A World of Strangers (8 page)

‘And the farm – also dust and stones?'

‘Oh no,' she said; and I realized – not without comfort, for the delicious lunch and the wines had, as usual, awakened in me a great respect for life lived in the exquisite orderliness of wealth – that nothing in Hamish Alexander's empire would be dust and stones.

‘There's water on the farm, of course; all sorts of pumps and gadgets huffing and puffing to keep it irrigated. And there are huge trees round the house, cypress and pepper trees – it should be quite charming when we've got it fixed up more or less the way we want it. I hope that by the time
you
come there'll be a second bathroom built on, and the
painting will be done.' She said this with the complacent, determined air of a woman who is making a house over to conform as closely as possible to the setting for herself that she always carries in her mind. Uproot her again tomorrow and she will begin again at once to attempt to make the next shell of habitation conform to this master setting. In this primitive cause those waxy, inutile, decorated hands would work as tirelessly and instinctively as any animal's claws making ready the nest; and in the nest would be – she herself. It was a perversion of the nesting instinct that you see often in sophisticated women; the drive remains, crazily fixed, while the purpose for which it was rooted in human nature has been lost, truly forgotten.

‘I work a lot with the young horses,' she was saying. ‘Archie's time is taken up with the administrative side, mostly. But I play around, helping to break them in, making a fuss of them, generally acting Mama. They're fantastic darlings! Adorable! The dogs are quite unhappy sometimes, they're so jealous, you know, Cecil,' she said to the other girl.

‘Are they?' the girl said, raising her eyebrows while she ate.

‘Two funny old sealyhams,' Kit Baxter confessed to me, as if I were sure to be disgusted at the idea, ‘quite moth-eaten and lazy and not very bright, I know; and a Siamese whose eyes are much too light. But they adore me, I say it quite immodestly, they adore me. Kit's own regiment, that's what I call them, Kit's own.'

It was impossible to think of anything to say to this forlorn piece of whimsy. It was one of those thin places in conversation through which one suddenly sees something one isn't meant to see. Cecil Rowe saved me by catching my eye with the friendly opening of a smile struggling against the disadvantage of a mouthful of braised pigeon and rice. You would never have caught the exquisite American out in a smile like that; I warmed to it, all the same. When the girl could speak, she said,' I was so hungry I was quite drunk. I had to eat quickly to give myself some ballast.'

Kit Baxter and I laughed with her. ‘People here certainly
do eat a substantial lunch,' I said, ‘but you've all had such an energetic morning, I suppose you must.'

‘Restaurateurs wouldn't agree with you,' said Kit. ‘They complain that people in Johannesburg hardly eat at all, in the European sense. A meal is always simply a necessary prelude to be got over in good time for some other entertainment, not an evening's pleasure in itself.'

‘Do you find South Africans eat more than we do?' I said to Cecil Rowe.

‘How would I know? I'm not English,' she said.

I was surprised; she looked and dressed like any upper-middle-class English girl, and what was more, she did not have the flat, unmistakable South African speech that I had heard all about me in the town, and that I had noticed at once in the Alexanders' son, Douglas, and the crocodile-hunting John, for example.

‘Then you're an Afrikaner,' I said, taking care to pronounce the word of identification correctly, like a naturalist coming upon a species of which he has heard, but never before encountered.

‘No, no,' she said, laughing and indignant, ‘I'm not. I'm not that.'

‘Of
course
you're English,' said Kit.' Your
parents
are English. You happen to be born here. Just as you might have been born in India, or Egypt – that's all.'

‘I've never met a publisher before,' said the girl. ‘Have you, Kit? I've somehow never
thought
about publishers – you know, I mean, you read a book and it's the author who counts, the publisher's simply a name on the jacket. It's difficult to think of the publisher as a person sitting beside you at lunch.'

‘Rightly so, too,' I said, ‘when the person is really only a sort of publisher's office boy.'

‘But aren't you a son or something of the people who own the publisher's?'

‘Nephew.'

‘Well, there you are.'

‘I'm being trained from the Ground Up. And I haven't got very far.'

‘How far?'

‘Trade relations. I've come to South Africa as the agent for our firm.'

She nodded her head, thinking a moment. ‘Didn't you bring out that book there's been such a fuss about?'

My mind skimmed over the last three or four Aden Parrot titles that had filled the correspondence columns of the papers with protagonist letters. ‘You mean
God's Creatures?
The anti-vivisection one?'

