A World of Strangers Read online

  ‘You mean this’, she lifted her chin to indicate the room and the guests, ‘is the same as being in England.’

  ‘It could be. It doesn’t necessarily follow that I should be a guest in this house, if it were in England’ – I did not like to say that it would be most unlikely – ‘but the point is that this house could be there. You and your sister and Mrs Baxter – pretty girls who are nice to lunch with, who go to each other’s parties, and live, eat, and sleep horses,’ I was laughing, but she listened seriously, ‘you might be in any English county.’

  ‘I’m a butcher’s daughter,’ she said. ‘My sister Margaret and I. It’s funny, all the big butchers here seem to keep horses. Two or three wealthy butchers in this town have fine stables. Of course I don’t mean the sort who stand behind the counter in a striped apron! Wholesale butchers, who control prices and whatnot. We start riding when we’re small and go to the kind of school where riding’s the thing, and then we grow up among riding people. As you said – they do what riding people do anywhere else, same old thing: hunt, and go to hunt balls and so on. Know other sporty people and belong to country clubs.’ She pulled a face. ‘That’s how we end up looking, speaking, dressing, even behaving like a class we don’t belong to in a country we don’t live in. – It’s sort of the wrong way round, isn’t it?’

  ‘Oh come, now. Why shouldn’t people ride simply because they like to?’

  ‘But they don’t,’ she said, grumpily, in the tone of telling me something she knew quite well that I knew. ‘That’s the trouble. They can’t.’

  ‘Well, I used to, sometimes, when I found myself near horses.’

  ‘Oh you. Exactly. You could. You’re not the kind who can’t ride, and you’re not the kind who has to.’

  She said it with the air of paying me an enormous, terse, reluctant compliment.

  ‘I take back what I said about you being found in an English county,’ I said. ‘You’re not a bit like any of the young county ladies I’ve ever known.’

  ‘I don’t think you know any, anyway.’

  And then she was carried off by the inevitable conversational scene-shifter whose reputation for popularity seems to rest on the confidence with which he interrupts everyone.

  Chapter 3

  I found somewhere to live; a flat, ugly but cheap, in the steep suburb of boarding-houses and flat buildings that was more an extension of the city than a suburb. At the corner, trams lurched down or struggled up, screeching. The street was one of those newly old streets that I saw all over Johannesburg – a place without a memory; twenty-year-old houses seemed to be considered not worth repair, and blocks of flats ten years old had sunk into their own shoddiness in a way that everyone seemed satisfied was commensurate with their age. The building itself smelled of frying and the stairs were of uneven depth, so that you kept putting your foot down and missing the step that wasn’t where you expected it to be; this much remained of my impressions after I’d been to look over the place. There was a fair-sized room with a small balcony that had been glassed-in to make it a room-and-a-half, and a pitch-dark bathroom in which, coming to it out of the sun of the street, I could make out nothing; but I supposed what the estate agents called the ‘usual offices’ would prove to be there.

  I found that flat through, of all people, John Hamilton, the crocodile hunter, who was going into town after that Sunday lunch at the Alexanders’ and gave me a lift back to the hotel. He drove as if his car were a missile it was his pleasure to guide through the streets, and he talked all the time. When he was held up by the traffic lights, he looked about him with restless interest, commenting on whatever caught his eye – a new car: ‘That’s a lovely job for you! The Stud, see it? I wonder how good the lock is in this model. . .’ – an African in a beige fedora, and a suit of exaggerated cut, carrying a rolled umbrella and escorting an elaborately dressed black woman with the haunches of a brewer’s dray-horse: ‘Look at that pair! God these natives are dead keen on clothes! Dressed to kill!’ Then, as he let the clutch out, and the car sprang ahead, he released again the main stream of his talk. He was a great enthusiast about his country, and all that it offered in the way of physical challenge; there was hardly a mountain he hadn’t climbed, a piece of coast or trout stream he hadn’t fished, an animal he hadn’t stalked. He told me about abalone diving near Cape Town, angling for giant barracuda off the East African coast, riding a pony through the passes of Basutoland, and outwitting wily guinea-fowl in the Bushveld. Also about the things he had only looked at: the flowers in Namaqualand in the spring, the wild beasts in the game reserves, the great rivers and deserts from the Cape to the Congo. He regarded Africa as he might a woman who gave him great pleasure; an attitude unexpected and unaffected.

