A World of Strangers

Chapter 5

That day had a second morning. Steven had found a taxi-driver friend to take me home, and I got into bed in my flat about five o’clock, just as the yelling, whistling, and clanging of a new day was beginning in the roof-top servants’ quarters of the buildings all around me. But I slept. These mercilessly cheerful sounds were whisked away from me instantly and I sank from gibbering, gabbling level to level of nightmare until, like a stone, I lay at the sea-bed of sleep. I never read or listen to accounts of other people’s dreams and I have an unbroken vow never to recount my own, so I will not describe what I saw and experienced on the way; I will only say that when I woke, as I did with knife-stroke abruptness when the flat boy came in to clean, I seemed to have awakened from months-long sleep and heavy dreams. I had landed on a corrugated iron roof among the pumpkins; all that went before that — the ship plying south in warmer and warmer seas, the hotel, the parties and faces, the Stratford and Arthur Hollward’s office — seemed as exaggerated, high-coloured, and hallucinatory as the room in Sophiatown where I had been drunk with Steven. I felt as if I had just arrived in Johannesburg. I knew, in my bones, without opening my eyes to the room, where I was, that morning. Sick, shaky, insatiably thirsty, and with the restless aching in my hands and feet that I always get with a hangover, I was aware of the place as one would silently accept a familiar presence on a morning too hideous for speech or sign.

I went to the office at noon, and shut myself in; twice I sent Amon out, first to get me aspirins, then a bottle of lime juice — I had read somewhere that the quickest way to rid your bloodstream of alcohol is to wash it away with innocuous liquids. The second time, as he was leaving the room, he hesitated at the door and tramped slowly back to my desk. ‘I wish to tell you, thank you, sir, for the permission to go off,’ he said.

‘What’s that?’ I wished he would not mumble; one always had to go over twice whatever he had to say.

As he began again, I suddenly remembered. ‘Oh, that’s all right. Just try and let us know the day before you’re needed, eh, Amon.’

The day climbed to the full power of its summer heat in the early afternoon; when I went to the window, seeking ease and air, an unbearable brightness flashed off everything metal and there was a tarry smell from the melting street. I opened letters from my mother and Faunce but did not get so far as to read them.

When at four o’clock I gave up and decided to go home, I walked out of the building and straight into Cecil Rowe. For a moment I had a wild hope that she would not see me, that somehow the cruel street that, after the cool and dim lift, almost put my eyes out with glare, would blind her to me. All around me, the melting make-up on the women’s faces gave them the swimming look of a mirage, the men were flushed and shiny or greenish and greasy, as if the heat were a fever alternately producing flushes and chills. A few street Africans had gone into immobility, caps over eyes, against whatever poles or shopfronts offered support. I stopped and turned to the fat newspaper seller who, brisk with pùrpose in all weathers, had just dumped his pile of evening papers on the kerb. But she was there, at my side. She said, ‘Why are you always around this part of the world?’

I couldn’t find change to pay for my paper. While I dredged into my trouser pocket, I felt, feebly, that I couldn’t defend myself against her. Again she was dressed with showy simplicity, a cosmetic emanation — not merely the perfume she had used, but the impregnation of skin, hair, and clothes with the incense of the rites of female self-worship — came headily from her. ‘I’ve only met you here once before.’

‘Yes. Yesterday,’ she said, as if this called for an explanation. ‘So it was.’ I really could not believe that it was only twenty-four hours since I had encountered her in the bar.

She laughed. ‘You are vague,’ she said, then, mimicking my startled air: ‘Yes, it was yesterday.’

‘My office is here, in this building.’

She craned her neck, smooth with powder under the tight necklace that the flesh swelled against as she talked. ‘Up here? Above Adorable? Well I’m darned!’

‘What is Adorable — I’ve been wondering ever since I’ve been here.’

She opened her handbag, as if compelled to get my fumbling over with. ‘Here’ — she gave me three pennies for the paper seller. ‘It’s Paul’s place — the hairdresser. My hairdresser; that’s where I’ve come from now.’

She wore one of those wide hats that every now and then hid her face entirely; from what I could see of her hair it looked different again; brighter, gilded. It seemed to me stupid and tiring to be expected to find an approach to a woman who changed herself every day.

She was looking at me curiously, with a faint rise of interest. ‘You look awful,’ she said. ‘What’s happened to you since yesterday?’

‘I feel grim,’ I said, with a smile.

‘This bloody heat is grim,’ she said. ‘I’m going to go home and lie in a cold bath. Thank goodness I don’t have to do any social drinking today.’

There was a pause; one of those imperceptible moments of hanging-fire when the direction a conversation is to take is silently decided.

Almost reluctantly, I was the one to speak. Yet the instant in which she saw that I was about to do so, her eyes gave the faint blink of encouragement and part responsibility.

‘I was trying to decide which one was your husband.’

She said, ‘They’re two idiots who make film advertisements.’

‘And you act in them.’

She pulled a face. ‘Not yet. I’ve been fiddling about, doing a bit of modelling lately. As you see.’ She indicated herself with sudden naturalness, as if she were in carnival dress.

‘You look charming,’ I said, dutifully.

‘Thank you.

‘So you see’, she spoke again, quickly, ‘that was why I didn’t introduce you when you came up to the table yesterday.’

I remembered, out of the hazy immediate past, how animated and eager she had seemed with her companions. ‘You appeared to be enjoying yourself very much.’

‘Oh, my dear’ — an echo of that same social manner sounded in her defensive voice — ’ Enjoying myself! And you thought one of them was my husband — what a mood of self-deception you were in!’

‘Oh well,’ I said wearily, ‘anyway, I’m forgiven, you’re forgiven — ’

‘Forgiven?’ she said shrewdly, happily, ‘I’m forgiven? What for-?’

I was confused. ‘Not introducing,’ I said, and she knew that I meant, ‘For enjoying yourself so much.’

So I found myself in the Stratford bar again, and this time I had what I had wanted; I was with the girl, Cecil Rowe. But this carelessly-aimed largesse from whatever pile of favours has been stored up in the name of my existence, was flung at me on the wrong day. I was tired and the idea of a drink filled me with nausea; but it was more than that; the girl I had coveted jealously yesterday, the girl I had met at the dream-feast in the Caliph’s house above the gold-mines, the fair lady to my urban knight, pinning her colours on a briefcase — she belonged to the unreality through which I had fallen. It was odd to find her here at all; it was an effort to confirm her existence in, and therefore her sober kinship with, the city that I was aware of when I wakened in my flat that morning.

I sat with her in the bar on the hard Tudor chairs under the sign of the plaster lion and the picture of Henry the Eighth, without a trace of the triumph and pleasure I had imagined, but male opportunism, with the farsightedness of instinct, saw to it for me, in spite of myself, that I behaved just as I would have if that triumph and pleasure had been alive in me.

As we sat down, she said, with a careless air of wanting to get it over with, ‘About the husband; I have no husband, idiot or not. I’m divorced.’ And as we both laughed, she added: ‘I never know whether to tell people or let them find out. If I say nothing, they say something that embarrasses them, sooner or later, and if I come out with it, it always sounds like an announcement.’ She was rather forlornly lively (perhaps my own subconscious inert state affected her) and she clutched a young Englishwoman’s bright social manner about her as if it were a disgusting old coat that she’d love to throw away. Now and then, when I was talking and she was listening, she would lapse, quite unconsciously, I was sure, into perfect mimicry of the part she was dressed for — the languid object that is the mannequin, showing herself off like a diamond whose facets must be turned in the light. She told me that she lived in a flat with her three-year-old child; the modelling work was something quite new to her, it seemed to be fun; she would like to go to Rome and be a model there. There was a girl who’d done quite well — but she was dark and had an angry tom cat’s face. That was the fashionable face to have, just now, she assured me. When we parted, she said, ‘Why don’t you come out to Alexanders’ on Saturday and ride?’ I said I might; unable to project myself into the imagined scene as to the milieu of the moon.

I wanted to see Steven Sitole again, quickly. I had no idea where to find him, so next day I telephoned Sam at the magazine offices where I had been told he worked. His big voice sounded surprised, then obliging: ‘Oh, Mr Hood-were you all right the other night?’ ‘Of course. Fine.’ ‘Well, I’m glad to hear that. I was a bit nervous about letting you go off with old Steven.’

He couldn’t tell me, right off, where I could telephone Steven, and a third person, someone in the office, was drawn into the conversation. ‘-Eddie, where’s Steven operate from these days? What? No, man, the phone number. Where can you get hold of him?’ Back into the telephone, he said, ‘You can try him at this number, Mr Hood. He’s not there all the time, but they’ll take messages for him. It’s a printer’s; 31-6489 — got it?’ I thanked him and said I hoped I’d see him again some time. He laughed embarrassedly and said, ‘I wonder if we will,’ as if it were not a simple matter that would be likely to be brought about without any particular effort on our part.

Steven was in when I telephoned the printer’s. ‘Wha-at? Oh, that’s O.K. And me too, I’m O.K.,’ he said, when I thanked him for taking me with him the other evening.’ The taxi was magnificent,’ I said. ‘Got me in well before the milk.’ ‘Wh-at?’ he said again. ‘The what? Oh, old Dhla-mini. Good. Good.’ He was one of those people who, over the telephone, always sound as if they are not listening. Some small tension of novelty and excitement that had drawn tight in the recollection of the unexpectedness of the night I had spent with him, gave way; for him, the incident was part of unremarkable experience to which my presence had perhaps given a mild fillip. I said guardedly, because I meant it, as I had said merely as a piece of meaningless politeness to Sam, I hoped I should see him again some time. But he said, ‘Sure thing. Whenever you say?’ ‘Could we have lunch together, Friday, perhaps?’ He laughed at me in a leisurely fashion. ‘But where can we go together for lunch, man?’ Of course, I hadn’t thought; he couldn’t go into any restaurant or tea-room in town. ‘What about one of your places?’ I said.’ Would I be allowed in one of them?’ Now he roared with laughter. ‘You haven’t seen them,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t suggest it if you’d seen them.’ ‘All right, all right. Where do we eat?’ ‘I could come over to your place if you make it Saturday instead of Friday,’ he suggested. ‘Jolly good. We’ll knock up some lunch at the flat. What time? Half past twelve-ish? I usually leave the office about eleven on Saturday mornings.’ As I agreed, I suddenly remembered the half-promise to go riding at the Alexanders’; and dismissed it. I told Steven where the flat was, and we hung up.

I also telephoned Anna Louw before the weekend. She said, ‘I hear you went with Steven to Sophiatown. Where’d he take you?’

‘I don’t know, exactly,’ I said, stiffly.

‘That shebeen-lizard,’ she said mildly.

‘You know, I like him. He’s unexpected, I suppose, that’s it.’

‘What had you expected?’ she asked with patient interest. With her you felt that your most halting utterance was given full attention. This scrutiny of the clichés of perfunctory communication, the hit-or-miss of words inadequate either to express or conceal, embarrassed me. Like most people, I do not mean half of what I say, and I cannot say half of what I mean; and I do not care to be made self-conscious of this. Much that is to be communicated is not stated; but she was the kind of person who accepts nothing until there has been the struggle to body it forth in words.

‘I don’t know, really,’ I said, confused by pressure and irritated by my confusion. Confusion brought a momentary blankness, a blotting out, and I thrust forward the image of this blankness itself for answer, and it served: ‘I hadn’t expected anything, I didn’t know what I could expect. I hadn’t thought about it.’ But of course, that wasn’t right, it wasn’t true; what I had done, in fact, was purposely not to think about the only expectations I could have had from my second-hand information; I had shrunk from the idea of meeting an earnest, bespectacled black man who would talk, over the tea-cup balanced on his knee, of the latest piece of discriminatory law against his people — Uncle Faunce’s black man, my mother’s black man. A man who would bore me and bring to the surface ponderous emotions of self-righteousness and guilt. I suppose any real, live black man would have seemed unexpected to me after this cipher. Certainly a young man who took me drinking with him.

On Saturday morning I bought some cooked ham and salami (there was beer in the flat) and set it out on the table when I got home; it had the forlorn look of food that has been processed rather than cooked. Then I opened a bottle of beer and sat down by the open window with my unopened Observer and Sunday Times, that followed me to Johannesburg by airmail, only a week late. The noises of the suburban street came up to me sociably; I found that I heard not just voices, shouting children, barking dogs, but the fading screech, as it went away up the street, of the tricycle belonging to a particular small boy, the shrill hysteria of the collie dog forever patrolling the fence of the house hard pressed between two flat buildings, half a block away, and the laughter of the two Italian immigrant children from the building next door. Between half past twelve and one, I looked out a few times to show Steven, if he should come round the corner, where he was bound for, but there was nothing but the relaxed Saturday life of the street — different, I imagine, from the week-day life which I was seldom there to see: cars disgorging working couples piled with their weekend food supplies, men carrying bottles of brandy and cases of soda and Coca-Cola out of the boots, small boys in the shabby khaki or violently jazzy American shirts that South African children wear, kicking and straggling their way to the municipal swimming bath, with their bathing trunks pulled on their sunburned bullet heads of spiky fair hair. I read on and finished the bottle of beer and then found it was two o’clock. The street was almost empty now, everyone was indoors, at lunch; Isaac, the flat boy, had begun his Saturday afternoon washing of one of the tenants’ cars, and was sloshing buckets of water over a blowsy chromium beauty now several years out of date and badly in need of decarbonizing. Steven didn’t come; and at last I sat down and ate. I found I was so hungry I could have eaten all the meat, but I thought he might still turn up. He didn’t come. At three o’clock the young couple from the flat above mine emerged in clean tennis shorts and drove away in their little car, business-like and preoccupied as they were when they went off to their offices in the mornings. Gradually the street was almost cleared of cars; Isaac gathered his group of sophists from the aimless and the delivery men cycling by, and, as he flapped his chamois about the big car, delivered an off-hand oration to them where they squatted on the kerb. A sentimental song skirled out of a high window, was snatched back out of the air by the turn of a knob somewhere, and replaced by the mad chatter of race-course commentary, like a quarrel between parrots. And on all this, round all this, a splendid afternoon shone, clear and brilliant, dwarfing the thin smoke of boiler-room chimneys and the small dirty breath of car exhausts.

I felt a little flat and foolish, as one does when a guest fails to present himself. If Steven had had a telephone, and if I had known where to find him at his home, I should have phoned and said ‘What the hell has happened to you?’ and perhaps not minded at all that he hadn’t come. But he had no telephone and I had no idea where he lived. A whole complex of streets like this one, and beyond that a place half-imagined (tin huts, sacking over doorways in a newspaper picture), half-remembered (between mean houses, narrow darkness crowded with the sleeping presence of too many people, pumpkins on the roof, and an old nag sleeping): all this seemed to blot out the possibility of communication between us.

I might just as well have gone to the Alexanders’ after all; the afternoon, too beautiful to be contained by the suburban street, suggested this. But it was too late to do anything about it, anyway. I dragged the chair I had taken from the office out on to the little cement box that was my balcony, and sat there with my feet up, reading and dozing; all up the street there were men doing the same, like canaries hung out to get the sun. The Alexanders, on their side of the town, did not claim me. Steven, away on his, had not claimed me, either. Up on the roof of the flat building opposite, two African nursemaids in the dishabille of dirty woollen headscarfs instead of workday white caps, and three or four flat boys still in their cleaners’ dress of cotton shorts and tunic, danced and yelled to the scratchy, repetitive music of one record, played on a portable gramophone. In amorphous, anonymous suburbia I lay low; not a stranger, but a man who, for the moment, belongs to himself.

It was true that a black man and a white man, though acquainted, were unlikely to run into each other again by chance in Johannesburg. The routine of their lives might run parallel most of the time, but it was astonishing how effective were the arrangements for preventing a crossing. But I did see Steven Sitole again, simply because I knew Anna Louw; had it not been for this, perhaps we should unremarkably have lost sight of each other at once.

I was kept busy about the affairs of Aden Parrot all the next week; I even had to take work home to the flat in the evenings. During the day, I was mostly out of Johannesburg, visiting booksellers in the small towns strung along the path of the gold mines of the Witwatersrand. It was the East Rand I went to that week, I remember, and I went by train, because Faunce was still hedging about letting me have a car, though it was clear enough that in a country with poor public transport, I must have one. I was struck at once by the queerness of the landscape; man-made to a startling degree — as if the people had been presented with an upland plateau and left to finish it, to create a background of natural features instead of to fit in with one — and at the same time curiously empty, as if truly abandoned to man. Between the factories that thinned out from the perimeter of one town, almost meeting the last industrial outpost of the next, there was a horizon of strange hills. Some of them were made of soft white sand, like the sand of the desert or the sea, piled up in colossal castles. Others looked like volcanoes on whose sides the rolling yellow larva had petrified; fissures stained rust-coloured, and eroded formations like the giant roots of trees, marked their bases. There were others, cream, white, buff-coloured, and yellow, and worn into rippling corrugations by the wind, built up in horizontal ridges, like the tombs of ancient kings. Where coal mines had been, black mountains of coal dust glittered dully.

