A World of Strangers Read online

  ‘This is a very special day for me. This boy’s the son of my friend Althea Thomas, and Graham Hood. – I was devoted to them.’ She made it sound as if my mother and father were a cause; and perhaps, to her, they were: the embodiment of the causes of the Thirties, to which she remembered herself responding for a time, just as she had taken to cloche hats a year or two earlier. Anyway, the name of my father cheerfully meant nothing to these people, just as, I suppose, the names of his more illustrious contemporaries – a Spender or a Toller – would have meant nothing. But I could see that Marion Alexander’s insistence on my parentage suggested to some of the sharper women that mine must be a family that featured in the Tatler. Some of those who were English accepted me with the airy freemasonry of those who know the privileges and disadvantages, for whatever they are worth, of their own order. Those who were not English all seemed to take travel in Britain and Europe as much for granted as a journey in a suburban train, and talked to me of most Continental countries as if they assumed my familiarity with these places was as easy as their own. One flew from here to there; hired a car; met one’s daughter in Switzerland; one’s husband flew in from Rome; sister met one in Vienna; fjords and alps, casinos and cruises, palazzos and espadrilles. . . .

  One of the black men in a white suit came out and beat a gong through all this.

  As the people rose to trail in to lunch, conversations took a final turn: the last word was said on English furniture, on someone’s wedding the week before, on the values in real estate in Johannesburg, on the merits of a new golf course being laid out by someone named Jock, and the cannon bones of a horse named Tom Piper.

  On the way to the dining-room, I had a ridiculous encounter with the American girl, who happened to be the last of the women shepherded before me. She turned her head and said in a low, dead, American voice, ‘I hear you’re a gread wrider?’ ‘No, no, just a publisher,’ I said, embarrassed, because I wasn’t really even that, yet. At which she burst out laughing – a bold, full laugh, surprising in contrast to her speaking voice – and said: ‘I guess I’ve got the wrong purson.’ But she offered no explanation, and the conversation promptly died. It was only later, when I was studying her where she sat, across the table from me, beside Douglas Alexander and one of the twins, that I suddenly realized that what she had said was not ‘writer’ but ‘rider’. I had an agitated impulse to lean across the glasses and silver and the Italian bread basket and explain; but it was obviously no good. Explain that I was neither writer nor rider? I was the wrong person, anyway. She’d accepted the fact, that was that. Bored and indifferent to their company, she belonged and could belong only to the twins, part of their cutting a dash. Yet she ate and drank steadily without the lipstick coming off her beautiful mouth; which seemed to me wonderful: the casual mark of a special kind of girl, not quite real, whom I would never get; perhaps would never try or really want to get.

  Douglas Alexander, as the children of self-assured, temperamentally vigorous parents often are, was a rather blank youngster, with the look of a perpetual listener on his face; as if, since childhood, he had been taking in conversations to which he was not expected to make a contribution, and long habit had vitiated his desire to do so, although he was not longer disqualified by being under age. He certainly did not behave like any sort of popular concept of a gold-mining millionaire’s son that I could think of; all the time that he was keeping up an apparently lame and stilted conversation (about New York, I gathered) with the American beauty, his eyes kept gliding out of their polite focus on her and looking sharply to the other side, as if there were something there attracting his urgent attention. On the girl’s left, the one twin jounced and twisted, waving his glass about, bumping her frequently with shoulder or elbow, as he chattered to his neighbour and audience. Every now and then he would notice her, and with the impersonal, momentary, instinctive recall to sex with which a dog will briefly lick, once or twice, another dog, would pass his hand down her arm or pat her hair.

