The Late Bourgeois World Read online

  She made herself useful doing some typing for Max and spent a lot of time getting people out of what she called ‘messes’ – mostly the aftermath of parties she went to – taking home in her little borrowed car the corpses that piled up, staying the night with girls whose men had gone off with someone else. She patched the lining of Spears’ raincoat and drove him on his complicated errands. There was the night I got up and found her dressed as if for a picnic, carrying a spray gun. ‘Going slogan-painting,’ she said. She went off with a tiny torch to wait to be picked up by whomever it was she was working with. I went back to bed and told Max. ‘A midnight feast for Sunnybunny! O wacko!’ he said. The absurd play on her name was his invention; he and Spears treated her with the comradely mock-flirtatiousness that men show towards unattractive girls. I said, ‘Spears shouldn’t tease her, it’ll set her after him. She worships the two of you.’ ‘Why on earth not? Do Spears no harm, and she needs a man, our Sunbun.’

  She was always urging us to go to parties with her, but these were the parties where white liberals and black tarts and toughs went for what each could get out of the other. It surprised me that Max, once or twice, seemed willing to go. The work he and Spears were doing was going badly; Max was finding Spears evasive. Yet it became a sort of craze for the three of them – Max, Spears and Sunbun – to appear at these parties as a weird trio. I dropped out because I couldn’t last till three in the morning without drinking too much, and if I drank too much I couldn’t work next day; if Max and Spears couldn’t get on with their work, then, at least the parties provided a reason.

  Often when I came home from the laboratory Max would be sitting waiting; punishing Spears with his waiting as a child believes he is punishing the grown-up who is not even aware of being the object of resentment. When Bobo’s voice rose in the kitchen, or shrieked in the bath, Max gave me one of his seizing looks. The calm of white coats and routine work, life apprehended as a neat smear under a microscope, came from me like the bar on the breath of a drunkard.

  Felicity used to hover, importantly self-effacing. ‘I was desperate, d’y’know, he hasn’t turned up all day. I made some excuse to go out and scout around but no one knew where he was.’ She spoke to me out of Max’s earshot, as if he must not hear his condition discussed. Then Spears would arrive, and the casual tone of his excuses and apologies was not altered, whether Max was angry and sulky, or whether he suddenly was in a warm good mood and behaved as though Spears had not been expected until that particular moment. One night when this happened – the arrival of Spears at long last, and a quick rise in Max’s mood – Max was moving about the room like a cork caught up off the sand by the tide, opening beer, offering cheese on the point of a knife, talking, putting papers together, and he pointed the knife at Felicity, saying in a cheerful impatient aside. ‘Come on, move that big arse, Sunbun, you know where you put the list I gave you –’

  It was his way of talking to her and I was astonished, this time, to see her cry. I suddenly understood that he had made love to her.

  He stood there with the steel blade dulled with the grease of cheese, gesturing at her, and she rushed out of the room with all her flesh – buttocks, breasts – quaking; it was somehow specially moving, as if some poor peaceful browser had been stuck with a spear. I went after her and bumped into Daphne, holding a freshly ironed dress that she must have tried to hand to her. I said quickly, ‘I’ll take it.’

  ‘What she got to cry for?’ Daphne lifted her chin, she wanted me to know she knew, too.

  Max said, ‘She bloody well wouldn’t leave me alone. It started after a party and I was drunk anyway. She smothers you with her bloody great tits, you’ve got to fight your way out and that’s the easiest way.’ It was true that one couldn’t be jealous of Felicity. If she’d been a woman I had been jealous of it would have been different. But there was only one reason why Max made love to her. He knew it and I knew it. He needed approval and admiration so much that he was prepared to throw in a good fuck as payment. I could have forgiven him sleeping with a woman he wanted, but I couldn’t forgive him the humiliation in her big shaking body when she ran out of the room. I used to think of it when we were making love. And I couldn’t tell him because I myself couldn’t give the approval and admiration.

  Max shunned the Van Den Sandt’s standards of success but in a way they triumphed in him, passing on, like a family nose or chin, the rage to succeed. He did not weigh in on their scale, but he retained the revengeful need to be acknowledged. It came from them: the desire to show somebody. What? The objects of his purpose were not demonstrable in the way that money and social prestige are. Why is it that these people always win, even if only by destruction?

  Oh, there were other women. When he went underground during the State of Emergency in 1960, he lived with Eve King while hidden in her house. And before that there was the thing with Roberta Weininger – beautiful Roberta, she’s been under house arrest for some time, now. These love affairs caused me pain, and in its context I had one or two affairs of my own. I suppose I thought of redressing the balance – some such expedient. But this again was the use of measures designed for a situation that had very little bearing on the realities of ours. If I’d only known, it didn’t matter how many women Max had, it didn’t make any difference. Whether or not he could really love a woman, me or any other woman, was not what was vital to him.

