The Late Bourgeois World

Chapter 4

Chapter 4

There’s not much point in spending a long time with the old lady, my grandmother. As her memory’s so bad, it doesn’t make any difference whether you stay half an hour or two hours; so long as she sees you. She looks up from her indifference, which is the past, and in the daze of the present she finds a face — that’s about all. I made a cup of coffee to wake myself up and then drove across the suburbs to the Home. It was intermission at the matinees; children thronged the cinema entrances pushing each other about and eating ice cream in the sun. At a main intersection a down-at-heel white family hawked hanks of coloured spun sugar along the line of cars. People ran about on tennis courts I passed, and clustered on the bowling greens. The empty red beer cartons were thick on every open space. If I were dumped back in it from eternity I should know at once that it was Saturday afternoon. It was in people’s faces, the pleasure of the weekend, like the sweets clutched in children’s hands.

The Home is an old house whose original iron-roofed colonial-Victorian has been knocked out and added on to. The entrance has steel and glass doors and tropical plants under concealed lighting, but on the first-floor landing there is a black wooden bear of the kind once designed to hold umbrellas in the crooks of his arms, and there are other ornately carved survivals of the objects with which the new-rich, from Europe, of seventy years ago announced the change of status from successful gold prospector to mining magnate. There is even a stained-glass window with the petals of cough-drop coloured, art nouveau irises outlined in thick lead.

I’ve always felt that the place has a more human feel than any modern building designed as an institution, but when my grandmother first went there and was still able to care, she complained that it was ugly and old-fashioned. She loves plastics — artificial flowers, ‘simulated’ silk, synthetic marble, fake leather. There was no sense of the day of the week, inside; the same warm air, faintly lit with methylated spirits, that comes back to me each visit as something I forget entirely in-between. No seasons, either. Spring or winter, it feels the same. The corridors are covered with something that deadens footfalls and you pass the wide-open doors of wards where not all the patients are in bed, or old, either — it is a home for the chronically sick as well as the aged. I’ve got to know some of the shapes even before I recognize the faces — because of the particular position which a malady will force someone to adopt in bed or chair. Among the very small white-haired old ladies, the dying diabetic, taking so long to die, was still there, humped on her side, smoking. She has the reckless drinker’s face that diabetics sometimes have, and looks as if she had once been good-looking — like a finished whore. But the distinguishing marks of social caste are often distorted by illness; the Home is not cheap and it is unlikely that she belongs to anything other than the respectable middle class. The monster with the enormous belly was sitting on a chair with her legs splayed out, like a dead frog swollen on a pond. I have never known what is the matter with her.

Outside my grandmother’s little room a bouquet stood in a vase on the floor. Anemones, freesias and snowdrops, exactly like mine.

I opened the door softly and stood a moment. She was sitting in a chair with a mouth drawn in lipstick on her face, and her hair, that she had always kept short and tinted and curled, pulled back into a skimpy knot. They dress her every day and they had even put on her triple pearl choker and huge button earrings. Her eyes flew open and in the light that came from behind me I saw terror expand her face and the red-drawn outline fall agape.

‘Who is that!’ she called out in horror.

‘Don’t be silly, now, it’s Elisabeth, your grandchild —’ The nurse came across the room between us, but I said, ‘Let her see me properly,’ and came over beside her where the light from the window was on me, and kissed her, and said, ‘Here I am, I didn’t want to miss your birthday.’ She took the kiss and then drew back, still alarmed, and looked at me, searching. ‘It’s Elisabeth, isn’t it, Elisabeth my darling —’ and though the Afrikaans nurse burst in with assurances and cheerful laughter, took no notice. She motioned me to her and kissed me again. Then her hand went up to her mouth and pressed it and she said angrily, to the air, ‘Why haven’t I got my teeth in, if Elisabeth is here. Where are my teeth?’

‘Well, your gums was sore this morning, grannie, don’t you remember? You didn’t want to put it in. Wait, I’ll bring it, I first want to put some of that stuff on —’

‘What is she talking about? Give them to me!’ The old lady clawed at the woman’s hand and then, having got her teeth, concentrated carefully on the two plates before slowly deciding where uppers and lowers should go. The nurse was chattering; I suppose it is an enormous relief to have some company other than that of a senile old lady. ‘She always get a fright when somebody come to the door. I don’t know why she’s so scared, you know … since this last lot of angina attacks. I don’t know what it is, she seem to think someone’s going to come and get her … I always say,’ and now she turned to my grandmother, playful, soothing, ‘nobody going to hurt you, grannie, nobody can do you any harm here, isn’t it? I tell her.’

