Life Times (35 page)

He was saying, ‘I've been so indebted to you, Frances, really you've been great.'

‘—not phonies, no, that's not what I mean, on the contrary, they're very real, you understand?'

‘Oh, your big good-looking friend, he's been marvellous. Saturday night we were out on the town, you know.' He was proud of the adventure but didn't want to use the word ‘
shebeen
' over the telephone.

She said, ‘You must understand. Because the corruption's real. Even they've become what they are because things are the way they are. Being phony is being corrupted by the situation . . . and that's real enough. We're made out of
that
.'

He thought maybe he was finding it difficult to follow her over the telephone, and seized upon the word: ‘Yes, the “situation” – he was able to slip me into what I gather is one of the livelier places.'

Frances Taver said, ‘I don't want you to be taken in—'

The urgency of her voice stopped his mouth, was communicated to him even if what she said was not.

‘—by anyone,' the woman was saying.

He understood, indeed, that something complicated was wrong, but he knew, too, that he wouldn't be there long enough to find out, that perhaps you needed to live and die there, to find out. All she heard over the telephone was the voice assuring her, ‘Everyone's been marvellous . . . really marvellous. I just hope I can get back here some day – that is, if they ever let me in again . . .'

E
very morning he was sent to the baker and the French children slid out of dark walls like the village cats and walked in his footsteps. He couldn't understand what they said to each other, but he thought he understood their laughter: he was a stranger. He looked forward to the half-fearful, disdainful feeling their presence at his back gave him, and as he left the house expected at each alley, hole and doorway the start of dread with which he would see them. They didn't follow him into the baker's shop. Perhaps the baker wouldn't have them – they looked poor, and the boy knew, from the piccanins at home, that poor kids steal. He had never been into a bakery at home in South Africa; the baker-boy, a black man who rode a tricycle with a rattling bin on the front, came through the yard holding the loaves out of the way of the barking dogs, and put two white and one brown on the kitchen table. It was the same with fruit and vegetables; at home the old Indian, Vallabhbhai, stopped his greengrocer's lorry at the back gate, and his piccanin carried into the kitchen whatever you bought.

But here, the family said, part of the fun was doing your own shopping in the little shops that were hidden away by the switchback of narrow streets. They made him repeat over and over again the words for asking for bread, in French, but once in the baker's shop he never said them, only pointed at the loaf he wanted and held out his hand with money in it. He felt that he was someone else, a dumb man perhaps. After a few days, if he were given change he would point again, this time at a bun with a glazing of jam. He had established himself as a customer. The woman who served chattered at him, smiled with her head on one side while she picked the money out of his palm; but he gave no sign of response.

There was another child who sometimes turned up with the usual group. He would hail them loudly, from across a street, in their own language, and stalk along with them for a bit, talking away, but he looked different. The boy thought it was just because this one was richer. Although he wore the usual canvas shoes and cotton shorts, he was hung about with all sorts of equipment – a camera and two other leather cases. He began to appear in the bakery each morning. He stood right near, as if the dumb person were also invisible, and peering up experiencedly under a thick, shiny fringe of brown hair, looked along the cakes on top of the counter while apparently discussing them in a joking, familiar way with the woman. He also appeared unexpectedly in other places, without the group. Once he was leaning against the damp archway to the tunnel that smelled like a school lavatory – it was the quick way from the upper level of streets to the lower. Another time he came out of the door of the streaky-pink-painted house with the Ali Baba pots, as if he must have been watching at the window. Then he was balancing along the top of the wall that overlooked the pitch where in the afternoons the baker and other men played a bowling game with a heavy ball. Suddenly, he was outside the gate of the villa that the family were living in; he squatted on the doorstep of the house opposite, doing something to the inside of his camera. He spoke: ‘You English?'

‘Yes – not really – no. I mean, I speak English, but I come from South Africa.'

‘Africa? You come from
Africa
? That's a heck of a way!'

‘Fifteen hours or so. We came in a jet. We actually took a little longer because, you see, something went wrong with the one engine and we had to wait three hours in the middle of the night in Kano. Boy, was it hot, and there was a live camel wandering around.' The anecdote cut itself off abruptly; the family often said long-winded stories were a bore.

‘I've had some pretty interesting experiences myself. My parents are travelling round the world and I'm going with them. Most of the time. I'll go back home to school for a while in the Fall. Africa. Fantastic. We may get out there sometime. D'you know anything about these darned Polaroids? It's stuck. I've got a couple of pictures of you I must show you. I take candid shots. All over the place. I've got another camera, a Minox, but I mostly use this one here because it develops the prints right in the box and you can give them to people right off. It's good for a laugh. I've got some pretty interesting pictures, too.'

‘Where was I – in the street?'

‘Oh I'm taking shots all the time. All over the place.'

‘What's the other case?'

‘Tape recorder. I'll get you on tape, too. I tape people at Zizi's Bar and in the
Place
, they don't know I'm doing it, I've got this minute little mike, you see. It's fantastic.'

‘And what's in here?'

The aerial was pulled out like a silver wand. ‘My transistor, of course, my beloved transistor. D'you know what I just heard? – “Help!” Are the Beatles popular down in Africa?'

‘We saw them in London – live. My brother and sister and me. She bought the record of “Help!” but we haven't got anything to play it on, here.'

‘Good God, some guys get all the breaks! You
saw
them. You notice how I've grown my hair? Say, look, I can bring down my portable player and your sister can hear her record.'

‘What time can you come?'

‘Any time you say. I'm easy. I've got to go for this darned French lesson now, and I
have
to be in at noon so that old Madame Blanche can give me my lunch before she quits, but I'll be around indefinitely after that.'

‘Straight after lunch. About two. I'll wait for you here. Could you bring the pictures, as well – of me?'

