A World of Strangers (18 page)

Sam's house was in another township, a rather better one. The core of most of the houses was brick, even if the usual extensions of tin and hessian had accreted round them. I went there with Steven one night for supper, and when we walked through the yard-smell of ammonia and wood-smoke, to which I was by then accustomed, with the strange, conglomerate night-cry of the township about us, and the dim lights and the sudden, intimate voices of the houses that shared the yard, close to us, and through the door that opened abruptly from two uneven concrete steps, I was
bewildered. I might have stepped into a room ‘done over' by some young couple in a Chelsea flat. Green felt deadened the floor underfoot. There was a piano, piled with music. A record player in what all cabinet makers outside Sweden consider to be Swedish style. A divan with cushions. A red lamp. All along one wall, a bookcase made of painted planks and bricks. At the window, a green Venetian blind dropped its multiple lids on the township. Sam's wife, Ella, pretty and shy, served a roast lamb and potato dinner with a bottle of wine, and afterwards the four of us listened to a Beethoven quartet and then to Sam, playing some songs of his own composition.

Steven wanted to go to a shebeen when we left. It was run by a man who was part Indian, part African, part white, and a Basuto woman with the proportions of a whale who called me ‘master' in the intimate obsequiousness of a house servant who knows the family too well. Steven knew everybody there, flirted with the shrill coloured tarts who, drunk, reminded me of pantomime dames, and had about himself generally an air of sophistication and relief. He stood beside me, at last, twisting his cheap signet ring with the bit of red glass in it fondly, as if its shoddiness pleased him. ‘A place like Sam's is all right,' he said, ‘but it costs too much.'

‘His wife's got quite a well-paid job, too, I gather, so I suppose they can manage,' I said. I had already got over the bewilderment of the difference between what was well-paid for blacks and what was well-paid for whites; just as one becomes accustomed to translating values from one's own currency to that of a foreign country in which one has lived for a little time. And I had learned to accept too, without embarrassment, the fact that I, with my not-very-generous salary, and my flat all to myself, was a rich man when I was in the townships.

‘I don't mean just money. The effort and trouble. Keep up a place like that in a location. All the dirt, the easy-going, all round you. Imagine the way the neighbours look at you; you're like a zoo! All the old women want to come and peer in the door to see what people do in such a house.' Like most exhibitionistic people, Steven was a good mimic.

I laughed. ‘Still, it's an achievement to manage to live that way, in a location.'

‘Ah,' said Steven, ‘that's it. It's a showplace.' He assumed a high falsetto, parody of some white woman's voice he must have heard somewhere: ‘“. . . an oasis of culture, my dear!” Is it a king's house, a millionaire's house? Man, it's just an ordinary way to live.'

I saw what he meant. If living decently, following a modest taste for civilized things, meant living eccentrically or remarkably, one might prefer to refuse the right masquerading as a privilege.

‘Why should I guard like a cave of jewels,' he said, changing his sharp-eyed fake ring from one finger to another, ‘a nice little house that any other man can have anywhere he likes in a street full of such houses?' And he grinned at me with that careless aplomb, shrugging his shoulders and looking down his nose at himself, that gave him such an air, and always, wherever we went in the townships, drew the young bloods about him to hear what he would say next.

He was, without question, the most ‘popular' person I have ever known. I put the word popular between the quotes of the suspect, because to me it connotes a man who gets the most votes in a presidential election at a golf club, and I don't mean that sort of popularity. Perhaps ‘loved' would be a better word. But he wasn't exactly loved, either; he was too impersonal and elusive for that. I think they gloried in him, those hangers-on – they gloried in his white man's ways produced unselfconsciously in their company, like a parlour trick that looks easy enough for anyone to learn. Looking always as if they'd just sheepishly awakened from a sleep with their clothes on, they sought something: was it the gum they pushed ceaselessly from one side of their mouths to the other, like the Americans do? Would the latest slang, in English, do it? Or the sports shirt with the pink and black collar? They did not know; they had not found out yet. But Steven had; they could see it, there he was. He had not gone under beneath his correspondence college B.A. the way black men did, becoming crushed and solemn with education, and the fit and cut of that aspect of the white man's
Johannesburg that dazzled them most hung on him as comfortably as his well-tailored jacket.

