The Late Bourgeois World Read online

  At the recess as we all clattered into the echoing corridors of the courts, I smelt her perfume. People talking as they went, forming groups that obstructed each other, had squeezed us together. The jar of coming face to face opened her mouth after years of silence between us. She spoke. ‘What have we done to deserve this!’ Under each eye and from lips to chin were deep scores, the lashes of a beauty’s battle with age. I came back at her – I don’t know where it came from – ‘You remember when he burned his father’s clothes.’

  Footsteps rang all about us, we were being jostled.

  ‘What? All children get up to things. That was nothing.’

  ‘He did it because he was in trouble at school, and he’d tried to talk about it to his father for days, but his father was too busy. Every time he tried to lead round to what he wanted to say he was told, run away now, your father’s busy.’

  Her painted mouth shaped an incredulous laugh. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Yes, you don’t remember. But you’ll remember it was the time when your husband was angling to get into the Cabinet. The time when he was Chief Whip, and was so busy?’

  I was excited with hatred of her self-pity, the very smell of her stank in my nostrils. Oh we bathed and perfumed and depilated white ladies, in whose wombs the sanctity of the white race is entombed! What concoction of musk and boiled petals can disguise the dirt done in the name of that sanctity? Max took that dirt upon himself, tarred and feathered himself with it, and she complained of her martyred respectability. I wanted to wound her; could nothing wound her? She turned her back as one does on someone of whom it is useless to expect anything.

  And yet, at the beginning, the Van Den Sandts regarded me as an ally. Not personally, but in my capacity as a ‘normal’ interest for a boy who didn’t have many. If their Max wouldn’t join the country club or pull his weight as a member of the United Party Youth, then at least he’d found himself a ‘little girl’. The ‘little’ was used as indicative of my social standing, not my size; I was a shopkeeper’s daughter from a small town, while Max’s father not only had been a frontbencher in the Smuts government but was also a director of various companies, from cigarette manufacture to plastic packaging. When Max was a student they didn’t take him very seriously, of course, and regarded what they knew of his activities in student politics, along with his pointed non-appearance at dinner parties and his shabby clothes, as youthful Bohemianism. I don’t know whether they ever knew that he was a member of a Communist cell, probably not. To them it was all a game, a fancy dress ball like the ones they used to go to in the thirties. Soon he would put away the costume, wear a suit, join one of his father’s companies, invest in the share market and build a nice home for the little girl he would marry. They had no idea that he was spending his time with African and Indian students who took him home where he had never been before, to the locations and ghettoes, and introduced him to men who, while they worked as white men’s drivers and cleaners and factory hands, had formulated their own views of their destiny and had their own ideas of setting about to achieve it. For the Van Den Sandts none of this existed; when Mrs Van Den Sandt spoke of ‘we South Africans’ she meant the Afrikaans- and English-speaking white people, and when Theo Van Den Sandt called for ‘a united South Africa, going forward to an era of progress and prosperity for all’ he meant the unity of the same two white groups, and higher wages and bigger cars for them. For the rest – the ten or eleven million ‘natives’ – their labour was directed in various Acts of no interest outside Parliament, and their lives were incidental to their labour, since until the white man came they knew nothing better than a mud hut in the veld. As for the few who had managed to get an education, the one or two outstanding ones who were let into the University alongside her own son – Mrs Van Den Sandt thought it ‘marvellous, how some of them can raise themselves if they make the effort’; but the ‘effort’ was not related in her mind to any room in a location yard where somebody else’s son puzzled through his work by the light of a bit of candle, squashing with his thumbnail (I always remember this description of his student days given by one of our friends) the bugs as they crawled out of their cracks.

  The Van Den Sandts must have relied on me to lead Max by the penis, as it were, into the life he was born for; and I suppose that was why she was inclined to take with sophisticated tolerance, unlike my own parents, the fact that I got myself pregnant at eighteen. ‘It’s just a mistake, that’s all,’ she said in a sort of soothing baby talk, as if a puppy had wet the carpet. And after Max and I were married she looked at me with mock censure, raising her eyebrows and smiling when we came to lunch one day: ‘Oh look at its little belly, if you please! My dear, all the old cats are going to start counting soon – but we don’t care a fig for them, do we!’

