A World of Strangers

Chapter 1

My mother sometimes says, with the mixture of polite diffidence and embarrassed culpability with which understanding parents are apt to regard their adult children, that there must be something of my grandfathers in me. The one, my mother’s father, was in the Indian Civil Service, and the other, who pre-dated him considerably, was killed in the Boer War. He was a colonel and a hero, and I discovered when I was quite young that my family was ashamed of him. When I was a child, the maternal grandfather was still alive, retired in Bournemouth, and they were ashamed of him, too. My father and mother were of the generation that, after the first World War, turned upon their parents and their heritage even more contemptuously than is usual with each succeeding generation. They felt themselves to be almost a new species. My mother refused to come out, with a presentation at Court and a party of her mother’s family house in the Cotswolds; she went to London and took a job as secretary to one of the international peace organizations which flourished hopefully at the time. My father left Oxford before taking Greats and went to Berlin with a young German student to carry a Socialist flag in the Revolution. He married there, too, and so although he and my mother lived together for several years after they met in England, they were not able to marry until he had managed to divorce his first wife — she was a Pole, I think. I barely scraped into legitimacy by being born when my parents had been respectably married for five months. My father edited two or three short-lived literary reviews, translated German and French political writings and some poetry, and although he was in his late thirties at the time, managed to get to Spain, if not exactly into the war, with the Republicans in 1936. He came back safely, but died of kidney disease in 1938. All this time, and, indeed, all through my childhood, we were supported in conventional comfort by his sinecure as a director in the publishing house which was, and is, his mother’s family business.

Our flat in Kensington and later our house in the Cotswolds near my maternal grandmother’s house — once it had been part of the estate — were places much frequented by victims and their champions. The world of my childhood was the beginning of the world of victims we now know, and each of these victims, like an ox attended by a group of tick-birds, had his attendant champions who, as tick-birds both batten on their ox’s misery and relieve him at the same time by eating the vermin on his skin, gave the victim succour and drew from him for themselves a special kind of nourishment. Do I sound sneering? I don’t mean to be. But I suppose I got tired of them, as a child and an adolescent; tired of the German refugee professors, and the earnest Christians and passionate Jews who ran the committees to care for them and protest for them, tired of the poets who limped in from their stint in Spain, and the indignant intellectual volubility of the brilliant people who spoke for them; tired of the committee members for the relief of Chinese war orphans, and the organizers of protest meetings in support of Abyssinia, and the saintly or urbane Indians who came to address the English committees for a free India on the best way to defeat the British Raj.

One day, when I was still a small boy, I found the sword that had belonged with my grandfather’s dress uniform and thought I would hang it up on the wall in the hall of our flat in London. I was busy assembling nails and hooks and hammer for the job when my mother came in with a friend. ‘Darling, what on earth are you doing with that?’ She pointed the toe of her shoe at the sword, lying on the carpet. ‘It’s grandfather’s sword; I found it at Grannie’s and she said I could have it. We can hang it up here. Won’t it look lovely? And look, she gave me this, too — it’s the citation about his bravery at Jagersfontein.’ Perhaps the friend my mother had with her was the representative of some spirited minority or other — I can’t remember who he was — but she obviously found it embarrassing, in a light sort of way (she was laughing, I know), to be confronted with a son who wanted to display his grandfather’s citation for Boer War bravery in a home where Imperialism was deplored. ‘Look at this,’ she said to her companion, pulling a face in mock pompousness, and handing him the framed citation. And then to me, ‘Toby, you don’t want to hang that thing up there, really, darling. .’ I said to the man, eager to explain, ‘Grandfather is buried at this place Jagersfontein. He killed a hell of a lot of Boers, though. He was a colonel.’ The two grown-ups roared with laughter. Then my mother said firmly, ‘Toby, I will not have that thing hanging here or anywhere. Not the sword. Not the citation. Positively not.’

Because her creed of living included a nervous and almost exaggerated respect for the feelings of her children, she took me aside later and quietly explained that to honour my grandfather’s exploits in the Boer War was almost like celebrating a victory for Franco in Spain. She thought this comparison would be the most meaningful for me because of my father. It was, but not in the way she thought. She did not understand a child’s uncomplicated personal loyalties. ‘But grandfather fought on the English side, daddy was against Franco — how do you mean nearly the same?’ My poor mother, if only she hadn’t taken so seriously her self-imposed task of impressing upon a schoolboy the ethical difference, irrespective of personal ties, between the Wrong Side and the Right Side, she might have realized that my interest in my grandfather was nothing more than the inspiration of the boy’s books that she considered suitable reading for me, in which great deeds were done and much face was gained in the name of dead ancestral heroes.

Anyway, the sword and the citation were packed away again, and the war came and there were more and more dispossessed and more and more committees. I was just old enough to get into the end of the war — I was in the Navy, but I never left my training-ship — and when I came back and went to Oxford and then joined my great-uncle, old Faunce (we have ridiculous names in our family; I was lucky to get away with Tobias), in the publishing firm, there was no shortage of injustices to champion, nor has there been, ever since. Of course, by then, I was old enough to take up my own stand in a house where it was considered sinful not to take a stand. I did often find that my interest in the sudden acceleration of the problems of human relationships now that man-ordained barriers of race, creed, class, and colour were breaking up, was as great as that of my mother and Faunce and their set. But I reserved to myself, even in that house, the right not to take a stand if I didn’t feel like it. Not to shame myself into indignance if I didn’t happen to give a damn. Was this just a rather childish defiance? Perhaps. But I assure you that there was something about Uncle Faunce, banging down his sherry glass beside the sheaf of letters and papers he had brought with him to Sunday lunch, and saying, ‘People don’t know the facts. We must start a newspaper campaign. Letters. Get Donald to do something for the Statesman. And what about Larry? I’ll call a public meeting myself. .’ that was inclined to cool the adrenalin of partisanship for any issue or person to stagnation in my blood by the time we had reached the stewed pears.

The atmosphere of ideological flux which I had breathed all my life sometimes seemed terrifyingly thin, a rare air in which one must gasp for the want of the oxygen of certainty, of an established way of life. Paradoxically, there had been bred into me a horror of the freedom that is freedom only to be free; I wanted to be free to cling to what I should break from, if I wished. I did not think that a man should have to lose himself, in Gide’s sense, in order to find himself. Something in me clung strongly to the need for mediating powers — tradition, religion, perhaps; a world where you might, if you wished, grow up to do what was expected of you. My mother and father gave up a great many small, unworthy things that together, constituted a workable framework of living, but what did they have to offer in their place? Freedom; an empty international plain where a wind turns over torn newspapers printed in languages you don’t understand.

So it was that at times like the Sunday I’ve just described, I found myself settling back into a cold, turgid solidity, not an opposition so much as an obstinacy, immovable, silent, and tight-lipped, that was, I was told, completely exasperating. At these times I assure you that I honestly could feel my responses battening down against the talk; I felt that what I really wanted was to enjoy what was left of the privileged life to which I and my kind have no particular right, and which exists, even in its present reduced condition, much as it was gained, by discrimination and exploitation. I felt, with a kind of irritated relief that I really belonged to that bad old good life which my parents helped push down into a dishonoured grave. At Oxford once, when I was talking like this, a rather drunk friend (I was rather drunk too) said that when I was in that sort of mood what I really inspired in others was a strong desire to kick me in my pompous backside; which pleased me very much.

Since India had been off their conscience, my family and their set had had an overwhelming supply of victims and their champions from Africa. First it was Seretse Khama, then Michael Scott, the Hereros, Nkrumah. Pamphlets about Dr Malan and the new Prime Minister of South Africa, Strijdom, about the Mau Mau, about Belgian colonial policy in the Congo, and self-government in Nigeria, piled up beside my mother’s bath, where she liked to do this sort of reading. Journalists, foreign correspondents, and crusading parsons who had been to shake a Christian fist in the face of the godless white oppressors in South Africa, came to dine and tell their tales. All this had had the usual effect on me; had rather put me off Africa.

When Faunce began to talk of sending me to South Africa to relieve Arthur Hollward, who had been the agent there for our firm, Aden Parrot, for fifteen years or so, most of my friends, and my mother, were at once in a flurry of excitement. What an opportunity! Wouldn’t I like to be briefed about the situation out there by a Negro doctor from Johannesburg who happened to be giving a series of lectures at a summer school in Kent? Wouldn’t I collect data about the housing of Africans for a world convention on housing which would be held in Stockholm next year? Would I look into the situation of the Indian minority? Would I be sure to visit the African College at Lovedale? Would I be willing to send a weekly newsletter on the effects of racial segregation?

I told them all that I would be going to Africa as a publisher’s agent, to visit bookshops and promote the sale of books. I didn’t want to investigate anything; I didn’t want to send newsletters home.

I had no intention of becoming what they saw me as, what they, in their own particular brand of salaciousness, envied me the opportunity to become — a voyeur of the world’s ills and social perversions. I felt, as I had so often before, a hostility, irritation, and resentment that made me want to shout, ridiculously: I want to live! I want to see people who interest me and amuse me, black, white, or any colour. I want to take care of my own relationships with men and women who come into my life, and let the abstractions of race and politics go hang. I want to live! And to hell with you all!

I lay on the deck and my immediate surroundings made nonsense out of that over-dramatic statement. The sky was so blue that it looked as if it might crack, splinter with the shining intensity of its blueness — rip as the sea did, spilling out seething whiteness where the ship cut through. The sun was blinding as a mirror or a miracle. You could not look upon his face; it was too much pagan glory for a human. Below me was the lido deck, where the water of the swimming pool tilted solidly with the slow roll of the ship, like a slice of green jelly. The children screamed as they cast themselves into the water in their rubber rings. A delicious smell of soup came before my nose and was snatched away by the wind. The men lay like dogs, basking almost naked round the feet of the women. The women wore big hats and dark glasses like a disguise, and you could not tell whether or not they were looking at you. I was barefoot and in swimming-trunks and could feel the sun leaning steadily on my shoulders. I was hungry again (it was only an hour since breakfast) and full of the pleasant consciousness of the desire to stretch my arms and legs.

It was our last day aboard. Early next morning we were to reach harbour in Durban. Miss Everard had asked for my address in Johannesburg because she wanted to send me a case of pineapples from her brother’s estate. Half-an-hour before, I had had a last swim with Rina Turgell and was amazed to notice that, despite her black woollen swim-suit with the school badge, she had a really beautiful body. One could not believe this when one saw her flat-chested and dressed. Had it happened on the voyage?

The chief steward — the light of frenzied creation in his eyes — was busy making swans and dolphins of ice, and neoclassical women out of butter, for the farewell dinner that night.

Chapter 2

I Seemed to have progressed merely from one unreality to another. Before me, as I sat at dinner, I saw a swan made of ice carried by.

I had been in Johannesburg three days, and was living in what I had discovered must be the biggest tourist hotel in the city. When I woke in the morning I had absolutely no idea where I was. The room was designed to give you no clue; it was as anonymous as a prison cell or a ward in a hospital. It was a hotel room, circa 195-, anywhere. The carpet was pale and thick. The curtains were pale and thick. The shiny pale yellow wood of the bedside table had the classic pattern of cigarette burns. (Are there perhaps factories that supply these articles of furniture ready burnt, just as fake antiques are said to be supplied with worm-holes?) In the dining-room, where there were gilded interior balconies which could not be reached because nothing led to them, and the concealed lighting produced the effect of a perpetual stage sun-set, English, Americans and unidentified foreigners sat with the stunned faces of wealthy travellers. The waiters were the usual weary, flat-footed Italians and Germans. Admittedly, the lift operators in their red-and-gold bell-hop outfits had black faces; but with them it seemed to be black-face in the vaudeville, rather than the pigmentation sense. In the marble foyer there were small show-cases of the kind you see at airports, displaying luxuries and curios; one showed a crystal bottle of perfume on a velvet altar, another an embroidered oriental coat, in another there were two crossed assegais before a shield covered with the skin of some animal, and a curious-looking gourd covered with coloured bead-work. A gilt card behind the glass announced that these last were obtainable at so-and-so’s, the house for genuine native crafts and African curios. I would hand the key of my room to the receptionist, whose hair was like a small helmet of tarnished brass; she would rake the key toward her across the counter in a hand whose nails were so long that the hand seemed to stand over and trap objects in the manner of a spider, rather than pick them up. And so, I would go out into the city.

