A World of Strangers (29 page)

We stood, pressed back against the shelter of the hall's entrance with the rest of the audience, chattering, a glitter of eyes catching the mirror-light of the downpour, shoulders tightened against the cold, the planes of many faces, Indian, African, Caucasian, pleasantly contrasting. I could not help thinking that we seemed less sheep-like than most crowds
just let out from an entertainment; I suppose it was the novelty, for although in Johannesburg I'd been in crowds composed of white men, and crowds composed of black, I'd never seen more than a roomful of both mingled. I asked Steven and the others to come to my flat for a drink on their way home. People kept making sudden dashes, driven before the wind, to their cars, and soon we found our opportunity and rushed out, too.

Our two cars reached the building where I lived at almost the same moment, and we clattered up the stairs and into my flat together in the mild relief and excitement of getting in out of the cold. Steven had no coat and his jacket had been pretty thoroughly wetted even in the short exposure to and from Elias's car, so he took it off and hung it over a magazine rack before the electric fire, to dry. He hadn't liked the opera at all. He and I argued while we poured the gin and brandy, and gave each person one of the hollow ice cubes – they were thin shapes of ice with water inside them – that, for some curious reason, probably old age, were the best my refrigerator could do.

‘What's the good of a thing like that, to Sam. He can do much better on his own; what does he want that chap Brunner for? I get so wild when I see him panting after these whites, holding out his hand, let's be pals, thanks for the chance to work with you – and all they want to do is pick his brains and pinch his music. It makes me sick, man, I tell you.' Steven dismissed the whole evening.

‘Right, it wasn't much good. But you can't say that Sam doesn't get anything out of it, he's had the chance to see the thing performed, and that's something. Without Brunner it wouldn't have happened.'

‘Brunner!' said Steven. He broke a match between his teeth.

‘Of course, he's a bit of a bloody fool; but what does that matter. Look here, Steve, Sam's got good ideas and some of his music's wonderful, but he doesn't know anything about the conventions of the stage, you know what I mean? He doesn't know how to combine his ideas into a whole, he doesn't even know how to get people on and off a stage. He
doesn't know what the limitations of a stage are. How could he? How many plays has he seen in his life?'

‘A few,' said Steven. ‘Quite a few.'

I knew that even to Steven, who had been to England, the definition of a formal stage presentation was loose; he might count revues and even a concert or two as being part of Sam's experience.

‘A very few. Twice since I've been in Johannesburg I've read that the cast of some theatrical company was going to give a performance for Africans in some location township, or in the University Hall. Has Sam ever been inside a theatre?'

Steven was mimicking: ‘The Africans were an absolutely
marvellous
audience. Quite the
best
audience we've ever had. D'you know that they actually picked up points that white audiences missed?' – This was the standard comment of white companies when interviewed by the Press after a performance before a black audience, even if they had presented Anouilh to a hall full of black schoolchildren.

‘Has Sam ever been inside a theatre?'

‘No, of course not, how could he. But he's listened to hundreds of records. He's got opera, he's got
Macbeth,
and
Romeo and Juliet
acted by the Old Vic, he's got American musicals, that play
Under Milk Wood
– oh, dozens. I don't think Mr Brunner can teach him anything.'

‘Don't be a damn fool. Anybody can teach him something. Anybody who's been able to see plays and hear operas.'

Steven looked patronizingly superior. ‘He's a fool', he insisted, ‘to let them pick his brains. And he even says thank you, Baas, for it.'

The others sat around politely, sipping their drinks almost surreptitiously, as if they were frightened to disturb us. Betty Ntolo giggled with embarrassment at the sight of Steven, talking as he did about white men in a white man's house; she was never at ease in the company of even one white person. But I think she wanted to show the little nurse, who was one of Steven's latest admirers – Steven is the only man I have ever known who
really
never had to pursue women, but
had them come after him – that she was a familiar, used to him and his ways. ‘I think that girl, the well-built one, the one who played the sister – she's rather good,' said Elias Shomang, settled back more comfortably in his chair now; he had been sitting, with the belly-burdened awkwardness of a heavy man, on the edge. And the talk became more general. ‘I know her,' said Peter. ‘She used to sing with an outfit I know, but she's gone all posh.'

‘She's certainly ample,' I said.