  Max’s face changed and without greeting her he turned and went out of the room. I found him in his old bedroom. ‘If I don’t bother about it, why should you?’ But what was a silly incident, to me, was the ruthless persistence of a social manner that had affectionately belittled him, all his life. Only a man could beget a child, yet she managed to make it something ‘clever’ and ‘naughty’ the children had done.

  It was while I was pregnant, in 1952, that the Defiance Campaign began. Max was one of a group of white people who marched into an African area prohibited to whites, and he also went to Durban to camp with Africans and Indians on a public square in protest against segregation. Of course, the whole idea was to get oneself arrested and to go to jail. But the charges against Max were dropped, and although we never found out why, he was always convinced that his father had contrived it. If this was so, it was a terrible thing to do to Max; but of course they didn’t do it for Max, they did it for themselves. It wouldn’t have done for a prominent United Party MP to have a son in prison for defiance of colour bar laws, even though by that time the Nationalists had been in power for five years and Van Den Sandt had lost for good his chance of becoming a Cabinet minister. If Max wouldn’t act as a white man for white men, the Van Den Sandts wouldn’t let him act at all. That’s what they wanted to do to him. And then a time came when he made a bomb.

  They were gathering together their weekend purchases all round me, the good citizens who never had any doubt about where their allegiance lay. The steady winter sun, so bone-warming, so reassuringly benign (perhaps we can’t help feeling that if we have the best climate in the world we must deserve it?) shone on the shapes of bottles of wine and whisky, the prawns and cakes and bunches of flowers, plain evidence of the superior living standards of white civilization, that they were taking home. I saw them give their children pennies to drop into the SPCA collection box and the hat of the black beggar. Home-made bombs have not shaken the ground under their feet, nor have the riots, the marches, the shootings of a few years back, though like all decent people, they deplore the inhumanity of violence, and, reserving the right of constitutional action to themselves alone, commend it to others as the only decent way to achieve change – should one want such a thing.

  I too have my package of pork fillets and my chair in the sun; you would not know me from the others. We are all still alive and the cars are crawling impatiently one behind the other. Whereas Max is in the sea, in the soup, at the bottom of the sea; poor madman: I suppose it will be possible to say that, now, as it has been satisfactorily possible to say, in the end, of many who have proved awkward, including the one who didn’t know that a Prime Minister with a divine mission might need a silver bullet. Only madmen do such things. But can any white man who wants change really be all there? It’s a comforting thought.

  Some of them would remember, today, that they were right not to take Max seriously, poor devil, when he made that frightful speech at his sister’s wedding. If they were castigated, well, the poor fellow was unbalanced. It was long before the bomb, Lord yes, long before it had come to that – long before we had come to a lot of things. Max and I were still together, Bobo was a little baby a few months
old, we still, curiously, had some sort of place in the Van Den Sandt family life. It was after the Defiance Campaign affair, of course, but I suppose since Max’s part in that had been hushed up, the Van Den Sandts didn’t feel that that constituted a valid rift between Max and themselves. Only public injury counts, with them. In one of those twists of an ancient code degenerating far from its source that is characteristic of a civilization brought over the sea and kept in mothballs, the Van Den Sandts interpret honour as something that exists in the eyes of others; you can do each other to death, in private: shame or pain come only from what leaks out. A daughter’s wedding to a suitable candidate was a public occasion (they’d been done out of Max’s by my pregnancy even if Max would not have refused to play) and the bride’s only brother was a traditional participant in the jocular clannish emotionalism of the celebration. Therefore Max lost all other identity; the Van Den Sandts insisted that he must propose the toast to Queenie and her bridegroom. I think they felt confident that the convention of the occasion would carry him along as such things did for them, through everything; that, married, with a wife and baby of his own, the ceremonies and loyalties of his kind would hold sway over him at last, he would ‘rise to it’ irresistibly, like the good fellow any son of theirs must be, underneath, after all.

  I was surprised that Max gave in; I had wondered if I’d be able to get him to go to the wedding at all. I thought it must be because of Queenie, of whom he was fond, in an unthinking sort of way – she was so pretty, one of those girls whom one sets aside in one’s mind from any further necessity to account for themselves.