There were no valleys between these hills for they were simply set down, on the flat veld. Patches of tough green grass and short waving grasses showed, but mostly the growth was weird, wet and thin; a few cows would stand in the reeds of an indefinite swampy patch where the ooze shone mother-of-pearl, like oil; a rectangular lake out of which pipes humped had sheets of violet and pink, like a crude water-colour. In some places there was no earth but a bare, grey scum that had dried and cracked open. And there was black earth, round a disused coal mine, where somone had once thrown away a peach pip, and it had grown into a tree, making out of the coal dirt some hard, hairy green peaches.

There were trees; eucalyptus trees, confined to plantations that formed grey geometrical shapes in which, as you passed, you caught a glimpse of white, peeling branches like the flash of flesh. A few spindly outcasts, eucalyptus and wattle, got some sort of living in tortured angles against the steep sides of the yellow hills.

It was a man-made place in quite a different sense from that of a city. (Quite a different sense from that of the midlands in England, too, or the Welsh coal-country.) If it had not been for the hills, the horizon would have been a matter of the limitations of the human eye. Men themselves had made their own spatial boundaries, themselves had created the natural features of hills, water, and woods. What they had made, in the emptiness, was the symbol rather than the thing itself. The cyanide dumps were not hills, the dams of chemically-treated water pumped from underground were not lakes, the plantations were not woods: but they suggested them, they stood for them. And like all true fantasies, this one had been created subconsciously. The people who had made this landscape had merely been concerned to dump above ground, out of the way, the waste matter that was incidental to the recovery of gold.

The towns themselves were quite another matter. They were conscious creations, all right. They were ugly, cheap, and jazzily dreary, got up in civic ‘beautifying’ efforts on the taste level of a housemaid’s Sunday-best. The main street invariably led in one end of the town and out the other, and on the way were the lines of shops, offering, in coloured neon, fish-and-chips and furniture on terms and building-loans and gents’ outfitting, grinning brides and kiddies in the photographer’s, dingy bars in the brewers’ chain of hotels, a cinema with Cinemascope and, of course, the town hall with the municipal coat-of-arms picked out in pansies between fat palms like pineapples. One of these places had coloured lights on fancy wire frames arched across the street at twenty-foot intervals; at the end of the diminishing vista, you could just see the headgear of the nearest mine-shaft. In each town I visited the local booksellers — there was a newsagents’ chain, like the brewers’ chain, running through them all, and usually one other independent shop-and talked shop to them as best I could before getting to the business of taking their orders for new Aden Parrot books. Most of them were nice chaps, who stuck doggedly to what they knew they could sell, and were as nervous about ordering a new author as the proprietor of a grocery shop might be of offering his customers an unfamiliar kind of cheese; they reminded me of the comfortable pipe-smokers who kept the local bookseller and stationer’s in the English seaside towns of my childhood.

I had felt that I owed Anna Louw some sort of entertainment or hospitality, and so I had asked her to come to a cinema with me on the Friday night. When I got back to Johannesburg from my last day’s journeying about the East Rand, I felt too tired to bother with her instructions about buses and routes (she had asked me to dinner) and took a taxi to where she lived. The address was north of the town, on the way to the Alexanders’, in the pocket of a half-developed suburb that lay surrounded by, but neglected by contrast with, other suburbs. There she had a cottage in the grounds of a larger house; a kind of paste-board cottage that had been formed out of a reversal of the onion-peeling process: first there had been one room and a bathroom, weekend shelter for a casual guest from the big house, then someone had added a kitchen, and so a more stable existence was possible there, then a veranda, and, finally, the veranda had been closed-in and subdivided to make a small, cellular house. The first thing I noticed was the lowness of all the doors and ceilings; I had to dip my head to step into the softly-coloured complexity of Anna’s house. It was like stooping to look into a nest or a cave, a hidden, personal place that exists unperturbed under the unnoticing eye of the passing world.

Two or three people were sitting about the small living-room; the windows were open wide, and I had a sense of the light running out, moving from the room like a tide. ‘Hullo, Mr Hood,’ said little Sam, welcomingly. Anna introduced me to a dumpy, grey-haired woman in slacks, who kept saying, in a strong Hollands accent, ‘I got do go, now, my deer, eh? I got do go now.’ Steven was there. He got up from the divan under the windows, where he had been sitting, and backed away in invitation to me to sit down. He shook hands. ‘Hallo, how are you? This is a very comfortable place.’ He was grinning, with his glass dangling in his hand, held by the rim. Glasses and a porcelain vase shone once, as the ebb in passing sometimes turns over bright objects to gleam for a moment out of the mud.

‘I can’t make out what I’m pouring,’ said Anna, and switched on a lamp.

‘Doesn’t matter, perhaps it’ll turn out something interesting,’ said Steven. They all stirred in the sudden warm light; started a little in themselves as shadows jumped out at once at angles from the objects in the room. ‘No!’ said the Hollander, standing up and shaking her thick body inside her slacks; I saw that her coarse hair was streaked with its original yellow, like the nicotine stains on the fingers of heavy smokers. ‘I must go, Anna!’

Anna hurried back to the circle of the lamplight after seeing her off. ‘Toby! Now please pour yourself a drink!’ ‘Got one,’ I held it up. She was carefully dressed, in red, and she looked suddenly pretty in the vivid way of dark women. Perhaps because she was at home, she seemed to have relaxed, too, that measured seriousness of manner that I associated with her.’ I’m sorry!’ she said.’ She’s not a bad old thing at all.’

‘What’s the matter?’

‘Oh it was before you came. You wouldn’t notice it so much.’ She turned to the others, apologetic, but confident that they would share her amusement at the same time.

‘Going, going, never gone,’ said Steven, putting down his glass and waving his hands.

‘I think she’s a nice lady,’ said little Sam. ‘Nothing wrong with her.’

‘She came in — she occasionally comes in just about this time, or after supper, for coffee with me — but when she saw Sam and Steven she kept saying, all the time, I must go, I must go.’

‘But she didn’t!’ said Steven.

Anna asked me how I’d got there, and then we got talking about the car I needed, and what kind it should be, and where I should get it. The subject of cars is paraffin on the fire of talk among most men, and Steven and Sam lit up at once in passionate discussion. Sam said that I should get a new small British or Continental car that would be cheap to run. Steven plumped for a good second-hand job, a big powerful American car, a model of a reliable year, that, once overhauled, would go like new. ‘What’s a good of a car without power? What d’you want a machine without power for? May as well walk,’ he cried flamboyantly to Sam. ‘Steven, man,’ said Sam, planting himself before him to get a hearing, ‘a second-hand car spends more time in the garage than on the road.’

‘You find a good American car,’ said Steven to me, over his head.

We all began to talk at once: ‘Listen to me. . look here. . so long as it goes, I don’t. . ’

Steven burst through. ‘I’ve got a friend who works in the biggest garage in town. You know the Ford people? You know the Chev people? He’s worked with their crack mechanics for years. He can buy and sell them, ten times over. You get your second-hand car and don’t you worry. I’ll get him to do over the whole engine for you. It’ll cost you half. Maybe even nothing. You leave it to me.’

They had come in to see Anna on their way home from work. We all walked out to Sam’s little car to see them off, and I said to Steven, ‘What happened to you that Saturday, anyway?’ He smiled charmingly, utterly culpable and self-reproachful: ‘I’m awfully sorry about that, Mr Hood, really I’m sorry. I suddenly had to go off to Klerksdorp. I asked some chap to let you know, but you know what these people are. . I want you to come to my place to a party tomorrow night. Yes, there’s a big party on tomorrow and I want you to come. You’ll both come. We’ll fix it tomorrow.’

They went off, waving and talking. I had the feeling there was no party; or there was not going to be one until a few minutes ago.

‘Silly ass,’ said Anna, as we entered the house again. She picked up a couple of official-looking letters from the table where the lamp was. ‘He bought a woman’s watch and a camera from some place in town, and he hasn’t paid for them. Now he’s being sued. Don’t know what I’m supposed to do about it. It’s hardly a thing for legal aid.’

I smiled. ‘Hardly.’

‘Of course, Sam always thinks I can fix everything.’ She sighed and sat down, gazing accusingly at the lamp.

‘I should think he’s pretty well right.’ This confirmation of the confidence she inspired seemed to distress her; as if, for a moment, she saw a diminution of herself in the habit of capable response which was expected of her.

‘What’s Steven’s excuse?’ I asked, curious.

‘The girl ran away with the watch, and the camera had a faulty lens, anyway — so he felt it was justice all round if he didn’t finish his payments.’

We both laughed, but there was an edge of irritation to her amusement.

‘It’s part of the Robin Hood code that a lot of them like to think they live by, just now. It’s an elastic code that can be stretched to cover even gangsters with a moral justification of some kind. And, of course, it’s romantic. There’s terribly little that’s romantic in location life. That part of it I understand very well. In the Karroo dorp where I grew up there was nothing romantic, either.’

‘I don’t know whether I understand what “romantic” means to you,’ I said.

‘Well, what does it usually mean? — Something foreign, something outside your familiar life? That’s what I mean, anyway. Even if it’s only an unfamiliar way of looking at your own life, another interpretation of it. Then you’re not just a black man doing down a white man, you’re robbing the rich to give to the poor.’

In the kitchen she did everything unhurriedly but practisedly. When she lifted the lid of a pot, there was the comforting vegetable scent of a home-made soup, and there were two thick pats of fillet lying on a board, ready for grilling. I hung about, talking to her, getting in the way rather than helping, as you do in a kitchen when you don’t know where things are kept.’ I’m glad to hear that you’re not too down on Steven’s romantic view of life — although I’m not sure, yet, that I agree about it being romantic.’

‘It’s romantic, all right,’ said Anna, sending tomatoes seething into a hot pan,’ and I am down on it. I understand the need to be romantic in some way, but I’m down on this way. It’s a waste of energy. You won’t catch Steven working with Congress or any other African movement, for that matter. He never defied, either — I’m talking about the defiance campaign, the passive resistance movement of a year or two back. The only defiance he’s interested in is not paying his bills, or buying drink. He’s got this picture of himself as the embittered, devil-may-care African, and believe me, he’s making a career of it. He doesn’t care a damn about his people; he’s only concerned with his own misfortune in being born one of them.’ The sizzling of the tomatoes in butter spat angrily around her.

‘Why should Steven have to be involved in these movements and congresses and what-not?’ I said. ‘I must admit, the whole idea would fill me with distaste. I’d run a mile at the thought.’

Over the tomatoes, she smiled the private smile of the old hand: the stoker when the ship’s passenger marvels at the fact that anyone can work in such heat, the foundryman when someone says, ‘How do you stand the noise?’ ‘Somebody’s got to do it. Why should you expect somebody else to do it for you? Nobody really wants to.’

‘Ah now, that’s not so. I’ve always thought that there are two kinds of people, people with public lives, and people with private lives. The people with public lives are concerned with a collective fate, the private livers with an individual one. But — roughly, since the Kaiser’s war, I suppose — the private livers have become hunted people. Hunted and defamed. You must join. You must be Communist or Anti-Communist, Nationalist or Kaffirboetie’ — she smiled at my pronunciation — ‘you must protest, defy, non-co-operate. And all these things you must do; you can’t leave it all in the infinitely more capable hands of the public livers.’

She turned from the stove with her answer all ready, but then paused a moment, filling in the pause by gesturing for me to pass her the soup bowls, and said, as if she had suddenly discarded her argument, ‘Yes, there’s less and less chance to live your own life. That’s true. The pressure’s too strong.’

‘From outside, as well as within, that’s my point,’ I said, obstinately, not wishing to claim common ground where I did not think there was any. ‘The public life people have always responded to pressure from within — their own conscience, sense of responsibility toward others, ambition, and so on; but the private livers, in whom these things are latent, weak, or differently directed, could go on simply going their own ways, unless the pressure from outside became too strong. Well, now it’s just bloody irresistible. It isn’t enough that a chap like Steven has all the bother of being a black man in this country, on top of it he’s expected to give up to political action whatever small part of his life he can call his own.’

I followed Anna into the living-room, where she carried the soup. ‘He wants the results of that political action, doesn’t he?’ she called, over her shoulder. ‘He wants to be free of the pass laws and the colour bar and the whole caboodle? — Well, let him fight for it.’ She laughed, indignant in spite of herself.

All the old, wild reluctant boredom with which I had borne with this sort of talk all my life was charged, this time, with something more personal; a nervous excitement, a touchiness. I felt the necessity to get the better of her; to punish her, almost, ‘My dear Anna, you’re so wrong, too. The private liver, the selfish man, the shirker, as you think him — he’s a rebel. He’s a rebel against rebellion. On the side, he’s got a private revolution of his own; it’s waged for himself, but quite a lot of other people may benefit. I think that about Steven. He won’t troop along with your Congress, or get himself arrested in the public library, but, in spite of everything the white man does to knock the spirit out of him, he remains very much alive — getting drunk, getting in debt, running his insurance racket. Learning all the shady tricks, so that, in the end, he can beat dear old white civilization at its own games. He’s muscling in; who’s to say he won’t get there first? While the Congress chaps are pounding fiercely on the front door, he’s slipped in through a back window. But, most important of all, he’s alive, isn’t he? He’s alive, in defiance of everything that would attempt to make him half-alive. I don’t suppose he’s been well fed, but he looks wiry, his schooling hasn’t been anything much, but it seems to me he’s got himself an education that works, all the same, well-paid jobs are closed to him, so he’s invented one for himself. And when the Congress chaps get in at last, perhaps they’ll find him there, waiting.’ I laughed.

‘Oh my God! What a horrible idea.’ She pressed her napkin against her mouth and drew in her shoulders.

I was perversely triumphant. I added, with some arrogance ‘Well, don’t underestimate the Sitoles of this world, anyway. They’re like history; their progress is inexorable. Let that be a consolation to you when your Congresses and protests don’t seem to be getting very far.’

When we had finished our dinner and she was out of the room, getting her coat, I wandered about, looking at books and objects that I had been noticing since I had arrived. The books were what I would have expected to find, political books on Russia, China, and India, all the books I had ever read about Africa, and a great many more besides, some old Left Book Club editions, a couple of books of reproductions of paintings, and no poetry or novels at all, so far as I could see, except a paper-back mystery. But some of the objects were unusual, and, to me, highly interesting. There was a huge, benign African mask of black wood, and a small, evil one with a grey ruff of what I guessed must be monkey fur, there was a beautiful hide drum, and a clay pot blackened with stove polish and studded with red lucky beans; there was a little brass Shiva, and a Chinese marriage fish hanging from a nail on the wall. All these things were brought together in intimacy in the small space, and each retained, absolutely unmodified by the presence of the others, the look of authority of its place in the life from which it had been taken. I have noticed this before in objects which have been created for utility or ritual: even out of the context of their use, they never take on the banal look of ornaments. I had just picked up a snapshot of Anna, standing beside a smiling Indian woman, and herself wearing Indian dress, when she came back into the room.

‘A sari suits you very well. Have you been in India?’

She shook her head. ‘I was married to an Indian. He gave me this, too; isn’t it beautiful?’ She showed me the white Kashmir shawl she was wearing. I admired it and we talked about it for a few minutes, while she went round locking up the cottage.

In the car, she said, ‘Were you surprised about my marriage?’

‘Well, yes. I suppose I was.’

‘But of course, it doesn’t seem so very extraordinary to English people.’

‘No.’

‘Not the way it is here.’ She added, in her matter-of-fact voice, the voice of the conscientious committee member drawing the attention of the meeting to something she does not want them to overlook: ‘It was before the Mixed Marriages Act, of course.’

I suddenly choked with the desire to laugh; I couldn’t help it, it came spluttering out. ‘I can’t think of a marriage in terms of legislation. That’s all I mean.’ Did she think of anything in any other terms?

‘Was it very difficult, being married like that in this country?’ I asked, as I might have asked about the cultivation of some plant in her garden.

She hesitated a moment. ‘A bit. Didn’t seem so then; seems so now.’

She changed gear with a typical, neat, considerate movement. And I had a sudden sense of loneliness, her loneliness, that appeared unsummoned behind her flat, commonplace talk like a face at the window of a locked house.

Chapter 6

Steven, in a graduate gown, was at the centre; the party spun round him, slowly at first, then whipped up by the black skirts and flailing sleeves that flew from the mast of his energy. When I arrived at the house in Sophiatown (Sam had come all the way to fetch me, because Anna Louw was not coming to the party) there were a dozen or so young men standing about against the walls of the room. Some leaned on each other’s shoulders, and a cigarette was passed up and down for each to take a draw. They murmured among themselves now and then, laughed suddenly, or dreamed, as loiterers do. Steven swept among them a few times, clutching the arm of one enthusiastically, bending his head for an explosive, confidential joke with another. They were dressed in anything they could find, it seemed: one, in a laundry-creased white shirt and new flannel trousers with a fancy belt, hung on a friend in a sweater almost completely unravelled and tattered brown pants whose turn-ups, stiff with motor-oil, were held round his bare legs by bicycle clips. They wore loose, hairy tweed jackets, suit-jackets that might have been filched off a scarecrow, filthy old caps, fancy gilt tie-pins, torn laceless sandshoes, impeccably brushed suède shoes. Their faces had the glazed look of youths who have spent their lives in the streets, watching; watching the earth-mover eating out the vacant plot, the fire-engine screaming by, or the drunk, weaving along the gutter.

