A World of Strangers (21 page)

‘Oh, I want to get in!' she said, rattling at the french doors that led on to the terrace. I looked up and around. Someone had begun to make alterations to the upper story of the house, but had never finished; there were builders' planks and ropes about, and raw brickwork gaped where half a gable had been taken away. We struggled and laughed while I tried to lift her to test a likely-looking window, with a broken pane, but it was round the side of the house where there was no terrace to shorten the distance from window to
ground, and she couldn't reach the latch. We became idiotically determined to get in. ‘Wait a minute! What if we brought Danny round and you got on his back?' ‘No, let's try the kitchen first.' At this, she turned and ran ahead of me through the yard and shook at the kitchen door; it was fast, and she left it at once, in the manner of someone merely satisfying another that he will have to resort to her plan, and ran up the three steps to the next door and took its handle firmly in both hands. But as she touched it, it gave way. She looked round at me, astonished and smiling. And we trooped in. It was the scullery door, and from it we went into the kitchen. ‘Natives must have broken in,' she said. There was a chaos of emptiness and smashed glass; the cupboards had been wrenched open, the light fittings lay spintered like hoar frost upon the floor: the moment when it had been ransacked seemed to grip it still. In the passage and the living-rooms, mice-pills were all about the floor, and everywhere, through all the empty rooms, drifts of silvery down, blown in from the catkins in the garden, lifted and sank in the draught of our passing.

‘This must have been a nice room,' she said, placing herself at the french doors and looking out through the dirty glass from the context of some imaginary setting. Outside, we saw one of the horses snort, but could not hear it. She wandered from room to room, touching the dead wires that hung, wrenched loose, from the wall, the empty sockets and brackets. ‘The telephone must have been here.' ‘This was for a lamp, I suppose.' Sadness settled on her movements; wondering, she took my hand and clung to it without noticing me. Was she thinking of places she had left somewhere in her disregarded life, lights she had touched on, a pattern of rooms her feet had come to know as a blind man knows? Perhaps it was not as simple as that; the disquiet of the emptiness seemed to take a sounding in her; she was aware of depth and silence, communications the telephone could not carry, a need of assurance the electric light could not bring.

She had a strong fear of herself, as many active people do. I sensed this fear, and, excited by it, began to kiss her. She
let me kiss and caress her with a kind of amazement; she was like one of those people who, called up by a conjuror from an audience and told, do this, do that, produces something unimaginable – a bunch of roses, a cage of mice, a Japanese flag. Her open eyes were watching me, her mouth did not participate with the practised pleasure-giving I had found there before. Only the nipples, those unflattering and indiscriminate responders who really never learn to know the hand of a lover from any other stimulus, automatically touched out at the palm of my hand through the stuff of her clothes. ‘For Christ's sake!' she said suddenly, recalled to herself. ‘Not here.' Social caution, her only and familiar arbiter, restored her to a sense of her own known world. The fit of the blues was gone; I had provided her with a situation that she could deal with.

Someone who loved her would have done much more. But she did not know what she needed, and accepted, without knowledge of failed expectation, my preoccupation with the taste of nicotine and lipstick in her mouth.

As we rode back along the valley, a pile of livid light from the hidden sun showed along the grassy ridges. A black man wearing an old white sheet robe and carrying a long stick with a piece of blue cloth tied to it, passed us on his way to join the worshippers we could just see, going in a stooping, leaping, yelling procession round a drummer, where a knot of acacias made a meeting-place. He was singing under his breath, and he murmured ‘Afternoon, baas.'

When we got back to the Alexanders', Cecil remarked, with the confidence of an order where dirt and chaos went with one side, and beauty and power went with the other, ‘We really ought to get hold of the agents for that empty house. All the out-of-work natives for miles around must be sleeping there. You should just see it, Marion.'

