A World of Strangers

Chapter 16

After I had bathed and shaved the dirt away, and fried myself a plateful of eggs for lunch — I still felt as hungry as I had been in the bushveld — I went to town. The kitchen of the flat was piled with guinea-fowl, there were feathers and the smell of wood-smoke filled the place; I didn’t know quite what to do with the birds and thought I’d decide when I came back in the evening. In the meantime, it was simple to shut the door on it all.

Saturday’s and Monday’s mail lay on my desk at the office; nothing much, the usual publicity handouts and invoices from Aden Parrot, letters from booksellers who had under-ordered and were now clamouring for stocks of an unexpected best-seller, a note from my sister, on holiday in Spain. There was also a long, hand-written (too confidential even for Faunce’s confidential secretary) letter from Uncle Faunce, telling me that it was possible that Arthur Hollward might ask to be relieved of the South African representation of Aden Parrot; he seemed to be getting old and to have a hankering to settle down in England. How would I feel about staying on, perhaps for a year or two. Nothing definite; merely a feeler, and so on. It was what Uncle Faunce called ‘playing with the idea’. While I read it, I was thinking about my guinea-fowl — half for Marion Alexander, half for Cecil? Perhaps a couple for Sam and his wife, and, of course, Anna Louw. I put Faunce’s letter away without thinking about it; first I hadn’t known what to do with my birds, now I didn’t seem to have enough to go round. I wrote down the names of the possible recipients on the back of my cigarette box.

I worked on at the papers around me until nearly five, when the typist, her coat on ready to go home, came in and said, ‘Oh I forgot. There was a mysterious phone call from the police yesterday. Something about stolen property.’

‘Stolen property? Whose?’

‘Well, I told them that as far as I knew you hadn’t lost anything. You haven’t had a burglary or anything like that at the flat, have you?’ She was a good one, this one; an earnest, rather greasy-haired little girl who was a graduate of the university in Johannesburg, and had taken the humble office job because she was passionately interested in publishing and hoped to get herself a job with Aden Parrot in London, eventually. ‘I’ve got the number, anyway, so perhaps you’d better phone them.’

Before I left the office, I did. When I had given my name and address, and had been handed from voice to voice until I reached the right one, it said hoarsely, patiently, ‘We got a coat here, sir. There was a card in the pocket with your name and address.’

I said, ‘A grey coat with checked lining?’

‘That’s right. We got it here for you.’

‘But I’d lent that coat to a friend.’

‘Well, it must’ve been stolen from him. It was found on a native on Saturday night. You’re lucky. All you got to do is come along and sign for it.’

I said, indignantly, triumphantly, with a laugh, ‘But I lent it to him. He’s Steven Sitole, he’s the friend. Give it back to him.’ The card in the pocket. ‘Whatever you’ve left in the pockets is mine, eh, Toby.’ How Steven must be laughing, over this.

The voice said, ‘He’s dead, sir. He was with a whole lot of other natives in a car that crashed on the Germiston road, and the coat was on his body. They were making a get-away from an Indian club the police was raiding.’

How can I explain the jolt of horror, the knowing, the recognition with which, at that instant, I felt, beneath my hand, the dog as I had discovered her on the back seat of the car. Dread passed a hand over my face, cold. I understood. To my bones, I understood.

I said, ‘What was his name? What was the name of the man? Have you the names there?’

He had not; ‘You must go and find out,’ I said. ‘You must go and fetch the report or whatever it is and read it to me.’

He protested, but I made him. I did not think while I waited, I did not think.

‘Native called Steven Sitole and another one, Dan Ngobo, both dead. Two other natives and an Indian arrested. Three bottles of brandy in the car.’

I said, ‘All right.’

‘And the coat, sir, whad’ju want us to do with the coat?’

I went to the mortuary and got permission to see him. The man said, ‘Did he work for you? You won’t recognize him.’ But I knew I must look at him because otherwise I would never be able to believe that he was gone. I would go away back to England one day and it would seem to me that he was merely left behind, he would begin to live again, forgotten by me. I wanted his death to come home to me, as his quickness had done.

He was broken, that was all. He was still himself. He looked as if he had been in a long and terrible fight, and had lost.

I said to the man, ‘He had a ring, a cheap ring with a red stone in it, that he always wore on his little finger?’

But he knew nothing about it.