The sun had been shining, out there, every day since I arrived. Nothing remarkable about that, I suppose, in this country. The brightness seemed strange to me, not because I’d come from early winter in London, but because I’d just left the coloured twilight of the hotel. It was a surprise to find that morning and noon, a waxing and waning of the day, existed, after that dim timeless light. The slither of feet on concrete came up to meet me from the city pavement; I descended to it from the hotel steps, entered into it, moved off with it. At the corner, where I crossed the street, the traffic lights held back rows of big American cars — black, pomegranate-coloured, turquoise — impatient bicycles, creaking tramcars. Cries, bells, hammerings, shufflings, talk, roaring exhausts, and muttering engines — the sounds generic to a city surrounded me as the sound of the wind in leaves would indicate to me that I was in a forest. The air seemed to strike sparks off the corners of buildings in the sun; the shade was black and hard. There seemed to be a great many more white people than black. Women brushed me, smelling of expensive perfume. Parcels nudged me. A pregnant woman burgeoned toward me; a black man wearing a dust-coat and a cap with the name of a firm in celluloid letters across it swooped to pick up a cigarette someone had dropped, and put it behind his ear. He whistled piercingly as he went along. Three youths with the ends of their stiffly-oiled hair dyed brassy, like the gilded heads of cheap plaster busts, the dwindling silhouette of vast loose jacket and narrow trousers, and the fast soft gait of shoes with soles thick as rubber bathmats, passed with narrowed eyes, as if some purpose held them together. They appeared to be talking, but they were not; two were making with their lips the broken, bubbling half-syllables that babies make, a kind of babbled tune, not quite singing.

The buildings were brand new, taking up quite a lot of, if not quite scraping the sky, or gimcrack, balconies cut out of tin with a fretsaw, plaster plaque proclaiming ‘Erected 1911’ above a new shopfront obvious as a set of the latest false teeth. The clocks, whether set in the gilded cupolas of the nineteen hundreds, or the skin-thin marble of this year, didn’t agree. The plaster mannequins leant toward the street behind concave glass, showing clothes from London and Vienna. There didn’t seem to be any trees; but then I had only been in the place almost a matter of hours, and I’d seen scarcely anything beyond the streets between the hotel and Arthur Hollward’s office.

Arthur’s office (it would be mine, soon, when he went home to England) was less than three short blocks from the hotel and was on the ninth floor of a fairly new building. On the ground floor there were a bookshop, a chemist’s, something called ‘Adorable’ I hadn’t yet identified (probably some sort of woman’s dress shop — the windows were entirely blanked out with yellow satin draping), a dry cleaner’s depot, and a bar. The bar was called the Stratford and had lattice windows of beer-coloured glass with a tudor rose as a central motif. The rest of the façade of the building and the foyer had an anonymous, cinema-splendour; the lift doors — there were two of them — were bronze, the stairs were of veined stone, like a well-ripened cheese, the floor was an abstract mosaic and the whole of the wall opposite the lift was covered with sections of mirror, tinted blue, and secured by crystal knobs. An ante-room of God, if ever there was one. When the lifts came down, it was discovered that one was lined with dirt-streaked padding and had a splintered wooden floor — it was a goods lift — and the other had initials scratched all over its chipped enamel interior; the Gorgonzola stairway gave way, after the first floor, to narrow cement steps; the inner corridors, with their plumbing system running exposed along the greenish walls, were like the intestines of some cold-blooded animal.

Behind his plain varnished door, old Arthur had a small outer office where his typist sat, and where, in addition to her desk and two dingy chairs, there was a stand displaying the latest in the famous series of pocket-books put out by our firm. Arthur’s own office led off this room, and the moment I stepped into it for the first time I felt the unremarkable assurance that the rabbit must feel on entering a burrow, or a fox an acrid den: it had the look and smell — new books and dust, typical as the smell of a chemist’s — of the offices at Aden Parrot in London. Even the threat of Faunce’s presence seemed to be there; perhaps old Arthur created this by what I can only describe as wholesome awe of Faunce. Arthur regarded Faunce as preposterous and delightful; which was like a child being led to give the right answer, for this was just what Faunce, goodness knows how long ago, decided to be. Of course, I’d known Arthur Hollward (or rather he’d known me), through the London office, since I was a schoolboy. He was one of those almost charmless people for whom contact with a person of the enormous charm of Faunce was a ducking in a vivid element which left, so to speak, a rosy tinge in the colourless lesser personality. By quoting Faunce, even by being roused to the warmth of appreciating him so much, Arthur had acquired a mild charm of his own.

Any member of our family had, for Arthur, the aura of Faunce, and he treated me with a mixture of the self-respecting deference of the old retainer to the young son of the house, and an avuncular good-humour, which, I think, was the attitude he imagined Faunce himself took with me. (As if Faunce would ever be bothered with a minor role such as that of kindly uncle!) Arthur was delighted to see me, obviously had been excited about my coming, and shook my hand and patted me about as if it were all he could do not to say, ‘My! What a big boy you’ve grown.’ We talked a little, about business and Faunce, and what was going on at Aden Parrot generally, and, as I had thought he would, Arthur said that his wife expected him to bring me home to dinner on that, my first night in Johannesburg. He introduced me to the typist, Miss McCann, who was one of those common little girls to whom anaemia gives a quenched look which may be mistaken for refinement, and who, appropriately, smelled of sickroom cologne. I should have to find some means of getting rid of her. He also introduced a young black man who came into the outer office with a small mail-pouch which he emptied on Miss McCann’s desk — a young man whose clothes were all a little too large or too small for him; I couldn’t help noticing his shoes, in particular — they stood away all round his heel and ankle. ‘Oh, and this is Amon,’ said Arthur. ‘Amon, this is Mr Hood who’s come from London to take my place while I’m away.’ The youngster smiled sheepishly, not looking at me, and mumbled, ‘Yes sir. Thank you, sir.’ The typist was turning over the mail with an air of strong suspicion, as if she were sure to find something unpleasant, or amiss. She took out two slips of paper, signed them and handed them to the youngster. He went out without having looked at me.

The Hollwards’ house was exactly the sort of house they would have had in England. Arthur laid the crazy paving himself and it was he who kept the standard roses tied to their supports; Mrs Hollward had refurnished the sitting-room in what she called ‘modern’ Swedish-style — low chairs covered in abstract design linen, lamps made out of Chianti bottles with raffia shades, a Van Gogh reproduction over the fireplace. Flower vases were in the form of hollow swans or fish; you stubbed out your cigarette in the gouged-out belly of a pottery rabbit. The whole managed to reproduce exactly the effect of the chintz-and-barbola-work scheme which it had evidently replaced.

Dinner was served by a thin, silent African woman with steel-rimmed spectacles, and several times, as dishes were carried back to the kitchen after we had been served, I heard Mrs Hollward instruct: ‘Cover that up and put it in the refrigerator’ or ‘You can finish that’. After dinner, Arthur gave me a South African cognac, which wasn’t bad, and talked some more about Faunce; Mrs Hollward listened with a sort of shy, polite glee, her pleasure in these anecdotes obviously increased rather than staled by their familiarity, as a child loves to hear its favourite fairy-tale over and over again.

The next night I found myself at a concert. When I left Arthur’s office at five, I went into the Stratford bar, not because I really wanted a drink, but because it was to be part of my surroundings for some time; I was prompted by the mixture of dogged resignation and curiosity which sends one peering all over a ship on which one is to be living for a few weeks. This Stratford was the sort of place that looked dreary and might well come to look absolutely trustworthy and welcoming as one invested it with habit. I’d only have to be there having a few drinks with a charming girl just once, to feel attached to the general uninvitingness of the place. But when I came to think of it, there were no women there at all; and in a way, that was rather nice, too. I eavesdropped over my beer, and it seemed that most of the men there were lawyers or newspapermen. Then I wandered back to the hotel through the harassed scurry of the afternoon rush — people didn’t seem to linger much in this city after work — and took a look at the scene in there.

The unvarying pinkish light shone on, as it had in the morning; in the great lounge, three cowed-looking café-musicians produced the musical equivalent of this light, while loud parties of flushed young men bought drinks for giggling girls unused to such splendour; older men, with faces arranged as carefully as their pale silk ties, rose to greet the heel-clicking entrance of elegant, disdainful girls who must be mannequins or actresses; and the tourist residents, whether English, American or Continental, looked curiously foreign among these others, who, if varied in class and purpose, were at least clearly on their own ground.

I took a look, and that was all; I went straight out into the street again. But it was hard, I found, to loiter in Johannesburg. It was a warm evening — the sun dying in angry flashes between the buildings — and I looked for a pavement café, but couldn’t find one. I looked into one or two other hotels, but they seemed much like my own. I found a park, and in it an art gallery — it was shut — but unless you are with a girl, or are a child, or are very old, somehow you can’t sit about in a park.

Where now? I said to myself.

And I crossed a bridge over a railway cutting into the town again. Down to my left, along the town bank of the cutting, I saw a thick queue sheltered under a tin roof. I walked a little way to see what it was about. And I saw that it was a bus queue; the people in it had the tired, unimpatient faces of those who wait in the same place at the same time every day. They were all black.

As I made my way uptown past the butchers’ shops and the dry cleaners’ and the corner hotel bars, I realized that the fact that they were black had come to me last, and least importantly, I had registered it as an afterthought, in fact. Whereas, in Mombasa, that day, when the launch approached the shore, the first thing that had struck me was the blackness, the Africanness of the faces waiting there. Yet I knew at once what the difference was. Those were peasants; the vacant, brutish-faced peasant, if you like, or the fine, unspoiled natural man — depends how you see it. These faces in the Johannesburg bus queue bore all the marks of initiation into western civilization; they were tired by city noise, distasteful jobs, worries about money, desires for things they couldn’t afford, their feet ached from standing and their heads ached from the drinking of the night before — much like those faces you used to see all over London in those endless queues during the war.

I had dinner in a third-rate restaurant with a fancy name, where the waiters were all Indian. The one who served me made a great show of busy zeal and produced my steak and limp, pale chips with a flourish, but the restaurant was almost empty, and the others stood around the walls, flicking their waiters’ napkins like horses switching at flies with their tails.

Then I began to walk again, with the vague intent of finding a cinema showing something I hadn’t seen in London; but I happened to walk past a hall where, in a crowd that spread out into the street, an enormous photograph announced an orchestral concert with a famous violinist as soloist. I had heard him four or five times at home, and I don’t suppose I should have gone out of my way to get in to hear him again, but somebody waved a ticket under my nose — a single ticket — and I bought it from him. While I took the money from my pocket, half a dozen people closed in hopefully round us in case the deal fell through and the ticket was still for sale. Anyway, it was mine, and I was a duly qualified member of the throng in a big, ugly foyer. Inside, the hall (I discovered that it was the city hall itself) was ugly, too. But the audience was not-ugly, I mean; there were some beautiful women there, and everyone had an air of ease, well- even if not always becomingly dressed, well-fed, and unruffled. There was a fair sprinkling of the sort of faces you see at concerts everywhere: the serious devotees, old men with crests of white hair, old ladies in shawls or oriental turbans, students who sat with downcast eyes over the score as if they were praying, pretty girls with strange hair styles and stranger clothes. I sat and listened in an atmosphere of perfume and silky furs; beringed hands and bleached hair; pomade and the lingering, after-dinner cigar smell in fine cloth. In the interval, the usual talk flew about: brass weak, pace a little too fast, violinist himself absolutely divine, violinist not so good as last year in Salzburg, violinist still the only interpreter of Mozart, violinist passé now, only good enough for South Africa — the same talk, with different place-names, that you hear at any concert in London.

When the concert was over, I streamed out with these glossy-looking people, and found my way between their cars and back to the hotel. In the lounge, the pink light still shone on what were either the same people I’d seen there at sundowner time, or others exactly like them. Except the tourists. They had gone to bed. One of them had left a pamphlet at the empty table at which I sat while I waited for a cup of coffee. AFRICA IN ALL ITS SAVAGE GLORY. ONLY HOURS AWAY. LUXURY SAFARI CARS PICK YOU UP AT YOUR JOHANNESBURG HOTEL, TAKE YOU TO THE KRUGER PARK — THE SAME DAY, YOU SEE LIONS, BUCK, HIPPO. AFTER A REFRESHING NIGHT’S SLEEP IN CAMP WITH ALL COMFORTS, YOU’RE OFF AGAIN, TO SEE ELEPHANT, GIRAFFE, AND MANY OTHER WILD ANIMALS IN THEIR NATURAL STATE, LIVING THE LAW OF THE JUNGLE. The next page told, in similar terms, of the native war dances to be seen twice monthly at a Mine compound near Johannesburg. On the next, a picture of a beautiful black girl with an enchanting smile, dressed in a beaded tribal costume, but with plump bared breasts, advertised the unspoilt charm of zululand. I felt as if I were reading of another country, from seas away. But then the country of the tourist pamphlet always is another country, an embarrassing abstraction of the desirable that, thank God, does not exist on this planet, where there are always ants and bad smells and empty Coca-Cola bottles to keep the grubby finger-print of reality upon the beautiful.

