A World of Strangers Read online

  I was interested in what Anna Louw had to say, but not sufficiently interested in her as a woman for it to occur to me to wonder why she should seem to be fellow to this kind of freedom. I merely took it for granted that she was.

  ‘Why don’t we go and have some dinner?’ I said. I had been standing on the pavement for ten minutes or more, still holding the parcels, and with no sign of going in to my flat.

  Out of the dark, her voice was friendly, matter-of-fact, without intimacy, but without coquetry, too. ‘I would have liked to ask you to bacon and eggs at my cottage, but the fact is, I’m supposed to go to a party.

  ‘Why don’t you come?’ The words were spoken as the outcome of a decision.

  ‘Could I?’

  I saw her smile slowly in the dark. ‘If you’d like to, of course you can.’

  ‘Well. . .?’

  She waited for me to answer myself. ‘I must dash up to the flat and dump these things. I need a wash.’

  ‘I’ll wait,’ she said.

  When I was across the road she leaned out of the car and called, softly, decorously: ‘Don’t change, you know. It’s not a party. . .’

  As I met myself in the thin ice of the bathroom mirror – even with the light on, there were corners in that bathroom that remained sunk in darkness, and there was always the feeling that if the brittle, peeling reflector broke, the image would fall into the steamy dark – I saw that my hair was dirty and in need of a cut. That morning I had managed to nick the lobe of my ear, and there was a little black crust of blood sealing the place. Nicotine had stained striations on my lower teeth. I saw another face: the painted, stylized, woman’s face of Cecil Rowe, so pretty above the hollow collar-bones. It occurred to me as the face of another species than myself; I sometimes had this feeling about women, and it excited me. A wry form of romanticism, I suppose; if I could not believe them better, purer, gentler beings, I liked to see them, in a flash, now and again, as some charming creature in a tank or a cage.

  I wondered what Anna Louw was thinking of while she waited for me down below in the car, with the crickets shrilling steadily through the lurching drunken quarrel of radios that came from the flat windows. When we drove off again, she seemed to have withdrawn a little, as if perhaps she doubted the impulse that had made her invite me to accompany her.

  I tried to be as pleasant and easy as I could, in order to reassure her, like a dog showing, with sidlings and submissive flattened ears, that he will behave if he is taken along on a walk. Presently she parked the car under a street-light, and in its harsh wash, she looked tired as she said,’ This will be a mixture of people. It’s not always a success.’

  I felt that she almost wanted me to say, let’s not go, let’s drive away, go somewhere else. ‘You don’t have to worry. I’ll find some way of letting everyone know that you hardly know me, that you’ve brought me along out of the kindness of your heart.’

  She shook her head and laughed; the laugh turned into a weary yawn. She had the flatness of a person who has had several drinks rather too long ago, and is in need of several more, or a meal. I misunderstood her, but she could not bring herself to explain.

  The house was a very small bungalow and it was filled with people; from the gate, shadows moving against the reddish, curtained light of the windows, and the deep vibration of voices and movement gave it the charged air of a house in full use. There fell upon us the subdued moment of entry; and then we tramped in over the worn boards of a narrow passage (the front door was off the latch) and a large, beautiful woman in a tight black dress that made it a struggle for her to walk, and a bright pink shawl whose fringe hung over the drink she kept upright in her hand, opened her eyes wide, lifted her eyebrows and, clasping Anna, held her away in what was apparently speechless joy at seeing her. From the way Anna kissed her hurriedly and cut in at once with her own greetings and introduction, I realized, before the woman got anything out, that she was not overcome, but simply unable to speak because she was a stutterer. At last, as if a hand had suddenly let go of her throat, she said in a rich torrent, ‘S – so glad to have you, Mr Hood. Come in and I’ll see if I can find something for you to drink – it’s glasses that are the problem, I’m afraid. I tried to phone you and ask you to bring some, Anna -’ And she drew us into a small, full room where a portrait of herself looked over the heads of fifteen or twenty people, some of whom were black men or some other dark-skinned race. Her eyebrows lifted again, her lips parted agonizingly as she prepared to call people’s attention to me and introduce me, putting a long, strong hand, the hand folded like a lily in the painting, on my arm, but again Anna came gracefully to her rescue: ‘Sylvia, darling, don’t bother, I’ll get Mr Hood circulating.’ ‘You’ll f – give,’ the woman turned to me in an apology that went mute. ‘Of course,’ I nodded and smiled, trying not to exaggerate these signs of goodwill the way one does for the deaf. She gasped something to Anna about the food; and then left us, swept her queenly way through the guests, and disappeared, in what I gathered was the direction of the kitchen.

