The Late Bourgeois World (11 page)

He doesn't worry about being seen, either. I know that he comes straight up through the front entrance of the building, so that the watchman, who sits on his box on the lookout for people sneaking up to the servants' rooms on the roof by way of the back stairs, won't bother him, and if he met the caretaker – somehow he doesn't – he'd spin her a plausible, breezy yarn to account for his presence, and get away with it, too. There are some Africans who can do these things; others can't move a step without getting entangled in the taboos all round their feet. I learnt that while Max was working with them. When he – Luke – stood in the doorway I realized that he is not present to me in any way when I don't see or hear him. He exists only when his voice is on the other end of the telephone or when he stands there like this, a large, grinning young man, filling his clothes. And yet I felt happy to see him. He is immediately
there
– one of those people whose clothes move audibly, cloth on cloth, with the movement of muscle, whose breathing is something one is as comfortably aware of as a cat's purr in the room, and whose body-warmth leaves
fingerprints on his glass. He came in heavily and I put down the catch on the Yale. ‘Good – great – good to see you …' He put his hands at once on the top of my arms and let them slide down towards the elbows, squeezing me gently. We stood there a moment, grinning, flirting. ‘And you, I'd forgotten what you look like …' ‘Hey, what's this, what's here – have I been away
so
long?' It was a light hair he had found and pulled out, on top of my head. ‘Nonsense, it's the newest thing. They do it at the hairdresser, it's called streaking …' It was a game; he gave me a little appraising lift, with the heel of the hand, on the outer sides of my breasts, as one says, ‘There!', and we went into the living room.

He was talking, wandering round the room, looking, touching here and there, to establish intimacy at once, to show that he was at home; or reading the signs – who had been there, what sort of claims had left their mark, what was the state of my life expressed there. I could see that – from the point of view of information – he missed the flowers that, to me, walking into a room like this, would have had something to say immediately. But, fairly familiar though he may be with the normal trappings of white people's homes, he's not familiar enough to notice the significant difference between a bunch of flowers that a woman like me might have bought on a street-corner, and an expensive bouquet
from a florist. ‘I came down on Tuesday – no, it was
very
late we left, Wednesday, early on Wednesday morning, really. Something wrong with the car –'

‘Naturally.' I held up the brandy bottle in one hand, the open wine bottle in the other.

‘Oh anything. Brandy. Well, the fan belt was gone and the chappie I was with –'

‘Aren't you here with the truck? How's old Reba?'

‘Okay; he just sticks at home these days and leaves me to do the moving around. He's had a lot of trouble with his wife – I don't know, she bumps into things without realizing. Something with the balance. The doctor can't find out. As a matter of fact, Reba said to ask you.'

‘Well, I'm not a doctor … it sounds like middle ear.'

‘Yes, that's right, that's what the doctor says, but she's not keen …' I laughed – ‘But she can't pick and choose – there simply is such a thing as a middle ear, and if its function is disturbed you can lose your balance.'

‘Well I know, but she's only got two ears, she says –' He wanted to make us laugh at African logic.

I gave him his brandy, and I went to the kitchen and quickly turned on the gas under the meat and mixed the dressing with the salad, using my unwashed hands as I always do when there's nobody to see.

He heard me clattering about in there and when I came out with the tray, I said to his broad smile, ‘What is it now?' and he said, ‘That's what I like about white girls, so efficient. Everything goes just-like-that.'

‘Oh, I'm making a special effort,' I said, putting the bread and salad and butter on the table.

‘Oh I'm appreciative,' he came back.

I was in and out, and each time I came into the living room he was an audience; then he held the baboon, amused, I could see in his face, full of curiosity, feeling that he had put his hand on my life – ‘So you've been fixing the monkey, eh? You keep busy all the time.'

‘It's Bobo's – my son.'

‘Nice thing for a little boy,' he said, stroking the fur with one finger.

‘Not so little any more. Maybe too old for it, now.'

‘Man, I could play with a thing like that myself.'