A slight, distracted dent between the bald eyebrows showed that the old lady was aware of some habitually bothersome background noise. With her big, regular false teeth in her mouth she speaks in a high, controlled voice behind them, to avoid their distortion, but even then there is thickness and sibilance, as though she were speaking through a medium. ‘And the husband? With you, or away again at the moment? And Bobo? How is that sweet boy?’

She forgets that I was divorced from Max, and if I were to tell her he is dead, she would forget that, too. In her room with the signed photographs of famous artists on the walls (she has her own things around her) it always seems that nothing has happened. Or that everything has already happened. I sat under Jascha Heifetz facing Noel Coward and the framed menu of the lunch where she had met him in 1928, and told her that I had seen Bobo in the morning; he wished her a happy birthday.

‘It’s my birthday?’ she said. And repeated it at intervals so that I had to explain again and again. ‘How old is it this time?’

‘Eighty-seven.’ I wasn’t sure.

She pulled a little-girl face, relic of the sham simplicity of her sophistication. ‘Horrible. Too long.’

‘… It’s my birthday? I didn’t know … I don’t know anything.’

I patted her hand, in which the pulse throbbed everywhere. They keep her nails painted red, as she used to, but the effect, like the pearls round her neck, is recognizable not as a familiar adornment but as something done to her.

I said, ‘Have you seen the flowers I sent?’ and the nurse chipped in, ‘She won’t have it in the room. I arrange it nicely but she don’t want it near her.’

‘Why? But why don’t you want your flowers in here?’

The old lady’s face went empty.

‘Do they smell too strong? Don’t you like the scent? I’m afraid it’s not the time of year for roses.’ She used to talk about how much she loved roses — perhaps because she had very little interest in natural things, and roses were a safe choice.

‘Yes, I think it’s the smell she find too strong. It must be. I brought it in and show it to her, but she won’t have it!’

My grandmother looked from the nurse to me. ‘Who is that?’ she asked me, pointing at her. Her face drew together in accusation. The nurse began to bustle, smiling, cajoling, ‘Ag, grannie, it’s me, Sister Grobler —’ but my grandmother dismissed the explanation with an impatient flicker of the facial muscles and said to me, ‘Who is she? What is she doing here?’

I told her, and she seemed satisfied and then said, ‘Is she good to me?’

I said yes, yes of course she was good to her. The nurse was cataloguing in a sing-song lullaby voice, ‘I make your bed … I bath you … I make your hair nice … I make you your cocoa …’ but for my grandmother, again, she did not exist. The hands with the sunken hollows between the knuckles twitched now and then; they have never done any work, and my grandmother used to lavish pride and creams on them. She has lived on dividends all her life (her father was an engineer associated with Rhodes and Beit) but — my mother says — she won’t leave any behind her, the expenses of her senility are eating up the last of her capital. My grandmother’s capital has been a source of bitterness at home as long as I can remember; my mother’s father left no specific provision for his children, and her marriage to a penniless young man happened to coincide with my grandmother’s own second marriage to a man not much older than her daughter’s, on whom she spent the greater part of this capital and certainly all that she might have been expected to provide for the advancement of her daughter. It would have been useful if she could have left some money to Bobo, but there it is. Oddly, she never shared my parents’ attitude to the way Max and I lived, and, vague about the nature of Max’s shortcomings as a husband and provider as related by my mother, seemed to assume that he was merely rather a high-spirited and headstrong boy, some sort of charming adventurer (she had known a few) translated into present-day terms; some fashion she hadn’t caught up with yet.

My mother and father were extremely gratified to have me ‘marry into’ the Van Den Sandts, although I’d spoiled the dignity of the alliance somewhat by being pregnant before the wedding. Yet even if people in our small town were able to say meaningfully that he’d had to marry me, the son of a wealthy MP was a son-in-law most of them would have liked for a daughter of their own. My parents will be equally gratified, now, to know that he is dead. Is that too hard a thing to say? The son of a wealthy MP — that was what they expected of Max, and they didn’t get it. But didn’t I, in my way, expect something of him that he wasn’t? The summer I was seventeen, the summer I met Max, I was helping out, for Christmas, in my father’s shop. The fancy goods counter, with painted ‘coasters’ for glasses, cheap cuckoo clocks and watches, maroon vases with gilt fluted tops, Japanese bridge pencils with tassels, German cork-screws with dogs’ heads, china figurines of ballet dancers. Shop girls came in and bought these things with the money that they earned in other shops, selling similar stuff. Black men lingered a long time over the choice of a watch that, paid for out of notes folded small for saving, would be back within a week, I knew, because those watches didn’t work properly. I had seen nothing of the product of human skills except what was before me in my father’s drapery shop-cum-department store, but I knew there must be things more worth having than these, and an object in life less shameful than palming them off on people who knew nothing better to desire. The shoddy was my sickening secret. And then I found that Max knew all about it; that the house he lived in, and what went on there, his surroundings, though richer and less obviously unattractive, were part of it, too, and that this quality of life was apparently what our fathers and grandfathers had fought two wars abroad and killed black men in ‘native’ wars of conquest here at home, to secure for us. Truth and beauty — good God, that’s what I thought he would find, that’s what I expected of Max.

