The Late Bourgeois World

Chapter 1

I opened the telegram and said, ‘He’s dead —’ and as I looked up into Graham Mill’s gaze I saw that he knew who, before I could say. He had met Max, my first husband, a few times, and of course he had heard all about him, he had helped me get to see him when he was in prison. ‘How?’ he said, in his flat professional voice, putting out his hand for the telegram, but I said, ‘Killed himself!’ — and only then let him have it.

It read MAX FOUND DROWNED IN CAR CAPETOWN HARBOUR. It had been sent by the friend with whom probably he had been staying; I have not heard from Max for more than a year, he didn’t even remember Bobo’s birthday last month. ‘Doesn’t say when it was,’ Graham said.

‘Last night, or early this morning, must have been.’ My voice came out cold and angry; I could hear it. It made Graham nervous, he nodded slowly while staring away from me. ‘Otherwise it would have been in the morning paper. I don’t think I looked at the late news —’

The newspaper was on the table among the coffee things. Our cups were half drunk, our cigarettes burned in the saucers; I don’t have to go to work on Saturdays, and, as usual, Graham had come to share my late breakfast. We always divide the newspaper, like any old married couple, and the page containing the stop press column was resting against the honey jar. There was a smear of stickiness on the latest scores in an international golf match: that was all.

Graham, reading over the telegram, said, ‘Why — I wonder.’ This was not an unforeseeable end for Max; Graham was questioning what specific demand had brought it about.

I felt immense irritation break out like cold sweat and answered, ‘Because of me!’

Since I had gone to the door to receive the telegram I had not sat down and stood about like someone stung by insult. Graham patiently bore my angry voice, yet though he must know I spoke in the sense of ‘to spite me’, I saw in his face the astonishing consideration of a self-accusation I had never made, a guilt that, God knows, he knew was not mine. Blast him, he chose deliberately to misunderstand me.

He is good about practical matters and he was the first to think of Bobo — ‘What about the boy? You don’t want him to read about it in tonight’s paper. Shall I drive over to the school and tell him?’ He always refers to Bobo as ‘the boy’; an expression indicative of formal concern for the sacredness of childhood that amuses me. But I said no, I’d go myself. ‘The boy’ is mine, after all. Perhaps unconsciously — let’s be fair to him — Graham tries to move in on responsibility for the child as a means of creating some sort of surety for his relationship with me. It’s not for nothing that he has a lawyer’s mind. If Bobo starts looking upon any man I’m friendly with as a father, it could be awkward if the friendship were to wane.

‘Have some more coffee.’ Graham filled my cup and patted my chair. But I drank it standing. It was as if I had had a quarrel — but with whom? — and were waiting for the right thing to be said — but by whom? ‘I’ll have to go this morning. I’ve got to see my grandmother sometime this afternoon.’ He knows I don’t visit the old lady very regularly; ‘Make it tomorrow.’ ‘No, it’s her birthday today, I can’t.’ He gave a little parenthetic smile. ‘How old is she now?’

‘Somewhere in the eighties.’

I knew exactly how the telegram was worded but I read it over again before crumpling it up and dropping it on the breakfast tray.

While I bathed and dressed, Graham sat in the sun by the open doors of my balcony, reading the paper with the proper attention it is never given at table. As I went about the flat I kept catching sight of him, his long whipcord-covered legs breaking their knife-crease at the knee, his weekend tweed jacket and clean, old silk shirt, the pale creased jaw and deep eyes, behind glasses, of a man who works late into the nights. Graham has a long mouth whose lips, clearly defined in outline by a change in skin-texture like the milled edge of a coin, are a strange, bluish colour. Under the lights in court, in the fancy dress of a barrister, his face is only the heavy-rimmed glasses and this mouth.

When I was ready to go, he got up to leave the flat, too. ‘Will you get away from Grandmama in time for a drink at Schroeders’? They’re leaving for Europe tomorrow.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘What about tonight? Would you like to have dinner somewhere?’

I said, ‘No, I can’t … there’s some damned dinner party. I can’t.’