  I asked him if he’d been to Hamish Alexander’s farm in the Karoo.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Nothing much to tempt me there. Poor old Archie’s having a go at it now, of course. Or rather Kit is, as usual.’

  I said that Kit Baxter had seemed very enthusiastic about the farm.

  ‘Kit’s a great girl,’ he said. ‘That girl’s always trying to make something of Archie. Unfortunately, there’s nothing much to work on,’ he indicated Archie.’ I hate to see a person wasting their energies. All you can say about Archie, he’s a good-looking chap, always has been and always will be; prop him up in a lounge or bar and he’ll look right. You know those ventriloquists who have marvellous dolls, and the ventriloquist’s the stooge, and the clever things come out of the mouth of the doll? – Well, that’s Kit and Archie. Whatever he seems to think or do, it’s Kit pulling the strings and thinking for him. Now this whole last year she’s been around the Alexanders, Marion loves her to death, Hamish loves her to death, they can’t move without the Baxters. Next thing, Kit’s got them believing Archie’s a great horse breeder, got them believing they love Archie, and she’s all set on the Karoo farm, making something of Archie again. – You did say the Plaza, didn’t you?’

  ‘Unfortunately, yes.’

  ‘I hear it’s not too bad,’ he said with the careless air of disposing of someone else’s expense account.

  ‘Our agent here booked me in. But I must get out of the place within the next few days; I can’t afford it, anyway. I must start hunting for a flat or a room somewhere, tomorrow.’

  ‘I’ll give you a note to someone who’ll fix you up,’ he said practically and sympathetically, and when he stopped the car at the hotel, he lifted his lean body and fished a card out of his pocket. He wrote on it quickly.’ Barlow’s a good chap. I’m sure he’ll find something for you. – No trouble; I’m glad you mentioned it. Good-bye, boy; we’ll bump into you again some time.’ And with the alert look of a man who is always expected somewhere, he drove off.

  Once I’d got the flat, I felt I ought to telephone and thank him, perhaps ask him to have a drink with me. On the other hand, his unhesitating offer of help was so casual, that my imposing myself on him with thanks might provide, for him, the only burdensome thing about his gesture.

  I felt mildly elated at the idea of the flat. I still hadn’t caught up with a sense of my own reality, here in this country; perhaps once I’d got my personal squalor around me, I should be convinced of my validity. I remembered how comfortingly that used to happen at school: you would go back after the holidays, and for the first day, in the bare, institutional cubicle, you didn’t seem to exist at all; then the books unpacked, the pullover and shoes lying about, the picture of the lolling-tongued dog stuck up on the wall, the smell of the raincoat behind the door – these would combine in sudden assurance of your identity and its firm place in the life of school. I should have to buy a divan, I supposed, and a table and chairs. Then, the next week, when Arthur was gone, I’d take the easy-chair out of the office; oh, and a rug, I’d have to get a rug. . .

  I woke up very early one morning at the hotel and kept thinking about all this, quite idiotically. In fact, I’d been wakened early several mornings that week by the sound of hurrying footste
ps and voices that didn’t bother to keep low. The first couple of times, though I was awake, I couldn’t muster the weak weightlessness of my still sleeping body and get up to see what was going on, but on this morning I did. Behind the curtain that smelled of dust and clung to me with static electricity, I struggled with the catch of the window and pushed it wide; down below in the grey street, black men were on their way to work. They coughed, shouted, and chattered in their ringing Bantu languages. I could not see the sun, but light ran like water along the steel shopfronts opposite and a gob of spit shone in the gutter. No one else was about.

