The Late Bourgeois World

Chapter 3

Chapter 3

The telephone was ringing as I came into the flat, but when I reached it, it stopped. I was sure it was Graham and then I saw a bunch of flowers under cellophane, on the table; he’d got the florist to send them here instead of to the Home. But my name was on the finicky little envelope — he had sent me flowers at the same time as he ordered them for the old lady. Samson the cleaner must have been working in the flat when they were delivered, and had taken them in. They were pressed like faces against glass; I ripped them free of the squeaky transparency and read the card: With love, G. Graham and I have no private names, references, or love-words. We use the standard vocabulary when necessary. A cold bruised smell came up from the flowers; it was the snowdrops, with their onion-like stems and leaves, their chilly greenness. He knows how crazy I am about them. And about the muguet-du-bois that we bought when we met for a week in the Black Forest in Europe last year. There is nothing wrong with a plain statement: With love. He happened to be in the florist’s and so he sent me some flowers. It’s not a thing he would do specially, unless it were on a birthday or something. It might have been because of Max; but good God, no, surely not, that would have been awful, he wouldn’t have done it. We had made love the night before, but there was nothing special about that. One doesn’t like to admit to habit, but the fact is that he doesn’t have his mind on court the next day, on Friday evenings, and I don’t have to get up next morning to go to work.

While I was putting the flowers in water the phone rang again. ‘They’re lovely — I’ve just come in this minute. The first snowdrops I’ve seen this year.’

‘How was he?’

‘Oh, it was all right. He’s a very sensible child, thank God.’

I began to wish he would say come to lunch, but I wouldn’t do anything about it because we make a point of not living in each other’s pocket, and if I were to start it, I’d have to expect him to make the same sort of use of me at some time when it might not be convenient. You can’t have it both ways. He was probably lunching at the house of the young advocate he’d been playing golf with; the wife is a lawyer, too, a nice girl — I enjoy their company and have a sort of open invitation from them, but before people like this, his colleagues, we don’t like to give the impression of ‘going about everywhere together’, we make it tacitly clear that we’re not to be regarded as a ‘couple’. There’s no point in a man like Graham flaunting the fact that he’s got a woman unless — what? I don’t suppose you could say that our affair wasn’t serious; but all the same, it’s not classified, labelled.

Graham told me there was something about Max in the early edition of the evening paper. ‘Do you want me to read it?’

‘No, just tell me.’

But he cleared his throat as he does before he reads something aloud, or begins his plea in court. Unlike most lawyers he has a good voice. ‘It’s not much. There’s no mention of you, only his parents. The case is exhumed, of course … and it says he was a named Communist — I don’t somehow remember …?’

‘Which he wasn’t. He was never named. However.’

‘A diving team managed to bring up the car. There was a suitcase full of documents and papers in the back, all so damaged by water that it will not be possible to determine their nature.’

‘That’s good.’

‘Nothing else. His father’s career in Parliament.’

‘Oh yes. No mention of Bobo at all?’

‘Fortunately not.’

We might have been cool criminals discussing a successful getaway.

I said, ‘It was a most perfect morning. Did you have a good game?’

‘Booker beat the pants off me. That’s the second time this week and I’ve told him it’s once too often.’ He and his golf partner had been opposing counsel in a case Graham had lost.

I said, ‘I don’t understand it. If I were you I should have seen enough of him to last me for a bit.’ He laughed; I am always shocked by the way lawyers can attack each other with every sign of bitter ruthlessness over somebody’s life — and then sit in brotherly bonhomie at the tea break. ‘Nothing’s more frightening than professionalism. Imagine, whether you get ten years or go free can depend on whether or not your counsel can out-talk the other man’s, and there they are boozing together at the golf club. It terrifies me more than the idea of the judge. I like to think that when I go to a lawyer, he’s as tied up in my affairs as I am myself.’

We both laughed; on ground we’d gone over before.

‘But you know that wouldn’t do at all, he’d be giving very bad counsel if he were to be. You’re too emotional.’

I thought of how we’d just talked of Max’s death. Honesty sounds callous; so that one is almost ashamed of it.

‘Booker doesn’t know we’re going to appeal, anyway,’ he teased me drily. ‘I’ll get my own back in court if not on the green. I’m going to do some work this afternoon, that is, if I don’t sleep. I don’t suppose I’ll be able to resist a sleep. That chair you made me buy.’ In Denmark he ordered the beautiful leather furniture they make there, and we threw out the ugly stuff his wife must have thought suitable for a ‘gentleman’s study’. There’s a chair you could sleep the whole night in, even make love in, not that he ever would. Yesterday after the servant had taken the coffee away, although the mood for love-making came as we sat in front of the fire, we went into his bedroom as usual. What nonsense it is to write of the ‘disembodied’ voice on the telephone; all of Graham was there as he talked commonplaces. Last night he was held in my body a long time.

