A World of Strangers

by Nadine Gordimer

  ‘Well, who’ve you been talking into something now?’

  Suddenly he’d sit down opposite me, throwing aside the pose, grinning his battered, broken-toothed grin.

  ‘The trouble with you, Toby’ – ‘the trouble with you’ was one of Steven’s favourite openings – ‘is that you’ve lost faith in the power of the human voice. You only believe things when you see them written down. It’s much better not to have things on paper, for other people to keep after they’ve gone out of your head.’

  ‘No simple wisdom this morning please.’

  ‘Don’t worry, man, I’m off. You remember that fellow from Tzaneen, Bobby, the short one?’

  ‘I don’t, but that doesn’t matter; what about him?’

  ‘He’s a good guy. He’s got a job with old Jake, in the printing shop, but he hasn’t got a permit to work in Jo’burg. I’m gonna fix it for him now.’

  He knew a fellow. This time a fellow who was a clerk in the immigration office. But always a fellow somewhere; a fellow who laid bets on horses for him; a fellow who bought brandy for him; a fellow who got him an exemption pass, so that he didn’t have to carry a wallet-full of identity papers and tax receipts about with him. The more restrictions grew up around him and his kind – and there seemed to be fresh ones every month – the quicker he found a way round them. Much of his vitality and resource and time went into this; sometimes I wondered how long one could keep up this sort of thing – how would he live as he grew older? – but mostly I enjoyed the flair with which he did it. Nothing could keep Steven out. In the locations often there was the charged atmosphere, smouldering, smothered, and sour, like the porridge turning to beer in the pots, of a vast energy turned in upon itself. But he wriggled and cheated and broke through.

  At least once a week he would drag me off on some fantastic jaunt, or suddenly bring me into the company of new people, all apparently old friends of his. We went to Lucky Chaputra’s splendid wedding, in February, and to a conference of witch-doctors – pompous, prosperous men in blue suits with well-rounded waistcoats. He arranged a special performance of Indian dancing for me, and didn’t tell me about it until we were at the door of the house in Vrededorp where the girl I’d seen before was waiting for us; then he laughed and swaggered and made boastful light of the surprise. ‘You’re really impressed with that baby, I think, Toby,’ he murmured, looking at me sideways. He would have pimped for me, but he was never in the least dependent on me for anything; that first night in the shebeen when we were drunk together he had got the moment he wanted from me; he didn’t want anything else, or less.

  Often I thought how well he and Cecil would have got on together, if they could have known each other. Their flaring enthusiasms, their unchannelled energy, their obstinately passionate aimlessness – each would have matched, out-topped the other.

  William cleaned the floor around Cecil’s feet unnoticed; the New Year went on as unremarkably as William’s return to working anonymity; he had disappeared for three days, the day the turn of the hill hid him, but once he was back everything was as before. Cecil was going to ride Hamish’s prize mare in the big Show that is held in Johannesburg at Easter, and the muscles of her forearms were quite steely with the determination of her training. She went off to Kit Baxter at the Karroo farm for a week, and when I went to Hamish’s for a swim, on the Saturday morning, I found that old John Hamilton had fetched the little boy Keith and coy Eveline, the nanny, from the flat, and was giving the child a swimming lesson. I felt guilty because I hadn’t thought to do it; I might have taken the boy to the zoo, or something, while Cecil was away, but really, she did so little for him that there was nothing much to compensate him for in his mother’s absence. He turned and frowned away from the glare of the water, and, in the moment, he was terribly like her. Suddenly I wished her back, very strongly; I was aware not of her laughing, talking, active social presence, but of her silent, sentient self that was inarticulate – her hand, smelling of cigarette smoke, early in the morning, the exact displacement of her weight as she flopped into the car beside me.

  I continued to think about all this while John and I lay in the sun – an amber sun, with all the white heat turned to the other side of the world – and he talked with his usual ease and lack of demand.

