The Golden Notebook (15 page)

went off. All the young men were now singing, around the piano, so I left the room too, and went to where I had seen George leaning. I clambered through nettles and blackjacks, because he had moved further around to the back, and was standing staring through a grove of paw-paw trees at the little shack where the cook lived with his wife and his children. There were a couple of brown children squatting in the dust among the chickens. I noticed that George's very sleek arm was trembling as he tried to light a cigarette, and he failed, and threw it impatiently away, unlit, and he remarked calmly: 'No, my bye-blow is not present.' A gong rang down at the hotel for lunch. 'We'd better go in,' I said. 'Stay here with me a minute.' He put his hand on my shoulder, and the heat of it burned through my dress. The gong stopped sending out its long metallic waves of sound, and the piano stopped inside. Silence, and a dove cooed from the jacaranda tree. George put his hand on my breast, and he said: 'Anna, I could take you to bed now-and then Marie, that's my black girl, and then go back to my wife tonight and have her, and be happy with all three of you. Do you understand that, Anna?' 'No,' I said, angry. And yet his hand on my breast made me understand it. 'Don't you?' he said, ironic. 'No?' 'No,' I insisted, lying on behalf of all women, and thinking of his wife, who made me feel caged. He shut his eyes. His black eyelashes made tiny rainbows as they trembled on his brown cheek. He said, without opening his eyes: 'Sometimes I look at myself from the outside. George Hounslow, respected citizen, eccentric of course, with his socialism, but that's cancelled out by his devotion to all the aged parents and his charming wife and three children. And beside me I can see a whacking great gorilla swinging its arms and grinning. I can see the gorilla so clearly I'm surprised no one else can.' He let his hand fall off my breast so that I was able to breathe steadily again and I said: 'Willi's right. You can't do anything about it so you must stop tormenting yourself.' His eyes were still shut. I didn't know I was going to say what I did, but his eyes flew open and he backed away, so it was some sort of telepathy. I said: 'And you can't commit suicide.' 'Why not?' he asked curiously. 'For the same reason you can't take the child into your house. You've got nine people to worry about.' 'Anna, I've been wondering if I'd take the child into my house if I had-let's say, only two people to worry about?' I didn't know what to say. After a moment he put his arm around me and walked me through the blackjacks and the nettles saying: 'Come down with me to the hotel and keep the gorilla off.' And now, of course, I was perversely annoyed that I had refused the gorilla and was in the role of sexless sister, and I sat by Paul at lunch and not by George. After lunch we all slept for a long time, and began to drink early. Although the dance that night was private, for 'the associated farmers of Mashopi and District,' by the time the farmers and their wives arrived in their big cars the dancing room was already full of people dancing. All of us, and a lot more airforce down from the city, and Johnnie was playing the piano and the regular pianist, who was not a tenth as good as Johnnie, had gone very willingly off to the bar. The master of ceremonies for the evening formalised matters by making a hasty and not very sincere speech about welcoming the boys in blue, and we all danced until Johnnie got tired, which was about five in the morning. Afterwards we stood about in groups under a clear cold star-frosted sky, and the moon made sharp black shadows around us. We all had our arms about each other and we were singing. The scent of the flowers was clear and cool again in the reviving night air, and they stood up fresh and strong. Paul was with me, we had been dancing together all evening. Willi was with Maryrose- he had been dancing with her. And Jimmy, who was very drunk, was stumbling around by himself. He had cut himself again somehow and was bleeding from a small wound over his eyes. And that was the end of our first full day, and it set the pattern for all the rest. The big 'general' dance next night was attended by all the same people, and the Boothbys' bar did well, the Boothbys' cook was overworked, and presumably his wife had assignations with George. Who was painfully, fruitlessly attentive to Maryrose. On that second evening Stanley Lett began his attentions to Mrs. Lattimer, the red-head, which ended in-but I was going to say disaster. That word is ridiculous. Because what is so painful about that time is that nothing was disastrous. It was all wrong, ugly, unhappy and coloured with cynicism, but nothing was tragic, there were no moments that could change anything or anybody. From time to time the emotional lightning flashed and showed a landscape of private misery, and then-we went on dancing. Stanley Lett's affair