The call box bleeped at his end and I said something again about the flowers, before we hung up. Once alone, I didn’t feel the slightest inclination to go out, after all; I felt, on the contrary, a relief. I brought the water in the vase to the right level. I threw the paper and cellophane in the kitchen bin and put the food I’d bought into the refrigerator. I opened the creaking joints of my plastic and aluminium chair and sat on the balcony in the sun, smoking. Many of the demands one makes on other people are nothing but nervous habit, like reaching for a cigarette. That’s something for me to remember, if I were ever to think of marrying again. I don’t think I’ll marry again. But I catch myself speaking of Max as my ‘first husband’; which sounds as if I expect to have another. Well, at thirty, one can’t be too sure of what one may still do.

At eighteen I was quite sure, of course. I would be married and have a baby. This future had come out to meet me as expected, though perhaps sooner. Max might not have been the man according to specifications, but the situation, deep in my subconscious, matched the pattern I’d been given to go by. The concept of marriage as shelter remained with me, even if it were only to be shelter from parents and their ways. There, whatever the walls were made of, I should live a woman’s life, which was? A life lived among women like my mother, attached to a man like my father. But the trouble is that there are not more men like my father — in the sense that the sort of man my father is doesn’t represent to me, in my world, what it did to my mother in hers. I was brought up to live among women, as middle-class women with their shopping and social and household concerns comfortably do, but I have to live among men. Most of what there was to learn from my family and background has turned out to be hopelessly obsolete, for me.

Graham and I have known each other since the trial. I was already divorced from Max, but there was no one else to do anything, that’s how I met Graham, I was told he was the right man for the case. As it happened he couldn’t take the brief, in the end it was given over to someone else, but he remained interested and afterwards, when Max was in prison, he helped me make various applications on Max’s behalf. Graham didn’t ask me any questions, he was like one of those doctors with whom you feel that he knows everything about you, simply from a professional reading of signs you don’t even know you exhibit. He had a wife once; she was a girl he’d gone about with since they were schoolchildren, and she died of meningitis when she was younger than I am now. There are still traycloths in the house on which she embroidered her initials.

Graham defends many people on political charges and is one of a handful of advocates who ignore the possible consequences of getting a reputation for being willing to take such cases. I’ve got my job analysing stools for tapeworm and urine for bilharzia and blood for cholesterol (at the Institute for Medical Research). And so we keep our hands clean. So far as work is concerned, at least. Neither of us makes money out of cheap labour or performs a service confined to people of a particular colour. For myself, thank God shit and blood are all the same, no matter whom they come from.

In Europe last year, we enjoyed ourselves very much, and lived in the same room, the same bed, in easy intimacy. We each went our own way some of the time, but we’d planned the holiday together and we stayed together for the greater part. I don’t think we once felt irritated with each other. Yet since we’ve been back we’ve lived again just as we used to, sometimes not sleeping together for two weeks, each taking up large tracts of life where the other has no claim. I didn’t need him, sitting in the sun on my balcony.

A sexual connection. But there is more to it than that. A love affair? Less than that. I’m not suggesting it’s a new form of relationship, of course, but rather that it’s made up of the bits of old ones that don’t work. It’s decent enough; harms nobody, not even ourselves. I suppose Graham would marry me, if I wanted it. Perhaps he wants it; and then it would all change. If I wanted a man, here, at this time, in this country, could I find a better one? He doesn’t act, that’s true; but he doesn’t give way, and that’s not bad, in a deadlock. He lives white, but what’s the point of the gesture of living any other way? He will survive his own convictions, he will do what he sets out to do, he will keep whatever promises he makes. When I talk with him about history or politics I am aware of the magnetic pull of his mind to the truth. One can’t get at it, but to have some idea where it is! Yet when he’s inside me — last night — there’s the strangest thing. He’s much better than someone my own age, he comes to me with a solid and majestic erection that will last as long as we choose. Sometimes he will be in me for an hour and I can put my hand on my belly and feel the blunt head, like a standard upheld, through my flesh. But while he fills me, while you’d think the last gap in me was closed for ever, while we lie there silent I get the feeling that I am the one who has drawn him up into my flesh, I am the one who holds him there, that I am the one who has him, helpless. If I flex the muscles inside me it’s as if I were throttling someone. He doesn’t speak; the suffering of pleasure shuts his eyes, the lids are tender without his glasses. And even when he brings about the climax for us — afterwards I am still holding him as if strangled: warm, thick, dead, inside.

That’s how it is.

But I don’t think of it often; and sitting on my balcony in the midday sun that cannot possibly be called ‘winter’, it simply took a place in my consciousness (I was growing drowsy from the dry warmth) with the pigeons toeing their way along the guttering, two children I couldn’t see, but could hear shooting water pistols at each other, below my feet, and the men on the bit of grass above the pavement opposite. They were black men with their delivery bicycles, or in working overalls. They lay flung down upon the grass, the legends of firms across their backs. They were drinking beer out of the big red cartons, in the sun. We were all in the sun. There is a way of being with people that comes only by not knowing names. If you have no particular need of anyone, you find yourself belonging to a company you hadn’t been admitted to before; I didn’t need anybody because I had these people who, like myself, would get up and go away in a little while. Without any reason, I felt very much at home.

In spite of everything.