She looked faraway, shook her head, ‘M-mh. Nobody would know about that here.'

‘The one about institutional personality – children in orphanages?'

Her frown rejected this as outlandish.'
You
know, the book about the natives, the one that was banned -'

‘Oh, you mean
White Cain, Black Abel
– no, unfortunately, that wasn't ours.' The book, brought out about six months ago by Aden Parrot's closest rival, had sold over fifty thousand copies. It was written by a missionary who lived for six years in the Native Reserves, and was a passionate attack, from the standpoint of a deeply religious man, on the failure of Christianity to influence the policy of white people toward black in South Africa. ‘What did you think of it? Did you read it?'

She cut herself a slice of Bel Paese and said,' Oh I thought it was jolly good,' as if she were talking of a novel that had served to pass an evening. ‘I
must
have a cigarette. D'you mind?'

All up and down the table, people were smoking; the meal was at an end, and we all got up and went into the room I had caught a glimpse of from the front door. There was coffee and also old brandy and liqueurs, and the smell, like the smell of fine leather, of cigars; a warm fug of well-being filled the room, in which, in my slightly hazy state, I saw that every sort of efficient indulgence lay about, like in those rooms conjured up by Genii for people in fairy stories who always seem to wish for the same sort of thing, as if, given the chance, nobody really knows anything else to wish for: there were silver or limoges cigarette lighters on every
other table, as well as the little coloured match-books on which were printed ‘Hamish' or ‘Marion', silver dishes of thin mints and huge chocolates, jade boxes and lacquer boxes and silver boxes filled with cigarettes, silver gadgets to guillotine the cigars, even amethyst, rose, and green sugar crystals to sweeten the coffee.

Most of the guests were drawn to look at Marion Alexander's new ‘find' – a picture she had evidently just bought. ‘Come and tell me what you think of this,' she said, with the faintest emphasis, as if I didn't need any more, on the last word. It was a small and rather dingy Courbet, deeply set in a frame the colour and texture of dried mud.' Interesting,' I murmured politely. ‘They're not easily come by, I imagine.' ‘Here!' she said. ‘Can you believe it? I found it here, in Johannesburg!' I attempted to look impressed, although I couldn't imagine why anyone should want to find such a thing anywhere. ‘How do you spell the name?' a woman asked me, quietly studying the picture. I spelled it. The woman nodded slowly. ‘I love it, Marion, I think it's the most exciting thing you've bought yet!' said someone else.

‘Well I can tell you I couldn't believe it when my little man told me there was a Courbet to be bought in Johannesburg,' Mrs Alexander said for the third or fourth time. I managed to drift out of the group of admirers, back to a chair. ‘. . . of course, I still think
that's
a wonderful thing,' I heard, and saw one of the bulls straddling his heavy body on two thin legs before an enormous oil that must surely have been painted with the offices of the Union Castle shipping company in mind – it showed a great duck-bosomed mail-ship, tricked out with pennants, in what I recognized as Table Bay, with Cape Town and Table Mountain behind it. Now that I noticed, there was quite a variety of pictures in the room; most of them were in the Table Bay
genre
; the
genre
of the room, generally: not a discomforting brush-stroke in any of them. I decided that I didn't mind; I didn't mind any more than I did my mother's collection of charcoal drawings, woodcuts, lithographs, pastels, oils,
collages,
mosaics, and wire-and-cardboard compositions that she had
bought from unknown, unsung, and unhung prophets of art over the last thirty years.

Cecil Rowe wandered over and sat on a low chair beside me. Her legs, unsexed by gaberdine jodhpurs, rolled apart and she looked down at them, stirring her toes. ‘Well, how do you like it here so far?' she said, managing not to yawn. ‘Think our policemen wonderful? No? That's fine – nobody does.'

‘You know, the thing one never remembers is how much the same things are likely to be, rather than how different,' I said.

‘How's that?' With her face in repose, I noticed that, although she was too young to have lines, I could see the pull, beneath the skin, of the muscle that always exerted the same tension when she smiled; her mouth, too, though pretty enough in its fresh paint in contrast to the patchy look of the worn make-up on her cheeks and chin, had about it when she talked the practised mobility of having expressed much, and not all of it pleasant.

