Eumor did a little of everything: he owned finance companies, tea-shops, hotels, landscaping firms, bicycle repair shops, garages, bad racehorses, good asbestos mines. Starting from nothing, he still had nothing – in the sense that if you possess or control a million pounds’ worth of property, owe eight hundred and fifty thousand to your creditors, and play the stock market, the horses and the chemmy tables with the balance, you still have nothing.
Eumor had an impeccable financial sense; I had once watched him leaf through a dozen assorted balance sheets, of companies ranging from marginal gold mines to semi-derelict tyre factories, and pick out the only two which, a year later, proved to be solvent. Naturally, those had been the ones that he himself had bought – and, again naturally, he had made his choice in the interval between the second and third acts of an Old Vic production of
Hamlet
at the Empire Theatre.
We had never been in business together, though four years earlier, when Kate Marais Advertising had just been incorporated, he had been generously helpful. He was always pretending to be my lover, though privately he lamented an uncertain virility with the recurrent and memorable words: ‘But Kate, dar-r-r-ling, it won’t t-r-r-ravel!’ Little wonder that Eumor was my favourite man.
Bruno van Thaal, my ‘Afrikaner pansy’, certainly had no concern about his virility; he had long disdained to put it to the test. I must confess to an inherent affection for homosexuals; they are amusing, well-groomed, gossipy, and above all no bother to a girl. Bruno was that somewhat rare thing, an Afrikaner of taste and sensibility; he was small, slim, good-looking and fundamentally kind-hearted.
His family and mine had landed on these dubious shores about two hundred years earlier; the Marais descendants took to gold-mining, the van Thaals to farming and land speculation. Now (and a student of heredity would doubtless find it intriguing) the last of the Marais was in advertising, and the last of the van Thaals did almost nothing at all, with perverse and continuous enjoyment.
There was, however, one thing which Bruno van Thaal did, and he did it for me, extremely well. My weekly gossip column, carried by the three Sunday newspapers which was all that God and the Dutch Reformed Church allowed us, needed local contributors; although I lived and worked in Cape Town, I tried to cover also the varied misconduct of Johannesburg, Durban, Bloemfontein, and Pretoria. My ‘locals’ (of whom Bruno was one) had to work undercover; there was really no other way in which they could attend the necessary parties, report accurately on what happened, and still be invited out in the future.
Of the four people I had working for me in the field, Bruno was certainly the most dependable, the most observant, and the most malicious. But of course, he had the best material to work on.
My column was written for my own pleasure, and for the edification of those people interested in misbehaviour – a wide readership indeed. Personally, I subscribed to the reputed motto of that merry monarch, King Edward VII: ‘I don’t mind what people do, as long as they don’t do it in the streets and frighten the horses.’ In Johannesburg, they were a trifle inclined to frighten the horses.
There was, indeed, a remarkable amount of high-pressure drinking and casual fornication in this city. It was not as intense, of course, as what went on in Kenya, where the upper crust of ‘white settlers’ really behaved very badly indeed, when judged by anything except farmyard standards. Someone should one day write a little piece called
A Day in the Life of a Kenya Nobleman
; the quota of drinks downed, maidens overthrown, husbands duped, lovers maimed, and bullets hitting the pillow would overload the most elaborate Bureau of Statistics.
But Johannesburg really did very well, in its own quiet way. There was little or no prostitution – the essential yardstick of a moral community; pleasure was public, violence was funny, and love, above all, was amateur.
All of which made it very easy to write a gossip column – especially with the beady blue eyes of Bruno van Thaal to help me.
Those beady blue eyes were now surveying me, with an appraisal all the more intuitive and feminine for being utterly neuter; I knew that Bruno was taking in every last detail, from gabardine suit (slightly crushed from the flight) to
maquillage
(repaired as good as new). Finally he said: ‘Kate, you look wonderful!’
‘A man tried to pick me up for
three
whole hours!’ I said, kissing him.
‘My dear, you must have fainted dead away!’
Eumor swept off his Panama hat, and declared, in his unusual Balkanised English: ‘I kill him to the death! Where is he? How tall?’
‘Nine feet.’
‘I surrender.’
Joel Sachs said: ‘Hallo, Kate! Nice to see you again.’
‘How’s our business?’