  ‘What on earth will you find to say?’ I asked, laughing at the idea of him.

  ‘As if you’re expected to say anything,’ he said. ‘To the happy couple!’

  And I waved an imaginary glass and responded, ‘Yay! Hurray!’

  Mrs Van Den Sandt gave me money to buy myself a dress for the wedding; a generous gift, spoilt by her inability to resist the remark: ‘Don’t let Theo know how much your little dress cost – he’ll be furious at my extravagance!’ so that I’d be sure to understand how generous she had been and how modest my expectations of the Van Den Sandts ought to be. What she didn’t know was that the dress cost less than half of what I told her, and I’d used the rest of the money to pay the chemist and dairy. I sat there behind the swag of carnations and roses that decorated the bride’s table, eating smoked salmon and drinking champagne, and felt only an empathetic inward trill of shyness – hidden by the smile politely exchanged with the uncle next to me – when Max got up to speak. Max is – was – slight and not very tall, but he had the big wrists and the small bright-blue, far-sighted eyes of his mother’s antecedents; in him, unmistakably, was the Boer identity that she archly claimed for herself. He wore his dark suit and his best, raw silk tie that I had given him. He gave, to the expanse of table cloth directly beneath him rather than anywhere else, the nervous smile that always reminded me of the mouth-movement of an uncertain feline animal, not snarling, unable to express a greeting, yet acknowledging an approach. He did not look at me, nor at anyone. His first few words were lost in the talk that had not quite yet damped down, but then his voice emerged, ‘… my sister and Allan, the man she has chosen to marry, a happy life together. Naturally we wish them this, though there’s not much more we can do about it than wish. I mean it’s up to them.’

  There was a stir towards laughter, a false start – they were expecting to have to respond to a joke or innuendo soon, but Max did not seem to understand, and went on, ‘I don’t know Allan at all, and though I think I know my sister, I don’t suppose I know much about her, either. We have to leave it to them to make a go of it for themselves. And – good luck to them. They’re young, my sister’s beautiful –’

  And this time the growl of laughter was confident. Max became inaudible, though I guessed he was probably saying something about the beauty being in spite of the way she’d been got up for the day. The guests had decided that his ignoring of their response was some sort of dead-pan wit and their laughter surged appreciatively into every pause or hesitation as he went on, ‘… between the two of them. But the kind of life they’ll live, the way they’ll live among other people – that’s another thing again, and here one can have something to say. I know I’m supposed to be speaking for everybody here’ (there was an emotional murmur of support) ‘all these people who have known Queen since she was born, and who have known her husband, known Allan – and who have come here full of the good feeling they get when they get together and drink each other’s health – your health, Queen and Allan – but I’d like to say off my own bat’ (eyes were on him with the indulgent, smiling attention good manners decreed) ‘don’t let the world begin and end for you with the – how many is it? Four hundred? – people sitting here in this – the Donnybrook Country and Sporting Club today. These good friends of our parents and Allan’s parents, our father’s regional chairman and the former ministers of this and that (I don’t want to make a mistake in the portfolios) and all the others, I don’t know the names but I recognize the faces, all right – who have made us, and made this club, and made this country what it is.’ (There was prolonged clapping, led by someone with loud, hard palms.) ‘There’s a whole world outside this.’ (Applause broke out again.) ‘Shut outside. Kept out. Shutting this in … Don’t stay inside and let your arteries harden, like theirs … I’m not talking about the sort of thing some of them have, those who have had their thrombosis, I don’t mean veins gone furry through sitting around in places like this fine club and having more than enough to eat –’ (Clapping began and spattered out, like mistaken applause between movements at a concert.) ‘What I’m asking you to look out for is – is moral sclerosis. Moral sclerosis. Hardening of the heart, narrowing of the mind; while the dividends go up. The thing that makes them distribute free blankets in the location in winter, while refusing to pay wages people could live on. Smugness. Among us, you can’t be too young to pick it up. It sets in pretty quick. More widespread than bilharzia in the rivers, and a damned sight harder to cure.’

  There was a murmurous titter. The uncle beside me whispered anxiously, ‘He’s inherited his father’s gifts as a speaker.’