He’s not a child, he’s forty-six, and he took up his cigarettes and car keys without pique. But as we were leaving the flat I was the one who said, ‘Could you do something for me? Do you think you could go to a florist and get them to send some flowers to the old lady? Shops’ll be closing by the time I get back from the school.’ He nodded without smiling and wrote down the address in his small, beautiful handwriting.

The road to the school leads away from the hilly ridges of Johannesburg and soon strikes out straight through the mealie fields and flat highveld of the plain. It’s early winter; it was one of those absolutely wind-still mornings filled with calm steady sunlight that make the few trees look black against the pale grass. All that was left of the frost overnight was the fresh smell. There was an old pepper tree here and there, where there must once have been a farmhouse; eucalyptus with tattered curls of bark, twiggy acacias, mud-walls of an abandoned hut; an Indian store; a yellowing willow beside a crack in the earth.

It was all exactly as it had been. When I was a child. When Max was a child. It was the morning I had woken up to, gone out into again and again; the very morning. I felt the sun on my eyelids as I drove. How was it possible that it could be still there, just the same, the sun, the pale grass, the bright air, the feeling of it as it was when we had no inkling of what already existed within it. After all that had happened to us, how could this morning, in which nothing had yet happened, still exist? Time is change; we measure its passing by how much things alter. Within this particular latitude of space, which is timeless, one meridian of the sun identical with another, we changed our evil innocence for what was coming to us; if I had gone to live somewhere else in the world I should never have known that this particular morning — phenomenon of geographical position, yearly rainfall, atmospheric pressures — continues, will always continue, to exist.

Max grew up looking out on the veld, here. His parents had their farm — what the estate agents call a country estate — on the edge of the city. His father was a member of parliament and they used to have big Party receptions there. They bred pointers and ducks — for the look of the thing, Max used to say. But he told me that when he was a child he would come back from solitary games in the veld and at a certain point suddenly hear the distant quacking of the ducks like a conversation he couldn’t understand.

All this was my way of thinking about Max’s death, I suppose, because the fact of his death, even the manner of it, was just something that had been told to me. Something to which my contemporary being said quietly: of course. Max had driven a car into the sea and gone down with it; as Max once burned his father’s clothes, and, yes, as Max, three years ago, tried to blow up a post office. This time I wasn’t looking, that’s all. Oh will this child’s game never end, between Max and me? That was what turned me cold with anger when the telegram came; the feeling that he was looking over the shoulder of his death to see … if I were looking?

Perhaps I was flattering myself (dreary flattery, balm that burned like ice, if it was) and there was someone else by now in whose eye he saw himself — friend, woman — it didn’t matter whom. But I knew, when I read the telegram, it was for me. The worn phrases of human failure, ‘everything was finished’, ‘broken up’, have taken on a new lease of literal meaning between Max and me, we have truly gone through every possibility by which attachment can survive, worn them all threadbare, until any kind of communication was no longer contained, but went like a fist through empty air. And as for broken up — the successive images in which I — we — had seen ourselves together were splintered to crystal dust — like the broken glass, residue of some collision, that I swerved to avoid on the road. But Max would kick from the wreckage the button that asserts the identity of the dead.

The anger left me, then, melted. I always like driving by myself, it brings back something of the self-sufficiency of childhood, and in addition I had the curious freedom of a break in routine. Max was dead; I felt nothing directly about the fact except that I believed it. Yet it divided the morning before I had read the telegram from the morning after I had done so, and in the severance I was cut loose. Of course I can do what I like on Saturday mornings, but it’s been weeks since I’ve done anything but have Graham in to breakfast, wash my hair, and perhaps go to the suburban shops. Even as irregular (in every sense of the word) a thing as this business with Graham and me has taken on a sort of pattern; we go away on holidays together but we don’t sleep together often at home — and yet this casualness has become an ‘arrangement’ in itself, and even my evenings in bars and clubs with people he’s never heard of are part of habit.