On a few benches and old dining-chairs, there were some women in haphazard cheap-jack finery and one or two men in business suits and glasses. The room itself was as empty of objects as the shebeen had been; and in it, everyone simply stood or sat, without awkwardness, and without any tension of expectation. More poeple kept coming in all the time; Steven seemed to make sorties beyond the door and return triumphantly each time, gathering new arrivals. Sam was his lieutenant, speeding and skidding about him with twinkling importance. A piano was pushed in; its strings jarred and jangled and died away. Steven was in conference, his arms spreading his gown about two other men; he dashed out, dashed in, grinned at me, raised his brows at someone else. A yellow boy with girl’s hands and a huge, pitch-black man with the weight of his body resting on the tight belt of his pants brought brandy round in coloured lemonade glasses. It was offered to me, and to all the others who, like me, sat on the benches or hard chairs. A second serving came in, this time in cups. But it did not get as far as the chaps hanging round the wall, and they did not seem to expect it; only watched. Talk rose, as the volume of people displaced the silence. They kept sauntering in, girls hand in hand, with the little breasts and big haunches that I noticed in very young African women, pretty tarts with faces broad with pleasure, powder showing dull mauve like the bloom on a black grape, on their skin, thin young men whose shoulders hunched-in their chests, gangling young men with the benign look of the very tall; pale, yellow fat faces, bony, reddish-skinned faces, shining black faces. They spoke to each other in the monosyllabic, subdued way of an audience, and threw in a few words of dated American-English, as if that were the fashionable thing to do. ‘Doing all right there, Dan?’ ‘Sure, boy. How’s it with you, these days?’ ‘Hullo, baby — ’ ‘You in good shape, honey?’

There was a little breeze of notes on a saxophone; it died down. A clarinet gave a brief howl. Somewhere behind the press of people, the big bass began to pant. Music grew in the room like a new form of life unfolding, like the atmosphere changing in a rising wind. Musical instruments appeared from underfoot; people who had been talking took to another tongue through the object they plucked or blew. Feet moved, heads swayed; there was no audience, no performers — everyone breathed music as they breathed air. Sam was clinched with the piano in some joyous struggle both knew. A yellow youth in a black beret charmed his saxophone like a snake, with its own weaving voice. The bass thumped along for dear life under the enchanted hand of a man with the bearded, black delicate face of an Assyrian king. A fat boy with a pock-marked face jumped with rubber knees into a little clearing; girls began to swing this way and that from their partners’ hands, like springs coiling and uncoiling.

I had seen jazz-crazy youths and girls at home in England, in a frenzy of dance-hall jive. I had seen them writhing, the identity drained out of their vacant faces, like chopped-off bits of some obscene animal that, dismembered and scattered, continue to jig on out of nervous impulse. But the jazz in this room was not a frenzy. It was a fulfilment, a passion of jazz. Here they danced for joy. They danced out of wholeness, as children roll screaming down a grass bank. Now and then a special couple would make space for themselves, and gather the whole swirling vigour of the room into their performance. They laughed and shouted to the others who danced around them, corollary to their rhythm; comments and challenges flew back.

One of the men in business suits came up to me and said confidentially, ‘I suppose this must all seem rather crude.’

‘Crude?’

He waved a hand at the room, that buffeted him where he stood, so that he had the stance of a man on a ship in a high sea.

‘My friend,’ I said, ‘you don’t know what our parties are like.’ And it was true that that very first night I was struck by the strange innocence of their dancing. In all its wild and orgiastic shake and shamble, there was never a suggestion that it was a parody of or a substitute for sex. There was none of the dreamy concupiscence that hangs, the aura of a lean, wolfish sex-hunger, about the scarcely moving couples in a white night-club. For these people, the music and the dancing were not a dream and an escape, but an assertion. Once or twice I took one of the young women in their bright nylon blouses and danced, but it was more than my own lack of skill and half-hearted experience of dancing as a rather embarrassing social necessity that made me feel almost as if I were maimed in that press of dancing people. It was more than my stiff, shy, and unwilling limbs. What was needed was — at a deeper level — something akin to the feeling I had had when I was swimming with Stella Turgell at Mombasa, the feeling that the age-old crystals of the North were melting away in my blood. The men and women about me had had little to drink, they had none of the trappings of food and ease without which the people among whom I had lived are unable to whip up any sort of mood of celebration; yet it was there, spontaneously. Their joy was something wonderful and formidable, a weapon I didn’t have. And, moving feebly among them, I felt the attraction of this capacity for joy as one might look upon someone performing a beautiful physical skill which one has lost, or perhaps never had. Lopped off, gone, generations ago; drained off with the pigment fading out of our skin. I understood, for the first time, the fear, the sense of loss there can be under a white skin. I suppose it was the point of no return for me, as it is for so many others: from there, you either hate what you have not got, or are fascinated by it. For myself, I was drawn to the light of a fire at which I had never been warmed, a feast to which I had not been invited.

I looked at Steven, dancing proudly as a strutting cock before a little round-eyed, painted black girl, calling out remarks that kept admiring eyes turned on him, and I thought of him playing darts in an East End pub. Why should he want that grey, fog-sodden world with its dreary pastimes scaled down to dwindling energies? Yet he did. He was drawn to it just as I was drawn to the abundant life that blazed so carelessly in the room about me. When black men lose that abundance, sink it, as they long to, in the vast vitiation of our world, both the hate and the fascination will be gone, and we will be as indifferent to them as we are to each other.

Like Alice plunging after the White Rabbit, I went with Steven into the townships, the shebeens, the rooms and houses of his friends. I do not want to suggest by this a descent into an underworld, but another world, to which the conditions of the Johannesburg I worked and lived in did not pertain. First, the scale of proportion was reversed: in the city, and in my suburban street, the buildings rose above, the gardens made a space round the people — we lived, as city people do, in the shelter of the city, in a context that, while overshadowing, also provides the dignity of concealment: figures in the street pass out of sight under trees and shadows, living passes out of sight behind walls and fences. By contrast, an African township looked like something that had been razed almost to the ground. The mass of houses and shacks were so low and crowded together that the people seemed to be swarming over them, as if they had just invaded a deserted settlement. Every time I went to a township I was aware of this sudden drop in the horizon of buildings and rise of humans; nothing concealed, nothing sheltered — in any but the most obvious sense — any moment of the people’s lives. A blinding light of reality never left them. And they lived, all the time, in all the layers of society at once: pimps, gangsters, errand boys, washwomen, schoolteachers, boxers, musicians and undertakers, labourers and patent medicine men — these were neighbours, and shared a tap, a yard, even a lavatory.

So convincing was Steven’s confidence in himself and his friends that when Faunce advanced me the money to buy a car, I bought a second-hand Chevrolet and took it to Steven’s mechanic friend to be overhauled. He lived in Alexandra Township, an abandoned-looking place outside the northern boundaries of Johannesburg, a kind of vast, smoking rubbish-pile picked over by voracious humanity. All the people who lived there worked in Johannesburg, but the town did not own the place, nor was it responsible for it. It had the aged look of all slums — even the earth, the red dirt roads, seemed worn down to their knobbly shins, and there was nothing, no brick, post, or piece of tin that was new and had not been battered in and out of the shape of a succession of uses — but, in fact, like everything else in Johannesburg, it was, in terms of human habitations, young, fresh, hardly begun; perhaps thirty or forty years old. From the beginning, it must have been a proliferation of dirt and decay, the pretty Shangri-la legend in reverse — the place where rot blooms.

A stream that flowed thick, blue-grey dirty wash-water ran by the house of Steven’s friend. Children played and screamed in it, and when they came to stand round the car, the scales of scum coated their legs like a disease. Although we went there three or four times (I had to leave the car with this man Alfred for some days) I was never asked to go into his house. It was a brick shack with a dead tree leaning over it; from the tree hung bits of rope and an old tyre on which the children swung, and the yard was a surrealist sculptor’s garden of old motor car parts — a yellow bumper, a rusted hood, and other unidentified shapes. While Alfred, a fat, shy man who fingered his nose tenderly while he talked, and Steven who, I am sure, knew nothing about cars, but could not bear to be nothing but a looker-on, lay wriggling along on their shoulder-muscles under the car, the children and I watched each other. When they had tired of giggling about me, they went back to their own absorbing aimlessness. Among them an idiot, a kind of baboon-girl of about fourteen, hunch-backed, grotesquely steatopygous, grunted and squealed in subhuman frustration at their teasing. Two plump, easy-eyed women gossiped and, with a quick hand at the right moment, kept setting to rights a fat baby with bead anklets who kept tumbling down the steps of a homemade clay veranda on the shack opposite. A donkey-cart selling wood screeched and tottered by; people bounced over the rutted road on bicycles, women, endless women, yelled, threw buckets of slop into the road, laughed and thumped at tubs of washing. And the monster was as unremarkable as the fat baby.

Sam’s house was in another township, a rather better one. The core of most of the houses was brick, even if the usual extensions of tin and hessian had accreted round them. I went there with Steven one night for supper, and when we walked through the yard-smell of ammonia and wood-smoke, to which I was by then accustomed, with the strange, conglomerate night-cry of the township about us, and the dim lights and the sudden, intimate voices of the houses that shared the yard, close to us, and through the door that opened abruptly from two uneven concrete steps, I was bewildered. I might have stepped into a room ‘done over’ by some young couple in a Chelsea flat. Green felt deadened the floor underfoot. There was a piano, piled with music. A record player in what all cabinet makers outside Sweden consider to be Swedish style. A divan with cushions. A red lamp. All along one wall, a bookcase made of painted planks and bricks. At the window, a green Venetian blind dropped its multiple lids on the township. Sam’s wife, Ella, pretty and shy, served a roast lamb and potato dinner with a bottle of wine, and afterwards the four of us listened to a Beethoven quartet and then to Sam, playing some songs of his own composition.

Steven wanted to go to a shebeen when we left. It was run by a man who was part Indian, part African, part white, and a Basuto woman with the proportions of a whale who called me ‘master’ in the intimate obsequiousness of a house servant who knows the family too well. Steven knew everybody there, flirted with the shrill coloured tarts who, drunk, reminded me of pantomime dames, and had about himself generally an air of sophistication and relief. He stood beside me, at last, twisting his cheap signet ring with the bit of red glass in it fondly, as if its shoddiness pleased him. ‘A place like Sam’s is all right,’ he said, ‘but it costs too much.’

‘His wife’s got quite a well-paid job, too, I gather, so I suppose they can manage,’ I said. I had already got over the bewilderment of the difference between what was well-paid for blacks and what was well-paid for whites; just as one becomes accustomed to translating values from one’s own currency to that of a foreign country in which one has lived for a little time. And I had learned to accept too, without embarrassment, the fact that I, with my not-very-generous salary, and my flat all to myself, was a rich man when I was in the townships.

‘I don’t mean just money. The effort and trouble. Keep up a place like that in a location. All the dirt, the easy-going, all round you. Imagine the way the neighbours look at you; you’re like a zoo! All the old women want to come and peer in the door to see what people do in such a house.’ Like most exhibitionistic people, Steven was a good mimic.

I laughed. ‘Still, it’s an achievement to manage to live that way, in a location.’

‘Ah,’ said Steven, ‘that’s it. It’s a showplace.’ He assumed a high falsetto, parody of some white woman’s voice he must have heard somewhere: ‘“. . an oasis of culture, my dear!” Is it a king’s house, a millionaire’s house? Man, it’s just an ordinary way to live.’

I saw what he meant. If living decently, following a modest taste for civilized things, meant living eccentrically or remarkably, one might prefer to refuse the right masquerading as a privilege.

‘Why should I guard like a cave of jewels,’ he said, changing his sharp-eyed fake ring from one finger to another, ‘a nice little house that any other man can have anywhere he likes in a street full of such houses?’ And he grinned at me with that careless aplomb, shrugging his shoulders and looking down his nose at himself, that gave him such an air, and always, wherever we went in the townships, drew the young bloods about him to hear what he would say next.

He was, without question, the most ‘popular’ person I have ever known. I put the word popular between the quotes of the suspect, because to me it connotes a man who gets the most votes in a presidential election at a golf club, and I don’t mean that sort of popularity. Perhaps ‘loved’ would be a better word. But he wasn’t exactly loved, either; he was too impersonal and elusive for that. I think they gloried in him, those hangers-on — they gloried in his white man’s ways produced unselfconsciously in their company, like a parlour trick that looks easy enough for anyone to learn. Looking always as if they’d just sheepishly awakened from a sleep with their clothes on, they sought something: was it the gum they pushed ceaselessly from one side of their mouths to the other, like the Americans do? Would the latest slang, in English, do it? Or the sports shirt with the pink and black collar? They did not know; they had not found out yet. But Steven had; they could see it, there he was. He had not gone under beneath his correspondence college B.A. the way black men did, becoming crushed and solemn with education, and the fit and cut of that aspect of the white man’s Johannesburg that dazzled them most hung on him as comfortably as his well-tailored jacket.

Feckless, aimless, like creatures flopping in the sand in evolution from water to land, they saw his slippery-footed ease between the black man’s element and the white. He was something new, and they worshipped the new, which lack of possessions made them believe must always be the better. He was a new kind of man, not a white man, but not quite a black man, either: a kind of flash — flash-in-the-pan — produced by the surface of the two societies in friction.

It never seemed odd or extraordinary to me that Steven himself, free of so many rooms, houses, shacks, and shebeens, had no particular place to live, during the time I knew him. He once told me that he had no idea how many times he had moved, in his lifetime; he had lost count. He had been born in a location in one of the Reef gold-mining towns, and except for his year in England, he had been moving from one township to another, from one room to another, ever since.

I could not imagine what sort of place would have been right as home, to Steven.

Chapter 7

It was on a Sunday morning, after a party to celebrate the first of Steven’s moves since I had known him, that I went to see Cecil Rowe. The party was a warming- and naming-party for a house in a rakishly dingy part of Sophiatown where Steven had taken a room, in the company of his other bachelor cronies. It seemed to me highly unlikely that they were really living there, for there was little evidence of furniture or clothes — in fact, the place had the stunned and stripped look of a house that has been moved out of, rather than into — but it was blessed with jazz and brandy (someone even brought along a birthday cake) and it was duly named The House of Fame. (‘What’s it famous for?’ I asked, and Steven said, ‘Me, of course.’) The party ended about one on the peculiar note of promise of African parties, with all the men drifting off cheerfully into the dark to other assignations. I gave one or two of the lesser hangers-on lifts to various parts of the township, whose steep streets were still alive with strollers, tsotsis, lovers, quarrels, people singing, and drunks, and drove back to the shut-down quiet of the white town. My steps rang up the stairwell of the flats, and I had a sudden wave of homesickness that took the form of a vivid sense of a corner off Ebury Street, just below a little garden with wall-flowers smelling sweet and cold at night, where I used to go, one spring, to the flat of a girl with whom I was in love.

In the morning this mood of alienation persisted slightly — like most homesicknesses, it was for what I should have liked to have had, rather than what I really had left behind — and I thought I would go to church. There were bells ringing tangledly through the clear air while I bathed and shaved carefully and put on a blue suit. I walked vaguely in the direction where I remembered having seen a small Anglican church, and found myself there in less than ten minutes. Little girls with curled hair, dangling handbags, hung about their mothers; there was a strong smell of brilliantine in the group outside the church, and a strong smell of floor-wax inside. It was a cottagey-looking building and the priest was to match; he seemed embarrassed by the prayers he offered, and doubtful about the intercession of his blessing. He took as his text ‘Without me ye can do nothing’ and he advocated Christ as if he were suggesting a course of vitamin pills; the congregation listened politely. The whole service was very Low, and I decided that I would try the Cathedral in town, next time.

But at least when I came out I was prepared to accept the fact that this place in which I found myself was not the blue-grey Cotswold village, calm as a shadow, where, of my family, only my grandmother and I sometimes sat in church in the empty pew that had once belonged to our family; and I respected the flat statement of the sunlight, hitting everything full on, and the chipped façade of the corner Greek shop opposite the church, and the two Africans sitting with their feet in the gutter, drinking lemonade and carrying on a conversation that could have been heard three blocks away, and the pretty plump Jewish girls swinging down the road in their Sunday shorts, and the shoddy suburban houses, ready for the knockout of the demolition gang after only twenty or thirty years — respected the place for being itself.

