A World of Strangers

Chapter 12

A christmas party at The High House seemed to have no beginning and no end. When I picked up Cecil and took her out there for lunch on Christmas Eve — this was to celebrate the arrival, from the Karroo, of the Baxters, whom Marion had talked out of Kit’s idea of a house party in Neksburg — the pool was full of young men and girls, and roars of whisky-released laughter came up from the shade of the veranda, where Hamish Alexander sat in white bowling flannels and brown suède shoes, drum-bellied, bristling with good humour, surrounded by the older guests. When we left in the afternoon, some had gone but others were newly-arrived. Then there was to be a dinner-party in the evening, to which neither Cecil nor I were going. She had to take her child to a children’s party at her parents’; I was going to a celebration arranged by Steven. She was to spend Christmas Day with her family too, and I had plans of my own to fulfil. So I did not see her again until Boxing Day, when we had been invited to go to Alexanders’ again, and arrived at midday to find the party in its third day, the pool still lively as the seal enclosure at a zoo, the veranda still dispensing laughter from the bar.

It seemed hotter than it had ever been, all summer, so far, in Johannesburg. Sun and wine and beer and whisky made the atmosphere of a fiesta; it was not Christmas, to me, but I liked it. Outside my flat, piccanins shuffled and jerked their backsides to tin whistles and a banging on old tins. While the shops were open, a weary, sweating concourse streamed the streets, thick as a trail of ants following the scent of sugar; then, except for cinema crowds, the city was left to the drunks. Church bells jangled and, on the balconies of flats, the hot sun turned on the baubles of Christmas trees in tubs. Black men who delivered clinking cases from the bottle store wore paper hats. If the place was not gay, at least it had let itself go. At Alexanders’, presents, flowers, glasses, and food covered luxury with abundance; even the garden, in the swell of midsummer sap, was heaped with so much colour, so pollen-thick, so vibrant with bees, criss-crossed by birds, so heavy with peaches and plums whose delicious over-ripeness smelled headier even than the perfumes of the women, that the very texture of the air was plenty. The cornucopia jammed down over your head. Cecil flashed and turned in this atmosphere, a creature in its own element: she seemed to me to exist, and rightly so, for no other purpose than to laugh, her eyes brilliant with alcohol, her lap full of presents, among flowers and drunken bees.

My Christmas Eve with Steven started at about ten o’clock at a club run by Indians some miles out of Johannesburg. Lucky Chaputra had insisted that we come, Steven said, but when we left the club, shortly before midnight, Lucky still had not turned up himself, though we had been well looked after, no doubt on his instructions. The club was one of those places one could never find again; I drove to it blindly, turning when Steven told me, following landmarks invisible to me, down dirt-tracks and through dongas, over the dark veld. Steven chattered all the time, and sometimes could not bear to spoil a story by interrupting it with a direction, so that, a minute or two late, he would suddenly call out, sensing something unfamiliar about our progress: ‘Wait a minute! Stop, man! We’ve missed the turning.’

There was a concert on at the club when we got there. The programme went very slowly, because after every few items the audience, Muslim and Hindu men, drifted out to their cars. They would drift into the hall again in ten or fifteen minutes, each time a little more vociferous and critical in their calls for the entertainment to recommence. The reason was that the club — which had, like other country clubs, a swimming pool and tennis courts — could not, of course, get a licence to serve liquor. The members drank in their cars, fast and neat.

Steven and I, the only white man and the only African there, were hustled into an anteroom lit by a candle, where, first, the fat, pale organizer of the show, an anxious man named Jayasingh, and a thin business man named Mia and, as the evening went on, a number of other club personages, gave us Haig and water. When the others ate dry triangular sandwiches of the kind served at wedding receptions, we got plates of hot vermicelli with cinnamon and sugar. As usual, there were not enough glasses to go round, and we politely drank up quickly so that the others could get a drink in before it was time to get back into the hall. In this anteroom there was no furniture except an iron bed empty of a mattress and a table. There was a plaster figurine among the whisky bottles on the mantelpiece; I went over to look at it, and Mia, solicitously kind, rushed up with the candle: ‘Ghandiji’ he cried,’ I’ll show you.’ The plaster figure wore a tiny pair of wire spectacles. The candle lit up, too, on the wall, two or three group photographs of Indian business men with striped suits and important expressions.

In the hall we sat on the floor on spring mattresses. ‘Indian-style,’ my neighbours kept telling me, with an air of novelty. ‘He sings in Hindustani and I only understand a bit of Gujerati,’ someone complained, while the band-leader, a wild, mournful-looking boy whom I would sooner have expected to see giving a performance supine on a bed of nails, sobbed and wailed, exactly like all those other young men who drive adolescents to an adoring frenzy. Presently a girl, with face and body of the most tender grace and beauty, came out to a slurring roar of appreciation. She wore a sari and there were bells round the ankles of her bare feet; the men called and hailed while she danced and rolled her eyes in a rhumba. ‘Lola, Lola, lovely my dear,’ Mia kept saying. And to me: ‘Those pigs can’t shut up. Isn’t she very good?’ I admired her and asked if she ever did any real Indian dancing. Immediately Mia and a number of others began a fervent conversation in which the word ‘classical’ kept recurring like the date of some great discovery, a battle recalled, or a noble name remembered. Classical, classical. After one or two more intervals in the anteroom, it began to go up like a call of despair, a cry in the wilderness — each one of them loved only classical, classical, what did Indians in this country know of classical? Poor sweating Jayasingh, pathetic as only a harassed fat man can be, became offended: his show, the best artists at the greatest expense, did not please. We all went out into the garden with him, like a deputation, and Mia, in an official tone (‘My dear, dear Mr Jayasingh. .’), and Steven and I with appreciative agreeing noises, tried to reassure him. I don’t think he was reassured, though perhaps he was mollified. A few minutes later, Mia had him in a corner again, while the show went on, and presently we were smuggled out of the hall during the performance of a band number, and, with Mia, Jayasingh, and one or two more, were closeted in the anteroom.

This time the Indian girl was there. I have never seen anything more beautiful. She had never been in India, and she spoke English with a strong South African accent, but she had an ancestral beauty, she had in flesh the round stone breasts and little round waist of women in Tenth Century Indian sculpture; I had once cut out a photograph of such an image, Vriksaka, the Tree Goddess. The live girl sat on an empty whisky-case, hardly touched by the thick yellow light of the smoking candle, hardly seen, and sang the way a bird sings on a telephone wire. People kept pushing into the room. Some were pushed out again. Those in the room talked admiringly, encouraged more than they listened, but I felt they really were moved by the idea of her singing. She sang traditional Indian songs as long as we wanted her to, which was as long as the important members dared keep her from the general audience, and then she went from among us, listening with attentiveness to the long compliments, slipping inoffensively from the pawings of those who would detain her, ducking her head swiftly beneath the hands, faces, the despairing, longing cries: ‘Classical. . classical. . ’ She was made to please: I had not seen a creature like her before.