  ‘You’ve got to come along with me. We can’t have you going off back to England one of these days without having seen the best guinea-fowl shooting in the country. Man, you’ll love it. A couple of gallons of red wine, plenty to eat, and you walk twenty miles or so a day. You feel great, I can tell you. No trouble, no dirty work – I always see we have good boys to keep the camp going, and clean the birds and all that. I wouldn’t take you on the first shoot, though, if there hasn’t been a good ground frost yet it’s the very devil, you get yourself covered in ticks. Then, if you go too late, say August, there’s too much grass down, no cover for the birds and they’re off, the moment you sight them. You haven’t a snowball’s to get anywhere near. God, that’s maddening! You know what I mean, Toby?’

  I answered with the appropriate, laconic show of response which is simply a series of polite noises hiding inattention, and that, I have to admit since living out of England, is done particularly and inoffensively well by Englishmen. Foreigners attribute the manner to that other famous English trait, a predilection for understatement, and so save themselves the implication of boredom. In any case, I was not bored by John Hamilton; I simply wasn’t listening to him.

  Marion Alexander came out across the lawn dressed for town, from where she had just come. Like many women who aren’t young any more, when she was high-heeled and pulled in here and there and wore an elaborate hat and all the glittering, distracting surface of jewellery, veils, furs that such women employ, she looked, from a distance, almost beautiful. A quick look rapidly taking in all the adornments of beauty suggested a beautiful woman, and so, for a moment, you saw one. Then, as she came nearer, the components fell apart; there was a thick neck under the pearls, the legs were spindly, there were ropes of veins on the backs of the beringed hands.

  ‘Have you had everything you want, darlings?’ she called, and again, as she came up to us, ‘Has Jonas been looking after you?’

  ‘The lot,’ said John, gesturing to the tray of used cups on the grass, and the table with glasses and a jug of orange juice.

  ‘We could do with something a little stronger than that,’ said Marion in reproof of the absent servant, Jonas. The Alexanders took it for granted that their guests needed a constant stream of refreshment, that the only way they could be expected to continue functioning as guests was by something approximating to the system whereby failing patients are kept alive by a night-and-day saline drip into their veins. Jonas was called and told to bring whisky and gin and all the things that went with them. Marion kissed Cecil’s child, marvelling over him as she did over everything: ‘Isn’t that the most enchanting . . .’ she said to us as she settled carefully to rest in one of the low garden chairs. ‘That is the most adorable thing.’

  ‘D’you know,’ John agreed, ‘he’s got absolutely no fear of the water at all? He’s ready to slip out of your hand and drown himself the moment you get him in.’

  ‘He’s exactly Cecil, isn’t he?’ said Marion, conjuring up for us a picture of touching maternal charm, Cecil and her son. ‘Just exactly her spirit, her way of going at things, and her smile – too amazing, the smile.’

  They built up this picture which I did not recognize; though I suppose, on appearances, it was recognizable. It did not exist, but it could seem to exist, as people or objects can be brought into relationship with each other in a faked photograph. I felt suddenly jealous and wanted to assert my own familiarity with Cecil by exposing the fake, denigrating her. It was on the tip of my tongue to say, womanishly,’ It’s a pity she dislikes the boy so much.’

  Marion was going to Europe in a week or two – ‘You must look after Hamish,’ she said to John and me; she said it to everyone, in that absent affectatio
n of simplicity and childishness that the sprightly elderly rich love to adopt. She talked enthusiastically about how she would be seeing my mother; I could see her, telephoning my mother from a suite at Claridge’s, talking about me as she talked about Cecil. And my mother, slightly appalled, trying to recognize me; my mother, at lunch with Marion, looking at Marion’s clothes and diamonds, listening to her chatter, puzzled and even a little hurt (my mother always dutifully took the shortcomings of her children on herself) that I should choose to spend my time in South Africa with people like that. Then she would decide not to invite Marion to dinner after all – she was not young and pretty enough for Faunce to overlook her uselessness, nor was she clever enough for Faunce to forgive her age.