I don't know whether he's professionally affable or if he really experiences the airy, immediate response to his surroundings that he always shows. Sometimes, when his great eyes are steady with attention to what I'm saying, there's a flicker – just a hair's-breadth flicker – that makes me aware that he's thinking, fast, in his own language, about something else.

He said, smiling, holding me in the admiring, kidding gaze that I rather enjoy, ‘Can't you sit down and relax a while?' Much of his small talk is in the
style of American films he has seen, but it fits quite naturally, just as the rather too hairy, too tweedy jacket he wore was all right, on him. The delicious scent of onions stewing in butter grew as we talked. I asked about the Basutoland elections, and we were both content to warm up on neutral ground, so to speak. Then we got on to the position of the South African refugees there. He began to complain of the restrictions placed upon them by the British administration, referring to it as ‘your English friends', and I protested – ‘
My
friends? Why my friends? Though I pity the poor devils, having to deal with a pack of squabbling political refugees –' ‘A-ah, they play nicely along with the South African government, don't you worry,' he said. ‘Specially the PAC chaps,' I said. Our voices rose and we were laughing. ‘Beating each other up between speeches!' But under the laughter – or using the laughter – he veered away from the subject, that was too closely related to his visits to Johannesburg, would perhaps lead us too quickly to a point he would judge when to reach. I know that he doesn't come to see me for nothing. There's always a reason. Though once at least (the last time he came) he's gone away again without my finding out what it was; something must have indicated to him that he wouldn't get whatever it was that he wanted, anyway. He's nobody's fool, young Luke.

It was about ten when we got down to the food – it was sizzling and succulent the way it never is when someone else serves it up behind doors. He wanted a beer, but I was out of it, and so he carried on with the brandy and I had the lovely wine to myself. A few years ago I should have protested; I've developed a secret, spinsterish (or is it bachelor) pleasure in such small selfish greeds. (I in my flat, I suppose, and Graham in his house.) While it went down, warm as the temperature of the room, black-red, matt as fresh milk on the back of my tongue, I thought of how once – long ago, at the beginning – I said to Max, what would one do if somebody you loved died, how did one know how to go on? I always remember what he said: ‘Well, after even only a few hours, you get thirsty, and you want again – you want a drink of water …'

The dinner was so awfully good. It was like a feast. I said to the man with the smooth black face and long eyes, opposite me, ‘I don't know whether you saw in the paper; my husband is dead.' After I had spoken my heart suddenly whipped up very fast, as it does when you have got something out at last. And yet I hadn't thought about mentioning anything to this visitor; the day was over, it had no connection with the visit; the visit had no connection with anything else in my life, such visits are like the hour when you wake up in the
night and read and smoke, and then go to sleep – they have no context.

His mouth was full of food. He looked at me dismayed, as if he wanted to spit it out; I felt terribly embarrassed. ‘Christ, I didn't know. When was that?'

I said, ‘I've been divorced for ages, you know. I've had Bobo alone with me since he was quite small.'

‘The fellow in Cape Town – he was the one you were married to? I read about it but I –'

‘Yes, I had a telegram early this morning. I hadn't seen him or heard from him for a year.'

He kept saying, over again, ‘Good God … I didn't know, you see.'

I went on eating in order to force him to do so, but he sat looking at me: ‘Hell, that's bad, man.'

‘So what did you do, Liz, what'd you do?'

I could feel him watching me while I ate, spearing a piece of meat, scooping a few soft rings of onion on to it, and putting the fork in my mouth. When I had finished that mouthful, I sat back a bit in my chair and looked at him. ‘There's nothing to do, Luke. I drove out to the school, that's all, to tell my son.'

‘What about the funeral?'

‘Oh, that'll be in Cape Town.' I wanted to bring the facts of life home to him, so to speak.

‘So you're not going?' No doubt he was thinking of an African family funeral, with all feuds and
estrangements forgotten, and everyone foregathering from distant and disparate lives.

‘No, I won't be going.'

