A World of Strangers

by Nadine Gordimer

  I said, ‘Oh, I see.’

  Later, she led me to make love to her again, and in the dark I thought triumphantly, desperately: I am alive. Yes, one of us is still alive.

  Chapter 17

  Steven had died like a criminal, but he was buried like a king. All the hangers-on, the admirers, the friends, and acquaintances of his gregarious life came, as one of them expressed it to me, to see him off. There was a band in the funeral procession, there was Betty Ntolo and a whole parade of other entertainers, there were orations in three languages, there were wreaths three feet high. And he was not a film star, or a politician, or anyone known at the distance of fame; all these people had known him as one of themselves.

  Sam, when he saw me, held my arm and wept; but I could not cry, just as, in the midst of the joy of jazz at one of Steven’s parties, I could not dance. We went home to Sam’s house and sat drinking the tea that his wife Ella served us in silence. Later he and I walked to the top of the ash-heap that made a promontory near their house. Spring was coming; even up there, a stripling peach-tree that had found a hold of soil under the ash put out a few fragments of thin, brilliant leaf. Beneath us, the township smoked as if it had just been pillaged and destroyed. ‘I’ve sold my car,’ he said. ‘That’s where I was on Tuesday when you came. I’d promised to deliver it.’

  I knew how proud he was of the little Morris, how to him it was part of the modest stake in civilized living which it was so hard for Africans to acquire. ‘But why? What was wrong with it?’

  ‘My brother had to have some money. Ella’s got two sisters who want to go on at school. Oh, a dozen different reasons, all boiling down to the same thing – cash.’

  ‘That’s a damned shame.’

  He smiled, to put me at ease. ‘Toby, man, the black skin’s not the thing. If you know anybody who wants to know what it’s like to be a black man, this is it. No matter how much you manage to do for yourself, it’s not enough. If you’ve got a decent job with decent money it can’t do you much good, because it’s got to spread so far. You’re always a rich man compared with your sister or your brother, or your wife’s cousins. You can’t ever get out of debt while there’s one member of the family who has to pay a fine or get sick and go to hospital. And so it goes on. If I get an increase, what’ll it help me? Someone’ll have to have it to pay tax or get a set of false teeth.’

  ‘Suppose you don’t?’

  He shook his head at me, knowing better. ‘You can’t. You always know yourself what it’s like not to be able to finish school.’

  ‘Steven once said it wasn’t worth the effort to live as you and Ella do, to try and keep up some sort of standard against the odds.’

  ‘It’s always worth it, for me,’ said Sam, grinding the heel of his shoe into the ash. A group of children wandered up on to the ash heap; they seemed to belong there, as seals belong on rocks – the dusty skin, the bare backsides, the yellowed eyes, the animal shrillness of their wanderers’ voices. As we passed them, they called out at us. ‘They only know how to curse,’ Sam said, and turning on me in sorrow, shame, and anger, burst out, ‘The way that he died! A man like him! Running away in a car with a bunch of gangsters! D’you think if he’d been a white man that’s all there would have been for him?’

  I began to spend a lot of time with Sam and his quiet wife. At first I felt awkward about going to their house so much more often than I used to when Steven was alive; but they accepted me in their shy, unremarking way as if this was inevitable for all of us. The life they led was very different from Steven’s; except for occasional jazz sessions, to which Sam did not take Ella, and to which she did not expect to go, they spent most of their time working; especially Ella – even when Sam played the piano or listened to gramophone records in the evening, she would sit in a corner, bent pain-stakingly over her books. She wanted to read for a Social Science degree, and was preparing herself, by following correspondence courses, for the time when she might be able to give up her teaching job and go to a university. She was pregnant again, but neither she nor Sam seemed to think that the care of a second child would push her hope of continuing her studies still further into the uncertain future.

