The Late Bourgeois World Read online

  It was about ten when we got down to the food – it was sizzling and succulent the way it never is when someone else serves it up behind doors. He wanted a beer, but I was out of it, and so he carried on with the brandy and I had the lovely wine to myself. A few years ago I should have protested; I’ve developed a secret, spinsterish (or is it bachelor) pleasure in such small selfish greeds. (I in my flat, I suppose, and Graham in his house.) While it went down, warm as the temperature of the room, black-red, matt as fresh milk on the back of my tongue, I thought of how once – long ago, at the beginning – I said to Max, what would one do if somebody you loved died, how did one know how to go on? I always remember what he said: ‘Well, after even only a few hours, you get thirsty, and you want again – you want a drink of water …’

  The dinner was so awfully good. It was like a feast. I said to the man with the smooth black face and long eyes, opposite me, ‘I don’t know whether you saw in the paper; my husband is dead.’ After I had spoken my heart suddenly whipped up very fast, as it does when you have got something out at last. And yet I hadn’t thought about mentioning anything to this visitor; the day was over, it had no connection with the visit; the visit had no connection with anything else in my life, such visits are like the hour when you wake up in the night and read and smoke, and then go to sleep – they have no context.

  His mouth was full of food. He looked at me dismayed, as if he wanted to spit it out; I felt terribly embarrassed. ‘Christ, I didn’t know. When was that?’

  I said, ‘I’ve been divorced for ages, you know. I’ve had Bobo alone with me since he was quite small.’

  ‘The fellow in Cape Town – he was the one you were married to? I read about it but I –’

  ‘Yes, I had a telegram early this morning. I hadn’t seen him or heard from him for a year.’

  He kept saying, over again, ‘Good God … I didn’t know, you see.’

  I went on eating in order to force him to do so, but he sat looking at me: ‘Hell, that’s bad, man.’

  ‘So what did you do, Liz, what’d you do?’

  I could feel him watching me while I ate, spearing a piece of meat, scooping a few soft rings of onion on to it, and putting the fork in my mouth. When I had finished that mouthful, I sat back a bit in my chair and looked at him. ‘There’s nothing to do, Luke. I drove out to the school, that’s all, to tell my son.’

  ‘What about the funeral?’

  ‘Oh, that’ll be in Cape Town.’ I wanted to bring the facts of life home to him, so to speak.

  ‘So you’re not going?’ No doubt he was thinking of an African family funeral, with all feuds and estrangements forgotten, and everyone foregathering from distant and disparate lives.

  ‘No, I won’t be going.’

  ‘He was the husband,’ he said.

  ‘Oh yes,’ I said, ‘I know that. I’ve been thinking, he must have been the one for me. It couldn’t have been much different.’

  We size each other up entirely without malice. I don’t pretend to know anything about him, except what I can pick up in his innocent, calculating, good-looking plump face, he interprets me entirely as an outsider – I the outsider – by the exigencies of the life he belongs to.

  Slowly he began to eat again, we both went on eating, as if I had persuaded him to it. He said, ‘Wha’d’you think made him do it? Political reasons?’ He knows, of course, that Max turned State witness, that time.

  ‘If he’d been one of your chaps he wouldn’t have needed to do it himself, ay? Someone else would have stuck a knife in him and thrown him in the harbour.’

  He said, ‘Hell, Liz, man, take it easy’ – with a short snort of a laugh. But it’s true; it’s all so much simpler if you’re black, even your guilt’s dealt with for you. African State witnesses appear masked in court, but they can’t count on lasting long.

  ‘You think he couldn’t get it off his mind?’

  I said, ‘Oh I don’t know, Luke, I really don’t know.’

  ‘But, man, you knew him from way back, you knew what sort of person he was, even if you haven’t seen him lately.’

  ‘He wasn’t the sort of person he thought he was.’

  ‘Ah, well.’ He didn’t want to risk speaking ill of the dead. I said, by way of comfort, ‘There are people who kill themselves because they can’t bear not to live for ever’ – I smiled with my lips turned down, in case he thought I was talking about an afterlife in heaven – ‘I mean, they can’t put up with the limitations of the time they’re alive in. Saints and martyrs are the same sort.’ But he just said, ‘The poor chap, ay,’ and I had a glimpse of myself as another white woman who talks too much. I offered him wine again. ‘No, I’ll stick to this,’ he said, so I filled up my own glass; drinks too much, too, I thought. But I was in a calm, steady mood, I never drink when I am in a bad one. We helped ourselves to more food, a to and fro of hands and dishes and no ceremony. He was telling me about Reba’s scheme to build six freehold houses for better-off Africans round the Basutoland capital. ‘If Reba could only get someone to back him, he could really go ahead. He can get cheap bricks and cheap timber –’

  ‘But what sort of houses will they be!’

  ‘No, they’re all right. Reba knows what he’s doing. Did you ever know that fellow Basil Katz? Yes, he’s up there now and he’s done some drawings and everything for Reba.’

  I wasn’t much interested, and it was easy to sound sympathetic. ‘The building societies won’t play?’

