A World of Strangers (6 page)

When the concert was over, I streamed out with these glossy-looking people, and found my way between their cars and back to the hotel. In the lounge, the pink light still shone on what were either the same people I'd seen there at sundowner time, or others exactly like them. Except the tourists. They had gone to bed. One of them had left a pamphlet at the empty table at which I sat while I waited for a cup of
coffee. AFRICA IN ALL ITS SAVAGE GLORY. ONLY HOURS AWAY. LUXURY SAFARI CARS PICK YOU UP AT YOUR JOHANNESBURG HOTEL, TAKE YOU TO THE KRUGER PARK – THE SAME DAY, YOU SEE LIONS, BUCK, HIPPO. AFTER A REFRESHING NIGHT'S SLEEP IN CAMP WITH ALL COMFORTS, YOU'RE OFF AGAIN, TO SEE ELEPHANT, GIRAFFE, AND MANY OTHER WILD ANIMALS IN THEIR NATURAL STATE, LIVING THE LAW OF THE JUNGLE. The next page told, in similar terms, of the native war dances to be seen twice monthly at a Mine compound near Johannesburg. On the next, a picture of a beautiful black girl with an enchanting smile, dressed in a beaded tribal costume, but with plump bared breasts, advertised the unspoilt charm of zululand. I felt as if I were reading of another country, from seas away. But then the country of the tourist pamphlet always is another country, an embarrassing abstraction of the desirable that, thank God, does not exist on this planet, where there are always ants and bad smells and empty Coca-Cola bottles to keep the grubby finger-print of reality upon the beautiful.

Was I in Africa? I went to bed in that hotel room where even the drop of the loosed button from my shirt was muffled in a conspiracy of stuffs to keep the atmosphere anonymous.

I told Arthur that I must find somewhere else to live – a small flat perhaps. ‘Ah well,' he said with a smile of indulgent sympathy, ‘good things can't last for ever.'

‘No.'

‘I thought it would be nice for you to start off here with a flourish, though.'

‘Oh, it was.'

I was afraid that he was about to recommend an alternative, a more modest edition of the hotel, a smaller version of that package of fluorescence and stale air.

‘There's a particularly nice place in Parktown, I believe – private hotel where a lot of people out from home stay.'

(No, he'd decided that what I needed as a more permanent base after my flutter in the Plaza-Ritz, or whatever it was called, was a genteel English boarding-house.) ‘I'll
speak to Jessie about it; I think she knows someone who lives there.'

‘Oh, thank you, Arthur, but I think I'll definitely try for a flat of some kind. As a matter of fact, I may be on the track of one. I mean, one of the people I was given a letter of introduction to has more or less promised to see what he can do -' I embarrassed myself by the glib lie.

‘Now that's sensible,' said Arthur, pleased to think that I must be making use of Faunce's illustrious connexions. ‘Much better idea to have a little
pied
à
terre
of your own. And if there's someone to pull strings for you, well and good.'

I believe there's some sort of propaganda dictum to the effect that a lie, spoken with conviction enough, becomes true. Anyway, the influence of a personal lie is a curious thing; mine had the effect of sending me to read slowly through the sixpenny notebook of addresses I hadn't opened since I sailed from England. I didn't know what I was looking for; certainly not for someone who could pull strings. It was almost with reluctance that I went through the meaningless names and addresses scribbled down in my own and other people's handwriting, in London and in the Cotswolds, in cars and restaurants, the houses of friends, and at Aden Parrot. What had I said at the time that they were being written? Oh yes, please do. Of course, I'll look them up. I'm sure it'll be a great help to me. Yes, I'd like to get to know them. Signor A. Pozzi, 177 Barston Place, Riviera Road. And in parenthesis ‘(Arnolfo and Betty)', Arthur Coutts, Inanda Club, Sandown (ask for Ex. 53), Max and Doreen Brown, Cleantry Court, Isipingo Street. Hildegarde Cegg, 42-7831. David Marshall, c/o Broadcast House. And then my mother's and Faunce's list: ‘worth-while' people. A writer, who'd brought out, under our imprint, the miscegenation novel now as regular a South African export as gold or fruit A newspaper editor. A university professor. An ex-chairman of the Institute of Race Relations. A priest who was something to do with the Penal Reform League. A woman doctor who was superintendent of a hospital for Africans. Reverend This, Doctor That. An Indian who was
secretary to some congress or other; an African leader. An M.P.

Squashed in at the bottom of the page was a name I remembered my mother hesitating over. She had discussed with Faunce whether it was worth-while my bothering to look up this woman; she
had
been a rather pleasant girl when they knew her in her youth, but she had married this tycoon, this man who was supposed to be second only to Ernest Oppenheimer in importance in the gold-mining industry and she didn't seem to have
done
anything since. Wouldn't I be likely to be bored stiff by that sort of family? Then Faunce had said, well, he might be amused in a way; it might be interesting for him to get a look at these people – and so my mother wrote it in, after all: Marion (and Hamish) Alexander, The High House, Illovo. The telephone number was written so small, I could hardly make it out; my mother had thought it unlikely that I should use it.