When my grandmother dies, Bobo will get her father’s gold hunter and chain, that Beit gave him.

After the first five minutes with her, as usual, I didn’t know what to say. Searching the deep vacancy of her face for what lies lost there, I drew up from the trance of age her old pleasure in streets and cities, and described an imaginary shopping trip I had taken in the morning. ‘I was looking for something for the evening — you know, soon the weather will be getting warmer, and I want something light, but with sleeves …’

Slowly her attention surfaced and steadied. ‘What are they wearing this year? Will it be black?’

‘Well, no. I thought I’d like white, as a matter of fact, not dead white …’

She was leaning forward confidentially: ‘Hard on the face,’ she said.

‘Yes … But off-white, something soft and simple.’

‘Always at the cleaners, my darling. You can only wear it once. And did you see what you wanted?’

‘I went from shop to shop … it was so crowded. One shouldn’t try to buy clothes on a Saturday. I had coffee at Vola’s — you remember, you used to like the coffee there. And the day when you took Bobo for lunch and he went and stole the rolls off the next table …?’

Very slowly the smile began, cracking the line of the mouth, lopsided and then coming through the whole deserted face, inhabiting it once more. We giggled together.

‘“Grannie, help yourself.” “Grannie, help yourself.”’ The precise memory was turned up; she was quoting Bobo.

The nurse broke in, ‘You see? Look how lively she is! You can remember everything so nice when you want to! You see, when your granddaughter comes you can really talk nice … it’s just you get lazy here with me …’ Her red plump arms had pointed elbows the shape of peach pips as she waved them about.

The old lady’s face drained of meaning. I chatted on but she gave me only a slow blinking glance, half-puzzled, half-indulgent. I was talking but there was a dignity, final, bedrock, in her ignoring me; it was true that I was saying nothing.

She said suddenly, ‘What happened?’

There is nothing to say.

She asks now only the questions that are never answered. I can’t tell her, you are going to die, that’s all. She’s had all the things that have been devised to soften life but there doesn’t seem to have been anything done to make death more bearable.

‘If I can’t go out any more, what shall I do, then?’

‘Perhaps you could go out. Perhaps I could take you and Sister Grobler to a film one afternoon.’

‘But will I understand? What shall I do, then?’

I said to her with a meaningless reassuring smile, ‘Stay here, quietly …’

‘But tell me, what happened?’

I said, ‘Nothing has happened. There’s nothing wrong. It’s just old age, quite natural, quite normal. You are eighty-six — seven — it’s a great age.’

Soon the hour I’d stipulated to myself was up and I said goodbye to her with the usual bright smiles and promises that I should see her again next week (if I don’t go for a month she won’t know the difference). She was repeating, ‘It’s old age, old age, great age, you are teaching me —’

As I got out of the door of the Home my own step came back to me after the silence of the corridors, quick, clipped, heel-and-toe on the paving, exhilarating and … slightly cruel. On the walls of the viaduct I have to drive under on my way home I noticed again the arrow-and-spear sign that has been there for a long time, now, the red paint still not entirely faded, and an unfinished message: TORTURE THE END. Perhaps it is one that Sunbun wrote. Whoever it was, was interrupted. There was one of those sunsets beginning — the kind we’ve been having for months. Buildings and telephone poles were punched black against a watercolour sky into which fresh colour kept washing and spreading, higher and higher. We’ve never seen so high before; every day the colours go up and up to a hectic lilac, and from that, at last, comes the night. People carry their drinks outside not so much to look at the light, as to be in it. It’s everywhere, surrounding faces and hair as it does the trees. It comes from a volcanic eruption on the other side of the world, from particles of dust that have risen to the upper atmosphere. Some people think it’s from atomic tests; but it’s said that, in Africa, we are safe from atomic fallout from the Northern Hemisphere because of the doldrums, an area where the elements lie becalmed and can carry no pollution.