Driving back to town, I talked about her to Steven, and soon we slipped from the particular to women in general, and then, inevitably, to the particular again, while Steven told me of his conquests in London. It was an old subject, one we’d come to time and again in the confidential small hours in the townships. It seemed to be a point of honour for a black man who’d made something of himself to boast of how, in his small beginnings as waiter, bell-boy, or some such conveniently-placed menial, he had been coveted by a white woman. Some of the stories rang true, and some of them didn’t. But everybody had one to tell. I suppose that in the country I was living in, in the city I was living in, such tales were sensational, anarchic, and meant far more; but I must say that to me, as a stranger and an outsider, they were simply part of the old sex myth I have mentioned before — the wistful projection of joy not to be had at home.

We finished up the night at the House of Fame, where Steven was no longer living, but of which he was still master of ceremonies. In the township, singing people, arm-in-arm, filled the streets. The girls, yelling and shaking as they careered along, wore paper dough-boy hats inscribed ‘Hiya Babe’ or ‘I’m No Angel’. The dingy houses, where old people tried to sleep and the smallest children were in bed, showed no life. But there must have been some, like the House of Fame, where people made their own music and danced and talked. From the hidden yards came voices with the particular, chanting quality of beer-drink frenzy. The shebeens were open for a roaring trade — we went into one to look for a friend of Steven’s — and there were more police about than I had known before. ‘A lot of broken heads and stabbings before Christmas is over,’ said Steven, grinning and shaking his head. ‘The Prince of Peace seems to skip us.’

On Christmas Day I went to church with Sam’s wife, Ella, and their little girl. The child was dressed in a stiff frilly frock and she wore the gilt locket I had brought as a Christmas present for her. We went to the Anglican church in the location where they had their house, and only Ella accepted my going as an ordinary thing to do; Sam was delighted that I should want to go with Ella, but in the manner of someone who approves a piece of intrepid sight-seeing.

I was glad to be with a friend, instead of among the polite strangers who filled their cosy church near my flat with an incense of brilliantine. In this church in the township the priest was a tubby, untidy Englishman, tonsured by baldness. The church was built of ugly, purplish brick and smelled of the soap with which the congregants had washed, and of the smoke with which their clothing was impregnated from their cooking fires. A choir of small boys and another of women sang with the unearthly voices of Africans: voices that seem to have a register of their own. After one look round at me, the congregants accepted my presence with scarcely a whispered conversation, though I don’t think it likely that a white layman had ever been in their church before. After the service I saw that the priest wanted to come up and speak to me, but I pretended not to see, and we left quickly. I don’t suppose any church will ever suit me so well as our church at home, where once my grandfathers gathered their families about them in their own pew; so much for me, as a worshipper.

Christmas dinner was at Sam’s. There was a chicken and everyone who was invited brought something for the table — there was a tinned pudding, a cream-cake, some sausages, nuts, and sweets. It was more like a picnic than anything else, in spite of the stifling little room in which we were confined; the hot, bright day, everyone wandering about the room picking up what they pleased to eat, the pestering flies, the nearness of voices and raspberry squeakers blown in the street outside. I had brought bon-bons and a couple of bottles of wine, and, inevitably, Sam ended up at his piano. Everyone there fell into song as easily as other people drift into conversation; carols, traditional songs, and jazz hummed and thrummed and soared from them. As I drove away in the afternoon, I was stopped by police and told to report to the charge office because I had no permit to be in the location; I was lucky — it was the first time I had been caught, and I had been in the townships innumerable times without a permit.

I got home to the flat and found it nearly as hot as the crowded room I had just left, and, a little before six, I half-undressed, lay on my bed, and fell asleep. When I woke, it was not, as I thought, early evening, but morning. So it was that I seemed to go straight from the township to the High House; sleep was a blank moment that scarcely separated the rutted township track that I had learned to ride like a roller-coaster, from the smooth driveway — a tunnel of feathery green and flowers — where the car drew soundlessly toward the fountain of voices rising beside the Alexanders’ house.

I had picked up Cecil at her flat. Her little boy hung round the doorway as she prepared to leave. ‘Are you going in the car?’ ‘Are you going to swim?’ he kept asking me.

‘Why not bring him along?’

She signed an impatient warning. ‘No, no. He’s going out later. He’ll be fetched after lunch.’

In the car, she grumbled about the time she had spent with her family, but before we reached the Alexanders’ she had sighed, stretched, fidgeted, lit a cigarette in pleased relaxation. She lifted her arm and put her hand round the nape of my neck, pinching my ear. One of her ways of making love was to lick my ear, like a dog, and I supposed she wanted to remind me. I slid my left hand into the warmth behind her bare knee, just to remind her. She laughed and demanded: ‘And where did you decide to go, after all?’ At once, it seemed absolutely necessary to belong along with her, I did not want to be even the remove of a surprised or baffled look from her. I mentioned the name of a bookseller and his wife of whom she had heard me speak before.

‘What was it like?’

‘All right.’

‘Couldn’t have been as bad as my collection of old crows.’

She sat on the grass beside the pool, opening the presents that had been kept for her from the day before. There was a piece of jewellery from Hamish and Marion that she unwrapped with a deep sigh of achievement; while she exclaimed and hugged them, while she cried to Kit and others with perfect surprise, I had the feeling that she had been almost sure she would get the ring, had made sure she would get it. Coloured and tinselled packages lay, burst open, all round her. Perfume, cosmetics, smoking gadgets, satin, and nylon; John Hamilton picked out a giant pencil that looked like bamboo and had a fur tassel, and began autographing the legs of the women sunbathing; Kit went through the loot with expert fingers; one of the Peever twins came over, hale and dripping, smelling of wet hair and the chlorine of the pool, and kissed Cecil in a scatter of water. ‘Sweetie! My one and only! Happy Chrissie!’ Donald Alexander had a girl at last, a soft little girl of twenty or so, who slithered away into the pool with a splash when John tried to write on her brown thigh. Archie Baxter called encouragement; in swimming trunks he exposed a stricken-looking body and dwindling legs, like a splendidly-furred dog shorn of its pelt Kit seemed guardedly snappy with him; perhaps the strain of a three-day party made the front of the handsome, amusing couple wear thin. She had made as good a job of herself as usual and was bright as a cinema façade where the name of the next ‘attraction’ has just been newly put up in lights. John Hamilton was paying her a good deal of attention. His was a practical kind of court: ‘Look here, Kit, d’you know what you want to do? You want to get one of your boys to blow through that pipe, a bicycle pump’d do it. .’ he said, advising her with the air of wanting to get down and do it himself, about the maintenance of the filter plant just installed for the swimming pool she’d had built at the farm.