  Soon Hamish Alexander came home – we had dressed, and moved with Marion up to the veranda by then. He gave us the formula of greeting and interest that always rolled off his tongue; Had we had a swim (or a ride)? Was the water not too warm, too cold (according to the season)? Had we had a drink? We would stay for lunch, of course. For himself, he never did any of the things he expected his guests to have done, except, of course, eat and drink. With all people who were not mining men or financiers, he kept a don’t-bother-your-head-about-it attitude toward discussions about finance, and what he called ‘precious metals’. When he was talking with his own kind about these things, he always gave his opinions the backing of the editorial or royal ‘we’ – it was never what he thought – as if he reported for another self, a corporate self, left behind in the great building in the city which housed the head offices of his company.

  Politics sometimes gathered a little group of men into a huddle at The High House – the women there never contributed except for the rare passing interruption of some piercing and paralysing generality – but Hamish did not encourage the talk. In fact, he seemed to have some special sensory awareness of it, and he would call across, almost warningly, ‘What’s that you say? I don’t think people quite realize the particular difficulty -’ as if he resented the mere useless airing of views of men who had no knowledge behind-the-scenes. Perhaps all this was a device to protect his leisure; anyway, I know that a big strike of African mine-workers on the Rhodesian Copperbelt, that sent him up there to confer with people from the Oppenheimer group, was simply ‘this Rhodesian nuisance’ that absented him from a big theatre party arranged by Marion, and uranium – the discovery of which had been confirmed in some of the worked-out gold mines of his group – was practically a dirty word in the house, or a sacred one – it took some daring to bring it out, at any rate.

  The few times I had heard politics talked at The High House, it had hardly seemed to be concerned with the same country or spoken by people in the same situation as the talk I heard in Sophiatown or in houses where black and white people met. The people at Alexanders’ were almost entirely preoccupied with the struggle between the Afrikaner and the Englishman; that is, the Nationalists and themselves. To the other people I knew, the squabbling of the two white peoples was simply picayune; dwarfed by the towering bout between black and white. When an important Nationalist recanted and turned on his old Party colleagues, making speeches of high emotion calling for unity (between English-and Afrikaans-speaking whites) instead of a divided people, there was an air of triumph about politics at The High House; in fact, for the first time, politics came out of the corner and was generally talked. They discussed a possible refurbishing of their United Party as they might have considered doing up a perfectly livable room they hadn’t used much lately, or reconditioning a plant that hadn’t been in production for a while.

  In Anna Louw’s house, where the event wasn’t mentioned until I brought it up myself, Sam said, ‘United people? What’s the paper mean? United against us?’ And Sylvia Danziger, who was there too, went off into a peal of stuttering laughter.

  Cecil did well at the show, but not quite well enough to keep her in the triumphant euphoria in which she was most attractive. I went along to see her compete, twice; when she came out, needle-straight above Hamish’s prancing mare, I felt again in a flash the moment when I had noticed her first in the Stratford Bar, months before: she had the exciting, self-absorbed remoteness of a woman whom one does not know. But my attention wandered from the spectacle of one rider after another, uniformly the same, urging their horses to the same performance round the same course; beyond the creak of saddle-leather, a band bumbled somewhere nearby, flags stirred limply, prize cows lowed over in the agricultural section, and, farther away still, there was the vast snore of city traffic, rising and falling and twining. I found Cecil sitting beside me, grim under the black velvet cap, smelling of horse sweat. I gave her a cigarette and her hand was trembling. When someone did worse than she had done, she had difficulty in keeping her flushed face impassive, and looked swiftly sideways at Hamish and Kit. When someone did better than she had, she looked at no one, and fidgeted with the cloth of her breeches stretched tight over her knees. The day she won an event, we all had lunch together at the members’ restaurant; Hamish hardly ever went to places that did not carry some sort of privilege. It was a poor lunch, but there was plenty of champagne and a great crowd of well-dressed people in an atmosphere of perfume and cigar-smoke. I was astonished, when I looked up across the heads, to see Anna Louw looking at me. She had a hat on (I had never seen her wear a hat before) and she was smiling, like a child smiling from the top of the big wheel. When Hamish’s party was on its way out, and I had left the others to go and get Marion’s coat for her from the counter where such things were handed for safe keeping, I found myself near enough Anna to go and speak to her. She was alone; waiting for her escort, I supposed.