Feckless, aimless, like creatures flopping in the sand in evolution from water to land, they saw his slippery-footed ease between the black man's element and the white. He was something new, and they worshipped the new, which lack of possessions made them believe must always be the better. He was a new kind of man, not a white man, but not quite a black man, either: a kind of flash – flash-in-the-pan – produced by the surface of the two societies in friction.

It never seemed odd or extraordinary to me that Steven himself, free of so many rooms, houses, shacks, and shebeens, had no particular place to live, during the time I knew him. He once told me that he had no idea how many times he had moved, in his lifetime; he had lost count. He had been born in a location in one of the Reef gold-mining towns, and except for his year in England, he had been moving from one township to another, from one room to another, ever since.

I could not imagine what sort of place would have been right as home, to Steven.

It was on a Sunday morning, after a party to celebrate the first of Steven's moves since I had known him, that I went to see Cecil Rowe. The party was a warming- and naming-party for a house in a rakishly dingy part of Sophiatown where Steven had taken a room, in the company of his other bachelor cronies. It seemed to me highly unlikely that they were really living there, for there was little evidence of furniture or clothes – in fact, the place had the stunned and stripped look of a house that has been moved out of, rather than into – but it was blessed with jazz and brandy (someone even brought along a birthday cake) and it was duly named The House of Fame. (‘What's it famous for?' I asked, and Steven said, ‘Me, of course.') The party ended
about one on the peculiar note of promise of African parties, with all the men drifting off cheerfully into the dark to other assignations. I gave one or two of the lesser hangers-on lifts to various parts of the township, whose steep streets were still alive with strollers, tsotsis, lovers, quarrels, people singing, and drunks, and drove back to the shut-down quiet of the white town. My steps rang up the stairwell of the flats, and I had a sudden wave of homesickness that took the form of a vivid sense of a corner off Ebury Street, just below a little garden with wall-flowers smelling sweet and cold at night, where I used to go, one spring, to the flat of a girl with whom I was in love.

In the morning this mood of alienation persisted slightly – like most homesicknesses, it was for what I should have liked to have had, rather than what I really had left behind – and I thought I would go to church. There were bells ringing tangledly through the clear air while I bathed and shaved carefully and put on a blue suit. I walked vaguely in the direction where I remembered having seen a small Anglican church, and found myself there in less than ten minutes. Little girls with curled hair, dangling handbags, hung about their mothers; there was a strong smell of brilliantine in the group outside the church, and a strong smell of floor-wax inside. It was a cottagey-looking building and the priest was to match; he seemed embarrassed by the prayers he offered, and doubtful about the intercession of his blessing. He took as his text ‘Without me ye can do nothing' and he advocated Christ as if he were suggesting a course of vitamin pills; the congregation listened politely. The whole service was very Low, and I decided that I would try the Cathedral in town, next time.

But at least when I came out I was prepared to accept the fact that this place in which I found myself was not the blue-grey Cotswold village, calm as a shadow, where, of my family, only my grandmother and I sometimes sat in church in the empty pew that had once belonged to our family; and I respected the flat statement of the sunlight, hitting everything full on, and the chipped façade of the corner Greek shop opposite the church, and the two Africans sitting with
their feet in the gutter, drinking lemonade and carrying on a conversation that could have been heard three blocks away, and the pretty plump Jewish girls swinging down the road in their Sunday shorts, and the shoddy suburban houses, ready for the knockout of the demolition gang after only twenty or thirty years – respected the place for being itself.