I’d been given a silk shirt (from Marion), an expensive bottle of after-shave lotion (from the Baxters), and, from Cecil, one of those sumptuous-looking picture books that publishers bring out specially for Christmas, and which go vaguely under the name of ‘art’. I’d never worn a silk shirt, never put scented stuff on my face, would probably never open the book again after that day. I lay idly in a big chair, talking now and then, listening; listening, sometimes with my eyes closed, to the slap and plunge of people in the water, and the talk of the Christmas Handicap that had been run the previous Saturday. There was a woman with blued white hair, the upper half of whose body swelled splendidly as a caryatid’s; she had an affected, absent way of talking — ‘Absolutely glamorous’ was her standard comment. But the moment someone mentioned racing, I heard her voice change, her languor drop, and she spoke shrewdly, intelligently, and imaginatively; I opened my eyes because I couldn’t believe my ears — and even after only a minute in the shelter of the explosive dark of my eyelids, the garden and the people sprang up with strong variety and brightness, a deep texture of colour and shadow through which I seemed to look down. I went into the pool before lunch, floating in a stream of pleasant sensations, a current that touched only the nerve-endings; the lave of cool water, the astringent prickle of midday sun, the smell of plums and hot grass, and the perfume on the skin of a woman as she rose out of the water a moment, beside me.

I succumbed completely to such moods. This one took me on the instant, enclosing as a bubble, and I did not compare or relate it to what had gone before; an Orpheus, I passed from one world to another — but neither was real to me. For in each, what sign was there that the other existed?

Cecil and I left about five o’clock and drove home in gathering silence. The summer sun was at a level to strike us right in the eyes, an impaling glare you couldn’t escape. Cecil was like a bird suddenly quenched by the blanket thrown over its cage; all her gaiety went out under the sense of the holiday over. The ebb of animation from drinks and the atmosphere of playful admiration with which she and her friends surrounded each other, left her stranded. The idea of the New Year, only a week away, seemed to depress her. ‘I’ll be twenty-nine,’ she said. She wondered what the year would be like; I said, meaning to reassure her, like any other year. She hardly spoke again.

I realized that I was incapable of generating the kind of atmosphere that we had just left, and which, like some drug without which an addict cannot live, though it brought her to the doldrums in which she was now, was also the only thing likely to float her clear again. I fell silent, too. And she sat like a child for whom the end of the party is the end of the world; that was how she lived, from one treat to the next, free of a job, free of her child, free of all the every-day ballast that, I suppose, makes life possible for most people.

Her flat smelled stale from being shut up through the heat of the day. She treated me with the absent, dependent, grateful manner of the convalescent who wakes and is glad to find someone sitting at the bedside. When we had opened the windows and the balcony doors, we simply sat about, for a while, talking desultorily and looking through a couple of the American picture magazines to which she subscribed and which usually lay about unopened. The building, the whole street, were not so much quiet as abandoned, with the gone-dead feeling of places awaiting the return of holiday-makers. She came and sat beside me and leaned against me, kicking off her shoes and putting her feet up on the stained table where I and my predecessors had rested their glasses. It was one of those hours when you feel that you will never be hungry again, nor want to make love again.

I got interested in an article that whipped familiarly through the Stone Age with a character named Prehistoric Jones, the prototype man-in-a-grey-flannel-suit, and Cecil decided to go off and have a bath.

I didn’t realize how long she’d been gone — she must have been soaking for more than twenty minutes, the sun had dropped and the air seemed to breathe again — when she suddenly appeared at the doorway wrapped in her bath-towel and looking stunned, as if she could not believe what had alarmed her. ‘Come and listen,’ she said. ‘Quickly.’

She took my hand tightly and led me to the bathroom. ‘Listen.’ She jerked my hand to be still. There was nothing, for a moment, except the drizzle of a tap, but when I made to speak she stopped me urgently. Then I heard the panting of a dog, somewhere on the other side of the wall, in the street. But as I identified the sound it grew, it was the panting of something else. What? It grew in volume, it quick-ended, it harshly filled and emptied some unimaginable cavern of a breast, while Cecil, dripping wet, stared at the wall in horror. Then, as she turned to warn me of the anguish of what was to come, it came: the last roaring pant, a breath taken in hell, burst into a vast, wailing sobbing, the terrible sorrow of a man. A man! I jumped up and opened the window, and she leapt up behind me to see me do what she had been afraid to do for herself. I looked. The street seemed empty, commonplace, peaceful. Some broken paper streamers, yellow and pink, lay in the road. A bicycle was propped against a tree. And then we saw him sitting with his head on his arms, in the gutter, just below us. He was a tall Zulu — the stretched lobes of his ears hung loose where he had once worn fancy disks in them — and he had on only a pair of trousers.

‘It’s William!’ said Cecil, with an hysterical laugh of relief, as if the identification of the man as the familiar servant who cleaned the flats on her floor automatically put an end to the horror.

But as she spoke, the man got up, his back to us, and began to pace back and forth across the road, and in his splendid chest the hideous panting began again, working up to a gasping climax, and ended in the raucous and frightful sobbing that left him crouching in the gutter with his head bowed on his hands. ‘William!’ Cecil called. ‘William!’ — the voice of authority and reproof that never failed to bring him to the kitchen door. We saw his face, looking directly at us as he began to pace and pant again; saw that he did not see us, or anything.

‘William! William!’

Cecil was shaking as if she had just been struck in the face. ‘What’s the matter with him?’ she begged me. ‘What’s wrong with him?’ She felt the threat of a disaster she had never heard of, the dread of the discovery of some human sorrow unknown to her, hidden as the New Year, something that was neither death, poverty, or divorce.

She thought of sorrow, I thought of madness. It seemed to me he must have gone crazy. I wanted to go out and try to talk to him, but she would not let me go without her, she flung on her clothes grimly and made me wait for her.’ You don’t want to go. You watch through the window.’ ‘No, no.’ Her hands could hardly put her clothing together.

She stood beside me on the pavement, looking down at the man, her one trembling hand with the nails scarlet against her temple, holding back her hair. We called his name, but the man did not know we were there. We clattered up the ringing iron of the back stairs to the roof, where the servants lived, and fetched one of the other flat boys. He was a small, bow-legged Basuto, who smoked a pipe as crooked as his legs. He stood looking at the man in the gutter, admiring his extremity. ‘He been smoking. Dagga make him like that.’

‘Speak to him, go on, speak to him,’ ordered Cecil angrily; she might have been telling him to scrub the floor.

The little man didn’t move. ‘I don’t touch him,’ he said. ‘He know nothing, nothing. Sometime three day he won’t know nothing.’ He enjoyed giving information.

