Eumor was slowing up, struggling once more with the exact sense of what he wanted to say. ‘Kate, I have lived here thirty years. I have watched everything, I am not blind. But I tell you, this book taught me twice as much. And all the same, it is more like poetry than a book.’
‘Why did he give you a proof copy?’
‘I am his friend.’
I don’t know why I found the satellite phrase moving, and shaming at the same time; but it was so, in swift and almost unbearable measure. Eumor was his friend, I was not. I had withdrawn my patronage, for all sorts of perfectly good reasons; but I had withdrawn it. Nearly a year had passed since we had been lovers; during all the happy time together Jonathan must have been working faithfully, and during all the time since then also – unhelped by me, dismissed as a poor man and a liar … I had been working too, of course … I had made £9,000, and enjoyed myself a great deal … It wasn’t going to be possible to formulate any of these ideas properly, until I had read and assessed the book; but however disciplined I might be, however sulky and proud, a childish refusal to be impressed was no longer a plausible reaction. Every ostrich, sooner or later, came up for air – fresh, fantastic, mortifying air. If this, incredibly, were to be my astonished-ostrich phase, I had better face it, with all the grace that God allowed.
‘Eumor,’ I said. ‘I’d like to read that book. Can you organise it?’
‘Immediately! I send it down.’
‘But, Eumor – don’t tell him.’
‘Ah,’ said Eumor, meaningly.
‘All right – ah!’
I still envy anyone who reads
Ex Afrika
for the first time.
As all the world knows, it is not a long book; by a remarkable feat of compression (bearing in mind the huge canvas of Southern Africa, the byways and digressions that beckon all the time) Jonathan Steele had kept his story down to 70,000 words. I remember one critic who remarked on that fact in a particular sense: ‘Seventy thousand words,’ he wrote, ‘and not one going to waste, not one which does not do the work of ten, in sheer magic evocation.’ Disallowing that terrible word ‘evocation’, used nowadays for everything from cigarette ads to old horse-race commentaries, the man was exactly right. Jonathan had watched, thought, felt and lived his book for a year, and then distilled his story down to a concise, poetic belief, which had, for almost everyone who read it, a shattering reality.
I am not sure what I had been expecting to read; I had been led to forecast a phoney book, and part of me, indeed, was hoping to be proved right. Even as recently as Eumor’s telephone call, when he said: ‘It’s about a young man who comes to South Africa,’ and added something about there being ‘a girl like you’ in it, I had been anticipating some atrocious by-product of the confessional; a subject piece, conceived in the guts, sucked from the thumb, and stuck together with self-regard.
It would be, I thought, a sort of ‘What Awful Africa Did to Me’ diatribe; one of those exhibitionist sagas which really belonged in the realm of indecent exposure, along with all tomes written by poets’ widows with left-over lives to kill, women whose husbands died of throat cancer, reformed drunks, unreformed society whores, and ladies exposing for sale their many-splendoured things.
I had been wrong, all wrong.
Ex Afrika
was a beautiful book, and a discerning one; when Eumor, once again, had said that it taught him twice as much as he knew before, I was ready, after reading it, to sign my name under the same testimonial. I read it in one gulp – there was really no other choice – and then went back again and started breathing and licking it in, word by word, picture by picture, in purest self-indulgence.
It was Africa in little – people, places and things seen in their customary raucous confusion and then reduced to order and sense by a craftsman’s eye. It
was
about a young man who came to Africa; a young man who could look around him with a childish sense of wonder and an adult capacity to drink deep without getting drunk; who saw what the people were doing to each other, and why they were doing it, and when it had gone wrong, and how it should go right – if … The ‘if’ was love, I suppose, or common sense or decency or terror of bloodshed.
But the book was not a sermon. It was better than a sermon. It was a piece of mankind held up for inspection – inspection from all conceivable angles, like a jewel of many polished facets, none more flawless than another; a jewel of a book, indeed, presented in all the dimensions which skill, love and pity could encompass.
There was one astonishing thing about it, which only dawned on me slowly. I kept meeting sections of it with a sense of partial recognition, thinking subconsciously:
But it wasn’t like that
or
I didn’t mean it that way
or
He’s right
,
only he is still unfair
. I then realised that I had played more than one part in the book; not just as ‘the girl like me’, a sometimes flattering, sometimes bitchy portrait which I had to admit was extremely well done; but in the more unexpected realm of politics.
