A World of Strangers Read online

  ‘Here.’ We turned into an unlit yard, with two rows of rooms or cottages – each row seemed to be under one continuous roof, but there were four or five doors in the length of each. They were shut against the night as if they were deserted and empty, but our feet were sucked by mud round a tap that snivelled and drizzled, and there was a strong smell of rotting vegetables, and the general sourness of a much-used place. Beyond and slightly behind the end wall of the right-hand row, there was a small detached building with some kind of lean-to porch attached – a creeper grew over it like a fishnet draped to dry. Steven pushed me up three broken steps and knocked on the door. The knock gave back its own sound; but in a moment the door opened the width of a face and a voice spoke, sleepily it seemed to me, and then changed its tone with recognition when Steven murmured. Of course I could not understand what was said. But we went in, past a woman’s face with a woollen scarf wrapped round the head, under the candle she held against the wall. I remember noticing that it was the swollen-looking face of a stupid woman. We went through a cave of a room where something smallish, probably a child, was asleep on an iron bed, and the candle caught, in passing, a bunch of paper roses and a primus stove, and then into a larger room with walls painted olive green half-way up like the waiting room in a station, and an electric bulb with a celluloid shade hanging over a table where four or five men did not look up. There was also another group, sitting on a bed, and they stubbed out their laughter, almost with relief, as if it had gone on too long beyond the merit of what had occasioned it, as we came in, and started talking in what, even in a language I didn’t understand, I could recognize as the interrogatory tone of a change of subject. Everyone was drinking, but there were no bottles in sight. On the walls, a huge Coca-Cola calendar – a girl on a beach, in bathing costume and accompanied by a tiny radio and a carrier of Coca-Cola – hung with the look of inevitability of a holy picture given its niche. It was the barest room I had ever been in in my life; it depended entirely on humans.

  Most of the men seemed to know Steven. If they happened to catch his eye they nodded; one or two said something. A man in American-looking trousers and a pastel shirt with a bow tie got up. Steven asked him a question; he answered; Steven nodded. The man went out of the door – not the door by which we had entered, but another next to the chimney that had no fireplace beneath it, and in a moment came back with two tumblers. ‘Have you got two dollars?’ said Steven, taking a half-crown out of his pocket. I gave him a pound; ‘Ten bob’ll do,’ he said, as he took it. He paid for the drinks and for a moment, as the change was counted out, I saw, very close, the face of the man who had brought them; a broad face, smooth and the colour of olive oil, almost Chinese-looking, with a very large straight mouth whose width was accentuated by a pitch-black moustache that followed the outline of the upper lip closely, and even went down, parenthetically, round the two sides.

  ‘You drink brandy and coke?’ said Steven.

  Room was made for us at the table; a man in the grease-stiff cap of a garage attendant lifted his head from his arms and regarded me as if he believed he were seeing me with some inner sight, the drunk’s sight. Steven had taken his drink at a gulp. He said, patronizingly, ‘I should have taken you to one of the Vrededorp places, where other whites come, and you wouldn’t be noticed.’ ‘Who comes?’ I said; I was feeling the conspicuous unimportance that a child feels in a room full of words he doesn’t understand. ‘Not many like you,’ Steven laughed, narrowing his nostrils and lifting his chin as if he were telling me something highly complimentary. ‘White bums and down-and-outs.’ Then he called across my head to the group talking on the bed; a young man in one of those cheap knit shirts with a picture stamped on the chest, took up the exchange, which was laughing, scornful, and animated. I had the feeling it might be about me. Perhaps it was. I didn’t care. You always think people are talking about you when they use a foreign language.

  Two men left; their hands were pushed into their pockets in the manner of those whose pockets are empty. Like the room, this shebeen in which they had taken their pleasure, they were bared. They had nothing but themselves. Chequebooks, those little purses women have, foam-rubber cushions, the deathly moonlight of fluorescent strips; these things came to my mind confusedly, mockery and salvation. I felt very drunk; all the room was retreating from me, draining away like water down a plug-hole, with a roaring gurgle that I didn’t understand. Steven’s voice, right in my ear because it was English, was saying, ‘I was good at darts in England. I used to walk into the pub and take anybody on. They used to call me Lucky. Imagine that. Why d’you think they called me Lucky?’