  At their house, I met a different sort of people from those I had become familiar with through Steven. An old Congress leader from another part of the country came to sit and listen while young doctors and lawyers criticized what Congress was doing; an elderly professor – educated in America in the days when such freedoms were at least possible for those who could afford them – spoke with the slightly soured, weary air of one who has heard everything, experienced every emotion of the speakers, many times before. These ageing men, sitting heavily on upright chairs, their legs planted apart, looked almost, already, the statues they might become one day, when the memory of what they had been was restored after the thrusting aside by the younger and more aggressive which was inevitable for them now. The old men kept the habitual gravity that the unsophisticated associate with wisdom. The young men had the swift, deliberately unpompous manner that belongs to a more worldly conception of the knowledgeable man. They seemed to have an exaggerated respect for each other; I often thought how this would change if they found themselves in a parliament and took to the conventions of white party politics. But perhaps this excessive show of respect was already merely a sign of jealousy between them. All of them, the old and the young, were passionate men – the energy of passion was coiled steely and resilient, ready, in them.

  I had moved from my old flat, and in the new one, undiscovered as yet by my neighbours or the caretaker, Peter and one or two others who had been the matrix of Steven’s daily life, came to see me. Even Lucky Chaputra came once or twice, awkward, worried and eager to absolve Steven from his shadow. ‘He wasn’t ever in on any of my deals, he just enjoyed knowing me and my crowd.’ Peter sat and drank a couple of brandies with me and didn’t talk much; we’d play some records and he would criticize the players, suddenly confident on his own ground. Wherever Steven’s friends gathered, in shebeens or at parties, his health was drunk, as if his death were another, and the craziest of his exploits. He hadn’t been cautious enough to survive; they admired him for it. Only by the exercise of constant caution, in word, deed, and most important, mind, could an African expect to survive. But he hadn’t cared to live that way; he was their sort of hero. Something in their faces when they drank to him made me shudder inwardly; I had only loved him as a man.

  I had not been to the Alexanders’ for weeks. I couldn’t go there any more, that was all. Steven’s death had provided a check, a pause, when the strain of the kind of life I had been living for months broke in upon me. While I had kept going, simply carried along, I had not consciously been aware of the enormous strain of such a way of life, where one set of loyalties and interests made claims in direct conflict with another set, equally strong; where not only did I have to keep my friends physically apart, but could not even speak to one group about the others. I went to Sam’s house because there I could sit in silence, the silence of my confusion, and they would not question me. Sam, looking up from the notes he was making on a sheet of music manuscript, withdrawn behind his big spectacles, then suddenly seeing me and giving me that incongruous black sambo smile of his; Ella, earnest and big-bellied at her Mumford and John Stuart Mill. Was I with them, or were they a refuge? Could I give them up? Surrender them and accept the whisky and the jokes round the swimming pool? Why was it not as simple as giving up The High House?

  Within, I started up in panic. Suppose theirs – Sam’s and Ella’s faces – were to be the casual face of destiny that I had known would claim me some day, the innocent unsuspecting involvement to which I would find I had committed myself, nailed the tail on the donkey with my eyes shut, and from which my life would never get free again? Like a neurotic struggling against a cure, I hugged to myself the aimless freedom that had hung about my neck so long. Suppose, when I went back to England, I should find that, for me, reality was left behind i
n Johannesburg?

  Faunce’s letter lay in a drawer in my desk. I had not answered it. He had not mentioned not having received a reply; perhaps already he had discarded ’playing with the idea’ of my staying on in Africa. One or two years, longer? If I went on living here, how should I live?

  Across the heads intimately drawn together in the Stratford Bar, Cecil sat with the chair beside her piled with parcels. As I came in, and hesitated a moment to find her in the smoky, vaguely underground atmosphere that always reminded me of London pubs, I saw her regard the parcels familiarly, as if, sitting there in a chair, was a friend of whom she knew what to expect. Then she saw me and hastily stuffed away, as it were, this feminine reverie, and put up her hand in her usual imperious style of greeting. She was as attractive as ever, not really beautiful, as I had once thought her, but irresistible in her defects, which she, in her vanity, crossly despaired of.