  ‘It’s a hundred per cent endemic in places like this Donnybrook Country and Sporting Club, and in all the suburbs you’re likely to choose from to live in. Just don’t be too sure they’re healthy, our nice clean suburbs for whites only.’

  They were smiling blindly, deafly, keeping their attitudes of bland attention as they would have done if the hostess had lost her panties on the dance floor, or they had suddenly overheard an embarrassing private noise.

  ‘— and your children. If you have babies, Queenie and Allan, don’t worry too much about who kisses them – it’s what they’ll tell them later that infects. It’s what being nicely brought up will make of them that you’ve got to watch out for. Moral sclerosis – yes, that’s all I wanted to say, just stay alive and feeling and thinking – and that’s all I can say that’ll be of any use …’

  Max suddenly became aware of the people about him, and sat down. There was a second of silence and then the same pair of hard palms began to clap and a few other hands followed hollowly, but someone at the bride’s table at once leapt up and thrust out his glass in the toast that Max had forgotten – ‘The bride and groom!’ All the gilded folding chairs shuffled and all the figures rose in solidarity – ‘To the bride and groom!’ I saw the determinedly smiling faces behind the glasses of wine as if they had turned on him. But the voices of congratulation clashed over my head, the band struck up ‘For They Are Jolly Good Fellows’, and the din swept over him, ignoring him, asserting them. In a little while nobody seemed to remember that the speech had been any different from dozens of others they’d sat through and didn’t remember. Only Mrs Van Den Sandt’s make-up stood out like a face drawn on her face as she leant vivaciously across the table to receive kisses and congratulations; the skin beneath must have been dr
ained of blood.

  Poor Max – moral sclerosis! The way he fell in love with that prig’s phrase and kept repeating it: moral sclerosis. Where on earth had he got it from? And all the analogies he kept raking up to go with it. Like our old Sunday school lessons – the world is God’s garden and we are all His flowers, etc. (The Blight of Dishonesty, Aphids of Doubt.) And could there have been a more unsuitable time and place for such an attempt? What sort of show could his awkward honesty make against the sheer rudeness of him? They were all in the right, again, and he was wrong; and I could have kicked him for it. We did not leave the wedding. We stayed on and got rather tight and danced together in an ostentatious solidarity of our own, but I couldn’t say a word to him about the speech, it was so horribly funny, and I suppose that made him ashamed, and he sulked for days.

  As for the bride, his sister Queenie, home and school had succeeded with her so completely that she did not understand his strange, muddled outburst sufficiently to feel the need to ignore it. ‘What a jawing to give us at our wedding!’ she complained good-naturedly. ‘I thought I was back at school or something! You think because you got married first you can lecture me like an old grandpa!’

  Moral sclerosis; good God.

  After all this time, the idiotic term still makes me squirm – and apparently express the embarrassment outwardly, in a smile: when I drew up before the raised glove of the traffic policeman who’s on duty at my corner on Saturdays, I realized that he was smiling back at the female behind glass in the manner of one responding to the unexpected, but never unwelcome overture.

  Chapter 3

  The telephone was ringing as I came into the flat, but when I reached it, it stopped. I was sure it was Graham and then I saw a bunch of flowers under cellophane, on the table; he’d got the florist to send them here instead of to the Home. But my name was on the finicky little envelope – he had sent me flowers at the same time as he ordered them for the old lady. Samson the cleaner must have been working in the flat when they were delivered, and had taken them in. They were pressed like faces against glass; I ripped them free of the squeaky transparency and read the card: With love, G. Graham and I have no private names, references, or love-words. We use the standard vocabulary when necessary. A cold bruised smell came up from the flowers; it was the snowdrops, with their onion-like stems and leaves, their chilly greenness. He knows how crazy I am about them. And about the muguet-du-bois that we bought when we met for a week in the Black Forest in Europe last year. There is nothing wrong with a plain statement: With love. He happened to be in the florist’s and so he sent me some flowers. It’s not a thing he would do specially, unless it were on a birthday or something. It might have been because of Max; but good God, no, surely not, that would have been awful, he wouldn’t have done it. We had made love the night before, but there was nothing special about that. One doesn’t like to admit to habit, but the fact is that he doesn’t have his mind on court the next day, on Friday evenings, and I don’t have to get up next morning to go to work.