Was I in Africa? I went to bed in that hotel room where even the drop of the loosed button from my shirt was muffled in a conspiracy of stuffs to keep the atmosphere anonymous.

I told Arthur that I must find somewhere else to live — a small flat perhaps. ‘Ah well,’ he said with a smile of indulgent sympathy, ‘good things can’t last for ever.’

‘No.’

‘I thought it would be nice for you to start off here with a flourish, though.’

‘Oh, it was.’

I was afraid that he was about to recommend an alternative, a more modest edition of the hotel, a smaller version of that package of fluorescence and stale air.

‘There’s a particularly nice place in Parktown, I believe — private hotel where a lot of people out from home stay.’

(No, he’d decided that what I needed as a more permanent base after my flutter in the Plaza-Ritz, or whatever it was called, was a genteel English boarding-house.) ‘I’ll speak to Jessie about it; I think she knows someone who lives there.’

‘Oh, thank you, Arthur, but I think I’ll definitely try for a flat of some kind. As a matter of fact, I may be on the track of one. I mean, one of the people I was given a letter of introduction to has more or less promised to see what he can do — ’ I embarrassed myself by the glib lie.

‘Now that’s sensible,’ said Arthur, pleased to think that I must be making use of Faunce’s illustrious connexions. ‘Much better idea to have a little pied à terre of your own. And if there’s someone to pull strings for you, well and good.’

I believe there’s some sort of propaganda dictum to the effect that a lie, spoken with conviction enough, becomes true. Anyway, the influence of a personal lie is a curious thing; mine had the effect of sending me to read slowly through the sixpenny notebook of addresses I hadn’t opened since I sailed from England. I didn’t know what I was looking for; certainly not for someone who could pull strings. It was almost with reluctance that I went through the meaningless names and addresses scribbled down in my own and other people’s handwriting, in London and in the Cotswolds, in cars and restaurants, the houses of friends, and at Aden Parrot. What had I said at the time that they were being written? Oh yes, please do. Of course, I’ll look them up. I’m sure it’ll be a great help to me. Yes, I’d like to get to know them. Signor A. Pozzi, 177 Barston Place, Riviera Road. And in parenthesis ‘(Arnolfo and Betty)’, Arthur Coutts, Inanda Club, Sandown (ask for Ex. 53), Max and Doreen Brown, Cleantry Court, Isipingo Street. Hildegarde Cegg, 42-7831. David Marshall, c/o Broadcast House. And then my mother’s and Faunce’s list: ‘worth-while’ people. A writer, who’d brought out, under our imprint, the miscegenation novel now as regular a South African export as gold or fruit A newspaper editor. A university professor. An ex-chairman of the Institute of Race Relations. A priest who was something to do with the Penal Reform League. A woman doctor who was superintendent of a hospital for Africans. Reverend This, Doctor That. An Indian who was secretary to some congress or other; an African leader. An M.P.

Squashed in at the bottom of the page was a name I remembered my mother hesitating over. She had discussed with Faunce whether it was worth-while my bothering to look up this woman; she had been a rather pleasant girl when they knew her in her youth, but she had married this tycoon, this man who was supposed to be second only to Ernest Oppenheimer in importance in the gold-mining industry and she didn’t seem to have done anything since. Wouldn’t I be likely to be bored stiff by that sort of family? Then Faunce had said, well, he might be amused in a way; it might be interesting for him to get a look at these people — and so my mother wrote it in, after all: Marion (and Hamish) Alexander, The High House, Illovo. The telephone number was written so small, I could hardly make it out; my mother had thought it unlikely that I should use it.

I decided on the Alexanders, Hamish and Marion Alexander, of The High House. A voice that I had already learned to distinguish as an African’s answered the telephone. Mrs Alexander was out; I left my name and the telephone number of the hotel. And somehow I felt satisfied with the gesture. If the Alexanders didn’t telephone me back, I didn’t ever have to bother about them again.

While I was at dinner, that night, I was called to the telephone. I walked through the dining-room with that swift, furtive air which characterizes people summoned to private business from public rooms; everyone ignored me as steadfastly as I did them. (All kinds of living have their codes, and how quickly one conforms to the particular one in which one finds oneself, no matter how ridiculous it may be.) I lifted the hotel telephone receiver, still warm from someone else’s ear, and there was my mother’s voice; a product of the same school, brought into tune, so to speak, by the same fork. ‘Mr Hood? Toby? — This is Marion Alexander.’

‘Yes, Toby Hood. Hullo, Mrs Alexander.’

‘I couldn’t believe it! I thought the servant had got the name wrong! The last time I saw you, you were still at school, before the war. . How and why are you here? And how wonderful!’

She asked me to Sunday lunch. A black Buick driven by an African chauffeur came to fetch me at the hotel at twelve o’clock. I tried to talk to him as we drove, but he answered in a reluctant, pompous, off-hand manner, using Americanisms in not quite their right sense. I think he thought I was very badly dressed.

We left the city — which is without life on Sunday; even the cinemas are closed — and crossed the new Queen Elizabeth bridge. I twisted my head to look back and I must say that, from there, it all looked rather fine; the rectangular buildings, bone and sand and stone colour, pale as objects picked up on a beach, made a frieze of clean, hard shapes against a sky that was all space. If there had been a river under the bridge, this might have been a beautiful city — but there was no water, there were the sheds, tracks, and steel tangle of a railway junction. We passed mean little houses clinging to the fringe of the city, then the University — grey buildings, green trees, and red earth sloping down the hill — and then suburb after suburb of pleasant houses, neat, tame, and comfortable, as such houses are anywhere, but surrounded, overshadowed, overlaid, almost, by trees and flowers of unusual and heavy beauty. The further we drove, the bigger the gardens were; at last we turned off the tar on to a sand road. The car rode softly; the trees nearly met, overhead; in a clearing, I saw the watery shine of a horse’s rump. On a rough stone gateway, white-painted iron letters spelt the high house. The drive was lined with round-limbed, feathery trees; hydrangeas grew in green cumulus, billowing beneath them. I saw a tennis court, a swimming-pool with a rustic changehouse, lawns green without texture, a lily-pond, a bank of irises, and then the house, built on a green mound. A large house, of course, rather like a bloated cottage, with a steep thatched roof curling up over dormer windows, thick white chimneys, and a balcony and abutting porch extending it on the two sides I could see.

The car dropped me at the front door, which was open, and while I waited for someone to answer my knock, I could see in and also was aware of the vibration of voices on the other side of the big bay window on my right. The entrance hall led away down a few broad shallow steps to the left; I got the impression of a long, mushroom-coloured room there, with gleams of copper and gilt, flowers and glass. In the hall there was a marquetry table under a huge mirror with a mother-of-pearl inlaid frame. Further back, the first steps of a white staircase spread in a dais; carpet seemed to grow up the stairs, padding the rim of each step like pink moss. An African appeared soundlessly; I followed him soundlessly (I found later that the entire ground floor of the house was covered with that carpeting the colour of a mushroom’s gills) past the mirror that reflected three new golf balls and a very old golf glove, sweated and dried to the shape of the wearer’s hand, on the table below it, and through a large living-room full of sofas and chairs covered in women’s dress colours, that led to a veranda. If you could call it that; a superior sort of veranda. The entire wall of the room was open to it, and it was got up like something out of a film, with a bar, a barbecue fireplace, chaises longues, glass and wrought-iron tables, mauve Venetian glass lanterns and queer trailing plants.

A burst of laughter was interrupted by my appearance; five people looked up, and a thick-set man with a bald, sunburned head struggled from his chair and came over to greet me. ‘You’ll be Toby Hood,’ he said. ‘Come and have a drink. Marion’s not back yet.’ He seemed to think that his own identity, that of Hamish Alexander, was self-evident, and he began to introduce me to the others. ‘Archie Baxter’ — a thin, youngish man with the good looks of the distinguished drinker in the whisky advertisements. ‘Kit Baxter’, an equally good-looking young woman, also with a commercial finish about her; they were the kind of couple whose clothes — in this instance, riding clothes — might have been donated by some firm in return for having them worn to advantage, and in the right company. ‘And this is Margaret Gerling and her big sister, Cecil Rowe.’ At this they laughed, and looked alike, the two pretty girls who were also in riding clothes. It seemed a bit ridiculous to stretch myself out, almost supine, the moment I walked into a stranger’s house, and so I sat on the foot-rest of one of the long chairs, between Mrs Baxter and what I now saw was the elder of the two sisters, Cecil Rowe. Baxter, who was over at the little bar, said, ‘Won’t you try one of my Martinis?’ and Mrs Baxter pushed a tray of olives and nuts along a low table, within my reach.

Once I had a drink and was seated, they took up their chatter again; Hamish Alexander had the totally impersonal welcome and perpetual smile of the man who has many guests, most of them not invited by himself. The women were animated and talkative, especially Margaret Gerling and Mrs Baxter. All three had short, bright fashionable hair, not blonde and yet not brown, the blue eyes, the sunburned necks and brilliant finger-nails, the high actressy voices and oddly inarticulate vocabulary — vogue words, smart clichés, innuendo, and slang — of young upper-class Englishwomen. Nice girls, I should say. Gay, quite witty, and decorative. A shade more sophisticated, a shade less intelligent, a shade more sexy than Rina Turgell. I laughed at their stories — mostly riding stories, against themselves — that were not very good but were well told, along with the others. I contributed a story, not a riding one, but also against myself. A number of other guests came, and the elaborate outdoor room began to fill up.

There were middle-aged couples, the wives looking far younger than they could have been, in cotton dresses which displayed a lot of well-preserved flesh. But they were good-looking women who smelled luxurious. The men wore the clothes of whatever sport they had just left off playing, or, pasty and wattled, sat, stranded, in a well-pressed get-up of flannels, silk shirts, and scarves that covered the ruin of the hardened arteries, the damaged liver, or the enlarged heart that lay heavily in the breast. One of these last sat next to me, eventually; and I felt myself moved to a kind of disgusted pity, as I always am by the sight of one of these old bulls of finance, still sniffing the sawdust, with the broken shafts of money-tussles, overwork, overeating, over-drinking stuck fast in their thick necks. There was a thin, tall man with thick white hair — the sort of man who plays a fast game of tennis at sixty, and marries a twenty-five-year-old at seventy. He had just been on a crocodile-shooting safari in Northern Rhodesia, and he talked about it in a loud, natural, overbearing voice that had the effect of breaking up minor conversations by the sheer contrast of its absolute confidence in the interest of what it was saying.

‘Is it true that you must get them between the eyes, John?’ asked Mrs Baxter.

‘I don’t know about that, but I don’t mind telling you, they’ve got to be pretty damn well dead before you can count on ’em to be dead,’ he said. ‘You think you’ve got them, and then they just knife off through the water and you never find them again. We must’ve shot a dozen for every one we got aboard. But what beasts they are; you feel you’re doing ’em a favour by killing them. And when the boys slit ’em open-’ he put his hand — with one of those expensive watches that tell the time, date, and phases of the moon, on the wrist — over his face, hiding it to the wiry, tangled black eyebrows.

Hamish Alexander, who obviously enjoyed him, sat forward grinning, his strong, patchy yellow teeth oddly matching the gingerish bristles on his red neck. ‘I’ve heard about that,’ he said gleefully. ‘I’ve heard people. .’

‘Hamish, hearing about it couldn’t give you the least idea. . The whole boat, I mean. It stank like a — a,’ his mouth pursed itself but stopped in time.

‘- Charnel-house,’ said Kit Baxter, sweetly.

Everyone laughed. ‘Tactful Kit,’ said Baxter.

John leant over and kissed Kit on her round, smooth brow. ‘And how good she smells — ’ There was more laughter. ‘But honestly, I don’t mind telling you, though you know how dignified and all that my behaviour usually is — ’

‘Did you dress for dinner every night, John?’ someone called.

‘‘- I wanted to jump off that boat and swim ashore. Honest to God, nothing would have kept me on that boat but crocodiles still in the water!’

