The Late Bourgeois World Read online

  ‘Yes, but the writer – he’s an East German – uses it as a wider one – it covers the arts, religious beliefs, technology, scientific discoveries, love-making, everything –’

  ‘But excluding the Communist world, then.’

  ‘Well no, not really’ – he loves to give me a concise explanation – ‘it exists in relation to the early Communist world – shall we call it. Defining one, you assume the existence of the other. So both are part of a total historical phenomenon.’

  I poured him another drink because I wanted him to go, and although he wanted to go, he accepted it. ‘Did you work all afternoon? Or did you really sleep?’

  But I knew that he had worked; he gave the admission of a dry, dazed half-smile, something that came from the room where he’d been shut up among documents, as a monk, who during his novitiate still makes some sorties into the life outside, is claimed by the silence of the cell that has never really relinquished him. Even the Friday night love-making had not made Graham sleepy in the afternoon; in that room of his, he wrote and intoned into the dictaphone, alone with his own voice. I’ve heard it sometimes from outside the door; like someone sending up prayer.

  I mentioned I’d noticed that the arrow-and-spear sign was still on the walls of the viaduct near the Home.

  ‘I’m not surprised. I think there are a few new ones round the town, too. Somebody’s brave. Or foolhardy.’ He told me last week that a young white girl got eighteen months for painting the same symbol; but of course in the Cape black men and women are getting three years for offences like giving ten bobs’ worth of petrol for a car driven by an African National Congress member.

  ‘D’you think it’s all right, using that spear thing? I mean, when you think who it was who had the original idea.’ It came out in a political trial not long ago that this particular symbol of resistance was the invention of a police agent provocateur and spy. I’d have thought they’d want to find another symbol.

  He laughed. ‘I don’t suppose the motives of the inventor’ve much to do with it. After all, look at advertising agencies – do you think the people who coin the selling catchword believe in what they’re doing?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so. But it’s queer. A queer situation. I mean one could never think it would be like that.’

  We were silent for a moment; he was, so to speak, considerately bare-headed in these pauses in which the thought of Max was present. There was nothing to say about Max, but now and then, like the silent thin spread of spent water coming up to touch your feet on a dark beach at night, his death or his life came in, and a commonplace remark turned up reference to him. Graham asked, ‘The flowers arrive for your grandmother all right?’ I told him how they were kept outside the door; and how she had cried out when she saw a figure in the doorway.

  ‘It’s natural to be afraid of death.’ Just as if he were advising a dose of Syrup of Figs for Bobo (one of the fatherly gestures he sometimes boldly makes).

  ‘Maybe. But she’s never had to put up with what’s natural. Neither grey hairs nor cold weather. It’s true – until two or three years ago, when she became senile, she hadn’t lived through a winter in fifteen years – she flew from winter in England to the summer here, and from winter here to summer in England. But for this, now, nothing helps.’

  ‘Like the common cold,’ he said, standing up suddenly and looking down at me; almost amusedly, almost bored, accusingly. So he dismisses a conversation, or makes a decision. ‘Can you take me now?’ But he doesn’t understand. Since you have to die you ought to be provided with a perfectly ordinary sense of having had your fill. A mechanism like that which controls other appetites. You ought to know when you’ve had enough – like the feeling at the end of a meal. As simple and ordinary as that.

  I drove him home. His name is on the beautifully polished bronze plate on the gateway and a wrought-iron lantern is turned on by the servants at dusk every day above the teak front door. When he got out of the car I asked him to supper tomorrow. There was no difficulty about the lie; it didn’t seem to matter at all, everything was slack and somehow absent-minded between us. As soon as I’d dropped him, I drove home like a bat out of hell, feeling pleasurably skilful round corners, as I find I do when I’ve had just one sharp drink on an empty stomach. I had to get on and finish with the onions and have a bath, before half-past seven.

  I’d said about half-past seven, but I could safely count on eight o’clock, so there was plenty of time.

  I was expecting Luke Fokase. He phoned the laboratory on Thursday. ‘Look, how are things, man? I’m around. If I should drop in on Saturday, is that all right with you? I’m just around for a short time but I think I’ll still make it.’

  We don’t use names over the telephone. I said, ‘Come and eat with me in the evening.’

