The Late Bourgeois World Read online

  While I was putting the flowers in water the phone rang again. ‘They’re lovely – I’ve just come in this minute. The first snowdrops I’ve seen this year.’

  ‘How was he?’

  ‘Oh, it was all right. He’s a very sensible child, thank God.’

  I began to wish he would say come to lunch, but I wouldn’t do anything about it because we make a point of not living in each other’s pocket, and if I were to start it, I’d have to expect him to make the same sort of use of me at some time when it might not be convenient. You can’t have it both ways. He was probably lunching at the house of the young advocate he’d been playing golf with; the wife is a lawyer, too, a nice girl – I enjoy their company and have a sort of open invitation from them, but before people like this, his colleagues, we don’t like to give the impression of ‘going about everywhere together’, we make it tacitly clear that we’re not to be regarded as a ‘couple’. There’s no point in a man like Graham flaunting the fact that he’s got a woman unless – what? I don’t suppose you could say that our affair wasn’t serious; but all the same, it’s not classified, labelled.

  Graham told me there was something about Max in the early edition of the evening paper. ‘Do you want me to read it?’

  ‘No, just tell me.’

  But he cleared his throat as he does before he reads something aloud, or begins his plea in court. Unlike most lawyers he has a good voice. ‘It’s not much. There’s no mention of you, only his parents. The case is exhumed, of course … and it says he was a named Communist – I don’t somehow remember …?’

  ‘Which he wasn’t. He was never named. However.’

  ‘A diving team managed to bring up the car. There was a suitcase full of documents and papers in the back, all so damaged by water that it will not be possible to determine their nature.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘Nothing else. His father’s career in Parliament.’

  ‘Oh yes. No mention of Bobo at all?’

  ‘Fortunately not.’

  We might have been cool criminals discussing a successful getaway.

  I said, ‘It was a most perfect morning. Did you have a good game?’

  ‘Booker beat the pants off me. That’s the second time this week and I’ve told him it’s once too often.’ He and his golf partner had been opposing counsel in a case Graham had lost.

  I said, ‘I don’t understand it. If I were you I should have seen enough of him to last me for a bit.’ He laughed; I am always shocked by the way lawyers can attack each other with every sign of bitter ruthlessness over somebody’s life – and then sit in brotherly bonhomie at the tea break. ‘Nothing’s more frightening than professionalism. Imagine, whether you get ten years or go free can depend on whether or not your counsel can out-talk the other man’s, and there they are boozing together at the golf club. It terrifies me more than the idea of the judge. I like to think that when I go to a lawyer, he’s as tied up in my affairs as I am myself.’

  We both laughed; on ground we’d gone over before.

  ‘But you know that wouldn’t do at all, he’d be giving very bad counsel if he were to be. You’re too emotional.’

  I thought of how we’d just talked of Max’s death. Honesty sounds callous; so that one is almost ashamed of it.

  ‘Booker doesn’t know we’re going to appeal, anyway,’ he teased me drily. ‘I’ll get my own back in court if not on the green. I’m going to do some work this afternoon, that is, if I don’t sleep. I don’t suppose I’ll be able to resist a sleep. That chair you made me buy.’ In Denmark he ordered the beautiful leather furniture they make there, and we threw out the ugly stuff his wife must have thought suitable for a ‘gentleman’s study’. There’s a chair you could sleep the whole night in, even make love in, not that he ever would. Yesterday after the servant had taken the coffee away, although the mood for love-making came as we sat in front of the fire, we went into his bedroom as usual. What nonsense it is to write of the ‘disembodied’ voice on the telephone; all of Graham was there as he talked commonplaces. Last night he was held in my body a long time.

  The call box bleeped at his end and I said something again about the flowers, before we hung up. Once alone, I didn’t feel the slightest inclination to go out, after all; I felt, on the contrary, a relief. I brought the water in the vase to the right level. I threw the paper and cellophane in the kitchen bin and put the food I’d bought into the refrigerator. I opened the creaking joints of my plastic and aluminium chair and sat on the balcony in the sun, smoking. Many of the demands one makes on other people are nothing but nervous habit, like reaching for a cigarette. That’s something for me to remember, if I were ever to think of marrying again. I don’t think I’ll marry again. But I catch myself speaking of Max as my ‘first husband’; which sounds as if I expect to have another. Well, at thirty, one can’t be too sure of what one may still do.

  At eighteen I was quite sure, of course. I would be married and have a baby. This future had come out to meet me as expected, though perhaps sooner. Max might not have been the man according to specifications, but the situation, deep in my subconscious, matched the pattern I’d been given to go by. The concept of marriage as shelter remained with me, even if it were only to be shelter from parents and their ways. There, whatever the walls were made of, I should live a woman’s life, which was? A life lived among women like my mother, attached to a man like my father. But the trouble is that there are not more men like my father – in the sense that the sort of man my father is doesn’t represent to me, in my world, what it did to my mother in hers. I was brought up to live among women, as middle-class women with their shopping and social and household concerns comfortably do, but I have to live among men. Most of what there was to learn from my family and background has turned out to be hopelessly obsolete, for me.

