A World of Strangers Read online

  ‘I drank a lot of vodka last night,’ she said. ‘Have you ever tried it? It’s true it doesn’t give you a hangover, but I feel as if my blood had evaporated, like a bottle of methylated spirits left uncorked. Do you know any Poles? There are a lot of Poles here, now. Perhaps, you’ve met the Bolnadoskys – Freddie and Basha, a lovely blonde? We were in their party and of course Poles can drink any amount of anything.’

  ‘How’s the modelling been going? Not off to Italy yet?’

  ‘Oh that.’ I might have been referring to something out of her remote past.’ I’ve been riding morning noon and night, training for the show. You knew that Colin and Billy asked me to jump Xantippe? I came third with her, two faults, in the Open.’

  I remembered that Colin and Billy were the names of the twins I had met at the Alexanders’, but I was not sure about Xantippe. She saw this and said,’ You’ve heard of Xantippe, of course?’

  ‘What a shrew.’

  She frowned. ‘Nonsense, people are jealous of her. Once she knows you won’t stand any cheek, she’s the most obedient horse in the world.’

  ‘I was talking nonsense. What about Xantippe?’

  ‘Well, she’s the most famous horse in this country, like Foxhunter in England – surely you’ve heard of him?’

  We had some coffee, brought in by a pretty, giggling African girl who wore a lot of jewellery, and Cecil said, ‘Oh Eveline, you are a pet,’ and talked on about the horse show in which she had taken part.

  ‘So your modelling career is completely shelved,’ I said, at last.

  She answered quickly, as if the subject bored her: ‘I’m really not the type to sit about posing indoors.’

  ‘It’s all very horsey, at the moment, eh?’

  She jerked her chin on to her hand and blew a great smoke-screen between herself and her coffee-cup. ‘That’s the kind of life I was born to.’ I was delighted to see how she looked every inch the hard-riding, hard-drinking bitch, just as, in the Stratford, she had unconsciously assumed the spectacular narcissism of the mannequin.

  I planted my feet stolidly before me and said, ‘That’s not what you told me. You said you were a butcher’s daughter, that just because your father had a few horses you’d drifted into a way of life that went with a class and a country you didn’t belong to.’

  She was unperturbed. ‘I must have been mad. Drunk, more likely.’

  Our talk picked up, slipped into naturalness, and we began to enjoy ourselves. Later the front-door bell rang again, and this time it really was the Salvation Army. She begged sixpence from me for the collection, and when she came back into the room she was suddenly stricken with a kind of helpless consciousness of her dishabille, and stood there running her hands through her hair and lifting the corners of her eyes with her fingers on her temples. ‘I should get dressed, I must get dressed,’ she kept saying. She held her dressing-gown tightly, exclaiming over its stains as if they had appeared since I’d come, and curling her toes as if she were ashamed of her bare feet. I knew she felt me looking at her, but I could not stop. Then she went away, and when she came back, bathed and dressed, she was the conventionally pretty, unremarkable girl I had met that first day at the Alexanders’.

  Each spoke out of the train of thought with which he had been preoccupied while we were in separate rooms. ‘What made you come, after all this time?’ she said, fastening a bracelet on her wrist, and shaking her arm, as a dog settles into the feel of its collar. ‘I saw the name of your street. Where’s your child – it’s a girl, isn’t it?’ ‘A boy. Spending the week-end with the grandparents,’ she said, absently.

  ‘Don’t you care for him at all?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous! I adore him.’

  From where she sat, with her beautiful, thin-ankled legs crossed, on the sofa, she regarded her living-room with the same kind of critical helplessness she had shown toward herself, before she was dressed. It was an unsatisfactory room. A florist’s bouquet was dead in its vase. (I wondered who had sent it, and why.) The modern print on the cushions and the curtains that blew limply at the balcony door was a design of masks and faces in yellow and black, cross-eyed and mean, like Hallowe’en pumpkin cutouts. There were two table lamps of black porcelain with irregular-shaped holes in their torsos, as if someone had dreamed of Henry Moore in an art china shop, and a large print of a vase of magnolias, all watery sheen and pastel light, like a reflection in a flattering mirror. It seemed to be a room of many attempts, all of which had petered out into each other.