  ‘I don’t know why we always have to come to this place,’ she said gaily.

  I must have looked surprised, or even hurt, which was what she wanted; she knew I could not suppose her to be ignorant of why two people go back to the place where they first began to be interested in each other.

  ‘Shall we go somewhere else?’

  ‘No. But there are other places, I mean. Look at the table, so sticky you can’t touch it. The man must wipe it off.’

  I had not made love to her again, but we had had dinner together and gone to the theatre; our affair was running out, or had fallen into one of those lulls from which it might ignite again, mysteriously as a thread of dry grass under a piece of sunlit bottle. With all our old reservations of distrust, each pretended it was assumed that we knew why we had not seen much of each other lately, and that the reasons were satisfactory.

  ‘You never notice much where you are, though, do you?’ she said indulgently.

  After a few sips of her drink, she took off her coat, grumbling about the stuffiness of the place, and sat back in a loose, bloused dress that hung beautifully on her thin body, and just caught, with a change in the sculpture of its folds, on those small, loose breasts of hers. It was green, and made her look very blonde; her hair was kept a silvery colour, now.

  ‘That’s lovely.’

  ‘It ought to be,’ she said, impressed by what she had paid for the dress.

  ‘What’s all this loot? You seem to have been buying up the town.’

  ‘Oh – things. I’m getting older and I need expensive clothes now.’

  ‘Why don’t you come to London and show them what a model ought to look like, and get your picture in Vogue and what-not?’ I tried hard to believe in it; we would have a mews flat together, a place of gin-bottles and dressing-gowns, smelling of love.

  She smiled, the challenging smile with the corners of her mouth down. ‘I’d be petrified. You’d be the only person I’d know. I can’t even speak French; you’ve always made me feel so ignorant. Sometimes I’ve wanted to hit you when you’ve gone on talking about something I didn’t have the faintest idea about.’

  I said, astonished, ‘What, for heaven’s sake?’

  She was vague with remembered frustration: ‘Oh, I don’t know, some Greek who was cut up in bits or was turned into a bull or something.’

  We had another drink and our talk warmed and became malleable, it was like it was at the beginning, when all our mannerisms of speech were new to each other, and seemed delightful and amusing.

  Suddenly she leaned back and gave a deep sigh, content, musing, as if we had been recalling some conversation of the past. She said abruptly, ‘Darling, I’m going to marry Guy Patterson.’

  The voice of a woman who had sat down with the back of her chair touching mine, cut across us with the insistent interruption of a radio turned up ‘. . . that sort of thing never enters my mind as a rule. But all day last Saturday, I was writing fives for sevens and sevens for fives. . . .’

  I said, ‘So that’s why he had your stocking.’ And she laughed: ‘Oh no! I mean it wasn’t then, the whole thing blew up in about a week. . . .’ She was watching me, pleading for something.

  And the woman’s voice gobbled on,’ I said to my boss all morning, I said, I can’t do a thing right, fives for sevens and sevens for fives, all the time, it must mean something. . . .’

  ‘I thought he was married already.’

  ‘He’s divorced. We’re all divorced. I believe you’re cross.’

  I said sourly, ‘Of course I’m cross. I don’t suppose any man likes any woman he’s been at all in love with to get married.’

  ‘. . . Steady Joe was number five and Ascona was seven, honest to God, he took the double. . . .’

  She was looking at me fondly, with the reluctance with which I have noticed women are seized the moment they have given something up. It was as if we had the licence now to discuss ourselves, to give ourselves away without the fear of giving away some obscure advantage. We had always lacked confidence in each other, and now it didn’t matter any more. ‘You’re like a clam. I told you, I feel you watching me and keeping yourself to yourself.’ She studied me, looking for the answer. ‘Like an enemy,’ she pleaded. And then, ‘You never wanted to marry me, did you?’

  ‘Fives for sevens and sevens for fives, I mean, could you beat it?’