  Arthur dragged me round the bookshops those first few weeks. Like all the booksellers I’ve ever come across, these were either cheerful businessmen who sold books like so many pounds of cheese, or scornful intellectuals whose lips were perpetually curled in contempt for their customers’ tastes. I lunched with one of these last. At his suggestion we went to a coffee bar, where we ordered Parma ham and Gamembert with our espresso; after a long time, during which he told me how he had educated public taste in Johannesburg, and greeted, with a curious lift of the hand that was more like a dismissal, the number of good-looking young women who swept in and out of the crowded little place, a harassed Indian brought us goulash and apple strudel. Near us two greenfaced Italians argued and, with their black eyes, gave the passing girls a merciless anatomical appraisal. Outside on the pavement a squawking, gibbering band of filthy black children, ragged and snot-encrusted, sang the theme sob-song from a popular film. People fumbled for pennies to throw, and the brats scuttled like cockroaches to retrieve them. My friend the bookseller apologized for the bad service and explained that the place had only recently been opened and was rather too popular for the time being. ‘It’s pathetic,’ he said. ‘They’ve got so little to hold them together, they’ll rush to any new rallying point you offer them like dogs tearing after a bitch. Specially if they can pretend they’re somewhere else; Italy, for example,’ he waved a hand at the abstract mosaics, the black, bitter brew in our cups. ‘Anyway it does give one the illusion one’s in a civilized country,’ he added, for himself.

  That was the first time I encountered what I was soon to recognize as a familiar attitude among South Africans; an unexpressed desire to dissociate themselves from their milieu, a wish to make it clear that they were not taken in, even by themselves. It was a complex attitude, too, and it took many forms and affected many different kinds of people. On second thoughts, I had met with it even before that: the girl at the Alexanders’, the rider, had, in a way, shown the same uneasy desire.

  Arthur left; I moved into the flat; a warm, gritty wind swept people, dogs, papers, together in the streets. The membranes of my nose felt stiff and dry and I cut myself when I shaved every morning. A skin of ochre dust had grown over the tree-trunks and fences of the sand road that led to Hamish Alexander’s house, when I went there again, to a cocktail party in honour of the Baxters. Then the rain came, and lasted three days; a hard, noisy rain that scrubbed behind the city’s ears. Everything was flattened, drenched, and exhilarated; it was summer.

  Of the people I had met at the Alexanders’ before, only the twins, Margaret Gerling and one or two of the middle-aged married couples were at the Baxters’ party. There were a great many people, all standing up, with that air of impending crisis that characterizes cocktail parties. If you sat down, you were confronted with the debris of a lower level: half-drunk glasses, abandoned cigarettes, mislaid handbags, and canapés that had found their way into ashtrays or to the floor. I came away with an invitation to ‘drinks and supper’ next Saturday (from the beautiful wife of a steel man), an invitation to a first night party after the opening of a play (from what I gathered was the leading lady, a triumphantly ugly red-head with a fine memory for dirty stories and a talent for telling them) and a request to lunch sometime, at a Services Club, with the local equivalent of a Harley Street physician. Marion Alexander said why didn’t I come out and ride with the young people? And Margaret Gerling, in blue with a string of pearls, smiled across the room.

  The office was going smoothly, now that the over-anxious Arthur was no longer hovering, but the flat was proving an unexpected nuisance,. There were so many things I hadn’t thought of, when I’d calculated what I’d have to buy when I moved in. Towels, for example, and bed linen. Adaptors for electric plugs; the bedside radio and the second-hand lamp I’d bought myself couldn’t be used with their existing fittings. I had been out of the office one afternoon looking for these things in the shops, when I returned to find a woman waiting to see me.

  ‘The lady-dee tel-i-phoned you twice this morning, Mr Hood,’ said the typist, in her limp, sing-song incurious voice. I stood there nodding a polite greeting, holding my parcels with the awkwardness of the male unused to shopping. ‘Will you open the door for me, please, Miss McCann? – If you’ll just let me dump these things,’ I added, to the caller.

  ‘Of course.’ As I was going through the inner door to my office, I remembered: ‘I did ring the number left for me, but when I got through, a voice said Legal Aid Society, or something like that, so I thought the number must be wrong, and hung up.’