  ‘Good, good. I’ll drop by.’

  ‘About half-past seven.’

  I don’t know why I asked him again. I rather wish he’d leave me off his visiting list, leave me alone. But I miss their black faces. I forget about the shambles of the backyard house, the disappointments and the misunderstandings, and there are only the good times, when William Xaba and the others sat around all day Sunday under the apricot tree, and Spears came and talked to me while I cooked for us all. It comes back to me like a taste I haven’t come across since, and everything in my present life is momentarily automatous, as if I’ve woken up in a strange place. And yet I know that it was all no good, like every other luxury, friendship for its own sake is something only whites can afford. I ought to stick to my microscope and my lawyer and consider myself lucky I hadn’t the guts to risk ending up the way Max did.

  Luke isn’t one of the old crowd, but his half-section, Reba, knew Max, and that is how they both happened to come to me. They live in Basutoland, though of course they really belong here but were somehow able to prove their right to Basuto citizenship and papers from the British administration there. Reba has some building and cartage contracting business and he sends his old truck quite freely up and down between Maseru and Johannesburg with loads of second-hand building material. Apparently it provides an unscheduled bus service for politicals on the run, and even transports people in the other direction, taking them up to the Bechuanaland border. One night about fifteen months ago Reba arrived at my flat in the middle of the night; the truck had broken down with two chaps on board who had arranged to be escorted over the border that night, and he didn’t have enough money to pay for the repairs. I’d only met him once before, with Max, and I wasn’t quite sure if I really knew who he was, but I lent him what I had – eight pounds. I was afraid to – he could easily have been a police trap – but I was even more afraid not to; how could someone like me risk losing two Africans their chance to get away?

  He had with him that night a plump young man with a really black, smooth face – almost West African – and enormous almond eyes that were set in their wide-spaced openings in the black skin like the painted eyes of smiling Etruscan figures. That was Luke. Reba is a little, Vaseline-coloured man whose head is jammed back between his shoulders like a hunchback’s and who holds his big jaw full of teeth open in an attentive, silent laugh, while you’re speaking, as a hippopotamus keeps his ajar for the birds to pick his teeth. They were an immensely charming pair who gave the impression of being deeply untrustworthy. I didn’t expect to see the money again, but a registered envelope arrived with the notes and a letter of thanks idiotically signed ‘yours in the Struggle, Reba Shipise’. Since then, Luke turns up from time to time; he says, alternately, apparently not remembering from one visit to the next what explanation he gave last time – that Reba is too busy with his business or that Johannesburg has become ‘too hot’ for him. What does it matter? It’s none of my business, anyway. They’re both PAC men, too; and Max and I, like most white leftists and liberals, always supported ANC people because they are not ‘racialist’ and don’t count us out, but the government doesn’t make any fine distinction between those who are said t
o want to push the white man into the sea and those who merely want their majority vote – both kinds can rot in prison together. What does the fact that they are PAC rather than ANC matter, either? All the old niggling scruples of the days before black political parties were banned seem quite to have missed the point, now.

  It’s not often that I cook a proper meal, unless Bobo’s home on holiday; Graham can afford to buy our dinner in a restaurant, or we can eat at his house, where there’s a cook – it’s not worth the trouble for me to have to start work in the kitchen when I come home from the laboratory. So that the mere fact of cooking something that requires more skill and organization of tasks than frying an egg makes quite an occasion for me – it doesn’t matter whom it’s for. Anyway, Luke Fokase is always hungry. That first night he came with Reba he sat down and ate cold frigadelles I happened to have in the refrigerator. Pork fillets cooked buried in lots of thinly sliced onions are a bother to do, but I rather enjoyed getting everything prepared right up to the stage when all I should have to do was set it cooking, just before we wanted to eat. I opened a bottle of Spanish red wine that Graham had left in case we should happen to eat something worthy of it here, sometime – wine is very important to Graham, I notice that a good dinner and good wine and then love-making go together, with him, he doesn’t really enjoy the last without the first. I took a glass into the bathroom, and drank it in the bath. It looked lovely, the dark pansy-red against the tiles. I had the newspaper with me and I read the whole report from which Graham had read out bits about the space flight. There was nothing in the paper about Max; it had already been dropped from this, the late final edition.