  I was at Hamish Alexander’s end of the table, with Kit Baxter on my left and Cecil Rowe on my right. Mrs Baxter had a voice of great conscious charm, that she used, with purpose and efficiency, as if it were some piece of high fidelity equipment rather than the final, faulty evolution of those grunts and cries with which man first tried to give expression to the awful teeming of his brain. She was carrying on an exchange of banter and flattery with old Hamish, who was too far away for conversation to be comfortable. While her head was turned from me, the long fingers of her smooth hand with its uniform of red nails and rings felt blindly up and down the mother-of-pearl handle of a small knife, quite near me, carrying on some secret life of its own. Hamish Alexander’s red face, with the simple, short, plump-featured, retroussé profile of a child and the teary grin of his blue eyes, was cocked toward her along the table; but someone suddenly passed a question to him about uranium deposits, and immediately his face not only came to itself, but took on the close, guarded reasonableness, the poker-face frankness, of a man asked about something important and not to be disclosed. He gave himself the second or two of a peculiarly Scotch clearing of his throat, and then he began a long, blunt, bland, confidential red herring, with the words: ‘Now it’s not as simple as all that . . . As far back as nineteen forty-one -’

  Kit Baxter turned to me with perfectly convincing and certainly assumed delight. ‘I’ve been waiting to talk to you!’ she said. I grinned at her disbelievingly.’ I hope you haven’t written a book,’ I said, ‘because I’m afraid I haven’t much influence with Aden Parrot, in spite of what Mrs Alexander may have told you.’

  ‘Heavens, no, Kit couldn’t write anything. You’re quite safe there. It’s just that Marion tells me you’re likely to be in this country quite a while, and she and I thought you might like to come down to the farm some time – see something of the country. Not that it’s beautiful – though it is, to me, in a way – but it’s characteristic.’

  ‘What farm?’

  ‘Hamish’s. The Alexander stud farm, in the Karoo.’

  ‘Oh, I see. I didn’t know about it. What does he breed?’

  ‘Horses. Hamish started it more for fun than anything else. But now it’s turning into a big thing. Archie and I have been there since the beginning of the year.’

  ‘You and your husband live there?’

  ‘Hamish asked us to go down and take over, more or less permanently.’ She phrased it in order to make it clear that her husband’s appointment as manager of the Alexanders’ stud farm was a matter of friendship and patronage, rather than an ordinary job.

  ‘And how do you like that?’ I said.

  She laughed, and the skin crinkled prettily round her painted eyes. ‘You don’t think I’m the type for the farmer’s wife! But you’re wrong you know, quite wrong. I’m not a city person at all, really, I’m an absolute bumpkin in towns. I’ve always led a country life at home, and I hate London – Archie and I lived there for two years after the war and I couldn’t wait to get out of it. Our time in Johannesburg has really only been bearable because of Hamish and Marion – they’re such fantastic darlings, and we’ve been able to come out and ride whenever we like, and they’ve whisked us off down to the farm whenever we could get away’ – a dish held in a white-gloved hand that showed an inch of matt-black skin between cuff and sleeve, came between us -’ (Won’t you have some more mousse? Marion’s cook makes the best mousse you’ve ever tasted.) – It’s absolutely in the bundu, of course, forty-three miles from Neksburg and that’s not much to speak of, itself, I may say. I can’t describe these Karoo villages as “villages”, unless the person I’m talking to has seen them. They’re nothing at all like our idea of a village. Don’t start thinking of cottage gardens, mossy churchyards, and the rest of it. . . . Just think of dust and stones, that’s all, dust and stones, and a flybitten “hotel” with a couple of big shiny cars belonging to commercial travellers outside – also covered in dust.’

  ‘And the farm – also dust
and stones?’

  ‘Oh no,’ she said; and I realized – not without comfort, for the delicious lunch and the wines had, as usual, awakened in me a great respect for life lived in the exquisite orderliness of wealth – that nothing in Hamish Alexander’s empire would be dust and stones.

  ‘There’s water on the farm, of course; all sorts of pumps and gadgets huffing and puffing to keep it irrigated. And there are huge trees round the house, cypress and pepper trees – it should be quite charming when we’ve got it fixed up more or less the way we want it. I hope that by the time you come there’ll be a second bathroom built on, and the painting will be done.’ She said this with the complacent, determined air of a woman who is making a house over to conform as closely as possible to the setting for herself that she always carries in her mind. Uproot her again tomorrow and she will begin again at once to attempt to make the next shell of habitation conform to this master setting. In this primitive cause those waxy, inutile, decorated hands would work as tirelessly and instinctively as any animal’s claws making ready the nest; and in the nest would be – she herself. It was a perversion of the nesting instinct that you see often in sophisticated women; the drive remains, crazily fixed, while the purpose for which it was rooted in human nature has been lost, truly forgotten.