The book, where it bore on race relations, was wise and compassionate; and where it condemned things-as-they-were, it – I was going to say, it pulled its punches, but that wasn’t quite the tactic; rather did it concede (astonishingly for a red-blooded radical like Jonathan) that there might be two sides to this gory question, that all white men in South Africa were not automatically dolts or brutes, and all black men were not God’s elect and mankind’s undoubted masterpiece.
Father Shillingford, for example, was there, but not as Jesus Christ cycling sadly through the Transvaal; rather as a good but baffled man, who might, with the very best will in the world, precipitate a series of horrifying disasters, simply by upgrading the facts to suit his own generous heart. (In a location riot, for example, the ‘Father Shillingford’ of
Ex Afrika
was responsible for at least four extra deaths, because he gave asylum in his church to a Negro thug who, if he had been a white man, could never have excited a moment’s pity or even common tolerance.)
It was these ‘second thoughts’ of Jonathan’s that I found fascinating. They proved that he
had
been listening, a year earlier, he had been listening to everybody, however unlikely – myself, Eumor, Bruno, Lord Muddley, Gerald Thyssen … The book was brilliant, anyway; and it made wonderful sense, instead of being the slick-talking trash I had feared – or, at one ignoble stage, hoped.
But it was also balanced, in a way I would never have conceived possible, bearing in mind Jonathan’s surface fixation about the rights of man (Sub-division ‘Black, Enslaved’). The things that I and the others said in defence of ‘our side’ had taken root; sometimes they were laughed at, sometimes they were out-argued, but at least they were there, they were given a chance. The result was a novel of African life, as exciting, sane and rounded as it could well be. It was also the rarest thing of all, in any book about South Africa: it was hopeful.
When I had finished
Ex Afrika
again, at the second reading, I thought afresh: so he was working all the time, after all; he was working when he was happy with me, and when lonely and unhappy without me, and playing poker, and talking to Father Shillingford, and getting into police trouble, and wandering poor and proud … No wonder he had been preoccupied and unaccountable; to him, the book was all, and (like myself and my own job) he wasn’t going to have it sabotaged by any heavy-treading third party.
He had been telling the truth all the time, putting to shame all complaints and suspicions. I wished above everything that I could have been more help – for notwithstanding what I had given him, it was fair to say that he had written the book in spite of me.
It was now desperately important to find out if it were too late.
‘Desperate’, I found, was an appropriate word to use. I finished
Ex Afrika
on a Friday afternoon, and it happened that I was going to the ballet that evening. Thus it was a foolish piece of erotica, as well as the magic of the book, which impelled me to ring Jonathan up, after nearly a year of silence. During a not-very-good
Lac-des-Cygnes
, I became conscious, for the first time, of the ill-concealed endowments of the male dancers, which seemed to be exhibited, in extraordinary prominence, especially for my discomfort.
It was very unlikely that any of the saucy young gentlemen on the stage would have wished to cause me a moment’s worry in this department; but I knew one who would, and, in an overwhelming invasion of sexuality, primitive and undeniable, which took me out of the theatre at the interval, I knew that I had to have him, and it, and those, immediately.
I excused a frantic hankering by assuring myself that love would be there also.
I rang up Johannesburg as soon as I got back to my flat. After a long delay, when I feared that the continuous ringing at the other end was going to make me cry, there was a sudden click, and a native voice answered: ‘Master not home.’
‘Don’t ring off!’ Instantly afraid, I almost shouted the words; it must have given him the shock of his life. Then I remembered his name: ‘Alfred?’
‘Yes, missis?’
‘Where is the master?’
‘Master not home.’
‘But where is he? Is he out?’
‘Master out, yes.’
‘When will he be back?’
‘Don’t know, missis. Master gone away.’
It was a bad moment to hold an African conversation.
‘Where has he gone to, Alfred?’
‘Cape Town, missis.’
‘Cape Town!’ I really must stop shouting. ‘Whereabouts in Cape Town? I’m ringing up from Cape Town now.’