Lifting her glass, against which the rows of bracelets on her wrist slid tinkling, in a call for attention, one of the women said, ‘I remember once going out to the whaling station at Durban. — Why, of course, you were there too, Peggy; and Ivan — That was a smell to beat all smells; a real eighty-per-cent proof distillation of disgusting fishiness, oiliness, oh, I don’t know what.’

‘My dear Eve,’ said the man John, ‘I’m sorry, but we just can’t have evasions in this, this — ’

‘Context,’ said Kit.

‘This context —’

Kit seemed sure she could say it better for him: ‘You must call a stink a stink.’

In the shrieks of laughter that followed, the hostess, Marion Alexander, arrived, and with a general greeting to her guests, came straight over to where I had risen from my chair.

‘It’s Toby!’ and she kissed me. ‘I’m so glad you’re here. I hope they’ve been looking after you. I had a match this morning, so you must forgive my rudeness. There, I’ve put my lipstick on you. No, a little lower. That’s it.’ She took my arm, and then repeated her apologies, in a clear, singing voice, for the benefit of everyone: ‘Please forgive me — I didn’t think I’d be the last luncheon guest, I did believe I’d be home by half past twelve.’ I thought she looked extraordinary: she wore a white linen dress and a panama hat with a band round it. For the first few moments I did not realize that this was the outfit that women wear when they play bowls, and wondered why she should choose to look like a horribly ageing schoolgirl. I did not remember her, though on the telephone she had said that she remembered seeing me just before the war, when I was already a schoolboy, but I could see that she must once have been a pretty woman, and was much older than my mother. Or maybe it was just that she had grown older badly, and self-consciously. Underneath that hat, her face was painted whiter and pinker than it could ever have been when she was young; yet no doubt that was how she imagined she had looked, and so was what she chose to fake. She went to change, and Kit Baxter, with the pleading air of asking for a treat, jumped up and followed her, saying, ‘I want to come and talk to you, Marion!’

While they were gone, the last three guests arrived, and with them the Alexanders’ son, Douglas. He had come from golf; and the two new male guests were in riding clothes. Along with the old bulls, I was the only male guest not fresh from conquest of field or ball. The two latest were youthfully apoplectic, blond, with small, flat, lobeless ears, short noses, and bloodshot blue eyes. Every feature of their faces looked interchangeable; they burst in crying, ‘Hullo! Hullo! Hullo there, you people,’ like a comedy duo. They were, in fact, a duo: identical twins; looking at them was disturbing, like looking at someone after you’ve had a blow in the eye, and you keep seeing the outline of head, gestures, and talking mouth, duplicated. But they had with them a stunning American girl, thin as a Borzoi, in what looked to me like black tights (anyway, they were women’s trousers that didn’t hang down at the seat) and a thing like a man’s striped shirt that enveloped her but got caught on the two little shaking peaks of small breasts as she moved. She was very fair, without a hint of yellowness, and her hair was drawn back and held by a strand of the hair itself, twisted round it. Her face was very young and made up to look pale and downy, and her expression was as old as the hills. As she was introduced to the company, she flickered a kind of lizard-look over everyone, then put her long cigarette holder back in her mouth, like a dour man with a pipe. I got the impression that Tim and Tom (or whatever their names were) hardly knew her; that women caught on to their ruddy hide like burrs on wool. They were off again almost as soon as they came, waving away Archie Baxter: ‘No, no, old boy, before we have any of your stuff, we must have a swim. Have we time for a swim before lunch?’ ‘Course we’ve got time. Always time in Hamish’s house, isn’t there?’

They went off over the grass to the pool, and in a few minutes we could see them, hugging their arms round themselves on the edge, waving, then exploding the surface of the water, shouting at each other in their identical voices, as if someone were holding a conversation with himself out loud.

I felt inkstained and rather stale inside my hairy old suit, and, with my third drink disappearing, contented in this. Almost everyone had had a number of drinks by now (Hamish did not stir from his chair, and Archie Baxter managed the little bar, with the help of two Africans in white suits and gloves who passed endlessly into the house and out again, bearing soda and ice and cigarettes, and carrying away dirty glasses and ashtrays) and this, added to the anticipation of lunch, raised the pitch of the company. Mrs Alexander and Kit Baxter had returned. Mrs Alexander went about her guests with the warmth of a hostess who enjoys people and knows how to bring them together in a paper-lantern glow. She flattered, she exaggerated, you could see that, but the effect was to make one more agreeable; with the result that the whole conglomerate — guests, alcohol, gossip, and, later, enjoyable food — was agreeable. This is quite a different sort of success from that of the hostess who brings people of ideas together. This, in fact, was making something out of nothing very much.

The twins, freshly doused and towelled, came up and clamoured round the bar, with their American and Kit Baxter and the two sisters Cecil and Margaret. They spoke actor’s English, with exaggerated stresses. They showed off, I felt, rather than flirted, with the women. Marion Alexander kept taking me by the arm and presenting me to people: ‘Have you talked to this boy? I do wish you would, before I get a chance to, so that you can tell me if he’s altogether too bright for me. He’s Althea Thomas’s boy — Aden Parrot, the publishers, such a brainy family.’

‘This is a very special day for me. This boy’s the son of my friend Althea Thomas, and Graham Hood. — I was devoted to them.’ She made it sound as if my mother and father were a cause; and perhaps, to her, they were: the embodiment of the causes of the Thirties, to which she remembered herself responding for a time, just as she had taken to cloche hats a year or two earlier. Anyway, the name of my father cheerfully meant nothing to these people, just as, I suppose, the names of his more illustrious contemporaries — a Spender or a Toller — would have meant nothing. But I could see that Marion Alexander’s insistence on my parentage suggested to some of the sharper women that mine must be a family that featured in the Tatler. Some of those who were English accepted me with the airy freemasonry of those who know the privileges and disadvantages, for whatever they are worth, of their own order. Those who were not English all seemed to take travel in Britain and Europe as much for granted as a journey in a suburban train, and talked to me of most Continental countries as if they assumed my familiarity with these places was as easy as their own. One flew from here to there; hired a car; met one’s daughter in Switzerland; one’s husband flew in from Rome; sister met one in Vienna; fjords and alps, casinos and cruises, palazzos and espadrilles. .

One of the black men in a white suit came out and beat a gong through all this.

As the people rose to trail in to lunch, conversations took a final turn: the last word was said on English furniture, on someone’s wedding the week before, on the values in real estate in Johannesburg, on the merits of a new golf course being laid out by someone named Jock, and the cannon bones of a horse named Tom Piper.

On the way to the dining-room, I had a ridiculous encounter with the American girl, who happened to be the last of the women shepherded before me. She turned her head and said in a low, dead, American voice, ‘I hear you’re a gread wrider?’ ‘No, no, just a publisher,’ I said, embarrassed, because I wasn’t really even that, yet. At which she burst out laughing — a bold, full laugh, surprising in contrast to her speaking voice — and said: ‘I guess I’ve got the wrong purson.’ But she offered no explanation, and the conversation promptly died. It was only later, when I was studying her where she sat, across the table from me, beside Douglas Alexander and one of the twins, that I suddenly realized that what she had said was not ‘writer’ but ‘rider’. I had an agitated impulse to lean across the glasses and silver and the Italian bread basket and explain; but it was obviously no good. Explain that I was neither writer nor rider? I was the wrong person, anyway. She’d accepted the fact, that was that. Bored and indifferent to their company, she belonged and could belong only to the twins, part of their cutting a dash. Yet she ate and drank steadily without the lipstick coming off her beautiful mouth; which seemed to me wonderful: the casual mark of a special kind of girl, not quite real, whom I would never get; perhaps would never try or really want to get.

Douglas Alexander, as the children of self-assured, temperamentally vigorous parents often are, was a rather blank youngster, with the look of a perpetual listener on his face; as if, since childhood, he had been taking in conversations to which he was not expected to make a contribution, and long habit had vitiated his desire to do so, although he was not longer disqualified by being under age. He certainly did not behave like any sort of popular concept of a gold-mining millionaire’s son that I could think of; all the time that he was keeping up an apparently lame and stilted conversation (about New York, I gathered) with the American beauty, his eyes kept gliding out of their polite focus on her and looking sharply to the other side, as if there were something there attracting his urgent attention. On the girl’s left, the one twin jounced and twisted, waving his glass about, bumping her frequently with shoulder or elbow, as he chattered to his neighbour and audience. Every now and then he would notice her, and with the impersonal, momentary, instinctive recall to sex with which a dog will briefly lick, once or twice, another dog, would pass his hand down her arm or pat her hair.

I was at Hamish Alexander’s end of the table, with Kit Baxter on my left and Cecil Rowe on my right. Mrs Baxter had a voice of great conscious charm, that she used, with purpose and efficiency, as if it were some piece of high fidelity equipment rather than the final, faulty evolution of those grunts and cries with which man first tried to give expression to the awful teeming of his brain. She was carrying on an exchange of banter and flattery with old Hamish, who was too far away for conversation to be comfortable. While her head was turned from me, the long fingers of her smooth hand with its uniform of red nails and rings felt blindly up and down the mother-of-pearl handle of a small knife, quite near me, carrying on some secret life of its own. Hamish Alexander’s red face, with the simple, short, plump-featured, retroussé profile of a child and the teary grin of his blue eyes, was cocked toward her along the table; but someone suddenly passed a question to him about uranium deposits, and immediately his face not only came to itself, but took on the close, guarded reasonableness, the poker-face frankness, of a man asked about something important and not to be disclosed. He gave himself the second or two of a peculiarly Scotch clearing of his throat, and then he began a long, blunt, bland, confidential red herring, with the words: ‘Now it’s not as simple as all that. . As far back as nineteen forty-one — ’

Kit Baxter turned to me with perfectly convincing and certainly assumed delight. ‘I’ve been waiting to talk to you!’ she said. I grinned at her disbelievingly.’ I hope you haven’t written a book,’ I said, ‘because I’m afraid I haven’t much influence with Aden Parrot, in spite of what Mrs Alexander may have told you.’

‘Heavens, no, Kit couldn’t write anything. You’re quite safe there. It’s just that Marion tells me you’re likely to be in this country quite a while, and she and I thought you might like to come down to the farm some time — see something of the country. Not that it’s beautiful — though it is, to me, in a way — but it’s characteristic.’

‘What farm?’

‘Hamish’s. The Alexander stud farm, in the Karoo.’

‘Oh, I see. I didn’t know about it. What does he breed?’

‘Horses. Hamish started it more for fun than anything else. But now it’s turning into a big thing. Archie and I have been there since the beginning of the year.’

‘You and your husband live there?’

‘Hamish asked us to go down and take over, more or less permanently.’ She phrased it in order to make it clear that her husband’s appointment as manager of the Alexanders’ stud farm was a matter of friendship and patronage, rather than an ordinary job.

‘And how do you like that?’ I said.

She laughed, and the skin crinkled prettily round her painted eyes. ‘You don’t think I’m the type for the farmer’s wife! But you’re wrong you know, quite wrong. I’m not a city person at all, really, I’m an absolute bumpkin in towns. I’ve always led a country life at home, and I hate London — Archie and I lived there for two years after the war and I couldn’t wait to get out of it. Our time in Johannesburg has really only been bearable because of Hamish and Marion — they’re such fantastic darlings, and we’ve been able to come out and ride whenever we like, and they’ve whisked us off down to the farm whenever we could get away’ — a dish held in a white-gloved hand that showed an inch of matt-black skin between cuff and sleeve, came between us — ’ (Won’t you have some more mousse? Marion’s cook makes the best mousse you’ve ever tasted.) — It’s absolutely in the bundu, of course, forty-three miles from Neksburg and that’s not much to speak of, itself, I may say. I can’t describe these Karoo villages as “villages”, unless the person I’m talking to has seen them. They’re nothing at all like our idea of a village. Don’t start thinking of cottage gardens, mossy churchyards, and the rest of it. . Just think of dust and stones, that’s all, dust and stones, and a flybitten “hotel” with a couple of big shiny cars belonging to commercial travellers outside — also covered in dust.’

‘And the farm — also dust and stones?’

‘Oh no,’ she said; and I realized — not without comfort, for the delicious lunch and the wines had, as usual, awakened in me a great respect for life lived in the exquisite orderliness of wealth — that nothing in Hamish Alexander’s empire would be dust and stones.

