A World of Strangers Read online

  ‘What’s he busy with now?’ I said.

  ‘Resting,’ said Steven. ‘He’s got plenty of dough. Boy, if he were a white man he’d be a mining magnate or something. He’s cleverer than a cage of monkeys. He’s got a white man who plays for him on the stock exchange – yes, he’s made money like nobody’s business, out of gold shares. But he’s a restless boy, doesn’t know what to do with himself.’

  Chaputra came back into the room again, chuckled, and said,’ Nobody saw me’ – he had slipped into the men’s room in the building, which was, of course, meant only for white men. He shook hands and thanked me in his gauche South African accent: ‘Gee, that was a nice lunch, man. Thanks, Mr Hood.’ I felt as if I had given a schoolboy a treat.

  ‘You should see his Cadillac,’ Steven waved his long arms in ecstasy. Then murmured to me as they went out:’ I know it’s not the car, with you, I suppose you’re busy with some woman. Well, that’s how it is with all of us at some time or other.’

  ‘I’m sorry about tonight, I should’ve liked to have seen the fight. What about next week. Are you doing anything Monday night?’

  Immediately he lapsed into important vagueness, a device that, I had noticed before, he used to cover up the fact that for him, next week was too far off to have any reality. ‘Well, you see, I don’t know, I may have to go away on business for a few days. . . .’

  ‘Business! What business have you to do outside Johannesburg?’

  He made a graceful, swaggering exit, roaring with laughter that made the lie and the evasion inoffensive, and praised me out of all proportion for my mild perspicacity.

  That afternoon, before she left the office for the day, Miss McCann, smelling strongly of lavender water from a fresh application, appeared in my office accompanied by a fair, red-faced young man to whom I had nodded once or twice before when he had come to see her. He could easily have been her brother, an earlier-born member of the family, who had got more than his fair share of the vigour which had given out before her conception, but as he walked in behind her, I realized what should have been obvious to me before: he was her young man. I thought they must have come to make an announcement of some sort – perhaps that they were getting married and put on a grin of suitable expectancy, which was met with a stony, puffed-up stare from the young man, and was not met at all by Miss McCann, who kept her eyes on the tray full of old pencils and empty ball pens before me.

  Embarrassment settled like dust upon the room.

  ‘I know I have to give you two weeks’ notice,’ said the girl in her faint voice, ‘but I would like you to let me go. I mean, without waiting.’

  The young man moved up a little closer behind her, looking straight at me. He had that look about his mouth which suggested that he was saying, silently, things to himself that would encounter some break in the impulse between brain and tongue, and would never come out, except as some kind of shameful, strangled cry.

  I said, ‘I see. When would you like to leave?’

  ‘I want to finish now, tonight.’

  I said, trying to keep the balance of my indifference from exaggeration,’ Have you worked out your pay, with holiday pay, and so on?’

  She whispered, with a hint of tears to come, ‘Yes.’

  I had a sudden thought of how ugly she would be if she cried; perhaps her face, so nondescript now, would wash away altogether. I pitied the stocky, resentful young man.

  She handed me a slip of paper on which she had neatly typed the sum. I made out a cheque, and there was no sound in the room but the slither of the pen and the young man’s breathing. She took the cheque and went out, the young man trooping behind her, like a bull that has been led into the ring and out again, without using the blind urges in his breast. Before he closed the door he turned and paused a second, a pause that was directed at me. I said, ‘Yes?’ but, as I had thought, the impulse that stirred in him was too muddled, too little understood to find words or action. They were gone.

  For minutes I felt a tingling braggadocio, I wanted to feel that, truly, I had insulted and menaced the girl. I walked up and down the small room in a kind of nervous turmoil that some other, confusedly detached part of myself watched with excitement, as a scientist might observe in himself the phenomena of the fever which at last he is able to record subjectively. Why didn’t I dismiss without a second thought the idiotic girl and the whole stupid incident? It was an incident which, in the given set of circumstances and with the given participants, was so completely predictable that it was nothing but a cliché. On the face of it, I should have been bored by the whole thing. But the fact was that, once in it, it was not boring, it was not to be experienced as a standard social situation, because, once in it, all the unguessed-at things that underlie one’s predictable reactions leap up and take over; one cannot take them into account before, because they can only be touched off by certain situations – if those situations do not happen to arise around one, one could go through one’s life innocent and ignorant of their potential existence.

