The Golden Notebook (14 page)

I'm very nervous and ill-at-ease with women. Second, I'm twenty. I have all my life before me, and frankly the prospect often appals me. Thirdly, I'm twenty, and I'm in love with Anna and my heart is breaking.' George gave me a quick look to see if this were true, and I shrugged. George drank down a full tankard of beer without stopping, and said: 'Anyway I've no right to care whether anyone's in love with anyone. I'm a sod and a bastard. Well, that would be bearable, but I'm also a practising socialist. And I'm a swine. How can a swine be a socialist, that's what I want to know?' He was joking, but his eyes were full of tears again, and his body was clenched and tense with misery. Paul turned his head with his characteristic indolent charm, and let his wide blue eyes rest on George. I could positively hear him thinking: Oh, Lord, here's some real trouble, I don't even want to hear about it... he let himself slide to the floor, gave me the warmest and tenderest of smiles, and said: 'Darling Anna, I love you more than my life, but I'm going to help Maryrose.' His eyes said: Get rid of this gloomy idiot and I'll come back. George scarcely noticed him going. 'Anna,' said George. 'Anna, I don't know what to do.' And I felt just as Paul had: I don't want to be involved with real trouble. I wanted to be off with the group hanging garlands, for now that Paul had become a member of it, it was suddenly gay. They were beginning to dance. Paul and Maryrose, even June Boothby, because there were more men than girls, and people were drifting up from the hotel, drawn by the dance music. 'Let's get out,' said George. 'All this youth and jollity. It depresses me unutterably. Besides, if you come too, your man will talk. It's him I want to talk to.' 'Thanks,' I said, without much grace. But I went with him to the hotel verandah which was rapidly losing its occupants to the dance room. Willi patiently laid down his grammar, and said: 'I suppose it's too much to expect, to be allowed to work in peace.' We sat down, the three of us, our legs stretched into the sun, the rest of our bodies in the shade. The beer in our long glasses was light and golden and had spangles of sunlight in it. Then George began talking. What he was saying was so serious, but he spoke with a self-mocking jocularity, so that everything seemed ugly and jarring, and all the time the pulse of music came from the dance room and I wanted to be there. The facts were these. I've said his family life was difficult. It was intolerable. He had a wife and two sons and a daughter. He supported his wife's parents and his own. I've been in that little house. It was intolerable even to visit. The young couple, or rather, the middle-aged couple who supported it, were squeezed out of any real life together by the four old people and the three children. His wife worked hard all day and so did he. The four old ones were all, in various ways, invalids and needed special care and diets and so on. In that living-room in the evening, the four played cards interminably, with much bickering and elderly petulance; they played for hours, in the centre of the room, and the children did their homework where they could, and George and his wife went to bed early, more often than not from sheer exhaustion, apart from the fact their bedroom was the only place they could have some privacy. That was the home. And then half the week George was off along the roads, sometimes working hundreds of miles away on the other side of the country. He loved his wife, and she loved him, but he felt permanently guilty because managing that household would by itself have been hard work for any woman, let alone having to work as a secretary as well. None of them had had a holiday in years, and they were all permanently short of money, and miserable bickering went on about sixpences and shillings. Meanwhile, George had his affairs. And he liked African women particularly. About five years before he was in Mashopi for the night and had been very much taken with the wife of the Boothbys' cook. This woman had become his mistress. 'If you can use such a word,' said Willi, but George insisted, and without any consciousness of humour: 'Well why not? Surely if one doesn't like the colour bar, she's entitled to the proper word, as a measure of respect, so to speak.' George often travelled through Mashopi. Last year he had seen the group of children and one of them was lighter than the others and looked like George. He had asked the woman, and she had said yes, she believed it was his child. She was not making an issue of it. 'Well?' said Willi, 'what's the problem?' I remember George's look of sheer, miserable incredulity. 'But Willi-you stupid clod, there's my child, I'm responsible for it living in that slum back there.' 'Well?' said Willi again. 'I'm a socialist,' said George. 