  ‘You must call me Toby,’ I said, feeling it was urgent.

  ‘Did they call me Lucky because they call you Toby?’ said Steven, finishing another brandy. I pictured, with the dreamy pleasure of casting together the here and there, the tall black mascot in the London pub. I seemed to feel, myself, the spurious superstitious power of the other race; if you sleep with a Jewess (Negress, Chinese) you will never want any other kind again, gipsies read the future – and Queequeg, I saw Queequeg like those pictures I’d seen of American cigar-store Indians. I said something to Steven about Queequeg but he’d never heard of Moby Dick. He said, ‘We like to read the Russians. You’ll see, Africans want to read Dostoyevsky, man, they read lots of Dostoyevsky.’

  I said, ‘You read that somewhere, Steven.’

  There was a shout of laughter from the group in the corner.

  He laughed in ready guilt. ‘Anyway, a few do. They read Dostoyevsky because they want to feel miserable, to glory in another misery. I follow the racing page,’ he added swaggeringly. But even he didn’t believe in himself, as a man of the world. ‘The comics,’ he said, putting on a serious, considering face, ‘and the comics.

  ‘Trouble with me,’ he went on, ‘I don’t want to feel miserable, I don’t want any glory out of it. Sam and Peter and all those others, yap-yap all the time, chewing over the same old thing, this they’ve taken from us, that they’ve denied our children, pass laws, injustice – agh, I’m sick of it. Sick of feeling half a man. I don’t want to be bothered with black men’s troubles. You know that, Toby? These -’ and he circled the noisy room with a movement of his slim black hand with the too-long fingernails and a signet-ring in which a piece of red glass winked, exasperated and distasteful.

  ‘A private life,’ I said. ‘That’s what you want.’ He caught my arm. ‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘That’s it,’ while I nodded with the reiteration of a discovery. There it was, the truth. The drowned, battered out, howled down, disgraced truth. This young man with the brown face given a blueish, powdered look by drink and fatigue, with the ruined teeth and the flecks of matter at the outer corners of his stranger’s eyes – this young man and I, two strangers, had just cornered it in a small hour of the night like an animal almost believed to be exterminated entirely. We were drunk, yes, but we had it there. It was ours, a mouse of a truth, alive. Created by drink or not, I had had few such moments in my life, even in my own country, among my own friends. We did not understand each other; we wanted the same thing.

  When Steven suddenly stood up, sending an empty glass rolling down the table, I stood up too, because the need for abrupt departure was what I myself felt: when you are brought to face yourself, the moment must be broken, as you must turn away if you look into your own eyes in a mirror. But the woman with the woollen scarf round her head was standing in the doorway, the one through which we had not come, and she was saying something terse to the man with the pastel shirt and the Chinese-smooth face. Whatever it was that she said drew the whole room to its feet in crisis. Steven yelled ‘Come on, man’ crazily and dragged me, knocking into shoulders, backs, past someone who was shaking and heaving at the unconscious man with the greasy cap, into the cowering dark room through which we had entered when we came. He jumped up on what must have been the head of the bed I had noticed – the springs squeaked and he almost: overbalanced – and fumbled at
the window. ‘Christ Almighty,’ he was saying, ‘Christ Almighty.’ It was a sash window and at last it gave stiffly, then helter-skelter. ‘Steven, are you mad?’ ‘It’s the police, my dear Mr Hood.’ He stood grinning at me for a second. ‘Do you want to go back to town in the Black Maria? Get on.’ The top half of the window had joined the bottom, so we had to climb out of the upper half. Steven balanced on the sill and then went over; I heard a thud outside. I was alone in the strange little hovel-room a moment. The outline on the bed; it was still there – was it a child, or a bundle of clothes? It was too dark to see. The smell of the room came to me; the stuffiness of sleep, a dankness, like a shed with an earth floor, and something else, a sweet, fecund smell of coal-smoke and fermentation. And then I fell out into the night, and landed, surprisingly, quite well, with only one hand to steady myself on the ground, in an alley. Steven hissed at me and I flattened, giggling, against the wall. We heard shouts and the heavy running of police boots. The shuddering, rubbery bump of a fast car stopping. Overhead, two stars had the burnt-out look of fireworks the second before they die away. The sky was steeped to a clear, transient green, a becoming rather than a colour. We shinned – very noisily, it seemed to me – over a wall into a yard much like the one where the shebeen was. A thin white dog barked and snarled and wagged its tail. ‘Kaffir dog,’ said Steven, ignoring it. We passed a row of rooms, went out into the street, and then calmly walked into the fenced ‘garden’ – there was a peach-tree, and a path outlined with bricks – of a house on the opposite side of that street. As we passed beneath the windows on the side, a voice called out. Steven answered cheerfully; and the voice came back, charmed. There was no fence at the back of the house; there was the piece of ground with the horse tethered on it that I had noticed before.