  How was I, how was anyone to know it was like this? This evil embarrassment, a thing like a spell, like the moment in a dream when you wish urgently to speak and nothing comes out of your open mouth, that had suddenly sucked all the normality out of a room in which I sat between two men and a drab girl whose maximum assertion in life would not exceed the making of a crocheted tea-cosy. How could we, all of us in that room, have generated it? The skunk-odour of the spirit, down into which my head had been thrust and out of which I had now come up smarting-eyed and gasping, there’s a snoutful of it for you, my boy. And it was all so stupid and petty. A nobody of a girl thinks she’s too good to come into a room where a white man is sharing lunch with two black men. That’s all. Yet there I was, in a strange thrill of irritation, contemptuous of the girl, longing to punch the young white man on the nose, impatient and angry with the black man. Like a savage! I kept saying to myself. Like a savage! And I did not know whether I meant Steven (I kept having a consciously cruel picture of him, dressed up – I thought – as he imagines a gentleman to dress, a fatuous cinema-smirk of worldliness on his black face) or the inarticulate, red-faced suitor of Miss McCann, or myself, in my state of unaccustomed belligerent excitement.

  There is no distraction in the world to equal the pursuit of a woman, as men great and small have been demonstrating since Antony, and, as I had an arrangement to meet Cecil in the Stratford at six, my conscious preoccupation with the thought of her, as I made preparations to leave the office and join her, soon thrust down the incident beneath the lid of the past day. To hell with black men and white men and, indeed, all men. Oh the delightful, narrowing orbit of the evening, with the first whisky dissolving into peace and expectancy inside, the ice bobbing in the glass, and the woman, who, after so much thought, so much speculation, so much concentration of recollection in absence, really cannot be seen any more, so that you could not describe her face or the dress she is wearing, even if you had to – the total presence of the woman, imagined and real, all in one, beside you.

  As the lift fell through the layers of the building, the thought came to me, almost from outside, that perhaps I wouldn’t talk to Cecil about what had happened; it was quite honestly a relief to think I didn’t have to, without going into any reasons with myself. I had, I supposed, an Eastern equation of women with pleasure; I fiercely resisted any impingement on this preserve.

  Cecil would not have to go through the tests which Miss McCann had failed. There was no need to know how she would have met them.

  She was sitting at the same table at which we had already sat several times before. She watched me come in with the down-turned smile that was always like a challenge putting you on your mettle for you did not quite know what. She said, ‘Where is Chibuluma?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’ve been listening to that couple over there. They’re having a wonderful quarrel. She wants him to take a job at this place, and he says even though he doesn’t like “the flicks”
he likes to know that in Johannesburg there are forty “flicks” for him to choose from if he does want to go.’

  ‘I think it’s right up in Northern Rhodesia somewhere.’

  ‘Just let me listen another minute. When I was a child, I could never eat at all in a hotel dining-room, I was so busy listening to other people. They say you never hear any good of yourself, but think of the things you hear about other people.’

  Chapter 8

  My relationship with Cecil moved with queer inconsequence. We dropped apart for days and met again. This did not slow, or change, or damp what was happening between us. She was very much a stranger to me, I realized; much different from the two or three women with whom I had had affairs at Oxford, and the girl in London with whom I had been in love. If any of those women had had a background and childhood entirely dissimilar to mine (and this was true of the Ebury street girl, certainly) at least we were both part of the old, old pattern of an ancient country, and our bones shared with its stones an ancestral memory. If we did not know what we were, we knew what we had been, and this continuity was unbroken by the trauma of the birth of several generations in a new civilization.