Their talk went on sporadically, in the cadences I know so well, even if I don’t understand the words. It was the hour when all the flat-dwellers were at lunch and only they had time to lie on the grass, time that had no label attached to it. After a while I went in and cut myself the crust of the loaf I’d bought and put some papery shop-ham on it and ate a banana in which there was winter — a hard centre and a felted taste. When I had food in my stomach I was overcome by weariness and lay down on the divan in the living room, where it was warm, under the rug from Bobo’s bed.

A vision of seaweed swaying up from deep underwater.

Not asleep but awake in the vision, as I opened my eyes in the room. At once close to the water where the heads surface in bunches of torn rubber ribbons sizzling with the oxygen of broken water, bedraggle in the wash from the rocks; and at the same time looking down from the cliff high where the road is, down on the depths tortoiseshell with sun and the rippling distortion of the great stems, brown thrashing tubes that sway down, down, out of the focus of lenses of water thick as bottle-ends, down, down.

The water rushed into Max’s nostrils and filled his mouth as it opened for air. For the first time it came to me as it must have happened when he made it happen. The burning cold salt water rushing in everywhere and the last bubbles of life belching up from places where they had been caught — the car, under his shirt, in his lungs, filled with the final breath that he had taken before he went down. Down, down, to where the weeds must, at last, have their beginning. He took with him a suitcase of papers that could not be deciphered. So much sodden muck. He took them with him, and no one would ever know what they were — writings, tracts, plans, letters. He had succeeded in dying.

I was lying still in the room and my eyes were filled with tears. I wept not for Max’s death but for the pain and terror of the physical facts of it. The flowers had stirred and opened while I slept and the warm room was full of scent. I lay quite still and felt myself alive, there in the room as their scent was.

Max’s death is a postscript. A postscript can be something trivial, scarcely pertinent, or it can be important and finally relevant.

I believe I know all there was to know about Max. To know all may be to forgive, but it is not to love. You can know too much for love.

When Max and I got married he left the university and took a job — many jobs. None of them lasted long; there were so many other things to do, at that time there were still things you could do whose immediacy appealed to us — discussion and study groups in the rooms of people like ourselves and in the black townships, open-air meetings, demonstrations. The Communist Party had been declared illegal and officially disbanded, but in the guise of other organizations the whole rainbow from politically conservative do-gooders to the radical left-wing could still show itself fairly openly. Above all, African nationalism was at a stage when it had gained confidence and prestige in the eyes of the world through the passive resistance campaigns, and at home seemed ready to recognize Africans of any colour who wanted to be free of the colour bar. In our little crowd, Solly, Dave, Lily, Fatima, Alec, Charles — Indian, African, Coloured and white — Fatima gave Bobo his bottle, Dave laughed at Max’s bad moods. The future was already there; it was a matter of having the courage to announce it. How much courage? I don’t think we had any idea.

Max’s first job was abandoned because they wouldn’t give him three days off to attend a Trades Union conference. Max had been reading politics as a major subject at the university, but there were great gaps in what he felt he ought to know; at the time he was concentrating on trying to give a small group of politically ambitious Africans some of the theoretical background in economics that they wanted. I forget what happened to the next job — oh yes, he got a typist to mimeograph some leaflet during office hours. And so it went on. The jobs came last in any consideration because they were of no importance. He took whatever he could get to do that would help to keep us going. He had no particular qualifications, anyway; he had been studying for an arts degree, which his parents had seen as a harmless alternative to commerce or accountancy, and that he had seen as freedom of mind. The nature of the degree didn’t matter much to them; he’d been expected to join one of his father’s companies on the accomplishment of it, that’s all.

Max was supposed to be going on working for his degree, at night, but at night there was less time than during the day, since the study groups and meetings were all held after working hours, and friends came for sessions of talk that used to last half the night. I went back to work when Bobo was five months old, and we had a nanny, Daphne, a tough, pretty, real Johannesburg nanny who looked after Max, when he was at home, as well as the baby. Once she and I both suspected in the same month that we were pregnant, and, without my bothering Max or her telling her boyfriend, we managed to mend our situation by promptly taking some pills exacted from my doctor with a warning that they wouldn’t work if we were.

I was possessed by the idea that Max must be able to go back to university full-time and finish his course. We wouldn’t live off the Van Den Sandts (we’d had to take help from them now and then — over Bobo’s birth, for example). I wanted to find some work I could do at night, in addition to my daytime job. We examined the possibilities; I couldn’t type. I said at last, ‘A cinema usherette. That’s about all. I wonder what they get paid.’

‘Why not? With a Soutine pageboy’s outfit and a torch.’ I could see that the idea really pleased him. He began to remark to people, as if I had already taken the job, ‘Liz’s going to be working in a cinema. Don’t think you’re seeing things.’ I was working for a private firm of pathologists, then, and instead of becoming an usherette I got the writing up of some research notes to do for one of the doctors. It paid better than working in a cinema would have done, and I was able to do it at home. But Max was often irritated by Dr Farber’s notes spread about in the cramped flat where there was not enough room for his own books and papers, and he seemed to lose interest in the purpose of my extra job. To work as an usherette in a cinema was perhaps the furthest point one could possibly get from any sort of activity that Mrs Van Den Sandt or beautiful Queenie could have imagined themselves engaged in. I deprived Max of an opportunity of reaching an ultimate in his distance from them, and a gratification of his longing to come close to other people in a bond of necessity. I was aware of that longing, but I didn’t always understand when I failed to further its fulfilment.

