‘
Stupido!
That’s Jonathan Steele.’
‘I’m a country girl,’ I said. ‘Who’s Jonathan Steele?’
‘English,’ said Bruno over his shoulder. He always followed other people’s conversations, no matter how preoccupied he seemed to be. ‘Been here about three months.’
‘Doing what?’
‘Writing a book.’
‘Oh, God …’
Nowadays, everyone wrote books about my poor country, and about Africa in general; ranging from Alan Paton (wonderful) to John Gunther (worthy); from Ruark’s blood-and-guts melodrama to Monsarrat’s ponderous headstone over the colonial civil service. Most of the ones written by visitors were trash, ready-minced for the literary supermarket, like parti-coloured hamburger meat; seldom were they better than slick reportage.
In South Africa especially, we were by now bored to extinction with weekend ‘special correspondents’ who flew in, flew round, and flew out again, confident that they had exhausted the potentialities of this enormously complicated country in seventy-two hours, 2,000 miles of air travel, twenty conversations, three almost traditional love affairs, and one undercover session with devoted Anglican priest, heroic native leader, courageous Jewish advocate – whoever the current journalistic queen-ant might be.
Personally, I took little interest in South African politics, and still less in race relations. My family had played no small part in all these things, since 1750; and it now seemed to me high time for the Marais clan to take a rest, and concentrate on some kind of selfish personality cult, by way of a change.
Nor was I especially enamoured of visiting Englishmen who (if they were not rumpled, know-it-all journalists) were mostly those modern versions of the
rooinek –
terrible pink-faced City types, who arrived with £500 and a third-hand introduction to Harry Oppenheimer, and expected to assume control of the gold and diamond industries by the following weekend.
True, the English had made an unmatched contribution to my country, far greater than most Afrikaners (even non-Nationalists) would admit; their missionaries were opening up the country, and their soldiers stemming the black tide sweeping down from the north, when many of my ancestors were loafing down in Cape Town, complaining about the heat or slipping off to the slave quarters for a refresher course in sexual callisthenics. But latter-day Englishmen, with their E-string vocal chords and their intact colonial superiority, gave most of us a deep-seated pain which not even a title could assuage.
I woke from my acid daydream to hear Eumor say: ‘But this one is different, Kate. He is serious. He is going to remain a year.’
‘So long?’
‘He has written some earlier books also.’
‘All same Mickey Spillane.’
‘He is paid for by his publishers.’
‘Huh?’
Bruno – and this was exactly the sort of thing he ferreted out – explained. ‘Whoever they are, they’ve advanced enough money for him to live here a year, and write a book about it.’
That attracted my attention; all the publishers I knew were the hardest of hard-headed people, not at all given to this kind of wagering. ‘What sort of book?’
Bruno sniffed. ‘
With Rod and Gun in Darkest Johannesburg
,’ he said spitefully. ‘With full-colour illustration of the author wrestling a stockbroker in the lounge of the Canton Hotel.’
Eumor looked mystified. ‘Nonsense. It is a
roman
.’
‘Again?’
‘A romance. A novel.’
Sipping my brandy, I took another look at Jonathan Steele. This time our eyes met. He seemed to be smiling faintly. He must have been aware that we were talking about him.
‘You want to meet him?’ asked Eumor, the old-time fixer.
‘Yes.’
Close to, he was disappointing, for reasons grounded in a personal foible of mine. Whatever their size or shape, there is no reason why men should not be neat, clean, well-dressed; if we pay them the compliment of taking enormous trouble over our clothes, our make-up and our grooming, they should certainly be prepared to do the same. Rumpled suits, grubby cuffs, wrinkled ties, hair at the nape of the neck, yesterday’s shave – all these are within the spectrum of curable masculine faults.
Jonathan Steele was as clean as a new nail, but he
was
untidy, dressed in a rather shabby seersucker suit which should have been sent to the cleaners once more, that very afternoon, and then thrown away. His hair was suitable to a writer, his tie something less even than that. There was a further annoyance. Just as all women who wear high heels with slacks or a bathing suit look like whores, so all men in scuffed suede shoes carry with them a fatal air of poverty and neglect. Steele’s shoes were scuffed to the inner lining.