  ‘I work a lot with the young horses,’ she was saying. ‘Archie’s time is taken up with the administrative side, mostly. But I play around, helping to break them in, making a fuss of them, generally acting Mama. They’re fantastic darlings! Adorable! The dogs are quite unhappy sometimes, they’re so jealous, you know, Cecil,’ she said to the other girl.

  ‘Are they?’ the girl said, raising her eyebrows while she ate.

  ‘Two funny old sealyhams,’ Kit Baxter confessed to me, as if I were sure to be disgusted at the idea, ‘quite moth-eaten and lazy and not very bright, I know; and a Siamese whose eyes are much too light. But they adore me, I say it quite immodestly, they adore me. Kit’s own regiment, that’s what I call them, Kit’s own.’

  It was impossible to think of anything to say to this forlorn piece of whimsy. It was one of those thin places in conversation through which one suddenly sees something one isn’t meant to see. Cecil Rowe saved me by catching my eye with the friendly opening of a smile struggling against the disadvantage of a mouthful of braised pigeon and rice. You would never have caught the exquisite American out in a smile like that; I warmed to it, all the same. When the girl could speak, she said,’ I was so hungry I was quite drunk. I had to eat quickly to give myself some ballast.’

  Kit Baxter and I laughed with her. ‘People here certainly do eat a substantial lunch,’ I said, ‘but you’ve all had such an energetic morning, I suppose you must.’

  ‘Restaurateurs wouldn’t agree with you,’ said Kit. ‘They complain that people in Johannesburg hardly eat at all, in the European sense. A meal is always simply a necessary prelude to be got over in good time for some other entertainment, not an evening’s pleasure in itself.’

  ‘Do you find South Africans eat more than we do?’ I said to Cecil Rowe.

  ‘How would I know? I’m not English,’ she said.

  I was surprised; she looked and dressed like any upper-middle-class English girl, and what was more, she did not have the flat, unmistakable South African speech that I had heard all about me in the town, and that I had noticed at once in the Alexanders’ son, Douglas, and the crocodile-hunting John, for example.

  ‘Then you’re an Afrikaner,’ I said, taking care to pronounce the word of identification correctly, like a naturalist coming upon a species of which he has heard, but never before encountered.

  ‘No, no,’ she said, laughing and indignant, ‘I’m not. I’m not that.’

  ‘Of course you’re English,’ said Kit.’ Your parents are English. You happen to be born here. Just as you might have been born in India, or Egypt – that’s all.’

  ‘I’ve never met a publisher before,’ said the girl. ‘Have you, Kit? I’ve somehow never thought about publishers – you know, I mean, you read a book and it’s the author who counts, the publisher’s simply a name on the jacket. It’s difficult to think of the publisher as a person sitting beside you at lunch.’

  ‘Rightly so, too,’ I said, ‘when the person is really only a sort of publisher’s office boy.’

  ‘But aren’t you a son or something of the people who own the publisher’s?’

  ‘Nephew.’

  ‘Well, there you are.’

  ‘I’m being trained from the Ground Up. And I haven’t got very far.’

  ‘How far?’

  ‘Trade relations. I’ve come to South Africa as the agent for our firm.’

  She nodded her head, thinking a moment. ‘Didn’t you bring out that book there’s been such a fuss about?’

  My mind skimmed over the last three or four Aden Parrot titles that had filled the correspondence columns of the papers with protagonist letters. ‘You mean God’s Creatures? The anti-vivisection one?’

  She looked faraway, shook her head, ‘M-mh. Nobody would know about that here.’

  ‘The one about institutional personality – children in orphanages?’

  Her frown rejected this as outlandish.’ You know, the book about the natives, the one that was banned -’

  ‘Oh, you mean White Cain, Black Abel – no, unfortunately, that wasn’t ours.’ The book, brought out about six months ago by Aden Parrot’s closest rival, had sold over fifty thousand copies. It was written by a missionary who lived for six years in the Native Reserves, and was a passionate attack, from the standpoint of a deeply religious man, on the failure of Christianity to influence the policy of white people toward black in South Africa. ‘What did you think of it? Did you read it?’