‘He
was
the husband,' he said.

‘Oh yes,' I said, ‘I know that. I've been thinking, he must have been the one for me. It couldn't have been much different.'

We size each other up entirely without malice. I don't pretend to know anything about him, except what I can pick up in his innocent, calculating, good-looking plump face, he interprets me entirely as an outsider – I the outsider – by the exigencies of the life he belongs to.

Slowly he began to eat again, we both went on eating, as if I had persuaded him to it. He said, ‘Wha'd'you think made him do it? Political reasons?' He knows, of course, that Max turned State witness, that time.

‘If he'd been one of your chaps he wouldn't have needed to do it himself, ay? Someone else would have stuck a knife in him and thrown him in the harbour.'

He said, ‘Hell, Liz, man, take it easy' – with a short snort of a laugh. But it's true; it's all so much simpler if you're black, even your guilt's dealt with for you. African State witnesses appear masked in court, but they can't count on lasting long.

‘You think he couldn't get it off his mind?'

I said, ‘Oh I don't know, Luke, I really don't know.'

‘But, man, you knew him from way back, you knew what sort of person he was, even if you haven't seen him lately.'

‘He wasn't the sort of person he thought he was.'

‘Ah, well.' He didn't want to risk speaking ill of the dead. I said, by way of comfort, ‘There are people who kill themselves because they can't bear not to live for ever' – I smiled with my lips turned down, in case he thought I was talking about an afterlife in heaven – ‘I mean, they can't put up with the limitations of the time they're alive in. Saints and martyrs are the same sort.' But he just said, ‘The poor chap, ay,' and I had a glimpse of myself as another white woman who talks too much. I offered him wine again. ‘No, I'll stick to this,' he said, so I filled up my own glass; drinks too much, too, I thought. But I was in a calm, steady mood, I never drink when I am in a bad one. We helped ourselves to more food, a to and fro of hands and dishes and no ceremony. He was telling me about Reba's scheme to build six freehold houses for better-off Africans round the Basutoland capital. ‘If Reba could only get someone to back him, he could really go ahead. He can get cheap bricks and cheap timber –'

‘But what sort of houses will they be!'

‘No, they're all right. Reba knows what he's doing. Did you ever know that fellow Basil Katz?
Yes, he's up there now and he's done some drawings and everything for Reba.'

I wasn't much interested, and it was easy to sound sympathetic. ‘The building societies won't play?'

‘No, man, of course not, they won't do it for a black. It's a shame. I'm sorry for Reba, he's dead keen and he knows he can get the cement and the bricks, and the timber – cheap, really cheap. And he's got the labour – you know, it's a good thing to show the Basutos you're providing employment – it's a good thing.'

‘I don't suppose he can offer enough security – what's it?'

‘Collateral. Yes, that's it. But if he was a white, it'd be a different story –' Talking business, he assumed, perhaps unconsciously, the manner that he thought appropriate, chair tipped back, body eased casually. ‘On, say, thirty thousand rand, reckoning on a return of ten per cent – well, call it eight – you can expect a profit of close to three thousand, d'you realize that?'

‘But is there anyone there to buy houses like that? Have they got the money – I mean I should have thought it would have to be a sub-economic scheme of some kind.'

‘They've got it, they've got it. And Reba knows how to get it out of them.' He spoke with the city man's contempt for country people. ‘Reba's in with
the Chiefs, man. You should see the cattle they've got. Not the poor devils up in the mountains! Reba goes and sits and drinks beer with them, and talks and talks, man, and he tells them how when independence comes the new African government's going to need houses for the ministers and people, in the town … he t-a-l-k-s to them …' Breaking into Sotho, he showed me Reba palavering with the yokels – watching, with a white flick of his long eyes, my laughter. I wondered what he was putting up the performance for; what he had come for. But I had forgotten about this at the moment when I said, ‘And that's what you're doing in Johannesburg, trying to raise money for the tycoon's houses' – and neatly gave away to him the opening he wanted.