A World of Strangers (2 page)

The shop was full of people from the ship now – they kept coming in, as, in passing, they saw fellow passengers already inside, and soon every woman was fired with the desire to own a topaz. Some were arguing over carats and price, and one man, proud of his ability to deal with ‘the natives' of any country, was informing the jeweller that if an expert in Johannesburg pronounced the stones synthetic, he would sue the Indian jeweller. Rina, long hip jutting as she leaned against the counter, was giving her opinion of each purchase in her loudest, highest English voice, and swooping about from group to group. ‘What?' she called, looking up over the huddled bargaining heads. ‘No, I'm not coming. Mummy, you are frightfully mean! Can't I have even a weeny
one? Look at this smoky little thing.' Her mother went over to her and they spoke in the low voices of controlled argument for a moment, but Stella joined me at the door, without her. ‘Come. Let's be off,' she said, shortly, because she was angry. But her good manners and the pleasing facade of even temperament she had been taught as a girl immediately gave cover to irritation. She said lightly, ‘I wonder what the story is behind the consul and that poor little creature?'

‘Well, she is rather awful, isn't she? I mean you feel annoyed at his being so obviously ashamed of her, and at the same time you wouldn't really care to have a wife like that for yourself.'

‘Oh she's vulgar, all right,' said Stella. ‘But so are
they
in their way – don't you think? – Such official-looking impeccability, such diplomatic immunity from life itself! And that dragonish queenly old lady, with china tea in her veins and venom in her heart, I'm sure. Have you looked at their nostrils, those two? Positively curled back.'

I laughed. ‘What's that significant of?'

‘I'm always afraid of those nostrils,' she said wisely. Of course, Stella was just the sort of woman to believe in physiognomy and signs and portents, too.

‘Oh I do think people are
fascinating!
Don't you?' She was instantly buoyant again at the thought; she paused as we walked, overcome with an urgency of eagerness. I had noticed in her these very real moments of excitement and relief, when as now, by the pronouncement afresh of some commonplace generality, she reaffirmed or rediscovered for herself some concept of life that was important to her and which she sometimes lost or feared to lose.

As I have said, there was something about this woman which made one feel surly if one did not respond, as it was so easy to do, to the mood generated by her enthusiasms, even if one did not happen to share the enthusiasms themselves. I don't think I find people ‘fascinating' in quite the way she meant, but, just the same, we talked and laughed in a shared inconsequential lightheartedness all the way in the taxi that took us to Nyali Beach.

She was undressed before I was – I suppose she must have
had her swimming suit on under her dress – and by the time I came out from behind my clump of bushes, clutching the rolled-up bundle of my shirt and trousers, she was already in the pale turquoise, transparent sea. Although (I calculated) she would be of the generation of the Twenties, when girls ‘did everything' perhaps even more determinedly than they do now, her demeanour in the water immediately set her apart from the generation of the girls I knew and with whom I had swum at home, or on holidays in Italy or France. She did not swim at all, but floated gently, tamely, and conversationally, close in-shore. She did not wear a bathing cap, and her short, pretty blonde hair, like the make-up on her pretty face, remained perfect. You could see that all her life her body had been carefully shielded from the sun, and in place of the tanned legs and arms and the yellowish-brown necks I was used to associating with women, all her flesh shone pale and pearly under the shallow water and against the swimming suit which was a darker tone of the water colour. It was a remarkably youthful and pretty body (I'm afraid forty seemed old to me, for a woman), though not like a girl's, softer than a young girl's, and I admired it, though oddly enough I didn't find I desired it I felt sorry I didn't desire it; I supposed I was conditioned for ever to firm-fleshed girls with the limits of carefully-cultivated sunburn imposing a pattern counter to the pattern of their bodies.

I swam about a bit and then floated in the tepid calm with her for nearly an hour. After the dreary wet summer and the cold wet autumn at home – after a whole lifetime of dreary English winters and wet English springs – I was enchanted with the slack, warm beauty of the place. I seemed to feel an actual physical melting, as if some component of my blood that had remained insoluble for twenty-six years of English climate had suddenly, wonderfully, dissolved into free-flowing. I gazed in lazy physical joy at the lovely, smooth-patterned boles of the coconut palms, waving their far-off bouquets of green away above our heads, the water, and the white beach. I lifted an arm out of the water to feel the air, warm as the water. I dug my feet into the clean
sand, so soft its substance was soft as the water. The last jagged crystal in my English blood melted away.