‘There’s water on the farm, of course; all sorts of pumps and gadgets huffing and puffing to keep it irrigated. And there are huge trees round the house, cypress and pepper trees — it should be quite charming when we’ve got it fixed up more or less the way we want it. I hope that by the time you come there’ll be a second bathroom built on, and the painting will be done.’ She said this with the complacent, determined air of a woman who is making a house over to conform as closely as possible to the setting for herself that she always carries in her mind. Uproot her again tomorrow and she will begin again at once to attempt to make the next shell of habitation conform to this master setting. In this primitive cause those waxy, inutile, decorated hands would work as tirelessly and instinctively as any animal’s claws making ready the nest; and in the nest would be — she herself. It was a perversion of the nesting instinct that you see often in sophisticated women; the drive remains, crazily fixed, while the purpose for which it was rooted in human nature has been lost, truly forgotten.

‘I work a lot with the young horses,’ she was saying. ‘Archie’s time is taken up with the administrative side, mostly. But I play around, helping to break them in, making a fuss of them, generally acting Mama. They’re fantastic darlings! Adorable! The dogs are quite unhappy sometimes, they’re so jealous, you know, Cecil,’ she said to the other girl.

‘Are they?’ the girl said, raising her eyebrows while she ate.

‘Two funny old sealyhams,’ Kit Baxter confessed to me, as if I were sure to be disgusted at the idea, ‘quite moth-eaten and lazy and not very bright, I know; and a Siamese whose eyes are much too light. But they adore me, I say it quite immodestly, they adore me. Kit’s own regiment, that’s what I call them, Kit’s own.’

It was impossible to think of anything to say to this forlorn piece of whimsy. It was one of those thin places in conversation through which one suddenly sees something one isn’t meant to see. Cecil Rowe saved me by catching my eye with the friendly opening of a smile struggling against the disadvantage of a mouthful of braised pigeon and rice. You would never have caught the exquisite American out in a smile like that; I warmed to it, all the same. When the girl could speak, she said,’ I was so hungry I was quite drunk. I had to eat quickly to give myself some ballast.’

Kit Baxter and I laughed with her. ‘People here certainly do eat a substantial lunch,’ I said, ‘but you’ve all had such an energetic morning, I suppose you must.’

‘Restaurateurs wouldn’t agree with you,’ said Kit. ‘They complain that people in Johannesburg hardly eat at all, in the European sense. A meal is always simply a necessary prelude to be got over in good time for some other entertainment, not an evening’s pleasure in itself.’

‘Do you find South Africans eat more than we do?’ I said to Cecil Rowe.

‘How would I know? I’m not English,’ she said.

I was surprised; she looked and dressed like any upper-middle-class English girl, and what was more, she did not have the flat, unmistakable South African speech that I had heard all about me in the town, and that I had noticed at once in the Alexanders’ son, Douglas, and the crocodile-hunting John, for example.

‘Then you’re an Afrikaner,’ I said, taking care to pronounce the word of identification correctly, like a naturalist coming upon a species of which he has heard, but never before encountered.

‘No, no,’ she said, laughing and indignant, ‘I’m not. I’m not that.’

‘Of course you’re English,’ said Kit.’ Your parents are English. You happen to be born here. Just as you might have been born in India, or Egypt — that’s all.’

‘I’ve never met a publisher before,’ said the girl. ‘Have you, Kit? I’ve somehow never thought about publishers — you know, I mean, you read a book and it’s the author who counts, the publisher’s simply a name on the jacket. It’s difficult to think of the publisher as a person sitting beside you at lunch.’

‘Rightly so, too,’ I said, ‘when the person is really only a sort of publisher’s office boy.’

‘But aren’t you a son or something of the people who own the publisher’s?’

‘Nephew.’

‘Well, there you are.’

‘I’m being trained from the Ground Up. And I haven’t got very far.’

‘How far?’

‘Trade relations. I’ve come to South Africa as the agent for our firm.’

She nodded her head, thinking a moment. ‘Didn’t you bring out that book there’s been such a fuss about?’

My mind skimmed over the last three or four Aden Parrot titles that had filled the correspondence columns of the papers with protagonist letters. ‘You mean God’s Creatures? The anti-vivisection one?’

She looked faraway, shook her head, ‘M-mh. Nobody would know about that here.’

‘The one about institutional personality — children in orphanages?’

Her frown rejected this as outlandish.’ You know, the book about the natives, the one that was banned — ’

‘Oh, you mean White Cain, Black Abel — no, unfortunately, that wasn’t ours.’ The book, brought out about six months ago by Aden Parrot’s closest rival, had sold over fifty thousand copies. It was written by a missionary who lived for six years in the Native Reserves, and was a passionate attack, from the standpoint of a deeply religious man, on the failure of Christianity to influence the policy of white people toward black in South Africa. ‘What did you think of it? Did you read it?’

She cut herself a slice of Bel Paese and said,’ Oh I thought it was jolly good,’ as if she were talking of a novel that had served to pass an evening. ‘I must have a cigarette. D’you mind?’

All up and down the table, people were smoking; the meal was at an end, and we all got up and went into the room I had caught a glimpse of from the front door. There was coffee and also old brandy and liqueurs, and the smell, like the smell of fine leather, of cigars; a warm fug of well-being filled the room, in which, in my slightly hazy state, I saw that every sort of efficient indulgence lay about, like in those rooms conjured up by Genii for people in fairy stories who always seem to wish for the same sort of thing, as if, given the chance, nobody really knows anything else to wish for: there were silver or limoges cigarette lighters on every other table, as well as the little coloured match-books on which were printed ‘Hamish’ or ‘Marion’, silver dishes of thin mints and huge chocolates, jade boxes and lacquer boxes and silver boxes filled with cigarettes, silver gadgets to guillotine the cigars, even amethyst, rose, and green sugar crystals to sweeten the coffee.

Most of the guests were drawn to look at Marion Alexander’s new ‘find’ — a picture she had evidently just bought. ‘Come and tell me what you think of this,’ she said, with the faintest emphasis, as if I didn’t need any more, on the last word. It was a small and rather dingy Courbet, deeply set in a frame the colour and texture of dried mud.’ Interesting,’ I murmured politely. ‘They’re not easily come by, I imagine.’ ‘Here!’ she said. ‘Can you believe it? I found it here, in Johannesburg!’ I attempted to look impressed, although I couldn’t imagine why anyone should want to find such a thing anywhere. ‘How do you spell the name?’ a woman asked me, quietly studying the picture. I spelled it. The woman nodded slowly. ‘I love it, Marion, I think it’s the most exciting thing you’ve bought yet!’ said someone else.

‘Well I can tell you I couldn’t believe it when my little man told me there was a Courbet to be bought in Johannesburg,’ Mrs Alexander said for the third or fourth time. I managed to drift out of the group of admirers, back to a chair. ‘. . of course, I still think that’s a wonderful thing,’ I heard, and saw one of the bulls straddling his heavy body on two thin legs before an enormous oil that must surely have been painted with the offices of the Union Castle shipping company in mind — it showed a great duck-bosomed mail-ship, tricked out with pennants, in what I recognized as Table Bay, with Cape Town and Table Mountain behind it. Now that I noticed, there was quite a variety of pictures in the room; most of them were in the Table Bay genre; the genre of the room, generally: not a discomforting brush-stroke in any of them. I decided that I didn’t mind; I didn’t mind any more than I did my mother’s collection of charcoal drawings, woodcuts, lithographs, pastels, oils, collages, mosaics, and wire-and-cardboard compositions that she had bought from unknown, unsung, and unhung prophets of art over the last thirty years.

Cecil Rowe wandered over and sat on a low chair beside me. Her legs, unsexed by gaberdine jodhpurs, rolled apart and she looked down at them, stirring her toes. ‘Well, how do you like it here so far?’ she said, managing not to yawn. ‘Think our policemen wonderful? No? That’s fine — nobody does.’

‘You know, the thing one never remembers is how much the same things are likely to be, rather than how different,’ I said.

‘How’s that?’ With her face in repose, I noticed that, although she was too young to have lines, I could see the pull, beneath the skin, of the muscle that always exerted the same tension when she smiled; her mouth, too, though pretty enough in its fresh paint in contrast to the patchy look of the worn make-up on her cheeks and chin, had about it when she talked the practised mobility of having expressed much, and not all of it pleasant.

‘Well, when you arrive in a new country, you generally find yourself living in a hotel, and hotels tend to follow the same pattern everywhere, and then, at the beginning at least, you meet people to whom you’ve been given an introduction by friends at home — and so you meet the same sort of people everywhere, too.’

‘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 footsteps 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 hasn’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.

‘Well, as I say, we’re going to use the old Mofokeng woman as a test case, and we need her son to help us for a day or two — the old lady’s a bit bewildered about this business and she wants to have him around as moral support, to interpret for her and get dates straight and so on. I want to ask you to give him the necessary time off from work.’

‘But of course,’ I said. ‘He could’ve asked me himself, for that matter. He can go off whenever he’s needed.’

‘That’s very nice of you, Mr Hood. I think he didn’t want to ask in case you thought it was just another one of the grandmother tales, and refused.’

‘Grandmother tales?’

‘You know — I’ve had a letter saying my grandmother’s sick, and I must go home. . ’ She stood up to take her leave.

I said, conversationally, ‘I must say, Amon is about the last person I’d imagine as a cause célèbre.’

‘It’s not quite that’ she said.

‘I mean I haven’t felt much interest in him, as a person; he’s simply a part of the office set-up.’

‘Of course’ she said. But I felt sure she misunderstood me; surely that very non-committal politeness stemmed from a sense of moral superiority; she would be one of those for whom every utterance was a move to a black square or a white square.

‘He reminds me of someone in our London office — only, of course, he happens to be an old chap of sixty-eight or nine, he’s got too old for his job in the dispatch room, and he’s gone full circle back to a kind of working second childhood, making tea and licking stamps. But he’s like Amon; doing his work, but scarcely there at all. So it’s difficult to believe that he’s there anywhere else, either. You couldn’t imagine meeting Johnson in a pub, having his pint of beer, for example.’

‘Well, you certainly won’t meet Amon in a bar!’ She spoke gently, with her head a little on one side.

‘I’m coming down too’ I said, as she walked to the door. ‘Let me collect my parcels and we’ll continue this in the lift.’

‘Isn’t it finished?’ she said, laughing.

She stood waiting for me; she had no hat, no gloves, none of the usual paraphernalia that women usually have to grapple with before they are ready to go out into the street, and so, oddly, the roles were reversed, and she stood as I was used to standing, while I loaded myself with packets and boxes. Miss McCann had the cover on her typewriter and was setting off with soap and towel for the cloakroom down the corridor. I asked her to lock up, and said good-bye. ‘- Where’s Amon?’ I asked.

‘He’s run down to the Post Office with that registered letter for Better Books in Cape Town.’

But in the lift we talked of other things. ‘I’ve just got myself a flat,’ I told the neat dark head and little, tough face beside my elbow. The drop of the lift gave her that apprehensive, listening air that I often notice in people in lifts. I thought, irrelevantly, but with pleasure at being reminded of something I’d forgotten so long, of a Rilke poem I had once regarded as something awful and comforting:

And night by night, down into solitude

the heavy earth falls far from every star.

We are all failing. This hand’s falling too -

all have this falling-sickness none withstands.

And yet there’s always One whose gentle hands

this universal falling can’t fall through.

When we got outside, the street was full of men and women hurrying with the bent backs of city people, hurrying against the crowded bus, the brief evening of leisure. It was the time to seek the delay of a pub. I wondered whether I should ask her to have a drink with me; I felt in myself the restlessness, the inclination to let myself be carried away by cheap music, the shoddy titillation of dim corners, the swimming, fish-eye view of the world after a few drinks, that usually presages in me that other and deeper hunger, for love; so I pass from being too easily pleased to the greatest of all dissatisfactions.

She said ‘If your car’s a long way, I can take you to it. Mine’s just on the corner.’

‘Thanks, but I have no car. I’m going to the bus.’

‘Oh, then I’ll give you a lift; it’s easy for me.’

I decided that her company would be better than nothing; even if she annoyed me a little, she was pleasant. ‘Thank you very much. I wasn’t looking forward to bashing my way through the bus with this lot. But if you’re not in a great rush, won’t you come and have a drink first?’

We went, of course, into the Stratford; we were standing almost at the door, in any case. We went into the bar lounge — bars are for men only, all over South Africa — and sat at one of the yellow wooden tables with the scratched glass tops. The chairs had plastic-covered seats but the tall backs were stoutly Tudor and pressed hard between your shoulder-blades. Henry VIII in a muffin hat and a beard that looked superimposed on his face, like the beards small boys scribble on the faces of women on advertisement hoardings, stared at a gilt plaster lion that was the symbol of a South African brewery. Rings of wet shone up from the table.