I drove out to Sam’s house and found no one there; not even the crones in the yard could tell me where he and his wife might be. I drove back again, through the flare and dark of the night-time township, cries like streamers, smoke and the smells of food, drunken men, children, and chickens, the tsotsis hanging around the cinema — and I had to keep drumming it into myself, he is not there, he is not there. He was made up of all this; if it existed, how could he not? I had to keep explaining death to myself over and over again, as I met with each fresh piece of evidence against its possibility. Despite the war, despite the death of my father, I had never proved the fact of death in my own experience; since I was a man, I had never lost anything that meant more to me than a pet; I understood death only as a child, who has been told the facts of life, thinks he understands love.

In the city, the white powdered faces of women above fur coats showed under the neon lights of the cinemas and theatres, immigrant youth from Naples and Rome stood about on their thick-soled shoes before an espresso bar, the cars urged slowly round and round the streets, looking for parking-places. I drove slowly through the city, slowly through the suburb that climbed the hill.

In the flat, there were the guinea-fowl, the smell of wood-smoke and the feathers, floating along the floor in a current of air stirred by the opening door. The sight of the place was like a confrontation with the smiling face of someone who did not know that anything had happened. The amputation of pain severed me from the moment when I had shut the door behind me, not by eight hours, but by the timeless extension of experience; I had moved so far from that moment, that I felt stupidly unable to understand that, relatively, time had stood still, in my flat.

I knew I could not stay there. I closed the door and went back down the stairs and sat in my car. A hideous sense of aimlessness took hold of me; I sat like a man in an empty, darkened theatre, watching the scene coming down, being taken apart, and carted away. Where were the walls of stone, houses that would stand, a place of worship where you would find God? What had I known of Steven, a stranger, living and dying a life I could at best only observe; my brother. A meaningless life, without hope, without dignity, the life of the spiritual eunuch, fixed by the white man, a life of which he had made, with a flick of the wrist, the only possible thing — a gesture. A gesture. I had recognized it, across a world and a lifetime of friends and faces more comprehensible to me. How could it be true, that which both of us knew — that he was me, and I was him? He was in the bond of his skin, and I was free; the world was open to me and closed to him; how could I recognize my situation in his?

He had not come into his own; and what I believed should have been my own was destroyed before I was born heir to it.

At last I went upstairs again and wrapped up the guinea-fowl in newspaper and took them to Cecil. Sam was out; I could not telephone, across the breach of the town between white man and black, to find out if he was home yet. I couldn’t go to Anna Louw; it seemed to me that it would have been, in some curious way, a disloyalty to Steven to do so. I went to Cecil, with whom I could not discuss Steven’s death at all. Not to talk of it, to ignore pity or moralizing about the short, violent life — that seemed the only thing. For with Steven it was not that he was this or was that; simply, he was.

I drove to Cecil’s flat and found she was, as usual, in the bath. She spent so much of her time lying, smoking, in the bath. She called to me ‘I’ll be out in a minute,’ and I went to the kitchen with my burden of birds. Eveline was washing up the dinner things; ‘Master Toby!’ the woman giggled.

‘Where are we going to put them, we got the fridge full with those things already! Master Patterson he brought us six.’ And she showed me. But I left them to her and went away to the living-room and got myself a drink. In a little while, Cecil came in wearing a dressing-gown, the ends of her hair damp with bathwater. ‘Those birds are marvellous! You’re an angel! They’ll be fantastic eating.’

‘Eveline says you’ve got more than you need, already.’

She looked embarrassed, but careless of being found out in social lies, at once said,’ Oh Guy Patterson brought them. Some nonsense. He begged a stocking of mine to keep his head warm and promised me birds in exchange. How was the trip?’

‘Fine. What sort of weekend did you have?’

‘You do need a haircut. Look at this frill on your collar. You look dead-beat.’ She came and sat beside me and took my hand in her warm lap. I felt under my hand the cold body of the dog and took my hand away and put it behind her head and kissed her hard. She was pleased as she always was by the rough and unexpected advance, and she laughed and said, ‘Don’t tell me you’ve come back from the bush all randy,’ with the faintest emphasis on the ‘you’ that might have implied an unspoken ‘you too’; it crossed my mind that perhaps she was thinking of Patterson. Yet I turned to her and I kissed her and passion came like a miracle in my numbness, and there was compassion in the love-making. I caught her looking at me, as, in her untidy bedroom with the neck of the bedside lamp twisted to throw its light away from her, on to the wall, we went through the ancient ritual of oneness; gazing back at her paused face, I too, was sorry I had not done more for her, wanted or been able to take her in and make life real for her. Yet, in the end, she seemed to hold back on the brink of her own pleasure; she let me go ahead and then she lay back, her eyes open, smiling at herself in some private justification. I said to her, ‘What’s the matter?’ But she shook her head and still smiling, touched my hair, that she had complained about earlier, with a queer little gesture of finality and tenderness, as a woman might adjust her husband’s tie before they are to go out.