‘Well, when you arrive in a new country, you generally find yourself living in a hotel, and hotels tend to follow the same pattern everywhere, and then, at the beginning at least, you meet people to whom you've been given an introduction by friends at home – and so you meet the same sort of people everywhere, too.'

‘You mean this', she lifted her chin to indicate the room and the guests, ‘is the same as being in England.'

‘It could be. It doesn't necessarily follow that I should be a guest in this house, if it were in England' – I did not like to say that it would be most unlikely – ‘but the point is that this house could be
there.
You and your sister and Mrs Baxter – pretty girls who are nice to lunch with, who go to each other's parties, and live, eat, and sleep horses,' I was laughing, but she listened seriously, ‘you might be in any English county.'

‘I'm a butcher's daughter,' she said. ‘My sister Margaret and I. It's funny, all the big butchers here seem to keep horses. Two or three wealthy butchers in this town have fine stables. Of course I don't mean the sort who stand behind the counter in a striped apron! Wholesale butchers, who
control prices and whatnot. We start riding when we're small and go to the kind of school where riding's the thing, and then we grow up among riding people. As you said – they do what riding people do anywhere else, same old thing: hunt, and go to hunt balls and so on. Know other sporty people and belong to country clubs.' She pulled a face. ‘That's how we end up looking, speaking, dressing, even behaving like a class we don't belong to in a country we don't live in. – It's sort of the wrong way round, isn't it?'

‘Oh come, now. Why shouldn't people ride simply because they like to?'

‘But they don't,' she said, grumpily, in the tone of telling me something she knew quite well that I knew. ‘That's the trouble. They can't.'

‘Well, I used to, sometimes, when I found myself near horses.'

‘Oh you.
Exactly.
You could. You're not the kind who can't ride, and you're not the kind who has to.'

She said it with the air of paying me an enormous, terse, reluctant compliment.

‘I take back what I said about you being found in an English county,' I said. ‘You're not a bit like any of the young county ladies I've ever known.'

‘I don't think you know any, anyway.'

And then she was carried off by the inevitable conversational scene-shifter whose reputation for popularity seems to rest on the confidence with which he interrupts everyone.

I found somewhere to live; a flat, ugly but cheap, in the steep suburb of boarding-houses and flat buildings that was more an extension of the city than a suburb. At the corner, trams lurched down or struggled up, screeching. The street was one of those newly old streets that I saw all over Johannesburg – a place without a memory; twenty-year-old houses
seemed to be considered not worth repair, and blocks of flats ten years old had sunk into their own shoddiness in a way that everyone seemed satisfied was commensurate with their age. The building itself smelled of frying and the stairs were of uneven depth, so that you kept putting your foot down and missing the step that wasn't where you expected it to be; this much remained of my impressions after I'd been to look over the place. There was a fair-sized room with a small balcony that had been glassed-in to make it a room-and-a-half, and a pitch-dark bathroom in which, coming to it out of the sun of the street, I could make out nothing; but I supposed what the estate agents called the ‘usual offices' would prove to be there.

I found that flat through, of all people, John Hamilton, the crocodile hunter, who was going into town after that Sunday lunch at the Alexanders' and gave me a lift back to the hotel. He drove as if his car were a missile it was his pleasure to guide through the streets, and he talked all the time. When he was held up by the traffic lights, he looked about him with restless interest, commenting on whatever caught his eye – a new car: ‘That's a lovely job for you! The Stud, see it? I wonder how good the lock is in this model. . .' – an African in a beige fedora, and a suit of exaggerated cut, carrying a rolled umbrella and escorting an elaborately dressed black woman with the haunches of a brewer's dray-horse: ‘Look at that pair! God these natives are dead keen on clothes! Dressed to kill!' Then, as he let the clutch out, and the car sprang ahead, he released again the main stream of his talk. He was a great enthusiast about his country, and all that it offered in the way of physical challenge; there was hardly a mountain he hadn't climbed, a piece of coast or trout stream he hadn't fished, an animal he hadn't stalked. He told me about abalone diving near Cape Town, angling for giant barracuda off the East African coast, riding a pony through the passes of Basutoland, and outwitting wily guinea-fowl in the Bushveld. Also about the things he had only looked at: the flowers in Namaqualand in the spring, the wild beasts in the game reserves, the great rivers and deserts from the Cape to the Congo. He regarded Africa as he
might a woman who gave him great pleasure; an attitude unexpected and unaffected.