  The green was gone. The sky was all light now, but not the light of day. ‘Best thing I can do with you – ’ Steven was overcome by a fit of uncontrollable yawning. There was the virago shriek of a police car, behind us, to the left of us, we did not know where. This time I did not need any example from Steven. With one impulse we scrambled over a curling galvanized iron fence and found ourselves on the roof of a low shed among pumpkins put out to ripen. Steven put a pumpkin under his head, as you might use a plump quilted cushion for a sofa nap. We lay there panting and laughing in swaggering, schoolboy triumph.

  All at once, it was morning.

  Part Two

  Chapter 5

  That day had a second morning. Steven had found a taxi-driver friend to take me home, and I got into bed in my flat about five o’clock, just as the yelling, whistling, and clanging of a new day was beginning in the roof-top servants’ quarters of the buildings all around me. But I slept. These mercilessly cheerful sounds were whisked away from me instantly and I sank from gibbering, gabbling level to level of nightmare until, like a stone, I lay at the sea-bed of sleep. I never read or listen to accounts of other people’s dreams and I have an unbroken vow never to recount my own, so I will not describe what I saw and experienced on the way; I will only say that when I woke, as I did with knife-stroke abruptness when the flat boy came in to clean, I seemed to have awakened from months-long sleep and heavy dreams. I had landed on a corrugated iron roof among the pumpkins; all that went before that – the ship plying south in warmer and warmer seas, the hotel, the parties and faces, the Stratford and Arthur Hollward’s office – seemed as exaggerated, high-coloured, and hallucinatory as the room in Sophiatown where I had been drunk with Steven. I felt as if I had just arrived in Johannesburg. I knew, in my bones, without opening my eyes to the room, where I was, that morning. Sick, shaky, insatiably thirsty, and with the restless aching in my hands and feet that I always get with a hangover, I was aware of the place as one would silently accept a familiar presence on a morning too hideous for speech or sign.

  I went to the office at noon, and shut myself in; twice I sent Amon out, first to get me aspirins, then a bottle of lime juice – I had read somewhere that the quickest way to rid your bloodstream of alcohol is to wash it away with innocuous liquids. The second time, as he was leaving the room, he hesitated at the door and tramped slowly back to my desk. ‘I wish to tell you, thank you, sir, for the permission to go off,’ he said.

  ‘What’s that?’ I wished he would not mumble; one always had to go over twice whatever he had to say.

  As he began again, I suddenly remembered. ‘Oh, that’s all right. Just try and let us know the day before you’re needed, eh, Amon.’

  The day climbed to the full power of its summer heat in the early afternoon; when I went to the window, seeking ease and air, an unbearable brightness flashed off everything metal and there was a tarry smell from the melting street. I opened letters from my mother and Faunce but did not get so far as to read them.

  When at four o’clock I gave up and decided to go home, I walked out of the building and straight into Cecil Rowe. For a moment I had a wild hope that she would not see me, that somehow the cruel street that, after the cool and dim lift, almost put my eyes out with glare, would blind her to me. All around me, the melting make-up on the women’s faces gave them the swimming look of a mirage, the men were flushed and shiny or greenish and greasy, as if the heat were a fever alternately producing flushes and chills. A few street Africans had gone into immobility, caps over eyes, against whatever poles or shopfronts offered support. I stopped and turned to the fat newspaper seller who, brisk with pùrpose in all weathers, had just dumped his pile of evening papers on the kerb. But she was there, at my side. She said, ‘Why are you always around this part of the world?’