Steven couldn't seem to stop worrying at me that evening; he said, treating the women present – as he always did when it suited him – as if they were not there,' I can't understand it, Toby seems to find all our women too fat. What's this English taste for starved women?' We all laughed, but he went on, ‘I've never been able to interest him in a nice African girl yet.' Everyone laughed again, and I gave him some nonsense in answer; yet he was not looking at me, he had turned away to someone else, and I understood that he meant what he said, it was a cover for some reservation he had about me, some vague resentment at the fact that I had not been attracted by any African woman. He, I knew, did not suspect me of any trace of colour-prejudice; he attributed my lack of response to something far more wounding, because valid in the world outside colour – he believed that African women were simply not my physical concomitants. It was a slight to him; hypothetically, he had shown me some woman he had possessed and I had detracted from his possession by finding her unbeautiful.

Just then, there was a ring at the door, but it didn't surprise any of us very much, although the time was nearly midnight, because it was quite likely that some other friend who had been at the opera had decided to drop in. I got up and went to the door with my glass in my hand. The caretaker of the flats was standing there; she wore her fur coat, a long-haired animal with tawny stripes that made a chevron down her bosom, and her huge, regularly-painted face confronted me like a target in a shooting game. She was one of those people, quite common in Johannesburg, who don't seem to be Afrikaans-speaking, but don't really speak
English either. She whined like an Australian, she dropped aitches like a Cockney – it would take an expert in phonetics to convey what she made do with for communication.

She must have drawn breath as she heard the door open, for she said at once, from the top of her chest and the back of her distended nostrils, ‘Mr Hood, 'ev yoo brought natives into the building. I'v hed complaints yoo been bringing natives in the building, end jis now Mr Jarvis seen yoo coming in the front door with natives.'

I said, ‘Yes, Mrs Jarvis?' standing there with the glass in my hand as if I were about to propose a toast.

She came past me into the hall and closed the door; I guessed that she was not fully dressed beneath her fur coat, she held it tightly round her all the time. ‘I wanna tell yoo, Mr Hood, whatever yoo been used to, this is'n a location, yoo can't ‘ev natives. If yoo bringing natives, yoo'll 'ev to go.' Her breath was quite expelled. She looked past me as if she could not bring herself to look at me. She was a very clean, over-dressed, over-painted woman, and now, just as always when she passed you on the stairs, she smelled of cigarettes and toilet soap.

‘I can have whom I please in my own flat so long as I pay the rent.'

Through the open door into my room, she saw Peter and the nurse sitting on the divan and the jacket hanging before the radiator; Elias Shomang was hidden by the door, but Steven in shirtsleeves crossed with a bottle of soda-water, doing some imitation that made them all laugh.

Mrs Jarvis lost control of herself. Her hand left her coat and I saw an expanse of lace covering a vast flushed mound of flesh. ‘Yoo can't bring kaffirs in my building,' she screamed. ‘Sitting there like this is a bloody backyard location, I mean to say, the other tenants is got a right to 'ev yoo thrown out. Kaffir women coming here, behaving like scum, living with decent people. Wha'd'yoo think, sitting here with kaffirs. . . .'

Through the door, I saw that nobody in the room spoke, nobody looked at anybody else; the woman's voice took them like a seizure. It seemed to swell up and fill the flat,
and I shouted back at her, my throat bursting, ‘This is my flat, d'you hear, you've no right to walk in here.' But she went on and on: ‘Mr Hood! Mr Hood! Yoo got no right. I shoulda listened to what I been told. What would Mr McKay say, in his building, I got my job to think . . . place full of kaffirs. I know. I been told. Yoo coming home five o'clock in the morning in a kaffir taxi. Yoo unnerstend, Mr Hood.'

Steven said suddenly, standing in his shirtsleeves in the doorway between my room and the entrance, ‘You have no right, Toby, look in your lease and you'll see.' His voice was passionless and removed; I heard it like the voice of someone not present, a voice in one's brain. His brown, pale-palmed hands rested delicately on the door-frame, he stood lightly, and his eyes were glitteringly bright.

The woman turned and went out the front door.

I still had my glass in my hand; I had never put it down – it had happened as quickly and unmomentously as that. Shomang was murmuring regret, like a guest who has broken an ashtray. The nurse sat staring down at her lap; she looked as if a hand must descend on her shoulder any minute. We were all a little incoherent, shaken, cocky. Peter, that sleepy boy, who lived like a snake in the charmer's basket, only coming to life with music, said again and again, excitedly, ‘Bloody white bitches! Bloody white bitches!'

‘Is it true about the lease?' I said to Steven.

‘Of course. Haven't you got it?'

‘Somewhere. I've never read it.'

‘Read it and see. No natives unless they're in the capacity of servants.'