Although Max had been a member of a Communist cell at the university, he did not take a strictly Marxist line in his attempts to give Africans some background for the evolution of their own political thinking. And when the Communist Party began to function again, as an underground organization, although he was approached to become active under its discipline, he did not do so. He had been very young and unimportant during his brief experience in the Communist cell; maybe that had something to do with it — he didn’t see himself in that limited status, any more. After the Defiance Campaign, in which people of all sorts of political affiliation took part, he joined the new non-racial Liberal Party for a while, and then the Congress of Democrats. But the Africans themselves did not take the Liberal Party seriously; he saw himself set aside in a white group that Africans felt had the well-meaning presumption to speak for them. Even in the Congress of Democrats, a radical white organization (it provided a front for some important Communists) that did not confine itself to polite platform contacts at multi-racial conferences, he was restless. The COD people worked directly with African political movements, but had come into being mainly because, while identifying themselves with the African struggle, they understood as a matter of tactics that no African movement seeking mass support can afford to have white members.

I hadn’t joined the Liberal Party, but I worked in COD, not exactly with Max, but mostly on backroom stuff, printing propaganda for the African National Congress, and so on. You make curiously intense friendships when you work with the fear and excitement of police raids at your back. I believed in what I was doing and in the people I was doing it with. I certainly had enough courage to measure up to what was needed then — before Ninety Days — and I limited my activities only because of Bobo. Other people had children, too, of course, and they put their political work first, but then if Max and I were both to have been arrested there would have been literally no one to look after Bobo but Daphne, since even the thought of him being taken over by the Van Den Sandts or my parents constituted, for me, real abandonment.

I’m mincing words. After all these years, because Max is lying drowned. It’s like putting on a hat for a funeral, the old shabby convention that one must lie about people because they’re dead. The fact is, there was no one responsible for Bobo except myself. Max was unable to be aware of anyone’s needs but his own. My mother once called this inability ‘horrible selfishness’; whereas it was the irreversible training of his background that she had admired so much, and that she saw him as a crazy deviate from. Driven to school and home again by the chauffeur every day, and then shut out of the rooms where the grown-ups were at their meetings and parties, at the Van Den Sandts he was ministered to like a prince in a tower. Even poverty didn’t release him; and we were poor enough. He had the fanatic’s few needs, and expected that they should be answered. He bought a pair of shoes or books or brandy on credit and was arrogantly angry when we were asked to pay; or assumed that I would deal with the shops. Max simply did not know what it was to live with others; he knew all the rest of us as he knew Raskolnikov and Emma Bovary, Dr Copeland and Törless, shut up reading alone in his room on the farm. He would sit for hours analysing a man’s troubles and attitudes with good insight and a compound of curiosity and sympathy, but he would not notice that the man was exhausted; nor would he remember that the man had mentioned that he had to catch a train home at a certain time. He used to take Bobo off down to Fordsburg to be handed about among the adoring young daughters of a multiple Indian household, and then, eager to follow up an acquaintance he’d perhaps made the night before, he’d go on to some yard or house and dump Bobo with a set of faces or a pair of arms — anybody’s — the baby had never seen before. Once Fatima phoned me to say that the mother of a cartage contractor in Noordgesig, the Coloured township, had rung her up to get my number, because Bobo was yelling and she didn’t know what to offer him. Max had left with her son and Fatima’s brother; left Bobo as he used to drop a bicycle or toy for the servants to pick up from the Van Den Sandts’ lawn.

I tried to explain to Myra Roberts, a woman who seemed to me to have the only ‘saving grace’ there is — a natural feeling of responsibility for strangers as for one’s own family and friends — that COD couldn’t count on both Max and me because of Bobo. She said, ‘Oh we feel we can count on you!’ — and the emphasis made first my face burn and then hers. For a time I showed a certain coldness to her to make up for the disloyalty of that flush.

And yet Max would have done anything. That was somehow the trouble. When he was given a job he would always take it a stage beyond what he had been told was its intended limit. If (he was working on the news-sheet) he were asked to write a leader along certain lines, he would pursue the given conclusions further. He wrote well and would have liked to be editor of the news-sheet; if the executive could have felt assured that he would not use it to follow his own line and commit them where they did not choose to be committed, I think he’d have been made editor. In committee he sat charged with the desire to act — silent, shabby in his undergraduate non-conformist uniform of cracked veldskoen and blond beard, a nervous hand across his mouth. As they spoke — the experienced ones, who knew you must not risk bringing the banning of the organization nearer by one wasted word or step — his bright eyes paced them. And when they had finished he would seize upon the plan of action: ‘I’m seeing the trade union people tomorrow, anyway — I’ll talk to them.’ ‘This’s something that can only be done with the youth groupers. We’ll have to get together with Tlulo and Mokgadi, Brian Dlalisa and that Kanyele fellow must be kept clear of —’ A febrile impatience came from the sense that was always in him of being, in the end, whatever was done when working with white people like himself, outside the locations and prisons and work-gangs and overcrowded trains that held the heart of things.