It was then that I noticed the street-name and realized that I must be quite near where Cecil Rowe had told me she had a flat. On an impulse I let the steep gradient push me down the hill like a hand in my back, and, half way down, there it was — a building that was newer and more pretentious-looking, if not better than the one in which I lived. In the front, there were wind-torn rubber plants in bright pots, and a mosaic mural in the foyer representing a Zulu girl, a water-pot, and a beehive hut against a lot of saw-tooth greenery; but, as I thought, the open corridors behind, which led to the flats, were the usual grimly functional thoroughfares, full of drifts of soot and dirty fluff, empty milk bottles and garbage bins.

The Rowe girl’s flat was on the ground floor. I rang and rang and was just about to turn away, when I heard the soft slap of bare feet coming down a passage and someone struggled with the lock, giving muffled exclamations of exasperation, and at last flung the door open.

‘My God, I thought it was the Salvation Army,’ she said. ‘Hullo, it’s you — come in. Where’ve you sprung from?’

‘I’ve been to church, it’s just near here.’

She looked at me as if I were joking; then her expression changed to one of curiously feminine curiosity, that expression women get when they think you may be about to give away some aspect of yourself you really had not intended to let slip.’ Church? You don’t mean to say you go to church?’ She sounded most disbelieving.

‘Yes of course I do. At home I go quite regularly.’

She burst out laughing; embarrassed, gleeful laughter, as if she’d discovered that I wore corsets.’ Well, I’m surprised at you,’ she said. ‘I mean, you’re such an intellectual and all that.’

I can’t explain why, but I was somehow touched and reassured, in myself, by her out-of-date, six-thousand mile distant, colonial notion of an ‘intellectual’ as a free-thinking, Darwinian rationalist. It pleased me to think that to her, God was simply old-fashioned; it was better than to suspect, as I sometimes did of myself, that God was merely fashionable again.

‘Come in,’ she said, and certainly she was not dressed for lingering conversation in the doorway. She trailed before me into the living-room, in a splendidly feminine but grubby dressing-gown, and settled herself on a hard chair at the table, her bare feet hooked behind the bar of the chair, and her hand going out at once for a cigarette. (I imagined how it was with just that gesture that she would grope for a cigarette the moment she woke up in the morning.) It was over’a month since I had seen her, and if she had appeared in a different guise each time I had encountered her before, these were nothing to the change in her now. I suppose no man ever realizes how much of what he knows as a woman’s face is make-up; I know that my sister has often hooted in derision when I have remarked on some girl’s wonderful skin (You could take an inch off with a palette knife, my poor simpleton!) or the colour of another’s hair (It costs pounds to keep it like that!). This waxy, sunburned face with the pale lips and the sooty smudges round the eyes was older and softer than the other versions of it I had seen, there were imperfections of the skin, and habits of expression which grew out of the prevailing states of feeling in her life that I did not know, had made their fine grooves. Yet I recognized this face instantly; it was the one that had attracted me, all the time, beneath the others.

‘I drank a lot of vodka last night,’ she said. ‘Have you ever tried it? It’s true it doesn’t give you a hangover, but I feel as if my blood had evaporated, like a bottle of methylated spirits left uncorked. Do you know any Poles? There are a lot of Poles here, now. Perhaps, you’ve met the Bolnadoskys — Freddie and Basha, a lovely blonde? We were in their party and of course Poles can drink any amount of anything.’

‘How’s the modelling been going? Not off to Italy yet?’

‘Oh that.’ I might have been referring to something out of her remote past.’ I’ve been riding morning noon and night, training for the show. You knew that Colin and Billy asked me to jump Xantippe? I came third with her, two faults, in the Open.’

I remembered that Colin and Billy were the names of the twins I had met at the Alexanders’, but I was not sure about Xantippe. She saw this and said,’ You’ve heard of Xantippe, of course?’

‘What a shrew.’

She frowned. ‘Nonsense, people are jealous of her. Once she knows you won’t stand any cheek, she’s the most obedient horse in the world.’

‘I was talking nonsense. What about Xantippe?’

‘Well, she’s the most famous horse in this country, like Foxhunter in England — surely you’ve heard of him?’

We had some coffee, brought in by a pretty, giggling African girl who wore a lot of jewellery, and Cecil said, ‘Oh Eveline, you are a pet,’ and talked on about the horse show in which she had taken part.

‘So your modelling career is completely shelved,’ I said, at last.

She answered quickly, as if the subject bored her: ‘I’m really not the type to sit about posing indoors.’

‘It’s all very horsey, at the moment, eh?’

She jerked her chin on to her hand and blew a great smoke-screen between herself and her coffee-cup. ‘That’s the kind of life I was born to.’ I was delighted to see how she looked every inch the hard-riding, hard-drinking bitch, just as, in the Stratford, she had unconsciously assumed the spectacular narcissism of the mannequin.

I planted my feet stolidly before me and said, ‘That’s not what you told me. You said you were a butcher’s daughter, that just because your father had a few horses you’d drifted into a way of life that went with a class and a country you didn’t belong to.’

She was unperturbed. ‘I must have been mad. Drunk, more likely.’

Our talk picked up, slipped into naturalness, and we began to enjoy ourselves. Later the front-door bell rang again, and this time it really was the Salvation Army. She begged sixpence from me for the collection, and when she came back into the room she was suddenly stricken with a kind of helpless consciousness of her dishabille, and stood there running her hands through her hair and lifting the corners of her eyes with her fingers on her temples. ‘I should get dressed, I must get dressed,’ she kept saying. She held her dressing-gown tightly, exclaiming over its stains as if they had appeared since I’d come, and curling her toes as if she were ashamed of her bare feet. I knew she felt me looking at her, but I could not stop. Then she went away, and when she came back, bathed and dressed, she was the conventionally pretty, unremarkable girl I had met that first day at the Alexanders’.

Each spoke out of the train of thought with which he had been preoccupied while we were in separate rooms. ‘What made you come, after all this time?’ she said, fastening a bracelet on her wrist, and shaking her arm, as a dog settles into the feel of its collar. ‘I saw the name of your street. Where’s your child — it’s a girl, isn’t it?’ ‘A boy. Spending the week-end with the grandparents,’ she said, absently.

‘Don’t you care for him at all?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous! I adore him.’

From where she sat, with her beautiful, thin-ankled legs crossed, on the sofa, she regarded her living-room with the same kind of critical helplessness she had shown toward herself, before she was dressed. It was an unsatisfactory room. A florist’s bouquet was dead in its vase. (I wondered who had sent it, and why.) The modern print on the cushions and the curtains that blew limply at the balcony door was a design of masks and faces in yellow and black, cross-eyed and mean, like Hallowe’en pumpkin cutouts. There were two table lamps of black porcelain with irregular-shaped holes in their torsos, as if someone had dreamed of Henry Moore in an art china shop, and a large print of a vase of magnolias, all watery sheen and pastel light, like a reflection in a flattering mirror. It seemed to be a room of many attempts, all of which had petered out into each other.

‘- It’s not much of a reason,’ she said, broodingly, raking a cigarette out of a tarnished silver cigarette box. She was referring to my remark about having come to the flat because I had recognized the name of the street ‘Ugh, these must be at least three months old.’

I got up to give her one of my cigarettes. She continued to look at me inquiringly.

‘I don’t know. I was homesick. I’ve been tied up. Anyway, you’ve been very busy yourself.’

‘Well, you’re not busy today, I gather,’ she commented. I had been there an hour already.

‘I say! Am I keeping you from something — I’m sorry!’

She laughed. ‘I’m as free as a bird. All I have to do is to be at Hamish and Marion’s for lunch. What about you?’

‘I can’t simply turn up there again,’ I said.

‘Nonsense; people turn up there all the time. It’s what they like.’

I said with a sudden rush of desire to talk about myself: ‘I’ve had some curious experiences lately.’

She said, with interest and mild envy, ‘Really? Tell me, whom do you know, anyway? Who are these mysterious friends with whom you occupy yourself?’

‘I’ve been into the townships quite a few times; they’re extraordinary, you know.’

‘Where? What townships?’ It was clear that she had no idea what I was talking about.

‘The African townships — Sophiatown and so on.’

‘Oh, I know,’ her voice at once took on the tone of the old Londoner being told by the visitor that the Tower is well worth a visit. ‘Everyone who comes here gets all het up about the locations. They are simply too awful. Marion helps to run a crèche out in one of them, you know; Alexandra, or one of the others, I’m not sure.’

‘Last night I went to a house-warming party, in Sophiatown — ’

She tucked her legs up on the sofa and sat back, intrigued, smiling. ‘Oh no! A “house-warming”, if you don’t mind!’

The impulse to talk closed away as suddenly as it had opened. ‘It was quite a party,’ I said lamely, and smiled.

‘You should see Eveline sometimes, when she’s got up in her best. She’s got one old white dress of mine that she looks marvellous in. She spends every penny of her wages on clothes, and honestly, she looks a lot smarter than many white women, when she really puts her mind to it.’

I said,’ By the way, how’s Kit and the Karoo?’ and, with a quick turn of interest, she began:’ I must tell you. Hamish has just been down there for two weeks. .’ and launched into a long mischievous gossip about the Baxters.

I bought a great bunch of lilies and roses from an Indian vendor on the corner of a street, on the way to the Alexanders’, without much hope that this gift of flowers with which Marion Alexander’s own garden was in any case filled, would soften the obvious fact that I had turned up at The High House again chiefly to seek the company of one of the more regular guests. But I need not have worried; like those publishers of paper-back novelettes who must keep a long list of titles in print, the Alexanders wanted to keep their guest list full and varied, and welcomed the presence of casual if presentable hangers-on like myself, who would and could never offer reciprocal hospitality. There was the usual luxurious lunch, this time, as it was high summer, served in the garden beside the pool — a kind of Watteau picnic, with iced strawberries trickling maraschino into bowls of cream, and a great deal of pale wine that the women left lying about in their glasses on the grass. There were the usual amiable people, with plenty to say about nothing in particular, in whose company the fear, joy, strangeness, and muddle of life seemed mastered by a few catch phrases, like a tiger confined in a cricket-cage. Shadow lay on the grass lightly as the lace of thin foam on a calm sea. Every now and then the pool gave an enormous bright wink in the sun, and the laughter and voices seemed suddenly louder.

I borrowed a pair of trunks and swam, and later I borrowed some jodhpurs, so that I could ride out with Cecil, who wanted to show off to me on her horse — or rather, one of the Alexanders’ horses. She watched me indulgently, as if she were torn between wishing me to make an ass of myself, and bridling at the idea that anyone might suggest, by a word or a look, that that was what I was doing. In fact, she wished me to succeed and to fail, which excited me in that underworld of unspoken, sometimes unrealized, exchanges in which people retreat from or advance toward each other. But in the overt world of the Alexanders’ paddock, it left me unconcerned, for as I have never been a sportsman of any kind, I truly have — out of indifference — that contentment in the activity for its own sake which sportsmen grit their ambitious teeth and try to assume. Cecil put the horse through its paces in a little dressage (this was not the famous Xantippe that she was riding) and jumped him a few times; she rode very well, of course, though a trifle grimly, I thought, as if she were only aware, through all the movements that led up to it, of the successful conclusion of each thing she and the horse did. A few of the guests had strolled along to the paddock to watch, and they murmured approval and commented to each other; the twins, who had just arrived, woffled cries of pleasure in conditioned reflex each time she landed on the other side of an obstacle: ‘Oh, good girl! Well done, sweetie!’ Yet she came out of the manège subdued and even sulky, like a jockey who, after a race, finds his feet on the ground and himself no part of the yelling crowd.

For myself, I was finding a particular lulled and sentient ease in the nature of my presence in the Alexanders’ garden that day; even the borrowed clothes contributed to the feeling that I was gratuitously dipping into the pleasures of a life for which I had to take no responsibility, pleasures for which I would not have to settle, even with myself. Pleasures, indeed, for which I perhaps would not have cared to have to settle.

I saw Cecil several times during the following week. I took her to a play that I don’t think she liked very much, and, on another night, to a new restaurant she knew about. Whenever I went to fetch her she was stunningly dressed and looking beautiful, and it was easy for me to escort her as if I were taking a lovely and entertaining exhibit about, minding that doors did not catch her dress nor the wind her hair; I was not troubled by her at all. Each time, as the door banged to, the flat was left behind her like a discarded chrysalis, and, as her little boy was always in bed by the time I came, all I saw of him was, once, a crayon picture of a sun with a smile and a creature with two legs as long as a late afternoon shadow, that was lying on the passage floor. When she had had a few drinks, Cecil unfailingly became gay, just as you can depend upon a cat to strike up a purr after milk, and we were both in that stage of acquaintance when to each the other’s small stock of stories and anecdotes is new, so that each seems to the other a fund of wit and charm.

Steven telephoned me, but I did not have a chance to see him; he turned up at the office one lunch-time with an Indian, to ask me to come to a boxing match. Steven’s elegance always amazed me; I could not imagine how those trousers creased to a fine line, those well-brushed suède shoes, that smoothly-hanging tie, could come out of the permanent makeshift of the sort of place he lived in. It made me ruefully conscious of the fact that I, by contrast, reflected only too truthfully the state of my flat; sometimes my shirt was none too clean, because I had forgotten to make up my bundle for the wash-woman, there were buttons missing on the sleeves of my suit, and so long as the holes in my socks were where they could not be seen once my shoes were on, I continued to wear them.

‘You are becoming rather elusive,’ said Steven. ‘I suppose it’s the car. This is Dick Chaputra, you’ve heard of him, of course.’

‘It’s time to forget it, if you have,’ the Indian said, looking pleased.

I wondered at the odd variety of things I was supposed to have heard of in Johannesburg. We shook hands and Chaputra immediately took a piece of the dried meat that people in South Africa call biltong out of his pocket and, having offered it round, began to eat it, looking pleased with himself all the time.

Chaputra took the chair I gave him, but Steven, as usual, preferred to wander about the office while we talked, inspecting everything with his amiable and inquiring gaze, and perching where he felt like it.’ Dick’s just been to India,’ he said, as if it were an unaccountable whim for anyone to have indulged.

‘How’d he like it?’

The Indian’s grin tightened on the thong of leathery meat, loosened another tidbit. ‘Awful,’ he said, with his mouth full. ‘Boy, I wouldn’t live there for anything. D’you know, in Bombay, you see hundreds of people sleeping in the streets? It’s a fact. That’s where they live, just sleeping outside in the streets every night.’

‘Worse than natives,’ said Steven, opening his mouth, curling his tongue back to probe the socket of a tooth, and widening his nostrils. He chuckled to himself.

The Indian spoke English with the typical South African accent and intonation; if I looked away from his plump dark face, his satin-bright eyes, the white teeth, and thick, fly-away black hair that gave him that combination of Orientalism and aggressively Western boyishness that many Indians outside of India seem to have, I might have been listening to the voice of any of the white South African youths who passed me in the street every day. I asked him how long ago his family had come from India.

‘My grandfather was born there,’ he said. ‘I never saw the old man. But I’m telling you, you can have India, for me.’

As we could not go out anywhere to lunch together, I thought I would have sandwiches sent up to the office. I went into the outer office to ask Miss McCann, who would be going out to lunch in a few minutes, to order them for me from the usual place.

‘Two ham and two cheese?’

This was what I had most days, when I did not go out. ‘No, of course that’s not enough. Mixed sandwiches, for three.’

She said nothing, and kept her eyes on the pencil in her hand, as if she were waiting for me to go. When I was back in the office, I remembered some personal letters for the post, and rang for her. We were talking, and I had forgotten what I had rung for, when she appeared. She stood in the open doorway and did not speak. I said, ‘Yes, Miss McCann?’ She said, after a moment, ‘You rang for me, Mr Hood.’ There seemed to me to be something ridiculous about our exchange; then I realized that it was because instead of coming into the room, she was standing in the doorway like that.

‘Oh yes,’ I said, remembering. ‘If you’d just put these in with the mail’ — and I held the letters out to her. She stood for a moment without moving, and in a flash I understood, and then said, motioning with the letters, ‘Here they are. ‘I stood holding them out to her like a lettuce offered to coax a rabbit, and slowly she came, looking not at me nor at anyone else. But as she took them, I stopped her. ‘Just a minute — this one’s to go airmail, and this, but ask about this one, perhaps it could go by ordinary mail, find out how long that would take — ’ And so I kept her for perhaps two minutes, in that room, unable to get out. Steven struck up an exaggeratedly careless and swaggering chatter, displaying familiarity with my ways, and, as Miss McCann took the letters and walked out, was saying, in a lordly, weary manner, ‘Where’s the beer hidden today Toby? — Toby always has a bottle or two tucked away somewhere — ’

The door closed finally and precisely behind her, first the handle rose, then the latch clicked into place. My heart was thumping and I was suddenly irritated with Steven, for behaving as badly as the girl. Yet, after all, his only alternative was the negative rudeness of ignoring her; I understood, now, that he dared not show the common politeness of greeting her, as any man might expect to say ‘Good afternoon’ to any woman.