 

Clive came racing through the tiny courtyard and charged the flyscreen door, letting it bang behind him. ‘Hey! There's a boy who can speak English! He just talked to me! He's a real Amur-r-rican – just wait till you hear him. And you should see what he's got, a Polaroid camera – he's taken some pictures of me and I didn't even know him – and he's got a tiny little tape recorder, you can get people on it when they don't know – and the smallest transistor I've ever seen.'

His mother said, ‘So you've found a pal. Thank goodness.' She was cutting up green peppers for salad, and she offered him a slice on the point of her knife, but he didn't see it.

‘He's going round the world, but he goes back to America to school sometimes.'

‘Oh, where? Does he come from New York?'

‘I don't know, he said something about Fall, I think that's where the school is. The Fall, he said.'

‘That's not a place, silly – it's what they call autumn.'

The shower was in a kind of cupboard in the kitchen-dining room, and its sliding door was shaken in the frame, from inside. The impatient occupant got it to jerk open: she was his sister. ‘You've found what?' The enormous expectancy with which she had invested this holiday, for herself, opened her shining face under its plastic mob-cap.

‘We can hear the record, Jen, he's bringing his player. He's from America.'

‘How old?'

‘Same as me. About.'

She pulled off the cap and her straight hair fell down, covering her head to the shoulders and her face to her eyelashes. ‘Fine,' she said soberly.

His father sat reading
Nice-Matin
on one of the dining-table chairs, which was dressed, like a person, in a yellow skirt and a cover that fitted over its hard back. He had – unsuccessfully – put out a friendly foot to trip up the boy as he burst in, and now felt he ought to make another gesture of interest. As if to claim that he had been listening to every word, he said, ‘What's your friend's name?'

‘Oh, I don't know. He's American, he's the boy with the three leather cases—'

‘Yes, all right—'

‘You'll see him this afternoon. He's got a Beatle cut.' This last was addressed to the young girl, who turned, halfway up the stone stairs with a train of wet footprints behind her.

 

But of course Jenny, who was old enough to introduce people as adults do, at once asked the American boy who he was. She got a very full reply. ‘Well, I'm usually called Matt, but that's short for my second name, really – my real names are Nicholas Matthew Rootes Keller.'

‘Junior?' she teased, ‘The Third?'

‘No, why should I be? My father's name is Donald Rootes Keller. I'm named for my grandfather on my mother's side. She has one hell of a big family. Her brothers won five decorations between them, in the war. I mean, three in the war against the Germans, and two in the Korean War. My youngest uncle, that's Rod, he's got a hole in his back – it's where the ribs were – you can put your hand in. My hand, I mean' – he made a fist with a small, thin, tanned hand – ‘not an adult person's. How much more would you say my hand had t'grow, I mean – would you say half as much again, as much as that? – to be a full-size, man's hand—' He measured it against Clive's; the two ten-year-old fists matched eagerly.

‘Yours and Clive's put together – one full-size, king-size, man-size paw. Clip the coupon now. Enclose only one box-top or reasonable facsimile.'

But the elder brother's baiting went ignored or misunderstood by the two small boys. Clive might react with a faint grin of embarrassed pleasure and reflected glory at the reference to the magazine ad culture with which his friend was associated by his brother Mark. Matt went on talking in the innocence of one whose background is still as naturally accepted as once his mother's lap was.

He came to the villa often after that afternoon when the new Beatle record was heard for the first time on his player. The young people had nothing to do but wait while the parents slept after lunch (the
place
, where Jenny liked to stroll, in the evenings, inviting mute glances from boys who couldn't speak her language, was dull at that time of day) and they listened to the record again and again in the courtyard summerhouse that had been a pigsty before the peasant cottage became a villa. When the record palled, Matt taped their voices – ‘Say something African!' – and Mark made up a jumble of the one or two Zulu words he knew, with cheerleaders' cries, words of abuse and phrases from familiar road signs, in Afrikaans. ‘
Sakabona! Voetsak hambakahle hou links malingi mushle – Vrystaat!
'

The brothers and sister rocked their rickety chairs back ecstatically on two legs when the record was played, but Matt listened with eyes narrowed and tongue turned up to touch his teeth, like an ornithologist who is bringing back alive the song of rare birds. ‘Boy, thanks. Fantastic. That'll go into the documentary I'm going to make. Partly with my father's movie camera, I hope, and partly with my candid stills. I'm working on the script now. It's in the family, you see.' He had already explained that his father was writing a book (several books, one about each country they visited, in fact) and his mother was helping. ‘They keep to a strict schedule. They start work around noon and carry on until about one a.m. That's why I've got to be out of the house very early in the morning and I'm not supposed to come back in till they wake up for lunch. And that's why I've got to keep out of the house in the afternoons, too; they got to have peace
and
quiet. For sleep
and
for work.'

 

Jenny said, ‘Did you see his shorts – that Madras stuff you read about? The colours run when it's washed. I wish you could buy it here.'

‘That's a marvellous transistor, Dad.' Mark sat with his big bare feet flat on the courtyard flagstones and his head hung back in the sun – as if he didn't live in it all the year round, at home; but this was France he basked in, not sunlight.

‘W-e-ll, they spoil their children terribly. Here's a perfect example. A fifty-pound camera's a toy. What's there left for them to want when they grow up.'

Clive would have liked them to talk about Matt all the time. He said, ‘They've got a Maserati at home in America, at least, they did have, they've sold it now they're going round the world.'

The mother said, ‘Poor little devil, shut out in the streets with all that rubbish strung around his neck.'

‘Ho, rubbish, I'm sure!' said Clive, shrugging and turning up his palms exaggeratedly. ‘Of course, hundreds of dollars of equipment are worth nothing, you know, nothing at all.'