A World of Strangers Read online

  As she talked I saw that her months in Italy were her life, so far as she was concerned; the rest of her time, spent, apparently, between her mother’s home in Devon and her husband’s farm in Northern Rhodesia, was impatiently and almost blindly lived through. Her only comment on the stay in Africa to which this voyage which we were sharing was carrying her, was to remark, closing her eyes and wrinkling her nose in pleasure at the breeze: ‘Well, six weeks from now, we’ll be on our way back. Not this way, of course. West Coast.’

  ‘To Europe?’

  ‘England. But not for long. By April I’ll be back at Pensione Bandolini.’

  I pictured her, endlessly, tunelessly, coming down a hill road in Florence in the sunshine, a parasol open behind her head, pausing to smile at a bambino in the dust, waving her fluttering greeting and calling out in her clear English-voiced Italian to some peasant woman with black eyes, a black-downed lip, and ‘character’. The road, the child, the peasant – all were unreal. . . . I said: ‘Have you never lived in Africa?’

  She said, without opening her eyes, ‘Rina was born in Rhodesia. When she was very young, I did.’

  I wanted to say – that impossible question, idiotic, irresistible when you are on your way to live in a new country: What is it like? But I was aware that the fact that I was going out to live in Africa, and the fact that she was bound to it in some way, was a bond about which we never spoke; was something she would see that we stepped over or around, conversationally – something accepted and therefore not worth discussing, was it not? – her manner always seemed to imply, passing on rapidly and easily to the enchanting things about us, or left behind in the Mediterranean.

  There was a moment of silence, and then she went on, lightly, almost as if I had spoken after all, ‘You must have an active and not a contemplative nature, to take Africa. My husband adores it. He rushes about the farm, completely absorbed from morning till night. The people are quite terrible. I shall never forget them. Their awful dinner parties. Awful food. Same people, same food, year after year, simply at this one’s house this week, someone else’s house the next Nothing to talk of but crops, female complaints, servants. Ugly, ugly. Nothing but ugliness.’

  Suddenly she opened her eyes and drew herself upright, rising out of the water, and, shining, eager, she brought out one of her paralysing generalities again: ‘Beauty is the most important thing in life, don’t you think so?’

  When people come out with statements like that, I always feel that I do not know what they are talking about. I flounder before this bold snatching-up put of the half-sensed, dimly-realized things I have only now and then thought I might have touched for a moment. Is this great glittering flashy fish what it was that brushed my hand then and then, rarely? Is that all – this impossible great artefact? I recoil from it. If that’s the case, I shan’t let my perception wander down there again.

  I was sure that whatever this woman meant by ‘beauty’, whatever the word was a cover for, was the most important thing in her life. But I could not answer for it for myself, certainly not yet, not then. I said something empty, noncommittal, the kind of remark Americans put with glee into the mouths of the English in films. We came out of the water together, and parted to dress.

  Just as we were walking back over the sand to where our taxi was waiting under the palms, we saw the long-legged figure of Rina, flying down a path through the bushes toward us. Some people from the ship who had hired a taxi to take a look around had dropped her at the beach. ‘Here, darling,’ said Stella, throwing her swimming suit to the girl. ‘Hop in quickly. It’s heavenly.’ But Rina would not swim. Stella went back to her dressing-place to fetch a towel she had forgotten, and the girl said, nibbling at a leaf she had in her hand: ‘I’m so glad mummy’s had such a lovely morning.’ I thought, what an odd, patronizing child she is; what queer creatures English girls’ schools turn out. (Already I found myself thinking of England and English institutions objectively.)

  The taxi took the three of us up to the beach hotel and waited while we had tepid gin slings and a poor lunch. ‘Ugh!’ Stella made a face, though she laughed: ‘The moment you put your foot back here. Anything does.’

  The warm gin made me feel benevolent. I even found myself bantering quite pleasantly with Rina. ‘We should have found an Indian restaurant in the town,’ she said.’ I’d have liked something hot and sharp to eat.’