  Like many people who are young now, Cecil apparently had been brought up into a life that did not have much meaning for her; the only difference was that she believed unquestioningly that meaningful ways of life existed, unchanged. For her, the trouble was that when she tried to follow one or the other, it was like reading from a formula from which one of the ingredients has always been left out. She seemed to have no doubts about the worthwhileness of the things she attempted, whether she wanted to be a mannequin in Rome or a champion show jumper; but like a bloodhound that has had no nose bred into it, she was guessing at the trail, and ran helter-skelter, looking back inquiringly all the time, uncertain if she were going the right way about her pursuit, and in the right style. Nothing came naturally to her.

  She hardly ever spoke of her marriage, except in the most casual fashion, not, I think, because the fact of its failure was too important and painful to her, but because she was ashamed that she thought of it so little. It was like one of those dresses that she said had ‘never been a success’, that I once found stuffed in the back of a cupboard to which she had sent me to look for a thermos flask. She lived in today, this minute, and if the past or the future caught at her, struggled helplessly in moods that, watching her, you could give a name to, but that she herself did not relate to the circumstances of her life. She had the blues: so she shifted her feelings from the particular to the general.

  One Sunday afternoon we were riding together down the valley below Alexanders’, when we came upon a deserted house. It was during early November, when in Johannesburg an extraordinary theatrical light lay every afternoon between the sky and the city. The summer rains, sucked down so quickly that the earth was ringing hard again a day after storms and torrents, had produced a sudden, astonishing, deep-green luxuriance of foliage; all the trees, fir, gum, acacia and willow, sugar bush and poplar, had taken on full plumage. Between the black-blue greenness, like an optical illusion of bloom created by the damp air, there were huge purple smudges and pale mauve blurs – the jacaranda trees in flower, and behind them, over them, the sky, heavy with unshed rain, blue and purple with charged atmosphere, exchanged with the trees the colour of storm.

  The air was cool and massive and the horses went slowly up the neglected drive under more jacarandas. As always on Sundays, there was drumming and far-off singing somewhere down among the trees, where groups of Africans who were servants in the nearby suburbs were having a prayer-meeting; and Cecil was telling me a long anecdote about the first wife of John Hamilton, the Alexanders’ crocodile-hunting friend (he was at Alexanders’ that day), with the peculiar relish women have for the iniquities of their own sex. The horses stopped of their own accord on the overgrown terrace where last year’s leaves rotted, and she said, gaily, as if in answer to a suggestion, ‘Come on, then – let’s go in.’ We hooked the reins on to an iron spike that must once have held the pole of an awning, and tramped over the flagstones. We peered in at the windows, rattled the front door, and Cecil said, ‘Oh look!’ and ran to pick a yellow rose from the bushes that had thrown a defence of barbed entanglements across the terrace steps. They scratched across her boots. Though it was not more than ten years old, and, from the condition of the paint, could not have been empty longer than six months, the place had the air of a ruin that all things that are the work of men have about them the instant men desert them.

  ‘Oh, I want to get in!’ she said, rattling at the french doors that led on to the terrace. I looked up and around. Someone had begun to make alterations to the upper story of the house, but had never finished; there were builders’ planks and ropes about, and raw brickwork gaped where half a gable had been taken away. We struggled and laughed while I tried to lift her to test a likely-looking window, with a broken pane, but it was round the side of the house where there was no terrace to shorten the distance from window to ground, and she couldn’t reach the latch. We became idiotically determined to get in. ‘Wait a minute! What if we brought Danny round and you got on his back?’ ‘No, let’s try the kitchen first.’ At this, she turned and ran ahead of me through the yard and shook at the kitchen door; it was fast, and she left it at once, in the manner of someone merely satisfying another that he will have to resort to her plan, and ran up the three steps to the next door and took its handle firmly in both hands. But as she touched it, it gave way. She looked round at me, astonished and smiling. And we trooped in. It was the scullery door, and from it we went into the kitchen. ‘Natives must have broken in,’ she said. There was a chaos of emptiness and smashed glass; the cupboards had been wrenched open, the light fittings lay spintered like hoar frost upon the floor: the moment when it had been ransacked seemed to grip it still. In the passage and the living-rooms, mice-pills were all about the floor, and everywhere, through all the empty rooms, drifts of silvery down, blown in from the catkins in the garden, lifted and sank in the draught of our passing.

