A World of Strangers Read online

  ‘I thought it would be nice for you to start off here with a flourish, though.’

  ‘Oh, it was.’

  I was afraid that he was about to recommend an alternative, a more modest edition of the hotel, a smaller version of that package of fluorescence and stale air.

  ‘There’s a particularly nice place in Parktown, I believe – private hotel where a lot of people out from home stay.’

  (No, he’d decided that what I needed as a more permanent base after my flutter in the Plaza-Ritz, or whatever it was called, was a genteel English boarding-house.) ‘I’ll speak to Jessie about it; I think she knows someone who lives there.’

  ‘Oh, thank you, Arthur, but I think I’ll definitely try for a flat of some kind. As a matter of fact, I may be on the track of one. I mean, one of the people I was given a letter of introduction to has more or less promised to see what he can do -’ I embarrassed myself by the glib lie.

  ‘Now that’s sensible,’ said Arthur, pleased to think that I must be making use of Faunce’s illustrious connexions. ‘Much better idea to have a little pied à terre of your own. And if there’s someone to pull strings for you, well and good.’

  I believe there’s some sort of propaganda dictum to the effect that a lie, spoken with conviction enough, becomes true. Anyway, the influence of a personal lie is a curious thing; mine had the effect of sending me to read slowly through the sixpenny notebook of addresses I hadn’t opened since I sailed from England. I didn’t know what I was looking for; certainly not for someone who could pull strings. It was almost with reluctance that I went through the meaningless names and addresses scribbled down in my own and other people’s handwriting, in London and in the Cotswolds, in cars and restaurants, the houses of friends, and at Aden Parrot. What had I said at the time that they were being written? Oh yes, please do. Of course, I’ll look them up. I’m sure it’ll be a great help to me. Yes, I’d like to get to know them. Signor A. Pozzi, 177 Barston Place, Riviera Road. And in parenthesis ‘(Arnolfo and Betty)’, Arthur Coutts, Inanda Club, Sandown (ask for Ex. 53), Max and Doreen Brown, Cleantry Court, Isipingo Street. Hildegarde Cegg, 42-7831. David Marshall, c/o Broadcast House. And then my mother’s and Faunce’s list: ‘worth-while’ people. A writer, who’d brought out, under our imprint, the miscegenation novel now as regular a South African export as gold or fruit A newspaper editor. A university professor. An ex-chairman of the Institute of Race Relations. A priest who was something to do with the Penal Reform League. A woman doctor who was superintendent of a hospital for Africans. Reverend This, Doctor That. An Indian who was secretary to some congress or other; an African leader. An M.P.

  Squashed in at the bottom of the page was a name I remembered my mother hesitating over. She had discussed with Faunce whether it was worth-while my bothering to look up this woman; she had been a rather pleasant girl when they knew her in her youth, but she had married this tycoon, this man who was supposed to be second only to Ernest Oppenheimer in importance in the gold-mining industry and she didn’t seem to have done anything since. Wouldn’t I be likely to be bored stiff by that sort of family? Then Faunce had said, well, he might be amused in a way; it might be interesting for him to get a look at these people – and so my mother wrote it in, after all: Marion (and Hamish) Alexander, The High House, Illovo. The telephone number was written so small, I could hardly make it out; my mother had thought it unlikely that I should use it.

  I decided on the Alexanders, Hamish and Marion Alexander, of The High House. A voice that I had already learned to distinguish as an African’s answered the telephone. Mrs Alexander was out; I left my name and the telephone number of the hotel. And somehow I felt satisfied with the gesture. If the Alexanders didn’t telephone me back, I didn’t ever have to bother about them again.

  While I was at dinner, that night, I was called to the telephone. I walked through the dining-room with that swift, furtive air which characterizes people summoned to private business from public rooms; everyone ignored me as steadfastly as I did them. (All kinds of living have their codes, and how quickly one conforms to the particular one in which one finds oneself, no matter how ridiculous it may be.) I lifted the hotel telephone receiver, still warm from someone else’s ear, and there was my mother’s voice; a product of the same school, brought into tune, so to speak, by the same fork. ‘Mr Hood? Toby?-This is Marion Alexander.’

  ‘Yes, Toby Hood. Hullo, Mrs Alexander.’