It was true that I did have a couple of bottles of beer in the cupboard, which I kept there to drink when I had lunch in the office, on the principle, which even I didn’t believe, that it was a refreshing thing to do in summer. We drank it, tepid as it was, from some glasses I found put away unwashed in a cupboard (Amon was having one of his days off, to attend to the affair of his mother and Jagersfontein location) and, at last, the sandwiches came. The Indian looked all round the room, smiling, while he ate, and asked me direct, brisk questions about the business of Aden Parrot in South Africa, rather as if he had been called in to give an estimate of the firm’s assets. This was all done with the airy politeness of commercial habit; although he was probably a year or two older than I was, he even called me ‘sir’. When he left the room for a few minutes, the door had scarcely shut behind him when Steven said with the air of an impresario, ‘D’you know who he is? D’you remember that series of robberies in Hillbrow? You were here already, I’m sure you were. The big case where one of the witnesses disappeared? D’you remember? — Well, that’s his crowd. He’s Lucky Chaputra. That’s why he went off to India, to lie low. They didn’t have anything on him, but they knew the whole outfit was his. Couldn’t pin him down on a thing.’

‘What’s he busy with now?’ I said.

‘Resting,’ said Steven. ‘He’s got plenty of dough. Boy, if he were a white man he’d be a mining magnate or something. He’s cleverer than a cage of monkeys. He’s got a white man who plays for him on the stock exchange — yes, he’s made money like nobody’s business, out of gold shares. But he’s a restless boy, doesn’t know what to do with himself.’

Chaputra came back into the room again, chuckled, and said,’ Nobody saw me’ — he had slipped into the men’s room in the building, which was, of course, meant only for white men. He shook hands and thanked me in his gauche South African accent: ‘Gee, that was a nice lunch, man. Thanks, Mr Hood.’ I felt as if I had given a schoolboy a treat.

‘You should see his Cadillac,’ Steven waved his long arms in ecstasy. Then murmured to me as they went out:’ I know it’s not the car, with you, I suppose you’re busy with some woman. Well, that’s how it is with all of us at some time or other.’

‘I’m sorry about tonight, I should’ve liked to have seen the fight. What about next week. Are you doing anything Monday night?’

Immediately he lapsed into important vagueness, a device that, I had noticed before, he used to cover up the fact that for him, next week was too far off to have any reality. ‘Well, you see, I don’t know, I may have to go away on business for a few days. . ’

‘Business! What business have you to do outside Johannesburg?’

He made a graceful, swaggering exit, roaring with laughter that made the lie and the evasion inoffensive, and praised me out of all proportion for my mild perspicacity.

That afternoon, before she left the office for the day, Miss McCann, smelling strongly of lavender water from a fresh application, appeared in my office accompanied by a fair, red-faced young man to whom I had nodded once or twice before when he had come to see her. He could easily have been her brother, an earlier-born member of the family, who had got more than his fair share of the vigour which had given out before her conception, but as he walked in behind her, I realized what should have been obvious to me before: he was her young man. I thought they must have come to make an announcement of some sort — perhaps that they were getting married and put on a grin of suitable expectancy, which was met with a stony, puffed-up stare from the young man, and was not met at all by Miss McCann, who kept her eyes on the tray full of old pencils and empty ball pens before me.

Embarrassment settled like dust upon the room.

‘I know I have to give you two weeks’ notice,’ said the girl in her faint voice, ‘but I would like you to let me go. I mean, without waiting.’

The young man moved up a little closer behind her, looking straight at me. He had that look about his mouth which suggested that he was saying, silently, things to himself that would encounter some break in the impulse between brain and tongue, and would never come out, except as some kind of shameful, strangled cry.

I said, ‘I see. When would you like to leave?’

‘I want to finish now, tonight.’

I said, trying to keep the balance of my indifference from exaggeration,’ Have you worked out your pay, with holiday pay, and so on?’

She whispered, with a hint of tears to come, ‘Yes.’

I had a sudden thought of how ugly she would be if she cried; perhaps her face, so nondescript now, would wash away altogether. I pitied the stocky, resentful young man.

She handed me a slip of paper on which she had neatly typed the sum. I made out a cheque, and there was no sound in the room but the slither of the pen and the young man’s breathing. She took the cheque and went out, the young man trooping behind her, like a bull that has been led into the ring and out again, without using the blind urges in his breast. Before he closed the door he turned and paused a second, a pause that was directed at me. I said, ‘Yes?’ but, as I had thought, the impulse that stirred in him was too muddled, too little understood to find words or action. They were gone.

For minutes I felt a tingling braggadocio, I wanted to feel that, truly, I had insulted and menaced the girl. I walked up and down the small room in a kind of nervous turmoil that some other, confusedly detached part of myself watched with excitement, as a scientist might observe in himself the phenomena of the fever which at last he is able to record subjectively. Why didn’t I dismiss without a second thought the idiotic girl and the whole stupid incident? It was an incident which, in the given set of circumstances and with the given participants, was so completely predictable that it was nothing but a cliché. On the face of it, I should have been bored by the whole thing. But the fact was that, once in it, it was not boring, it was not to be experienced as a standard social situation, because, once in it, all the unguessed-at things that underlie one’s predictable reactions leap up and take over; one cannot take them into account before, because they can only be touched off by certain situations — if those situations do not happen to arise around one, one could go through one’s life innocent and ignorant of their potential existence.

How was I, how was anyone to know it was like this? This evil embarrassment, a thing like a spell, like the moment in a dream when you wish urgently to speak and nothing comes out of your open mouth, that had suddenly sucked all the normality out of a room in which I sat between two men and a drab girl whose maximum assertion in life would not exceed the making of a crocheted tea-cosy. How could we, all of us in that room, have generated it? The skunk-odour of the spirit, down into which my head had been thrust and out of which I had now come up smarting-eyed and gasping, there’s a snoutful of it for you, my boy. And it was all so stupid and petty. A nobody of a girl thinks she’s too good to come into a room where a white man is sharing lunch with two black men. That’s all. Yet there I was, in a strange thrill of irritation, contemptuous of the girl, longing to punch the young white man on the nose, impatient and angry with the black man. Like a savage! I kept saying to myself. Like a savage! And I did not know whether I meant Steven (I kept having a consciously cruel picture of him, dressed up — I thought — as he imagines a gentleman to dress, a fatuous cinema-smirk of worldliness on his black face) or the inarticulate, red-faced suitor of Miss McCann, or myself, in my state of unaccustomed belligerent excitement.

There is no distraction in the world to equal the pursuit of a woman, as men great and small have been demonstrating since Antony, and, as I had an arrangement to meet Cecil in the Stratford at six, my conscious preoccupation with the thought of her, as I made preparations to leave the office and join her, soon thrust down the incident beneath the lid of the past day. To hell with black men and white men and, indeed, all men. Oh the delightful, narrowing orbit of the evening, with the first whisky dissolving into peace and expectancy inside, the ice bobbing in the glass, and the woman, who, after so much thought, so much speculation, so much concentration of recollection in absence, really cannot be seen any more, so that you could not describe her face or the dress she is wearing, even if you had to — the total presence of the woman, imagined and real, all in one, beside you.

As the lift fell through the layers of the building, the thought came to me, almost from outside, that perhaps I wouldn’t talk to Cecil about what had happened; it was quite honestly a relief to think I didn’t have to, without going into any reasons with myself. I had, I supposed, an Eastern equation of women with pleasure; I fiercely resisted any impingement on this preserve.

Cecil would not have to go through the tests which Miss McCann had failed. There was no need to know how she would have met them.

She was sitting at the same table at which we had already sat several times before. She watched me come in with the down-turned smile that was always like a challenge putting you on your mettle for you did not quite know what. She said, ‘Where is Chibuluma?’

‘Why?’

‘I’ve been listening to that couple over there. They’re having a wonderful quarrel. She wants him to take a job at this place, and he says even though he doesn’t like “the flicks” he likes to know that in Johannesburg there are forty “flicks” for him to choose from if he does want to go.’

‘I think it’s right up in Northern Rhodesia somewhere.’

‘Just let me listen another minute. When I was a child, I could never eat at all in a hotel dining-room, I was so busy listening to other people. They say you never hear any good of yourself, but think of the things you hear about other people.’

Chapter 8

My relationship with Cecil moved with queer inconsequence. We dropped apart for days and met again. This did not slow, or change, or damp what was happening between us. She was very much a stranger to me, I realized; much different from the two or three women with whom I had had affairs at Oxford, and the girl in London with whom I had been in love. If any of those women had had a background and childhood entirely dissimilar to mine (and this was true of the Ebury street girl, certainly) at least we were both part of the old, old pattern of an ancient country, and our bones shared with its stones an ancestral memory. If we did not know what we were, we knew what we had been, and this continuity was unbroken by the trauma of the birth of several generations in a new civilization.

Like many people who are young now, Cecil apparently had been brought up into a life that did not have much meaning for her; the only difference was that she believed unquestioningly that meaningful ways of life existed, unchanged. For her, the trouble was that when she tried to follow one or the other, it was like reading from a formula from which one of the ingredients has always been left out. She seemed to have no doubts about the worthwhileness of the things she attempted, whether she wanted to be a mannequin in Rome or a champion show jumper; but like a bloodhound that has had no nose bred into it, she was guessing at the trail, and ran helter-skelter, looking back inquiringly all the time, uncertain if she were going the right way about her pursuit, and in the right style. Nothing came naturally to her.

She hardly ever spoke of her marriage, except in the most casual fashion, not, I think, because the fact of its failure was too important and painful to her, but because she was ashamed that she thought of it so little. It was like one of those dresses that she said had ‘never been a success’, that I once found stuffed in the back of a cupboard to which she had sent me to look for a thermos flask. She lived in today, this minute, and if the past or the future caught at her, struggled helplessly in moods that, watching her, you could give a name to, but that she herself did not relate to the circumstances of her life. She had the blues: so she shifted her feelings from the particular to the general.

One Sunday afternoon we were riding together down the valley below Alexanders’, when we came upon a deserted house. It was during early November, when in Johannesburg an extraordinary theatrical light lay every afternoon between the sky and the city. The summer rains, sucked down so quickly that the earth was ringing hard again a day after storms and torrents, had produced a sudden, astonishing, deep-green luxuriance of foliage; all the trees, fir, gum, acacia and willow, sugar bush and poplar, had taken on full plumage. Between the black-blue greenness, like an optical illusion of bloom created by the damp air, there were huge purple smudges and pale mauve blurs — the jacaranda trees in flower, and behind them, over them, the sky, heavy with unshed rain, blue and purple with charged atmosphere, exchanged with the trees the colour of storm.

The air was cool and massive and the horses went slowly up the neglected drive under more jacarandas. As always on Sundays, there was drumming and far-off singing somewhere down among the trees, where groups of Africans who were servants in the nearby suburbs were having a prayer-meeting; and Cecil was telling me a long anecdote about the first wife of John Hamilton, the Alexanders’ crocodile-hunting friend (he was at Alexanders’ that day), with the peculiar relish women have for the iniquities of their own sex. The horses stopped of their own accord on the overgrown terrace where last year’s leaves rotted, and she said, gaily, as if in answer to a suggestion, ‘Come on, then — let’s go in.’ We hooked the reins on to an iron spike that must once have held the pole of an awning, and tramped over the flagstones. We peered in at the windows, rattled the front door, and Cecil said, ‘Oh look!’ and ran to pick a yellow rose from the bushes that had thrown a defence of barbed entanglements across the terrace steps. They scratched across her boots. Though it was not more than ten years old, and, from the condition of the paint, could not have been empty longer than six months, the place had the air of a ruin that all things that are the work of men have about them the instant men desert them.

‘Oh, I want to get in!’ she said, rattling at the french doors that led on to the terrace. I looked up and around. Someone had begun to make alterations to the upper story of the house, but had never finished; there were builders’ planks and ropes about, and raw brickwork gaped where half a gable had been taken away. We struggled and laughed while I tried to lift her to test a likely-looking window, with a broken pane, but it was round the side of the house where there was no terrace to shorten the distance from window to ground, and she couldn’t reach the latch. We became idiotically determined to get in. ‘Wait a minute! What if we brought Danny round and you got on his back?’ ‘No, let’s try the kitchen first.’ At this, she turned and ran ahead of me through the yard and shook at the kitchen door; it was fast, and she left it at once, in the manner of someone merely satisfying another that he will have to resort to her plan, and ran up the three steps to the next door and took its handle firmly in both hands. But as she touched it, it gave way. She looked round at me, astonished and smiling. And we trooped in. It was the scullery door, and from it we went into the kitchen. ‘Natives must have broken in,’ she said. There was a chaos of emptiness and smashed glass; the cupboards had been wrenched open, the light fittings lay spintered like hoar frost upon the floor: the moment when it had been ransacked seemed to grip it still. In the passage and the living-rooms, mice-pills were all about the floor, and everywhere, through all the empty rooms, drifts of silvery down, blown in from the catkins in the garden, lifted and sank in the draught of our passing.

‘This must have been a nice room,’ she said, placing herself at the french doors and looking out through the dirty glass from the context of some imaginary setting. Outside, we saw one of the horses snort, but could not hear it. She wandered from room to room, touching the dead wires that hung, wrenched loose, from the wall, the empty sockets and brackets. ‘The telephone must have been here.’ ‘This was for a lamp, I suppose.’ Sadness settled on her movements; wondering, she took my hand and clung to it without noticing me. Was she thinking of places she had left somewhere in her disregarded life, lights she had touched on, a pattern of rooms her feet had come to know as a blind man knows? Perhaps it was not as simple as that; the disquiet of the emptiness seemed to take a sounding in her; she was aware of depth and silence, communications the telephone could not carry, a need of assurance the electric light could not bring.

She had a strong fear of herself, as many active people do. I sensed this fear, and, excited by it, began to kiss her. She let me kiss and caress her with a kind of amazement; she was like one of those people who, called up by a conjuror from an audience and told, do this, do that, produces something unimaginable — a bunch of roses, a cage of mice, a Japanese flag. Her open eyes were watching me, her mouth did not participate with the practised pleasure-giving I had found there before. Only the nipples, those unflattering and indiscriminate responders who really never learn to know the hand of a lover from any other stimulus, automatically touched out at the palm of my hand through the stuff of her clothes. ‘For Christ’s sake!’ she said suddenly, recalled to herself. ‘Not here.’ Social caution, her only and familiar arbiter, restored her to a sense of her own known world. The fit of the blues was gone; I had provided her with a situation that she could deal with.

Someone who loved her would have done much more. But she did not know what she needed, and accepted, without knowledge of failed expectation, my preoccupation with the taste of nicotine and lipstick in her mouth.

As we rode back along the valley, a pile of livid light from the hidden sun showed along the grassy ridges. A black man wearing an old white sheet robe and carrying a long stick with a piece of blue cloth tied to it, passed us on his way to join the worshippers we could just see, going in a stooping, leaping, yelling procession round a drummer, where a knot of acacias made a meeting-place. He was singing under his breath, and he murmured ‘Afternoon, baas.’

When we got back to the Alexanders’, Cecil remarked, with the confidence of an order where dirt and chaos went with one side, and beauty and power went with the other, ‘We really ought to get hold of the agents for that empty house. All the out-of-work natives for miles around must be sleeping there. You should just see it, Marion.’

The first time I made love to her was one night in her living-room, after we had been to dinner at the house of some friends of hers. What a lack of spontaneity there is about the first act of love between two people who seem familiar enough with each other on other levels of association! In the dark each apprehends in the other a secret creature who never appeared across the dinner table, or bought a newspaper in the street, or leaned forward to make a point in a political discussion. I could imagine that becoming aware of a life after death might be something like that: all the accepted manifestations of the awareness of being, stilled, like an engine cut off, and then, out of a new element of silence, another way of being. She groped, at last, for the table beside the divan: ‘Can you find me a cigarette?’ ‘Let me find the lamp first.’ ‘No, no, don’t turn it on. Here’s the box.’ We sat up in the dark with the divan cover pulled round us, smoking, like people come to shelter after a disaster of some sort — shipwreck or storm. I dressed and left not long after midnight; people who had been visiting one of the flats along the corridor were making their farewells and we emerged from the building together — they were a grey-faced bald man with strong hair curling out of his nose and ears, as if it had turned and grown down into instead of out of that cranium, and one of those heavy women who, despite large bosoms, corsets, and jewellery, when they reach middle age suddenly look like men. The moment the last good-bye had left their lips they sank into the grimness that is one kind of familiarity. They came along behind me like jailers, and the slam of our car doors, theirs and mine, as we drove off, was the final locking-up of the night.