It is also rare for me to get a chance to see Bobo on a Saturday; he’s allowed out only twice a month, on Sundays, and the school discourages visits from parents in between times. I realized I hadn’t got anything for him. Perhaps they’d let me take him out and I could buy him tea and cream scones at the country hotel near the school. Anyway, I’m the one for whom it is necessary to have presents for Bobo. I see this in his face when I anxiously lay out my carriers of apples and packets of sweets. I know that it is my way of trying to make up for sending him to that place — the school. And yet I had to do it; I have to cover up my reasons by letting it be taken for granted that I want him out of the way. For the truth is that I would hold on to Bobo, if I let myself. I could keep him clamped to my belly like one of those female baboons who carry their young clinging beneath their bodies. And I would never let go.

I can’t give him the life with the indispensable units, a mother and father and family, I was taught was a sacred trust to provide for any child I might ‘bring into the world’. I’m not even sure it would be enough, either, if I could. I had that life, Max had it, and yet it hasn’t seemed to have provided what it turned out we needed. Oh I know it’s easy enough to blame our parents for our troubles, and we belong to the generation that lays down its burdens on Freud, as our parents were exhorted to lay down theirs on Jesus. But I don’t think that the code of decent family life, kindness to dogs and neighbours, handouts to grateful servants, has brought us much more than bewilderment. What about all those strangers the code didn’t provide for, the men who didn’t feel themselves to be our servants and had nothing to be grateful for in being fobbed off with handouts, the people who weren’t neighbours and crowded in on us with hurts and hungers kindness couldn’t appease? I don’t know what will be asked of Bobo by the time he grows up, but I do know that the sort of background I was told a child should expect would leave him pretty helpless. I can only try to see to it that he looks for his kind of security elsewhere than in the white suburbs.

He wasn’t made there, thank God. It was in a car — which is where the white suburbs keep their sex. But at least it was out in the veld. One of the millions of babies made in cars, plantations, parks, alleys, all over the world. Because the suburbs, while talking romantic rubbish about ‘the young people’ among the flowers and decanters of the living room, ignore sex, the defining need of their youth. There are bedrooms, studies, dens, porches; but no place for that. I said to Max, ‘You forgot.’ He shrugged gloomily, as if he had never promised. But I knew it was my ‘fault’ as much as his. Then he said, speaking without any relation to circumstances, as he often did, ‘I’d like to have a child of my own. I’d like to have a child following me round, there’s nothing doggy about children. A child shouts “Look!” all the time and you see real things, colours of stones, and bits of wood.’ The last time he saw Bobo was more than a year ago. I could see that he liked him better than when he was little and used to yell; I was pleased that he could fool with him and forget that he used to yell back until the child’s open mouth went soundless with fright and I had to take him away and carry him round the streets.

Just before I reached the school there was one of those lorries that sell fruit at the side of the road, and a black man jumped up from a little fire he’d made himself and pranced out with an orange stuck on a stick. I bought a packet of nartjies for Bobo.

The school has very large grounds with a small dam and a plantation of eucalyptus trees — that was one of the reasons why I chose it: so that he would have somewhere that at least he could pretend was wild, to get away from playing fields and corridors. It’s difficult to remember what it was like being a child, but I do know that it was essential to have such a place. The buildings (and the gateposts with their iron arch bearing the school crest, and name in Celtic lettering) are of yellow brick that breaks out in crosses, raised like Braille bumps, all over the place. The sight of the school produces a subdued and cowed mood in me; I go on mental tiptoe from the moment I enter that gateway. Black men in neat overalls are always busy in the grounds trimming the hedges at sharp right angles and digging round the formal beds and clipped shrubs; they were sweeping up leaves, this time. Tin signs cut in the shape of a hand with pointing forefinger and painted in the headmaster’s wife’s Celtic lettering, indicate ‘Visitors’ Parking’, ‘Staff Only’, ‘Office’. The whole curve of the drive before the main building was empty but in the subservient anxiousness to do right that comes over me, I left the car in the visitors’ parking ground. It was about eleven o’clock and the cries of the boys at break came from the quadrangles and playing fields behind the buildings. I know that my view of the place is absurdly subjective, but how like a prison it was! Behind the clean and ugly bricks, a great shout of life going up, fading into the sunlit vacuum. I went up the polished steps and dropped the heavy knocker on the big oiled door.