  ‘Keeping a tag on you,’ she said, smiling with pleasure.

  ‘How was I to know you, in that hat?’

  John Hamilton, who was also in Hamish’s party, came up as he left the umpteenth group of friends he had paused to talk to as he lagged behind the rest of our party. He had had a lot to drink and his down-to-earth debonair manner, a cross between Father Christmas in a department store and man-about-town, was in spate. ‘Toby, there’s no dragging you away from the girls. Come on now, who’s this delightful young lady you’ve been keeping to yourself. – He’s a dark horse, my dear, always keeps the good things to himself. – Why don’t you bring her along to Hamish’s eh? Proper Don Juan and pretty darned selfish about it. D’you ride, my dear? Well, what does it matter, you can just sit and look charming. . . .’ He drifted on again, greeting people everywhere along the tables.

  ‘Bubbly drinks at lunch have a hideous effect on people,’ I said, awkwardly. ‘I think he’s rather a nice man,’ said Anna. ‘Oh he is, he is.’ I felt rebuked.

  ‘Did you have a good lunch?’ I asked. She and I had never had a conversation like this before.

  ‘Asparagus, turkey, ice-cream and chocolate sauce,’ she announced. I felt she was laughing at me. I should have liked to have taken off that hat of hers.

  ‘You sound as if you enjoyed it.’

  ‘Toby, man, there’s something fascinating about people like this, you know.’

  ‘You don’t really think so.’

  ‘Oh yes. It’s natural to be like them. If you’re a whole person, perfectly adapted to your own functions, like a fish in the sea or a lion in the jungle, you don’t give a damn for anybody else. There’s something queer about people like me, haven’t you noticed it? We want to change things because we haven’t got the divine selfishness of really healthy beings. We’re not enough to ourselves.’

  They were waiting, the faces of Hamish’s party, searching for me impatiently across the crowd. Cecil had her little whip authoritatively between her two hands, the winner’s smile, not directed towards anyone, but meant for herself, lifted her head. John Hamilton beckoned with a high wave like a man casting a lasso.

  One night in July, in late winter, the ‘opera’ that Sam had written and composed in collaboration with a white man was given in the dreary hall of a Bantu social centre. The new kind o
f fashionable audience had come to see it; the people who had ‘discovered’ the Africans artistically and were making the most of the distinction. And, automatically, since, as I’ve said before, the range of mixed society was so limited, they had drawn in people who had always worked with and had friends among Africans – even one famous man, who had championed the African cause in Europe and America.

  The opera was really more of a musical play than an opera, and yet too much like an opera to be a musical play; it just missed being either. It was also more of a white man’s idea of what a black man would write, and a black man’s idea of what a white man would expect him to write, than the fusion of a black man’s and a white man’s worlds of imagination. It missed being Sam’s work, and it missed being the other man’s too – for what that might have been worth. There were one or two good moments in it – especially in the music – but its general impression was that of one of those old-fashioned gipsy operettas that, so feebly wild and gay, never come alive, and it seemed to me to have about as much Africa in it as Ruritania ever resembled any Balkan country that’s ever been on a map. Of course, there was a mixed audience of black and white men and women, and that, in Johannesburg, gave us all a strange, embarrassed pleasure; you couldn’t help noticing it.

  It’s not supposed to rain in the Transvaal in winter but it was raining when we left the hall, and the winter wind of Johannesburg, the wind of high places, slapped at your face like a wet towel. Steven was with a few friends – Peter was there that night, and a shy little hospital nurse; Betty Ntolo, the singer, resplendent and giggling; and the man who owned the car that had brought them all, a fat man with a fat man’s deep voice, Elias Shomang.