A World of Strangers (5 page)

I Seemed to have progressed merely from one unreality to another. Before me, as I sat at dinner, I saw a swan made of ice carried by.

I had been in Johannesburg three days, and was living in what I had discovered must be the biggest tourist hotel in the city. When I woke in the morning I had absolutely no idea where I was. The room was designed to give you no clue; it was as anonymous as a prison cell or a ward in a hospital. It was a hotel room, circa 195-, anywhere. The carpet was pale and thick. The curtains were pale and thick. The shiny pale yellow wood of the bedside table had the classic pattern of cigarette burns. (Are there perhaps factories that supply these articles of furniture ready burnt, just as fake antiques are said to be supplied with worm-holes?) In the dining-room, where there were gilded interior balconies which could not be reached because nothing led to them, and the concealed lighting produced the effect of a perpetual stage sun-set, English, Americans and unidentified foreigners sat with the stunned faces of wealthy travellers. The waiters were the usual weary, flat-footed Italians and Germans. Admittedly, the lift operators in their red-and-gold bell-hop outfits had black faces; but with them it
seemed to be black-face in the vaudeville, rather than the pigmentation sense. In the marble foyer there were small show-cases of the kind you see at airports, displaying luxuries and curios; one showed a crystal bottle of perfume on a velvet altar, another an embroidered oriental coat, in another there were two crossed assegais before a shield covered with the skin of some animal, and a curious-looking gourd covered with coloured bead-work. A gilt card behind the glass announced that these last were obtainable at so-and-so's, the house for genuine native crafts and African curios. I would hand the key of my room to the receptionist, whose hair was like a small helmet of tarnished brass; she would rake the key toward her across the counter in a hand whose nails were so long that the hand seemed to stand over and trap objects in the manner of a spider, rather than pick them up. And so, I would go out into the city.

The sun had been shining, out there, every day since I arrived. Nothing remarkable about that, I suppose, in this country. The brightness seemed strange to me, not because I'd come from early winter in London, but because I'd just left the coloured twilight of the hotel. It was a surprise to find that morning and noon, a waxing and waning of the day, existed, after that dim timeless light. The slither of feet on concrete came up to meet me from the city pavement; I descended to it from the hotel steps, entered into it, moved off with it. At the corner, where I crossed the street, the traffic lights held back rows of big American cars – black, pomegranate-coloured, turquoise – impatient bicycles, creaking tramcars. Cries, bells, hammerings, shufflings, talk, roaring exhausts, and muttering engines – the sounds generic to a city surrounded me as the sound of the wind in leaves would indicate to me that I was in a forest. The air seemed to strike sparks off the corners of buildings in the sun; the shade was black and hard. There seemed to be a great many more white people than black. Women brushed me, smelling of expensive perfume. Parcels nudged me. A pregnant woman burgeoned toward me; a black man wearing a dust-coat and a cap with the name of a firm in celluloid letters across it swooped to pick up a cigarette someone had
dropped, and put it behind his ear. He whistled piercingly as he went along. Three youths with the ends of their stiffly-oiled hair dyed brassy, like the gilded heads of cheap plaster busts, the dwindling silhouette of vast loose jacket and narrow trousers, and the fast soft gait of shoes with soles thick as rubber bathmats, passed with narrowed eyes, as if some purpose held them together. They appeared to be talking, but they were not; two were making with their lips the broken, bubbling half-syllables that babies make, a kind of babbled tune, not quite singing.

The buildings were brand new, taking up quite a lot of, if not quite scraping the sky, or gimcrack, balconies cut out of tin with a fretsaw, plaster plaque proclaiming ‘Erected 1911' above a new shopfront obvious as a set of the latest false teeth. The clocks, whether set in the gilded cupolas of the nineteen hundreds, or the skin-thin marble of this year, didn't agree. The plaster mannequins leant toward the street behind concave glass, showing clothes from London and Vienna. There didn't seem to be any trees; but then I had only been in the place almost a matter of hours, and I'd seen scarcely anything beyond the streets between the hotel and Arthur Hollward's office.

