A World of Strangers (7 page)

‘Hamish, hearing about it couldn't give you the least idea. . . . The whole boat, I mean. It stank like a – a,' his mouth pursed itself but stopped in time.

‘- Charnel-house,' said Kit Baxter, sweetly.

Everyone laughed. ‘Tactful Kit,' said Baxter.

John leant over and kissed Kit on her round, smooth brow. ‘And how good
she
smells -' There was more laughter. ‘But honestly, I don't mind telling you, though you know how dignified and all that my behaviour usually is -'

‘Did you dress for dinner every night, John?' someone called.

‘‘- I wanted to jump off that boat and swim ashore. Honest to God, nothing would have kept me on that boat but crocodiles still in the water!'

Lifting her glass, against which the rows of bracelets on her wrist slid tinkling, in a call for attention, one of the women said, ‘I remember once going out to the whaling station at Durban. – Why, of course,
you
were there too, Peggy; and Ivan – That was a smell to beat all smells; a real eighty-per-cent proof distillation of disgusting fishiness, oiliness, oh, I don't know what.'

‘My dear Eve,' said the man John, ‘I'm sorry, but we just can't have evasions in this, this -'

‘Context,' said Kit.

‘This context –'

Kit seemed sure she could say it better for him: ‘You must call a stink a stink.'

In the shrieks of laughter that followed, the hostess, Marion Alexander, arrived, and with a general greeting to her guests, came straight over to where I had risen from my chair.

‘It's Toby!' and she kissed me. ‘I'm so glad you're here. I hope they've been looking after you. I had a match this morning, so you must forgive my rudeness. There, I've put my lipstick on you. No, a little lower. That's it.' She took my arm, and then repeated her apologies, in a clear, singing voice, for the benefit of everyone: ‘Please forgive me – I didn't think I'd be the last luncheon guest, I
did
believe I'd be home by half past twelve.' I thought she looked extraordinary: she wore a white linen dress and a panama hat with a band round it. For the first few moments I did not realize that this was the outfit that women wear when they play bowls, and wondered why she should choose to look like a horribly ageing schoolgirl. I did not remember her, though on the telephone she had said that she remembered seeing me just before the war, when I was already a schoolboy, but I could see that she must once have been a pretty woman, and was much older than my mother. Or maybe it was just that she had grown older badly, and self-consciously. Underneath that hat, her face was painted whiter and pinker than it could ever have been when she was young; yet no doubt that was how she imagined she had looked, and so was what she chose to fake. She went to change, and Kit
Baxter, with the pleading air of asking for a treat, jumped up and followed her, saying, ‘I want to come and talk to you, Marion!'

While they were gone, the last three guests arrived, and with them the Alexanders' son, Douglas. He had come from golf; and the two new male guests were in riding clothes. Along with the old bulls, I was the only male guest not fresh from conquest of field or ball. The two latest were youthfully apoplectic, blond, with small, flat, lobeless ears, short noses, and bloodshot blue eyes. Every feature of their faces looked interchangeable; they burst in crying, ‘Hullo! Hullo! Hullo there, you people,' like a comedy duo. They were, in fact, a duo: identical twins; looking at them was disturbing, like looking at someone after you've had a blow in the eye, and you keep seeing the outline of head, gestures, and talking mouth, duplicated. But they had with them a stunning American girl, thin as a Borzoi, in what looked to me like black tights (anyway, they were women's trousers that didn't hang down at the seat) and a thing like a man's striped shirt that enveloped her but got caught on the two little shaking peaks of small breasts as she moved. She was very fair, without a hint of yellowness, and her hair was drawn back and held by a strand of the hair itself, twisted round it. Her face was very young and made up to look pale and downy, and her expression was as old as the hills. As she was introduced to the company, she flickered a kind of lizard-look over everyone, then put her long cigarette holder back in her mouth, like a dour man with a pipe. I got the impression that Tim and Tom (or whatever their names were) hardly knew her; that women caught on to their ruddy hide like burrs on wool. They were off again almost as soon as they came, waving away Archie Baxter: ‘No, no, old boy, before we have any of your stuff, we must have a swim. Have we time for a swim before lunch?' ‘Course we've got time. Always time in Hamish's house, isn't there?'