  A woman waved a glass at Anna across the room, from here and there, voices greeted her; we passed a little group deep and oblivious in some argument as cows in a stream, passed a slender tense man who smiled at Anna on bad baby teeth, in an aside from his tête-à-tête with a tall redhead, and made our way to a table crowded with bottles. It was true, there were no clean glasses – but we found two – the kind that have once contained cheese spread, and have a flower motif painted on the outside – that were at least empty.

  A party has something in common with a battlefield in that, if you are in it, of it, you do not see it; your tête-á-tête or the little group in which you drink and talk is the party. But if you are a stranger, recognizing no one, drawn into no private context of friendship, there is a time, at the beginning of the evening, when you see the composition of the party as the armchair strategist sees the battle: steadily, formally, and whole.

  As the stiff gin stole about my body, like a torch opening up a dark house, I saw the pattern of that room with an almost omniscient eye. Those other faces, dark faces, other hands, dark hands, emerging from the same old coatsleeves, made a difference. The pattern had the tangled fascination of an Oriental rug my mother once had, where, if you looked, the scrolls and flowers that you expected to see were also found to be people, animals, jokes, and legends; things that, in real life, are not found together, cheek by jowl in the space of one experience. Nothing very remarkable was happening in the room; three Africans were talking to each other, a conspicuously well-dressed Indian was explaining something surprising to a white man and woman (you could see the serious, eager incredulity on their faces), the scrum of white people near the door still kept head-down over the ball of their discussion, there was the usual couple – a white one – who have made of the party a place to be alone together, and the only African woman there – as far as I could see – sat ignored, smiling into a tumbler of wine. All these people lived together in one country, anyway; all their lines were entangled by propinquity.

  Yet to have them in one room together, in the voluntary context of a party – to have them there because they wished to be there – did have, even for me, after one month in their country, the quality of the remarkable: the ordinary social pattern seemed as intricate and ambiguous in its composition as the Oriental rug.

  A man broke away from the group of Africans and came up to get himself a drink; he had the sauntering, abstracted air of the man who always knows where the drinks are kept; ‘The brandy run out?’ he said to me. It was the first word a black man spoke to me that wasn’t between master and servant. I moved away from the table so that he could look. ‘See if Sylvia can raise another bottle,’ he mumbled, and turned to the door through which she had gone earlier. Then he saw Anna. ‘I knew you’d be somewhere here!’ he said, grinning. He was a tall, thin man, with a long waist and a small round head. He was the pleasant, light colour of polished wood and his hair was like wool embroi
dery. His eyes were far away, burnt-out; he had a small, delicately-made nose, from whose characteristically flattened tip the nostrils curled back, and the gathered-together bones of his face gave prominence to his large mouth. When he smiled, charmingly, at Anna, he showed a battleground of gaps and fine broken teeth. ‘It seems people just can’t do without either of us, that’s all,’ said Anna, smiling. ‘How’ve you been?’

  ‘Oh, not bad, not bad.’

  ‘This is Mr Hood, Steven – I don’t think you told me your other name, did you?’ she added, to me.

  ‘Toby. Like the jugs.’

  The other man laughed. ‘That’s a good name. That should have been the name for me.’

  ‘Toby Hood, just from England – Steven Sitole.’ We shook hands. He went through the formula absently: how-do-you-do, pleased-to-meet-you. ‘How’s your drink, Mr Hood?’

  ‘Not good,’ I said, for my glass was empty.

  ‘Let me fix it for you,’ he said, with expansive party amiability. ‘And yours too, Anna.’

  ‘No, Steven, you’re a bad influence. I must set myself a time limit. Not more than one drink an hour.’

  ‘She’s quite a one for time limits, isn’t she?’ I said.

  Steven was tipping gin into my glass. ‘Is she?’