  We decided, anyway, not to risk the hotel coffee, but to go back to town and look for an Arab café. We did not find one, but trailing back in the direction of the docks, we passed a place that looked like an unsuccessful compromise between a continental café and a tea-shop. It was not quite open to the street and not quite enclosed. People sat, raised back from the street, and looked out from behind the briars and scrolls of a wrought iron shopfront which had been put up in place of the customary glass. The consul and his two women were sitting there, and they called down to us. We were burningly thirsty and we went in and sat at an adj-joining table. The consul’s party were just finishing lunch, and their coffee looked terrible, so, rather foolishly, at half past two on an afternoon of great heat, I ordered John Collinses for us. The place smelled of grilled steak and the drinks were a long time coming. A big fan went slowly in the middle of the ceiling, cutting up and pushing round shoal after shoal of warm air; it was odd to feel the movement of air past one’s face, entirely without the coolness associated with such movement. The place was almost empty and against the imitation log-cabin bar, a tall African waiter in a limp white robe and a red fez slept bolt upright. He wore fancy socks and a shabby version of the sort of pointed-toed patent dancing-shoes I had once seen in my father’s cupboard. His was the sweaty monkey-face that I associate with the few new-born babies I’ve been unable to avoid seeing; the sweat made it interesting by creating planes and highlighting creases that gave it that same innocent ancientness. The consul, who was sitting back with his elbow hooked round one of the iron curlycues on his chair, saw me looking at the man and waved his hand; a hand that, in movement, always looked as if it were giving an order. ‘There you are. Can you believe in the Mau Mau, here? We’re only three hundred miles from Nairobi, this is Kenya. You couldn’t credit it. Pangas and burnings. . . . And look at that. Wouldn’t want to harm a fly. . . .’ As if to prove the consul’s point, a fly settled on the sleeping face and crawled up the left cheek from mouth to eye.

  The amused bewilderment that must have shown rather stupidly on my face at that moment was not so much a sharing of the consul’s incredulity at the sight of the waiter in the face of facts, as a sudden realization about myself. I had spent the day in Mombasa like Sinbad the Sailor, seeking with my northern blood the old voluptuous adventure of warm seas and idleness in the sun. What about all the books I had read before I left England, all those books about Africa I had been reading for the past three or more years? The bluebooks, the leaflets, the surveys, the studies – the thick ones by professors of anthropology and sociology, the thin ones by economists and agronomists, the sensational ones by journalists? How far away was the scene of the Mau Mau situation in which my circle of friends and family had been so intensely interested, now that I was three hundred miles near to, instead of six thousand miles away from it?

  I sat and drank my sweet drink and did not feel even the mildest self-reproach. In fact I felt rather pleased with myself, as if I had been absolved from one suspicion of priggishness, bookishness I had harboured against myself. I simply did not care at all. I had not made any attempt whatever to use the day; I hadn’t presented the letter of introduction I’d been given to a prominent government official, I hadn’t tried to see for myself anything of African labour conditions, housing, or political emergence. I began to feel overwhelmingly sleepy; I still found the big, wide, lax heat (like being involved in one of creation’s enormous yawns) pleasurable, my veins widened, my pores opened to it The two pretty women (I supposed one must admit that Rina was pretty too, if one considered the small head without its relat
ion to that long body on which it was perched) looked very nearly female, instead of feminine, as if the food and liquor that relaxed their faces and the heat that made their hair cluster damply had melted away, along with the powder, that English cast of beauty – a real cast, in the concrete and not the figurative sense of the word – from which I have suffered all my life; yes, even as a child, even in the face of my mother.

  We went back to the ship very content; I noticed that Rina sang softly to herself, like a child, when she felt at peace with the world. The launch was full, and I sat listening to the tired, giggling, or earnest voices, tense with the excitement of shopping, of our fellow passengers.