But the others decided who should do what and they knew best who should approach whom. He would come home with the charge banked up glowing within him. The prescribed books on history, philosophy and literary criticism lay about (I read them while he was busy at meetings); what on earth would he have done with a Bachelor of Arts degree, anyway? It was a dead end that would have served a rich man’s son as a social token of attendance at a university. Perhaps he might have written something — he had passion and imagination; there were attempts, but he needed day-to-day involvement with others too much to be able to withhold himself in the inner concentration that I imagine a writer needs. He might have made a lawyer; but all the professions were part of the white club whose life membership ticket, his only birthright, he had torn up. He might have been a politician, even (it was in the family, after all), if political ambitions outside the maintenance of white power had been recognized. He might even have been a good revolutionary, if there had been a little more time, before all radical movements were banned, for him to acquire political discipline.

There are possibilities for me, but under what stone do they lie?

Max came home with a man called Spears Qwabe. He was a sodden, at-ease ex-schoolmaster who talked in a hoarse, soft voice. ‘The dangerous thing is we don’t look to see what comes after the struggle, we don’t think enough about what’s there on the other side. You must know where you’re going, man. You ask any of the chaps in town how he thinks we’re going to live when we’ve settled with the whites. He’s got a dreamy look in his eye thinking he’ll get a car and a job with a desk, that’s all. The same old set-up, only he’s not going to sit in the location or carry a pass. Even the political crowd don’t know where they going ideologically. ANC takes advice from the Commies, they willing to use their techniques of struggle, fine, okay, but apart from the few chaps who are Communists first and Africans second, who believes that ANC wants a society along orthodox Communist lines? They haven’t got a social doctrine — all right, you can wave the Freedom Charter, but how far does it go …? The same thing with PAC. Thinking just doesn’t go beyond the struggle. And if it does — without making a noise about it, what d’you think it is? What’s it amount to? Listen to them talk in their sleep and you’ll hear they just want to take over the works — the whole white social and economic set-up, man, the job lot. A black capitalist country with perhaps — I’ll say maybe — the nationalization of the mines as a gesture. “The mineral wealth beneath the soil, the banks and monopoly industry shall be transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole.” Nice poetry. But how they really going to work out an equitable distribution of what we’ve got? Does anybody talk sense about that? Does anybody bother to? And why should we have to take over any of the solutions of the East and West, cut-and-dried?’

‘You will, largely, whether you like it or not, because you’ll be taking over various institutions of the East and West, won’t you, you’re not going back to barter and cowrie currency —’ Max wanted to encourage him, show him off.

‘But wait — that’s nothing — human institutions are adaptable, isn’t it? What we need is to see ourselves as an industrialized people who can break out of the Capitalist — Communist pattern set by the nineteenth century for an industrialized society, and make a new pattern. Break right out.’ He talked a long time that first day he came, but maybe I remember as what he said then also what I heard him say later, at other times. ‘We want a modern democratic state, yes? Tribalism will make it bloody difficult, even here, where tribalism’s been just about finished off by the whites, anyway, although this government is playing it up again with Bantustans and so on. We must take the democratic elements of tribalism and incorporate them, use them, in a new doctrine of practical socialism. Socialism from Africa and for Africa. We don’t need to go to the West or the East to learn about the evils of monopoly, man — land always belonged to the tribe, grazing belonged to the tribe. You don’t have to teach us responsibility for the community welfare, we’ve always looked after each other and each other’s children. All this must be brought into a new ethos of the nation, eh? The spirit of our socialism will come from inside, from us, the technical realization will come from outside.’

Then Max began suddenly to rummage among our books and piles of newspapers, and he handed him Nyerere’s book.

‘Yes, yes — I know — but African socialism can’t be the work of one man. The doctrine of African socialism must be made by different thinkers, all adding to it. We must put it down, man. We’ve got political heroes, no thinkers. Mbeki, yes, all right, perhaps. We’ll have plenty political martyrs, plenty more; no thinkers! We must put it down, man!’

When Max was deeply interested, he had a way of standing before the person with whom he was in conversation, literally closing in for an exchange. I remember how he stood above the man in the dirty raincoat (even on the hottest day Spears held about him the late loneliness of a rainy three in the morning) saying, ‘Yes … but the two must run together, African socialism must be the philosophy of the struggle, it must be in at the struggle now — if it’s going to mean anything —’

I liked Spears. He drank but although he couldn’t always manage his legs he never lost the use of his tongue. He had a small coterie and they started calling themselves ‘Umanyano Ngamandla’, which meant something like ‘Let’s pull together’, as a colloquial name for an African socialist movement. Most of them were men who had broken away from the African National Congress or Pan African Congress. Max became their guru, or Spears became his; it doesn’t matter. COD ceased to exist in Max’s consciousness, he didn’t manage to return in decent order the papers that belonged to work he had been doing. I know that I went through our things to try and find them, but months dragged by, we moved house, and I grew more and more embarrassed at being asked for them. I had continued to work with COD because I thought Max was wrong — it frightened me to see him simply forget about the people we had worked with there. But I began to see in the work COD did, if not in my friends who did it, limitations that were in the nature of such an organization and that had always been there: I needed Max to be right.