But, the next time, I went to bed with Cecil in her warm, crumpled bed that smelled of perfume and cigarette smoke. She argued about the light, but I wanted to see her face, to know what she was feeling. (Who knows what women feel, in their queer, gratuitous moment?) She looked, in the light, like she had that Sunday morning, in her dressing-gown. Pride, bewilderment, vanity, greed, want, and determination were not smoothed out by the banality of make-up; her eyes were faintly bloodshot from sun, smoke, and gin, and the shape of her smile, drawn in knowingly at one corner, was there, marked for ever on her face, even when her mouth was in repose. At the back of her neck, the real smell of her hair came out from under the chemical scents of the processes it was subjected to in that be-curtained shop below my office — the real smell of blonde pigment, waxy and acid, which I always notice at once, perhaps because I am dark.

‘I didn’t want you to see my stomach,’ she said. ‘I can’t bear to look at it myself.’

‘Why, what’s supposed to be wrong with it?’

She rolled over face-down with her elbows tight to her sides and said resentfully, ‘Haven’t you ever seen a woman who’s had a child? It ruins the skin of your stomach. It looks like crinkle paper.’

But whatever the human climate to which she had been exposed in her life had done to weather her face, her body was entirely itself, sure and beautiful. She was a loving woman in bed, clever and full of tender enthusiasm: Now just wait, she would say, just wait a minute. . as if her caresses were carefully prepared surprises that must not be discovered before the right moment. The narrow bed, intended for a single sleeper, kept her close to me as I wanted, all night; there was no inch away to which she could move, even if she had wanted to. Her whole body burned with a steady warmth of energy, even while she slept, and only her buttocks and her breasts were cool, the way some people’s hands are always cool.

I got up to leave very early in the morning, so that I should be out of the flat before the servant came in. I was coming back down the passage from the bathroom when I saw, standing in the open doorway of the second bedroom, in the colourless light that comes in before dawn, a little boy. He was barefoot, and in mis-buttoned pyjamas, and he was holding his pillow. He was quite awake, but perhaps not sure where he had awakened: in some grown-up part of the night he did not know. But even as he watched me the light began to golden, and he must have known it was morning. He did not speak and he did not move while I passed his room and disappeared through the next doorway. Cecil turned at the sound of me dressing, moved her mouth as if she were tasting, and put out her hand to me. I said: ‘Your child met me in the passage. What will he make of that.’

‘Don’t have to worry about him,’ she murmured. ‘He won’t say anything.’ When I was ready to go, she suddenly woke up properly and called me back to kiss her and reproached me for trying to slip away without saying ‘a proper good morning’.

There was no one in the passage when I left, and the door of the second bedroom was shut.

Chapter 9

I wonder why it is that the life of poverty is regarded as more real than any other life. In books and films, the slice of life traditionally is cut from the lower crust; in almost all of us with full bellies, whose personal struggles are above the sustenance level, there is a nervous, even a respectful feeling that life may be elsewhere. The poor man has got it; he staggers beneath its violent weight, of course; one wouldn’t wish to be in his shoes — but he has it.

I thought about this idea a lot, at this time, when I was so often in the townships with Steven, and sometimes stayed for a night at Sam’s two-roomed house, sleeping on the divan in his living-room. I thought about it, but I never came to any firm conclusion. What do we mean by real life? That which is closest to the basic trinity, shared by all creatures: survival, food, reproduction? Then we indulge in romantic fallacy, stemming from some atavistic guilt, because, in life, reality is not an absolute, but consists of one set of conditions or another. To regard total pre-occupation with survival, food, and reproduction as the criterion of reality is to ignore other needs that men have created for themselves, and which, in combination with the basic ones, make men’s reality. In a society where laws take care of a man’s survival among his fellows, his part in commerce and industry ensures that he will eat as a matter of course, and his reproductive function is secured by the special mating system of marriage, the greatest reality of his life may consist in his meeting the growth of the financial empire which his brain and energy have created. The greatest reality, for the scientist, must lie in his patient onslaught on the opposition of the formula he can’t get right; for an artist, in accepting that no one, at present, will accept his particular vision. That is ‘real life’; for each man, the demands of his own condition.

I decided that possibly life in the townships seemed more ‘real’ simply because there were fewer distractions, far fewer vicarious means for spending passion, or boredom. To each human being there, the demands of his or her own condition came baldly. The reality was nearer the surface. There was nothing for the frustrated man to do but grumble in the street; there was nothing for the deserted girl to do but sit on the step and wait for her bastard to be born; there was nothing to be done with the drunk but let him lie in the yard until he’d got over it. Among the people I met with Cecil, frustrated men threw themselves into golf and horse-racing, girls who had had broken love affairs went off to Europe, drunks were called alcoholics, and underwent expensive cures. That was all. That was the only difference.

But was it? With so much to comfort and distract them, don’t people perhaps learn, at last, to feel a little less? And doesn’t that make life that much less ‘real’? — But, again, this sounded convincing, but seemed disproved in actual fact. For the people who frequented The High House (and also myself, my friends and acquaintances in England) made a great deal of their feelings, nervous breakdowns and other long-drawn-out miseries followed on their misadventures, and they knew that life very easily comes to a standstill; but the men and women of the townships, after brief and public mourning, wiped their noses with the backs of their hands, as it were, and did the next thing, knowing that nothing could interrupt life. There was the woman who lived in one of the houses that shared a yard with Sam’s house. One day she stopped us as we were entering the yard, and spoke to Sam. She was a cheerful, dirty slut with the usual pretty, milk-and-pee smelling baby falling over her feet, and Ella had often complained about her. When she had gone back to her house, Sam said to me, ‘D’you know anybody, any friend of yours in Sandown? That woman’s looking for a backyard room somewhere. She’s got people she washes for there, and she’d like a room nearby.’

‘What about her house?’

‘Her husband’s disappeared. Perhaps some of your friends have got a servant’s room they don’t use.’

Then, one night, there was a murder close by The House of Fame. Steven was hurrying home to one of his own drinking-and-talking sessions which I and a number of the hangers-on had not waited to begin (it was quite common for Steven to invite you to his room and then fail to be there when you arrived), and he came upon the dying man, lying in the street. He had pulled him up on to the steps of the nearest house, but: ‘He’d had it. Gone,’ Steven told us when he came in. ‘I’m sorry I’m so darned late, Toby, I’ve been fixing up insurance for an old Indian who owns a string of bug-houses’ — this was what the township cinemas were commonly called — ‘and, you know — he’s the sort of old chap who every time he wants to tell you something, no matter what, he’s got to begin right at the beginning of his life and lead up to it.’ He grinned, said, ‘Mind,’ and pushed aside the legs of the people who were sitting on his bed, so that he could put his smart tan leather briefcase under the bed. He straightened up and peered down at the side of his jacket, twitching at the sleeve. ‘There’s nothing on my suit, is there?’ One of the young men, who had never owned such a suit, jumped up to examine it, hitting at the cloth and saying, in Suto, that there was nothing to worry about. And it was true that there was a only a little red township dust on the suit, that dust that seemed more the powder of decaying buildings than the surface of the earth. But there was a smear of blood on one of Steven’s shirt-cuffs, like bright rust. ‘He’s made a bit of a mess of me,’ he said, and sighed. ‘Never mind, poor chap couldn’t help it.’

‘It was a gang, eh?’ someone said.

Steven nodded. ‘I should think he had it coming to him. It was a knife job, no chances. It must have happened about ten minutes before I came along, that’s all. They’d cleared off. People in the house there didn’t hear anything. When I saw he was finished, I just said, here you are, and skipped out as quick as I could.’ He was sitting down, now, and a glass of brandy dangled in his hands between his knees, in his characteristic fashion. He wrinkled his nose, not at the dead man, but at death. ‘A short life and a happy one,’ he said, and drank.

When I woke up in the morning in Sam’s house, I did have the strong, vivid feeling that life and death were breathing on me, hot and cold. No doubt in my own flat in a white suburb, or in the Alexanders’ house among the paddocks and the swimming pools and the Jacarandas, you were surrounded by living and dying, too. But there, you were not aware of it outside the personal aspects. In the townships, on a Saturday night, there was only an hour or two, between the late end of the long night and the early beginning of the day, when groans and laughter and fires were out. For the rest of the time, the whole cycle of living made a continuous and simultaneous assault on your senses. ‘There’s never a moment’s peace and quiet,’ Sam would say, standing in his little room with his old typewriter in his hands, as if in the space of those four thin walls there might be some corner of acoustical freak where he could put himself down and not hear the men shouting in the street, a procession of some sort, perhaps a school or a funeral parade, children quarrelling, a baby crying, a woman singing at a washtub, and the rusty bray and slam of the door of the communal lavatory in the yard as people trooped in and out of it. And in my flat, Steven would wander restlessly from the balcony to the living-room, saying, uneasily, ‘Man, I’m used to Sophiatown, there’s always something going on.’

I would walk with Sam in the early evening out on to the waste ground near his house. It was a promontory of ashes and clinker, picked bald, by urchins and the old, even of the rubbish that was dumped there, and it looked back over most of the township. At that time, the day seems to relent, even the dreariest things take on disguising qualities in the soft light. The ashheap took on the dignity of loneliness; we might have been standing on the crater of a burnt-out volcano, the substance beneath our feet gave no life to anything, animal or vegetable, it was a ghost of the fecund earth. Behind, and down below, everything teemed, rotted and flourished. There were no street-lights, and in the night that seemed to well up like dark water round the low, close confusion of shacks and houses — while, higher up, where we were, the day lingered in a pink mist — cooking fires showed like the flame of a match cupped in the hand. Sam said to me once, in the rather awkwardly jocular manner which he almost always used when speaking English, probably because it had been the way in which he first had managed to bridge the gaps of unease between himself and his first white acquaintances — ‘I suppose when you get back, this will seem like an ugly dream.’

But he was wrong, and it was hard for me to explain to him why, without having him attribute, on my part, too much to the romance of foreignness and poverty, the picturesque quality of other people’s dirt. He had his inner eye fixed quietly and steadily on his and his people’s destiny as decent bourgeois, his curse fell equally upon the roistering wretchedness of life in the townships, and his own childhood, when, as he described to me one evening up on that same ash-heap, he had herded tribal cattle in the Northern Transvaal. I sometimes thought, when I suddenly became aware of him through some expression on his face or something he said, how except when he was playing jazz, there was not one moment when his being was not quietly revolving on this purpose. His manner was a mixture of anxiousness and sad determination. He was full of dogged hope, a person whose life was pinned to a future. Just as Steven was hopeless, a person committed entirely to the present. Sam said of him, sadly: ‘Steven is just a white man in a black man’s skin, that’s the trouble’; which, taking into account the context of Sam’s affection and concern for Steven, was another way of saying what Anna Louw had said when she complained that Steven cared damn all for the African people. The only difference was, Anna saw Steven’s attitude as loss to his people, Sam saw it as a loss to Steven himself. Yet it was Steven who had some affection for the life down there, below the ash-heap, it was Steven who lived it as the reality of the present to which he was born — the only sure destiny any man has.

It was this aspect of township life, Steven’s aspect, if you like, that would make it impossible for me ever to look back upon it, from another country, as ‘an ugly dream’. It was no beauty, God knows, but it was no dream, either. It would not vanish from the mind’s eye; I should be able to believe in its existence even when I was somewhere else.

The first time I stepped out of Sam’s house on a Sunday morning, after spending the night there, the men and women stared at me, looked at me quizzically, and passed sniggering remarks — a white man who slept in the house of Africans was unheard-of, and under the greatest suspicion; a concupiscent grin informed the face of an old man, and he moved aside for me, saying’ Morning, baas’, for what could I have come for but sex?; and even when I was well known as an unexplained visitor at Sam’s house, and I took his little daughter by the hand down the road to buy her an orange from the row of vendors’ tin huts and home-made stalls and wares spread out on sacking on the ground, known as the ‘shops’, I was never anything but a stranger. But, as a stranger, I found in these places and among these people something I had never found at home. There were summer nights in Sophiatown, where Steven lived, when no one seemed to go to bed at all. The worse smells were made harmless by the warm, sour smell of beer. Urchins gambled under the street-lights that, spaced sparsely, attracted into their yellow light people as well as moths. There was singing and strolling; now and then one of the big American cars that the gangsters use would tear scrunching over the stones, down the street, setting long tongues of dust uncurling. The girls clicked in their throats with quick annoyance and screamed defiance in defence of their dirtied dresses. There was giggling and flirting. Some were primped and got up in high-heeled shoes, some were barefoot, dressed in a torn series of ragged garments, one overlaying the holes of another, and the last, inevitably, in spite of everything, worn through at the vital places, breasts and backside. On such a night, suddenly, a procession would burst round the corner, swaying, rocking, moving by a musical peristalsis: men and women and children, led by a saxophone and tin whistles, a rehearsal for a wedding due to take place next day. They sang and chanted, a sound to lift stones.

The life of the townships, at such moments, seemed to feed a side of my nature that had been starved; it did for me what Italy or Greece had done for other Englishmen, in other times. It did not change me; it released me and made me more myself.

Chapter 10

‘You don’t have to worry about him, he won’t say anything,’ Cecil had said of her child, when he saw me walking down the passage of her flat in the early hours of the morning. She was more than half asleep, and her tongue was unguarded when she spoke. Whatever that casual truth implied, I found, after the first automatic twinge of jealousy, that it was powerless to affect me. I had another life, outside the parenthesis of the time I spent with her; she, too, had hers. Each tacitly forwent inquiry into that of the other, because each suspected that the discovery of his own life by the other would make the parenthetic shared relationship impossible. I heard her say, to some people with whom we were having coffee after a cinema, ‘Toby does a lot of work among the natives.’ Later, when we were alone, I asked her, ‘What made you tell the Howards that I do a lot of “work” among natives?’ ‘Well, don’t you?’ she said, yawning. ‘I never have,’ I said. She let it drop; she assumed that anyone who had anything to do with Africans was concerned with charity or uplift, and that was that — she wasn’t going to quibble over what she satisfied herself could only be a matter of definition. And I, I left it at that, too. I had had my little flirt with danger by questioning her at all; thankfully, I hadn’t had to take it any further.

For I knew that if I told Cecil that my closest friends in Johannesburg were black men, and that I ate with them and slept in their houses, I would lose her. That was the fact of the matter. And I was damned if I was going to lose her. There was a good chance that her sophistication would save her from the classic reaction of horror and revulsion, but her strong instinct for the conventionally unconventional mores of the wealthy ‘smart’ set would have labelled me queer (not in the accepted, fashionable sense) and ruled me out. I knew that it was natural and unremarkable that I should sleep at Sam’s, in the township, on Sunday night, and in Cecil’s bed on Monday, since it is natural and unremarkable for a man to have friends and a woman to love. What did it matter that, because she did not know that it was natural and un-remarkable, she was not told about it. The facts of my having been there, at Sam’s, and being here, at Cecil’s, existed whether accepted or not. So, unaware, in her own life, Cecil demonstrated the truth she would have denied with every drop of blood in her body, had she been confronted with it openly.

For herself, she was often secretive and vague about her movements. She was hiding, I thought, not something, but nothing; she did not want me to know how she spent her days, because she herself suspected the style and rightness of what she did, and in imagination, she transferred her own judgement of herself, to me. She wanted no confirmation of this from outside. In fact, she wanted assurance that she was not as she suspected herself to be; and anyone who could have presented her to herself, strongly enough, as something other, could have made her into that other. She saw almost nothing of her family, even of her younger sister Margaret, whose clean pretty face was troubled by none of the ambiguities that had endeared her elder sister’s to me, and she spent more time than she always admitted with her great friend Rosamund Bell. The Bell woman was divorced, too, and had been left in possession of a splendid establishment so well-stocked with servants, children, and animals that it did not seem there could ever have been room for the husband who had provided all this. For women of a certain economic level, living on alimony seemed quite a profession in Johannesburg; it was taken for granted by many that, once having been married, they were entitled to be provided for, for life, in idleness. Another woman whom I met sometimes at the Alexanders’, a lively and charming woman, had been living for ten years with a man whom she admitted she could not afford to marry, because she would then lose the income of her ex-husband’s alimony — she and her lover used it to finance their trips to Europe. Like these women, Cecil lived on alimony, too, but either she was a bad manager, or the alimony was not as generous as theirs, for she grumbled continually about lack of money. It was true that though she had (what seemed to me to be, anyway) luxurious clothes, the flat was poorly stocked and shabby; the glass shelf in the bathroom was crowded with perfumes and elaborate cosmetics for the bath, but the towels were threadbare and too few, and, although there was always plenty of whisky and a bottle or two of good wine in the cupboard, she would make a great, despairing to-do, every now and then, in the kitchen, because too much butter had been used, or the maid, Eveline, had ordered a particular kind of fruit for the child, before the season of plenty had brought the price down. I remember a fuss about peaches. ‘Why can’t he eat bananas? Why must a child have fancies for peaches at sixpence each? Bananas are nourishing and I don’t want to hear any more nonsense about peaches, d’you hear? Honestly, Eveline, you seem to think I’m made of money.’