‘Dagga! But he’s in agony!’ Cecil covered her face, up to the eyes, with both hands.

It was true that the man in the gutter knew nothing; could not seem to find his way back to himself. His was an unspeakable anguish of alienation, lostness, the howling of the wolf of the soul in a waste. The ghastly ritual went on: tearing anxiety of pacing and panting, climax of sobs, then panting again.

Cecil took her hands from her face, and I saw that the palm of one was indented with the marks of her teeth.

She went into the flat and made some strong black coffee. When I approached him with a cup he flung himself away like a wild beast for whom food, in the hand of a man, is overlaid with the scent of fear.

Cecil never took her eyes off him; when he panted, her hand flew to her breast, when he sobbed, her mouth twitched. ‘Should we send for the police?’

‘They’ll arrest him.’

‘Get a doctor?’

It did not seem possible that any human being could reach him, where he was.

‘Why did he do it?’ she kept saying.

A few Africans had wandered down from the building, drawn by the spectacle. They talked and pointed, standing back, the way they might at a zoo. ‘That’s his Christmas,’ said a tall man with speckless black-and-white shoes, a Stetson, and a happy way of chewing a match. Christmas. The word was echoed in agreement, indulgently. When they had seen the whole thing through two or three times, they went back up the stairs, or strolled off up the street talking in their own language and detaining each other with the sort of gestures described in the air that people use when they are capping each other’s anecdotes.

We went inside, too, and in the living room, which did not face on the street, you could not hear the man. But Cecil kept going to stand in the bathroom, where you could. She sat on the edge of the bath and shushed me as if she must hear what there was to hear; the tap dripped and the steam parted to liquid runnels on the tiles while the frenzied travail sounded on, bestial and wretchedly human at the same time, a monstrous serenade from some medieval hell. It was all the cries we do not cry, all the howls we do not howl, all the bloody furies in our hearts that are never, must never be, let loose. Even I was afraid, hearing it; not of the man, but of a stir of recognition in myself. We sat in a kind of shameful fascination, and did not look at each other. She was tight-lipped, her long hands were clenched on themselves, the spikes of both blood-red thumbnails folded back on the fists.

The sobs died; whistled away like a wind in a broken, empty place. There was a roaring cry that brought tears to attention in Cecil’s eyes, turned fiercely to me. Then the sound of a man running, running up the street, running away with the grit of the street powdering beneath his power. At the bathroom window, we saw him, past the leaning bicycle, past the stragglers, up the hill where the curve of the street lifted him behind the foreground of the Jacarandas.

It was a gentle evening, as it so often is after a grillingly hot day in Johannesburg. Scraps of pastel floated about the sky, between the buildings, the trees and the chimneys of the street. Cecil went into the kitchen to get some ice and there I found her, her head against the grey dish towels that hung on a nail.

‘Are you crying?’

‘No.’

‘What’s wrong?’

She turned and she still had the look she had had when she couldn’t stop listening to the dagga-crazy man. ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do.’

‘How d’you mean? What about?’

‘This year.’ She stood in the kitchen as if it were a ruin. But the cheap alarum ticked and the engine of the refrigerator broke into a run; it was as I had always remembered it.

‘What do you want to do?’

She said, ‘What have I got to show? Twenty-nine. Not enough money to live decently. What on earth can I do with myself? The whole — thing — frittered away.’ She pushed the child’s tricycle aside with her foot, and began to run the hot tap over the ice-container. The cubes tumbled into the sink, and above the clatter she said savagely,’ Hamish’s is a terrible place, your whole life could go there, like one of the lunch parties.’

She began to talk of what she would do if she had money, if she didn’t have the child, if she lived in Europe. For the first time since I’d known her, I heard the South African accent come out in a phrase, in a word, beneath the carefully acquired upper-class English stereotype of her voice. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that she would find the same parties, the same rich indulgent friends, the same thoroughbred horses, everywhere.

‘His Christmas!’ she said, suddenly. She was sitting on the divan beside me and I felt a convulsion move her body, like the shudder a dog gives before it is sick. ‘What other country is there where you’d have a thing like that on your doorstep? What a Christmas for anybody! Nothing but a beast! How can you live with savages around you!’

I said to her, ‘But you cried. You made coffee for him.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘No. They said it was his Christmas. What would make anyone choose that Christmas?’ Like evidence, she began to gather up the presents, with their coloured and tinsel wrappings, their ribbons and sprigs of holly and extravagantly affectionate cards, that we had brought from Alexanders’ and piled on the table when we came in.

Chapter 13

Often, in the letters written to me from England, I would come across the phrase ‘the life out there’: the people I knew read of strikes, of beer-hall riots, and arrests for treason, they saw pictures of smiling black babies dressed in beads, of tall buildings, of politicians whose defiantly open mouths might be prophesying doom or development. Out of all that, I suppose they rounded off some sort of sphere to contain me, vague to them but of course certain to be perfectly clear to me.

They would have understood a city of many different ways of life, all intermingled, but would they have understood the awful triumphant separateness of the place I was living in? Could I tell them how pleasant it was to be lulled and indulged at The High House? Could I explain the freedom I felt where I had no legal right to be, in that place of segregation, a location? I supposed that to have a ‘life out there’, a real life in Johannesburg, you’d have to belong in one or the other, for keeps. You couldn’t really reconcile one with the other, the way people were, the way the laws were, and make a whole. The only way to do that was to do what Anna Louw had done — make for the frontier between the two, that hard and lonely place as yet sparsely populated.

In any case, I had no particular wish to explain myself, or the irreconcilables of the way I was living, to anybody, even myself. All my life I had lived among people who found it necessary to explain. If they hadn’t given me any tradition but doubt and self-examination, then I had chosen to prefer to trust to instinct. In Johannesburg, at least, it had proved a fairly lively way to live.

Steven’s gusto renewed itself as naturally as the sun rose every morning. Living by his wits kept them skinning-sharp; his whole life was an endless outwitting of authority. Sometimes he was a child playing cops and robbers; sometimes he was a lawyer cunningly, constantly, watchful for loopholes in a case that built up more formidably every day. He would slip into my office with his well-brushed suède shoes and his well-cut suit hanging fashionably loose, looking down his nose as he smiled, the way he had seen filmstars do.

‘Well, who’ve you been talking into something now?’

Suddenly he’d sit down opposite me, throwing aside the pose, grinning his battered, broken-toothed grin.

‘The trouble with you, Toby’ — ‘the trouble with you’ was one of Steven’s favourite openings — ‘is that you’ve lost faith in the power of the human voice. You only believe things when you see them written down. It’s much better not to have things on paper, for other people to keep after they’ve gone out of your head.’

‘No simple wisdom this morning please.’

‘Don’t worry, man, I’m off. You remember that fellow from Tzaneen, Bobby, the short one?’

