As sometimes happened, she got my thought. Sipping her orange juice, she looked at me across the room, and then she said: ‘This is where we came in, isn’t it? … How’s the bottle going, Johnny?’
‘Very well.’
‘You’ve put on weight, haven’t you?’
‘About eight pounds. But it’s all good stuff. I’ve been eating rather a lot, for some reason.’
‘Eating? But you never eat anything.’
‘It must be going around with Erwin … You’ve got yourself a lovely tan, Kate. But I told you that last night, didn’t I?’ I toasted her in spiked tomato juice. ‘You were wonderful.’
‘Don’t sound so surprised.’ She had reached the coffee stage now, and with it came the new line of thought, the one I had been waiting for; and with that, we were off to the races. ‘Johnny, who’s Susan Crompton?’
Answering, I used the light tone, but not, I hoped, too light; Kate was an excellent judge of such revealing falsities. ‘She’s just a girl in one of Erwin’s shows.’
‘It sounds very convenient.’
‘It’s not like that at all. How did you hear about her, anyway?’
‘Somebody must have known I could read, so they sent me some material.’
‘Who, for God’s sake?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Oh … What a lousy trick.’
‘The master speaks.’
‘Oh, come on, Kate!’ I said, energetically. ‘You know what those gossip columns are worth.’
‘What’s this one worth?’
‘Absolutely nothing. I’ve met her a few times, and we’ve been out together.’
‘And she’s stunning, like the man said?’
‘In a show-girl sort of way.’
‘What sort of way is that?’
I took another drink before I answered: ‘I mean, she’s tall, and quite good-looking, and she’s in a show. There are a million girls like her.’
‘You must have been busy.’
I laughed: ‘You can’t do them all.’
‘Some people try.’
‘Well, not me,’ I said, moving up for a bit of opposition. ‘Good God, if you knew the amount of work I’ve been doing! I haven’t had time for that sort of thing, even if I’d wanted it.’
‘Why didn’t you want it?’
‘I just didn’t. There wasn’t any message. What’s the opposite of chemistry?’
‘Sophistry.’ But she was frowning. ‘When did you see her last, then?’
‘About a week ago. Maybe a bit longer.’
‘That must have been when I cabled.’
‘I suppose it was, if you want to figure it out.’
‘I want to figure it out … Why did you stop?’
That seemed a good moment for a flash of irritation, and it needed no special effort to produce it. ‘I didn’t
stop
anything. We went out a few times, and that was it. I’ve been out with all sorts of people. Jack Taggart, and Hobart Mackay. I was at a party with Lord Muddley, the other night. Remember that character?’
‘I remember Lord Muddley,’ she told me, ‘and I’m not too worried about you and him. I’m worried about stunning Susan Crompton.’
‘You needn’t be,’ I said shortly. ‘She’s just a girl.’
‘That’s not the most reassuring thing you’ve ever said.’ Now, in a curious move, she turned over on her side, and put her head back on the pillow, and addressed me via the nearest wall. ‘Johnny, don’t fool around. If you’re involved with her, I want to know about it.’
‘I’m not involved with her.’
‘Were you?’
‘No. It wasn’t like that at all.’
‘What was it like?’
‘We went out a few times. I told you.’
‘Where does she live?’
‘Down in the fifties somewhere.’
‘Somewhere? You mean you walk around till you suddenly meet her? Don’t overdo it, my friend.’
‘West Fifty-fourth Street.’
‘That’s better.’ She turned her head, till she seemed even farther away from me, her face buried in the pillow. I had a sudden, bitter, panicky thought that she was doing this because she had gone into mourning, for me and for us; because she did not want to watch my face when I was lying; because she knew the whole story, or thought she did, and would never be persuaded otherwise. Her voice muffled, she asked: ‘Is it over, Johnny?’
‘A thing can’t be over if it never got started.’
She answered me with some words spoken into the pillow, which I could not hear, and I said: ‘What?’
Her head turned, and suddenly she sat up to face me. ‘I said, white man speak with forked tongue,’ she told me, in a swift change of mood. ‘Madison Avenue jargon joke … Steele, I’ve had enough of Susan Crompton, and I’d like to be sure you have.’
‘Admitting nothing,’ I said, ‘I’ve had enough of Susan Crompton.’
‘How old is she?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘
Johnny!
’
‘Twenty-something. Twenty-five, maybe.’
