.

  ‘Stanley’s a bloody leech,’ she said. ‘You drunk?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So’m I. Let’s have some wine.’

  We went, clumsily arm-about, like two boxers after a fight, to the drinks. ‘How’d you like to have a picture like that of yourself in your room, Sam?’ Steven Sitole was saying. ‘Oh I know it’s revolting to have oneself staring at oneself all the time,’ said Sylvia, hiding her face in her glass of wine. When she suddenly spoke fluently, it was as if some other self were speaking up inside her. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Sam, admiring a foreign custom. ‘I think, for a woman, it’s rather nice.’ ‘A rep-proach to me, a reproach to i-idiotic vanity-did I ever look like that? Or d-do I only think n-now that I did? Now that I can blame the difference on baggy eyes and wrinkles
and a jacket crown on a tooth?’

  I am bad at caressing women publicly; I looked foolishly encumbered by the redhead, and I knew it, and so all the pleasure was gone from the contact with her tall, warm body. We dropped apart and she went to Stanley, murmuring up to him in relief at the escape. I drank somebody’s glass of wine and looked from Sylvia to her portrait. ‘When was it done?’ ‘Oh don’t be so bloody t-tactless!’ There was laughter. The portrait looked right into your eyes, the way she herself did; but she must have been much more self-centred then: the face looked aware of the feather curving down from the hat, the shadows exchanged by the black hair and the wine-coloured dress. It was a portrait of a woman thinking about herself. ‘A Spanish or Italian beauty,’ I said.

  ‘Why is that always considered the compliment?’ Sylvia asked the company. ‘I’m a Jewess; couldn’t one say I used to be a beautiful one?’

  ‘Berenice, then,’ I said, looking at her. ‘That’s exactly it. The beautiful queen.’ Talk and laughter and argument swept another way. I could not follow it because of a pressing need; I wandered through the house but did not come upon the bathroom, so I went out into the dark garden, beyond the light of the windows. The physical relief, the fresh night air after the close room, and slow, pleasant turning of the wine in my head brought me to peace with myself. I staggered a little, but I was at home on this earth. A shape like my own brushed past the shrubs, and I was joined by someone. It was Steven Sitole. ‘What are you doing here?’ he said, as we stood companionably. I laughed. ‘Same as you.’

  He found this very funny. ‘- I’m selling books, I’m connected with a publishing firm.’

  He took out a packet of cigarettes and we strolled down to the gate, smoking. ‘I used to be a journalist,’ he said. ‘I know, Anna Louw told me. What made you give it up?’ ‘Various things,’ he said, in the vague, jaunty tone, mysterious and important, that I recognized as the tone of the man whom many jobs give up. ‘I had other things on the go. I couldn’t manage everything at once.’ ‘So what do you do now?’ Anna had told me, but I had forgotten already. ‘Insurance. Much more money in it.’ ‘You mean the usual sort of thing, life policies and so on.’ ‘That’s right,’ he laughed pleasantly. ‘Fire, funeral, accident, loss – all that stuff. Of course, we’re not like you people, mostly we insure against things we’re sure will happen, funerals mainly. Yes, I exploit the poor simple native, and in return he gets a lovely funeral – what do you say, a slap-up do.’

  ‘Did you really like England?’

  ‘I shouldn’t ever have come back here.’ He stumbled and I caught his arm. The darkness accepted him; his face and hands were gone in it; he sat down on the grass. ‘If you’d stayed,’ I said, searching for the right kind of meaningless reassurance, ‘if you’d stayed, you would have longed to come back.’

  ‘Man, there’s nothing in Africa I want,’ he said, grinning, and I became aware of his face again, though I could not see anything but his teeth; that smooth, polished-wood face with the withdrawn eyes, the delicate nose, the gathering-up of planes toward the mouth. Suppose he had been born to the old Africa, before the Arab and the white man came, suppose he had had a tribe, and a place in that tribe, and had known that his life was to hunt and fight and reproduce and live in the shelter of fear of the old gods – would that have been what he wanted? I thought of him in the room from where the blur of music and voices sounded, lean and gangling and befuddled, with a glass of brandy in his pink-palmed hand with the too-long nails. The idea was sad and ridiculous. And then I thought of myself, and what I wanted: a house lived in, a place made, a way of life created for me by my fathers, a destiny I could accept without choice or question. That was not sad and ridiculous. The wine closed over my head, and, sunk in myself, I fiercely and dismayedly resisted the idea; that could not be sad and ridiculous. It was what I wanted and could not get.

  ‘Let’s go,’ he said. I turned, in agreement, toward the house.

  ‘Let’s go and drink. I’ll take you to a place. You’re an Englishman, I can take you. Show you round. “Can I show you around?” Do the honours.’ The phrase pleased him and he repeated it, shaking his head and making a clicking sound of approval.

  ‘I came with Anna Louw. How can I?’

  ‘Woman’ll get herself home,’ he said. He stood up, threw his cigarette into the hedge, and a dog, scavenging along the gutter in the deserted street, stiffened into hostility and began to bark at him. He cursed it amiably. ‘They always bark at us. You don’t have to teach them, they know. People like Sylvia don’t know what to do to stop them. Hers is locked up, so he won’t embarrass her.’