with Mrs. Lattimer only led to an incident that I suppose must have happened a dozen times in her marriage. She was a woman of about forty-five, rather plump, with the most exquisite hands and slender legs. She had a delicate white skin, and enormous soft periwinkle blue eyes, the hazy, tender, short-sighted, almost purple blue eyes that look at life through a mist of tears. But in her case it was alcohol as well. Her husband was a big bad-tempered commercial type who was a steady brutal drinker. He began drinking when the bar opened and drank all day, getting steadily more morose. Whereas drinking made her soft and sighing and tearful. I never, not once, heard him say anything to her that wasn't brutal. It appeared she didn't notice, or had given up caring. They had no children, but she was inseparable from her dog, the most beautiful red setter, the colour of her hair, with eyes as yearning and tearful as hers. They sat together on the hotel verandah, the red-haired woman and her feathery red dog, and received homage and supplies of drinks from the other guests. The three used to come to the hotel every week-end. Well, Stanley Lett was fascinated by her. She had no side, he said. She was a real good sort, he said. That second night of dancing she was squired by Stanley while her husband drank in the bar until it closed, when he stood swaying by the piano until at last Stanley gave him a final finishing-off drink, so that he stumbled off to bed, leaving his wife dancing. It seemed he did not care what she did. She spent her time with us, or with Stanley, who had 'organised' for Johnnie a woman on a farm two miles off whose husband had gone to the war. The four were having, as they repeatedly said, a fine good time. We danced in the big room; and Johnnie played, with the farmer's wife, a big high-coloured blonde from Johannesburg, sitting beside him. Ted had temporarily given up the battle for Stanley's soul. As he said himself, sex had proved too strong for him. All that long week-end-it was nearly a week, we drank and danced with the sound of Johnnie's piano perpetually in our ears. And when we got back to town we knew that, as Paul remarked, our holiday had not done us much good. Only one person had maintained any sort of self-discipline and that was Willi, who worked steadily a good part of every day with his grammars. Though even he had succumbed a little-to Maryrose. It had been agreed that we should all go back to Mashopi. We went, I think, about two week-ends later. This was different from the general holiday-the hotel was empty save for ourselves, the Lattimers and their dog and the Boothbys. We were greeted by the Boothbys with much civility. It was clear that we had been discussed, that our proprietary ways with the hotel were much disapproved of, but that we spent too much money to be discouraged. I don't remember much of that week-end, or the four or five weekends which succeeded it-at intervals of some weeks. We did not go down every week-end. It must have been about six or eight months after our first visit that the crisis, if it can be called a crisis, occurred. It was the last time we went to Mashopi. We were the same people as before: George and Willi and Maryrose and myself; Ted, Paul and Jimmy. Stanley Lett and Johnnie were now part of another group with Mrs. Lattimer and her dog and the farmer's wife. Sometimes Ted joined them, and sat silent, very much out of it, to return shortly afterwards to us, where he sat equally silent, smiling to himself. It was a new smile for him, wry, bitter, and self-judging. Sitting under the gum-trees we would hear Mrs. Lattimer's lazy musical voice from the verandah: 'Stan-boy, get me a drink? What about a cigarette for me, Stan-boy? Son, come here and talk to me.' And he called her Mrs. Lattimer, but sometimes, forgetting, Myra, at which she would droop her black Irish eyelashes at him. He was about twenty-two or twenty-three; there were twenty years between them, and they very much enjoyed publicly playing the mother-and-son roles, with the sexuality so strong between them that we would look around apprehensively when Mrs. Lattimer came near. Looking back at those week-ends they seem like beads on a string, two big glittering ones to start with, then a succession of small unimportant ones, then another brilliant one to end. But that is just the lazy memory, because as soon as I start to think about the last week-end, I realise that there must have been incidents during the intervening week-ends that led up to it. But I can't remember, it's all gone. And I get exasperated, trying to remember-it's like wrestling with an obstinate other-self who insists on its own kind of privacy. Yet it's all there in my brain if only I could get at it. I am appalled at how much I didn't notice, living inside the subjective highly-coloured mist. How do I know that what I 'remember' was what was important? What I remember was chosen by Anna, of twenty years ago. I don't know what