The Late Bourgeois World

Chapter 5

Graham was here. He came at six. I was slicing onions for the pork fillets and opened the door with the knife in my wet hand. I’d said this morning I was going out for dinner — but there was nothing to be done about it. My smelly hands were there held stiffly away from me. He had my newspaper that he’d picked up from the doormat, and while I saw from the faintest possible movement at the corners of his long mouth that he understood, he said, ‘So the Americans have brought it off, too. They’ve had a man walking in space — look at this —’ Not able to touch the paper, I twisted my neck to see the front-page pictures of a dim foetal creature attached by a sort of umbilical cord to a dim vehicle. ‘I wish they wouldn’t try to print newspaper pictures in colour. You’d see much better if it were in plain black and white. It looks like something from one of Bobo’s comics.’

He wandered into the living room, opening up the paper while I closed the kitchen door and then disappeared into the bathroom to wash my hands. He was reading aloud the subheadings and bits of the long report: ‘He was several times ordered to return to the spacecraft, but he seemed to be enjoying himself out there … “Quit horsing around” came the terse order … No More Cookies … crumbs from Southern-style corn muffins posed a minor problem …’ I laughed and called out comments while scrubbing my fingernails. The smell didn’t come off. I came back into the living room rubbing lotion into my hands and he was sitting in his usual chair; it was not necessary, or possible, any more, to make an excuse or explanation. Only I could still smell the onion, if my hands moved close to my face.

He said, ‘I walked down. D’you know that it doesn’t take more than twenty-five minutes?’

‘Well, no, I don’t suppose it would. It’s downhill most of the way. But going back! D’you remember one day at Easter when my car wouldn’t start and I walked home from your house?’

‘When was that? But why didn’t I drive you?’

‘You’d lent your car to that fellow from the World Council of Jurists, don’t you remember?’

‘Oh, Patten, yes. Well, I’ll have a drink and start the long trek before it gets too dark.’

‘No, I can run you back. There’s plenty of time for me to dress.’ Now that I couldn’t explain, it was so easy to maintain a lie.

He smiled and said casually, ‘Oh fine,’ and got up to get the whisky bottle out of the cupboard. He supplies the whisky; I can’t afford to. I went to shut the balcony doors because it was getting chilly. The super-sunset was still framed there, a romanticized picture that made the room look drab. He said, ‘It’s magnificent.’

‘I’m getting used to them.’

He went on looking, so that I couldn’t close the doors, and waited for him to have had enough, like a patient attendant at a museum. ‘I’d like a few cows, and lovers floating above Fredagold Heights, though,’ he said. He has a Chagall drawing in his bedroom; curious, the way some women have a Marie Laurençin print in theirs. Why not in the living room? There is some private vision, version of life to which the public one doesn’t correspond. Or into which the public is not allowed. And yet he had never been interested in Chagall until a rich client gave him the drawing. Then he hung it in the bedroom.

‘Suppose it is fallout,’ I said.

‘Well?’ He is sometimes a little patronizing towards me, though not offensively.

‘Then it’s not beautiful, is it.’

‘There’s nothing moral about beauty.’ He smiled; we were having what he calls an ‘undergraduate chat.’

‘Truth is not beauty.’

‘Apparently not.’

I closed the doors but I couldn’t very well pull the curtains; he sat with his drink in his hand, the chair hitched round to face the view.

I hardly notice these sunsets any more, but his attention attracted mine as one’s attention is attracted by someone’s absorption in a piece of music one has heard too often and ceased to hear. I said, gazing because he was gazing, following the colour, ‘If it is fallout there’s something horrible about it looking like that.’

‘How does it look to you?’

I couldn’t see any floating lovers or fiddles or cows, out there. ‘Like the background to a huge Victorian landscape. Something with a quotation underneath with lots of references to the Soul and God’s Glory and the Infinite. Something that ought to have a scrolled gilt frame weighing twenty pounds. It’s what my grandmother would have been taught was beautiful, as a child. You know, that style. What’s it got to do with us. And with bombs.’

‘It’s a bit picture-postcard, but still.’

‘All the dawns and sunsets in all the albums rolled into one. The apotheosis of picture-postcard. Just imagine a colour photograph of that, exhibited in a hundred years’ time. Things are not like that with us at all.’