She said, softly, ‘It’ll soon be time for you to go back to England, won’t it. Perhaps I shall come and see you there.’

‘Are you really coming?’

She closed her eyes and drew her nostrils in, a child making a wish, ‘I shall marry a rich man and have a suite at the Dorchester and come and see you.’

I said, ‘Oh, I see.’

Later, she led me to make love to her again, and in the dark I thought triumphantly, desperately: I am alive. Yes, one of us is still alive.

Chapter 17

Steven had died like a criminal, but he was buried like a king. All the hangers-on, the admirers, the friends, and acquaintances of his gregarious life came, as one of them expressed it to me, to see him off. There was a band in the funeral procession, there was Betty Ntolo and a whole parade of other entertainers, there were orations in three languages, there were wreaths three feet high. And he was not a film star, or a politician, or anyone known at the distance of fame; all these people had known him as one of themselves.

Sam, when he saw me, held my arm and wept; but I could not cry, just as, in the midst of the joy of jazz at one of Steven’s parties, I could not dance. We went home to Sam’s house and sat drinking the tea that his wife Ella served us in silence. Later he and I walked to the top of the ash-heap that made a promontory near their house. Spring was coming; even up there, a stripling peach-tree that had found a hold of soil under the ash put out a few fragments of thin, brilliant leaf. Beneath us, the township smoked as if it had just been pillaged and destroyed. ‘I’ve sold my car,’ he said. ‘That’s where I was on Tuesday when you came. I’d promised to deliver it.’

I knew how proud he was of the little Morris, how to him it was part of the modest stake in civilized living which it was so hard for Africans to acquire. ‘But why? What was wrong with it?’

‘My brother had to have some money. Ella’s got two sisters who want to go on at school. Oh, a dozen different reasons, all boiling down to the same thing — cash.’

‘That’s a damned shame.’

He smiled, to put me at ease. ‘Toby, man, the black skin’s not the thing. If you know anybody who wants to know what it’s like to be a black man, this is it. No matter how much you manage to do for yourself, it’s not enough. If you’ve got a decent job with decent money it can’t do you much good, because it’s got to spread so far. You’re always a rich man compared with your sister or your brother, or your wife’s cousins. You can’t ever get out of debt while there’s one member of the family who has to pay a fine or get sick and go to hospital. And so it goes on. If I get an increase, what’ll it help me? Someone’ll have to have it to pay tax or get a set of false teeth.’

‘Suppose you don’t?’

He shook his head at me, knowing better. ‘You can’t. You always know yourself what it’s like not to be able to finish school.’

‘Steven once said it wasn’t worth the effort to live as you and Ella do, to try and keep up some sort of standard against the odds.’

‘It’s always worth it, for me,’ said Sam, grinding the heel of his shoe into the ash. A group of children wandered up on to the ash heap; they seemed to belong there, as seals belong on rocks — the dusty skin, the bare backsides, the yellowed eyes, the animal shrillness of their wanderers’ voices. As we passed them, they called out at us. ‘They only know how to curse,’ Sam said, and turning on me in sorrow, shame, and anger, burst out, ‘The way that he died! A man like him! Running away in a car with a bunch of gangsters! D’you think if he’d been a white man that’s all there would have been for him?’

I began to spend a lot of time with Sam and his quiet wife. At first I felt awkward about going to their house so much more often than I used to when Steven was alive; but they accepted me in their shy, unremarking way as if this was inevitable for all of us. The life they led was very different from Steven’s; except for occasional jazz sessions, to which Sam did not take Ella, and to which she did not expect to go, they spent most of their time working; especially Ella — even when Sam played the piano or listened to gramophone records in the evening, she would sit in a corner, bent pain-stakingly over her books. She wanted to read for a Social Science degree, and was preparing herself, by following correspondence courses, for the time when she might be able to give up her teaching job and go to a university. She was pregnant again, but neither she nor Sam seemed to think that the care of a second child would push her hope of continuing her studies still further into the uncertain future.