  ‘No, man, of course not, they won’t do it for a black. It’s a shame. I’m sorry for Reba, he’s dead keen and he knows he can get the cement and the bricks, and the timber – cheap, really cheap. And he’s got the labour – you know, it’s a good thing to show the Basutos you’re providing employment – it’s a good thing.’

  ‘I don’t suppose he can offer enough security – what’s it?’

  ‘Collateral. Yes, that’s it. But if he was a white, it’d be a different story –’ Talking business, he assumed, perhaps unconsciously, the manner that he thought appropriate, chair tipped back, body eased casually. ‘On, say, thirty thousand rand, reckoning on a return of ten per cent – well, call it eight – you can expect a profit of close to three thousand, d’you realize that?’

  ‘But is there anyone there to buy houses like that? Have they got the money – I mean I should have thought it would have to be a sub-economic scheme of some kind.’

  ‘They’ve got it, they’ve got it. And Reba knows how to get it out of them.’ He spoke with the city man’s contempt for country people. ‘Reba’s in with the Chiefs, man. You should see the cattle they’ve got. Not the poor devils up in the mountains! Reba goes and sits and drinks beer with them, and talks and talks, man, and he tells them how when independence comes the new African government’s going to need houses for the ministers and people, in the town … he t-a-l-k-s to them …’ Breaking into Sotho, he showed me Reba palavering with the yokels – watching, with a white flick of his long eyes, my laughter. I wondered what he was putting up the performance for; what he had come for. But I had forgotten about this at the moment when I said, ‘And that’s what you’re doing in Johannesburg, trying to raise money for the tycoon’s houses’ – and neatly gave away to him the opening he wanted.

  He looked at the piece of cheese he had just taken and pushed it away with the knife and got up, turning from the table. His full belly in the white shirt strained over his belt and he lifted it, expanding his chest in a deep breath. When he spoke again it was from another part of his mind: ‘No’ – softly, stiffly, as if it were none of my business – ‘No … not houses. That’s … that’s Reba’s’ – his hand made a loose, twirling gesture.

  ‘What d’you do – for a living, Luke?’ I came and stood in front of him with my arms folded. (He had told me that he was once a salesman for ladies’ underwear, in the townships.)

  What a face, those extraordinary cloisonné eyes, you could put your finger on the eyeball to try the smooth surface. His
chin lifted, to parry me, yet the smile, innocently blatant, would not be held back. The eyes filmed over as if someone had breathed on them. He grinned.

  ‘Oh, I know; you’re not the sort of person one can ask that.’

  ‘I’m with Reba – you know –’ He was laughing, fumbling.

  ‘No, no – I know you’re fully occupied, but how do you live? Haven’t you got a family somewhere?’

  ‘Not me. I travel solo.’ It’s taken for granted that we both know there’s a wife and children. He’s an expert at conveying what one might call sexual regret: the compliment of suggesting that he would like to make love to you, if time and place and the demands of two lives were different. I suppose he’s found that this goes down very well with the sort of white women who get to know black men like him; they feel titillated and yet safe, at the same time. In sounding for the right note to strike with me, he naturally tries this out among other things; I can’t very well tell him that I’ve had a black lover, years ago. He trailed the tips of his fingers along my ear and down my neck; a good move, if he’d only known it – I particularly like the rosy, almost translucent pads on the inner side of black hands, that look as if light were cupped in them.

  He put his arms round me and mine went round his warm, solid waist. We rocked gently. I teased him: ‘I suppose you’re supported by the Communist Party’ – like all PAC people, he accuses the ANC of being led by the nose, first by Moscow and then by Peking.

  ‘That’s right, that’s it.’ And, laughing, we broke away and drifted round the room, he saying, ‘I admit everything,’ ‘I confess,’ and I bringing over our cups of coffee. He settled awkwardly, on a stool that was too low for him, legs bent apart at the knees. I took my corner of the sofa. ‘It’s nice to be here,’ he said. ‘This room. I run all around through this dirty town – ever since Thursday – and then this room. My, I remember the first night – you in your nightie, with a little red – red, was it? Red with just a little bit of a pattern, here and there –’ (My raw silk gown that I don’t usually wear, because you can’t wash the thing, but I put it on if someone turns up and I’m not dressed.) ‘– but you came to the door calm as anything, not afraid at all of the two strange blacks on your doorstep.’

  Was it money? Sometimes he pays back and sometimes he doesn’t; I couldn’t remember whether he owes me anything at present. ‘I knew Reba,’ I put in, from my vantage on the comfortable sofa, not to make it too easy for him. ‘I’d seen Reba before.’

  ‘But you didn’t know who it was. You didn’t recognize him, I saw it. And you politely asked us in, just the same’ – a bit of business here – ‘and I even got a scrap of cold food from your supper … Liz …’ He was smilingly reproaching me, in flattery, for my good nature. ‘Lizzie …’ The play on my name, using incongruously, intentionally clumsily and quaintly, the form in which it is the kitchen girl’s generic, made a love-name of it.