  ‘I couldn’t believe it! I thought the servant had got the name wrong! The last time I saw you, you were still at school, before the war. . . . How and why are you here? And how wonderful!’

  She asked me to Sunday lunch. A black Buick driven by an African chauffeur came to fetch me at the hotel at twelve o’clock. I tried to talk to him as we drove, but he answered in a reluctant, pompous, off-hand manner, using Americanisms in not quite their right sense. I think he thought I was very badly dressed.

  We left the city – which is without life on Sunday; even the cinemas are closed – and crossed the new Queen Elizabeth bridge. I twisted my head to look back and I must say that, from there, it all looked rather fine; the rectangular buildings, bone and sand and stone colour, pale as objects picked up on a beach, made a frieze of clean, hard shapes against a sky that was all space. If there had been a river under the bridge, this might have been a beautiful city – but there was no water, there were the sheds, tracks, and steel tangle of a railway junction. We passed mean little houses clinging to the fringe of the city, then the University – grey buildings, green trees, and red earth sloping down the hill – and then suburb after suburb of pleasant houses, neat, tame, and comfortable, as such houses are anywhere, but surrounded, overshadowed, overlaid, almost, by trees and flowers of unusual and heavy beauty. The further we drove, the bigger the gardens were; at last we turned off the tar on to a sand road. The car rode softly; the trees nearly met, overhead; in a clearing, I saw the watery shine of a horse’s rump. On a rough stone gateway, white-painted iron letters spelt the high house. The drive was lined with round-limbed, feathery trees; hydrangeas grew in green cumulus, billowing beneath them. I saw a tennis court, a swimming-pool with a rustic changehouse, lawns green without texture, a lily-pond, a bank of irises, and then the house, built on a green mound. A large house, of course, rather like a bloated cottage, with a steep thatched roof curling up over dormer windows, thick white chimneys, and a balcony and abutting porch extending it on the two sides I could see.

  The car dropped me at the front door, which was open, and while I waited for someone to answer my knock, I could see in and also was aware of the vibration of voices on the other side of the big bay window on my right. The entrance hall led away down a few broad shallow steps to the left; I got the impression of a long, mushroom-coloured room there, with gleams of copper and gilt, flowers and glass. In the hall there was a marquetry table under a huge mirror with a mother-of-pearl inlaid frame. Further back, the first steps of a white staircase spread in a dais; carpet seemed to grow up the stairs, padding the rim of each step like pink moss. An African appeared soundlessly; I followed him soundlessly (I found later that the entire ground floor of the house was covered with that carpeting the colour of a mushroom’s gills) past the mirror that reflected three new golf balls and a very old golf glove, sweated and dried to the shape of the wearer’s hand, on the table below it, and through a large living-room full of sofas and chairs covered in women’s dress colours, that led to a veranda. If you could call it that; a superior sort of veranda. The entire wall of the room was open to it, and it was got up like something out of a film, with a bar, a barbecue fireplace, chaises longues, glass and wrought-iron tables, mauve Venetian glass lanterns and queer trailing plants.

  A burst of laughter was interrupted by my appearance; five people looked up, and a thick-set man with a bald, sunburned head struggled from his chair and came over to greet me. ‘You’ll be Toby Hood,’ he said. ‘Come and have a drink. Marion’s not back yet.’ He seemed to think that h
is own identity, that of Hamish Alexander, was self-evident, and he began to introduce me to the others. ‘Archie Baxter’ – a thin, youngish man with the good looks of the distinguished drinker in the whisky advertisements. ‘Kit Baxter’, an equally good-looking young woman, also with a commercial finish about her; they were the kind of couple whose clothes – in this instance, riding clothes – might have been donated by some firm in return for having them worn to advantage, and in the right company. ‘And this is Margaret Gerling and her big sister, Cecil Rowe.’ At this they laughed, and looked alike, the two pretty girls who were also in riding clothes. It seemed a bit ridiculous to stretch myself out, almost supine, the moment I walked into a stranger’s house, and so I sat on the foot-rest of one of the long chairs, between Mrs Baxter and what I now saw was the elder of the two sisters, Cecil Rowe. Baxter, who was over at the little bar, said, ‘Won’t you try one of my Martinis?’ and Mrs Baxter pushed a tray of olives and nuts along a low table, within my reach.