They went off over the grass to the pool, and in a few minutes we could see them, hugging their arms round themselves on the edge, waving, then exploding the surface of the water, shouting at each other in their identical voices, as if
someone were holding a conversation with himself out loud.

I felt inkstained and rather stale inside my hairy old suit, and, with my third drink disappearing, contented in this. Almost everyone had had a number of drinks by now (Hamish did not stir from his chair, and Archie Baxter managed the little bar, with the help of two Africans in white suits and gloves who passed endlessly into the house and out again, bearing soda and ice and cigarettes, and carrying away dirty glasses and ashtrays) and this, added to the anticipation of lunch, raised the pitch of the company. Mrs Alexander and Kit Baxter had returned. Mrs Alexander went about her guests with the warmth of a hostess who enjoys people and knows how to bring them together in a paper-lantern glow. She flattered, she exaggerated, you could see that, but the effect was to make one more agreeable; with the result that the whole conglomerate – guests, alcohol, gossip, and, later, enjoyable food –
was
agreeable. This is quite a different sort of success from that of the hostess who brings people of ideas together. This, in fact, was making something out of nothing very much.

The twins, freshly doused and towelled, came up and clamoured round the bar, with their American and Kit Baxter and the two sisters Cecil and Margaret. They spoke actor's English, with exaggerated stresses. They showed off, I felt, rather than flirted, with the women. Marion Alexander kept taking me by the arm and presenting me to people: ‘Have you talked to this boy? I do wish you would, before I get a chance to, so that you can tell me if he's altogether too bright for me. He's Althea Thomas's boy – Aden Parrot, the publishers, such a brainy family.'

‘This is a very special day for me. This boy's the son of my friend Althea Thomas, and Graham Hood. – I was devoted to them.' She made it sound as if my mother and father were a cause; and perhaps, to her, they were: the embodiment of the causes of the Thirties, to which she remembered herself responding for a time, just as she had taken to cloche hats a year or two earlier. Anyway, the name of my father cheerfully meant nothing to these people, just
as, I suppose, the names of his more illustrious contemporaries – a Spender or a Toller – would have meant nothing. But I could see that Marion Alexander's insistence on my parentage suggested to some of the sharper women that mine must be a family that featured in the
Tatler.
Some of those who were English accepted me with the airy freemasonry of those who know the privileges and disadvantages, for whatever they are worth, of their own order. Those who were not English all seemed to take travel in Britain and Europe as much for granted as a journey in a suburban train, and talked to me of most Continental countries as if they assumed my familiarity with these places was as easy as their own. One flew from here to there; hired a car; met one's daughter in Switzerland; one's husband flew in from Rome; sister met one in Vienna; fjords and alps, casinos and cruises, palazzos and espadrilles. . . .

One of the black men in a white suit came out and beat a gong through all this.

As the people rose to trail in to lunch, conversations took a final turn: the last word was said on English furniture, on someone's wedding the week before, on the values in real estate in Johannesburg, on the merits of a new golf course being laid out by someone named Jock, and the cannon bones of a horse named Tom Piper.

On the way to the dining-room, I had a ridiculous encounter with the American girl, who happened to be the last of the women shepherded before me. She turned her head and said in a low, dead, American voice, ‘I hear you're a gread wrider?' ‘No, no, just a publisher,' I said, embarrassed, because I wasn't really even that, yet. At which she burst out laughing – a bold, full laugh, surprising in contrast to her speaking voice – and said: ‘I guess I've got the wrong purson.' But she offered no explanation, and the conversation promptly died. It was only later, when I was studying her where she sat, across the table from me, beside Douglas Alexander and one of the twins, that I suddenly realized that what she had said was not ‘writer' but ‘rider'. I had an agitated impulse to lean across the glasses and silver and the Italian bread basket and explain; but it was
obviously no good. Explain that I was neither writer nor rider? I was the wrong person, anyway. She'd accepted the fact, that was that. Bored and indifferent to their company, she belonged and could belong only to the twins, part of their cutting a dash. Yet she ate and drank steadily without the lipstick coming off her beautiful mouth; which seemed to me wonderful: the casual mark of a special kind of girl, not quite real, whom I would never get; perhaps would never try or really want to get.