It was opened by what must have been a new junior master, heavy-jawed, nice-looking, with the large, slightly shaky hands, powerful but helpless, of the young man who is going through the stage of intense desire for women without knowing how to approach any. He wore shabby, fashionably narrow-legged pants and a knitted tie and was obviously one of the Oxford or Cambridge graduates working their way round Africa who are counted on to bring a healthy blast of contemporaneity into the curriculum. (Bobo has told me about one who played the guitar and taught the boys American anti-bomb and anti-segregation folk songs.)

The headmaster was at tea in the staffroom, but the young man took me to the headmaster’s study and asked me to sit down while he fetched him. I’ve been in that study a number of times; hostilely clean, hung with crossed-armed athletic groups, the shiny brown plastic flooring covered with a brown carpet in the standard concession to comfort to be found in the rooms of administrators of institutions. There was even a framed cartoon of the headmaster, cut from the school magazine; everyone said what an ‘approachable’, ‘human’ man he was.

He said how nice it was to see me — just as if one could drop in to the school any old time, instead of being sternly discouraged to appear outside the prescribed visiting days. And although he must have known I had something serious to say, his quick, peg-on-the-nose voice dealt out a succession of pleasantries that kept us both hanging fire. But no doubt the poor devil dreads parents’ problems, and this is just an unconscious device to stave off their recital. I told him that Bobo’s father had died, and how. He was understanding and sensible, according to the manual of appropriate behaviour for such an occasion, but in his face with its glaze of artificial attentiveness there was certainty of his distance from people like us. He knew the circumstances of Bobo’s background; divorce, political imprisonment, and now this. He knew it all the way, as a broad-minded man and a good Christian, I suppose he follows in the papers the Church’s self-searching over homosexuality or abortion. He and Mrs Jellings, who teaches art at the school, must have been married for at least twenty-five years, and last year their daughter was married from the school with a guard of honour of senior boys.

He got up and opened the door and stopped a boy who was passing in the corridor. ‘Braithwaite! Send Bruce Van Den Sandt here, will you? D’you know him? He’s in fourth.’ ‘Yes, sir, I know Van Den Sandt, sir. I think he’s on library duty.’ And he skidded off in a way that automatically drew a quick dent between the headmaster’s eyebrows.

Bruce Van Den Sandt. I hardly ever hear the name spoken. This is the other Bobo, whom I will never know. Yet it always pleases me to hear it; a person in his own right, complete, conjured up in himself. It was Max’s name; Max was dead, but like a word passed on, his name was called aloud in the school corridor.

The headmaster said, ‘Come in here. I suppose you’ll want to talk to him alone; that’ll be best.’ And he opened a door I’d seen, but never been through before, marked ‘Visitors’ Room’. I’d cowardly lost the moment to say, ‘I’d like to take him out and talk to him while we drive.’ Why am I idiotically timid before such people, while at the same time so critical of their limitations?

I sat in this shut-up parlour whose purpose I had now gained entry to and waited quite a little while before the door flung open and he filled the doorway — Bobo. He had the glowing ears and wide nostrils of a boy brought from the middle of a game, his hands were alert to the catch, his clothes were twisted, his smile was a grin of breathlessness. The high note of this energy might, like a certain pitch in music, have silently shattered the empty vase and the glass on the engravings of Cape scenes.

‘Ma? Well, nobody told me you were coming!’

He hugged me and we giggled, as we always do with the glee of being together and clandestine to school and everything else.

‘How’d you get in?’

I hadn’t thought about what I was going to say to Bobo, and now it was too late. I gripped his hand and gestured hard, with it in mine, once or twice, to call us to attention, and said, ‘We’ve got to talk, Bo. Something about Max, your father.’

At once he caught me out, as if he were the adult and I the child. He understood that I never referred to Max as anyone but ‘Max’. He was little when Max was on trial and in prison, but I have told him all about it since he’s been older. He nodded his head with a curious kind of acceptance. He knows there is always the possibility of trouble.

We sat down together on the awful little settee, like lovers facing each other for a declaration in a Victorian illustration. He dragged at his collapsed socks — ‘Pull your socks up, your mother’s here, Jelly said.’

‘He died, Bobo. They sent me a telegram this morning. It’ll be in the papers, so I must tell you — he killed himself.’