  ‘- It’s not much of a reason,’ she said, broodingly, raking a cigarette out of a tarnished silver cigarette box. She was referring to my remark about having come to the flat because I had recognized the name of the street ‘Ugh, these must be at least three months old.’

  I got up to give her one of my cigarettes. She continued to look at me inquiringly.

  ‘I don’t know. I was homesick. I’ve been tied up. Anyway, you’ve been very busy yourself.’

  ‘Well, you’re not busy today, I gather,’ she commented. I had been there an hour already.

  ‘I say! Am I keeping you from something – I’m sorry!’

  She laughed. ‘I’m as free as a bird. All I have to do is to be at Hamish and Marion’s for lunch. What about you?’

  ‘I can’t simply turn up there again,’ I said.

  ‘Nonsense; people turn up there all the time. It’s what they like.’

  I said with a sudden rush of desire to talk about myself: ‘I’ve had some curious experiences lately.’

  She said, with interest and mild envy, ‘Really? Tell me, whom do you know, anyway? Who are these mysterious friends with whom you occupy yourself?’

  ‘I’ve been into the townships quite a few times; they’re extraordinary, you know.’

  ‘Where? What townships?’ It was clear that she had no idea what I was talking about.

  ‘The African townships – Sophiatown and so on.’

  ‘Oh, I know,’ her voice at once took on the tone of the old Londoner being told by the visitor that the Tower is well worth a visit. ‘Everyone who comes here gets all het up about the locations. They are simply too awful. Marion helps to run a crèche out in one of them, you know; Alexandra, or one of the others, I’m not sure.’

  ‘Last night I went to a house-warming party, in Sophiatown – ’

  She tucked her legs up on the sofa and sat back, intrigued, smiling. ‘Oh no! A “house-warming”, if you don’t mind!’

  The impulse to talk closed away as suddenly as it had opened. ‘It was quite a party,’ I said lamely, and smiled.

  ‘You should see Eveline sometimes, when she’s got up in her best. She’s got one old white dress of mine that she looks marvellous in. She spends every penny of her wages on clothes, and honestly, she looks a lot smarter than many white women, when she really puts her mind to it.’

  I said,’ By the way, how’s Kit and the Karoo?’ and, with a quick turn of interest, she began:’ I must tell you. Hamish has just been down there for two weeks . . .’ and launched into a long mischievous gossip about the Baxters.

  I bought a great bunch of lilies and roses from an Indian vendor on the corner of a street, on the way to the Alexanders’, without much hope that this gift of flowers with which Marion Alexander’s own garden was in any case filled, would soften the obvious fact that I had turned up at The High House again chiefly to seek the company of one of the more regular guests. But I need not have worried; like those publishers of paper-back novelettes who must keep a long list of titles in print, the Alexanders wanted to keep their guest list full and varied, and welcomed the presence of casual if presentable hangers-on like myself, who would and could never offer reciprocal hospitality. There was the usual luxurious lunch, this time, as it was high summer, served in the garden beside the pool – a kind of Watteau picnic, with iced strawberries trickling maraschino into bowls of cream, and a great deal of pale wine that the women left lying about in their glasses on the grass. There were
the usual amiable people, with plenty to say about nothing in particular, in whose company the fear, joy, strangeness, and muddle of life seemed mastered by a few catch phrases, like a tiger confined in a cricket-cage. Shadow lay on the grass lightly as the lace of thin foam on a calm sea. Every now and then the pool gave an enormous bright wink in the sun, and the laughter and voices seemed suddenly louder.