‘I don’t, but that doesn’t matter; what about him?’

‘He’s a good guy. He’s got a job with old Jake, in the printing shop, but he hasn’t got a permit to work in Jo’burg. I’m gonna fix it for him now.’

He knew a fellow. This time a fellow who was a clerk in the immigration office. But always a fellow somewhere; a fellow who laid bets on horses for him; a fellow who bought brandy for him; a fellow who got him an exemption pass, so that he didn’t have to carry a wallet-full of identity papers and tax receipts about with him. The more restrictions grew up around him and his kind — and there seemed to be fresh ones every month — the quicker he found a way round them. Much of his vitality and resource and time went into this; sometimes I wondered how long one could keep up this sort of thing — how would he live as he grew older? — but mostly I enjoyed the flair with which he did it. Nothing could keep Steven out. In the locations often there was the charged atmosphere, smouldering, smothered, and sour, like the porridge turning to beer in the pots, of a vast energy turned in upon itself. But he wriggled and cheated and broke through.

At least once a week he would drag me off on some fantastic jaunt, or suddenly bring me into the company of new people, all apparently old friends of his. We went to Lucky Chaputra’s splendid wedding, in February, and to a conference of witch-doctors — pompous, prosperous men in blue suits with well-rounded waistcoats. He arranged a special performance of Indian dancing for me, and didn’t tell me about it until we were at the door of the house in Vrededorp where the girl I’d seen before was waiting for us; then he laughed and swaggered and made boastful light of the surprise. ‘You’re really impressed with that baby, I think, Toby,’ he murmured, looking at me sideways. He would have pimped for me, but he was never in the least dependent on me for anything; that first night in the shebeen when we were drunk together he had got the moment he wanted from me; he didn’t want anything else, or less.

Often I thought how well he and Cecil would have got on together, if they could have known each other. Their flaring enthusiasms, their unchannelled energy, their obstinately passionate aimlessness — each would have matched, out-topped the other.

William cleaned the floor around Cecil’s feet unnoticed; the New Year went on as unremarkably as William’s return to working anonymity; he had disappeared for three days, the day the turn of the hill hid him, but once he was back everything was as before. Cecil was going to ride Hamish’s prize mare in the big Show that is held in Johannesburg at Easter, and the muscles of her forearms were quite steely with the determination of her training. She went off to Kit Baxter at the Karroo farm for a week, and when I went to Hamish’s for a swim, on the Saturday morning, I found that old John Hamilton had fetched the little boy Keith and coy Eveline, the nanny, from the flat, and was giving the child a swimming lesson. I felt guilty because I hadn’t thought to do it; I might have taken the boy to the zoo, or something, while Cecil was away, but really, she did so little for him that there was nothing much to compensate him for in his mother’s absence. He turned and frowned away from the glare of the water, and, in the moment, he was terribly like her. Suddenly I wished her back, very strongly; I was aware not of her laughing, talking, active social presence, but of her silent, sentient self that was inarticulate — her hand, smelling of cigarette smoke, early in the morning, the exact displacement of her weight as she flopped into the car beside me.

I continued to think about all this while John and I lay in the sun — an amber sun, with all the white heat turned to the other side of the world — and he talked with his usual ease and lack of demand.

‘You’ve got to come along with me. We can’t have you going off back to England one of these days without having seen the best guinea-fowl shooting in the country. Man, you’ll love it. A couple of gallons of red wine, plenty to eat, and you walk twenty miles or so a day. You feel great, I can tell you. No trouble, no dirty work — I always see we have good boys to keep the camp going, and clean the birds and all that. I wouldn’t take you on the first shoot, though, if there hasn’t been a good ground frost yet it’s the very devil, you get yourself covered in ticks. Then, if you go too late, say August, there’s too much grass down, no cover for the birds and they’re off, the moment you sight them. You haven’t a snowball’s to get anywhere near. God, that’s maddening! You know what I mean, Toby?’

I answered with the appropriate, laconic show of response which is simply a series of polite noises hiding inattention, and that, I have to admit since living out of England, is done particularly and inoffensively well by Englishmen. Foreigners attribute the manner to that other famous English trait, a predilection for understatement, and so save themselves the implication of boredom. In any case, I was not bored by John Hamilton; I simply wasn’t listening to him.

Marion Alexander came out across the lawn dressed for town, from where she had just come. Like many women who aren’t young any more, when she was high-heeled and pulled in here and there and wore an elaborate hat and all the glittering, distracting surface of jewellery, veils, furs that such women employ, she looked, from a distance, almost beautiful. A quick look rapidly taking in all the adornments of beauty suggested a beautiful woman, and so, for a moment, you saw one. Then, as she came nearer, the components fell apart; there was a thick neck under the pearls, the legs were spindly, there were ropes of veins on the backs of the beringed hands.

‘Have you had everything you want, darlings?’ she called, and again, as she came up to us, ‘Has Jonas been looking after you?’

‘The lot,’ said John, gesturing to the tray of used cups on the grass, and the table with glasses and a jug of orange juice.

‘We could do with something a little stronger than that,’ said Marion in reproof of the absent servant, Jonas. The Alexanders took it for granted that their guests needed a constant stream of refreshment, that the only way they could be expected to continue functioning as guests was by something approximating to the system whereby failing patients are kept alive by a night-and-day saline drip into their veins. Jonas was called and told to bring whisky and gin and all the things that went with them. Marion kissed Cecil’s child, marvelling over him as she did over everything: ‘Isn’t that the most enchanting. .’ she said to us as she settled carefully to rest in one of the low garden chairs. ‘That is the most adorable thing.’

‘D’you know,’ John agreed, ‘he’s got absolutely no fear of the water at all? He’s ready to slip out of your hand and drown himself the moment you get him in.’

‘He’s exactly Cecil, isn’t he?’ said Marion, conjuring up for us a picture of touching maternal charm, Cecil and her son. ‘Just exactly her spirit, her way of going at things, and her smile — too amazing, the smile.’

They built up this picture which I did not recognize; though I suppose, on appearances, it was recognizable. It did not exist, but it could seem to exist, as people or objects can be brought into relationship with each other in a faked photograph. I felt suddenly jealous and wanted to assert my own familiarity with Cecil by exposing the fake, denigrating her. It was on the tip of my tongue to say, womanishly,’ It’s a pity she dislikes the boy so much.’

Marion was going to Europe in a week or two — ‘You must look after Hamish,’ she said to John and me; she said it to everyone, in that absent affectation of simplicity and childishness that the sprightly elderly rich love to adopt. She talked enthusiastically about how she would be seeing my mother; I could see her, telephoning my mother from a suite at Claridge’s, talking about me as she talked about Cecil. And my mother, slightly appalled, trying to recognize me; my mother, at lunch with Marion, looking at Marion’s clothes and diamonds, listening to her chatter, puzzled and even a little hurt (my mother always dutifully took the shortcomings of her children on herself) that I should choose to spend my time in South Africa with people like that. Then she would decide not to invite Marion to dinner after all — she was not young and pretty enough for Faunce to overlook her uselessness, nor was she clever enough for Faunce to forgive her age.