'And as far as it's possible in this hellhole I try to be a socialist and fight the colour bar. Well? I stand on platforms and make speeches-oh, very tactfully of course, saying that the colour bar is not in the best interests of all concerned, and gentle Jesus meek and mild wouldn't have approved, because it's more than my job is worth to say it's inhuman and stinkingly immoral and the whites are damned to eternity for it. And now I propose to behave just like every other stinking white sot who sleeps with a black woman and adds another half-caste to the Colony's quota.' 'She hasn't asked you to do anything about it,' said Willi. 'But that isn't the point.' George sank his face on his flat palms, and I saw the wetness creep between his fingers. 'It's eating me up,' he said. 'I've known about it this last year and it's driving me crazy.' 'Which isn't going to help matters much,' said Willi, and George dropped his hands sharply, showing his tear-smeared face and looked at him. 'Anna?' appealed George, looking at me. I was in the most extraordinary tumult of emotion. First, I was jealous of the woman. Last night I had been wishing I was her, but it was an impersonal emotion. Now I knew who it was, and I was astounded to find I was hating George and condemning him-just as I had resented him last night when he made me feel guilty. And then, and this was worse, I was surprised to find I resented the fact the woman was black. I had imagined myself free of any such emotion, but it seemed I was not, and I was ashamed and angry-with myself, and with George. But it was more than that. Being so young, twenty-three or four, I suffered, like so many 'emancipated' girls, from a terror of being trapped and tamed by domesticity. George's house, where he and his wife were trapped without hope of release, save through the deaths of four old people, represented to me the ultimate horror. It frightened me so that I even had nightmares about it. And yet-this man, George, the trapped one, the man who had put that unfortunate woman, his wife, in a cage, also represented for me, and I knew it, a powerful sexuality from which I fled inwardly, but then inevitably turned towards. I knew by instinct that if I went to bed with George I'd learn a sexuality that I hadn't come anywhere near yet. And with all these attitudes and emotions conflicting in me, I still liked him, indeed loved him, quite simply, as a human being. I sat there on the verandah, unable to speak for a while, knowing that my face was flushed and my hands trembling. And I listened to the music and the singing from the big room up the hill and I felt as if George were excluding me by the pressure of his unhappiness from something unbelievably sweet and lovely. At that time it seemed I spent half my life believing I was being excluded from this beautiful thing; and yet I knew with my intelligence that it was nonsense-that Maryrose, for instance, envied me because she believed Willi and I had everything she wanted-she believed we were two people who loved each other. Willi had been looking at me, and now he said: 'Anna is shocked because the woman is black.' 'That's part of it,' I said. 'I'm surprised that I do feel like that though.' 'I'm surprised you admit it,' said Willi, coldly, and his spectacles flashed. 'I'm surprised you don't,' said George to Willi. 'Come off it. You're such a bloody hypocrite.' And Willi lifted his grammars and set them ready on his knee. 'What's the alternative, have you an intelligent suggestion?' enquired Willi. 'Don't tell me. Being George, you believe it's your duty to take the child into your house. That means the four old people will be shocked into their graves, apart from the fact no one will ever speak to them again. The three children will be ostracised at school. Your wife will lose her job. You will lose your job. Nine people will be ruined. And what good will that do your son, George? May I ask?' 'And so that's the end of it all?' I asked. 'Yes, it is,' said Willi. He wore his usual expression at such moments, obstinate and patient, and his mouth was set. 'I could make it a test case,' said George. 'A test case of what?' 'All this bloody hypocrisy.' 'Why use the word to me-you've just called me a hypocrite.' George looked humble, and Willi said: 'Who'd pay the price of your noble gesture? You've got eight people dependent on you?' 'My wife isn't dependent on me. I'm dependent on her. Emotionally that is. Do you imagine I don't know it?' 'Do you want me to put the facts again?' said Willi, over-patient, and glancing at his text-books. Both George and I knew that because he had been called a hypocrite he would never soften now, but George went on: 'Willi, isn't there anything at all? Surely, it can't be finished, just like that?' 'Do you want me to say that it's unfair or immoral or something helpful like that?' 'Yes,' said George, after a pause, dropping his chin on his chest. 'Yes, I suppose that's what I want. Because what's worse is that if you think I've stopped sleeping with her, I haven't. There might be another little Hounslow in the Boothby kitchen any day. Of course, I'm more careful than I was.' 