  I borrowed a pair of trunks and swam, and later I borrowed some jodhpurs, so that I could ride out with Cecil, who wanted to show off to me on her horse – or rather, one of the Alexanders’ horses. She watched me indulgently, as if she were torn between wishing me to make an ass of myself, and bridling at the idea that anyone might suggest, by a word or a look, that that was what I was doing. In fact, she wished me to succeed and to fail, which excited me in that underworld of unspoken, sometimes unrealized, exchanges in which people retreat from or advance toward each other. But in the overt world of the Alexanders’ paddock, it left me unconcerned, for as I have never been a sportsman of any kind, I truly have – out of indifference – that contentment in the activity for its own sake which sportsmen grit their ambitious teeth and try to assume. Cecil put the horse through its paces in a little dressage (this was not the famous Xantippe that she was riding) and jumped him a few times; she rode very well, of course, though a trifle grimly, I thought, as if she were only aware, through all the movements that led up to it, of the successful conclusion of each thing she and the horse did. A few of the guests had strolled along to the paddock to watch, and they murmured approval and commented to each other; the twins, who had just arrived, woffled cries of pleasure in conditioned reflex each time she landed on the other side of an obstacle: ‘Oh, good girl! Well done, sweetie!’ Yet she came out of the manège subdued and even sulky, like a jockey who, after a race, finds his feet on the ground and himself no part of the yelling crowd.

  For myself, I was finding a particular lulled and sentient ease in the nature of my presence in the Alexanders’ garden that day; even the borrowed clothes contributed to the feeling that I was gratuitously dipping into the pleasures of a life for which I had to take no responsibility, pleasures for which I would not have to settle, even with myself. Pleasures, indeed, for which I perhaps would not have cared to have to settle.

  I saw Cecil several times during the following week. I took her to a play that I don’t think she liked very much, and, on another night, to a new restaurant she knew about. Whenever I went to fetch her she was stunningly dressed and looking beautiful, and it was easy for me to escort her as if I were taking a lovely and entertaining exhibit about, minding that doors did not catch her dress nor the wind her hair; I was not troubled by her at all. Each time, as the door banged to, the flat was left behind her like a discarded chrysalis, and, as her little boy was always in bed by the time I came, all I saw of him was, once, a crayon picture of a sun with a smile and a creature with two legs as long as a late afternoon shadow, that was lying on the passage floor. When she had had a few drinks, Cecil unfailingly became gay, just as you can depend upon a cat to strike up a purr after milk, and we were both in that stage of acquaintance when to each the other’s small stock of stories and anecdotes is new, so that each seems to the other a fund of wit and charm.

  Steven telephoned me, but I did not have a chance to see him; he turned up at the office one lunch-time with an Indian, to ask me to come to a boxing match. Steven’s elegance always amazed me; I could not imagine how those trousers creased to a fine line, those well-brushed suède shoes, that smoothly-hanging tie, could come out of the permanent makeshift of the sort of place he lived in. It made me ruefully conscious of the fact that I, by contrast, reflected only too truthfully the state of my flat; sometimes my shirt was none too clean, because I had forgotten to make up my bundle for the wash-woman, there were buttons missing on the sleeves of my suit, and so long as the holes in my socks were where they could not be seen once my shoes were on, I continued to wear them.

  ‘You are becoming rather elusive,’ said Steven. ‘I suppose it’s the car. This is Dick Chaputra, you’ve heard of him, of course.’

  ‘It’s time to forget it, if you have,’ the Indian said, looking pleased.

  I wondered at the odd variety of things I was supposed to have heard of in Johannesburg. We shook hands and Chaputra immediately took a piece of the dried meat that people in South Africa call biltong out of his pocket and, having offered it round, began to eat it, looking pleased with himself all the time.

  Chaputra took the chair I gave him, but Steven, as usual, preferred to wander about the office while we talked, inspecting everything with his amiable and inquiring gaze, and perching where he felt like it.’ Dick’s just been to India,’ he said, as if it were an unaccountable whim for anyone to have indulged.

  ‘How’d he like it?’

  The Indian’s grin tightened on the thong of leathery meat, loosened another tidbit. ‘Awful,’ he said, with his mouth full. ‘Boy, I wouldn’t live there for anything. D’you know, in Bombay, you see hundreds of people sleeping in the streets? It’s a fact. That’s where they live, just sleeping outside in the streets every night.’