Spears was with us most of the time. He and Max were formulating his methodology of African socialism. Max saw it as a series of pamphlets that would become the handbook, anyway, if not the bible, of the African revolution. We must put it down, man. The phrase was at once the purpose Spears lived by and the net of catchwords in which he tried to collect purpose when he was drinking; you could laugh at him when he repeated it drunk, go ahead and laugh at the infirmity of him: but it was like the name of a God, that does not alter in its omnipotence whether used as a curse or a blessing. We must put it down, man. I heard it all the time. It was the beat in his voice spacing the political clichés, grammatical constructions translated from Xhosa and literal translations from Afrikaans, of his strong-flavoured English.

And yet he did not see ‘getting it down’ in quite the literal terms that Max did, that Max could not escape from. Max planned point by point, chapter by chapter (at one time he thought of writing the whole thing in the form of Platonic dialogues); but Spears’ thinking erupted in a lava that, cooled to the process of note-taking, was difficult to break down into its component dissertation and analysis. Max and Spears talked late into the nights and every day Max wrote and recast from notes and memory. That was the time I came home from work and found Max yelling back at screaming Bobo. He had been trying to work all afternoon against the baby’s noisy games and interruptions. Max’s face was a child’s mask of hysterical frustration: I took Bobo and walked in the streets with him, but there was nothing I could do for the face of Max.

For hours he stood planted, arguing in front of Spears, he couldn’t stay put, in a chair. Spears was intense but quite without Max’s tension; he could talk just as well sitting on the kitchen table while I fried sausages, or while Bobo climbed up and used his shoulders as a road for a toy car. He used to call me ‘Honey’ and once or twice, when he was only a little drunk, he cornered me in the kitchen, but I told him I didn’t like the smell of brandy, and he kneaded my hand regretfully and said, ‘Forget it, honey’; I think that most of his drive towards women had washed away in brandy, but the residue was an unspecified casual tenderness to which Bobo and I responded. And Max. Max most of all. There was Max standing urgently over him, protesting, arguing, pressing — it was not just the determination to get it all down that held Max there; he hovered irresistibly towards what could never be got down, what Spears didn’t need to get down because it was his — an identity with millions like him, an abundance chartered by the deprivation of all that Max had had heaped upon himself. Some of the white people I know want the blacks’ innocence; that innocence, even in corruption, of the status of victim; but not Max. And everyone knows those whites who want to be allowed to ‘love’ the blacks out of guilt; and those who want to be allowed to ‘love’ them as an aberration, a distinction. Max wasn’t any of these. He wanted to come close; and in this country the people — with all the huddled warmth of the phrase — are black. Set aside with whites, even his own chosen kind, he was still left out, he experienced the isolation of his childhood become the isolation of his colour.

I don’t know whether Max loved me. He wanted to make love with me, of course. And he wanted to please me — no, he wanted my approval, my admiration for whatever he did. These pass as definitions of love; I can think of others that are neither more nor less acceptable. This business of living for each other, that one hears about; it can just as well be living for the sight of one’s self in the other’s eyes. Something keeps two people together; that’s as far as I’d go. ‘Love’ was the name I was given for it, but I don’t know that it always fits my experience. Someone has given Bobo the name, too; didn’t he say, ‘I’m sorry I didn’t love him?’ What did he mean? Did he mean that he didn’t need his father? Or that he didn’t stop his father from dying?

I wanted to make love to Max, and I wanted to give him the approval he wanted, I wanted to please him. But it wasn’t a matter of watching your husband rising a notch in the salary scale. What I wanted was for him to do the right things so that I could love him. Was that love?

Max was wonderful in bed because there was destruction in him. Passion of a kind; demonic sex. I’ve had it with others, since. With every orgasm I used to come back with the thought: I could die like that. And of course that was exactly what it was, the annihilation, every time, of the silences and sulks, the disorder and frustration of the days. We moved four times in the first three years, each time in response to having reached another impossible situation — living in a one-room flat with a baby; working at home in a two-room flat with a baby; not being able to afford a larger flat on my salary; not being allowed to have Africans visit us in the building — and there was never time or money to make each place more than habitable. Everything had happened to us too soon; before we’d collected enough chairs to sit on the ones we had had begun to fall to bits.