The dark was coming now, graining the texture of the lilac space. A sharp star came through like a splinter of glass. Usually when I say something that doesn’t particularly engage his mind, but that he thinks sensible, he will say, ‘You have a point there.’ It doesn’t exactly irritate me; it is one of the gauges in which I read what he thinks of me. When people know each other as well as he and I do, this is what is really taking place all the time, no matter what they are talking about. Never mind whether they’re discussing politics, or gossiping about friends or planning a holiday — the important thing is the constant shifting and maintaining of balance, the endless replaying of the roles each has secretly chosen the other to present, and which the other secretly contrives to appear to fulfil by nature. Even though I know I’m a damned intelligent woman — by far the most intelligent female he’s ever had any sort of dealings with — and that a relationship with a woman of my kind implies the acceptance not only of intellectual equality but also coeval commonsense (none of the patronizing affection towards precocious feminine cleverness) — in spite of this, even when I’m holding up my end in discussion a shade better than he is, there’s a sort of backward glance, in me, at my performance before him. And this corresponds to a hidden expectation from him that he will be intrigued by the quality of a female mind — that mind whose quality is accepted rationally as taken for granted. In Europe last year, arguing about paintings and buildings we saw together, in discussions of various kinds at friends’ dinner tables, in his house or my flat, talking politics as we do most of the time — underneath, he coaxes me, and I show off to him, I coax him and he performs for me.

While we were talking I was aware, as if standing aside from us both, that this other dialogue of ours was soothingly being taken up. Our speaking voices went on, a bit awkwardly, but, like the changing light in the Son et Lumière performances we saw in France, illuminating, independent of the narration, the real scene of events as it moved from walls to portal to courtyard and window, the light and shadow of the real happening between us was going on as usual, in silence.

Then instead of saying, ‘You have a point there,’ Graham said, ‘How would you say things are with us?’

For a second I took it as going straight to all that we competently avoided, a question about him and me, the lie he had caught me out with on my hands — and I could feel this given away, in my face.

I did not know what to say.

But it was a quiet, impersonal demand, the tone of the judge exercising the prerogative of judicial ignorance, not the partisan one of the advocate cross-examining. There was what I can only describe as a power failure between us; the voices went on but the real performance had stopped in darkness.

I said, ‘Well, I’d find it difficult to define — I mean, how would you describe — what could one say this is the age of? Not in terms of technical achievement, that’s too easy, and it’s not enough about us — about people — is it?’

‘Today, for instance.’ He was serious, tentative, sympathetic.

Yes, this day. This morning I was driving through the veld and it was exactly the veld, the sun, the winter morning of nine years old, for me; for Max. The morning in which our lives were a distant hum in the future, like the planes a distant hum in the sky (there was a big air-force training camp, near my home, during the war). Grow big, have a job, be married, pray to the blond Christ in the white people’s church, give the nanny your old clothes. This same morning and our lives were here and Max had been in prison and was dead and I was not a widow. What happened? That’s what she asked, the old lady, my grandmother. And while I was driving through the veld to see Bobo (Max heard the ducks quacking a conversation he never understood) a man was walking about in space. I said, ‘Graham, what on earth do you think they’ll call it in history?’ and he said, ‘I’ve just read a book that refers to ours as the Late Bourgeois World. How does that appeal to you?’

I laughed. It went over my skin like wind over water; that feeling you get from a certain combination of words, sometimes. ‘It’s got a nice dying fall. But that’s a political definition, they’re no good.’

‘Yes, but the writer — he’s an East German — uses it as a wider one — it covers the arts, religious beliefs, technology, scientific discoveries, love-making, everything —’

‘But excluding the Communist world, then.’

‘Well no, not really’ — he loves to give me a concise explanation — ‘it exists in relation to the early Communist world — shall we call it. Defining one, you assume the existence of the other. So both are part of a total historical phenomenon.’

I poured him another drink because I wanted him to go, and although he wanted to go, he accepted it. ‘Did you work all afternoon? Or did you really sleep?’

But I knew that he had worked; he gave the admission of a dry, dazed half-smile, something that came from the room where he’d been shut up among documents, as a monk, who during his novitiate still makes some sorties into the life outside, is claimed by the silence of the cell that has never really relinquished him. Even the Friday night love-making had not made Graham sleepy in the afternoon; in that room of his, he wrote and intoned into the dictaphone, alone with his own voice. I’ve heard it sometimes from outside the door; like someone sending up prayer.

I mentioned I’d noticed that the arrow-and-spear sign was still on the walls of the viaduct near the Home.

‘I’m not surprised. I think there are a few new ones round the town, too. Somebody’s brave. Or foolhardy.’ He told me last week that a young white girl got eighteen months for painting the same symbol; but of course in the Cape black men and women are getting three years for offences like giving ten bobs’ worth of petrol for a car driven by an African National Congress member.

‘D’you think it’s all right, using that spear thing? I mean, when you think who it was who had the original idea.’ It came out in a political trial not long ago that this particular symbol of resistance was the invention of a police agent provocateur and spy. I’d have thought they’d want to find another symbol.