She had two brandies and I drank gin, and we talked about flats — she had lived in three or four, and now had a cottage in the grounds of someone’s house — and about her Legal Aid Bureau. She told me some amusing stories about divorce cases she had handled for the Bureau, and I found myself telling her something of the lighter side of my mother’s and Faunce’s preoccupation with the world’s wrongs. I told her how Faunce had invited an ex-prisoner to dinner who entertained us by teaching us how to pick a lock, and how, another time, my mother had dashed all over London to get chickens killed according to Muslim ritual, in order to provide appropriate food for some Indian guests, only to find that the guests were Hindus and didn’t eat meat anyway.

‘It’s so easy to be ridiculous when you’re trying to identify yourself with the other person.’

‘Of course,’ she said, smiling reminiscently. ‘But it’s a risk you have to take, sometimes.’

‘Oh, there are ways and ways. Thing is, not to presume too much on your own understanding; never meet the other one more than half-way.’

She continued to smile attentively, looking down into her glass; she was clearly the land of person who often disagreed, but seldom argued: the sort of person who lets one run on.

My case for reserve against presumption began to take on some of the eager bombast I was decrying. I was aware of this, but, because she gave me the space of her attention in which to go on and make a fool of myself, somehow I could not stop. What did stop me instantly, what took my mind from what I was saying as surely as if a nerve had been cut between my brain and my tongue, was a snatch of voice that I knew. ‘We could do some mud-slinging, too,’: the phrase came to me clearly out of all the criss-crossed sibilants, laughs, and exclamations of the room. Who had spoken? In this town where I was a stranger, how could I know a voice? While I went on talking, my attention went all about the room, over the faces and the glasses and the cigarette smoke. And there was Cecil Rowe.

I hadn’t even noticed, that day at Hamish Alexander’s what sort of voice the girl had. She was sitting, half-turned away from me, at a table with two men; they must have come in after we had, but people were going and coming all the time, and her entry must have been screened from us. She looked, too, quite different from the way she had looked at the Alexanders’. Even her hair was a different colour. She wore a very small black hat in a straight line on her forehead, and a black dress that showed her collar-bones. From where I sat, her face had the poster-like vividness of a woman who is heavily made-up. She was talking and gesturing animatedly, conscious of success with her companions.

She did not see me, but when Anna Louw and I rose to go, and had to walk past her half-turned back as we went out, she turnned and stopped me, looking up. She had just taken a sip of her drink, and her mouth was parted. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘And how are you?’ The commonplace greeting was spoken like a challenge; as if I were someone from whom she had last parted in some extreme situation: drunk, angry, or in love.

‘Why, well, as you see. .’ I said, foolishly. She did look different. Standing a foot or two from her upturned face, I saw that her eyes were orientalized with blue shading and black lines, her hair showed her ears and lay in short, silvery feathers against the velvet of her hat, the shape of her mouth had somehow been altered by lipstick. I noticed that just in front of her right ear she had a raised mole; it had been covered with the warm-looking extra skin provided by an opaque make-up, but it showed itself just the same. So, oddly enough, beneath all this, the woman showed herself too. She looked very attractive; knowing, greedy, unsentimental. I wondered which of the men, the thick fair one with the tight-filled skin, or the thinner one, also fair, was her husband. She did not introduce me, and so, although I was about to do so, I did not introduce Anna Louw, either, and, with a smile, walked on. But she remained turned in her chair and included Anna Louw in the smiling movement that said good-bye. When I saw her looking at Anna Louw, I remembered how, a month ago, I had thought that I would only have to be in the Stratford once, with a girl, in order to feel attached to the place. Cecil Rowe was that kind of girl. Sitting there among the men in their office suits and the briefcases laid by the Tudor chairs, she was as much the charm of the queer, public yet furtive life of town as a shepherdess, all ribboned crooks and roses, is of a pastoral idyll.

Even Anna Louw’s car bore the signs of a woman who was accustomed to look after herself; in the dashboard cubby-hole there was a road map, a first-aid kit, and a card of fuse wire.

She said: ‘What’s your time?’ And when I told her, five past six, ‘Would you give me my cigarettes — they’re in there somewhere.’ I gave her one of mine, and she drew the first breath of it deep in as she drove, so that her small, compact body seemed to grow. ‘That’s the great thing about denying oneself something — the pleasure of having it again at last,’ I said.

‘Oh this first cigarette!’ she said. ‘The whole day seems to melt away.’

‘I think perhaps that’s why people make these rules for themselves; the emotional, equivalent of dumping thousands of tons of coffee in the sea, in order to keep the price up.’

‘That’s a nice idea,’ she said.’ It’s much nicer than saying that you do it for your liver, if it’s drink, or your lungs, if it’s cigarettes.’

‘But I believe it’s true; mostly the health reason is the least of it. And it’s the sort of subterfuge titillation that only arises out of plenty. The Africans you deal with — I’m sure they don’t have to break a diet in order to appreciate a good meal, or go on the wagon for a week to make a drink taste wonderful. It’s only people like us, who are sated with comfits of one kind and another, who have to go in for these dodges.’

‘Poverty without boredom.’

‘Yes.’

She smoked concentratedly for a moment before she took the cigarette out of her mouth and said, with her customary mildness (as if she had added up a line of figures and found an error), ‘I think there’s something wrong there. Poor people’ — I wondered if she deliberately broadened the reference — ‘can’t afford things; and that makes anything you want seem marvellous. Wouldn’t a cigarette seem just as wonderful to a man who couldn’t afford to buy himself one all day, as it does to me, who have kept myself from one all day on purpose? — You see?’

‘Ah, but his has been a real situation of want — yours is play.’

‘He doesn’t want to want; I do?’

‘That’s it.’

She laughed and shifted expressively in her seat: ‘Oh, my friend, you don’t know a thing about how I feel about smoking.’

A minute later she went on, ‘But I think, so far as other things are concerned, there’s something in what you say. I often think how it is that Africans don’t have as many made-up troubles as my white friends. — You know the sort of troubles that people have, women particularly, women with not much to do. — Anyway, it’s nonsense to generalize.’

‘Do you know a lot of Africans?’

‘I told you, most of our clients are Africans.’

‘That’s not what I meant.’

‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘I know some. Quite a few.’

I offered her another cigarette, and there was the business of lighting it and throwing the match out the window.

‘Why don’t you want to talk about it?’

She said, for time, as people do, ‘What. Oh, it’s not that I don’t want to talk about anything. But you must understand that you are in a country where there are all sorts of different ways of talking about or rather dealing with this thing. One of the ways is not to talk about it at all. Not to deal with it at all. Finished. That’s possible, you know; you’ll find out.’

‘I have. I’ve seen it. And apparently functioning perfectly,’ I said. Archie Baxter poured the drinks, the twins dived into the Reckitts-coloured pool, someone blew a cloud of cigar smoke through which a Courbet landscape appeared as a mirage. Uranium, cannon bones, Kit’s own regiment. ‘I’m afraid I wasn’t shocked at all. It was pleasant. It was like being anywhere else, only perhaps more comfortable.’

‘There you are’ she said, as if I were a child who had followed so far in a difficult lesson. In turn, I thought I recognized sweet reasonableness, that wide-eyed dissembler at Faunce’s dinner-table; but, in all fairness, I had to admit that she did seem quite bluntly to agree.’ There you are. And there are the other ways. . You’re a person I don’t know, someone from whom I’ve asked a favour for a client. Isn’t it better for me to leave it at that, rather than force upon you a consideration of my particular way? Force you into hostility, perhaps, because yours may be another?’

‘But you must know that I haven’t a way. I’ve only just got here.’

She looked at me quickly, as she drove. ‘You will have, soon, and that adds up to the same embarrassment. Anyway, you must have arrived with some idea, all ready. Even if it’s one that’s impossible now you’re here.’

I thought how steadily she spoke. The people whom I knew, I myself, seemed always to speak in rushes and checks, as if nothing ran clear in us, but struggled past uncertainties, squeezed thinly through doubts, and kept bursting the banks of conviction. She had an intonation and a rhythm of speech that was foreign to English, too, but was not the nagging sing-song of Miss McCann, the sing-song that seemed to me to be the dialect of Johannesburg.

I said, ‘It’s like love, or God; and I thought that here everyone would be discussing it over coffee cups, the way we do Russian foreign policy or expense accounts.’

Chapter 4

The car had come to a standstill under the jacarandas in my street; we sat in a natural silence for a moment or two. There ought to be some punctuation mark specially to indicate such pauses, like the sign that indicates a rest in music. ‘Where are you?’ she asked. ‘Oh, just over there, the one with the pillars.’

She started up the car again. ‘I’ll turn round and get right outside the door.’ ‘No, don’t please, this is fine.’

‘Do you find it very dull here?’ she said, as she handed my parcels to me through the window.

‘Well, I don’t know. I don’t seem to have any definite sort of life, yet. There are very few cities in the world that can stand up to being taken neat.’

‘We always feel so apologetic about it,’ she smiled. ‘You get used to hearing people from England and Europe telling you that there’s nothing here — rolling their eyes and throwing up their hands. . You don’t know exactly what they mean, but you feel they’re right.’

‘What do they mean, d’you suppose?’ The gathering darkness was like blotting-paper into which one shape ran into another; only her hands, resting on the steering wheel, and her face, showed in the car, and the street-lamps made pastel corollas for their luminous pistils out of the black mass of the trees.

‘I used to think it was because everything in town life here relates to another world — the plays are the plays of Europe, the cabaret jokes are those of London or New York. . You know what I mean? Johannesburg seems to have no genre of its own. .?’ She put her hand on the window in appeal. ‘That’s what people feel. Partly. But now I think there’s something else. Loneliness; of a special kind. Our loneliness. The lack of a common human identity. The loneliness of a powerful minority.’

‘I was told that no one walks in the streets here, at night,’ I said. She said candidly, ‘It’s not so much that we’re in danger, but that we’re so terribly afraid.’ We both laughed. ‘You’re not,’ I said, convincedly. ‘Oh yes I am,’ she said. ‘Afraid of the dark.’ A lighted balcony sprang out from the flat building opposite and a man walked out on to it, holding a bottle of beer and a glass. He knocked the cap off the bottle against the railing, and when he had poured the beer into the glass, stood looking out into the evening like a horse put out to grass after a day’s carting. From somewhere in the block of houses and shoddy flat buildings a voice screamed to the children playing below: ‘For the last time, I say. .’ An African servant woman came out of an alley fluidly as a cat; she went barefoot along the pavement, clutching a newspaper parcel, and then suddenly threw back her head and gave a great shouting laugh of greeting to someone we couldn’t see.

The woman in the car and I had the reluctance to part company of two people with no particular commitments who have suddenly got on quite well together. There was no tension of attraction between us; no reason why either should pretend the demands of other, more private plans. Like most young men, I took for granted the aimless freedom to decide simply from one moment to the next what I would do. Even at home in England, the evenings were foreign ports through which I, a sailor off a ship of unknown destination, wandered, not very curious, not very expectant, yet always, somewhere below my rational self, aware that round some corner, one day, would be the face or the street-fight that would do as my destiny.

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 embroidery. 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, triumphantly. ‘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?’

‘Have some.’ I felt happily solicitous toward this pixie, strayed out of a Barrie play. He got his soup, and I helped myself to a plateful of risotto — like most arty women of her type, this Sylvia cooked very well, but overdid the garlic in the salad and on the hot bread — and we went back to the party together. He went up to the tall woman with the Bloomsbury elegance, and she looked down and spoke to him with the half-attention of connubial familiarity.

The record planged and faded; was lifted off and replaced with a tango. Suddenly, Steven Sitole and the little old man’s wife, Dorothea, were dancing. She was as tall as he was, and they danced perfectly: like professionals, giving an exhibition, unaware of and uninterested in each other, his drunken face in a courteous trance, as if transfixed by the graceful and precise pattern through which his feet were guiding him, her abashed and broken, wilted body recalled to discipline. She danced as she spoke: as if everything were over, for her. Presently he returned her to her coffee.

At some point during the evening, Anna Louw had done something to her make-up and acquired — I suppose from the hostess — a shawl of red silk over the business-like dress she had been wearing when she walked into my office five or six hours earlier. I danced with her; she had the air of distinctness that a sober person has in a room where everyone else’s aura is quickened and blurred by euphoria — as if their souls were in motion while hers was still. ‘Good party,’ I said.