Bobo said, ‘You mean he committed suicide?’

Amazement smoothed and widened his face, the flush left it except for two ragged patches, like the scratches of some animal, on the lower cheeks. What came to him in that moment must have been the reality of all the things he had read about, happening to other people, the X showing where on the pavement the body fell, the arrow pointing at the blurred figure on the parapet.

I said, ‘Yes’ and to blot it all out, once and for all, to confine it, ‘He must have driven his car into the sea. He was never afraid of the sea, he was at home in it.’

He nodded, but he kept his eyes wide open on me, the brows, over their prominent frontal ridge, scrolled together in concentration. What was he facing? The fact of his own death? Mine? Bobo and I didn’t have to pretend to each other that we were grieving over Max in a personal way. If you haven’t had a father, can you lose him? Bobo hardly knew him; and although I hadn’t, couldn’t explain all that to him, he knows that I had come to the end of knowing Max.

Bobo said, ‘I somehow just can’t see his face.’

‘But it’s not so long since you saw him. Eighteen months, not more.’

‘I know, but then I hardly remembered what he looked like at all, and I was looking at him all the time the way you do with a new person. Then afterwards you can’t see their face.’

‘You’ve got a photograph, though.’ There on his locker, the upright leather folder with mother on one side, father on the other, just as all the other boys have.

‘Oh yes.’

There didn’t seem to be anything else to say; at least, not all at once, and not in that room.

‘I brought you some nartjies. I forgot to get anything in town.’

He said absently, making the show of pleasure that is his form of loving politeness, ‘Mmm … thanks. But I won’t take them now … just before you go, so’s when I’ve seen you off I can stick them in my desk before anyone sees.’

Then he said, ‘Let’s go outside for a bit,’ and when I said, ‘But are we allowed to? I wanted to ask Mr Jellings —’ ‘Really, Mummy, what’s there to be so chicken about? I don’t know how you’d manage in this joint!’ As we closed the door of the visitors’ room behind us, I said, ‘We’ve never been in there, before.’ ‘It’s for long-distance parents, really, though I don’t know what it’s for — you can tell from the pong no one ever goes in there.’ I smiled at the jargon. Bobo has mastered everything; that place has no terrors for him.

We kept to the formal, deserted front garden, away from the other boys. We walked up and down, talking trivialities, like people in hospital grounds who are relieved to have left the patient behind for a while. Bo told me he had written to me asking for new soccer boots, and whether it would be all right if Lopert came home with him next Sunday. I’d had a circular from the school about boxing lessons, and wanted to know if Bo were interested. Then we went to sit in the car, and he teased, ‘Why’n’t you just park in town and walk, Ma?’

Like most boys Bobo has a feeling for cars akin to the sense of place, and when he gets into the car I can see that it’s almost as if he were home, in the flat. He noses through all the old papers that collect on the shelf beneath the dashboard and looks for peppermints and traffic tickets in the glove box. I am often called upon to explain myself.

He was sitting beside me touching a loose knob, probably noting with some part of his mind that he must fix it sometime, and he said, ‘I don’t suppose it was painful or anything.’

I said, ‘Oh no. You mustn’t worry about that.’ Because all his life, he’s been made aware of the necessity to recognize and alleviate suffering; it’s the one thing he’s been presented with as being beyond questioning, since the first kitten was run over and the first street beggar was seen displaying his sores.

‘Just the idea.’ His head was low; now he looked round towards me without lifting it, sideways, and I knew quite well that what he was really asking about was the unknown territory of adult life where one would choose to die. But I wasn’t equal to that. He was. He blurted, ‘I feel sorry I didn’t love him.’

I looked at him without excuses. The one thing I hope to God I’ll never do is fob him off with them.

I said, ‘There may be talk among the boys — but you know he went after the right things, even if perhaps it was in the wrong way. The things he tried didn’t come off but at least he didn’t just eat and sleep and pat himself on the back. He wasn’t content to leave bad things the way they are. If he failed, well, that’s better than making no attempt. Some boys’ — I was going to say ‘fathers’ but I didn’t want him to go attacking all the scions of stock-broking houses — ‘some men live successfully in the world as it is, but they don’t have the courage even to fail at trying to change it.’