  Spears went underground, too, but other members of ‘Umanyano Ngamandla’ were detained and when they came out of prison the movement broke up; most of them, including Spears, rejoined the ANC, then banned and become an underground movement. The notes for the methodology of African socialism had been safe from the security raids on our outhouse cottage because I had bundled the papers into a laundry bag and kept it hidden in the laboratory, all the time. When Spears came to see me one day I told him they were intact; he smiled, the days of the work on the methodology belonged to another time. Decades, eras, centuries – they don’t have much meaning, now, when the imposition of an emergency law or the fall of a bomb changes life more profoundly in a day than one might reasonably expect to experience in a lifetime. Spears wasn’t drinking. He didn’t come often any more, and neither did William Xaba, another friend who always used to be in and out of the cottage. There was a move among politically active Africans to keep out of white houses, no matter whose they were, and to reject friendship and even intimacy with whites as part of white privilege. Max was in Cape Town then, for three months that stretched to six, working on a new radical journal whose editors were replaced as quickly as they were banned. Bobo and I went down for two weeks at Christmas and every day the three of us walked along the cliff road above the sea, where the polyps of seaweed reach up from far down in the water. ‘Look there. Look there,’ we urged Bobo, but his little boy’s gaze would follow your finger as its object, and see no further than the end of it. I wonder if it was the papers of the African socialist methodology that Max took down with him in the suitcase.

  Between heliograph flashes of sun on water, undeciphered, there are still things that were said. ‘Christ, when you see how African women will live! They know how to wait. And to keep themselves and their children together. There’s everything that matters to learn from them.’ Yes, he was right; I was an amateur in loneliness, in stoicism, in trust. ‘Maybe if you’re ever going to achieve something, you’ll have to do it quite alone.’ I said that once, knowing that already he was scornful of the journal he was working on, and (looking down at seaweed in the water like flowers imprisoned in a glass paperweight) seeing the end of this like the end of anything else he had begun. He didn’t answer.

  It was the last time we really lived together. He came back to Johannesburg and eventually we were divorced and he would disappear for months and turn up again. There was a rumour that he had slipped out of the country illegally and got in again. I didn’t know whom he spent his time with, though I had heard through our old Indian friend Solly that he had associated himself for a wh
ile with people who wanted to organize a new underground white revolutionary group.

  Then the telephone rang at eleven o’clock at night and he said, ‘Liz? That you Liz? When the papers come out – d’you get the morning paper? There may be something big… Don’t forget.’

  Nobody knows this. Nobody at all. I didn’t even tell the lawyers. I have never told Graham. It’s all that’s left of Max and me; all there is still between us. That voice, wild and quiet, over the telephone.

  The water covers everything, soon no bubbles rise.

  There were possibilities, but under what stone? Under what stone?

  Max’s bomb, described in court as being made of a tin filled with a mixture of sulphur, saltpetre and charcoal, was found before it exploded and he was arrested within twenty-four hours. Others were more or less successful and it all began again, and worse than it had ever been before: raids, arrests, detention without trial. The white people who were kind to their pets and servants were shocked at bombs and bloodshed, just as they had been shocked, in 1960, when the police fired on the men, women and children outside the Sharpeville pass office. They can’t stand the sight of blood; and again gave, to those who have no vote, the humane advice that the decent way to bring about change is by constitutional means. The liberal-minded whites whose protests, petitions and outspokenness have achieved nothing remarked the inefficiency of the terrorists and the wasteful senselessness of their attempts. You cannot hope to unseat the great alabaster backside with a tin-pot bomb. Why risk your life? The madness of the brave is the wisdom of life. I didn’t understand, till then. Madness, God, yes, it was; but why should the brave ones among us be forced to be mad?

  Some fled the country, some were held solitary in their cells and, refusing to speak, were kept on their feet under interrogation until they collapsed. Some did speak. Max was tried and sentenced to five years imprisonment but he was called as a State witness after serving fifteen months, and he spoke. He was beaten when he was first arrested, that we know, but what else he was confronted with later, what else they showed him in himself, we do not know – but he spoke. He spoke of Solly and Eve King and the man who was arrested with him, he spoke of William Xaba and other friends with whom we had lived and worked for years.

  He is dead now. He didn’t die for them – the people, but perhaps he did more than that. In his attempts to love he lost even his self-respect, in betrayal. He risked everything for them and lost everything. He gave his life in every way there is; and going down to the bed of the sea is the last.

  Chapter 4

  There’s not much point in spending a long time with the old lady, my grandmother. As her memory’s so bad, it doesn’t make any difference whether you stay half an hour or two hours; so long as she sees you. She looks up from her indifference, which is the past, and in the daze of the present she finds a face – that’s about all. I made a cup of coffee to wake myself up and then drove across the suburbs to the Home. It was intermission at the matinees; children thronged the cinema entrances pushing each other about and eating ice cream in the sun. At a main intersection a down-at-heel white family hawked hanks of coloured spun sugar along the line of cars. People ran about on tennis courts I passed, and clustered on the bowling greens. The empty red beer cartons were thick on every open space. If I were dumped back in it from eternity I should know at once that it was Saturday afternoon. It was in people’s faces, the pleasure of the weekend, like the sweets clutched in children’s hands.