At their house, I met a different sort of people from those I had become familiar with through Steven. An old Congress leader from another part of the country came to sit and listen while young doctors and lawyers criticized what Congress was doing; an elderly professor — educated in America in the days when such freedoms were at least possible for those who could afford them — spoke with the slightly soured, weary air of one who has heard everything, experienced every emotion of the speakers, many times before. These ageing men, sitting heavily on upright chairs, their legs planted apart, looked almost, already, the statues they might become one day, when the memory of what they had been was restored after the thrusting aside by the younger and more aggressive which was inevitable for them now. The old men kept the habitual gravity that the unsophisticated associate with wisdom. The young men had the swift, deliberately unpompous manner that belongs to a more worldly conception of the knowledgeable man. They seemed to have an exaggerated respect for each other; I often thought how this would change if they found themselves in a parliament and took to the conventions of white party politics. But perhaps this excessive show of respect was already merely a sign of jealousy between them. All of them, the old and the young, were passionate men — the energy of passion was coiled steely and resilient, ready, in them.

I had moved from my old flat, and in the new one, undiscovered as yet by my neighbours or the caretaker, Peter and one or two others who had been the matrix of Steven’s daily life, came to see me. Even Lucky Chaputra came once or twice, awkward, worried and eager to absolve Steven from his shadow. ‘He wasn’t ever in on any of my deals, he just enjoyed knowing me and my crowd.’ Peter sat and drank a couple of brandies with me and didn’t talk much; we’d play some records and he would criticize the players, suddenly confident on his own ground. Wherever Steven’s friends gathered, in shebeens or at parties, his health was drunk, as if his death were another, and the craziest of his exploits. He hadn’t been cautious enough to survive; they admired him for it. Only by the exercise of constant caution, in word, deed, and most important, mind, could an African expect to survive. But he hadn’t cared to live that way; he was their sort of hero. Something in their faces when they drank to him made me shudder inwardly; I had only loved him as a man.

I had not been to the Alexanders’ for weeks. I couldn’t go there any more, that was all. Steven’s death had provided a check, a pause, when the strain of the kind of life I had been living for months broke in upon me. While I had kept going, simply carried along, I had not consciously been aware of the enormous strain of such a way of life, where one set of loyalties and interests made claims in direct conflict with another set, equally strong; where not only did I have to keep my friends physically apart, but could not even speak to one group about the others. I went to Sam’s house because there I could sit in silence, the silence of my confusion, and they would not question me. Sam, looking up from the notes he was making on a sheet of music manuscript, withdrawn behind his big spectacles, then suddenly seeing me and giving me that incongruous black sambo smile of his; Ella, earnest and big-bellied at her Mumford and John Stuart Mill. Was I with them, or were they a refuge? Could I give them up? Surrender them and accept the whisky and the jokes round the swimming pool? Why was it not as simple as giving up The High House?

Within, I started up in panic. Suppose theirs — Sam’s and Ella’s faces — were to be the casual face of destiny that I had known would claim me some day, the innocent unsuspecting involvement to which I would find I had committed myself, nailed the tail on the donkey with my eyes shut, and from which my life would never get free again? Like a neurotic struggling against a cure, I hugged to myself the aimless freedom that had hung about my neck so long. Suppose, when I went back to England, I should find that, for me, reality was left behind in Johannesburg?

Faunce’s letter lay in a drawer in my desk. I had not answered it. He had not mentioned not having received a reply; perhaps already he had discarded ’playing with the idea’ of my staying on in Africa. One or two years, longer? If I went on living here, how should I live?

Across the heads intimately drawn together in the Stratford Bar, Cecil sat with the chair beside her piled with parcels. As I came in, and hesitated a moment to find her in the smoky, vaguely underground atmosphere that always reminded me of London pubs, I saw her regard the parcels familiarly, as if, sitting there in a chair, was a friend of whom she knew what to expect. Then she saw me and hastily stuffed away, as it were, this feminine reverie, and put up her hand in her usual imperious style of greeting. She was as attractive as ever, not really beautiful, as I had once thought her, but irresistible in her defects, which she, in her vanity, crossly despaired of.

‘I don’t know why we always have to come to this place,’ she said gaily.