It was Felicity Hare who tacked cotton cloth she had brought from Kenya round the packing cases our stuff was moved in to a converted outhouse in someone’s backyard. We used them as cupboards and tables. We had space there, and she lived with us for a time — a big, red-faced girl just down from Cambridge who wanted to ‘do something’ in Africa. She had been handed on down the continent from territory to territory by introductions from friends of friends and always either in danger of being deported by a British colonial government when she became too friendly with African nationalists, or appealing to a British consulate for protection when African governments wanted her deported for becoming too friendly with members of their Opposition. She wore shorts and would follow you from room to room, talking, whatever you were doing, hitching herself on some ledge or table corner too small to support her, with her enormous, marbled legs doubled up in a great fleshy pedestal. Her conversation was confused and conspiratorial — ‘Actually, the woman in charge of the place wasn’t American at all, she was a Dane, and the girls couldn’t stick her. Couldn’t understand what she was saying d’y’know. That’s another thing I didn’t tell you — they came from about twenty different tribes and could scarcely understand English anyway. But there’d been some fiddle in the State Department — that’s clear — and she wasn’t the one who was supposed to be there, at all. The girls weren’t learning a thing, but old Alongi Senga —’ ‘Who’s that?’ ‘— Senga, Minister of Education, d’y’know, stupid old bastard, Matthew Ochinua says they say all he wants to do is inspect high schools so’s he can pinch the boys’ bottoms. Anyway, he’d had a row with the Field Service people —’ Most of the stories ended with a shrug of the breasts and the big face gazing away, as if she had just discovered them, at her tiny hands with their little shields of bitten-down nail pressed into the plump pad of each finger: ‘So that was that …’ ‘So I was off …’

She made herself useful doing some typing for Max and spent a lot of time getting people out of what she called ‘messes’ — mostly the aftermath of parties she went to — taking home in her little borrowed car the corpses that piled up, staying the night with girls whose men had gone off with someone else. She patched the lining of Spears’ raincoat and drove him on his complicated errands. There was the night I got up and found her dressed as if for a picnic, carrying a spray gun. ‘Going slogan-painting,’ she said. She went off with a tiny torch to wait to be picked up by whomever it was she was working with. I went back to bed and told Max. ‘A midnight feast for Sunnybunny! O wacko!’ he said. The absurd play on her name was his invention; he and Spears treated her with the comradely mock-flirtatiousness that men show towards unattractive girls. I said, ‘Spears shouldn’t tease her, it’ll set her after him. She worships the two of you.’ ‘Why on earth not? Do Spears no harm, and she needs a man, our Sunbun.’

She was always urging us to go to parties with her, but these were the parties where white liberals and black tarts and toughs went for what each could get out of the other. It surprised me that Max, once or twice, seemed willing to go. The work he and Spears were doing was going badly; Max was finding Spears evasive. Yet it became a sort of craze for the three of them — Max, Spears and Sunbun — to appear at these parties as a weird trio. I dropped out because I couldn’t last till three in the morning without drinking too much, and if I drank too much I couldn’t work next day; if Max and Spears couldn’t get on with their work, then, at least the parties provided a reason.

Often when I came home from the laboratory Max would be sitting waiting; punishing Spears with his waiting as a child believes he is punishing the grown-up who is not even aware of being the object of resentment. When Bobo’s voice rose in the kitchen, or shrieked in the bath, Max gave me one of his seizing looks. The calm of white coats and routine work, life apprehended as a neat smear under a microscope, came from me like the bar on the breath of a drunkard.

Felicity used to hover, importantly self-effacing. ‘I was desperate, d’y’know, he hasn’t turned up all day. I made some excuse to go out and scout around but no one knew where he was.’ She spoke to me out of Max’s earshot, as if he must not hear his condition discussed. Then Spears would arrive, and the casual tone of his excuses and apologies was not altered, whether Max was angry and sulky, or whether he suddenly was in a warm good mood and behaved as though Spears had not been expected until that particular moment. One night when this happened — the arrival of Spears at long last, and a quick rise in Max’s mood — Max was moving about the room like a cork caught up off the sand by the tide, opening beer, offering cheese on the point of a knife, talking, putting papers together, and he pointed the knife at Felicity, saying in a cheerful impatient aside. ‘Come on, move that big arse, Sunbun, you know where you put the list I gave you —’

It was his way of talking to her and I was astonished, this time, to see her cry. I suddenly understood that he had made love to her.

He stood there with the steel blade dulled with the grease of cheese, gesturing at her, and she rushed out of the room with all her flesh — buttocks, breasts — quaking; it was somehow specially moving, as if some poor peaceful browser had been stuck with a spear. I went after her and bumped into Daphne, holding a freshly ironed dress that she must have tried to hand to her. I said quickly, ‘I’ll take it.’

‘What she got to cry for?’ Daphne lifted her chin, she wanted me to know she knew, too.

Max said, ‘She bloody well wouldn’t leave me alone. It started after a party and I was drunk anyway. She smothers you with her bloody great tits, you’ve got to fight your way out and that’s the easiest way.’ It was true that one couldn’t be jealous of Felicity. If she’d been a woman I had been jealous of it would have been different. But there was only one reason why Max made love to her. He knew it and I knew it. He needed approval and admiration so much that he was prepared to throw in a good fuck as payment. I could have forgiven him sleeping with a woman he wanted, but I couldn’t forgive him the humiliation in her big shaking body when she ran out of the room. I used to think of it when we were making love. And I couldn’t tell him because I myself couldn’t give the approval and admiration.

Max shunned the Van Den Sandt’s standards of success but in a way they triumphed in him, passing on, like a family nose or chin, the rage to succeed. He did not weigh in on their scale, but he retained the revengeful need to be acknowledged. It came from them: the desire to show somebody. What? The objects of his purpose were not demonstrable in the way that money and social prestige are. Why is it that these people always win, even if only by destruction?