  Graham and I have known each other since the trial. I was already divorced from Max, but there was no one else to do anything, that’s how I met Graham, I was told he was the right man for the case. As it happened he couldn’t take the brief, in the end it was given over to someone else, but he remained interested and afterwards, when Max was in prison, he helped me make various applications on Max’s behalf. Graham didn’t ask me any questions, he was like one of those doctors with whom you feel that he knows everything about you, simply from a professional reading of signs you don’t even know you exhibit. He had a wife once; she was a girl he’d gone about with since they were schoolchildren, and she died of meningitis when she was younger than I am now. There are still traycloths in the house on which she embroidered her initials.

  Graham defends many people on political charges and is one of a handful of advocates who ignore the possible consequences of getting a reputation for being willing to take such cases. I’ve got my job analysing stools for tapeworm and urine for bilharzia and blood for cholesterol (at the Institute for Medical Research). And so we keep our hands clean. So far as work is concerned, at least. Neither of us makes money out of cheap labour or performs a service confined to people of a particular colour. For myself, thank God shit and blood are all the same, no matter whom they come from.

  In Europe last year, we enjoyed ourselves very much, and lived in the same room, the same bed, in easy intimacy. We each went our own way some of the time, but we’d planned the holiday together and we stayed together for the greater part. I don’t think we once felt irritated with each other. Yet since we’ve been back we’ve lived again just as we used to, sometimes not sleeping together for two weeks, each taking up large tracts of life where the other has no claim. I didn’t need him, sitting in the sun on my balcony.

  A sexual connection. But there is more to it than that. A love affair? Less than that. I’m not suggesting it’s a new form of relationship, of course, but rather that it’s made up of the bits of old ones that don’t work. It’s decent enough; harms nobody, not even ourselves. I suppose Graham would marry me, if I wanted it. Perhaps he wants it; and then it would all ch
ange. If I wanted a man, here, at this time, in this country, could I find a better one? He doesn’t act, that’s true; but he doesn’t give way, and that’s not bad, in a deadlock. He lives white, but what’s the point of the gesture of living any other way? He will survive his own convictions, he will do what he sets out to do, he will keep whatever promises he makes. When I talk with him about history or politics I am aware of the magnetic pull of his mind to the truth. One can’t get at it, but to have some idea where it is! Yet when he’s inside me – last night – there’s the strangest thing. He’s much better than someone my own age, he comes to me with a solid and majestic erection that will last as long as we choose. Sometimes he will be in me for an hour and I can put my hand on my belly and feel the blunt head, like a standard upheld, through my flesh. But while he fills me, while you’d think the last gap in me was closed for ever, while we lie there silent I get the feeling that I am the one who has drawn him up into my flesh, I am the one who holds him there, that I am the one who has him, helpless. If I flex the muscles inside me it’s as if I were throttling someone. He doesn’t speak; the suffering of pleasure shuts his eyes, the lids are tender without his glasses. And even when he brings about the climax for us – afterwards I am still holding him as if strangled: warm, thick, dead, inside.

  That’s how it is.

  But I don’t think of it often; and sitting on my balcony in the midday sun that cannot possibly be called ‘winter’, it simply took a place in my consciousness (I was growing drowsy from the dry warmth) with the pigeons toeing their way along the guttering, two children I couldn’t see, but could hear shooting water pistols at each other, below my feet, and the men on the bit of grass above the pavement opposite. They were black men with their delivery bicycles, or in working overalls. They lay flung down upon the grass, the legends of firms across their backs. They were drinking beer out of the big red cartons, in the sun. We were all in the sun. There is a way of being with people that comes only by not knowing names. If you have no particular need of anyone, you find yourself belonging to a company you hadn’t been admitted to before; I didn’t need anybody because I had these people who, like myself, would get up and go away in a little while. Without any reason, I felt very much at home.

  In spite of everything.

  Their talk went on sporadically, in the cadences I know so well, even if I don’t understand the words. It was the hour when all the flat-dwellers were at lunch and only they had time to lie on the grass, time that had no label attached to it. After a while I went in and cut myself the crust of the loaf I’d bought and put some papery shop-ham on it and ate a banana in which there was winter – a hard centre and a felted taste. When I had food in my stomach I was overcome by weariness and lay down on the divan in the living room, where it was warm, under the rug from Bobo’s bed.

  A vision of seaweed swaying up from deep underwater.