It was then that I noticed the street-name and realized that I must be quite near where Cecil Rowe had told me she had a flat. On an impulse I let the steep gradient push me down the hill like a hand in my back, and, half way down, there it was – a building that was newer and more pretentious-looking, if not better than the one in which I lived. In the front, there were wind-torn rubber plants in bright pots, and a mosaic mural in the foyer representing a Zulu girl, a water-pot, and a beehive hut against a lot of saw-tooth greenery; but, as I thought, the open corridors behind, which led to the flats, were the usual grimly functional thoroughfares, full of drifts of soot and dirty fluff, empty milk bottles and garbage bins.

The Rowe girl's flat was on the ground floor. I rang and rang and was just about to turn away, when I heard the soft slap of bare feet coming down a passage and someone struggled with the lock, giving muffled exclamations of exasperation, and at last flung the door open.

‘My God, I thought it was the Salvation Army,' she said. ‘Hullo, it's you – come in. Where've you sprung from?'

‘I've been to church, it's just near here.'

She looked at me as if I were joking; then her expression changed to one of curiously feminine curiosity, that expression women get when they think you may be about to give away some aspect of yourself you really had not intended to let slip.' Church? You don't mean to say you go to church?' She sounded most disbelieving.

‘Yes of course I do. At home I go quite regularly.'

She burst out laughing; embarrassed, gleeful laughter, as if she'd discovered that I wore corsets.' Well, I'm surprised at
you,'
she said. ‘I mean, you're such an intellectual and all that.'

I can't explain why, but I was somehow touched and reassured, in myself, by her out-of-date, six-thousand mile distant, colonial notion of an ‘intellectual' as a free-thinking, Darwinian rationalist. It pleased me to think that to her, God was simply old-fashioned; it was better than to suspect, as I sometimes did of myself, that God was merely fashionable again.

‘Come in,' she said, and certainly she was not dressed for lingering conversation in the doorway. She trailed before me into the living-room, in a splendidly feminine but grubby dressing-gown, and settled herself on a hard chair at the table, her bare feet hooked behind the bar of the chair, and her hand going out at once for a cigarette. (I imagined how it was with just that gesture that she would grope for a cigarette the moment she woke up in the morning.) It was over'a month since I had seen her, and if she had appeared in a different guise each time I had encountered her before, these were nothing to the change in her now. I suppose no man ever realizes how much of what he knows as a woman's face is make-up; I know that my sister has often hooted in derision when I have remarked on some girl's wonderful skin (You could take an inch off with a palette knife, my poor simpleton!) or the colour of another's hair (It costs pounds to keep it like that!). This waxy, sunburned face with the pale lips and the sooty smudges round the eyes was older and softer than the other versions of it I had seen, there were imperfections of the skin, and habits of expression which grew out of the prevailing states of feeling in her life that I did not know, had made their fine grooves. Yet I recognized this face instantly; it was the one that had attracted me, all the time, beneath the others.

‘I drank a lot of vodka last night,' she said. ‘Have you ever tried it? It's true it doesn't give you a hangover, but I feel as if my blood had evaporated, like a bottle of methylated spirits left uncorked. Do you know any Poles? There are a lot of Poles here, now. Perhaps, you've met the Bolnadoskys – Freddie and Basha, a lovely blonde? We were in their party and of course Poles can drink any amount of anything.'

‘How's the modelling been going? Not off to Italy yet?'

‘Oh that.' I might have been referring to something out of her remote past.' I've been riding morning noon and night, training for the show. You knew that Colin and Billy asked me to jump Xantippe? I came third with her, two faults, in the Open.'

I remembered that Colin and Billy were the names of the twins I had met at the Alexanders', but I was not sure about Xantippe. She saw this and said,' You've heard of Xantippe, of course?'

‘What a shrew.'

She frowned. ‘Nonsense, people are jealous of her. Once she knows you won't stand any cheek, she's the most obedient horse in the world.'

‘I
was
talking nonsense. What about Xantippe?'

‘Well, she's the most famous horse in this country, like Foxhunter in England – surely you've heard of him?'

We had some coffee, brought in by a pretty, giggling African girl who wore a lot of jewellery, and Cecil said, ‘Oh Eveline, you are a pet,' and talked on about the horse show in which she had taken part.