The first time I made love to her was one night in her living-room, after we had been to dinner at the house of some friends of hers. What a lack of spontaneity there is about the first act of love between two people who seem familiar enough with each other on other levels of association!
In the dark each apprehends in the other a secret creature who never appeared across the dinner table, or bought a newspaper in the street, or leaned forward to make a point in a political discussion. I could imagine that becoming aware of a life after death might be something like that: all the accepted manifestations of the awareness of being, stilled, like an engine cut off, and then, out of a new element of silence, another way of being. She groped, at last, for the table beside the divan: ‘Can you find me a cigarette?' ‘Let me find the lamp first.' ‘No, no, don't turn it on. Here's the box.' We sat up in the dark with the divan cover pulled round us, smoking, like people come to shelter after a disaster of some sort – shipwreck or storm. I dressed and left not long after midnight; people who had been visiting one of the flats along the corridor were making their farewells and we emerged from the building together – they were a grey-faced bald man with strong hair curling out of his nose and ears, as if it had turned and grown down into instead of out of that cranium, and one of those heavy women who, despite large bosoms, corsets, and jewellery, when they reach middle age suddenly look like men. The moment the last good-bye had left their lips they sank into the grimness that is one kind of familiarity. They came along behind me like jailers, and the slam of our car doors, theirs and mine, as we drove off, was the final locking-up of the night.

But, the next time, I went to bed with Cecil in her warm, crumpled bed that smelled of perfume and cigarette smoke. She argued about the light, but I wanted to see her face, to know what she was feeling. (Who knows what women feel, in their queer, gratuitous moment?) She looked, in the light, like she had that Sunday morning, in her dressing-gown. Pride, bewilderment, vanity, greed, want, and determination were not smoothed out by the banality of make-up; her eyes were faintly bloodshot from sun, smoke, and gin, and the shape of her smile, drawn in knowingly at one corner, was there, marked for ever on her face, even when her mouth was in repose. At the back of her neck, the real smell of her hair came out from under the chemical scents of the processes it was subjected to in that be-curtained shop below
my office – the real smell of blonde pigment, waxy and acid, which I always notice at once, perhaps because I am dark.

‘I didn't want you to see my stomach,' she said. ‘I can't bear to look at it myself.'

‘Why, what's supposed to be wrong with it?'

She rolled over face-down with her elbows tight to her sides and said resentfully, ‘Haven't you ever seen a woman who's had a child? It ruins the skin of your stomach. It looks like crinkle paper.'

But whatever the human climate to which she had been exposed in her life had done to weather her face, her body was entirely itself, sure and beautiful. She was a loving woman in bed, clever and full of tender enthusiasm: Now just wait, she would say, just wait a minute . . . as if her caresses were carefully prepared surprises that must not be discovered before the right moment. The narrow bed, intended for a single sleeper, kept her close to me as I wanted, all night; there was no inch away to which she could move, even if she had wanted to. Her whole body burned with a steady warmth of energy, even while she slept, and only her buttocks and her breasts were cool, the way some people's hands are always cool.

I got up to leave very early in the morning, so that I should be out of the flat before the servant came in. I was coming back down the passage from the bathroom when I saw, standing in the open doorway of the second bedroom, in the colourless light that comes in before dawn, a little boy. He was barefoot, and in mis-buttoned pyjamas, and he was holding his pillow. He was quite awake, but perhaps not sure where he had awakened: in some grown-up part of the night he did not know. But even as he watched me the light began to golden, and he must have known it was morning. He did not speak and he did not move while I passed his room and disappeared through the next doorway. Cecil turned at the sound of me dressing, moved her mouth as if she were tasting, and put out her hand to me. I said: ‘Your child met me in the passage. What will he make of that.'

‘Don't have to worry about him,' she murmured. ‘He won't say anything.' When I was ready to go, she suddenly
woke up properly and called me back to kiss her and reproached me for trying to slip away without saying ‘a proper good morning'.

There was no one in the passage when I left, and the door of the second bedroom was shut.

I wonder why it is that the life of poverty is regarded as more real than any other life. In books and films, the slice of life traditionally is cut from the lower crust; in almost all of us with full bellies, whose personal struggles are above the sustenance level, there is a nervous, even a respectful feeling that life may be elsewhere. The poor man has got it; he staggers beneath its violent weight, of course; one wouldn't wish to be in his shoes – but he has it.