Douglas Alexander, as the children of self-assured, temperamentally vigorous parents often are, was a rather blank youngster, with the look of a perpetual listener on his face; as if, since childhood, he had been taking in conversations to which he was not expected to make a contribution, and long habit had vitiated his desire to do so, although he was not longer disqualified by being under age. He certainly did not behave like any sort of popular concept of a gold-mining millionaire's son that I could think of; all the time that he was keeping up an apparently lame and stilted conversation (about New York, I gathered) with the American beauty, his eyes kept gliding out of their polite focus on her and looking sharply to the other side, as if there were something there attracting his urgent attention. On the girl's left, the one twin jounced and twisted, waving his glass about, bumping her frequently with shoulder or elbow, as he chattered to his neighbour and audience. Every now and then he would notice her, and with the impersonal, momentary, instinctive recall to sex with which a dog will briefly lick, once or twice, another dog, would pass his hand down her arm or pat her hair.

I was at Hamish Alexander's end of the table, with Kit Baxter on my left and Cecil Rowe on my right. Mrs Baxter had a voice of great conscious charm, that she used, with purpose and efficiency, as if it were some piece of high fidelity equipment rather than the final, faulty evolution of those grunts and cries with which man first tried to give expression to the awful teeming of his brain. She was carrying on an exchange of banter and flattery with old Hamish, who was too far away for conversation to be comfortable.
While her head was turned from me, the long fingers of her smooth hand with its uniform of red nails and rings felt blindly up and down the mother-of-pearl handle of a small knife, quite near me, carrying on some secret life of its own. Hamish Alexander's red face, with the simple, short, plump-featured, retroussé profile of a child and the teary grin of his blue eyes, was cocked toward her along the table; but someone suddenly passed a question to him about uranium deposits, and immediately his face not only came to itself, but took on the close, guarded reasonableness, the poker-face frankness, of a man asked about something important and not to be disclosed. He gave himself the second or two of a peculiarly Scotch clearing of his throat, and then he began a long, blunt, bland, confidential red herring, with the words: ‘Now it's not as simple as all that . . . As far back as nineteen forty-one -'

Kit Baxter turned to me with perfectly convincing and certainly assumed delight. ‘I've been waiting to talk to you!' she said. I grinned at her disbelievingly.' I hope you haven't written a book,' I said, ‘because I'm afraid I haven't much influence with Aden Parrot, in spite of what Mrs Alexander may have told you.'

‘Heavens, no, Kit couldn't write anything. You're quite safe there. It's just that Marion tells me you're likely to be in this country quite a while, and she and I thought you might like to come down to the farm some time – see something of the country. Not that it's beautiful – though it is, to me, in a way – but it's characteristic.'

‘What farm?'

‘Hamish's. The Alexander stud farm, in the Karoo.'

‘Oh, I see. I didn't know about it. What does he breed?'

‘Horses. Hamish started it more for fun than anything else. But now it's turning into a big thing. Archie and I have been there since the beginning of the year.'

‘You and your husband live there?'

‘Hamish asked us to go down and take over, more or less permanently.' She phrased it in order to make it clear that her husband's appointment as manager of the Alexanders'
stud farm was a matter of friendship and patronage, rather than an ordinary job.

‘And how do you like that?' I said.

She laughed, and the skin crinkled prettily round her painted eyes. ‘You don't think I'm the type for the farmer's wife! But you're wrong you know, quite wrong. I'm not a city person at all, really, I'm an absolute bumpkin in towns. I've always led a country life at home, and I
hate
London – Archie and I lived there for two years after the war and I couldn't wait to get out of it. Our time in Johannesburg has really only been bearable because of Hamish and Marion – they're such fantastic darlings, and we've been able to come out and ride whenever we like, and they've whisked us off down to the farm whenever we could get away' – a dish held in a white-gloved hand that showed an inch of matt-black skin between cuff and sleeve, came between us -' (Won't you have some more mousse? Marion's cook makes the best mousse you've ever tasted.) – It's absolutely in the bundu, of course, forty-three miles from Neksburg and that's not much to speak of, itself, I may say. I can't describe these Karoo villages as “villages”, unless the person I'm talking to has seen them. They're nothing at all like
our
idea of a village. Don't start thinking of cottage gardens, mossy churchyards, and the rest of it. . . . Just think of dust and stones, that's all, dust and stones, and a flybitten “hotel” with a couple of big shiny cars belonging to commercial travellers outside – also covered in dust.'