Eumor introduced him all round. He waited until I asked him to sit down. He lit my fresh cigarette with the minimum of delay and fuss. He looked at me with a neutral air, neither as if I were the target for tonight (the majority reaction), nor as if his time for such frivolous contacts was severely limited. He seemed in fact a shabby man with brains and good manners; slightly withdrawn, somewhat proud, inwardly confident, as if he alone had the secret but wasn’t boasting about it. An Irish face, vaguely; pale, lean, potent … In a horribly feminine way, I felt that he was working his way into my good opinion, just by sitting there. I didn’t like that at all.
I asked him what he would drink and, after looking round at all our glasses, he said: ‘Brandy, please,’ with that slight edge to his voice which indicated that brandy would be a treat. Fraternelli took the order, and went behind a screen to execute it. (For some reason, grounded in heaven-knows-what morass of religion, teetotal fanaticism, and misplaced care, women in South Africa were not allowed to see bottles actually uncorked in public; there was thought to be something inflammatory in the gesture though I should have thought the reverse operation was the more suggestive. No matter; the result was that there were no mixed-company bars open to our shy gaze.)
While we were waiting, I asked Jonathan Steele about his book.
‘It’s still in the planning stage,’ he answered, with diffidence. His voice was deeper than I had expected. ‘I’ve only been here three months. I’m still wandering around, and talking to people.’
‘What sort of people?’
He looked at me. ‘You probably wouldn’t know them.’
I didn’t like that either, though I disguised it with a mock sternness when I spoke next.
‘Tell me,’ I commanded, ‘exactly what people you talked to yesterday!’
He answered, with ironic deliberation: ‘I was in Pretoria. There was a Black Sash demonstration. I watched, and talked to some of the women.’
I made the usual face. The Black Sash was an organisation which had grown up during the last few years; its members (all women) followed Cabinet ministers around, or picketed them at their offices, or lined up outside the House of Assembly, standing completely silent and immobile, wearing a black sash to indicate that they were in mourning for our somewhat tattered Constitution.
It was a good tactic, and effective to a limited extent; the police didn’t appreciate it at all, and a number of Cabinet ministers had reacted with a degree of rudeness and crudity which showed that it had got well under their skins.
Steele noticed my expression, and asked: ‘Don’t you believe in the idea?’
‘In a way,’ I answered. ‘But I just don’t want to be a lady in a black sash.’
‘You just want to be a lady?’
Our drinks had arrived, and in the pause that followed his words we all sipped them, as if signalled to do so. Bruno was watching Jonathan Steele and myself, with malicious interest; it was the sort of thing I paid him to do, in other circumstances and with other people; now it was rather disconcerting.
‘I’m a working girl,’ I answered curtly. ‘My family have lived a long time in this country – two hundred years, to be exact. Good or bad, we feel it belongs to us. And good or bad, we can choose whether to get involved in politics, or whether to do something else instead.’
‘But I don’t see,’ he said, again with deceptive diffidence, ‘how you can possibly live in South Africa, and
not
get involved in politics.’
‘It would take too long to explain,’ I answered. ‘But you can.’
At that point, if I had been ten years younger and my mother still alive and present at the table, she would have raised her eyebrows gently yet decisively, and changed the subject to one of her own choosing; later, in her bedroom, she would have said to me: ‘Katherine, I did not bring you up to be rude to your guests, however
odd
they may be …’ It was true that Jonathan Steele had made me angry; and the process was still continuing.
I watched him now, smiling faintly as he surveyed the four of us over the top of his brandy
ballon
, and I put into my own mental quotation marks the things he was thinking and saying to himself, like the disgruntled, declamatory, round-the-table list one makes up in one’s head at a dull dinner party.
To Eumor he was saying: ‘
You are the classic type of financial juggler
.’
To Joel: ‘
You are the wrong kind of Jew
.’
To Bruno: ‘
You are a pansy. I don’t like them
.’
To myself: ‘
You are beautiful
,
and unimportant
.’
And to all of us: ‘
How can you play like children
,
living on top of this disgusting volcano
?’
It was therefore with the utmost surprise that I heard myself saying to Jonathan Steele: ‘If you’re not doing anything else this evening, come to our party.’