He laughed. ‘I don’t suppose the motives of the inventor’ve much to do with it. After all, look at advertising agencies — do you think the people who coin the selling catchword believe in what they’re doing?’

‘Yes, I suppose so. But it’s queer. A queer situation. I mean one could never think it would be like that.’

We were silent for a moment; he was, so to speak, considerately bare-headed in these pauses in which the thought of Max was present. There was nothing to say about Max, but now and then, like the silent thin spread of spent water coming up to touch your feet on a dark beach at night, his death or his life came in, and a commonplace remark turned up reference to him. Graham asked, ‘The flowers arrive for your grandmother all right?’ I told him how they were kept outside the door; and how she had cried out when she saw a figure in the doorway.

‘It’s natural to be afraid of death.’ Just as if he were advising a dose of Syrup of Figs for Bobo (one of the fatherly gestures he sometimes boldly makes).

‘Maybe. But she’s never had to put up with what’s natural. Neither grey hairs nor cold weather. It’s true — until two or three years ago, when she became senile, she hadn’t lived through a winter in fifteen years — she flew from winter in England to the summer here, and from winter here to summer in England. But for this, now, nothing helps.’

‘Like the common cold,’ he said, standing up suddenly and looking down at me; almost amusedly, almost bored, accusingly. So he dismisses a conversation, or makes a decision. ‘Can you take me now?’ But he doesn’t understand. Since you have to die you ought to be provided with a perfectly ordinary sense of having had your fill. A mechanism like that which controls other appetites. You ought to know when you’ve had enough — like the feeling at the end of a meal. As simple and ordinary as that.

I drove him home. His name is on the beautifully polished bronze plate on the gateway and a wrought-iron lantern is turned on by the servants at dusk every day above the teak front door. When he got out of the car I asked him to supper tomorrow. There was no difficulty about the lie; it didn’t seem to matter at all, everything was slack and somehow absent-minded between us. As soon as I’d dropped him, I drove home like a bat out of hell, feeling pleasurably skilful round corners, as I find I do when I’ve had just one sharp drink on an empty stomach. I had to get on and finish with the onions and have a bath, before half-past seven.

I’d said about half-past seven, but I could safely count on eight o’clock, so there was plenty of time.

I was expecting Luke Fokase. He phoned the laboratory on Thursday. ‘Look, how are things, man? I’m around. If I should drop in on Saturday, is that all right with you? I’m just around for a short time but I think I’ll still make it.’

We don’t use names over the telephone. I said, ‘Come and eat with me in the evening.’

‘Good, good. I’ll drop by.’

‘About half-past seven.’

I don’t know why I asked him again. I rather wish he’d leave me off his visiting list, leave me alone. But I miss their black faces. I forget about the shambles of the backyard house, the disappointments and the misunderstandings, and there are only the good times, when William Xaba and the others sat around all day Sunday under the apricot tree, and Spears came and talked to me while I cooked for us all. It comes back to me like a taste I haven’t come across since, and everything in my present life is momentarily automatous, as if I’ve woken up in a strange place. And yet I know that it was all no good, like every other luxury, friendship for its own sake is something only whites can afford. I ought to stick to my microscope and my lawyer and consider myself lucky I hadn’t the guts to risk ending up the way Max did.

Luke isn’t one of the old crowd, but his half-section, Reba, knew Max, and that is how they both happened to come to me. They live in Basutoland, though of course they really belong here but were somehow able to prove their right to Basuto citizenship and papers from the British administration there. Reba has some building and cartage contracting business and he sends his old truck quite freely up and down between Maseru and Johannesburg with loads of second-hand building material. Apparently it provides an unscheduled bus service for politicals on the run, and even transports people in the other direction, taking them up to the Bechuanaland border. One night about fifteen months ago Reba arrived at my flat in the middle of the night; the truck had broken down with two chaps on board who had arranged to be escorted over the border that night, and he didn’t have enough money to pay for the repairs. I’d only met him once before, with Max, and I wasn’t quite sure if I really knew who he was, but I lent him what I had — eight pounds. I was afraid to — he could easily have been a police trap — but I was even more afraid not to; how could someone like me risk losing two Africans their chance to get away?