  Once I had a drink and was seated, they took up their chatter again; Hamish Alexander had the totally impersonal welcome and perpetual smile of the man who has many guests, most of them not invited by himself. The women were animated and talkative, especially Margaret Gerling and Mrs Baxter. All three had short, bright fashionable hair, not blonde and yet not brown, the blue eyes, the sunburned necks and brilliant finger-nails, the high actressy voices and oddly inarticulate vocabulary – vogue words, smart clichés, innuendo, and slang – of young upper-class Englishwomen. Nice girls, I should say. Gay, quite witty, and decorative. A shade more sophisticated, a shade less intelligent, a shade more sexy than Rina Turgell. I laughed at their stories – mostly riding stories, against themselves – that were not very good but were well told, along with the others. I contributed a story, not a riding one, but also against myself. A number of other guests came, and the elaborate outdoor room began to fill up.

  There were middle-aged couples, the wives looking far younger than they could have been, in cotton dresses which displayed a lot of well-preserved flesh. But they were good-looking women who smelled luxurious. The men wore the clothes of whatever sport they had just left off playing, or, pasty and wattled, sat, stranded, in a well-pressed get-up of flannels, silk shirts, and scarves that covered the ruin of the hardened arteries, the damaged liver, or the enlarged heart that lay heavily in the breast. One of these last sat next to me, eventually; and I felt myself moved to a kind of disgusted pity, as I always am by the sight of one of these old bulls of finance, still sniffing the sawdust, with the broken shafts of money-tussles, overwork, overeating, over-drinking stuck fast in their thick necks. There was a thin, tall man with thick white hair – the sort of man who plays a fast game of tennis at sixty, and marries a twenty-five-year-old at seventy. He had just been on a crocodile-shooting safari in Northern Rhodesia, and he talked about it in a loud, natural, overbearing voice that had the effect of breaking up minor conversations by the sheer contrast of its absolute confidence in the interest of what it was saying.

  ‘Is it true that you must get them between the eyes, John?’ asked Mrs Baxter.

  ‘I don’t know about that, but I don’t mind telling you, they’ve got to be pretty damn well dead before you can count on ’em to be dead,’ he said. ‘You think you’ve got them, and then they just knife off through the water and you never find them again. We must’ve shot a dozen for every one we got aboard. But what beasts they are; you feel you’re doing ’em a favour by killing them. And when the boys slit ’em open-’ he put his hand – with one of those expensive watches that tell the time, date, and phases of the moon, on the wrist – over his face, hiding it to the wiry, tangled black eyebrows.

  Hamish Alexander, who obviously enjoyed him, sat forward grinning, his strong, patchy yellow teeth oddly matching the gingerish bristles on his red neck. ‘I’ve heard about that,’ he said gleefully. ‘I’ve heard people. . .’

  ‘Hamish, hearing about it couldn’t give you the least idea. . . . The whole boat, I mean. It stank like a – a,’ his mouth pursed itself but stopped in time.

  ‘- Charnel-house,’ said Kit Baxter, sweetly.

  Everyone laughed. ‘Tactful Kit,’ said Baxter.

  John leant over and kissed Kit on her round, smooth brow. ‘And how good she smells -’ There was more laughter. ‘But honestly, I don’t mind telling you, though you know how dignified and all that my behaviour usually is -’

  ‘Did you dress for dinner every night, John?’ someone called.

  ‘‘- I wanted to jump off that boat and swim ashore. Honest to God, nothing would have kept me on that boat but crocodiles still in the water!’

  Lifting her glass, against which the rows of bracelets on her wrist slid tinkling, in a call for attention, one of the women said, ‘I remember once going out to the whaling station at Durban. – Why, of course, you were there too, Peggy; and Ivan – That was a smell to beat all smells; a real eighty-per-cent proof distillation of disgusting fishiness, oiliness, oh, I don’t know what.’

  ‘My dear Eve,’ said the man John, ‘I’m sorry, but we just can’t have evasions in this, this -’

  ‘Context,’ said Kit.

  ‘This context –’

  Kit seemed sure she could say it better for him: ‘You must call a stink a stink.’

  In the shrieks of laughter that followed, the hostess, Marion Alexander, arrived, and with a general greeting to her guests, came straight over to where I had risen from my chair.