Arthur's office (it would be mine, soon, when he went home to England) was less than three short blocks from the hotel and was on the ninth floor of a fairly new building. On the ground floor there were a bookshop, a chemist's, something called ‘Adorable' I hadn't yet identified (probably some sort of woman's dress shop – the windows were entirely blanked out with yellow satin draping), a dry cleaner's depot, and a bar. The bar was called the Stratford and had lattice windows of beer-coloured glass with a tudor rose as a central motif. The rest of the façade of the building and the foyer had an anonymous, cinema-splendour; the lift doors – there were two of them – were bronze, the stairs were of veined stone, like a well-ripened cheese, the floor was an abstract mosaic and the whole of the wall opposite the lift was covered with sections of mirror, tinted blue, and secured by crystal knobs. An ante-room of God, if ever there was one. When the lifts came down, it was discovered that
one was lined with dirt-streaked padding and had a splintered wooden floor – it was a goods lift – and the other had initials scratched all over its chipped enamel interior; the Gorgonzola stairway gave way, after the first floor, to narrow cement steps; the inner corridors, with their plumbing system running exposed along the greenish walls, were like the intestines of some cold-blooded animal.

Behind his plain varnished door, old Arthur had a small outer office where his typist sat, and where, in addition to her desk and two dingy chairs, there was a stand displaying the latest in the famous series of pocket-books put out by our firm. Arthur's own office led off this room, and the moment I stepped into it for the first time I felt the unremarkable assurance that the rabbit must feel on entering a burrow, or a fox an acrid den: it had the look and smell – new books and dust, typical as the smell of a chemist's – of the offices at Aden Parrot in London. Even the threat of Faunce's presence seemed to be there; perhaps old Arthur created this by what I can only describe as wholesome awe of Faunce. Arthur regarded Faunce as preposterous and delightful; which was like a child being led to give the right answer, for this was just what Faunce, goodness knows how long ago, decided to be. Of course, I'd known Arthur Hollward (or rather he'd known me), through the London office, since I was a schoolboy. He was one of those almost charmless people for whom contact with a person of the enormous charm of Faunce was a ducking in a vivid element which left, so to speak, a rosy tinge in the colourless lesser personality. By quoting Faunce, even by being roused to the warmth of appreciating him so much, Arthur had acquired a mild charm of his own.

Any member of our family had, for Arthur, the aura of Faunce, and he treated me with a mixture of the self-respecting deference of the old retainer to the young son of the house, and an avuncular good-humour, which, I think, was the attitude he imagined Faunce himself took with me. (As if Faunce would ever be bothered with a minor role such as that of kindly uncle!) Arthur was delighted to see me, obviously had been excited about my coming, and
shook my hand and patted me about as if it were all he could do not to say, ‘My! What a big boy you've grown.' We talked a little, about business and Faunce, and what was going on at Aden Parrot generally, and, as I had thought he would, Arthur said that his wife expected him to bring me home to dinner on that, my first night in Johannesburg. He introduced me to the typist, Miss McCann, who was one of those common little girls to whom anaemia gives a quenched look which may be mistaken for refinement, and who, appropriately, smelled of sickroom cologne. I should have to find some means of getting rid of her. He also introduced a young black man who came into the outer office with a small mail-pouch which he emptied on Miss McCann's desk – a young man whose clothes were all a little too large or too small for him; I couldn't help noticing his shoes, in particular – they stood away all round his heel and ankle. ‘Oh, and this is Amon,' said Arthur. ‘Amon, this is Mr Hood who's come from London to take my place while I'm away.' The youngster smiled sheepishly, not looking at me, and mumbled, ‘Yes sir. Thank you, sir.' The typist was turning over the mail with an air of strong suspicion, as if she were sure to find something unpleasant, or amiss. She took out two slips of paper, signed them and handed them to the youngster. He went out without having looked at me.

The Hollwards' house was exactly the sort of house they would have had in England. Arthur laid the crazy paving himself and it was he who kept the standard roses tied to their supports; Mrs Hollward had refurnished the sitting-room in what she called ‘modern' Swedish-style – low chairs covered in abstract design linen, lamps made out of Chianti bottles with raffia shades, a Van Gogh reproduction over the fireplace. Flower vases were in the form of hollow swans or fish; you stubbed out your cigarette in the gouged-out belly of a pottery rabbit. The whole managed to reproduce exactly the effect of the chintz-and-barbola-work scheme which it had evidently replaced.

Dinner was served by a thin, silent African woman with steel-rimmed spectacles, and several times, as dishes were carried back to the kitchen after we had been served, I
heard Mrs Hollward instruct: ‘Cover that up and put it in the refrigerator' or ‘You can finish that'. After dinner, Arthur gave me a South African cognac, which wasn't bad, and talked some more about Faunce; Mrs Hollward listened with a sort of shy, polite glee, her pleasure in these anecdotes obviously increased rather than staled by their familiarity, as a child loves to hear its favourite fairy-tale over and over again.