‘I’ll find out, you know.’
‘Tell me when you do.’
We were fencing still, but it was not so serious now. Kate seemed to have accepted something; perhaps she had even begun to accept the actual facts as I knew them and as she suspected; but if this were so, she could have decided at the same time not to be worried or deeply wounded by them, because the thing must assuredly be over and done with, a part of the buried past.
Perhaps, when she had used the phrase ‘
post mortem
’, she had already been willing it so … The topic seemed to have been disposed of, for this particular session; and in my relief I felt she was entitled to a remark she made later that afternoon.
We were downstairs, after lunch. When the doorbell rang, Julia answered it, and returned with the message that it was ‘the electrician’; and then Kate went out into the hall, where I heard a man’s voice in conversation which I could not distinguish. When she came back, I asked: ‘Who was that?’
She answered, very calmly, out of the blue: ‘Just the man to see about the lie-detector.’
Good old Kate.
We had given half a day to one of the issues in contention; it had been quite long enough for me, and if there were loose strings still untidily showing, they were not enough to trip a strong and wary man. But it appeared that we had two such topics to discuss; and for the second, I presently began to think that the rest of her life might not be enough. At nightfall, after a dinner enlivened by lots of homecoming champagne, and one of Julia’s nicest South African dishes, a sort of Cape-Malay version of stuffed eggplant which they called
brinjals
, we came to Kate’s chief concern.
The meal had supplied the clue. It was South Africa itself. As a matter of distraction, I welcomed the fact that it seemed so very important. But before long I realised that this welcome was likely to be overstayed.
She started with Maraisgezicht, her home, and why she had not been able to leave it for so long. It was, I had to admit, a sad story; and as she sat there, her legs stretched out on the zebra-skin couch, looking young and very pretty in a dress so elegant, severe and simple that it could only have been available to an heiress, I found myself moved by both pictures.
Kate was the one I preferred. But in essence, she was not there any more. She was far away, staring up at the façade of her great house, wandering through its rooms, trying to take care of its people, her people.
‘I couldn’t just walk in, and then out again,’ she told me. Her face was serious, and troubled; it was clear that this was a picture which had never left her, which she had brought back to keep her company and to grieve over. ‘Dad had been ill for such a long time. I’d always thought that the place would run itself, even if he weren’t there to watch over it, because it’s been going for so long, more than two hundred years, in the same mould. But that wasn’t true. It needed him, and if not him, then someone like him. Otherwise, it was just falling apart.’
‘But what about the agent?’ I asked. ‘Weren’t there two of them? What were they doing?’
She was frowning even more deeply. ‘One of them died, and the other–’ she paused, ‘–the other, I had to get rid of.’
‘Why?’
‘Because he didn’t deserve anything else. He was an Afrikaner, of course; one of my own people. He used to be very good at his job. But he’d changed, like so many other Afrikaners. He’d become brutal, Teutonic, harsh – all the bad words. I was ashamed of him, and so were the people he was overseeing. Ashamed and puzzled, like when a friend suddenly becomes your jailer, like it must be when one’s parents get divorced, or start hitting each other, or punishing their children for no reason beyond the pleasure of it … Anyway, he had to leave. He could go and play Hitler anywhere else, as far as I was concerned. But not on my money. Not at Maraisgezicht.’
‘But someone had to run the place. It must need a lot of discipline.’
She shook her head from side to side. ‘Not discipline like that. Not a private cage, with a long whip, and a bunch of mangy lions to use it on … The big Cape Province estates have never been run like that, and they don’t have to be … Do you remember meeting Simeon? Simeon Marais, the major-domo?’
I nodded. ‘A proud man.’
‘Not any more. By the time I got there, he’d become absolutely brutalised. Koopman – that’s the agent – used to treat him like an animal, like a dog he didn’t like. Simeon had never had to learn tricks like that – servile tricks, jumping and running with a man shouting at him, hitting him … But he’d learned them now …
And he’s an eighth generation Simeon Marais!
’ She put her hand up to her temples, in despair, in remembered pain. ‘It was like that all over Maraisgezicht. It was disgusting, repellent! So I got rid of Koopman, and the night he left they all came and thanked me, and I don’t know if there were more people crying than laughing.’
‘But you know an agent doesn’t have to behave like that. You could get another one, a good one.’