The servant, Eveline, laughed, and shouted to the little boy, Keith, in her loud, affectionate voice, ‘Come on, Cookie, let’s go up to the vegetable place. Mommy says we must eat bananas, bananas.’ The child trailed along beside her, hanging from her hand, while she laughed and swung the basket, and called to friends and delivery men as she went. Standing beside me on the balcony, Cecil watched them crossly. The boy turned and waved, fingers moving stiffly from the knuckle, a baby’s wave. She waved back. ‘If only he didn’t look exactly like me,’ she said, in irritation. ‘Why shouldn’t he?’ I asked, but she was serious. ‘You don’t know how horrible it is to reproduce yourself, like that. Every time he looks at me, and I see that face. . ’ It was as if all the distrust she had of herself was projected into the way she saw the little boy.

‘Women are strange,’ I smiled at her. ‘I should have thought it would have pleased you.’ What I was really thinking was that surely she would prefer the child to resemble her, rather than his father, from whom she was divorced, and for whom she felt, at best, indifference.

The servant, Eveline, shielded Cecil from the irritation of the child, and the child from Cecil’s irritation. Cecil was always saying, with the air and vocabulary of wild exaggeration that was the lingua franca of her friends, ‘I simply couldn’t live without my Eveline.’ She had no idea, of course, that this was literally true. Not only did the warm, vulgar, coquettish, affectionate creature keep ‘Cookie’ trailing at her heels all day long; all that was irresponsibly, greedily life-loving in her own nature leapt to identify itself with and abet Cecil in Cecil’s passionate diversions. Eveline, who herself wore a fashionable wedding ring although she had no husband, would drop her work and carry off Cecil’s earrings to the kitchen for a polish, while Cecil was dressing to go out. Cecil, feverishly engrossed in her hair, her face, or the look of a dress, often padded about in her stockings until the very second before the front door closed behind her, because Eveline had seen, at the last moment, that Cecil’s shoes could not be worn unless they were cleaned first. Cecil bribed, wheedled, and quarrelled with Eveline, to get her to stay in and look after the child on those days or nights when her time off clashed with some engagement Cecil wanted to keep. She appealed to her in desperation a dozen times a day: don’t call me to the telephone, please, Eveline, d’you hear — tell them I’m out, whoever it is, take a message, anything; please take Keith out for a walk and don’t come back till five — I’ve got to get some sleep; oh, Eveline, be a good girl and see if you can find something for us to eat, won’t you, we don’t feel like going out, after all. ‘Eveline adores Keith,’ she would say; as if that, too, she had delegated to hands more willing and capable than her own. I didn’t think Eveline did; but she didn’t mind the child, she took his presence around her ankles as the most natural thing in the world, and that, I imagine, is what a child needs more than ‘adoration’. Cecil regarded Eveline as a first-rate servant, and took this, as I have noticed people who have a good servant tend to, as some kind of oblique compliment to herself: as if she herself deserved or inspired Eveline’s first-rateness. In fact, the woman was her friend and protector, and, breezily unconscious of this role, stood between her and the realities of her existence.

When I met Cecil at the Stratford after one of her visits to the hairdresser, or she came frowning out into the sun on horseback at Alexanders’, all dash and style, it was difficult to believe that the effect had been produced in that flat, with the rumpled drawers, the bills lying about, and the urgent appeals to the untidy kitchen. But, like Steven, whom she would never meet, her appearance was contrived in indifference to and independence of her background. This was not the only point of resemblance between them. Like Steven, she kept up a fiction of importance; she would suddenly suggest that we should change our plans for a particular day because on that day she had committed herself to some (unspecified) arrangement, a mysterious ‘something she couldn’t very well get out of. Once or twice she announced that it was a damned nuisance, but she’d had a week-end invitation she couldn’t refuse. Sometimes the mere mention of these engagements was enough to fulfil whatever their purpose was, and she forgot about them, at other times she did disappear for an evening or a week-end. On one of these occasions, when I had gone with Sylvia Danziger, Anna, and a man who was a friend of theirs from Capetown, to a cinema, I looked over the balcony and saw Cecil moving out of the foyer with John Hamilton, Rosamund Bell, and another man who came quite often to Alexanders’. They were in evening dress, so I supposed they must be going on to a nightclub. Why she should think it necessary to make a secret of an evening spent with these people, I did not know. Did she think I should be jealous? But that was ridiculous; it was not as if she were going out with some new man she’d found for herself: these people were all old friends.

In their different ways, and in their one country where they pursued them, both Cecil and Steven were people who had not found commitment. Theirs was a strange freedom; the freedom of the loose end. They made the hour shine; but now and then they leapt up in half-real, half-mock panic and fled — perhaps, at that very moment, something better was waiting, somewhere else?

I respected this; for hadn’t I, for my reasons, felt myself a stranger, uncommitted, in my own world in England; and wasn’t that the reason why, in this African country, I had come to feel curiously at home, a stranger among people who were strangers to each other?

Chapter 11

In the few houses in Johannesburg where people of different colours met, you were likely to meet the same people time after time. Many of them had little in common but their indifference to the different colours of their skins; there was not room to seek your own kind in no man’s land: the space of a few rooms between the black encampment and the white.

I got asked to these houses because it was known that I had made black as well as white friends since I had come to Johannesburg. It was not easy for people who did not want to keep their lives and hospitality exclusive to one race, to find new blood; most of these people found that they had two sets of white friends and acquaintances, those who could be invited along with coloured people, and those, sometimes very close friends, who could not.

But of course it was natural that a particular phenomenon should arise, and this was just beginning to happen, while I was in Johannesburg that summer. On the one side, there was the great mass of whites for whom the colour bar was not a piece of man-devised legislation, but a real and eternal barrier; on the other, there were the people who, through social conscience, or (like myself) impatience with restrictive distinctions which they, personally, found meaningless, mixed with coloured people. It was inevitable, with all the books and newspaper reports being written about South Africa, that the forbidden fraternization should become, in a sense, fashionable, and attract certain white people who might never, otherwise, have overcome their prejudices against or indifference to the races on the periphery of their lives. They were often people who had failed to secure attention in other ways; by identifying themselves with Africans, they were able to feel the limelight on their faces for the first time, even if it was only a refraction of that brilliance which was falling on black faces. They ‘discovered* African painters, theatre groups, dancers and crafts; they collaborated with Africans in all sorts of arty ventures in which their own shaky talents were disguised by the novelty, the importance of the fact that their material was genuine African. It began to be fashionable (in a very small, avant-garde way, I may say; on a par, perhaps, with the personal exploration of the effects of mescalin, in other countries) to have at least one African friend. A pet-African, whose name you could drop casually: ‘Tom Kwaza was telling me at our house the other day. .’

Sam had been taken up by one of these people, an amateur composer, with whom he was ‘collaborating’ in the writing of a one-act ‘African’ opera, and, through him, I found myself at the composer’s house. There was a mixture of people, gathered for drinks; some of the old guard, who had always moved indiscriminately between black and white worlds — Dorothea Welz, a jolly priest in a dishevelled cassock — two young University lecturers who were married, the correspondent of an English newspaper, and an unidentified pretty girl, Sam, Steven, his friend Peter, and a young coloured man from the Cape. The hostess moved about in a state of suppressed high excitement, offering sausages and cold potato chips; she hung beggar-like at the edge of every conversation, with her plate and her entreating smile. The host raced from glass to glass, chivvying people to drink faster, filling up for those who had. Theirs was the desperate hospitality of people who are unsure of themselves. They communicated their ill-ease to the guests; at first it seemed that this was going to be an evening of stunted conversation: Dorothea Welz smoked, Sam sat on the edge of his chair, ready to raise himself a few inches, politely, every time the hostess approached with her plate, Steven sat back looking down under arched brows at his shoes, with the expression of a man who is thinking his own thoughts and doesn’t care who knows it. But if the hospitality was overdone, it was, literally, intoxicating. We all passed swiftly from sluggish reserve to the slightly theatrical confidential mood common to drinking parties. The newspaperman told the lecturer’s wife: ‘What enchanting feet you have. I noticed them the moment you came in. If I were your husband I would give you rings to wear on your toes. Perfectly beautiful little feet.’ And, in her fancy sandals, she curled her toes with pleasure: ‘Bells on my toes, don’t you mean?’

In a huddle with Dorothea and the host, the priest — on one beer — listened open-mouthed and laughing, protesting, ‘Lovely! lovely!’ to the young coloured from the Gape, who was giving an imitation of coloured speakers at a political meeting. Peter, the university lecturer, and I were part of an exchange that centred on the newspaperman’s pretty girl, Sam, and Steven. Her particular style was that while she looked and dressed like a conventionally fashionable young woman, and had the sophisticated, consciously charming and slightly deferential manner with men that such women practise, she carried this into situations where such women would never be found. She was the progressive young woman in disguise, like the poet in the clerk’s neat suit. The disguise was so successful that Steven was clearly taken in; she seemed to him to be the one kind of white woman whom he would never meet, the private ornament of the white man’s house which represented to the white man the purity of his race and the height of his privilege. She and Steven got on particularly well together, but there was an edge of haughtiness to Steven’s voice, an extra-careless twist to his banter that suggested that he could not really bring himself to believe that she regarded him, as she treated him, like any other man.

There was a general sort of disagreement about the respective merits of newspapers, which somehow became an exchange of personal spelling idiosyncrasies, and, in turn, became a discussion about languages, and accents. We had all (except the priest) had so much to drink that all our talk veered to the personal. As the discussion sub-divided into smaller conversations, I heard the girl say to Steven, ‘Now take the way you speak. You speak English much more like an Indian than an African.’

Sam giggled and said to Steven and the girl,’ It would be a good idea to have a competition, you know. Like they have competitions for the beauty queens with the best legs, and the rest of them is covered up. We should all stand behind a screen and talk and get someone to guess what we are.’

‘It’ll be interesting to see what kind of English comes out of Africa, eventually,’ the girl said, with her easy manner of deep interest. ‘Don’t you think it may be almost a new language, as it is in America?’

‘That may be,’ said Steven condescendingly. ‘That may very well be, eh, Sam? We are talking it already,’ and as the others laughed, added, ‘But seriously, in Sophiatown the tsotsis have got a language of their own, a mixture of English, Afrikaans, Zulu, anything. Perhaps we should all learn to talk it.’

The girl picked up her drink and leaned forward. ‘That must be a kind of local Cockney, eh?’

‘Perhaps we should all understand each other,’ persisted Steven, sniggering and drinking down the rest of his brandy.

‘D’you remember Esperanto?’

‘It’s still going strong, I imagine.’

The hostess, now so delighted with her party that she was recklessly swallowing drinks at the pace she had imposed on her guests, said out of her stock of bold phrases: ‘It won’t be the whites who’ll decide what language is going to be spoken here it’ll be you fellows.’

The conversation became even freer and more confidential; cigarettes smouldered on the floor, someone stepped on someone else’s drink; the old phrases began to come up, in the old, frank, confessional tones: ‘The trouble with the whites is. . ’ ‘At least the Afrikaner says to you straight out, look here Kaffir.’ ‘I’ve always wanted to know what Africans really think about mixed marriage.’ ‘And what’s the good of the Liberals opening party membership to us Africans if we haven’t got votes?’ ‘How do you really feel. .’ ‘What do you honestly think. .’ The young coloured was railing against coloureds who wouldn’t identify themselves with the Africans and Indians. Sam was saying urgently: ‘Don’t you believe there isn’t still time. Don’t you believe it.’

‘For God’s sake,’ said Steven, accepting another brandy, ‘must we always talk about it?’ ‘By all means,’ said the pretty girl, spreading out her hands as if to draw the company closer, ‘Let’s talk about anything you like. Hundreds of things I always want to talk about.’ ‘You see,’ Peter suddenly contributed, giggling, ‘we always think you want to talk about it.’

‘And we always think you want to!’ said the lecturer.

‘There it sits,’ said Sam excitedly, ‘the uninvited guest, wherever you go — ’

‘Hey, we should write a song about that,’ the host looked in proudly upon the conversation.

‘Can’t we talk about something else?’

The hostess looked at us all, fondly. There were almost tears in her eyes. She felt so released, accepted, that she said, arch and wordly, to Sam and Steven: ‘I’m going to see if our black brothers in the kitchen can’t rustle up some tinned soup for us.’

The female member of the university couple had appeared on the arm of my chair: ‘May I perch next to you?’ and when I had persuaded her to take the chair instead, I turned back to the company just as the newspaperman’s pretty girl was asking, ‘Cigarette, anybody? Has anyone got a cigarette for me?’ Mine were finished. So were the university lecturer’s. While we fumbled, the girl sat forward, expectantly, her lovely grey eyes exaggerating her need, in response to the audience. I suppose if a woman is beautiful and greatly appealing, it is almost impossible for her not to use the virtuosity of her charm, sometimes simply for the careless pleasure of using it, as an acrobat might turn a masterly somersault at home on his own lawn, or a peacock shake out his splendid tail when there was no hen about to be impressed. She was dressed up — as it were — in the look of a woman cajoling a favour from a lover; there it was, that look she could do so easily, in a minute, anywhere.

Sam said, ‘Here, Steven, you’ve got some cigarettes —’ And Steven raised his eyebrows in inquiry, already twisting in his chair to get at his pocket. ‘Sure thing, somewhere here.’ He found the paper pack, and talking, dividing his attention, opened the torn top; there was one cigarette in it. The girl, following what he was saying, held out her hand in a charming mock supplication and relief. And then I saw, quite distinctly, an exact moment, between one word and the next, when Steven’s mind cut out from what he was saying — he saw the girl, saw the feathers of her charm all spread out in complacent display — and then cut back to the sound of his own voice again. He went on talking without a pause, and while he did so, he carefully took the single cigarette out of the crumpled pack, tapped it on the table to settle the tobacco, and put it in his mouth. Peter, the lecturer, Sam, the lecturer’s wife, myself, and the girl with her hand still held out before her, watched his hand go out to the cigarette lighter on the table, pick it up, and light the cigarette, pinching in his nostrils with the first draw.

No one said, ‘Hey, what’s the idea? What about that cigarette?’ No one laughed. No one acknowledged, made of the incident a moment’s absentmindedness on the part of a man who had had rather a lot to drink. We exempted him, and so gave away what he and all black men must always suspect of the company of white men: he was not like us, after all; after all, he was black.

The girl’s hand came slowly back to her; she covered it with her other one, in her lap. And she too, went on talking, smiling, asking questions with an air of intense interest, confessing her own opinions self-critically and with laughter. A little later, when I had drifted into another group and out again, I heard her say, detaining the host with a dove-like inclination of her head, ‘Sweetie, do you think you’ve got a filter tip in the house for me?’

At this time, I didn’t really want to go and see Anna Louw. Once I was in her company, I was always glad of it, and couldn’t understand my reluctance; yet no sooner was I away again than I was conscious of a childish relief, and an impatience to get back to my preoccupation with other people.

I was a bit ashamed that it seemed to work out that the times when I sought her out coincided with the times when I couldn’t be with Cecil, or when Steven had gone to ground on one of his enthusiastic mysteries, which, these days, were likely to be involved with Lucky Chaputra. In the first few minutes, I always felt that I had a left-out air about me that was unmistakable to Anna; my ring of phrase had echoes of the people with whom I had been spending most of my time, my manner carried still the impression of theirs.

I drove out to see her one afternoon after I had left the office; she was in the tiny part of the garden which was considered hers, and while she dug a thin little Indian girl flitted about her, calling out in a soft twanging voice nasal as a mosquito’s. I heard them across the garden, before they saw me; peaceful sounds, the singing whine of the child and the slow, reasonable answers of the woman, monosyllabic but somehow satisfying in sound, as Anna’s Afrikaans accent tended to make them. I had encountered the child there before, several times — ‘She’s Hassim’s little sister,’ Anna had told me. Hassim was Anna’s divorced husband, whom I had never met, and whom I don’t think she ever saw.

The child ran away into the house when she saw me coming, but slowly, as a background to the talk between Anna and me, I was aware of her approaching, step by step, hanging back and yet coming on. I called ‘Hullo, Urmila!’ but she was behind a bush; and only when I turned my attention back to Anna, and forgot about the child, did she take up her game where she had been interrupted.

I had thought I should have to make some excuses for not having come before (the real excuses were the only plausible ones, but though they might tacitly be accepted, they must not be spoken aloud) but, as always, I had forgotten that if Anna spoke little, she was also the easiest person in the world to talk to. All she said was,’ How’re you getting on, Toby?’ and I lay down on the grass while she went on pressing down the soil round the seedlings she was planting, and I told her about the incident of Steven and the cigarette. That was how it was, in her company. I’d wonder what on earth I’d find to say, and then something I didn’t even know I’d been brooding about would come out of my mouth as simply as a remark about the weather.

She threw no new light upon the incident. ‘He’s an odd customer,’ she said mildly, when I had finished. Yet the very matter-of-factness of her acceptance had the effect of bringing the incident into perspective; a perspective, I realized with surprise, that was not mine. It was the perspective of the frontier, the black-and-white society between white and black, and I was only a visitor there, however much I had made myself at home. Anna was a real frontiersman who had left the known world behind and set up her camp in the wilderness; the skirmishes of that new place were part of the condition of life, for her.