‘It certainly makes social life a little difficult,' said Shomang cordially, in his stilted African English. At that we all laughed. Betty Ntolo, hanging on Steven's shoulder, put her hand over her mouth as if to stifle the sound of us all. Steven shook her off, kindly, ‘A quick one and then we better get going.'

‘To hell with her,' I said, bringing over the brandy.

‘She's the kind to go for the police,' he said,' Wheeeeee.
Bang-bang. Open up. Flying Squad here, sir. We got a report you're selling drink to natives in your flat. . . .' He did an imitation that combined the absurdities of gangster films with the absurdities that he had noted in his own experience.

‘We should have gone to Ma Ramosa's.'

‘We can still go.'

‘Ach, one doesn't feel like it.' Elias Shomang was not a shebeen frequenter.

It was still raining hard, and I lent Steven my greatcoat; it was too short for him, and shabbier than anything he would have owned, but he seemed pleased to wear it. ‘It'll get spoiled in the rain,' he protested, but he did not take it off.

‘You know damn well it couldn't look any worse than it does already.'

‘Whatever you've left in the pockets is mine, eh, Toby.'

They all trooped out after him, and in the dark passage I couldn't see him, I could only hear him call, about the coat, ‘I'll bring it in to the office on Monday.'

‘Yes, yes. O.K. Anytime.'

When they had gone I felt tired and surlily pleased to be alone; all I wanted was to pour myself a brandy and get into bed and open the bundle of English papers I hadn't been able to look at since they had arrived the day before. I had a surfeit of the unfamiliar and unexpected; even the names of places that belonged to a known and predictable way of life would have been a respite. But I had, instead, to go looking through the suitcase on top of the bathroom cupboard where I kept a few clothes I didn't wear; for, the way plans one absently accedes to, thinking they will come to nothing anyway, suddenly materialize, the week-end in the bushveld with John Hamilton had caught up with me, and I was to be ready for him in the morning. He had told me what I must bring, but again, I hadn't listened very attentively, and so I had to throw into an old duffle-bag what my imagination suggested, and what the resources of the suitcase of apparently useless clothing could supply. It seemed to me to be idiotic to be going off on this jaunt, anyway; I was irritated, as I tried to find the things I supposed I should
need, that I had let myself be drawn into it. I hadn't even remembered, when Steven had called back to me that he'd return my coat on Monday, that I wouldn't be in the office on Monday. Not that that mattered; Steven was an African and would understand. Perhaps I should take on myself the blessed prerogative of Africans, and simply not turn up for the shoot; but Hamilton, blast him, wouldn't understand, and was too likeable – in a curious way, too innocent a person – for one to be able to be rude to him. So I put in a couple of pairs of woollen socks, and a heavy pullover I had last worn at Zermatt, and a pair of brand-new khaki shorts I had bought in London for the outdoor life I had thought I was going to lead in South Africa, and went to bed, too tired to read and in an ugly mood. I didn't sleep well, either, but kept waking myself like an uneasy animal that is on guard, even in its sleep.

At evening, the low horizon of bush ran together as the light left it, and seemed to sink over the edge of the world with the sun. And in the morning, it emerged again, a strangely even line of greyish trees, and, afar, was present all day. When we walked up to it, where it bordered the great mealie lands, it separated and thinned into growths of various characters; flat-topped, spreading trees, with mean and sparse foliage, waist- or shoulder-high bushes with short grass between them; low patches of briar; thickets of all three, trees, bush, and briar, through which not even the dog could crawl. And all these things were fanged with thorns. Everything that grew in this stunted forest had its particular weapon of thorn. The trees had long white spikes, clean and surgical-looking, like a doctor's instrument, giving off a powdery glitter in the sun. Some of the bushes had the same kind of thorn, but others had shorter, thicker ones, more like those of a rose-bush, and some had thorns like fish hooks from which clothing, flesh or fur could not easily be released. The aloes with their thick fleshy leaves were spiked with red thorns. But worst and cruellest were the black, shiny quills, so sharp and smooth that they slid into your skin as quickly as a hypodermic needle, that covered the trailing briars, ankle-high. As you tore through them you heard them clawing at your boots, and no matter how careful you tried to be, every now and then one would stab into your ankle or calf. If it did not break off in your flesh as you pulled free, it would tear a bloody groove through the skin, as if reluctant to let you go without a taste of your blood. If it broke off, it would fester in your flesh, just beyond the grasp of fingernails or tweezers, until the inflammation it had set up around itself softened and swelled the skin enough for you to press it out.