  I couldn’t find change to pay for my paper. While I dredged into my trouser pocket, I felt, feebly, that I couldn’t defend myself against her. Again she was dressed with showy simplicity, a cosmetic emanation – not merely the perfume she had used, but the impregnation of skin, hair, and clothes with the incense of the rites of female self-worship – came headily from her. ‘I’ve only met you here once before.’

  ‘Yes. Yesterday,’ she said, as if this called for an explanation. ‘So it was.’ I really could not believe that it was only twenty-four hours since I had encountered her in the bar.

  She laughed. ‘You are vague,’ she said, then, mimicking my startled air: ‘Yes, it was yesterday.’

  ‘My office is here, in this building.’

  She craned her neck, smooth with powder under the tight necklace that the flesh swelled against as she talked. ‘Up here? Above Adorable? Well I’m darned!’

  ‘What is Adorable – I’ve been wondering ever since I’ve been here.’

  She opened her handbag, as if compelled to get my fumbling over with. ‘Here’ – she gave me three pennies for the paper seller. ‘It’s Paul’s place – the hairdresser. My hairdresser; that’s where I’ve come from now.’

  She wore one of those wide hats that every now and then hid her face entirely; from what I could see of her hair it looked different again; brighter, gilded. It seemed to me stupid and tiring to be expected to find an approach to a woman who changed herself every day.

  She was looking at me curiously, with a faint rise of interest. ‘You look awful,’ she said. ‘What’s happened to you since yesterday?’

  ‘I feel grim,’ I said, with a smile.

  ‘This bloody heat is grim,’ she said. ‘I’m going to go home and lie in a cold bath. Thank goodness I don’t have to do any social drinking today.’

  There was a pause; one of those imperceptible moments of hanging-fire when the direction a conversation is to take is silently decided.

  Almost reluctantly, I was the one to speak. Yet the instant in which she saw that I was about to do so, her eyes gave the faint blink of encouragement and part responsibility.

  ‘I was trying to decide which one was your husband.’

  She said, ‘They’re two idiots who make film advertisements.’

  ‘And you act in them.’

  She pulled a face. ‘Not yet. I’ve been fiddling about, doing a bit of modelli
ng lately. As you see.’ She indicated herself with sudden naturalness, as if she were in carnival dress.

  ‘You look charming,’ I said, dutifully.

  ‘Thank you.

  ‘So you see’, she spoke again, quickly, ‘that was why I didn’t introduce you when you came up to the table yesterday.’

  I remembered, out of the hazy immediate past, how animated and eager she had seemed with her companions. ‘You appeared to be enjoying yourself very much.’

  ‘Oh, my dear’ – an echo of that same social manner sounded in her defensive voice -’ Enjoying myself! And you thought one of them was my husband – what a mood of self-deception you were in!’

  ‘Oh well,’ I said wearily, ‘anyway, I’m forgiven, you’re forgiven -’

  ‘Forgiven?’ she said shrewdly, happily, ‘I’m forgiven? What for-?’

  I was confused. ‘Not introducing,’ I said, and she knew that I meant, ‘For enjoying yourself so much.’

  So I found myself in the Stratford bar again, and this time I had what I had wanted; I was with the girl, Cecil Rowe. But this carelessly-aimed largesse from whatever pile of favours has been stored up in the name of my existence, was flung at me on the wrong day. I was tired and the idea of a drink filled me with nausea; but it was more than that; the girl I had coveted jealously yesterday, the girl I had met at the dream-feast in the Caliph’s house above the gold-mines, the fair lady to my urban knight, pinning her colours on a briefcase – she belonged to the unreality through which I had fallen. It was odd to find her here at all; it was an effort to confirm her existence in, and therefore her sober kinship with, the city that I was aware of when I wakened in my flat that morning.