I must have looked surprised, or even hurt, which was what she wanted; she knew I could not suppose her to be ignorant of why two people go back to the place where they first began to be interested in each other.

‘Shall we go somewhere else?’

‘No. But there are other places, I mean. Look at the table, so sticky you can’t touch it. The man must wipe it off.’

I had not made love to her again, but we had had dinner together and gone to the theatre; our affair was running out, or had fallen into one of those lulls from which it might ignite again, mysteriously as a thread of dry grass under a piece of sunlit bottle. With all our old reservations of distrust, each pretended it was assumed that we knew why we had not seen much of each other lately, and that the reasons were satisfactory.

‘You never notice much where you are, though, do you?’ she said indulgently.

After a few sips of her drink, she took off her coat, grumbling about the stuffiness of the place, and sat back in a loose, bloused dress that hung beautifully on her thin body, and just caught, with a change in the sculpture of its folds, on those small, loose breasts of hers. It was green, and made her look very blonde; her hair was kept a silvery colour, now.

‘That’s lovely.’

‘It ought to be,’ she said, impressed by what she had paid for the dress.

‘What’s all this loot? You seem to have been buying up the town.’

‘Oh — things. I’m getting older and I need expensive clothes now.’

‘Why don’t you come to London and show them what a model ought to look like, and get your picture in Vogue and what-not?’ I tried hard to believe in it; we would have a mews flat together, a place of gin-bottles and dressing-gowns, smelling of love.

She smiled, the challenging smile with the corners of her mouth down. ‘I’d be petrified. You’d be the only person I’d know. I can’t even speak French; you’ve always made me feel so ignorant. Sometimes I’ve wanted to hit you when you’ve gone on talking about something I didn’t have the faintest idea about.’

I said, astonished, ‘What, for heaven’s sake?’

She was vague with remembered frustration: ‘Oh, I don’t know, some Greek who was cut up in bits or was turned into a bull or something.’

We had another drink and our talk warmed and became malleable, it was like it was at the beginning, when all our mannerisms of speech were new to each other, and seemed delightful and amusing.

Suddenly she leaned back and gave a deep sigh, content, musing, as if we had been recalling some conversation of the past. She said abruptly, ‘Darling, I’m going to marry Guy Patterson.’

The voice of a woman who had sat down with the back of her chair touching mine, cut across us with the insistent interruption of a radio turned up ‘. . that sort of thing never enters my mind as a rule. But all day last Saturday, I was writing fives for sevens and sevens for fives. . ’

I said, ‘So that’s why he had your stocking.’ And she laughed: ‘Oh no! I mean it wasn’t then, the whole thing blew up in about a week. . ’ She was watching me, pleading for something.

And the woman’s voice gobbled on,’ I said to my boss all morning, I said, I can’t do a thing right, fives for sevens and sevens for fives, all the time, it must mean something. . ’

‘I thought he was married already.’

‘He’s divorced. We’re all divorced. I believe you’re cross.’

I said sourly, ‘Of course I’m cross. I don’t suppose any man likes any woman he’s been at all in love with to get married.’

‘. . Steady Joe was number five and Ascona was seven, honest to God, he took the double. . ’

She was looking at me fondly, with the reluctance with which I have noticed women are seized the moment they have given something up. It was as if we had the licence now to discuss ourselves, to give ourselves away without the fear of giving away some obscure advantage. We had always lacked confidence in each other, and now it didn’t matter any more. ‘You’re like a clam. I told you, I feel you watching me and keeping yourself to yourself.’ She studied me, looking for the answer. ‘Like an enemy,’ she pleaded. And then, ‘You never wanted to marry me, did you?’

‘Fives for sevens and sevens for fives, I mean, could you beat it?’

‘But when I marry it’ll be someone like you, that I know.’ And how do you suppose you’ll reconcile that with a preference for the company of people like Sam and Ella, I sneered at myself? I put the thought away with all the other irreconcilables in myself; for me, the exoticism of women still lay in beauty and self-absorbed femininity, I would choose an houri rather than a companion. No doubt what I had seen in the nasty woodshed of childhood was a serious-minded intellectual woman.

‘You do think Patterson’s charming, don’t you, you do like him?’ She used his surname as if to ensure that she could convince herself that she would get an objective answer; nothing less, in the need for reassurance that beset her, would do.