  Indicating Steven, she said to me: ‘We only meet at parties, and they’re inclined to be timeless.’

  He laughed at her admiringly, as if he had certain expectations of her, and she always came up to them. He was familiar and at ease with her, but the familiarity and ease were those of a foreigner: a Frenchman, Italian, or German not sure whether the English woman whom he has met is a fair sample of all the English women whom he will never know, or an exception under no circumstances to be regarded as representative.

  His purpose, which was the bottle of brandy, was not to be deflected, and once he had given me my drink, he excused himself. Anna introduced me to the young man with the redhead – an Englishman – and then we drifted over to the earnest group near the door, which, in its turn, had taken in the Indian, Jimmy Naidoo, and his wife, who sat – on something so low and small that it was hidden by the draperies of her yellow sari – ample and vague in outline as a piece of municipal statuary whose sculptor has not dared attempt the feet. All the rest stood, and she looked up into the talk with an attentive and well-brought-up air, a sallow face with the sleepless look of deeply-ringed eyes. The other woman in the group was an Englishwoman with a Modigliani neck rising white and splendid to a slightly receding chin and a thick streaky coil of blonde hair that rested like a heavy hand on her nape; white arms and hands long and perfect, as if the mould in which they had been cast had just been gently cracked from them, were crossed over a flattened and exhausted-looking body in a green velvet dress. She had the ghost of a voice, and she had once been a painter; they were talking about painting. ‘If I could paint,’ said a grey-haired man who screwed up his eyes and bared his lower teeth in attack when he talked, ‘- especially if I painted in this country – I’d revive literary painting. There are too many landscape painters here. They don’t know how to deal with man, so they leave him out.’

  ‘Or if they do put him in, they use only the picturesque aspect – they treat a face or a figure as if it were a tree,’ said a young man who seemed to have struggled with his clothes and lost – the sleeves of his brown shirt hung over his wrists, but the collar was too small and had popped open under a very big woollen tie.

  ‘What do you have in mind when you say literary painting?’

  ‘“When did you last see your father,”’ whispered the Englishwoman, who had been introduced to me as Dorothea Welz.

  ‘And why not?’ said the grey-haired man. ‘What’s wrong with pictures that tell a story?’

  ‘Fine for backache pills,’ said Naidoo, beaming.

  ‘I think he means what I call problem pictures,’ someone else said. ‘A scene that poses a certain situation.’

  ‘That’s what he said. That’s what literary painting is.’

  ‘- a white child playing with an expensive toy under the eye of an African in one of those fancy maid’s uniforms, and in the street outside the garden you see some tsotsis sauntering past -’

  ‘Oh Christ!’

  ‘. . . much abstract painting is, in fact, literary painting, the expression of ideas, what else can you call it?’

  ‘. . . those nubile Zulu maidens, all boot-polish breasts and flashing teeth.’

  ‘When are you going to paint again, Dorothea?’ said the untidy young man, as if he were in the habit of questioning everybody about everything.

  ‘Why should I?’ she said, as if she really hoped for an answer.

  Steven Sitole appeared beside me.’ What’s Gerard Sekoto turning out these days?’ someone turned to ask him. He shrugged, grinned irresponsibly. ‘I wouldn’t know. Do you know what’s happened to him?’ he asked me.

  ‘Who’s that?’ I said.

  ‘I don’t think he’s known in England,’ Anna put in.

  ‘Oh but he must be,’ said the grey-haired man, ‘Isn’t he hung somewhere important, the Tate?’

  ‘Musée National d’Art Moderne bought something,’ whispered Dorothea, ‘not London.’ Those hands and arms looked as if they had never before been out of long white gloves.

  The party formed, broke apart and reformed, like a shoal of fish; Steven was the one that darts about, in and out the body of the shoal at different points; the hostess, Sylvia, burst into the room at intervals, as a wave washes out the formation of a shoal, breaking up a conversation, dragging someone off to talk to someone else, begging another to help her with some kitchen mystery, and withdrew again, as a wave recedes over the bodies of fish, and they gently float back into their order of suspension in calm water.