  Once aboard, the Turgells and I retired to our cabins to sleep off the enervation of gin and sun. Before I lay down I saw for a moment in my porthole the round brilliant picture of the shore, a picture like those made up under glass on the tops of silver dressing-table utensils, out of butterfly wings. Glittering blue sky, glittering green palms, glittering blue water. When I stretched on the bunk, the little shelf of books beneath the porthole rose to eye-level. The Peoples of South Africa, The Problems of South Africa, Report on South Africa, Heart of Africa. I began to read the titles, the authors, the publishers’ imprints, rhythmically and compulsively. Suddenly, I felt the warm turquoise water swinging below me as I kept myself afloat. Sand like the dust of crystals was pouring through my fingers, hairy coco-nuts like some giant’s sex, swung far above my head, under the beautiful scimitar fronds of a soaring palm. Sinbad, Sinbad, Sinbad the Sailor.

  I woke just after five o’clock and went up on deck. We were moving slowly out of the harbour, that smooth, silent retreat from the land while the ship is borne, not of its own volition, but under tow. Every time we left a port of call there was this strange moment, a moment of silence when here and there a hand lifted along the rail in a half-wave to the unknown figures standing on the shore, like a drooping flag stirring once in a current of air. Then the engines began beating, the ship turned in the strong wash of her own power, and we were no longer merely slipping out of human grasp, away, away, but heading on out to sea and our next objective, toward, toward. It was the time when we turned from the rail, sought each other’s company, pulled the chairs up round the small deck-tables, and summoned the bar steward. Stella arrived, freshly dressed and scented, carrying the Italian grammar which she studied assiduously an hour a day, then the consul, in shorts and white stockings which transformed his distinction into something vaguely naval. Soon Mamma followed, with her stiff, Queen Mary gait and her writing materials – she had always just written, or was about to write, letters. Rina, still in those dreadful green trousers that hung down slack where she hadn’t enough behind to fill them, came up with Miss Everard, the tall, handsome spinster of fifty who wore a man’s watch, and in the evening, magnificent gauze saris. She had been something called ‘household adviser’ to some Indian prince who, despite Indian democracy and Nehru, seemed to have lived in all the splendour of the old days of independent princely states. She was going to live with her brother in one of the British Protectorates in Africa, and she, too, was a passionate Italophile, scattering her speech with cara mia’s. Carlo, the fat partner of the duo of Carlo and Nino, in charge of the little mosaic-decorated bar outside the dining-room, stood back to usher the two ladies before him out on to the deck, but Everard swept him along with them, shrieking at him in aggressively musical Italian over her shoulder. It seemed that all her talking, and she was a vast and enveloping talker, was done over her shoulder. In passing, as it were, she had always the final word. She sat down with us, made herself comfortable, talking away to Carlo all the time, and only interrupted herself to say to us in English, as if the suggestion were absurd: ‘I’m not intruding?’ Before we could protest, she had ordered drinks for us, in Italian, with many gestures of stirring, of adding a soupçon of something, of putting in plenty of ice, and more terse interjections in English: ‘And you? Pink gin? An Americano? With or without bitters?’

  Carlo, with his Hallowe’en pumpkin smile, his round amiable eyes, and those little feet in white pointed-toed shoes which supported him almost twenty-four hours a day on such missions, went off to his bar and came back with the specified variety of drinks, perfectly mixed, perfectly chilled, and accompanied by dishes of black and green olives. After the indifferent food, the heat, and the tepid, over-sweet drinks ashore, the sight and taste of his calm handiwork made one regard the big fat smiling man with almost sentimental relief – we were ‘home’, cherished, attended, indulged. I remarked to the consul, perhaps not-so-un-consciously paraphrasing Stella, that I thought luxury was one of the most important things in life. But he merely smiled, lifting his eyebrows in polite agreement with something he felt he had not heard aright, but which was not important enough to bear a repetition. Of course, he had not lived in England since long before the war; he knew nothing of the world in which I had grown up, where every small service you could afford to buy yourself was given you grudgingly, where, justly, no doubt, but drearily, nevertheless, you often had to retire with your host after dinner, not to the library for port and cigars, but to the kitchen for dish-washing.