Oh, there were other women. When he went underground during the State of Emergency in 1960, he lived with Eve King while hidden in her house. And before that there was the thing with Roberta Weininger — beautiful Roberta, she’s been under house arrest for some time, now. These love affairs caused me pain, and in its context I had one or two affairs of my own. I suppose I thought of redressing the balance — some such expedient. But this again was the use of measures designed for a situation that had very little bearing on the realities of ours. If I’d only known, it didn’t matter how many women Max had, it didn’t make any difference. Whether or not he could really love a woman, me or any other woman, was not what was vital to him.

Spears went underground, too, but other members of ‘Umanyano Ngamandla’ were detained and when they came out of prison the movement broke up; most of them, including Spears, rejoined the ANC, then banned and become an underground movement. The notes for the methodology of African socialism had been safe from the security raids on our outhouse cottage because I had bundled the papers into a laundry bag and kept it hidden in the laboratory, all the time. When Spears came to see me one day I told him they were intact; he smiled, the days of the work on the methodology belonged to another time. Decades, eras, centuries — they don’t have much meaning, now, when the imposition of an emergency law or the fall of a bomb changes life more profoundly in a day than one might reasonably expect to experience in a lifetime. Spears wasn’t drinking. He didn’t come often any more, and neither did William Xaba, another friend who always used to be in and out of the cottage. There was a move among politically active Africans to keep out of white houses, no matter whose they were, and to reject friendship and even intimacy with whites as part of white privilege. Max was in Cape Town then, for three months that stretched to six, working on a new radical journal whose editors were replaced as quickly as they were banned. Bobo and I went down for two weeks at Christmas and every day the three of us walked along the cliff road above the sea, where the polyps of seaweed reach up from far down in the water. ‘Look there. Look there,’ we urged Bobo, but his little boy’s gaze would follow your finger as its object, and see no further than the end of it. I wonder if it was the papers of the African socialist methodology that Max took down with him in the suitcase.

Between heliograph flashes of sun on water, undeciphered, there are still things that were said. ‘Christ, when you see how African women will live! They know how to wait. And to keep themselves and their children together. There’s everything that matters to learn from them.’ Yes, he was right; I was an amateur in loneliness, in stoicism, in trust. ‘Maybe if you’re ever going to achieve something, you’ll have to do it quite alone.’ I said that once, knowing that already he was scornful of the journal he was working on, and (looking down at seaweed in the water like flowers imprisoned in a glass paperweight) seeing the end of this like the end of anything else he had begun. He didn’t answer.

It was the last time we really lived together. He came back to Johannesburg and eventually we were divorced and he would disappear for months and turn up again. There was a rumour that he had slipped out of the country illegally and got in again. I didn’t know whom he spent his time with, though I had heard through our old Indian friend Solly that he had associated himself for a while with people who wanted to organize a new underground white revolutionary group.

Then the telephone rang at eleven o’clock at night and he said, ‘Liz? That you Liz? When the papers come out — d’you get the morning paper? There may be something big… Don’t forget.’

Nobody knows this. Nobody at all. I didn’t even tell the lawyers. I have never told Graham. It’s all that’s left of Max and me; all there is still between us. That voice, wild and quiet, over the telephone.

The water covers everything, soon no bubbles rise.

There were possibilities, but under what stone? Under what stone?

Max’s bomb, described in court as being made of a tin filled with a mixture of sulphur, saltpetre and charcoal, was found before it exploded and he was arrested within twenty-four hours. Others were more or less successful and it all began again, and worse than it had ever been before: raids, arrests, detention without trial. The white people who were kind to their pets and servants were shocked at bombs and bloodshed, just as they had been shocked, in 1960, when the police fired on the men, women and children outside the Sharpeville pass office. They can’t stand the sight of blood; and again gave, to those who have no vote, the humane advice that the decent way to bring about change is by constitutional means. The liberal-minded whites whose protests, petitions and outspokenness have achieved nothing remarked the inefficiency of the terrorists and the wasteful senselessness of their attempts. You cannot hope to unseat the great alabaster backside with a tin-pot bomb. Why risk your life? The madness of the brave is the wisdom of life. I didn’t understand, till then. Madness, God, yes, it was; but why should the brave ones among us be forced to be mad?

Some fled the country, some were held solitary in their cells and, refusing to speak, were kept on their feet under interrogation until they collapsed. Some did speak. Max was tried and sentenced to five years imprisonment but he was called as a State witness after serving fifteen months, and he spoke. He was beaten when he was first arrested, that we know, but what else he was confronted with later, what else they showed him in himself, we do not know — but he spoke. He spoke of Solly and Eve King and the man who was arrested with him, he spoke of William Xaba and other friends with whom we had lived and worked for years.

He is dead now. He didn’t die for them — the people, but perhaps he did more than that. In his attempts to love he lost even his self-respect, in betrayal. He risked everything for them and lost everything. He gave his life in every way there is; and going down to the bed of the sea is the last.