Soon Hamish Alexander came home — we had dressed, and moved with Marion up to the veranda by then. He gave us the formula of greeting and interest that always rolled off his tongue; Had we had a swim (or a ride)? Was the water not too warm, too cold (according to the season)? Had we had a drink? We would stay for lunch, of course. For himself, he never did any of the things he expected his guests to have done, except, of course, eat and drink. With all people who were not mining men or financiers, he kept a don’t-bother-your-head-about-it attitude toward discussions about finance, and what he called ‘precious metals’. When he was talking with his own kind about these things, he always gave his opinions the backing of the editorial or royal ‘we’ — it was never what he thought — as if he reported for another self, a corporate self, left behind in the great building in the city which housed the head offices of his company.

Politics sometimes gathered a little group of men into a huddle at The High House — the women there never contributed except for the rare passing interruption of some piercing and paralysing generality — but Hamish did not encourage the talk. In fact, he seemed to have some special sensory awareness of it, and he would call across, almost warningly, ‘What’s that you say? I don’t think people quite realize the particular difficulty — ’ as if he resented the mere useless airing of views of men who had no knowledge behind-the-scenes. Perhaps all this was a device to protect his leisure; anyway, I know that a big strike of African mine-workers on the Rhodesian Copperbelt, that sent him up there to confer with people from the Oppenheimer group, was simply ‘this Rhodesian nuisance’ that absented him from a big theatre party arranged by Marion, and uranium — the discovery of which had been confirmed in some of the worked-out gold mines of his group — was practically a dirty word in the house, or a sacred one — it took some daring to bring it out, at any rate.

The few times I had heard politics talked at The High House, it had hardly seemed to be concerned with the same country or spoken by people in the same situation as the talk I heard in Sophiatown or in houses where black and white people met. The people at Alexanders’ were almost entirely preoccupied with the struggle between the Afrikaner and the Englishman; that is, the Nationalists and themselves. To the other people I knew, the squabbling of the two white peoples was simply picayune; dwarfed by the towering bout between black and white. When an important Nationalist recanted and turned on his old Party colleagues, making speeches of high emotion calling for unity (between English-and Afrikaans-speaking whites) instead of a divided people, there was an air of triumph about politics at The High House; in fact, for the first time, politics came out of the corner and was generally talked. They discussed a possible refurbishing of their United Party as they might have considered doing up a perfectly livable room they hadn’t used much lately, or reconditioning a plant that hadn’t been in production for a while.

In Anna Louw’s house, where the event wasn’t mentioned until I brought it up myself, Sam said, ‘United people? What’s the paper mean? United against us?’ And Sylvia Danziger, who was there too, went off into a peal of stuttering laughter.

Cecil did well at the show, but not quite well enough to keep her in the triumphant euphoria in which she was most attractive. I went along to see her compete, twice; when she came out, needle-straight above Hamish’s prancing mare, I felt again in a flash the moment when I had noticed her first in the Stratford Bar, months before: she had the exciting, self-absorbed remoteness of a woman whom one does not know. But my attention wandered from the spectacle of one rider after another, uniformly the same, urging their horses to the same performance round the same course; beyond the creak of saddle-leather, a band bumbled somewhere nearby, flags stirred limply, prize cows lowed over in the agricultural section, and, farther away still, there was the vast snore of city traffic, rising and falling and twining. I found Cecil sitting beside me, grim under the black velvet cap, smelling of horse sweat. I gave her a cigarette and her hand was trembling. When someone did worse than she had done, she had difficulty in keeping her flushed face impassive, and looked swiftly sideways at Hamish and Kit. When someone did better than she had, she looked at no one, and fidgeted with the cloth of her breeches stretched tight over her knees. The day she won an event, we all had lunch together at the members’ restaurant; Hamish hardly ever went to places that did not carry some sort of privilege. It was a poor lunch, but there was plenty of champagne and a great crowd of well-dressed people in an atmosphere of perfume and cigar-smoke. I was astonished, when I looked up across the heads, to see Anna Louw looking at me. She had a hat on (I had never seen her wear a hat before) and she was smiling, like a child smiling from the top of the big wheel. When Hamish’s party was on its way out, and I had left the others to go and get Marion’s coat for her from the counter where such things were handed for safe keeping, I found myself near enough Anna to go and speak to her. She was alone; waiting for her escort, I supposed.

‘Keeping a tag on you,’ she said, smiling with pleasure.

‘How was I to know you, in that hat?’

John Hamilton, who was also in Hamish’s party, came up as he left the umpteenth group of friends he had paused to talk to as he lagged behind the rest of our party. He had had a lot to drink and his down-to-earth debonair manner, a cross between Father Christmas in a department store and man-about-town, was in spate. ‘Toby, there’s no dragging you away from the girls. Come on now, who’s this delightful young lady you’ve been keeping to yourself. — He’s a dark horse, my dear, always keeps the good things to himself. — Why don’t you bring her along to Hamish’s eh? Proper Don Juan and pretty darned selfish about it. D’you ride, my dear? Well, what does it matter, you can just sit and look charming. . ’ He drifted on again, greeting people everywhere along the tables.

‘Bubbly drinks at lunch have a hideous effect on people,’ I said, awkwardly. ‘I think he’s rather a nice man,’ said Anna. ‘Oh he is, he is.’ I felt rebuked.

‘Did you have a good lunch?’ I asked. She and I had never had a conversation like this before.

‘Asparagus, turkey, ice-cream and chocolate sauce,’ she announced. I felt she was laughing at me. I should have liked to have taken off that hat of hers.

‘You sound as if you enjoyed it.’

‘Toby, man, there’s something fascinating about people like this, you know.’

‘You don’t really think so.’

‘Oh yes. It’s natural to be like them. If you’re a whole person, perfectly adapted to your own functions, like a fish in the sea or a lion in the jungle, you don’t give a damn for anybody else. There’s something queer about people like me, haven’t you noticed it? We want to change things because we haven’t got the divine selfishness of really healthy beings. We’re not enough to ourselves.’

They were waiting, the faces of Hamish’s party, searching for me impatiently across the crowd. Cecil had her little whip authoritatively between her two hands, the winner’s smile, not directed towards anyone, but meant for herself, lifted her head. John Hamilton beckoned with a high wave like a man casting a lasso.