  ‘But when I marry it’ll be someone like you, that I know.’ And how do you suppose you’ll reconcile that with a preference for the company of people like Sam and Ella, I sneered at myself? I put the thought away with all the other irreconcilables in myself; for me, the exoticism of women still lay in beauty and self-absorbed femininity, I would choose an houri rather than a companion. No doubt what I had seen in the nasty woodshed of childhood was a serious-minded intellectual woman.

  ‘You do think Patterson’s charming, don’t you, you do like him?’ She used his surname as if to ensure that she could convince herself that she would get an objective answer; nothing less, in the need for reassurance that beset her, would do.

  I said what was expected of me, and she assented, in confirmation, with little alert movements of her head; and when I had done, looked at me, as if perhaps I might say just one thing more, the thing that would make it certain once and for all that she was plumping down on the right side of the balance.

  So she had chosen Patterson; in her greed and fear of life, surely and fatefully, her hand had closed on him. Patterson, the hero preserved in whisky. She would have to face no challenge of any kind with him; she got him ready-made, with the triumph of a woman at a bargain sale, his purpose already proven and his windmill tilted at before she had ever known him. Again I remembered the Sunday afternoon in the empty house, when I had suddenly become aware of what she needed, what one might be able to do for her if one loved her. And now, as then, I could not give her her salvation; in the end, I had not that final word.

  We began to talk of Patterson and his position in Hamish’s group, and of where he and Cecil would live. ‘Guy insists that we get a white woman to look after Keith, then I can be quite free.’ I could see that this was the ultimate abdication of her relationship with the little boy, she would let him go, slip the bond, loosed now – even in her conscience – because he was delegated to a white woman, as she could never entirely be while he was delegated to a black one. Now there was no need at all for her to be his mother; her eyes, that had drawn their usual immediate brilliance from a few drinks, shone on some imagined future of money, travel, enjoyment, headstrong in the determined turning away of reality. I pitied her, but again, not enough to oppose her with the loss she chose for herself. I said, ‘How does he get on with Keith?’ And she said, ‘Oh he adores him’ and went on to tell me that Patterson had to go to Canada on business in three months’ time, and that they would probably make that the wedding trip. Hamish had been going to go himself, but since he hadn’t been too well lately – but, of course I didn’t know about Hamish’s high blood-pressure, I hadn’t been there for so long. ‘Marion thought it was because of me that you haven’t been
coming to The High House,’ she said, with a smile. ‘Because of Guy.’

  ‘Hamish and Marion are really wonderful people,’ she added, as if in defence of some amorphous threat that had never been uttered, but was sensed, like thunder in the air. But later she returned to me, free of me, no longer afraid of what she would find out about me. ‘Did you really have natives coming to see you in your flat?’ she asked shyly. ‘Guy says that that’s why you had to leave the first flat.’

  ‘Now, where did he get that from, I wonder?’

  ‘There’s a man called Derek Jackson. Well, he’s a friend of Guy and he was living with some woman who had a flat in the same building. She told him about it.’ She was frankly curious: ‘You mean you can actually sit down to dinner with them and it doesn’t seem any different to you?’

  ‘But they’re my friends. The man I’ve known best since I’ve been here was an African. He was killed in an accident in July.’

  She looked at me, fascinated. ‘And they seem like other people to you? You were really fond of this chap?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, embarrassed with myself because I was explaining my affection for Steven as if I were trying to make comprehensible a liking for the company of snakes, or chimpanzees, ‘I got on particularly well with him.’

  She looked down at her hands, with the long, red, filbert nails. ‘You know, I can’t imagine it – I mean, a black man next to me at table, talking to me like anyone else. The idea of touching their hands -’ Her hand came out in the imaginary experiment and hesitated, waved back.

  I said, ‘It’s no good talking about it. Let’s forget it.’

  We smiled at each other, holding the ground of the smile, two people who embrace without words on the strip between their two camps. Like an enemy, she had said of me. Like an enemy, I had lounged and taken my ease at The High House. Like an enemy: the word took away my freedom, tore up the safe conduct of the open mind.