  Even then I was dressed and ready long before Luke came, and did not know what to do with myself. There are so many things that ought to be done when I have the time, but an awkward little wedge of time like this is not much use. Whatever I began, I should not finish. I can never go back to a half-written letter; the tone, when you take it up again, doesn’t match.

  And yet to put on a record and pour myself another glass of wine and sit – something that sounds delightful – made me feel as if I were on stage before an empty auditorium. I fetched the book I was reading in bed in the morning. Since I stopped halfway down the page at which a dry cleaner’s slip marked my place, there was Max’s death; it seemed to me a different book, I can’t explain – it sounded quite differently there in that inner chamber where one hears a writer’s voice behind the common currency of words. The voice went on and on but ran into itself as an echo throws one wave of sound back and forth on top of another. I read the words and sentences, but my mind twitched to the single electrical impulse – the death of Max. As soon as I gave up the attempt to read, it was all right again. I wasn’t even thinking about him. Through the walls there was the muffled clatter of dinner time in the flats on either side of mine, and the bark of someone’s radio at full volume. Car doors slammed and the clear winter air juggled voices. Our lights blazed at Fredagold Heights and theirs blazed back. I saw the tube of glue lying in the ashtray (I’d had it out to stick down the sole of my shoe a few days ago) and remembered that I had never got round to mending the head of the baboon mascot I brought back for Bobo from Livingstone, on the way home from Europe last year. It came broken out of my overnight bag; and after showing it to him I’d put it away among my cosmetics, telling him I’d stick the snout on. I went to the bedroom and found it, at the back of the drawer; one of the red lucky-bean eyes had come out, too, but I found that as well, in the fluff and spilt powder. The thing is made of some unidentifiable fur (meerkat? rat?), well observed, with an obscenely arched tail, and a close-set, human expression about the bean eyes in a face carved out of a bit of soft wood. I glued both broken surfaces very carefully and then pressed them together accurately. I scraped off with my fingernail the hairline of glue squeezed out along the break and then held snout and head tightly while the fusion set; you wouldn’t be able to tell that it was mended. I began to think about how one day I would buy albums and begin to stick in the photographs of Bobo as a baby that are lying in an old hatbox on the top of the bathroom cupboard. Most of the others – him as a little boy – went along with our personal papers and cuttings in security raids on the old cottage, and I’ve never been able to get them back. Sticking Bobo’s pictures into an album and recording the dates on which and places where they were taken suddenly seemed enthusiastically possible, just as if the kind of life in which one does this sort of thing would fly into place around us with the act. My stomach was rumbling hunger, and with fingers tacky with glue, I had just poured myself another glass of wine when there was a soft, two-four beat rapping at the door; Luke doesn’t ring bells.

  Chapter 6

  He doesn’t worry about being seen, either. I know that he comes straight up through the front entrance of the building, so that the watchman, who sits on his box on the lookout for people sneaking up to the servants’ rooms on the roof by way of the back stairs, won’t bother him, and if he met the caretaker – somehow he doesn’t – he’d spin her a plausible, breezy yarn to account for his presence, and get away with it, too. There are some Africans who can do these things; others can’t move a step without getting entangled in the taboos all round their feet. I learnt that while Max was working with them. When he – Luke – stood in the doorway I realized that he is not present to me in any way when I don’t see or hear him. He exists only when his voice is on the other end of the telephone or when he stands there like this, a large, grinning young man, filling his clothes. And yet I felt happy to see him. He is immediately there – one of those people whose clothes move audibly, cloth on cloth, with the movement of muscle, whose breathing is something one is as comfortably aware of as a cat’s purr in the room, and whose body-warmth leaves fingerprints on his glass. He came in heavily and I put down the catch on the Yale. ‘Good – great – good to see you …’ He put his hands at once on the top of my arms and let them slide down towards the elbows, squeezing me gently. We stood there a moment, grinning, flirting. ‘And you, I’d forgotten what you look like …’ ‘Hey, what’s this, what’s here – have I been away so long?’ It was a light hair he had found and pulled out, on top of my head. ‘Nonsense, it’s the newest thing. They do it at the hairdresser, it’s called streaking …’ It was a game; he gave me a little appraising lift, with the heel of the hand, on the outer sides of my breasts, as one says, ‘There!’, and we went into the living room.