I said what was expected of me, and she assented, in confirmation, with little alert movements of her head; and when I had done, looked at me, as if perhaps I might say just one thing more, the thing that would make it certain once and for all that she was plumping down on the right side of the balance.

So she had chosen Patterson; in her greed and fear of life, surely and fatefully, her hand had closed on him. Patterson, the hero preserved in whisky. She would have to face no challenge of any kind with him; she got him ready-made, with the triumph of a woman at a bargain sale, his purpose already proven and his windmill tilted at before she had ever known him. Again I remembered the Sunday afternoon in the empty house, when I had suddenly become aware of what she needed, what one might be able to do for her if one loved her. And now, as then, I could not give her her salvation; in the end, I had not that final word.

We began to talk of Patterson and his position in Hamish’s group, and of where he and Cecil would live. ‘Guy insists that we get a white woman to look after Keith, then I can be quite free.’ I could see that this was the ultimate abdication of her relationship with the little boy, she would let him go, slip the bond, loosed now — even in her conscience — because he was delegated to a white woman, as she could never entirely be while he was delegated to a black one. Now there was no need at all for her to be his mother; her eyes, that had drawn their usual immediate brilliance from a few drinks, shone on some imagined future of money, travel, enjoyment, headstrong in the determined turning away of reality. I pitied her, but again, not enough to oppose her with the loss she chose for herself. I said, ‘How does he get on with Keith?’ And she said, ‘Oh he adores him’ and went on to tell me that Patterson had to go to Canada on business in three months’ time, and that they would probably make that the wedding trip. Hamish had been going to go himself, but since he hadn’t been too well lately — but, of course I didn’t know about Hamish’s high blood-pressure, I hadn’t been there for so long. ‘Marion thought it was because of me that you haven’t been coming to The High House,’ she said, with a smile. ‘Because of Guy.’

‘Hamish and Marion are really wonderful people,’ she added, as if in defence of some amorphous threat that had never been uttered, but was sensed, like thunder in the air. But later she returned to me, free of me, no longer afraid of what she would find out about me. ‘Did you really have natives coming to see you in your flat?’ she asked shyly. ‘Guy says that that’s why you had to leave the first flat.’

‘Now, where did he get that from, I wonder?’

‘There’s a man called Derek Jackson. Well, he’s a friend of Guy and he was living with some woman who had a flat in the same building. She told him about it.’ She was frankly curious: ‘You mean you can actually sit down to dinner with them and it doesn’t seem any different to you?’

‘But they’re my friends. The man I’ve known best since I’ve been here was an African. He was killed in an accident in July.’

She looked at me, fascinated. ‘And they seem like other people to you? You were really fond of this chap?’

‘Yes,’ I said, embarrassed with myself because I was explaining my affection for Steven as if I were trying to make comprehensible a liking for the company of snakes, or chimpanzees, ‘I got on particularly well with him.’

She looked down at her hands, with the long, red, filbert nails. ‘You know, I can’t imagine it — I mean, a black man next to me at table, talking to me like anyone else. The idea of touching their hands — ’ Her hand came out in the imaginary experiment and hesitated, waved back.

I said, ‘It’s no good talking about it. Let’s forget it.’

We smiled at each other, holding the ground of the smile, two people who embrace without words on the strip between their two camps. Like an enemy, she had said of me. Like an enemy, I had lounged and taken my ease at The High House. Like an enemy: the word took away my freedom, tore up the safe conduct of the open mind.

Chapter 18

Away down the platform, I saw the short, hurrying figure of Sam, coming toward me from the Africans’ end of the station. A dry, warm wind of spring, that took me back full circle to the days when I had arrived in Johannesburg a year ago, lifted the covers of the pulp magazines on the vendor’s stand, and the gritty benches, the rails below and the asphalt floor seemed dusted with shining mica. He came on briskly, waving once, grinning, and I saw him say something to a black child sitting on a bundle among squatting and lounging relatives. ‘I’ve squeezed in on the corner of Plein Street’ he said, holding up my car keys a moment before putting them in his pocket. He was going to use my car while I was away in Cape Town on Aden Parrot business for a month.

‘Don’t forget, you must always leave her in gear, the handbrake doesn’t hold.’

He laughed, ‘I won’t let her get away. I’ll even tighten that clutch pedal for you. Where’s the train?’

‘Late, I suppose. My name’s on the reservation list, all right, I’ve just looked.’