  She cut herself a slice of Bel Paese and said,’ Oh I thought it was jolly good,’ as if she were talking of a novel that had served to pass an evening. ‘I must have a cigarette. D’you mind?’

  All up and down the table, people were smoking; the meal was at an end, and we all got up and went into the room I had caught a glimpse of from the front door. There was coffee and also old brandy and liqueurs, and the smell, like the smell of fine leather, of cigars; a warm fug of well-being filled the room, in which, in my slightly hazy state, I saw that every sort of efficient indulgence lay about, like in those rooms conjured up by Genii for people in fairy stories who always seem to wish for the same sort of thing, as if, given the chance, nobody really knows anything else to wish for: there were silver or limoges cigarette lighters on every other table, as well as the little coloured match-books on which were printed ‘Hamish’ or ‘Marion’, silver dishes of thin mints and huge chocolates, jade boxes and lacquer boxes and silver boxes filled with cigarettes, silver gadgets to guillotine the cigars, even amethyst, rose, and green sugar crystals to sweeten the coffee.

  Most of the guests were drawn to look at Marion Alexander’s new ‘find’ – a picture she had evidently just bought. ‘Come and tell me what you think of this,’ she said, with the faintest emphasis, as if I didn’t need any more, on the last word. It was a small and rather dingy Courbet, deeply set in a frame the colour and texture of dried mud.’ Interesting,’ I murmured politely. ‘They’re not easily come by, I imagine.’ ‘Here!’ she said. ‘Can you believe it? I found it here, in Johannesburg!’ I attempted to look impressed, although I couldn’t imagine why anyone should want to find such a thing anywhere. ‘How do you spell the name?’ a woman asked me, quietly studying the picture. I spelled it. The woman nodded slowly. ‘I love it, Marion, I think it’s the most exciting thing you’ve bought yet!’ said someone else.

  ‘Well I can tell you I couldn’t believe it when my little man told me there was a Courbet to be bought in Johannesburg,’ Mrs Alexander said for the third or fourth time. I managed to drift out of the group of admirers, back to a chair. ‘. . . of course, I still think that’s a wonderful thing,’ I heard, and saw one of the bulls straddling his heavy body on two thin legs before an enormous oi
l that must surely have been painted with the offices of the Union Castle shipping company in mind – it showed a great duck-bosomed mail-ship, tricked out with pennants, in what I recognized as Table Bay, with Cape Town and Table Mountain behind it. Now that I noticed, there was quite a variety of pictures in the room; most of them were in the Table Bay genre; the genre of the room, generally: not a discomforting brush-stroke in any of them. I decided that I didn’t mind; I didn’t mind any more than I did my mother’s collection of charcoal drawings, woodcuts, lithographs, pastels, oils, collages, mosaics, and wire-and-cardboard compositions that she had bought from unknown, unsung, and unhung prophets of art over the last thirty years.

  Cecil Rowe wandered over and sat on a low chair beside me. Her legs, unsexed by gaberdine jodhpurs, rolled apart and she looked down at them, stirring her toes. ‘Well, how do you like it here so far?’ she said, managing not to yawn. ‘Think our policemen wonderful? No? That’s fine – nobody does.’

  ‘You know, the thing one never remembers is how much the same things are likely to be, rather than how different,’ I said.

  ‘How’s that?’ With her face in repose, I noticed that, although she was too young to have lines, I could see the pull, beneath the skin, of the muscle that always exerted the same tension when she smiled; her mouth, too, though pretty enough in its fresh paint in contrast to the patchy look of the worn make-up on her cheeks and chin, had about it when she talked the practised mobility of having expressed much, and not all of it pleasant.

  ‘Well, when you arrive in a new country, you generally find yourself living in a hotel, and hotels tend to follow the same pattern everywhere, and then, at the beginning at least, you meet people to whom you’ve been given an introduction by friends at home – and so you meet the same sort of people everywhere, too.’