  ‘It’s Toby!’ and she kissed me. ‘I’m so glad you’re here. I hope they’ve been looking after you. I had a match this morning, so you must forgive my rudeness. There, I’ve put my lipstick on you. No, a little lower. That’s it.’ She took my arm, and then repeated her apologies, in a clear, singing voice, for the benefit of everyone: ‘Please forgive me – I didn’t think I’d be the last luncheon guest, I did believe I’d be home by half past twelve.’ I thought she looked extraordinary: she wore a white linen dress and a panama hat with a band round it. For the first few moments I did not realize that this was the outfit that women wear when they play bowls, and wondered why she should choose to look like a horribly ageing schoolgirl. I did not remember her, though on the telephone she had said that she remembered seeing me just before the war, when I was already a schoolboy, but I could see that she must once have been a pretty woman, and was much older than my mother. Or maybe it was just that she had grown older badly, and self-consciously. Underneath that hat, her face was painted whiter and pinker than it could ever have been when she was young; yet no doubt that was how she imagined she had looked, and so was what she chose to fake. She went to change, and Kit Baxter, with the pleading air of asking for a treat, jumped up and followed her, saying, ‘I want to come and talk to you, Marion!’

  While they were gone, the last three guests arrived, and with them the Alexanders’ son, Douglas. He had come from golf; and the two new male guests were in riding clothes. Along with the old bulls, I was the only male guest not fresh from conquest of field or ball. The two latest were youthfully apoplectic, blond, with small, flat, lobeless ears, short noses, and bloodshot blue eyes. Every feature of their faces looked interchangeable; they burst in crying, ‘Hullo! Hullo! Hullo there, you people,’ like a comedy duo. They were, in fact, a duo: identical twins; looking at them was disturbing, like looking at someone after you’ve had a blow in the eye, and you keep seeing the outline of head, gestures, and talking mouth, duplicated. But they had with them a stunning American girl, thin as a Borzoi, in what looked to me like black tights (anyway, they were women’s trousers that didn’t hang down at the seat) and a thing like a man’s striped shirt that enveloped her but got caught on the two little shaking peaks of small breasts as she moved. She was very fair, without a hint of yellowness, and her hair was drawn back and held by a strand of the hair itself, twisted round it. Her face was very young and made up to look pale and downy, and her expression was as old as the hills. As she was introduced to the company, she fl
ickered a kind of lizard-look over everyone, then put her long cigarette holder back in her mouth, like a dour man with a pipe. I got the impression that Tim and Tom (or whatever their names were) hardly knew her; that women caught on to their ruddy hide like burrs on wool. They were off again almost as soon as they came, waving away Archie Baxter: ‘No, no, old boy, before we have any of your stuff, we must have a swim. Have we time for a swim before lunch?’ ‘Course we’ve got time. Always time in Hamish’s house, isn’t there?’

  They went off over the grass to the pool, and in a few minutes we could see them, hugging their arms round themselves on the edge, waving, then exploding the surface of the water, shouting at each other in their identical voices, as if someone were holding a conversation with himself out loud.

  I felt inkstained and rather stale inside my hairy old suit, and, with my third drink disappearing, contented in this. Almost everyone had had a number of drinks by now (Hamish did not stir from his chair, and Archie Baxter managed the little bar, with the help of two Africans in white suits and gloves who passed endlessly into the house and out again, bearing soda and ice and cigarettes, and carrying away dirty glasses and ashtrays) and this, added to the anticipation of lunch, raised the pitch of the company. Mrs Alexander and Kit Baxter had returned. Mrs Alexander went about her guests with the warmth of a hostess who enjoys people and knows how to bring them together in a paper-lantern glow. She flattered, she exaggerated, you could see that, but the effect was to make one more agreeable; with the result that the whole conglomerate – guests, alcohol, gossip, and, later, enjoyable food – was agreeable. This is quite a different sort of success from that of the hostess who brings people of ideas together. This, in fact, was making something out of nothing very much.

  The twins, freshly doused and towelled, came up and clamoured round the bar, with their American and Kit Baxter and the two sisters Cecil and Margaret. They spoke actor’s English, with exaggerated stresses. They showed off, I felt, rather than flirted, with the women. Marion Alexander kept taking me by the arm and presenting me to people: ‘Have you talked to this boy? I do wish you would, before I get a chance to, so that you can tell me if he’s altogether too bright for me. He’s Althea Thomas’s boy – Aden Parrot, the publishers, such a brainy family.’