But Stella Turgell talked of Italy. Warmth and beauty and physical happiness meant Italy to her, though they might be experienced on a beach on the East Coast of Africa. She and her daughter had just spent nearly two months in Florence, and apparently Stella spent several months of each year somewhere in Italy – in Rome, Perugia, Venice, Garda, and, always, Florence. They did not seem to me to be really rich people, and I wondered what circumstances in their background gave them this freedom. Stella's passion for Italy was nineteenth-century, Byronic – the nearest I can possibly bring it to the present day is to say that when it came to Italy and all things Italian, she saw everything like one of those young girls in Forster's early novels about the English in Italy, girls who marry the libertine sons of dentists in places with names like Poggibonsi, or whose lives are changed irrevocably after being spectator to an Italian quarrel in an Italian square. The Italy of Moravia and the realist films did not exist for her. Her way of talking about Italy embarrassed me, even when we confined ourselves to discussing paintings and churches, though my mood that day when we were floating in the sea was such that nothing could irritate or embarrass me more than mildly.

As she talked I saw that her months in Italy were her life, so far as she was concerned; the rest of her time, spent, apparently, between her mother's home in Devon and her husband's farm in Northern Rhodesia, was impatiently and almost blindly lived through. Her only comment on the stay in Africa to which this voyage which we were sharing was carrying her, was to remark, closing her eyes and wrinkling her nose in pleasure at the breeze: ‘Well, six weeks from now, we'll be on our way back. Not this way, of course. West Coast.'

‘To Europe?'

‘England. But not for long. By April I'll be back at Pensione Bandolini.'

I pictured her, endlessly, tunelessly, coming down a hill road in Florence in the sunshine, a parasol open behind her
head, pausing to smile at a bambino in the dust, waving her fluttering greeting and calling out in her clear English-voiced Italian to some peasant woman with black eyes, a black-downed lip, and ‘character'. The road, the child, the peasant – all were unreal. . . . I said: ‘Have you never lived in Africa?'

She said, without opening her eyes, ‘Rina was born in Rhodesia. When she was very young, I did.'

I wanted to say – that impossible question, idiotic, irresistible when you are on your way to live in a new country: What is it like? But I was aware that the fact that I was going out to live in Africa, and the fact that she was bound to it in some way, was a bond about which we never spoke; was something she would see that we stepped over or around, conversationally – something accepted and therefore not worth discussing, was it not? – her manner always seemed to imply, passing on rapidly and easily to the enchanting things about us, or left behind in the Mediterranean.

There was a moment of silence, and then she went on, lightly, almost as if I had spoken after all, ‘You must have an active and not a contemplative nature, to take Africa. My husband adores it. He rushes about the farm, completely absorbed from morning till night. The people are quite terrible. I shall never forget them. Their awful dinner parties. Awful food. Same people, same food, year after year, simply at this one's house this week, someone else's house the next Nothing to talk of but crops, female complaints, servants. Ugly, ugly. Nothing but ugliness.'

Suddenly she opened her eyes and drew herself upright, rising out of the water, and, shining, eager, she brought out one of her paralysing generalities again: ‘Beauty is
the
most important thing in life, don't you think so?'

When people come out with statements like that, I always feel that I do not know what they are talking about. I flounder before this bold snatching-up put of the half-sensed, dimly-realized things I have only now and then thought I might have touched for a moment. Is this great glittering flashy fish what it was that brushed my hand then and then, rarely? Is that all – this impossible great artefact? I recoil
from it. If that's the case, I shan't let my perception wander down
there
again.

I was sure that whatever this woman meant by ‘beauty', whatever the word was a cover for,
was
the most important thing in her life. But I could not answer for it for myself, certainly not yet, not then. I said something empty, noncommittal, the kind of remark Americans put with glee into the mouths of the English in films. We came out of the water together, and parted to dress.