I thought about this idea a lot, at this time, when I was so often in the townships with Steven, and sometimes stayed for a night at Sam's two-roomed house, sleeping on the divan in his living-room. I thought about it, but I never came to any firm conclusion. What do we mean by real life? That which is closest to the basic trinity, shared by all creatures: survival, food, reproduction? Then we indulge in romantic fallacy, stemming from some atavistic guilt, because, in life, reality is not an absolute, but consists of one set of conditions or another. To regard total pre-occupation with survival, food, and reproduction as the criterion of reality is to ignore other needs that men have created for themselves, and which, in combination with the basic ones, make men's reality. In a society where laws take care of a man's survival among his fellows, his part in commerce and industry ensures that he will eat as a matter of course, and his reproductive function is secured by the special mating system of marriage, the greatest reality of his life may consist in his meeting the growth of the financial empire which his brain and energy have created. The greatest reality, for the
scientist, must lie in his patient onslaught on the opposition of the formula he can't get right; for an artist, in accepting that no one, at present, will accept his particular vision. That is ‘real life'; for each man, the demands of his own condition.

I decided that possibly life in the townships seemed more ‘real' simply because there were fewer distractions, far fewer vicarious means for spending passion, or boredom. To each human being there, the demands of his or her own condition came baldly. The reality was nearer the surface. There was nothing for the frustrated man to do but grumble in the street; there was nothing for the deserted girl to do but sit on the step and wait for her bastard to be born; there was nothing to be done with the drunk but let him lie in the yard until he'd got over it. Among the people I met with Cecil, frustrated men threw themselves into golf and horse-racing, girls who had had broken love affairs went off to Europe, drunks were called alcoholics, and underwent expensive cures. That was all. That was the only difference.

But was it? With so much to comfort and distract them, don't people perhaps learn, at last, to feel a little less? And doesn't that make life that much less ‘real'? – But, again, this sounded convincing, but seemed disproved in actual fact. For the people who frequented The High House (and also myself, my friends and acquaintances in England) made a great deal of their feelings, nervous breakdowns and other long-drawn-out miseries followed on their misadventures, and they knew that life very easily comes to a standstill; but the men and women of the townships, after brief and public mourning, wiped their noses with the backs of their hands, as it were, and did the next thing, knowing that nothing could interrupt life. There was the woman who lived in one of the houses that shared a yard with Sam's house. One day she stopped us as we were entering the yard, and spoke to Sam. She was a cheerful, dirty slut with the usual pretty, milk-and-pee smelling baby falling over her feet, and Ella had often complained about her. When she had gone back to her house, Sam said to me, ‘D'you know anybody, any friend of yours in Sandown? That woman's looking for a
backyard room somewhere. She's got people she washes for there, and she'd like a room nearby.'

‘What about her house?'

‘Her husband's disappeared. Perhaps some of your friends have got a servant's room they don't use.'

Then, one night, there was a murder close by The House of Fame. Steven was hurrying home to one of his own drinking-and-talking sessions which I and a number of the hangers-on had not waited to begin (it was quite common for Steven to invite you to his room and then fail to be there when you arrived), and he came upon the dying man, lying in the street. He had pulled him up on to the steps of the nearest house, but: ‘He'd had it. Gone,' Steven told us when he came in. ‘I'm sorry I'm so darned late, Toby, I've been fixing up insurance for an old Indian who owns a string of bug-houses' – this was what the township cinemas were commonly called – ‘and, you know – he's the sort of old chap who every time he wants to tell you something, no matter what, he's got to begin right at the beginning of his life and lead up to it.' He grinned, said, ‘Mind,' and pushed aside the legs of the people who were sitting on his bed, so that he could put his smart tan leather briefcase under the bed. He straightened up and peered down at the side of his jacket, twitching at the sleeve. ‘There's nothing on my suit, is there?' One of the young men, who had never owned such a suit, jumped up to examine it, hitting at the cloth and saying, in Suto, that there was nothing to worry about. And it was true that there was a only a little red township dust on the suit, that dust that seemed more the powder of decaying buildings than the surface of the earth. But there was a smear of blood on one of Steven's shirt-cuffs, like bright rust. ‘He's made a bit of a mess of me,' he said, and sighed. ‘Never mind, poor chap couldn't help it.'