He had with him that night a plump young man with a really black, smooth face — almost West African — and enormous almond eyes that were set in their wide-spaced openings in the black skin like the painted eyes of smiling Etruscan figures. That was Luke. Reba is a little, Vaseline-coloured man whose head is jammed back between his shoulders like a hunchback’s and who holds his big jaw full of teeth open in an attentive, silent laugh, while you’re speaking, as a hippopotamus keeps his ajar for the birds to pick his teeth. They were an immensely charming pair who gave the impression of being deeply untrustworthy. I didn’t expect to see the money again, but a registered envelope arrived with the notes and a letter of thanks idiotically signed ‘yours in the Struggle, Reba Shipise’. Since then, Luke turns up from time to time; he says, alternately, apparently not remembering from one visit to the next what explanation he gave last time — that Reba is too busy with his business or that Johannesburg has become ‘too hot’ for him. What does it matter? It’s none of my business, anyway. They’re both PAC men, too; and Max and I, like most white leftists and liberals, always supported ANC people because they are not ‘racialist’ and don’t count us out, but the government doesn’t make any fine distinction between those who are said to want to push the white man into the sea and those who merely want their majority vote — both kinds can rot in prison together. What does the fact that they are PAC rather than ANC matter, either? All the old niggling scruples of the days before black political parties were banned seem quite to have missed the point, now.

It’s not often that I cook a proper meal, unless Bobo’s home on holiday; Graham can afford to buy our dinner in a restaurant, or we can eat at his house, where there’s a cook — it’s not worth the trouble for me to have to start work in the kitchen when I come home from the laboratory. So that the mere fact of cooking something that requires more skill and organization of tasks than frying an egg makes quite an occasion for me — it doesn’t matter whom it’s for. Anyway, Luke Fokase is always hungry. That first night he came with Reba he sat down and ate cold frigadelles I happened to have in the refrigerator. Pork fillets cooked buried in lots of thinly sliced onions are a bother to do, but I rather enjoyed getting everything prepared right up to the stage when all I should have to do was set it cooking, just before we wanted to eat. I opened a bottle of Spanish red wine that Graham had left in case we should happen to eat something worthy of it here, sometime — wine is very important to Graham, I notice that a good dinner and good wine and then love-making go together, with him, he doesn’t really enjoy the last without the first. I took a glass into the bathroom, and drank it in the bath. It looked lovely, the dark pansy-red against the tiles. I had the newspaper with me and I read the whole report from which Graham had read out bits about the space flight. There was nothing in the paper about Max; it had already been dropped from this, the late final edition.

Even then I was dressed and ready long before Luke came, and did not know what to do with myself. There are so many things that ought to be done when I have the time, but an awkward little wedge of time like this is not much use. Whatever I began, I should not finish. I can never go back to a half-written letter; the tone, when you take it up again, doesn’t match.

And yet to put on a record and pour myself another glass of wine and sit — something that sounds delightful — made me feel as if I were on stage before an empty auditorium. I fetched the book I was reading in bed in the morning. Since I stopped halfway down the page at which a dry cleaner’s slip marked my place, there was Max’s death; it seemed to me a different book, I can’t explain — it sounded quite differently there in that inner chamber where one hears a writer’s voice behind the common currency of words. The voice went on and on but ran into itself as an echo throws one wave of sound back and forth on top of another. I read the words and sentences, but my mind twitched to the single electrical impulse — the death of Max. As soon as I gave up the attempt to read, it was all right again. I wasn’t even thinking about him. Through the walls there was the muffled clatter of dinner time in the flats on either side of mine, and the bark of someone’s radio at full volume. Car doors slammed and the clear winter air juggled voices. Our lights blazed at Fredagold Heights and theirs blazed back. I saw the tube of glue lying in the ashtray (I’d had it out to stick down the sole of my shoe a few days ago) and remembered that I had never got round to mending the head of the baboon mascot I brought back for Bobo from Livingstone, on the way home from Europe last year. It came broken out of my overnight bag; and after showing it to him I’d put it away among my cosmetics, telling him I’d stick the snout on. I went to the bedroom and found it, at the back of the drawer; one of the red lucky-bean eyes had come out, too, but I found that as well, in the fluff and spilt powder. The thing is made of some unidentifiable fur (meerkat? rat?), well observed, with an obscenely arched tail, and a close-set, human expression about the bean eyes in a face carved out of a bit of soft wood. I glued both broken surfaces very carefully and then pressed them together accurately. I scraped off with my fingernail the hairline of glue squeezed out along the break and then held snout and head tightly while the fusion set; you wouldn’t be able to tell that it was mended. I began to think about how one day I would buy albums and begin to stick in the photographs of Bobo as a baby that are lying in an old hatbox on the top of the bathroom cupboard. Most of the others — him as a little boy — went along with our personal papers and cuttings in security raids on the old cottage, and I’ve never been able to get them back. Sticking Bobo’s pictures into an album and recording the dates on which and places where they were taken suddenly seemed enthusiastically possible, just as if the kind of life in which one does this sort of thing would fly into place around us with the act. My stomach was rumbling hunger, and with fingers tacky with glue, I had just poured myself another glass of wine when there was a soft, two-four beat rapping at the door; Luke doesn’t ring bells.