  The Home is an old house whose original iron-roofed colonial-Victorian has been knocked out and added on to. The entrance has steel and glass doors and tropical plants under concealed lighting, but on the first-floor landing there is a black wooden bear of the kind once designed to hold umbrellas in the crooks of his arms, and there are other ornately carved survivals of the objects with which the new-rich, from Europe, of seventy years ago announced the change of status from successful gold prospector to mining magnate. There is even a stained-glass window with the petals of cough-drop coloured, art nouveau irises outlined in thick lead.

  I’ve always felt that the place has a more human feel than any modern building designed as an institution, but when my grandmother first went there and was still able to care, she complained that it was ugly and old-fashioned. She loves plastics – artificial flowers, ‘simulated’ silk, synthetic marble, fake leather. There was no sense of the day of the week, inside; the same warm air, faintly lit with methylated spirits, that comes back to me each visit as something I forget entirely in-between. No seasons, either. Spring or winter, it feels the same. The corridors are covered with something that deadens footfalls and you pass the wide-open doors of wards where not all the patients are in bed, or old, either – it is a home for the chronically sick as well as the aged. I’ve got to know some of the shapes even before I recognize the faces – because of the particular position which a malady will force someone to adopt in bed or chair. Among the very small white-haired old ladies, the dying diabetic, taking so long to die, was still there, humped on her side, smoking. She has the reckless drinker’s face that diabetics sometimes have, and looks as if she had once been good-looking – like a finished whore. But the distinguishing marks of social caste are often distorted by illness; the Home is not cheap and it is unlikely that she belongs to anything other than the respectable middle class. The monster with the enormous belly was sitting on a chair with her legs splayed out, like a dead frog swollen on a pond. I have never known what is the matter with her.

  Outside my grandmother’s little room a bouquet stood in a vase on the floor. Anemones, freesias and snowdrops, exactly like mine.

  I opened the door softly and stood a moment. She was sitting in a chair with a mouth drawn in lipstick on her face, and her hair, that she had always kept short and tinted and curled, pulled back into a skimpy knot. They dress her every day and they had even put on her triple pearl choker and huge button earrings. Her eyes flew open and in the light that came from behind me I saw terror expand her face and the red-drawn outline fall agape.

  ‘Who is that!’ she called out in horror.

  ‘Don’t be silly, now, it’s Elisabeth, your grandchild –’ The nurse came across the room between us, but I said, ‘Let her see me properly,’ and came over beside her where the light from the window was on me, and kissed her, and said, ‘Here I am, I didn’t want to miss your birthday.’ She took the kiss and then drew back, still alarmed, and looked at me, searching. ‘It’s Elisabeth, isn’t it, Elisabeth my darling –’ and though the Afrikaans nurse burst in with assurances and cheerful laughter, took no notice. She motioned me to her and kissed me again. Then her hand went up to her mouth and pressed it and she said angrily, to the air, ‘Why haven’t I got my teeth in, if Elisabeth is here. Where are my teeth?’

  ‘Well, your gums was sore this morning, grannie, don’t you remember? You didn’t want to put it in. Wait, I’ll bring it, I first want to put some of that stuff on –’

  ‘What is she talking about? Give them to me!’ The old lady clawed at the woman’s hand and then, having got her teeth, concentrated carefully on the two plates before slowly deciding where uppers and lowers should go. The nurse was chattering; I suppose it is an enormous relief to have some company other than that of a senile old lady. ‘She always get a fright when somebody come to the door. I don’t know why she’s so scared, you know … since this last lot of angina attacks. I don’t know what it is, she seem to think someone’s going to come and get her … I always say,’ and now she turned to my grandmother, playful, soothing, ‘nobody going to hurt you, grannie, nobody can do you any harm here, isn’t it? I tell her.’

  A slight, distracted dent between the bald eyebrows showed that the old lady was aware of some habitually bothersome background noise. With her big, regular false teeth in her mouth she speaks in a high, controlled voice behind them, to avoid their distortion, but even then there is thickness and sibilance, as though she were speaking through a medium. ‘And the husban
d? With you, or away again at the moment? And Bobo? How is that sweet boy?’

  She forgets that I was divorced from Max, and if I were to tell her he is dead, she would forget that, too. In her room with the signed photographs of famous artists on the walls (she has her own things around her) it always seems that nothing has happened. Or that everything has already happened. I sat under Jascha Heifetz facing Noel Coward and the framed menu of the lunch where she had met him in 1928, and told her that I had seen Bobo in the morning; he wished her a happy birthday.

  ‘It’s my birthday?’ she said. And repeated it at intervals so that I had to explain again and again. ‘How old is it this time?’

  ‘Eighty-seven.’ I wasn’t sure.

  She pulled a little-girl face, relic of the sham simplicity of her sophistication. ‘Horrible. Too long.’