  ‘This must have been a nice room,’ she said, placing herself at the french doors and looking out through the dirty glass from the context of some imaginary setting. Outside, we saw one of the horses snort, but could not hear it. She wandered from room to room, touching the dead wires that hung, wrenched loose, from the wall, the empty sockets and brackets. ‘The telephone must have been here.’ ‘This was for a lamp, I suppose.’ Sadness settled on her movements; wondering, she took my hand and clung to it without noticing me. Was she thinking of places she had left somewhere in her disregarded life, lights she had touched on, a pattern of rooms her feet had come to know as a blind man knows? Perhaps it was not as simple as that; the disquiet of the emptiness seemed to take a sounding in her; she was aware of depth and silence, communications the telephone could not carry, a need of assurance the electric light could not bring.

  She had a strong fear of herself, as many active people do. I sensed this fear, and, excited by it, began to kiss her. She let me kiss and caress her with a kind of amazement; she was like one of those people who, called up by a conjuror from an audience and told, do this, do that, produces something unimaginable – a bunch of roses, a cage of mice, a Japanese flag. Her open eyes were watching me, her mouth did not participate with the practised pleasure-giving I had found there before. Only the nipples, those unflattering and indiscriminate responders who really never learn to know the hand of a lover from any other stimulus, automatically touched out at the palm of my hand through the stuff of her clothes. ‘For Christ’s sake!’ she said suddenly, recalled to herself. ‘Not here.’ Social caution, her only and familiar arbiter, restored her to a sense of her own known world. The fit of the blues was gone; I had provided her with a situation that she could deal with.

  Someone who loved her would have done much more. But she did not know what she needed, and accepted, without knowledge of failed expectation, my preoccupation with the taste of nicotine
and lipstick in her mouth.

  As we rode back along the valley, a pile of livid light from the hidden sun showed along the grassy ridges. A black man wearing an old white sheet robe and carrying a long stick with a piece of blue cloth tied to it, passed us on his way to join the worshippers we could just see, going in a stooping, leaping, yelling procession round a drummer, where a knot of acacias made a meeting-place. He was singing under his breath, and he murmured ‘Afternoon, baas.’

  When we got back to the Alexanders’, Cecil remarked, with the confidence of an order where dirt and chaos went with one side, and beauty and power went with the other, ‘We really ought to get hold of the agents for that empty house. All the out-of-work natives for miles around must be sleeping there. You should just see it, Marion.’

  The first time I made love to her was one night in her living-room, after we had been to dinner at the house of some friends of hers. What a lack of spontaneity there is about the first act of love between two people who seem familiar enough with each other on other levels of association! In the dark each apprehends in the other a secret creature who never appeared across the dinner table, or bought a newspaper in the street, or leaned forward to make a point in a political discussion. I could imagine that becoming aware of a life after death might be something like that: all the accepted manifestations of the awareness of being, stilled, like an engine cut off, and then, out of a new element of silence, another way of being. She groped, at last, for the table beside the divan: ‘Can you find me a cigarette?’ ‘Let me find the lamp first.’ ‘No, no, don’t turn it on. Here’s the box.’ We sat up in the dark with the divan cover pulled round us, smoking, like people come to shelter after a disaster of some sort – shipwreck or storm. I dressed and left not long after midnight; people who had been visiting one of the flats along the corridor were making their farewells and we emerged from the building together – they were a grey-faced bald man with strong hair curling out of his nose and ears, as if it had turned and grown down into instead of out of that cranium, and one of those heavy women who, despite large bosoms, corsets, and jewellery, when they reach middle age suddenly look like men. The moment the last good-bye had left their lips they sank into the grimness that is one kind of familiarity. They came along behind me like jailers, and the slam of our car doors, theirs and mine, as we drove off, was the final locking-up of the night.