Apparently he was the only one who was not surprised; he answered: ‘Thank you – I’d like that very much,’ as if the invitation stemmed from a half-hour’s easy social intercourse. Eumor was staring at me in sardonic inquiry; Bruno frowned petulantly; Joel Sachs went so far as to choke on his Armagnac. But it was Joel, the perceptive Jew, and the only person at the table with a built-in, hereditary preference for peace, who smoothed the moment out.
‘That’s fine, Mr Steele!’ he said. ‘Marlborough Hotel, any time after six o’clock … I’m sure there’ll be a lot of people you know.’
‘Oh yes!’ said Bruno van Thaal, whose personal preference was for strife. ‘We’ve got the Black Sash running the bar.’
‘Then my constitution will be safeguarded,’ said Jonathan Steele, and rose to make his farewells.
I thought that a very adequate retort, and, in the circumstances, defensively brilliant. Watching Steele leave the restaurant, I was not sorry that I had invited him.
But I was in a minority.
‘Now why on earth did you do that?’ asked Bruno peevishly, as soon as Steele was out of earshot. ‘The Marlborough holds three hundred people in agonising discomfort, we’ve got three hundred and fifty coming for certain, and the people I
haven’t
asked are all in screaming sulks already. And yet you go and invite that
agitator!
’
‘I heard my mother whispering to me,’ I answered.
‘You and your mother,’ said Bruno, who had been fobbed off with this excuse for eccentricity on many similar occasions. ‘I wish you two would work out your timing beforehand.’
‘He was not in good humour,’ volunteered Eumor, belatedly conscience-stricken over his protégé. ‘But it will be a great book, I swear to you. I have listened to him talk. Brilliant!
Fantastique!
Fabelhaft!
’
‘Nuts!’ said Bruno, who was in a bad mood, and determined to stay there. ‘He’s not a genius – he just needs a haircut. I’ll bet you he never even writes a book.’
‘How much?’ asked Eumor.
‘One million pounds.’
‘Five hundred thousand,’ said Eumor prudently. ‘Cash.’
‘Done.’
‘Besides,’ I said, wishing for no special reason to make up some ground, ‘if he’s writing about South Africa he ought to meets lots of other people, besides those dreary Black Sash matrons.’
‘And
communists
,’ said Bruno darkly.
‘And natives.’
‘And Father Billingsgate, or whatever his name is.’
‘And the African National Congress.’
‘And us,’ concluded Joel Sachs, on a sensible note.
‘Gentlemen,’ I said rising, ‘Kate Marais Advertising has to do a little work. I’ll see you all in three hours’ time.’
‘If we can get into the hotel,’ said Bruno, ‘past all these
hordes
of new people.’
I walked back with Joel Sachs to our office on Commissioner Street. It was one of my favourite times of the day, in Johannesburg; the shadows were lengthening, the caverns of the streets were growing cooler, the first edition of the
Star
was just out and being bought at the street corners, where groups of people who looked as though they didn’t have a cent in the world thumbed through the stock-market prices, the race results from England, the sweepstake draws, the cars-for-sale.
These were the white men, poor and not-so-poor, but most of the other faces in the street were black, of course; we were outnumbered (for that was how an Afrikaner thought of it) nearly five to one in this city, and the main throng was native.
There were women selling lemons and pears and limes and pawpaws; women with babies strapped to their backs; women in brightly-coloured clothes, the élite from the native brothels. The men were office messengers; mine-boys trudging in convoy to the railway station; beggars squirming on the pavement; loafers; pickpockets; shabby black clergymen of the ‘bush Baptist’ variety; young idlers (whom we called
skellums
) on the lookout for the unlocked car, the coat or suitcase forgotten on a back seat, the handbag hanging open; the American tourists who were fair game for everyone.
From the groups playing dice at the street corners came an occasional pungent drift of
dagga
smoke, the home-grown version of
marijuana
which gave a man courage – sometimes too much courage for his own good.
On the sunny side of the street, the colours were gaudy and eye-catching; in the shade, we walked in a cool twilight, part of a restless drifting throng approaching with pleasure the idle hours of the day.