  With the third or fourth drink, I met the two Africans with whom Steven had been talking when we came in. They had long unpronounceable names, but they were also called Sam and Peter. Sam was short, hardly as tall as Anna Louw, and had the little man’s neatness – well-shined shoes, a blue suit with a waistcoat, a red bow tie – and the astonishing, beaming face of the picture-book piccanin, the little Black Sambo face. I thought at once how awful it must be for him to know that he bore this face – large, shining brown eyes with curly lashes, the huge happy smile on white teeth, the large round head, uneven and top-heavy, like a tender gourd. It was as if an Englishman should find that he looked exactly like Lord Fauntleroy. Peter was boyish-looking, with a prominent Adam’s apple, a pimply skin, and tiny ears that seemed to participate when he talked, and lay flat back against his head when he laughed, like a pleased animal’s. He kept putting dance records, from a pile on the floor, on the superior sort of gramophone – part of an intricate high fidelity system with which the room was wired – to which nobody listened. Sam smiled at me over the soup; Anna had brought round a tray of cups of good hot borscht, cups so hot we had to hold them from hand to hand. Peter took one experimental swallow of the sweet-sour, earthy-scented brew and then left his cup behind the records. But Sam and I drank ours with relish. ‘It’s a Russian dish, isn’t it?’ Out of that small body, he had a deep, strong voice: ‘Tell me, Mr Hood, do you know what Kvas is, perhaps?’

  ‘Kvas? How do you spell it?’

  We both laughed. ‘Kvas,’ he said.’ I’m just reading a book where somebody drinks it – she has a sudden longing to drink it. You know how it is, you want to know what this taste is she’s thinking about.’

  ‘A pity it wasn’t borscht, now,’ I said. Sylvia came up to us with her beautiful raised brows: ‘A-all right? You’ve had some s-soup?’ We showed our cups. ‘It was delicious,’ said Sam. ‘But you haven’t had a potato? You must have potatoes!’ She rushed off, magnificently hampered by her dress, to fetch a dish of boiled potatoes. We had no soup left but we each took one.

  ‘Always have potatoes with kvas,’ I said to Sam. ‘Always,’ he said.

  ‘Y-you’ve been reading Anna Karenina!’ she got out, tr
iumphantly. ‘I remember, I remember! What’s her name? The girl Levin marries – she drinks kvas.’

  ‘Wants to drink it,’ said Sam, opening up in a smile of pure enjoyment.

  ‘He has – not me,’ I said.

  She put her hand on the little man’s arm. ‘Ah,’ she said, with a deep, exaggerated breath that expressed the enthusiasm she would never get out in words, ‘isn’t that a m—’ the m hung in the air for seconds. ‘Miracle,’ said Sam excitedly. ‘That’s what that book is; God, I think about it all the time I’m not reading it.’ ‘I hadn’t read it for f-fifteen years, and then, only last year, when I was in hospital -’ They went into an enthusiasts’ huddle.

  Some people had plates of food, by now, and there seemed to have been a lavish re-issue of red wine. They wandered in and out of what I had thought was the door to the kitchen, helping themselves. I took my empty soup-cup, and Sam’s, and went the same way. The redhead, carrying a full plate and a glass of wine and a roll, called out’ Oops – mind me.’ We were caught in each other’s smiles for a moment, foolishly, like a cobweb. Seeing that she was rather drunk, I realized that I must be the same. But the hot soup gave me the illusion of a temporary check; weighted me down. I went soberly enough through the door and found it led into a passage, where an old man with misted glasses and the face of an embryo chicken said in a strong Eastern European accent, ‘Is my vife still dere?’

  ‘Which one’s your wife?’ I said, as I might have said to a lost child, which one’s your mummy?

  ‘Dorosea,’ he said impatiently. ‘Don’t you know Dorosea?’

  ‘I’ve just met a tall woman in a green dress.’

  ‘Dat’s right. Dat’s right,’ he said with relief, walking with me into a room fumigated with the stink of ripe cheese rising from a marmite on a Victorian marble-topped washstand that had been painted white. He wheezed a chuckle. ‘To tell you za trus, I fell asleep, ya know. I fell asleep in Sylvia’s room, there at the back. Honestly, I had no idea whether it’s ten o’clock, three o’clock, one o’clock. Vot’s de soup?’