  ‘Worse than natives,’ said Steven, opening his mouth, curling his tongue back to probe the socket of a tooth, and widening his nostrils. He chuckled to himself.

  The Indian spoke English with the typical South African accent and intonation; if I looked away from his plump dark face, his satin-bright eyes, the white teeth, and thick, fly-away black hair that gave him that combination of Orientalism and aggressively Western boyishness that many Indians outside of India seem to have, I might have been listening to the voice of any of the white South African youths who passed me in the street every day. I asked him how long ago his family had come from India.

  ‘My grandfather was born there,’ he said. ‘I never saw the old man. But I’m telling you, you can have India, for me.’

  As we could not go out anywhere to lunch together, I thought I would have sandwiches sent up to the office. I went into the outer office to ask Miss McCann, who would be going out to lunch in a few minutes, to order them for me from the usual place.

  ‘Two ham and two cheese?’

  This was what I had most days, when I did not go out. ‘No, of course that’s not enough. Mixed sandwiches, for three.’

  She said nothing, and kept her eyes on the pencil in her hand, as if she were waiting for me to go. When I was back in the office, I remembered some personal letters for the post, and rang for her. We were talking, and I had forgotten what I had rung for, when she appeared. She stood in the open doorway and did not speak. I said, ‘Yes, Miss McCann?’ She said, after a moment, ‘You rang for me, Mr Hood.’ There seemed to me to be something ridiculous about our exchange; then I realized that it was because instead of coming into the room, she was standing in the doorway like that.

  ‘Oh yes,’ I said, remembering. ‘If you’d just put these in with the mail’ – and I held the letters out to her. She stood for a moment without moving, and in a flash I understood, and then said, motioning with the letters, ‘Here they are. ‘I stood holding them out to her like a lettuce offered to coax a rabbit, and slowly she came, looking not at me nor at anyone else. But as she took them, I stopped her. ‘Just a minute – this one’s to go airmail, and this, but ask about this one, perhaps it could go by ordinary mail, find out how long that would take -’ And so I kept her for perhaps two minutes, in that room, unable to get out. Steven struck up an exaggeratedly careless and swaggering chatter, displaying familiarity with my ways, and, as Miss McCann took the letters and walked out, was saying, in a lordly, weary manner, ‘Where’s the beer hidden today Toby? – Toby always has a bottle or two tucked away somewhere -’

  The door closed finally and precisely behind her, first the handle rose, then the latch clicked into place. My heart was thumping and I was suddenly irritated with Steven, for behaving as badly as the girl. Yet, after all, his only alternative was the negative rudeness of ignoring her; I under
stood, now, that he dared not show the common politeness of greeting her, as any man might expect to say ‘Good afternoon’ to any woman.

  It was true that I did have a couple of bottles of beer in the cupboard, which I kept there to drink when I had lunch in the office, on the principle, which even I didn’t believe, that it was a refreshing thing to do in summer. We drank it, tepid as it was, from some glasses I found put away unwashed in a cupboard (Amon was having one of his days off, to attend to the affair of his mother and Jagersfontein location) and, at last, the sandwiches came. The Indian looked all round the room, smiling, while he ate, and asked me direct, brisk questions about the business of Aden Parrot in South Africa, rather as if he had been called in to give an estimate of the firm’s assets. This was all done with the airy politeness of commercial habit; although he was probably a year or two older than I was, he even called me ‘sir’. When he left the room for a few minutes, the door had scarcely shut behind him when Steven said with the air of an impresario, ‘D’you know who he is? D’you remember that series of robberies in Hillbrow? You were here already, I’m sure you were. The big case where one of the witnesses disappeared? D’you remember? – Well, that’s his crowd. He’s Lucky Chaputra. That’s why he went off to India, to lie low. They didn’t have anything on him, but they knew the whole outfit was his. Couldn’t pin him down on a thing.’