‘I’m glad.’

I felt sorry I’d wished her someone else in the bar in the town.

Steven Sitole had been standing over the solitary African girl, one arm on the wall behind her, his back screening her from the room, in the other hand, the glass that was never empty. Yet this show of attention had the perfunctoriness of a joke; it reminded me, somehow, of the absent-minded attentions of the twin to the American beauty at Marion Alexander’s lunch.

‘Steven’s a charmer,’ I said.

She glanced at him a moment, but said nothing. ‘Have you had a chance to talk to Sam, Sam Mofokenzazi?’

‘Not really. That’s the little one?’

‘He writes well — I think. I don’t mean his job — he’s a journalist on a paper for Africans that’s published in English. His own stuff, stories and so on. And he writes music.’

‘And Sitole? What’s he do?’

‘Insurance agent. He used to be a newspaper man, too. He spent a year in England after the war.’

‘Is that the important thing about him?’

‘Yes.’ She looked at me in my innocence. ‘That’s rather like returning from that bourne whence no traveller returns. Africans can’t pop in and out of Africa.’

The African girl had been persuaded, giggling, away from the wall, and now she sat awkwardly on a table, among the bottles, disposing her head and her hands in the manner of someone who is about to sing. The gramophone was stopped. In the hastily assembled silence (a voice cried out: What’s happened to the music, damn it? — a group of talkers were shushed, Sylvia crept grandly about refilling glasses with wine) she assumed a professional coquetry. She sang a popular torch song, in the innocent, sensual voice that I have always enjoyed in American Negro singers, the pagan voice in which sex is not suggestive and guilty, but overt and fine. She tried to imitate the vocal titillations of white singers she must have heard on records, but the strange shrill of her high notes and the gentleness of her low notes escaped artifice: all the warm, continuous gamut of sensuality was there, from the mother’s breast to the lover’s bed. Delight was like a sudden, simple happiness in the room; the catalyst that I have sometimes seen come upon the isolated units of an audience at a concert. She sang on; another torch song — a piece of wild, ritualistic swing that sent the young Peter off dancing to himself in a corner, panting and jerking — even a sentimental ballad in Yiddish, and then songs in her own tongue and others that sounded the same to me. Sometimes, from across the room, Sam and Peter would come in like the toll of two big bells, or the low accent of the big bass. Sylvia, who had tiptoed up beside Anna Louw, whispered, ‘Thank God she sings, at least. Their women never utter. One simply c-can’t have them.’

‘How did she get here?’ I asked, since it was obviously not by invitation. ‘The way I did?’

Anna laughed, ‘Steven must have brought her. Quite a triumph; she’s very popular. She’s Betty Ntolo. She sings with their best band.’

When her songs were over, the African girl was danced round once by the untidy young man who had talked about painting, and then returned to the chair in which she had been sitting all evening. Once she was not performing, an insurmountable naïveté cast her, so to speak, underfoot; it was impossible to rescue her from it, because the moment anyone, with a polite word or an invitation to dance, made an attempt, they threatened to go down with her in the threshing ineptness of her giggling unresponse. I danced with her, for three or four interminable minutes. I had gone up to her to tell her how much I liked her songs, but once I had said this, and she had giggled as if she were going to bring out something paralysingly funny, and then said the single word: ‘Yes,’ I was aware that I couldn’t simply walk away, and couldn’t carry the conversation one monosyllable further. So I asked her to dance, a request to which she could, and did, respond by getting to her feet, tittering, and saying nothing.

She had a pretty, golden-brown face powdered dull, and a sooty beauty-spot was drawn next to her left eye; her ears, like Peter’s, were smaller and neater than any adult ears I had ever seen, and in them hung large gilt hoops. She wore a kind of turban of black chiffon that covered her hair, and was secured with gilt-nobbed hatpins. Every now and then, as she followed me, her pink tongue came out to touch her top lip and looked pleasing against her white teeth. She had large, round, prominent eyes, bovine and rather yellowed. They were quite blank; as if, here, she was frightened to think.

The top half of her body was slight and her waist small, but she was weighted down with great solid hams, monumental calves, and feet that made trumpery out of the high-heeled sandals strapped round them.

I said to her, ‘I hear you sing with a band.’

‘Yes.’ Like a child trapped in the kindly interrogation of a well-meaning uncle.

‘What’s the band called?’

She answered something unintelligible; her brown hand with its meaningless armour of red-painted nails was cold with pride and misery.

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t quite catch it.’ I bent my head to her.

Like many singers, who successfully manage half a dozen languages in as many songs, she was not so good when she spoke. ‘The Township Ten,’ she said, with a strong accent.

The Indians were going; the wife stood at the door with a camel-hair coat over her sari, patient and bored, while the husband made his conscientious round of farewells. Anna was dancing with the Englishman with the baby teeth, and the redhead, suddenly before me, blew a cloud of smoke between her face and mine. When I had led the African girl to a chair, I went back to the redhead. ‘About time,’ she said.

‘You’ve been much occupied.’

As we danced, she leant her head back to talk and her two breasts touched my chest firmly and distinctly, buttonholing me.

‘Stanley’s a bloody leech,’ she said. ‘You drunk?’

‘No.’

‘So’m I. Let’s have some wine.’

We went, clumsily arm-about, like two boxers after a fight, to the drinks. ‘How’d you like to have a picture like that of yourself in your room, Sam?’ Steven Sitole was saying. ‘Oh I know it’s revolting to have oneself staring at oneself all the time,’ said Sylvia, hiding her face in her glass of wine. When she suddenly spoke fluently, it was as if some other self were speaking up inside her. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Sam, admiring a foreign custom. ‘I think, for a woman, it’s rather nice.’ ‘A rep-proach to me, a reproach to i-idiotic vanity-did I ever look like that? Or d-do I only think n-now that I did? Now that I can blame the difference on baggy eyes and wrinkles and a jacket crown on a tooth?’

I am bad at caressing women publicly; I looked foolishly encumbered by the redhead, and I knew it, and so all the pleasure was gone from the contact with her tall, warm body. We dropped apart and she went to Stanley, murmuring up to him in relief at the escape. I drank somebody’s glass of wine and looked from Sylvia to her portrait. ‘When was it done?’ ‘Oh don’t be so bloody t-tactless!’ There was laughter. The portrait looked right into your eyes, the way she herself did; but she must have been much more self-centred then: the face looked aware of the feather curving down from the hat, the shadows exchanged by the black hair and the wine-coloured dress. It was a portrait of a woman thinking about herself. ‘A Spanish or Italian beauty,’ I said.

‘Why is that always considered the compliment?’ Sylvia asked the company. ‘I’m a Jewess; couldn’t one say I used to be a beautiful one?’

‘Berenice, then,’ I said, looking at her. ‘That’s exactly it. The beautiful queen.’ Talk and laughter and argument swept another way. I could not follow it because of a pressing need; I wandered through the house but did not come upon the bathroom, so I went out into the dark garden, beyond the light of the windows. The physical relief, the fresh night air after the close room, and slow, pleasant turning of the wine in my head brought me to peace with myself. I staggered a little, but I was at home on this earth. A shape like my own brushed past the shrubs, and I was joined by someone. It was Steven Sitole. ‘What are you doing here?’ he said, as we stood companionably. I laughed. ‘Same as you.’

He found this very funny. ‘- I’m selling books, I’m connected with a publishing firm.’

He took out a packet of cigarettes and we strolled down to the gate, smoking. ‘I used to be a journalist,’ he said. ‘I know, Anna Louw told me. What made you give it up?’ ‘Various things,’ he said, in the vague, jaunty tone, mysterious and important, that I recognized as the tone of the man whom many jobs give up. ‘I had other things on the go. I couldn’t manage everything at once.’ ‘So what do you do now?’ Anna had told me, but I had forgotten already. ‘Insurance. Much more money in it.’ ‘You mean the usual sort of thing, life policies and so on.’ ‘That’s right,’ he laughed pleasantly. ‘Fire, funeral, accident, loss — all that stuff. Of course, we’re not like you people, mostly we insure against things we’re sure will happen, funerals mainly. Yes, I exploit the poor simple native, and in return he gets a lovely funeral — what do you say, a slap-up do.’

‘Did you really like England?’

‘I shouldn’t ever have come back here.’ He stumbled and I caught his arm. The darkness accepted him; his face and hands were gone in it; he sat down on the grass. ‘If you’d stayed,’ I said, searching for the right kind of meaningless reassurance, ‘if you’d stayed, you would have longed to come back.’

‘Man, there’s nothing in Africa I want,’ he said, grinning, and I became aware of his face again, though I could not see anything but his teeth; that smooth, polished-wood face with the withdrawn eyes, the delicate nose, the gathering-up of planes toward the mouth. Suppose he had been born to the old Africa, before the Arab and the white man came, suppose he had had a tribe, and a place in that tribe, and had known that his life was to hunt and fight and reproduce and live in the shelter of fear of the old gods — would that have been what he wanted? I thought of him in the room from where the blur of music and voices sounded, lean and gangling and befuddled, with a glass of brandy in his pink-palmed hand with the too-long nails. The idea was sad and ridiculous. And then I thought of myself, and what I wanted: a house lived in, a place made, a way of life created for me by my fathers, a destiny I could accept without choice or question. That was not sad and ridiculous. The wine closed over my head, and, sunk in myself, I fiercely and dismayedly resisted the idea; that could not be sad and ridiculous. It was what I wanted and could not get.

‘Let’s go,’ he said. I turned, in agreement, toward the house.

‘Let’s go and drink. I’ll take you to a place. You’re an Englishman, I can take you. Show you round. “Can I show you around?” Do the honours.’ The phrase pleased him and he repeated it, shaking his head and making a clicking sound of approval.

‘I came with Anna Louw. How can I?’

‘Woman’ll get herself home,’ he said. He stood up, threw his cigarette into the hedge, and a dog, scavenging along the gutter in the deserted street, stiffened into hostility and began to bark at him. He cursed it amiably. ‘They always bark at us. You don’t have to teach them, they know. People like Sylvia don’t know what to do to stop them. Hers is locked up, so he won’t embarrass her.’

When we got inside again, he seemed to forget his suggestion. He got into a political argument with Sam, Dorothea Welz, and the Englishman, Stanley, against whom the redhead leaned, silent. I danced, dazedly, with Sylvia, and, her tongue loosened by wine, we talked about London and Aden Parrot paper-backs. Anna Louw came up and said, ‘Darling, I have to be in court at nine tomorrow and I haven’t even finished preparing my stuff.’ ‘Anna!’ Sylvia was concerned. ‘Honestly, I must go. But you don’t have to come,’ she said to me. ‘Don’t you come because of me. Someone else will always take you home.’ I protested my willingness to go, but she knew I didn’t want to. I thanked her, tried to tell her across the restlessness of the room that I would telephone her to do so properly, but she slipped out with the considerateness of one who does not want to break up a party. Old Welz went with her: Dorothea had rushed up, when she saw Anna leaving, and begged: ‘For heaven’s sake, take poor Egon with you, will you, Anna? He’s had a long day and he’s quite dead.’ ‘Thank God.’ The little man put his arm round Anna. ‘It’s enough. Let’s go. Sylvia, Sylvia, thenk you. You are a woman of qvality. Look how you last; the others,’ his chin jerked in the direction of the redhead, ‘they droop, their paint runs. . ’ ‘Oh, go on, Egon, do,’ said Dorothea. ‘As soon as I’ve proved myself unquestionably right, I’ll follow. . ’ Steven had dropped out of the argument and was singing, a soft, two-part Bantu song, with Sam. Sam waved his hand gently, to keep Steven in time. Steven’s cigarette held its shape in ash, burnt down in his forgotten fingers. ‘Come on; again,’ Sam coaxed. When Sitole saw me, he stopped the song abruptly and the ash fell on his shoe. ‘Let’s go and drink. I’ll take you,’ he grinned.

‘In what?’

‘Your car.’

‘I haven’t got a car,’ I said. Peter had just put on a particularly loud record, and he was trying to persuade the African woman to sing again.

‘No car.’ Steven put a hand down on Sam’s shoulder and laughed. ‘He hasn’t got a car.’

‘Don’t all white men have cars?’ said Sam, with obedient good humour, giving his line.

‘Once upon a time,’ said Steven, ‘dear children, there was a man who didn’t have a car. All right. We’ll use Sam’s.’

‘Steve, I have to go straight home.’