'That's your affair,' said Willi. 'You are an inhuman swine,' said George after a pause. 'Thank you,' said Willi. 'But there's nothing to be done, is there? You agree, don't you?' 'That boy's going to grow up there among the pumpkins and the chickens and be a farm labourer or a half-arsed clerk, and my other three are going to get through to university and out of this bloody country if I have to kill myself paying for it.' 'What is the point?' said Willi. 'Your blood? Your sacred sperm, or what?' Both George and I were shocked. Willi saw it with a tightening of his face, and it remained angry as George said: 'No, it's the responsibility. It's the gap between what I believe in and what I do.' Willi shrugged and we were silent. Through the heavy midday hush came the sound of Johnnie's drumming fingers. George looked at me again, and I rallied myself to fight Willi. Looking back I want to laugh-because I automatically chose to argue in literary terms, just as he automatically answered in political terms. But at the time it didn't seem extraordinary. And it didn't seem extraordinary to George either, who sat nodding as I spoke. 'Look,' I said. 'In the nineteenth century literature was full of this. It was a sort of moral touchstone. Like Resurrection, for instance. But now you just shrug your shoulders and it doesn't matter?' 'I haven't noticed that I shrugged,' said Willi. 'But perhaps it is true that the moral dilemma of a society is no longer crystallised by the fact of an illegitimate child?' 'Why not?' I asked. 'Why not?' said George, very fierce. 'Well, would you really say the problem of the African in this country is summed up by the Boothbys' cook's white cuckoo?' 'You put things so prettily' said George angrily. (And yet he would continue to come to Willi humbly for advice, and revere him, and write to him self-abasing letters for years after he left the Colony.) Now he stared out into the sunlight, blinking away tears, and then he said: 'I'm going to get my glass filled.' He went off to the bar. Willi lifted his text-book, and said without looking at me: 'Yes, I know. But I'm not impressed by your reproachful eyes. You'd give him the same advice, wouldn't you? Full of ohs and ahs, but the same advice.' 'What it amounts to is that everything is so terrible that we've got calloused because of it and we don't really care.' 'May I suggest you stick to certain basic principles-such as abolishing what is wrong, changing what is wrong? Instead of sitting around crying about it?' 'And in the meantime?' 'In the meantime I'm going to study and you will go off and let George weep on your shoulder and be very sorry for him, which will achieve precisely nothing.' I left him and walked slowly back up to the big room. George was leaning against the wall, a glass in his hand, eyes closed. I knew I should go to him, but I didn't. I went into the big room. Maryrose was sitting by herself at a window and I joined her. She had been crying. I said: 'This seems to be a day for everyone to cry.' 'Not you,' said Maryrose. This meant that I was too happy with Willi to need to cry, so I sat down by her and said: 'What's wrong?' 'I was sitting here and watching them dance and I began thinking. Only a few months ago we believed that the world was going to change and everything was going to be beautiful and now we know it won't.' 'Do we?' I said, with a kind of terror. 'Why should it?' she asked, simply. I didn't have the moral energy to fight it, and after a pause she said: 'What did George want you for? I suppose he said I was a bitch for hitting him?' 'Can you imagine George saying anyone is a bitch for hitting him? Well why did you?' 'I was crying about that too. Because of course the real reason I hit him was because I know someone Uke George could make me forget my brother.' 'Well perhaps you should let someone like George have a try?' 'Perhaps I should,' she said. She gave me a small, old smile, which said so clearly: What a baby you are!-that I said angrily: 'But if you know something, why don't you do something about it?' Again the small smile, and she said: 'No one will ever love me like my brother did. He really loved me. George would make love to me. And that wouldn't be the same thing, would it? But what's wrong with saying: I've had the best thing already and I'll never have it again, instead of just having sex. What's wrong with it?' 'When you say, what's wrong with it, like that, then I never know what answer to make, even though I know there's something wrong.' 'What, then?' She sounded really curious, and I said, even more angry: 'You just don't try, you don't try. You just give up.' 'It's all very well for you,' she said, meaning Willi again, and now I couldn't say anything. It was my turn to want to cry, and she saw it, and said out of her infinite superiority in suffering: 'Don't cry, Anna, there's never any point. Well I'm going to get washed for lunch.' And she