‘Yes, missis.’
‘Did he give you a number, Alfred?’
‘Master out, in Cape Town.’
I tried four hotels in as many minutes, and I found Jonathan at the fourth one. He sounded surprised, and rather sleepy at the same time. At least, I hoped it was just sleepy. It was very important that he should not be in the least drunk.
I said: ‘Drop everything.’
I could almost hear him smile; it had been one of our accustomed signals. ‘I will if you will,’ he answered.
‘I’m dropping everything now,’ I said.
I was trembling already, damn it.
‘At the very most, you have twenty minutes’ start,’ said Jonathan.
It was a wonderful re-encounter. Indeed, approximately four million people learned exactly how wonderful it was, because he used the whole thing three years later in a disconcerting novel called
Wrap-Around
, and I was readily identifiable. But even if I had known that particular piece of exploitation, I would not have minded, nor hesitated. Girls are grateful creatures, and suddenly all that I was, was a girl.
We had some catching up to do, after the first wild wordless homecoming; but amazingly little, bearing in mind our total separation of nearly a year. Exquisitely relieved, we revelled in the happy parallel of getting up-to-date. First there was the book – now, in a sense, a top priority of both our lives.
‘It’s wonderful, Johnny,’ I assured him. ‘I was amazed when Eumor told me about
Pacific Monthly
, but I’m not any more … And you were actually working on it all the time. That’s what’s so incredible!’
‘Why?’ he asked, seeming to be genuinely puzzled. ‘I told you I was writing a book.’
I kissed him. It was a very great pleasure. Much of my body was woefully exhausted, but my lips and my heart were not.
‘All right, you told me. But you weren’t very convincing about it.’
‘Have faith … Just because I don’t sit around looking like Tolstoy or lecturing my friends on creative imagery, doesn’t mean I’m not a writer.’
‘You’re a writer, all right. But Johnny, it
did
seem as though you were wasting your time. There were lots of other things, weren’t there?’
‘What other things?’ He had got up, and was replenishing our glasses, while I lay still on the bed; but he had a way of communicating alertness, even with his back towards me, even with words of no tension whatsoever.
‘Oh – drinking.’
‘I was sad. Very sad. More sad than you’ll ever know.’
‘And that awful thing with the police.’
‘I didn’t waste it, did I?’
‘No. But then, all those women.’
‘What women?’ He had turned, glasses in hand; except for the slip of white skin round his loins, he was very sunburnt, and well-muscled, and male – all the things I wanted to keep for myself, and hated to share. ‘I haven’t had any women.’
‘But darling, the rumours …’ I reeled off a few of the atrocious names that Bruno had given me. ‘It couldn’t all be just talk.’
‘Of course I met most of them. A fragrant nosegay indeed. They’re part of Johannesburg, aren’t they? – a fairly sordid part, but a part nonetheless. I wanted to see what they were like at close quarters. Now I know.’ He gave me my drink, kissed me in four or five important places, and lay down beside me. ‘Except for one woman – I’ll tell you about her later – I haven’t gone to bed with anyone. Ididn’t want to. It wouldn’t have cured anything. I discovered years ago that the answer to losing one girl isn’t another. It’s no girl.’
‘Who was this one woman?’ I asked, cut to the silly heart.
‘Later, Kate.’ He had grown up; he was in command; he laid down the terms; I did not mind. ‘But I’ll confess some other things to you,’ he said – and it sounded a strong phrase, not a weak one. ‘When you walked out on me, I drank like a maniac, to try to forget how utterly miserable I was. And I went around with lots of women too, creating the maximum uproar in the process – basically, so as to make you jealous, because I knew you’d hear about it, sooner or later. But my particular torment, all the time, was the idea of you in bed with someone else.
Have
you?’
‘No, Johnny. Not once.’
I was so glad that this was true.
‘Thank God for that. I couldn’t have borne it … Kate, what are we going to do?’
‘You tell me.’
‘I’ve got to go back to Johannesburg. The book has been sold to America – I only heard about it this morning – and there’s the possibility of a film …’ He was not boasting, he was not even parading his riches for me; but he was quietly excited, deeply pleased. ‘I must stay in one place for a bit, so that I can keep in touch. But when the rush is over–’