  The voice came through the open door: ‘That was right. I was telephoning from the Legal Aid Bureau.’

  I had put down my parcels, placed Arthur’s brass hand on some loose papers lying on the desk. ‘Please come in,’ I said, going to the door again.

  She was a short, dark woman, young, with the neat head of a tidy bird. She entered and sat down with the confidence of habit; few people I had known could enter a room like that unless they were going to sell you advertising space or insurance.

  ‘I hope you won’t mind my walking in without an appointment, Mr Hood,’ she said. ‘But you’re close by my office and I thought I might as well come on my way home and see if I could talk to you for a few minutes – it’s always so much better than trying to explain over the telephone, anyway.’

  ‘Of course. Besides, to tell you the truth, I don’t have any appointments. So few people seem to need to see me.’

  She was at ease already; the confession, with its implications of amateurishness, put me at ease.

  ‘I’m Anna Louw,’ she said, and although I’d been in the country less than a month, the name, the pronunciation of which told me it was Afrikaans, already produced in me a slight shift of attitude; mentally, I changed balance. I had experienced the same thing, in myself and others, when we met with German visitors to England, after the war. ‘I’m a lawyer and I work for the Legal Aid Bureau, which you may know handles the legal troubles of people who can’t afford to go to law through the usual channels.’

  ‘I’ve been in Johannesburg only a month -’

  ‘Well, of course, then, how could you know? Anyway, as you can imagine, most of the people we help are Africans. Not only are they poor, they’re also the most ignorant of their rights.’

  I said, half-jokingly, ‘I’ve been led to believe they haven’t many to be ignorant about.’

  She seemed to consider this carefully a moment before she said, ‘Those that they have we try to help them know and keep.’

  I suddenly felt embarrassed and inadequate; Faunce or my mother would have known so well what to say to this woman; they would not have missed this opportunity to align themselves on the side of the angels. Since all I could do was mumble sympathetic approval, I kept a dull-witted silence. Perhaps she mistook it for impatience, for she went on at once with the imperturbability of the professional interviewer: ‘I’ve come to see you about Amon Mofokeng.’

  ‘Amon?’ The flickering figure of the young black man who was always seen coming or going on errands and trips to the post office, suddenly jumped into a third dimension. He had another name, another life.’ What has Amon done?’

  A smile broke the considering calm of her face. She had a square jaw – all her face was too broad for its size – and her white teeth were pretty against the pale gums that very dark people sometimes have. ‘He h
asn’t done anything. He’s got a mother, living in Jagersfontein location. Or at least, she was living there. She’s been evicted, along with the other residents, and re-settled in a new native township. The only trouble is, she had freehold, a house of her own in the old location, and in the new place there is no freehold. The old story – I’m sure you’ve read about similar things before you came here.’

  I nodded. I offered her a cigarette, but she put up her hand saying,’ Only after six,’ and I withdrew the packet and took one for myself.

  ‘We are going to use Amon Mofokeng’s mother as a test case,’ she said, bringing her black brows together over the bridge of her nose: one of those short, jutting noses with an abrupt bulge, turning slightly up, at the tip. ‘We are going to ask the local authority to show cause why the owner of confiscated freehold property should be satisfied to receive leasehold property in compensation. We’ve chosen Amon’s mother because she seems to have been the oldest freehold householder in Jagersfontein – she lived there for twenty-two years.’

  ‘Where is this location?’ I asked.

  ‘Not in Johannesburg,’ she said. ‘It’s part of a town named Jagersfontein on the West Rand – the gold-mines to the west of Johannesburg. They’ve started mining uranium there near Jagersfontein now, too, and the town’s been going ahead furiously. Hence this move to give the Africans the boot; to push them further out of the way of the town.’

  ‘You know, I believe my grandfather may be buried there,’ I said. ‘He fell in the Boer War at a place called Jagersfontein.’

  She smiled, as if, like me, she had suddenly remembered the framed citation, my mother’s foot pointed at the sword: Darling what on earth are you doing with that? ‘It could be,’ she said. ‘There are several Jagersfonteins, but this would be a likely one for a Boer War grave.