One night in July, in late winter, the ‘opera’ that Sam had written and composed in collaboration with a white man was given in the dreary hall of a Bantu social centre. The new kind of fashionable audience had come to see it; the people who had ‘discovered’ the Africans artistically and were making the most of the distinction. And, automatically, since, as I’ve said before, the range of mixed society was so limited, they had drawn in people who had always worked with and had friends among Africans — even one famous man, who had championed the African cause in Europe and America.

The opera was really more of a musical play than an opera, and yet too much like an opera to be a musical play; it just missed being either. It was also more of a white man’s idea of what a black man would write, and a black man’s idea of what a white man would expect him to write, than the fusion of a black man’s and a white man’s worlds of imagination. It missed being Sam’s work, and it missed being the other man’s too — for what that might have been worth. There were one or two good moments in it — especially in the music — but its general impression was that of one of those old-fashioned gipsy operettas that, so feebly wild and gay, never come alive, and it seemed to me to have about as much Africa in it as Ruritania ever resembled any Balkan country that’s ever been on a map. Of course, there was a mixed audience of black and white men and women, and that, in Johannesburg, gave us all a strange, embarrassed pleasure; you couldn’t help noticing it.

It’s not supposed to rain in the Transvaal in winter but it was raining when we left the hall, and the winter wind of Johannesburg, the wind of high places, slapped at your face like a wet towel. Steven was with a few friends — Peter was there that night, and a shy little hospital nurse; Betty Ntolo, the singer, resplendent and giggling; and the man who owned the car that had brought them all, a fat man with a fat man’s deep voice, Elias Shomang.

We stood, pressed back against the shelter of the hall’s entrance with the rest of the audience, chattering, a glitter of eyes catching the mirror-light of the downpour, shoulders tightened against the cold, the planes of many faces, Indian, African, Caucasian, pleasantly contrasting. I could not help thinking that we seemed less sheep-like than most crowds just let out from an entertainment; I suppose it was the novelty, for although in Johannesburg I’d been in crowds composed of white men, and crowds composed of black, I’d never seen more than a roomful of both mingled. I asked Steven and the others to come to my flat for a drink on their way home. People kept making sudden dashes, driven before the wind, to their cars, and soon we found our opportunity and rushed out, too.

Our two cars reached the building where I lived at almost the same moment, and we clattered up the stairs and into my flat together in the mild relief and excitement of getting in out of the cold. Steven had no coat and his jacket had been pretty thoroughly wetted even in the short exposure to and from Elias’s car, so he took it off and hung it over a magazine rack before the electric fire, to dry. He hadn’t liked the opera at all. He and I argued while we poured the gin and brandy, and gave each person one of the hollow ice cubes — they were thin shapes of ice with water inside them — that, for some curious reason, probably old age, were the best my refrigerator could do.

‘What’s the good of a thing like that, to Sam. He can do much better on his own; what does he want that chap Brunner for? I get so wild when I see him panting after these whites, holding out his hand, let’s be pals, thanks for the chance to work with you — and all they want to do is pick his brains and pinch his music. It makes me sick, man, I tell you.’ Steven dismissed the whole evening.

‘Right, it wasn’t much good. But you can’t say that Sam doesn’t get anything out of it, he’s had the chance to see the thing performed, and that’s something. Without Brunner it wouldn’t have happened.’

‘Brunner!’ said Steven. He broke a match between his teeth.

‘Of course, he’s a bit of a bloody fool; but what does that matter. Look here, Steve, Sam’s got good ideas and some of his music’s wonderful, but he doesn’t know anything about the conventions of the stage, you know what I mean? He doesn’t know how to combine his ideas into a whole, he doesn’t even know how to get people on and off a stage. He doesn’t know what the limitations of a stage are. How could he? How many plays has he seen in his life?’

‘A few,’ said Steven. ‘Quite a few.’

I knew that even to Steven, who had been to England, the definition of a formal stage presentation was loose; he might count revues and even a concert or two as being part of Sam’s experience.

‘A very few. Twice since I’ve been in Johannesburg I’ve read that the cast of some theatrical company was going to give a performance for Africans in some location township, or in the University Hall. Has Sam ever been inside a theatre?’

Steven was mimicking: ‘The Africans were an absolutely marvellous audience. Quite the best audience we’ve ever had. D’you know that they actually picked up points that white audiences missed?’ — This was the standard comment of white companies when interviewed by the Press after a performance before a black audience, even if they had presented Anouilh to a hall full of black schoolchildren.

‘Has Sam ever been inside a theatre?’

‘No, of course not, how could he. But he’s listened to hundreds of records. He’s got opera, he’s got Macbeth, and Romeo and Juliet acted by the Old Vic, he’s got American musicals, that play Under Milk Wood — oh, dozens. I don’t think Mr Brunner can teach him anything.’

‘Don’t be a damn fool. Anybody can teach him something. Anybody who’s been able to see plays and hear operas.’

Steven looked patronizingly superior. ‘He’s a fool’, he insisted, ‘to let them pick his brains. And he even says thank you, Baas, for it.’

The others sat around politely, sipping their drinks almost surreptitiously, as if they were frightened to disturb us. Betty Ntolo giggled with embarrassment at the sight of Steven, talking as he did about white men in a white man’s house; she was never at ease in the company of even one white person. But I think she wanted to show the little nurse, who was one of Steven’s latest admirers — Steven is the only man I have ever known who really never had to pursue women, but had them come after him — that she was a familiar, used to him and his ways. ‘I think that girl, the well-built one, the one who played the sister — she’s rather good,’ said Elias Shomang, settled back more comfortably in his chair now; he had been sitting, with the belly-burdened awkwardness of a heavy man, on the edge. And the talk became more general. ‘I know her,’ said Peter. ‘She used to sing with an outfit I know, but she’s gone all posh.’

‘She’s certainly ample,’ I said.

Steven couldn’t seem to stop worrying at me that evening; he said, treating the women present — as he always did when it suited him — as if they were not there,’ I can’t understand it, Toby seems to find all our women too fat. What’s this English taste for starved women?’ We all laughed, but he went on, ‘I’ve never been able to interest him in a nice African girl yet.’ Everyone laughed again, and I gave him some nonsense in answer; yet he was not looking at me, he had turned away to someone else, and I understood that he meant what he said, it was a cover for some reservation he had about me, some vague resentment at the fact that I had not been attracted by any African woman. He, I knew, did not suspect me of any trace of colour-prejudice; he attributed my lack of response to something far more wounding, because valid in the world outside colour — he believed that African women were simply not my physical concomitants. It was a slight to him; hypothetically, he had shown me some woman he had possessed and I had detracted from his possession by finding her unbeautiful.