  ‘I just didn’t know what else to say,’ I said flippantly, and caught again behind his eyes the recording of a piece of intelligence in words I did not know: he was encouraged to hope again, this time, I shouldn’t know what to say, and again I’d simply be bewildered into giving what was wanted of me.

  He shifted heavily on the low seat and screwed up his eyes with a distressed movement of his head, as if someone were shining a light on him. It was a kind of pantomime of despair – for my benefit. He drew breath to speak, and then caught it up short, and let his hands express the attempt in a limp jerk. And yet behind the show he was putting on there was for me something real that he wasn’t aware of – the sense of this young black bull in the white china shop, with its nice little dinners and bookshelves and bric-a-brac and coffee-cup talk.

  ‘These few days,’ he said, ‘I’ve racked my brains … these few days! Morning to night, going here and going there. I’m telling you, it’s been a time …’

  I said nothing, but waited, and he picked up the cue. ‘You see, if we’re going to keep anything alive, if we’re going to look after the chaps – there’s lawyers to pay all the time – now all these cases in the Eastern Cape –’

  He drew me in with a look, and I nodded; twenty-one PAC men were charged with sabotage this week – it was a small mention in the paper, there are so many of these cases, all people who were detained a year ago and are only now beginning to be charged.

  ‘But doesn’t Defence and Aid provide lawyers?’ Always the orderly white mind, accustomed to dealing with disaster through the proper professional channels.

  He put up a hand as if to say, not so fast. ‘They do, they do, to a certain extent – but you know how it is, there’re all sorts of snags, man. You know how these things are; it’s all got to be cut and dried and investigated and approved. And it’s not only legal defence you’ve got to worry about. It’s the families and so on.’ He looked straight at me for a moment with calm, oval eyes from which all communication seemed to slide wide away. ‘There are other problems.’ He saw nothing, while a fact was laid swiftly under my gaze.

  I said, ‘I know so little these days. I have to believe what the papers say, there’s nothing going on in the townships, the underground’s broken for the time being.’

  ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘That’s all you know, Liz, that’s all you need to know.’ He was flattering again. He knows we whites love to feel we are ‘all right’, to be trusted; and sufficiently ‘in’ to understand an unspoken confidence.

  He said suddenly, ‘You remember Colonel Gaisford, hey?’ and I laughed and was about to say, God, that poor old codger – but it was a good thing I didn’t, because he went on – ‘He was a grand old man, one of the best, a good friend to us, a true friend’ – the sort of missionary phraseology that the colonel himself might have used. Colonel Gaisford was a man whose kind of goodness becomes naïvety in a situation whose realities he doesn’t understand. He went to jail last year, protesting quite truthfully that he didn’t know that the money in the charitable fund he was administering was being used to send people out of the country for military training. But I saw that Luke’s feeling for the old man, the man they used quite shamelessly, was genuine, and the hearty epithets were the only ones he had to convey a sense of nobility. ‘I’m telling you, you can’t replace a man like that. I mean we’ve had a few people helping us since then’ – he delicately mentioned one or two names; and now I had heard them, now I was aware of being drawn still further in – ‘but it hasn’t worked out too well.’

  It was a curious way of putting it; one of the names has fled the country, another, of course, is under house arrest. In fact, that was the very difficulty he was coming to – ‘He’s under house arrest and it’s pretty impossible for him to handle the money.’

  ‘There’s still money coming into the country?’

  It wasn’t a matter for my curiosity, but he had drawn me along so far, and I suppose he felt he owed me something. ‘Coming in, all right. At least it would if we could arrange for it. Good God, Liz, if you knew what I’ve tried, these few days. I’ve been battling to fix something up, but wherever I go, from this one to that one, there’s a snag –’

  ‘It’s dangerous! Don’t you think they know about you, by now?’

  He didn’t answer, only smiled as if to say, debonairly, let’s leave that one alone. If he hasn’t someone on his tail, he would never admit it, and if he has, well, the fact has long since been accepted by both trailed and trailer, they will run their course together.

  ‘It’s such an easy thing, too, Liz man’ – as if I could banish the obtuseness, the unwillingness of ‘this one and that one’ – ‘it’s just somebody with a bank account with a bit of money in it. Somebody who gets cash from overseas sometimes – that’s all you need. Don’t you know someone who’ll take a few extra credits for the next few months?’

  So that was it. I was caught out; like that game we used to play as children, when the one who was ‘he’ would drop a handkerchief behind your back and you would suddenly find yourself �
�on’; it doesn’t matter how alert you think you’re being, you still get the handkerchief served on you.

  There was a quickening of wits between us. ‘Who on earth would I know!’ I made it sound ridiculous.

  ‘Some friend –’ If I had drawn back, he had stepped up to confront me. He had that expression again, as if the sun were in his eyes; dazzled but not deflected.

  ‘But what friend?’

  His large eyes took in, barred in advance, any way out I might try. He waited.

  ‘I don’t know anybody – and what about the colonel?’ Anyone who received this money would go the same way as old Gaisford.