I rolled on to my back and watched the leaves run together in the magnetism of gathering darkness. Anna went on methodically, digging and planting, making little grunting sighs of effort as she moved round the bed of earth. She had the absorption in her activity of people who are used to doing things alone. For a moment, I had the feeling of not being there; I was aware, as one seldom is in the company of another, of her being, in depth, beyond the surface at which her life had touched upon mine. I asked her, suddenly:

‘What made you marry Hassim Bhayat?’

She shuffled round — she was sitting on her haunches — and picked up a seedling held in its little fist of earth. It was an inquiring gesture.

‘Was it because he was an Indian?’

She was still holding up the seedling, and though her back was to the fading light, and I could not see her face clearly, I sensed her following my face. She said, ‘I was in love with him. But what’s the good of saying, I would have loved him whatever he’d been. He was an Indian. That was part of what made him what he was. A woman who falls in love with a rich man will tell you she’d love him just as much if he was a lorry driver. Of course she wouldn’t. His money, the things he’s done with it and it’s done to him — they’re part of what he’s like and what she’s fallen in love with. Of course, that doesn’t mean to say she couldn’t fall in love, another time, with a lorry driver — ’ She turned away and put the plant into the place prepared for it.

‘You don’t think there was something of a gesture in it? Nothing like that?’

‘No,’ she said, with slow conviction. ‘But it’s terribly hard to keep a marriage like ours personal; it starts off like an ordinary marriage but then everything else, outside it, forces on it the onus of a test case. If you quarrel, you can’t simply be a man and wife who don’t get on, immediately you’re the proof that mixed marriages don’t work. You’ve no idea how this influences you, in time. You get terribly nervous; honestly. You begin to question yourself, all the time: do I disagree about this only because I’m white? Does this depress Hassim only because he’s an Indian, or would a white man feel the same — ’ The Indian child called out something, and Anna answered her. ‘It’s a good thing we didn’t have any children,’ she said. I didn’t answer, because I thought perhaps she was hardly aware that she had spoken. ‘It’s a good thing, after all.’ And now her voice broke through her thoughts, so to speak, ‘I used to say, it’s too bad if it’s hard for the children; you just have to make them understand that they’re only misfits in a worn-out society that doesn’t count, that, in reality, they’re the new people in the world that’s coming, the decent one where colour doesn’t matter. D’you think that’s true?’

‘I don’t see why not.’

She laughed.’ It’s not true yet. It’s a hell of a life to impose on a half-and-half child in the meantime; waiting for a kingdom of heaven that probably won’t come to earth in its lifetime. It’ll come. But it’s too big, too far off — you can’t measure an historical process against the life of a kid. That’s what I think now, anyway.’

‘It has to start somewhere, of course.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But not with a child of mine.’

I got up, and realized how damp with coming night the grass had become; my shirt was cold against my back. ‘Anna, I’m glad to find you’re a coward about something. You’ve always impressed me as being brave as a lion.’ She gave a little Afrikaans exclamation of derision, and laughed.

The Indian child had switched on all the lights in the cottage. From the darkening garden, warm light coloured by the objects on which it shone in the rooms, where all the curtains were open, seemed to swell up and fill the house’s shape like breath in a coloured balloon. We put the garden tools away together, and went up to the house. Anna, in a sudden mood of animation unusual for her, was telling me about the stuffed lion that stood in the hotel in the Karoo village where she had lived as a child. ‘Have you ever heard of the Cape Mountain lion? Well, it’s supposed to have been extinct since heaven knows when. This one was shot round about 1865, and somehow or other they’ve preserved it all this time. An Englishman killed it and sent it to England and had it stuffed, and it was in some club in London for years. When I was a kid, it was in the lounge of the old Neksburg hotel, right next to the cigarette machine. It doesn’t look much like a real lion, to me; more like one of those funny-looking beasts made in stone, what d’you call them — chimera, is it?’

‘Is it still there now? I think that’s the name of the place I’ve been invited to over Christmas — Neksburg, yes I’m sure.’

Anna gave a long, whistling exclamation: ‘Christmas in Neksburg, you don’t know what you’re in for!’ She seemed much amused.

‘Well, it’s not actually in Neksburg itself, it’s a stud farm belonging to some people I know, here — the Alexanders. People called Baxter run it for them, and there’s some idea about a house party — I don’t know if’t’ll come to anything.’

‘Ah, that’s a different sort of Neksburg,’ said Anna, smiling. ‘The Chamber of Mines Alexander? Very posh. It must be one of the thousand morgen efforts around there. Swimming pools and heaven knows what.’

‘But Neksburg is the village you come from?’ I asked. ‘Isn’t it odd? I have the feeling we’ve had this sort of conversation before.’

‘We have,’ she said. ‘You remember? The first time I met you. I mentioned that Jagersfontein Location case, and you said, Jagersfontein — my grandfather was killed at Jagersfontein!’

‘And we’ve never been to look for his grave,’ I said.

She waved her muddy hands in distaste. ‘Ach, it was probably my grandfather who killed him. Leave these old wars alone.’ She went off to the little bathroom to wash.

‘How much longer is that Jagersfontein case going to drag on, anyway,’ I called. ‘Amon was off again last Friday, it seems to have been going on for months.’

‘He was off when?’

‘Friday.’

‘The case was dropped a month ago.’

‘Grandmother tale, eh?’

Anna came in, hair tidied, inspecting her nails. ‘You fix him,’ she said, toughly. ‘Ah, how beautiful, Urmila! Toby, see what she’s done?’ The child had decorated the table with garlands of those brass-coloured dwarf marigolds that smell rank. I stayed to supper and smoked all through the meal to kill the weedy reek, since I knew not only Urmila but Anna would be offended if I removed my garland. After supper Urmila brought a book and stood, leaning on Anna’s chair, while Anna read her a chapter. The book was Peter Pan, and I wondered what Urmila made of even such an unconventional English nursery as the Darlings’. But I had the feeling, watching the child’s dark, ugly face, with the nervous lips along which her fingers wandered all the time, as if to read reassurance, and the dark eyes whose expressionlessness never altered, that it was not the story she listened to or wanted, but the fact of being read to. Anna put her to bed herself, and I heard the child murmuring and laughing to her.

When Anna came back into the room, she said, crossly, ‘They make the poor child so timid. I don’t know what she’ll be fit for — ’

‘A good Muslim wife,’ I suggested. ‘Maybe,’ said Anna. ‘Maybe,’ and sighed.

‘At least we were brought up to be able to look after ourselves,’ she said. ‘Didn’t always end up doing it the way the old people had imagined, but still. When I was her age I was at boarding-school in Bloemfontein, and I used to go there by train on my own.’ Sometimes she showed a sturdy, obstinate pride in the ways of the family she had, I gathered from what I knew of her, broken with irrevocably. We sat drinking brandy-and-soda and talked about her childhood. Her family owned a tea-room in the Karroo village of Neksburg, ‘Tee-en-koffie-kamer,’ she told me. ‘On the main road that runs through the dorp to Cape Town. It’s for tourists mainly, but since my uncle made it bigger in 1935, it’s also been a gathering-place for the local youngsters on Saturdays, and a place where natives come in to buy a bottle of milk, or bread, or cigarettes. Someone told me that the latest improvement is that natives are not allowed to come in at the front door of the shop. My cousin Toy — he’s running it now with one of my brothers — has another door, in the lane off the street, for natives. I haven’t been home since before I married Hassim, so I haven’t seen it for myself. We used to live behind the shop. There’s a yard, with an iron pergola which has rotted away in the grip of a big old grapevine — the iron’s embedded in the thick stem of the vine — and behind that’s our house. An old house, too, with thick stone walls, a flat roof, and shutters — at least it was, until they built a wooden veranda on to it, and painted the wood orange. My grandmother had tubs with ferns in them put in the yard; that’s where we used to play, with the children of our coloured servants, who were also supposed to look after us. The whole village is along that main street, the baker, the butcher, the two general stores, another café, run by a Greek, the estate agent’s, the lawyer’s, the old hotel and the new hotel, and, of course, an enormous garage. That went up about ten years ago. It’s the only modern building in Neksburg and it really hits you in the eye, all shiny, with a huge plate-glass window, and the chromium petrol pumps, and a couple of the local coloureds got up in blue uniforms. That and the travellers’ big cars outside the new hotel — they’re completely unlike anything else in Neksburg, but their out-of-placeness is part of the place — d’you know what I mean?’

‘. . dust and stones, and a fly-bitten hotel with a couple of shiny cars. . ’ — Anna’s was the Neksburg Kit Baxter had talked about months ago, that first day at the Alexanders’.

‘Right opposite our tea-room there are five pepper trees.’ Anna was picking her way among the significant things of a child’s life. ‘I remember beginning to look at those pepper trees. You know how, to a certain stage, you don’t really look at things? Well, up till then, the pepper trees had been the same as the tea-room and the yard and the house. — I forgot to tell you that on the walls of the tea-room, we had coloured photographs of the members of the family, particularly the children. We went to Bloemfontein specially to have them taken; I mean, if a baby was born, it was taken on its first birthday, and so on. There was a picture of me and my two younger brothers on the wall just above the paraffin refrigerator. I used to look at it for hours, in fact I looked at it every time I walked into the shop, because I believed that that must be the way I really looked, not the way I was when I saw myself in the mirror. In the picture my lips were bright red and my hair had touches of yellow. There was a big picture of my cousin Johannes’s fiancée, with a rose in her long yellow curls — she really did have them — and her hand raised to her neck to show the ring on her finger. And there was an even bigger one of another little cousin, the beauty of the family, and my age, with a mauve crinoline. Well, I don’t remember when exactly it was, how old I was, but I distinctly remember a clear division of time when I suddenly knew for sure that the pepper trees, always outside there, always to be seen, were one thing, and our tee-kamer, with the smirking photographs that didn’t look like us, and the mirrors with the holders filled with dust-covered crinkle paper flowers, and the radiogram that shook when it sang, were another. It was in the season when the pepper trees were — in fruit, would you call it? — when the little pink beads were ripe, and mixed up with the pale greyish leaves, so that the trees looked soft. From then on, whenever I came back from school for the holidays, I found that the things I didn’t mind about Neksburg were the things my brothers and cousins were impatient and ashamed of, and the things they admired and welcomed were the things I was ashamed of. More than anything, I was ashamed of the coloured photographs. I cried over them, once, down in the culvert where the stream was, near the cemetery. They were ashamed when they saw someone carrying a goat tied on his back while he rode a bicycle.’

I would never have guessed that Anna’s revolt should have begun as a revolt of taste. I asked her when she had begun to be interested in politics.

‘When I was working in Bloemfontein and then Johannesburg. You see, my family didn’t think it anything unusual for me to want to go to work in a city. They thought I wanted smart clothes and dances and plenty of boy friends. When I got myself articled to a lawyer, they didn’t take that too seriously. They let me go without a murmur. So long as I went to church on Sundays, that was all right.

‘You know, long after I was a member of the Party and a trade union official, my father knew nothing about any of it, he wouldn’t listen to anything about it. He was convinced that I had a nice office job in the big city, and that all I was waiting for was to come home holding hands with some nice Dirkie or Koosie, ready to hang a new picture of myself on the tee-kamer wall.’

‘And when did they finally find out?’

‘An uncle told them. There are Louws everywhere, all fifty-second cousins, and nosy as hell. I was running a union of coloured women, sweetworkers.’

‘What happened?’

She got up and refilled our glasses. When she was settled again, she said, ‘Oh, I got off quite lucky. They dropped me. They wanted to forget about me, quickly. I think they really did believe that I was crazy; they could be less ashamed of me, that way, it would then be something I couldn’t really help. My mother used to come and see me now and then, but I had never been very close to her. I would rather have seen my father; no chance of that, though. She’s dead. She died when I passed my final law exam, just before I married Hassim. The old man’s still in Neksburg. They’re strange people, really. There’s very little dignity left in them; they’re passionate Nationalists, of course, in the narrowest, most superannuated sense, they hate the English, they hate the blacks, they’re terrified of them all. In fact they hate and fear everything and everyone except themselves — what a miserable way to exist. And yet, d’you know, they’re directly descended from the Voortrekkers — one would expect them to have more guts. The Voortrekkers may have been bigotted, but they had guts.’

‘Well, you’re the answer,’ I said, ‘you’re the one who’s made the trek, this generation.’

She said, in her measured, downright manner, ‘In a way, I understand my family’s reluctance to own me, their own flesh and blood, reminding them of everything they’re afraid of. And have you ever noticed how dark I am? I’m like a blooming Spaniard. Huguenot blood, they say. Probably true, too, we’ve got La Valles and Dupreez on my mother’s side. But more likely some old boy’s flutter with a black girl in the old days, as well.’

We talked on past midnight. The child called out once, from the bedroom, and Anna went to her. In the few minutes she was gone, I became aware of the night outside, that suddenly blew up and flung itself in a squall of wind and scratching leaves, at the window. I went to the bathroom and saw there, as everywhere in the little house, the serene order of Anna’s mind; the tidy rows of toilet bottles, the fine soap, the clean thick towels.

When she came back to the living-room, a heavy, sparse fall of rain on the roof muted some remark she made, and I got up to go.

She stood, holding her arms in protection against some imagined chill from the sound of the rain. She looked very small and stocky, and tiredness, the burned-out animation of so much talk, marked deeply under her eyes. ‘Wait till this goes over,’ she said. We both had had quite a lot to drink, and a mood of confidential timelessness had settled around us, intensified by the rain, which, too, took a shift in rhythm and settled to a soft, steady, enclosing sound.

She told me about the visit to Russia in 1950 that had disillusioned her once and for all about Communism, and after which she had broken with the Party in revulsion. Unlike most ex-Communists I knew in London, Anna had not remained in that state of spiritual convalescence which was as far as they seemed able to recover from loss of faith — but she shared with those who would never be able to put themselves together again, a dogmatism of manner, as old military men never again walk quite like other men. Although she no longer had to believe unquestioningly, she could not shed the air of being always right.

Still later, she said, suddenly, ‘When you go to Neksburg you must go and see the lion.’

We had been talking about Faunce and my father, but the remark did not seem irrelevant. After a moment, I said, ‘Probably I won’t go at all.’

She sat back, buried in the big chair and looked at me steadily, with the smiling concentration of vision slowed by brandy, as if she were a star whose light took a million years to reach me. ‘D’you like those people?’ she asked. There was genuine curiosity, not implied criticism, in the question.

‘Some of them.’

She nodded in agreement. ‘The one in the Stratford Bar. She’s lovely-looking.’

I said,’ None of the people I know here seem to know each other.’

‘What are they like?’

I told her about the people at The High House, colouring the picture a little, at once feeling disloyal and at the same time mildly, enjoyably revengeful, as if I’d just discovered I’d been taken in by them. They were as unfamiliar to her as people of another country; I don’t suppose she would have wanted to know them, anyway, but it was another reminder to me of the boundaries she had left, and probably could never re-enter. Her face, chin lifted to pull at a cigarette, or bent, with the shadows streaking down it, over the glass cupped in her hands, was the face of burned boats, blown bridges; one of those faces you suddenly see, by a trick of the light, in the rock formation of the side of a mountain. I felt suddenly afraid of her, I put out my hand and touched, with the touch of fear, the thing I fled from. I had no desire for her but I kissed her. The rain had stopped as if to listen; the whole night was still. She did not shut her eyes for an instant; every time I opened mine, she was looking at me, as if she were waiting for something to be over, to have done. She went on talking while she took my hand, turned it palm up, then down, then pressed the nails, one by one: ‘You think you’ll keep free, with one foot here and another there, and a look in somewhere else, but even you, even a stranger like you, Toby — you won’t keep it up.’ She stood up and wiped the windowsill dry of the rain that lay on it in a scatter of magnifying lenses, thick and glassy. We were both standing about the room as if the night were breaking up. I thought of Cecil with a flash of longing, but she was like one of those women you imagine before you have ever had a woman. I made love to Anna at last, slowly because I had had so much to drink, and pleasure came to me as if wrung from my grasp. When our excitement was over the rain began again as if it had never stopped.

I suppose there’s no use trying to explain oneself, so far as one’s feelings about women are concerned. The whole mysterious business may be influenced by, even spoiled by one’s idea of what one should feel, what one’s code is, but the fact remains that old Adam has a code of his own that sometimes makes nonsense of the imposed one. You do something cheap, goatish, or foolish, and it feels right. That’s all. And if you feel right and comfortable, reason — all the reasons why you shouldn’t — cannot discomfit you. My extension of conversation with Anna (that’s no polite euphemism — that was exactly what it seemed to be, the moment it was past) had the effect of deepening my interest in Cecil. For weeks, there was a gentle madness for me in the mention of her name; her faults entranced me, an inch of darker colour grown out at the roots of her hair touched me, her laugh, in the next room, astonished me, like a secret called aloud. A season of love seized me; and it was Christmas, Christmas in midsummer.