He looked satisfied. He is only a little boy, after all; he said with a rough sigh, ‘We’ve had a lot of trouble through politics, haven’t we.’

‘Well, we can’t really blame this on politics. I mean, Max suffered a lot for his political views, but I don’t suppose this — what he did now — is a direct result of something political. I mean — Max was in a mess, he somehow couldn’t deal with what happened to him, largely, yes, because of his political actions, but also because … in general, he wasn’t equal to the demands he … he took upon himself.’ I added lamely, ‘As if you insisted on playing in the first team when you were only good enough — strong enough for third.’

As he followed what I was saying his head moved slightly in the current from the adult world, the way I have sometimes noticed a plant do in a breath of air I couldn’t feel.

In the end he has to take on trust what he is told; the only choice he can exercise is by whom. And he chooses me. At times I’m uneasy to see how sceptically he reports what he is told by others. But the reaction will come with adolescence, if I’m to believe what I’ve been told is ‘healthy development’. He’ll tear me down. But with what? Of course I’d craftily like to find out, so that I can defend myself in advance, but one generation can never know the weapons of the next. He picked up my hand and kissed it swiftly on the back near the thumb just as he used to do suddenly, for no reason I knew, when he was little. It must be five years since he stopped doing it, out of embarrassment or because he didn’t need to. But there was no one to see, in the empty car park. He said, ‘What are you going to do today? Is Graham coming over?’

‘I don’t think so. I saw him this morning, he was there for breakfast.’

‘I expect Jellings’ll put Max in prayers tonight. Usually when a relation dies he’s in prayers.’

So Max would have a service for his soul in the school chapel. There wouldn’t be any other. It wasn’t likely they’d pray for him, the ones he worked with, the ones he betrayed. Max wasn’t anybody’s hero; and yet, who knows? When he made his poor little bomb it was to help blow the blacks free; and when he turned State witness the whites, I suppose, might have taken it as justification for claiming him their own man. He may have been just the sort of hero we should expect.

I’ve noticed that Bobo always senses when I am about to go. He said, ‘Let me turn the car for you?’ and I didn’t dare suggest that he might get into trouble if anyone saw him, but obediently moved over to the passenger seat as he got out and came round to the driver’s side. He drove once right round the parking ground and then I said, ‘That’s enough. Hop out.’ He laughed and pulled a face and put the brake on. ‘See you Sunday week, then. And you’re bringing what’s-his-name —’

‘Lopert.’

‘I don’t think I’ve met him, have I? What about Weldon, doesn’t he want to come too?’ Weldon is another of the boys who live too far away to be able to go home on Sunday outings; all last term Bobo brought him to the flat.

‘I expect he’ll be going with the Pargiters.’

‘Have you two quarrelled or something?’

‘No, well, he’s always talking about “munts” and things — and when we get hot after soccer he says we smell like kaffirs. Then when I get fed up he thinks it’s because I’m offended at him saying I’m like a kaffir — he just doesn’t understand that it’s not that at all, what I can’t stand is him calling them kaffirs and talking as if they were the only ones who ever smell. He just laughs and is as nice as anything … He doesn’t understand. There’s nothing wrong in it, to him. Nearly all the boys are like that. You get to like them a hell of a lot, and then they say things. You just have to keep quiet.’ He was looking at me frowningly, his face stoical, dismayed, looking for an answer but knowing, already, there wasn’t one. He said, ‘Sometimes I wish we were like other people.’

I said, ‘What people?’

‘They don’t care.’

‘I know’. In full view of blank school buildings we exchanged the approved cheek-kiss expected of mothers and sons. ‘Next Sunday.’

‘Don’t be late. Don’t forget to get up, the way you always do.’

‘Ne-ver! The nartjies!’ He turned back for me to thrust the paper carrier through the window, and I saw him career off up the drive with the bulge buttoned under his blazer, feet flying, whorl of hair sticking up on the crown. I felt, as I sometimes do, an unreasonable confidence in Bobo. He is all right. He will be all right.

In spite of everything.