The next night I found myself at a concert. When I left Arthur's office at five, I went into the Stratford bar, not because I really wanted a drink, but because it was to be part of my surroundings for some time; I was prompted by the mixture of dogged resignation and curiosity which sends one peering all over a ship on which one is to be living for a few weeks. This Stratford was the sort of place that looked dreary and might well come to look absolutely trustworthy and welcoming as one invested it with habit. I'd only have to be there having a few drinks with a charming girl just once, to feel attached to the general uninvitingness of the place. But when I came to think of it, there were no women there at all; and in a way, that was rather nice, too. I eavesdropped over my beer, and it seemed that most of the men there were lawyers or newspapermen. Then I wandered back to the hotel through the harassed scurry of the afternoon rush – people didn't seem to linger much in this city after work – and took a look at the scene in there.

The unvarying pinkish light shone on, as it had in the morning; in the great lounge, three cowed-looking café-musicians produced the musical equivalent of this light, while loud parties of flushed young men bought drinks for giggling girls unused to such splendour; older men, with faces arranged as carefully as their pale silk ties, rose to greet the heel-clicking entrance of elegant, disdainful girls who must be mannequins or actresses; and the tourist residents, whether English, American or Continental, looked curiously foreign among these others, who, if varied in class and purpose, were at least clearly on their own ground.

I took a look, and that was all; I went straight out into the street again. But it was hard, I found, to loiter in
Johannesburg. It was a warm evening – the sun dying in angry flashes between the buildings – and I looked for a pavement café, but couldn't find one. I looked into one or two other hotels, but they seemed much like my own. I found a park, and in it an art gallery – it was shut – but unless you are with a girl, or are a child, or are very old, somehow you can't sit about in a park.

Where now? I said to myself.

And I crossed a bridge over a railway cutting into the town again. Down to my left, along the town bank of the cutting, I saw a thick queue sheltered under a tin roof. I walked a little way to see what it was about. And I saw that it was a bus queue; the people in it had the tired, unimpatient faces of those who wait in the same place at the same time every day. They were all black.

As I made my way uptown past the butchers' shops and the dry cleaners' and the corner hotel bars, I realized that the fact that they were black had come to me last, and least importantly, I had registered it as an afterthought, in fact. Whereas, in Mombasa, that day, when the launch approached the shore, the first thing that had struck me was the blackness, the Africanness of the faces waiting there. Yet I knew at once what the difference was. Those were peasants; the vacant, brutish-faced peasant, if you like, or the fine, unspoiled natural man – depends how you see it. These faces in the Johannesburg bus queue bore all the marks of initiation into western civilization; they were tired by city noise, distasteful jobs, worries about money, desires for things they couldn't afford, their feet ached from standing and their heads ached from the drinking of the night before – much like those faces you used to see all over London in those endless queues during the war.

I had dinner in a third-rate restaurant with a fancy name, where the waiters were all Indian. The one who served me made a great show of busy zeal and produced my steak and limp, pale chips with a flourish, but the restaurant was almost empty, and the others stood around the walls, flicking their waiters' napkins like horses switching at flies with their tails.

Then I began to walk again, with the vague intent of finding a cinema showing something I hadn't seen in London; but I happened to walk past a hall where, in a crowd that spread out into the street, an enormous photograph announced an orchestral concert with a famous violinist as soloist. I had heard him four or five times at home, and I don't suppose I should have gone out of my way to get in to hear him again, but somebody waved a ticket under my nose – a single ticket – and I bought it from him. While I took the money from my pocket, half a dozen people closed in hopefully round us in case the deal fell through and the ticket was still for sale. Anyway, it was mine, and I was a duly qualified member of the throng in a big, ugly foyer. Inside, the hall (I discovered that it was the city hall itself) was ugly, too. But the audience was not-ugly, I mean; there were some beautiful women there, and everyone had an air of ease, well- even if not always becomingly dressed, well-fed, and unruffled. There was a fair sprinkling of the sort of faces you see at concerts everywhere: the serious devotees, old men with crests of white hair, old ladies in shawls or oriental turbans, students who sat with downcast eyes over the score as if they were praying, pretty girls with strange hair styles and stranger clothes. I sat and listened in an atmosphere of perfume and silky furs; beringed hands and bleached hair; pomade and the lingering, after-dinner cigar smell in fine cloth. In the interval, the usual talk flew about: brass weak, pace a little too fast, violinist himself
absolutely
divine, violinist not so good as last year in Salzburg, violinist still the
only
interpreter of Mozart, violinist
passé
now, only good enough for South Africa – the same talk, with different place-names, that you hear at any concert in London.