She shook her head again, more vigorously. ‘It’s
my
house, and they are
my
people. How can I leave them to be handled by strangers? They need me, Johnny. Most of them knew me when I was a little girl. Some – a few – can remember my father when he first went off to school in Cape Town. On a red pony, they said, with a satchel of books, and a little shotgun for luck … I can’t leave people like that. I have to take care of them, and of Maraisgezicht. With all that money, I can do it. It can be a great house again, with hundreds of people who can count on working there all their lives, working as men … I can do it. But I have to be there, to make sure that things go right.
We
have to be there.’
This was fast becoming a fantasy, with tentacles which might stretch anywhere, with undertones of fact which I did not like at all. I tried to ward off my share of it.
‘I don’t think I’d exactly fit in there, Kate. Can you honestly see me helping you to run Maraisgezicht? Or lending a paternal hand with the labour force, with my little shotgun in my hand? It’s not my line, it never was, and it never could be.’
‘You
would
fit in!’ she insisted. ‘But in a different way, an even better way. You could try to do for South Africa what I would try to do for Maraisgezicht.’ And as I looked at her in astonishment: ‘It’s true. There’s a desperate need for people like you.’
I laughed, in absolute disbelief. ‘The jails must be full of them.’
‘That’s exactly it! All South Africa is going that way, and unless people who know the country, and love it, and want to change it, agree to come to the rescue, it’s going to go down in ruins.’
She paused, but it was only for breath. She seemed ready to break over me with an even bigger wave, an avalanche of argument which truly took me by surprise. I scarcely recognised her tonight. She had left me a simple traveller, and returned as a messiah with a message.
‘I was wrong about South Africa,’ she said after a moment. ‘I was wrong, and you were right.’ And as she saw me ready to disagree, she held up her hand for the floor. ‘I mean it. I was wrong about not getting involved. One
must
get involved. Anything else is simply cowardice. Anyone who doesn’t speak out now doesn’t deserve to have a tongue to speak with.’
‘But what on earth is the use of speaking out? I told you – you just end up in jail.’
‘Then keep out of jail!’ she answered forcefully. ‘Keep on the right side of those monstrous laws. It’s not too difficult, for a clever man. But you must still do something about them. It’s not too late – I’m sure of that – but very soon it will be.’
Unwisely, I asked: ‘What monstrous laws?’
‘You read about them in the papers,’ she answered, ‘and often it doesn’t mean much. You tend to think: people don’t go to prison for nothing, people deserve what they get if they try to defy the law. It’s not true any more! South Africa is becoming a colossal jail, for anyone who doesn’t keep to one line of thought and one single conviction – that things are going to stay as they are forever. If you show the least sign of resisting, you can be labelled a communist, or a criminal, or a traitor, and you might as well be dead. They just take you out of circulation. You can be imprisoned for anything! I found that out at first hand.’
That sounded like a brand new item. Pouring out some more champagne – it seemed a good night to stay with the grape – I asked: ‘What happened?’
Kate was very ready to tell me. ‘As soon as we got there,’ she said, ‘we found that Julia’s brother was in trouble. Bad trouble. Her mother hadn’t told Julia anything about it, because she was afraid to write. He was in jail. He’d been there for eight months. Something to do with that fatuous treason trial. Treason!’ She positively ripped the word out. ‘He works on the railways – just a man with a hammer, some kind of maintenance work – and he joined a protest meeting up in the Transvaal, trying to improve union rights for coloureds, and the police stuck a communist label on the movement, and rounded everyone up, and suddenly Julia’s brother was awaiting trial for treasonable activity against the republic. And he’s still being held.
‘We were in Johannesburg,’ she went on, ‘because Dad was in the hospital there, and that was where her brother was in prison, so I told Julia to try and see him, or get a message to him, in case he wanted anything – and the next thing that happened,
she
was in jail too. It was absolutely monstrous! They came and picked her up for questioning, one day when I was out. She was completely terrified, of course. She wasn’t even able to leave a message for me. They asked her where she’d been lately, and when she said New York, they suddenly started asking her streams of questions about who she knew in America, and if she belonged to any clubs, and whether she’d brought any letters or messages over – things like that. They kept her there for three days, interrogating her all the time, trying to link her with what her brother was supposed to be doing, before they even let me know about it. Then it took another two days to get her out, and it would have taken longer if I hadn’t put every lawyer in town onto the job, and all the newspapers as well.’