  The dense green coastline with the masts of coco-nut palms criss-crossed against the sky faded into distance and the radiance of a sunset that seemed to arise, like a halo, from, rather than be reflected in, the sea. But other coastlines, those of islands at all levels near and far in the distance, emerged before and sank away into light behind us, little coastlines with a pearly dip of beach, and the pinkish-mauve haze of pencilled boles, and the dark-green, almost blue, crowns of palm. Our table grew quite gay. The consul ordered another round of drinks and then I did. Rina went into competition with the consul, flipping olive pits into the water. Miss Everard began a long, animated discussion of the day ashore with me in French (she presumed I must speak something) to which I replied with equally obstinate animation in English. I absolutely refused to speak to Miss Everard in any language other than English; I had even managed to cultivate a questioning look in my eyes when she trotted out some old Latin tag.

  The ship’s first officer, a dapper Triestino, more like a Frenchman than Italian in appearance, strolled past and was invited to join us. He was an obvious admirer of Stella, and complimenting her graciously in Italian as he sat beside her, brought a happy blush to her bosom and neck, as if her body had never learned the cultivated decorum of her face. Even the consul’s wife, coming bewilderedly and cautiously from the direction of her cabin, outrageously painted and in an ‘afternoon’ frock, fitted in somehow, and after changing her mind twice about her choice of a drink, settled beside me.

  ‘He seems a lot better since we sailed,’ she said to her husband, not noticing that she was interrupting. He shook two olive pits together in his hand and screwed up his face in her direction: ‘What is it you say?’ ‘I said Flopsy’s a lot better, dear.’

  The consul said with rasping pity,’ My wife’s cat appeared to have some difficulty in digesting his luncheon fish, or whatever-it-was.’

  It was clear that he intended the subject to be closed, so far as the general company was concerned, and so she turned to me and said, confidentially, ‘It was not fish, it was mince. But not ordinary mince, some spice was in it.’

  Was she Welsh, perhaps, I wondered? There was a stilted-ness, an absence of elision in her speech which somehow was not English. Stella had suggested that she was an early indiscretion of the consul’s, from Turkey, or perhaps the Middle East; an indiscretion with which he found himself saddled, in honour bound, for the rest of his life. Certainly there was something Levantine if not Eastern in her appearance.

  The consul grew positively gallant with Stella – the nearest he could ever get toward being flirtatious – and the eyes of old Montecelli, or whatever the first officer’s name was, swam bright and bulging as a Pekinese’s with smiling Mediterranean maleness. Everard (in English, astonishingly) told some really funny stories about her Indian prince and
his household. Our laughter and our raised voices had the effect of isolating us rather enviably from the other passengers; they strolled past, or sat apart in their own little groups, like children who pretend not to know that there is a party in the next-door garden. How ridiculously much these trivial things matter in hotels and ships, how they reproduce in miniature the whole human situation, the haves and the have-nots, the chosen and the rejected, the prestige of the successful fight for the female, the singling out of their leader by the herd! All there, on the air-conditioned, safe, and sanitary liner, being worked out in the form of shuffle-board championships, the crossing-the-line ceremony, and the parties made up for the Captain’s ball. Psychologists say that the activities of children at play are one long imaginative rehearsal for life; adults, too, never stop muttering the lines and reproducing the cues, even on holiday; even between performances. Though none of these people with whom I sat drinking were people whom I would choose as friends, I was surprised and a little inclined to sneer at myself to find that I enjoyed the warm feeling of being one of the group, of belonging. Long after most of the other passengers had gone down to dress for dinner, we continued to sit on, drinking and laughing and talking noisy nonsense. When at last we rose we were agreed, with rather gin-borne accord and enthusiasm, that we should gather after dinner and make something of a party, so far as we were concerned, of the decorous dancing to the ship’s band which took place on those nights on which there was no cinema show.