  He was talking, wandering round the room, looking, touching here and there, to establish intimacy at once, to show that he was at home; or reading the signs – who had been there, what sort of claims had left their mark, what was the state of my life expressed there. I could see that – from the point of view of information – he missed the flowers that, to me, walking into a room like this, would have had something to say immediately. But, fairly familiar though he may be with the normal trappings of white people’s homes, he’s not familiar enough to notice the significant difference between a bunch of flowers that a woman like me might have bought on a street-corner, and an expensive bouquet from a florist. ‘I came down on Tuesday – no, it was very late we left, Wednesday, early on Wednesday morning, really. Something wrong with the car –’

  ‘Naturally.’ I held up the brandy bottle in one hand, the open wine bottle in the other.

  ‘Oh anything. Brandy. Well, the fan belt was gone and the chappie I was with –’

  ‘Aren’t you here with the truck? How’s old Reba?’

  ‘Okay; he just sticks at home these days and leaves me to do the moving around. He’s had a lot of trouble with his wife – I don’t know, she bumps into things without realizing. Something with the balance. The doctor can’t find out. As a matter of fact, Reba said to ask you.’

  ‘Well, I’m not a doctor … it sounds like middle ear.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right, that’s what the doctor says, but she’s not keen …’ I laughed – ‘But she can’t pick and choose – there simply is such a t
hing as a middle ear, and if its function is disturbed you can lose your balance.’

  ‘Well I know, but she’s only got two ears, she says –’ He wanted to make us laugh at African logic.

  I gave him his brandy, and I went to the kitchen and quickly turned on the gas under the meat and mixed the dressing with the salad, using my unwashed hands as I always do when there’s nobody to see.

  He heard me clattering about in there and when I came out with the tray, I said to his broad smile, ‘What is it now?’ and he said, ‘That’s what I like about white girls, so efficient. Everything goes just-like-that.’

  ‘Oh, I’m making a special effort,’ I said, putting the bread and salad and butter on the table.

  ‘Oh I’m appreciative,’ he came back.

  I was in and out, and each time I came into the living room he was an audience; then he held the baboon, amused, I could see in his face, full of curiosity, feeling that he had put his hand on my life – ‘So you’ve been fixing the monkey, eh? You keep busy all the time.’

  ‘It’s Bobo’s – my son.’

  ‘Nice thing for a little boy,’ he said, stroking the fur with one finger.

  ‘Not so little any more. Maybe too old for it, now.’

  ‘Man, I could play with a thing like that myself.’

  I don’t know whether he’s professionally affable or if he really experiences the airy, immediate response to his surroundings that he always shows. Sometimes, when his great eyes are steady with attention to what I’m saying, there’s a flicker – just a hair’s-breadth flicker – that makes me aware that he’s thinking, fast, in his own language, about something else.

  He said, smiling, holding me in the admiring, kidding gaze that I rather enjoy, ‘Can’t you sit down and relax a while?’ Much of his small talk is in the style of American films he has seen, but it fits quite naturally, just as the rather too hairy, too tweedy jacket he wore was all right, on him. The delicious scent of onions stewing in butter grew as we talked. I asked about the Basutoland elections, and we were both content to warm up on neutral ground, so to speak. Then we got on to the position of the South African refugees there. He began to complain of the restrictions placed upon them by the British administration, referring to it as ‘your English friends’, and I protested – ‘My friends? Why my friends? Though I pity the poor devils, having to deal with a pack of squabbling political refugees –’ ‘A-ah, they play nicely along with the South African government, don’t you worry,’ he said. ‘Specially the PAC chaps,’ I said. Our voices rose and we were laughing. ‘Beating each other up between speeches!’ But under the laughter – or using the laughter – he veered away from the subject, that was too closely related to his visits to Johannesburg, would perhaps lead us too quickly to a point he would judge when to reach. I know that he doesn’t come to see me for nothing. There’s always a reason. Though once at least (the last time he came) he’s gone away again without my finding out what it was; something must have indicated to him that he wouldn’t get whatever it was that he wanted, anyway. He’s nobody’s fool, young Luke.