  Not asleep but awake in the vision, as I opened my eyes in the room. At once close to the water where the heads surface in bunches of torn rubber ribbons sizzling with the oxygen of broken water, bedraggle in the wash from the rocks; and at the same time looking down from the cliff high where the road is, down on the depths tortoiseshell with sun and the rippling distortion of the great stems, brown thrashing tubes that sway down, down, out of the focus of lenses of water thick as bottle-ends, down, down.

  The water rushed into Max’s nostrils and filled his mouth as it opened for air. For the first time it came to me as it must have happened when he made it happen. The burning cold salt water rushing in everywhere and the last bubbles of life belching up from places where they had been caught – the car, under his shirt, in his lungs, filled with the final breath that he had taken before he went down. Down, down, to where the weeds must, at last, have their beginning. He took with him a suitcase of papers that could not be deciphered. So much sodden muck. He took them with him, and no one would ever know what they were – writings, tracts, plans, letters. He had succeeded in dying.

  I was lying still in the room and my eyes were filled with tears. I wept not for Max’s death but for the pain and terror of the physical facts of it. The flowers had stirred and opened while I slept and the warm room was full of scent. I lay quite still and felt myself alive, there in the room as their scent was.

  Max’s death is a postscript. A postscript can be something trivial, scarcely pertinent, or it can be important and finally relevant.

  I believe I know all there was to know about Max. To know all may be to forgive, but it is not to love. You can know too much for love.

  When Max and I got married he left the university and took a job – many jobs. None of them lasted long; there were so many other things to do, at that time there were still things you could do whose immediacy appealed to us – discussion and study groups in the rooms of people like ourselves and in the black townships, open-air meetings, demonstrations. The Communist Party had been declared illegal and officially disbanded, but in the guise of other organizations the whole rainbow from politically conservative do-gooders to the radical left-wing could still show itself fairly openly. Above all, African nationalism was at a stage when it had gained confidence and prestige in the eyes of the world through the passive resistance campaigns, and at home seemed ready to recognize Africans of any colour who wanted to be free of the colour bar. In our little crowd, Solly, Dave, Lily, Fatima, Alec, Charles – Indian, African, Coloured and white – Fatima gave Bobo his bottle, Dave laughed at Max’s bad moods. The future was already there; it was a matter of having the courage to announce it. How much courage? I don’t think we had any idea.

  Max’s first job was abandoned because they wouldn’t give him three days off to attend a Trades Union conference. Max had been reading politics as a major subject at the university, but there were great gaps in what he felt he ought to know; at the time he was concentrating on trying to give a small group of politically ambitious Africans some of the theoretical background in economics that they wanted. I forget what happened to the next job – oh yes, he got a typist to mimeograph some leaflet during office hours. And so it went on. The jobs came last in any consideration because they were of no importance. He took whatever he could get to do that would help to keep us going. He had no particular qualifications, anyway; he had been studying for an arts degree, which his parents had seen as a harmless alternative to commerce or accountancy, and that he had seen as freedom of mind. The nature of the degree didn’t matter much to them; he’d been expected to join one of his father’s companies on the accomplishment of it, that’s all.

  Max was supposed to be going on working for his degree, at night, but at night there was less time than during the day, since the study groups and meetings were all held after working hours, and friends came for sessions of talk that used to last half the night. I went back to work when Bobo was five months old, and we had a nanny, Daphne, a tough, pretty, real Johannesburg nanny who looked after Max, when he was at home, as well as the baby. Once she and I both suspected in the same month that we were pregnant, and, without my bothering Max or her telling her boyfriend, we managed to mend our situation by promptly taking some pills exacted from my doctor with a warning that they wouldn’t work if we were.

  I was possessed by the idea that Max must be able to go back to university full-time and finish his course. We wouldn’t live off the Van Den Sandts (we’d had to take help from them now and then – over Bobo’s birth, for example). I wanted to find some work I could do at night, in addition to my daytime job. We examined the possibilities; I couldn’t type. I said at last, ‘A cinema usherette. That’s about all. I wonder what they get paid.’

  ‘Why not? With a Soutine pageboy’s outfit and a torch.’ I could see that the idea really pleased him. He began to remark to people, as if I had already taken the job, ‘Liz’s going to be working in a cinema. Don’t think you’re seeing things.’ I was working for a private firm of pathologists, then, and instead of becoming an usherette I got the writing up of some re
search notes to do for one of the doctors. It paid better than working in a cinema would have done, and I was able to do it at home. But Max was often irritated by Dr Farber’s notes spread about in the cramped flat where there was not enough room for his own books and papers, and he seemed to lose interest in the purpose of my extra job. To work as an usherette in a cinema was perhaps the furthest point one could possibly get from any sort of activity that Mrs Van Den Sandt or beautiful Queenie could have imagined themselves engaged in. I deprived Max of an opportunity of reaching an ultimate in his distance from them, and a gratification of his longing to come close to other people in a bond of necessity. I was aware of that longing, but I didn’t always understand when I failed to further its fulfilment.