‘He’s married,’ said Steven, in a high voice,’ Sam’s a married man. Ah, go on, Sam.’

A few minutes later, when I was talking to someone else, he came up and said: ‘Sam wants to go now, Mr Hood.’ I excused myself and went with Steven back to the table where Sam was. ‘Sam’ll drop us off where we’re going,’ said Steven. We had one more drink, and then left, with Peter and the woman singer. We went almost unnoticed, for the party had suddenly blazed up again, as a dead fire will when a handful of crumpled letters catches the last spark. I know that I kissed Sylvia, and her cheek smelled of powder, and the others shook hands with her. The stray dog was still in the street, and he circled the car with a stiff tail, gurgling threateningly.

Sam’s little Morris was new and went with the smoothness of a car that is taken care of, though it was heavily loaded. I sat in front, beside him, and Steven, Peter, and the woman were pressed into the back. It was nearly one o’clock in the morning and all life was withdrawn from the streets in the white suburbs through which we drove, and the town. We followed tram-car tracks, we skirted the sharp corners of darker, meaner streets; the car took me along as the world whirls and turns through space: I had neither recognition nor volition in its progress. The street-lights ended. We went down, into the dark. There were shapes, darker against the darkness; there was the moon, half-grown, spreading a thin, luminous paint on planes that reflected her. A graveyard of broken cars and broken porcelain; an old horse sleeping, tethered, on a bare patch; mute shops patched about with signs you could not read; small, closed houses whose windows were barred with tin strips against the street; a solitary man stooping to pick up something the day had left; a sudden hysterical gabble behind a rickety fence, where a fowl had started up. Sam stopped the car. ‘You’re sure this is what you want, Steven,’ he said. Steven laughed and answered in their own language. He struggled out of the back, and I got out. We said goodnight. Sam seemed uncertain about leaving us there; he stood looking at us for a moment, and then he revved the engine rather longer than was necessary before he drove away.

The street had the comforting, out-dated sinisterness of a back-alley habitation, deserted and late at night. I have grown up to a world whose bogeys are bombs and the horrors of atomic radiation; in people like me there is a certain nostalgia about the personal, palpable threat of flesh-and-blood robbers and assassins, those bogeys of the past, long out-shadowed in evil. I felt a mild and pleasant excitement, adjunct to my drunkenness. Steven went along with the happy ease of a man who could have found his way in his sleep; he was at home in a dark and lonely street. He sang softly, under his breath, in his own language; so softly, he might have been breathing music. There was a little street-light, rheumy and high up, on the corner, and he took the top of my arm in his thin, hard hand and guided me to the right. There was some light here and there, behind windows — as if the dark had worn thin. And one door, leading right out on to the pavement, was open. From it, light the colour of orangeade made a geometrical shape of brightness in the dark. ‘No good,’ murmured Steven, and turned me sharply round again. ‘What’s wrong?’ ‘If the door’s open, the place is shut; that’s wrong.’ At the corner once more, I saw him grinning at me affectionately under the pale splash of the street-lamp: ‘I’m looking after you, Mr Hood.’ We felt we understood each other very well, in the manner that drunks do; just as they may equally suddenly feel curdled with long-borne grievances against each other, and may be compelled to fight.

‘Here.’ We turned into an unlit yard, with two rows of rooms or cottages — each row seemed to be under one continuous roof, but there were four or five doors in the length of each. They were shut against the night as if they were deserted and empty, but our feet were sucked by mud round a tap that snivelled and drizzled, and there was a strong smell of rotting vegetables, and the general sourness of a much-used place. Beyond and slightly behind the end wall of the right-hand row, there was a small detached building with some kind of lean-to porch attached — a creeper grew over it like a fishnet draped to dry. Steven pushed me up three broken steps and knocked on the door. The knock gave back its own sound; but in a moment the door opened the width of a face and a voice spoke, sleepily it seemed to me, and then changed its tone with recognition when Steven murmured. Of course I could not understand what was said. But we went in, past a woman’s face with a woollen scarf wrapped round the head, under the candle she held against the wall. I remember noticing that it was the swollen-looking face of a stupid woman. We went through a cave of a room where something smallish, probably a child, was asleep on an iron bed, and the candle caught, in passing, a bunch of paper roses and a primus stove, and then into a larger room with walls painted olive green half-way up like the waiting room in a station, and an electric bulb with a celluloid shade hanging over a table where four or five men did not look up. There was also another group, sitting on a bed, and they stubbed out their laughter, almost with relief, as if it had gone on too long beyond the merit of what had occasioned it, as we came in, and started talking in what, even in a language I didn’t understand, I could recognize as the interrogatory tone of a change of subject. Everyone was drinking, but there were no bottles in sight. On the walls, a huge Coca-Cola calendar — a girl on a beach, in bathing costume and accompanied by a tiny radio and a carrier of Coca-Cola — hung with the look of inevitability of a holy picture given its niche. It was the barest room I had ever been in in my life; it depended entirely on humans.

Most of the men seemed to know Steven. If they happened to catch his eye they nodded; one or two said something. A man in American-looking trousers and a pastel shirt with a bow tie got up. Steven asked him a question; he answered; Steven nodded. The man went out of the door — not the door by which we had entered, but another next to the chimney that had no fireplace beneath it, and in a moment came back with two tumblers. ‘Have you got two dollars?’ said Steven, taking a half-crown out of his pocket. I gave him a pound; ‘Ten bob’ll do,’ he said, as he took it. He paid for the drinks and for a moment, as the change was counted out, I saw, very close, the face of the man who had brought them; a broad face, smooth and the colour of olive oil, almost Chinese-looking, with a very large straight mouth whose width was accentuated by a pitch-black moustache that followed the outline of the upper lip closely, and even went down, parenthetically, round the two sides.

‘You drink brandy and coke?’ said Steven.

Room was made for us at the table; a man in the grease-stiff cap of a garage attendant lifted his head from his arms and regarded me as if he believed he were seeing me with some inner sight, the drunk’s sight. Steven had taken his drink at a gulp. He said, patronizingly, ‘I should have taken you to one of the Vrededorp places, where other whites come, and you wouldn’t be noticed.’ ‘Who comes?’ I said; I was feeling the conspicuous unimportance that a child feels in a room full of words he doesn’t understand. ‘Not many like you,’ Steven laughed, narrowing his nostrils and lifting his chin as if he were telling me something highly complimentary. ‘White bums and down-and-outs.’ Then he called across my head to the group talking on the bed; a young man in one of those cheap knit shirts with a picture stamped on the chest, took up the exchange, which was laughing, scornful, and animated. I had the feeling it might be about me. Perhaps it was. I didn’t care. You always think people are talking about you when they use a foreign language.

Two men left; their hands were pushed into their pockets in the manner of those whose pockets are empty. Like the room, this shebeen in which they had taken their pleasure, they were bared. They had nothing but themselves. Chequebooks, those little purses women have, foam-rubber cushions, the deathly moonlight of fluorescent strips; these things came to my mind confusedly, mockery and salvation. I felt very drunk; all the room was retreating from me, draining away like water down a plug-hole, with a roaring gurgle that I didn’t understand. Steven’s voice, right in my ear because it was English, was saying, ‘I was good at darts in England. I used to walk into the pub and take anybody on. They used to call me Lucky. Imagine that. Why d’you think they called me Lucky?’

‘You must call me Toby,’ I said, feeling it was urgent.

‘Did they call me Lucky because they call you Toby?’ said Steven, finishing another brandy. I pictured, with the dreamy pleasure of casting together the here and there, the tall black mascot in the London pub. I seemed to feel, myself, the spurious superstitious power of the other race; if you sleep with a Jewess (Negress, Chinese) you will never want any other kind again, gipsies read the future — and Queequeg, I saw Queequeg like those pictures I’d seen of American cigar-store Indians. I said something to Steven about Queequeg but he’d never heard of Moby Dick. He said, ‘We like to read the Russians. You’ll see, Africans want to read Dostoyevsky, man, they read lots of Dostoyevsky.’

I said, ‘You read that somewhere, Steven.’

There was a shout of laughter from the group in the corner.

He laughed in ready guilt. ‘Anyway, a few do. They read Dostoyevsky because they want to feel miserable, to glory in another misery. I follow the racing page,’ he added swaggeringly. But even he didn’t believe in himself, as a man of the world. ‘The comics,’ he said, putting on a serious, considering face, ‘and the comics.

‘Trouble with me,’ he went on, ‘I don’t want to feel miserable, I don’t want any glory out of it. Sam and Peter and all those others, yap-yap all the time, chewing over the same old thing, this they’ve taken from us, that they’ve denied our children, pass laws, injustice — agh, I’m sick of it. Sick of feeling half a man. I don’t want to be bothered with black men’s troubles. You know that, Toby? These — ’ and he circled the noisy room with a movement of his slim black hand with the too-long fingernails and a signet-ring in which a piece of red glass winked, exasperated and distasteful.

‘A private life,’ I said. ‘That’s what you want.’ He caught my arm. ‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘That’s it,’ while I nodded with the reiteration of a discovery. There it was, the truth. The drowned, battered out, howled down, disgraced truth. This young man with the brown face given a blueish, powdered look by drink and fatigue, with the ruined teeth and the flecks of matter at the outer corners of his stranger’s eyes — this young man and I, two strangers, had just cornered it in a small hour of the night like an animal almost believed to be exterminated entirely. We were drunk, yes, but we had it there. It was ours, a mouse of a truth, alive. Created by drink or not, I had had few such moments in my life, even in my own country, among my own friends. We did not understand each other; we wanted the same thing.

When Steven suddenly stood up, sending an empty glass rolling down the table, I stood up too, because the need for abrupt departure was what I myself felt: when you are brought to face yourself, the moment must be broken, as you must turn away if you look into your own eyes in a mirror. But the woman with the woollen scarf round her head was standing in the doorway, the one through which we had not come, and she was saying something terse to the man with the pastel shirt and the Chinese-smooth face. Whatever it was that she said drew the whole room to its feet in crisis. Steven yelled ‘Come on, man’ crazily and dragged me, knocking into shoulders, backs, past someone who was shaking and heaving at the unconscious man with the greasy cap, into the cowering dark room through which we had entered when we came. He jumped up on what must have been the head of the bed I had noticed — the springs squeaked and he almost: overbalanced — and fumbled at the window. ‘Christ Almighty,’ he was saying, ‘Christ Almighty.’ It was a sash window and at last it gave stiffly, then helter-skelter. ‘Steven, are you mad?’ ‘It’s the police, my dear Mr Hood.’ He stood grinning at me for a second. ‘Do you want to go back to town in the Black Maria? Get on.’ The top half of the window had joined the bottom, so we had to climb out of the upper half. Steven balanced on the sill and then went over; I heard a thud outside. I was alone in the strange little hovel-room a moment. The outline on the bed; it was still there — was it a child, or a bundle of clothes? It was too dark to see. The smell of the room came to me; the stuffiness of sleep, a dankness, like a shed with an earth floor, and something else, a sweet, fecund smell of coal-smoke and fermentation. And then I fell out into the night, and landed, surprisingly, quite well, with only one hand to steady myself on the ground, in an alley. Steven hissed at me and I flattened, giggling, against the wall. We heard shouts and the heavy running of police boots. The shuddering, rubbery bump of a fast car stopping. Overhead, two stars had the burnt-out look of fireworks the second before they die away. The sky was steeped to a clear, transient green, a becoming rather than a colour. We shinned — very noisily, it seemed to me — over a wall into a yard much like the one where the shebeen was. A thin white dog barked and snarled and wagged its tail. ‘Kaffir dog,’ said Steven, ignoring it. We passed a row of rooms, went out into the street, and then calmly walked into the fenced ‘garden’ — there was a peach-tree, and a path outlined with bricks — of a house on the opposite side of that street. As we passed beneath the windows on the side, a voice called out. Steven answered cheerfully; and the voice came back, charmed. There was no fence at the back of the house; there was the piece of ground with the horse tethered on it that I had noticed before.

The green was gone. The sky was all light now, but not the light of day. ‘Best thing I can do with you — ’ Steven was overcome by a fit of uncontrollable yawning. There was the virago shriek of a police car, behind us, to the left of us, we did not know where. This time I did not need any example from Steven. With one impulse we scrambled over a curling galvanized iron fence and found ourselves on the roof of a low shed among pumpkins put out to ripen. Steven put a pumpkin under his head, as you might use a plump quilted cushion for a sofa nap. We lay there panting and laughing in swaggering, schoolboy triumph.

All at once, it was morning.