At this end of the platform, where white people stood about with suitcases and jewel-boxes and golf clubs, a woman close by turned her head and stared to hear us talking like any other friends saying good-bye. In a country where the simplest impulses are likely to be highly unconventional, it’s a little difficult at first to take such astonished, curious, and even hostile glances for what they are, and to learn to feel neither superior nor angry. I had by now succeeded in doing so. For Sam, of course, it was different; but perhaps long ago he had forged himself a grin for anger, and the Black Sambo smile was also the smile of a tiger.

While we talked, the hollow, bumbling voice of the public address system began, and although I could not make out the English announcement, Sam understood the one in Afrikaans that followed. The train was going to leave from platform eleven, not from platform fifteen. With the swiftly roused excitement of people who are about to go on any kind of journey, everyone was at once caught up in a stir of talk and activity, gathering together possessions, giving each other instructions and counter-instructions, saying goodbyes with the tentative tone of an orchestra tuning up. Sam and I picked up my stuff and trudged off up the platform. He was talking about his wife. ‘I don’t suppose we’ll get down to writing, but I’ll send you a telegram when the child’s born. If it’s a boy we’re going to call it after Steven. I wish you could have been the godfather, Ella says she doesn’t know anyone else she wants. .’ he was panting under the weight of a heavy case, and we were being buffetted together and apart by the press of people.

‘Good God,’ I said, twisting my head to him, ‘you talk as if I’m going for good. I’ll be back in a month. The baby’ll be just about born. I’m not leaving the country.’ In my pocket were two newspaper cuttings; and a letter. The cuttings came from the same week-old issue of the morning paper; the issue of the day on which the paper had broken suddenly out of its accepted place in the ritual of shaving and breakfast, for there, in it, was a list of black and white people arrested on a treason charge, and half-way down the list was Anna Louw’s name. She was out on bail and I had been to see her; she had been arrested because of her connexion with an organization of African women for whom she acted privately as unofficial legal adviser. The police had searched the cottage when they came for her before dawn, and the presence of Urmila, who was spending a few days there, had been an added mark against Anna.

When I read the list on that morning I felt myself suddenly within the world of dispossession, where the prison record is a mark of honour, exile is home, and family a committee of protest — that world I had watched, from afar, a foreign country, since childhood. Hours later, when I picked up the scattered pages of the paper I had left — in my haste to get to the telephone, confirmation, explanation of what I had read — I saw, on one of the fallen pages, one of those smiles that stare out, daily, from social columns. There it was — the face of Cecil, with Patterson, at a charity cabaret in a nightclub. It was a good one of her; she wore one of those dresses that look like a bandage across the breasts, and her pretty collar-bones showed as she hunched her shoulders in laughter. So I cut that out, too. The two pieces of newspaper rested in my wallet in polarity. In a curious way, they set me at peace; the letter that lay with them was the long letter to Faunce, written at last, asking him if he was still serious about replacing Hollward, and if so, telling him that I would stay on indefinitely.

‘What’s that? I do what?’ shouted Sam, grimacing in the effort to follow what I was saying.

‘What’s the fuss, I’ll be back before the baby’s born. You talk as if I’m going away for good.’

We stopped at the top of a flight of steps; he would have to use the other, for black men, further along. ‘Oh damn, I forgot about this.’ I tried to take the second case from him. But he was looking at me, a long look, oblivious of the people pushing past, a look to take me in, and he was smiling slowly, wryly, the pure, strange smile of one who is accustomed to the impossible promise that will be broken, the hand, so warm on the quay, that becomes a flutter across the gulf and soon disappears.

I said, ignoring the irritated eddy of the people whose way we were deflecting, ‘Sam, I’ll be back for the baby’s christening. If it’s born while I’m away, you let me know, and I’ll come back in time.’

He looked at me as if he had forgiven me, already, for something I did not even know I would commit. ‘Who knows,’ he shouted, hitching up his hold on the case, as people pushed between us, ‘Who knows with you people, Toby, man? Maybe you won’t come back at all. Something will keep you away. Something will prevent you, and we won’t—’ the rest was lost as we disappeared from each other down our separate stairways. But at the bottom of the steps, where the train was waiting, he was there before me, laughing and gasping, and we held each other by the arms, too short of breath to speak, and laughing too much to catch our breath, while a young policeman with an innocent face, on which suspicion was like the serious frown wrinkling the brow of a puppy, watched us.