this Anna of now would choose. Because the experience with Mother Sugar and the experiments with the notebooks have sharpened my objectivity to the point where (but this kind of observation belongs to the blue notebook, not this one). At any rate, although it seems now that the final week-end exploded into all kinds of dramas without any previous warning, of course this is not possible. For instance, Paul's friendship with Jackson must have become quite highly developed to provoke Mrs. Boothby as it did. I can remember the moment when she ordered Paul finally out of the kitchen-it must have been the week-end before the last. Paul and I were in the kitchen talking to Jackson. Mrs. Boothby came in and said: 'You know it's against the rules for hotel guests to come into the kitchen.' I remember quite clearly the feeling of shock, as at an unfairness, like children feel when grown-ups are being arbitrary. So that means we must have been running in and out of the kitchen all that time without protest from her. Paul punished her by taking her at her word. He would wait at the back door of the kitchen until the time Jackson was due to go off after lunch, and then ostentatiously walk with him across to the wire fence that enclosed Jackson's cottage, talking with his hand on the man's arm and shoulder. And this contact between black and white flesh was deliberate, to provoke any white person that might be watching. We didn't go near the kitchen again. And because we were in a mood of high childishness we would giggle and talk of Mrs. Boothby like children talking about a headmistress. It seems extraordinary to me that we were capable of being so childish, and that we didn't care that we were hurting her. She had become 'an aborigine' because she resented Paul's friendship with Jackson. Yet we knew quite well there wasn't a white person in the Colony who wouldn't have resented it, and in our political roles we were capable of infinite patience and understanding in explaining to some white person why their racial attitudes were inhuman. I remember something else-Ted reasoning with Stanley Lett about Mrs. Lattimer. Ted said that Mr. Lattimer was getting jealous and with good reason. Stanley was good-naturedly derisive: Mr. Lattimer treated his wife like dirt, he said, and deserved what he got. But the derision was really for Ted, for it was he who was jealous, and of Stanley. Stanley did not care that Ted was hurt. And why should he? When anyone is wooed on one level for the sake of another it is always resented. Always. Of course, Ted was primarily in pursuit of the 'butterfly under the stone' and his romantic emotions were well under control. But they were there all right, and Ted deserved that moment, which occurred more than once, when Stanley smiled his hard-lipped knowing smile, his cold eyes narrowed, and said: 'Come off it, mate. You know that's not my cup of tea.' And yet. Ted had been offering a book, or an evening listening to music. Stanley had become openly contemptuous of Ted. And Ted, instead of telling him to go to hell, allowed it. Ted was one of the most scrupulous people I've known, yet he would go off on 'organising expeditions' with Stanley, to get beer or filch food. Afterwards he would tell us he had only gone in order to get an opportunity to explain to Stanley that this was not, 'as he would come to see in time,' the right way to live. But then he would give us a quick, ashamed glance, and turn his face away, smiling his new bitterly self-hating smile. And then there was the affair of George's son. All the group knew about it. Yet George was by nature a discreet man and I'm sure during that year he was tormenting himself he had mentioned it to no one. Neither Willi nor I told anyone. Yet we all knew. I suppose that one night when we were half-drunk, George made some reference that he imagined was unintelligible. Soon we were joking about it in the way we now made joking despairing references to the political situation in the country. I remember that one evening George made us laugh until we were helpless with a fantasy about how one day his son would come to his house demanding work as a houseboy. He, George, would not recognise him, but some mystical link, etc., would draw him to the poor child. He would be given work in the kitchen and his sensitivity of nature and innate intelligence, 'all inherited from me of course,' would soon endear him to the whole household. In no time he would be picking up the cards the four old people dropped at the card-table and providing a tender undemanding friendship for the three children-'his half-siblings.' For instance, he would prove invaluable as a ball-boy when they played tennis. At last his patient servitude would be rewarded. Light would flash on George suddenly, one day, at the moment when the boy was handing him his shoes, 'very well-polished, of course.' 'Baas, is there anything more I can do?' 'My son!' 'Father. At last!' And so on and so on. That night we