‘Booming.’
‘Darling,’ said Bruno van Thaal, ‘yesterday’s column was really rather naughty, wasn’t it?’
‘I tried to temper justice with malice.’ Out of sight of the others, I winked at him. It had been mostly his own material.
We moved inside the airport building, where it was cooler, and the noise of planes was deadened. A few people greeted me; one of the Customs men whom I knew smiled as he touched the peak of his cap; a mining man, a friend of my father, raised his hat with the courtesy of a much earlier age. Then the good-looking young steward who had elected to carry my stole and my cosmetic-case off the plane, and to collect the other luggage said: ‘All ready, Miss Marais.’
‘You should come up more often,’ said Bruno, as we moved through the dry sunshine towards the car park. ‘Johannesburg is really very
ordinary
without you.’
‘Four times a year is all that the traffic will bear … How about the party tonight?’
‘All laid on, darling.’
‘I bring a young girl, no?’ asked Eumor.
‘No.’
‘The daughter of my innkeeper?’
‘No … How are the horses, Eumor?’
‘Not so nice as the daughter of my innkeeper.’
‘There’ll be lots of girls there, Eumor,’ Joel Sachs reassured him. ‘You’ll do all right.’
‘But this one is different.’
‘Two heads?’ I asked.
‘With but a single thought,’ said Bruno.
A couple of minutes later we were in Eumor’s fancy-looking Cadillac, driving towards the mine-dumps and the gleaming white towers of Johannesburg.
We lunched, as usual, at the most civilised restaurant in Johannesburg, Fraternelli’s; this was a four-times-a-year ritual, and the ritual allowed us to be greedy, self-indulgent, and just a little bit high at the finish. We all had
caviar an blinis
, with Akvavit as a lubricant, to start with; then Bruno and I had
truite an bleu
, Joel Sachs grappled with a steak obviously culled from the biggest ox in the Transvaal, and Eumor, grumbling all the time, went off into the kitchen with Fraternelli and came back presently with the oddest-looking Italian confection, loosely labelled
cannelloni
, that I had seen since my last visit.
Pol Roger eased it all down; Armagnac pronounced the blessing; and Fraternelli came up with a rich and rare cheese from the Bel Paese stable, by way of farewell. And lest anyone should think this a specially Lucullan lunch, by Johannesburg standards, I can assure them that it was not.
Fraternelli served us, with much theatrical sleight of hand and finger-snapping; though disappointed that we had not ordered anything in the
flambé
category, so that he could attract attention to his favourite customers by applying a blowtorch and singeing the chandelier, he still contrived to make a
La Scala
production of the meal. He was a unique Johannesburg institution, capable, talented and enormously successful; in this city, whether you wanted a directors’ dinner for twenty or a seduction snack for two, food meant Fraternelli, and that was all there was to it.
He was a middle-aged Italian with two crosses to bear: the English language, which gave him every conceivable kind of trouble, and women, who served him even worse. If he could have mastered the one with the doomed facility with which he succumbed to the other, he would have been a happy man indeed.
He always called me ‘Miss Mary’ near enough to Miss Marais, and much nearer than he came to a lot of other words.
We were cheerful, rather noisy, and talkative in a slanderous sort of way. It was a well-lit, beautifully decorated room with a lot of elegant wrought ironwork framing the windows, and it was crammed with people who behaved according to their several public habits – eating stolidly, drinking deep, staring round them, table-hopping, waving, quarrelling, spilling water jugs, falling down when they paid the bill.
People table-hopped a good deal in our direction; it is a habit I can do without, particularly when one is hungry and fond of food; and we were not very forthcoming to such visitors. But it isn’t easy to be dismissive with one’s mouth full.
Women tended to dress well when they went to Fraternelli’s, and I noticed several people I knew who had obviously shot the works on their spring outfits. My dear silly friend Mrs Marchant, wearing a hat that I coveted, waved to me from across the room; another grim-looking woman whose name I couldn’t remember stopped as she neared our table, remarked somewhat coldly: ‘So sorry we can’t come tonight,’ and passed on.
‘I didn’t invite her,’ said Bruno, with relish.
‘Why not?’ I asked.
‘Don’t you remember? Last time she got as high as a kite, and started juggling with the stuffed avocados.’