  When we got inside again, he seemed to forget his suggestion. He got into a political argument with Sam, Dorothea Welz, and the Englishman, Stanley, against whom the redhead leaned, silent. I danced, dazedly, with Sylvia, and, her tongue loosened by wine, we talked about London and Aden Parrot paper-backs. Anna Louw came up and said, ‘Darling, I have to be in court at nine tomorrow and I haven’t even finished preparing my stuff.’ ‘Anna!’ Sylvia was concerned. ‘Honestly, I must go. But you don’t have to come,’ she said to me. ‘Don’t you come because of me. Someone else will always take you home.’ I protested my willingness to go, but she knew I didn’t want to. I thanked her, tried to tell her across the restlessness of the room that I would telephone her to do so properly, but she slipped out with the considerateness of one who does not want to break up a party. Old Welz went with her: Dorothea had rushed up, when she saw Anna leaving, and begged: ‘For heaven’s sake, take poor Egon with you, will you, Anna? He’s had a long day and he’s quite dead.’ ‘Thank God.’ The little man put his arm round Anna. ‘It’s enough. Let’s go. Sylvia, Sylvia, thenk you. You are a woman of qvality. Look how you last; the others,’ his chin jerked in the direction of the redhead, ‘they droop, their paint runs. . . .’ ‘Oh, go on, Egon, do,’ said Dorothea. ‘As soon as I’ve proved myself unquestionably right, I’ll follow. . . .’ Steven had dropped out of the argument and was singing, a soft, two-part Bantu song, with Sam. Sam waved his hand gently, to keep Steven in time. Steven’s cigarette held its shape in ash, burnt down in his forgotten fingers. ‘Come on; again,’ Sam coaxed. When Sitole saw me, he stopped the song abruptly and the ash fell on his shoe. ‘Let’s go and drink. I’ll take you,’ he grinned.

  ‘In what?’

  ‘Your car.’

  ‘I haven’t got a car,’ I said. Peter had just put on a particularly loud record, and he was trying to persuade the African woman to sing again.

  ‘No car.’ Steven put a hand down on Sam’s shoulder and laughed. ‘He hasn’t got a car.’

  ‘Don’t all white men have cars?’ said Sam, with obedient good humour, giving his line.

  ‘Once upon a time,’ said Steven, ‘dear children, there was a man who didn’t have a car. All right. We’ll use Sam’s.’

  ‘Steve, I have to go straight home.’

  ‘He’s married,’ said Steven, in a high voice,’ Sam’s a married man. Ah, go on, Sam.’

  A few minutes later, when I was talking to someone else, he came up and said: ‘Sam wants to go now, Mr Hood.’ I excused myself and went with Steven back to the table where Sam was. ‘Sam’ll drop us off where we’re going,’ said Steven. We had one more drink, and then left, with Peter and the woman singer. We went almost unnoticed, for the party had suddenly blazed up again, as a dead fire will when a handful of crumpled letters catches the last spark. I know that I kissed Sylvia, and her cheek smelled of powder, and the others shook hands with her. The stray dog was still in the street, and he circled the car with a stiff tail, gurgling threateningly.

  Sam’s little Morris was new and went with the smoothness of a car that is taken care of, though it was heavily loaded. I sat in front, beside him, and Steven, Peter, and the woman were pressed into the back. It was nearly one o’clock in the morning and all life was withdrawn from the streets in the white suburbs through which we drove, and the town. We followed tram-car tracks, we
skirted the sharp corners of darker, meaner streets; the car took me along as the world whirls and turns through space: I had neither recognition nor volition in its progress. The street-lights ended. We went down, into the dark. There were shapes, darker against the darkness; there was the moon, half-grown, spreading a thin, luminous paint on planes that reflected her. A graveyard of broken cars and broken porcelain; an old horse sleeping, tethered, on a bare patch; mute shops patched about with signs you could not read; small, closed houses whose windows were barred with tin strips against the street; a solitary man stooping to pick up something the day had left; a sudden hysterical gabble behind a rickety fence, where a fowl had started up. Sam stopped the car. ‘You’re sure this is what you want, Steven,’ he said. Steven laughed and answered in their own language. He struggled out of the back, and I got out. We said goodnight. Sam seemed uncertain about leaving us there; he stood looking at us for a moment, and then he revved the engine rather longer than was necessary before he drove away.

  The street had the comforting, out-dated sinisterness of a back-alley habitation, deserted and late at night. I have grown up to a world whose bogeys are bombs and the horrors of atomic radiation; in people like me there is a certain nostalgia about the personal, palpable threat of flesh-and-blood robbers and assassins, those bogeys of the past, long out-shadowed in evil. I felt a mild and pleasant excitement, adjunct to my drunkenness. Steven went along with the happy ease of a man who could have found his way in his sleep; he was at home in a dark and lonely street. He sang softly, under his breath, in his own language; so softly, he might have been breathing music. There was a little street-light, rheumy and high up, on the corner, and he took the top of my arm in his thin, hard hand and guided me to the right. There was some light here and there, behind windows – as if the dark had worn thin. And one door, leading right out on to the pavement, was open. From it, light the colour of orangeade made a geometrical shape of brightness in the dark. ‘No good,’ murmured Steven, and turned me sharply round again. ‘What’s wrong?’ ‘If the door’s open, the place is shut; that’s wrong.’ At the corner once more, I saw him grinning at me affectionately under the pale splash of the street-lamp: ‘I’m looking after you, Mr Hood.’ We felt we understood each other very well, in the manner that drunks do; just as they may equally suddenly feel curdled with long-borne grievances against each other, and may be compelled to fight.