Just as we were walking back over the sand to where our taxi was waiting under the palms, we saw the long-legged figure of Rina, flying down a path through the bushes toward us. Some people from the ship who had hired a taxi to take a look around had dropped her at the beach. ‘Here, darling,' said Stella, throwing her swimming suit to the girl. ‘Hop in quickly. It's heavenly.' But Rina would not swim. Stella went back to her dressing-place to fetch a towel she had forgotten, and the girl said, nibbling at a leaf she had in her hand: ‘I'm so glad mummy's had such a lovely morning.' I thought, what an odd, patronizing child she is; what queer creatures English girls' schools turn out. (Already I found myself thinking of England and English institutions objectively.)

The taxi took the three of us up to the beach hotel and waited while we had tepid gin slings and a poor lunch. ‘Ugh!' Stella made a face, though she laughed: ‘The moment you put your foot back here. Anything does.'

The warm gin made me feel benevolent. I even found myself bantering quite pleasantly with Rina. ‘We should have found an Indian restaurant in the town,' she said.' I'd have liked something hot and sharp to eat.'

We decided, anyway, not to risk the hotel coffee, but to go back to town and look for an Arab café. We did not find one, but trailing back in the direction of the docks, we passed a place that looked like an unsuccessful compromise between a continental café and a tea-shop. It was not quite open to the street and not quite enclosed. People sat, raised back from the street, and looked out from behind the briars and scrolls of a wrought iron shopfront which had been put
up in place of the customary glass. The consul and his two women were sitting there, and they called down to us. We were burningly thirsty and we went in and sat at an adj-joining table. The consul's party were just finishing lunch, and their coffee looked terrible, so, rather foolishly, at half past two on an afternoon of great heat, I ordered John Collinses for us. The place smelled of grilled steak and the drinks were a long time coming. A big fan went slowly in the middle of the ceiling, cutting up and pushing round shoal after shoal of warm air; it was odd to feel the movement of air past one's face, entirely without the coolness associated with such movement. The place was almost empty and against the imitation log-cabin bar, a tall African waiter in a limp white robe and a red fez slept bolt upright. He wore fancy socks and a shabby version of the sort of pointed-toed patent dancing-shoes I had once seen in my father's cupboard. His was the sweaty monkey-face that I associate with the few new-born babies I've been unable to avoid seeing; the sweat made it interesting by creating planes and highlighting creases that gave it that same innocent ancientness. The consul, who was sitting back with his elbow hooked round one of the iron curlycues on his chair, saw me looking at the man and waved his hand; a hand that, in movement, always looked as if it were giving an order. ‘There you are. Can you believe in the Mau Mau, here? We're only three hundred miles from Nairobi, this is Kenya. You couldn't credit it. Pangas and burnings. . . . And look at
that.
Wouldn't want to harm a fly. . . .' As if to prove the consul's point, a fly settled on the sleeping face and crawled up the left cheek from mouth to eye.

The amused bewilderment that must have shown rather stupidly on my face at that moment was not so much a sharing of the consul's incredulity at the sight of the waiter in the face of facts, as a sudden realization about myself. I had spent the day in Mombasa like Sinbad the Sailor, seeking with my northern blood the old voluptuous adventure of warm seas and idleness in the sun. What about all the books I had read before I left England, all those books about Africa I had been reading for the past three or more years?
The bluebooks, the leaflets, the surveys, the studies – the thick ones by professors of anthropology and sociology, the thin ones by economists and agronomists, the sensational ones by journalists? How far away was the scene of the Mau Mau situation in which my circle of friends and family had been so intensely interested, now that I was three hundred miles near to, instead of six thousand miles away from it?

I sat and drank my sweet drink and did not feel even the mildest self-reproach. In fact I felt rather pleased with myself, as if I had been absolved from one suspicion of priggishness, bookishness I had harboured against myself. I simply did not care at all. I had not made any attempt whatever to use the day; I hadn't presented the letter of introduction I'd been given to a prominent government official, I hadn't tried to see for myself anything of African labour conditions, housing, or political emergence. I began to feel overwhelmingly sleepy; I still found the big, wide, lax heat (like being involved in one of creation's enormous yawns) pleasurable, my veins widened, my pores opened to it The two pretty women (I supposed one must admit that Rina was pretty too, if one considered the small head without its relation to that long body on which it was perched) looked very nearly female, instead of feminine, as if the food and liquor that relaxed their faces and the heat that made their hair cluster damply had melted away, along with the powder, that English cast of beauty – a real cast, in the concrete and not the figurative sense of the word – from which I have suffered all my life; yes, even as a child, even in the face of my mother.