Fraternelli, who according to his custom had been listening closely, leant over and confided: ‘When wine is in, brain is out.’
‘Well said, Fraternelli,’ I answered, ‘You’re getting positively colloquial.’
He beamed, and hurried away to his dictionary.
‘And anyway,’ said Bruno, pursuing his theme, ‘she’s so ugly.’
‘I am ugly,’ said Eumor, with conviction. ‘This party is for beautiful people only?’
‘It is for my friends,’ I answered. ‘It is also for my many enemies, for the business connections of Kate Marais Advertising, for people I grew up with when I was a pretty little Johannesburg girl, for old chums of my father, and for odds and sods paying a visit to darkest Africa. It is to give me pleasure, and for Bruno to enjoy himself, fiddling the invitations.’
‘
Were
you a pretty little girl?’ asked Joel.
‘No, hideous. People would gaze at my brother, and say: “What a perfect angel!” and then they’d look at me, and say: “This is going to be the brainy one.” Very mortifying.’
‘You’ve come on since then, dear,’ said Bruno.
‘I was
always
ugly,’ said Eumor.
We talked about that night’s party, a yearly function for my firm, wildly expensive and great fun. Bruno and Joel Sachs did the invitations between them; I, first at long range and then a good deal closer, laid down the law about the decorations, the food, the entertainment and the service. In a city of parties, some of them excellent, we always tried to give ours a special quality partly for prestige reasons, partly because that is the only kind of party to give. Not for me the dusty canapés and tepid drinks, the crenellated fish-paste sandwiches which only a professional caterer could possibly dream up.
Generally, about three hundred people came, stayed for four hours, and then went on their way, much elevated. Already there had grown up a fissionable tradition, a tendency for our guests to split into smaller and smaller groups as the remainder of the evening progressed. Many was the continent girl, indeed, who had bestowed her all after the Kate Marais spring gallop, and many the maturer lady who had bestowed it all again.
Towards three o’clock that afternoon, Johannesburg being a very hard-working town, the restaurant began to clear. We sat back from our table, enjoying the Armagnac and an easier view of our surroundings. Joel and Bruno were arguing about the exact proportions of a dry martini, a traditional area of disagreement among Americans which was only now setting Johannesburg in an uproar. Eumor was giving me the horrid inside story of why one of his horses had failed to win, over the weekend.
A man whom I had subtly insulted in my column, twenty-four hours earlier, cut me so dead in passing, with such a defiant toss of the head, that I choked, and had to be revived. Fraternelli, now preoccupied with our catering for that evening, brought in (with suitable fanfare) a 16-lb Cape salmon in aspic for me to look at; I complained about the colour of the lemon peel decoration, which clashed with the creature’s eyes, and he retreated again, hand to head, promising much better things in the future.
Across the wastes of the emptying room, I became aware that I was being stared at.
It was a man, of course; in spite of the aura of oddity which surrounds any woman who lives alone and likes it, I was not an
afficionada
of any other club. He was sitting across the room from us, alone at an inconspicuous table; I had an impression of slimness, leanness, black hair, careless dress, disdain, poverty, maleness. (Several newspapers pay me substantial sums every week to recognise such things, even at thirty paces.) He was drinking his coffee, and staring, without insistence and with a certain detachment, at our table, and in particular at me.
I wondered why he was lunching at Fraternelli’s, and if he were finding it worth the snob-surcharge on the bill, and if so, for what reason.
I leant across to Eumor, cutting short his sad tale of bribed jockeys, colour-blind race stewards, and trainers sunk in debt, and asked: ‘’Oo dat?’
Eumor’s creased olive face wrinkled ever further, as if plumbing yet inkier depths of woe. He suddenly looked like the oldest Greek in the world, hearing the final results of Thermopylae.
‘Kate, Kate … You’re not listening to me the least little bit.’
‘Yes I am, Eumor, and I think it’s all perfectly terrible. But who’s the shady customer with the black hair?’
‘That’s me, darling.’
‘Eumor …’
Eumor, who (when he was not pretending to be my lover) liked to do a little social pimping on the side, half turned and glanced in the direction I indicated, though with such a hammed-up air of
insouciance
that he might as well have fired a signal rocket. Then, to my surprise, he waved in acknowledgement, and turned back to me.