Just then, there was a ring at the door, but it didn’t surprise any of us very much, although the time was nearly midnight, because it was quite likely that some other friend who had been at the opera had decided to drop in. I got up and went to the door with my glass in my hand. The caretaker of the flats was standing there; she wore her fur coat, a long-haired animal with tawny stripes that made a chevron down her bosom, and her huge, regularly-painted face confronted me like a target in a shooting game. She was one of those people, quite common in Johannesburg, who don’t seem to be Afrikaans-speaking, but don’t really speak English either. She whined like an Australian, she dropped aitches like a Cockney — it would take an expert in phonetics to convey what she made do with for communication.

She must have drawn breath as she heard the door open, for she said at once, from the top of her chest and the back of her distended nostrils, ‘Mr Hood, ’ev yoo brought natives into the building. I’v hed complaints yoo been bringing natives in the building, end jis now Mr Jarvis seen yoo coming in the front door with natives.’

I said, ‘Yes, Mrs Jarvis?’ standing there with the glass in my hand as if I were about to propose a toast.

She came past me into the hall and closed the door; I guessed that she was not fully dressed beneath her fur coat, she held it tightly round her all the time. ‘I wanna tell yoo, Mr Hood, whatever yoo been used to, this is’n a location, yoo can’t ‘ev natives. If yoo bringing natives, yoo’ll ’ev to go.’ Her breath was quite expelled. She looked past me as if she could not bring herself to look at me. She was a very clean, over-dressed, over-painted woman, and now, just as always when she passed you on the stairs, she smelled of cigarettes and toilet soap.

‘I can have whom I please in my own flat so long as I pay the rent.’

Through the open door into my room, she saw Peter and the nurse sitting on the divan and the jacket hanging before the radiator; Elias Shomang was hidden by the door, but Steven in shirtsleeves crossed with a bottle of soda-water, doing some imitation that made them all laugh.

Mrs Jarvis lost control of herself. Her hand left her coat and I saw an expanse of lace covering a vast flushed mound of flesh. ‘Yoo can’t bring kaffirs in my building,’ she screamed. ‘Sitting there like this is a bloody backyard location, I mean to say, the other tenants is got a right to ’ev yoo thrown out. Kaffir women coming here, behaving like scum, living with decent people. Wha’d’yoo think, sitting here with kaffirs. . ’

Through the door, I saw that nobody in the room spoke, nobody looked at anybody else; the woman’s voice took them like a seizure. It seemed to swell up and fill the flat, and I shouted back at her, my throat bursting, ‘This is my flat, d’you hear, you’ve no right to walk in here.’ But she went on and on: ‘Mr Hood! Mr Hood! Yoo got no right. I shoulda listened to what I been told. What would Mr McKay say, in his building, I got my job to think. . place full of kaffirs. I know. I been told. Yoo coming home five o’clock in the morning in a kaffir taxi. Yoo unnerstend, Mr Hood.’

Steven said suddenly, standing in his shirtsleeves in the doorway between my room and the entrance, ‘You have no right, Toby, look in your lease and you’ll see.’ His voice was passionless and removed; I heard it like the voice of someone not present, a voice in one’s brain. His brown, pale-palmed hands rested delicately on the door-frame, he stood lightly, and his eyes were glitteringly bright.

The woman turned and went out the front door.

I still had my glass in my hand; I had never put it down — it had happened as quickly and unmomentously as that. Shomang was murmuring regret, like a guest who has broken an ashtray. The nurse sat staring down at her lap; she looked as if a hand must descend on her shoulder any minute. We were all a little incoherent, shaken, cocky. Peter, that sleepy boy, who lived like a snake in the charmer’s basket, only coming to life with music, said again and again, excitedly, ‘Bloody white bitches! Bloody white bitches!’

‘Is it true about the lease?’ I said to Steven.

‘Of course. Haven’t you got it?’

‘Somewhere. I’ve never read it.’

‘Read it and see. No natives unless they’re in the capacity of servants.’

‘It certainly makes social life a little difficult,’ said Shomang cordially, in his stilted African English. At that we all laughed. Betty Ntolo, hanging on Steven’s shoulder, put her hand over her mouth as if to stifle the sound of us all. Steven shook her off, kindly, ‘A quick one and then we better get going.’

‘To hell with her,’ I said, bringing over the brandy.

‘She’s the kind to go for the police,’ he said,’ Wheeeeee. Bang-bang. Open up. Flying Squad here, sir. We got a report you’re selling drink to natives in your flat. . ’ He did an imitation that combined the absurdities of gangster films with the absurdities that he had noted in his own experience.

‘We should have gone to Ma Ramosa’s.’

‘We can still go.’

‘Ach, one doesn’t feel like it.’ Elias Shomang was not a shebeen frequenter.

It was still raining hard, and I lent Steven my greatcoat; it was too short for him, and shabbier than anything he would have owned, but he seemed pleased to wear it. ‘It’ll get spoiled in the rain,’ he protested, but he did not take it off.

‘You know damn well it couldn’t look any worse than it does already.’

‘Whatever you’ve left in the pockets is mine, eh, Toby.’

They all trooped out after him, and in the dark passage I couldn’t see him, I could only hear him call, about the coat, ‘I’ll bring it in to the office on Monday.’

‘Yes, yes. O.K. Anytime.’

When they had gone I felt tired and surlily pleased to be alone; all I wanted was to pour myself a brandy and get into bed and open the bundle of English papers I hadn’t been able to look at since they had arrived the day before. I had a surfeit of the unfamiliar and unexpected; even the names of places that belonged to a known and predictable way of life would have been a respite. But I had, instead, to go looking through the suitcase on top of the bathroom cupboard where I kept a few clothes I didn’t wear; for, the way plans one absently accedes to, thinking they will come to nothing anyway, suddenly materialize, the week-end in the bushveld with John Hamilton had caught up with me, and I was to be ready for him in the morning. He had told me what I must bring, but again, I hadn’t listened very attentively, and so I had to throw into an old duffle-bag what my imagination suggested, and what the resources of the suitcase of apparently useless clothing could supply. It seemed to me to be idiotic to be going off on this jaunt, anyway; I was irritated, as I tried to find the things I supposed I should need, that I had let myself be drawn into it. I hadn’t even remembered, when Steven had called back to me that he’d return my coat on Monday, that I wouldn’t be in the office on Monday. Not that that mattered; Steven was an African and would understand. Perhaps I should take on myself the blessed prerogative of Africans, and simply not turn up for the shoot; but Hamilton, blast him, wouldn’t understand, and was too likeable — in a curious way, too innocent a person — for one to be able to be rude to him. So I put in a couple of pairs of woollen socks, and a heavy pullover I had last worn at Zermatt, and a pair of brand-new khaki shorts I had bought in London for the outdoor life I had thought I was going to lead in South Africa, and went to bed, too tired to read and in an ugly mood. I didn’t sleep well, either, but kept waking myself like an uneasy animal that is on guard, even in its sleep.