I decided on the Alexanders, Hamish and Marion Alexander, of The High House. A voice that I had already learned to distinguish as an African's answered the telephone. Mrs Alexander was out; I left my name and the telephone number of the hotel. And somehow I felt satisfied with the gesture. If the Alexanders didn't telephone me back, I didn't ever have to bother about them again.

While I was at dinner, that night, I was called to the telephone. I walked through the dining-room with that swift, furtive air which characterizes people summoned to private business from public rooms; everyone ignored me as steadfastly as I did them. (All kinds of living have their codes, and how quickly one conforms to the particular one in which one finds oneself, no matter how ridiculous it may be.) I lifted the hotel telephone receiver, still warm from someone else's ear, and there was my mother's voice; a product of the same school, brought into tune, so to speak, by the same fork. ‘Mr Hood? Toby?-This is Marion Alexander.'

‘Yes, Toby Hood. Hullo, Mrs Alexander.'

‘I couldn't believe it! I thought the servant had got the
name wrong! The last time I saw you, you were still at school, before the war. . . . How and why are you here? And how wonderful!'

She asked me to Sunday lunch. A black Buick driven by an African chauffeur came to fetch me at the hotel at twelve o'clock. I tried to talk to him as we drove, but he answered in a reluctant, pompous, off-hand manner, using Americanisms in not quite their right sense. I think he thought I was very badly dressed.

We left the city – which is without life on Sunday; even the cinemas are closed – and crossed the new Queen Elizabeth bridge. I twisted my head to look back and I must say that, from there, it all looked rather fine; the rectangular buildings, bone and sand and stone colour, pale as objects picked up on a beach, made a frieze of clean, hard shapes against a sky that was all space. If there had been a river under the bridge, this might have been a beautiful city – but there was no water, there were the sheds, tracks, and steel tangle of a railway junction. We passed mean little houses clinging to the fringe of the city, then the University – grey buildings, green trees, and red earth sloping down the hill – and then suburb after suburb of pleasant houses, neat, tame, and comfortable, as such houses are anywhere, but surrounded, overshadowed, overlaid, almost, by trees and flowers of unusual and heavy beauty. The further we drove, the bigger the gardens were; at last we turned off the tar on to a sand road. The car rode softly; the trees nearly met, overhead; in a clearing, I saw the watery shine of a horse's rump. On a rough stone gateway, white-painted iron letters spelt the high house. The drive was lined with round-limbed, feathery trees; hydrangeas grew in green cumulus, billowing beneath them. I saw a tennis court, a swimming-pool with a rustic changehouse, lawns green without texture, a lily-pond, a bank of irises, and then the house, built on a green mound. A large house, of course, rather like a bloated cottage, with a steep thatched roof curling up over dormer windows, thick white chimneys, and a balcony and abutting porch extending it on the two sides I could see.

The car dropped me at the front door, which was open,
and while I waited for someone to answer my knock, I could see in and also was aware of the vibration of voices on the other side of the big bay window on my right. The entrance hall led away down a few broad shallow steps to the left; I got the impression of a long, mushroom-coloured room there, with gleams of copper and gilt, flowers and glass. In the hall there was a marquetry table under a huge mirror with a mother-of-pearl inlaid frame. Further back, the first steps of a white staircase spread in a dais; carpet seemed to grow up the stairs, padding the rim of each step like pink moss. An African appeared soundlessly; I followed him soundlessly (I found later that the entire ground floor of the house was covered with that carpeting the colour of a mushroom's gills) past the mirror that reflected three new golf balls and a very old golf glove, sweated and dried to the shape of the wearer's hand, on the table below it, and through a large living-room full of sofas and chairs covered in women's dress colours, that led to a veranda. If you could call it that; a superior sort of veranda. The entire wall of the room was open to it, and it was got up like something out of a film, with a bar, a barbecue fireplace,
chaises longues,
glass and wrought-iron tables, mauve Venetian glass lanterns and queer trailing plants.

A burst of laughter was interrupted by my appearance; five people looked up, and a thick-set man with a bald, sunburned head struggled from his chair and came over to greet me. ‘You'll be Toby Hood,' he said. ‘Come and have a drink. Marion's not back yet.' He seemed to think that his own identity, that of Hamish Alexander, was self-evident, and he began to introduce me to the others. ‘Archie Baxter' – a thin, youngish man with the good looks of the distinguished drinker in the whisky advertisements. ‘Kit Baxter', an equally good-looking young woman, also with a commercial finish about her; they were the kind of couple whose clothes – in this instance, riding clothes – might have been donated by some firm in return for having them worn to advantage, and in the right company. ‘And this is Margaret Gerling and her big sister, Cecil Rowe.' At this they laughed, and looked alike, the two pretty girls who were also in riding
clothes. It seemed a bit ridiculous to stretch myself out, almost supine, the moment I walked into a stranger's house, and so I sat on the foot-rest of one of the long chairs, between Mrs Baxter and what I now saw was the elder of the two sisters, Cecil Rowe. Baxter, who was over at the little bar, said, ‘Won't you try one of my Martinis?' and Mrs Baxter pushed a tray of olives and nuts along a low table, within my reach.

Once I had a drink and was seated, they took up their chatter again; Hamish Alexander had the totally impersonal welcome and perpetual smile of the man who has many guests, most of them not invited by himself. The women were animated and talkative, especially Margaret Gerling and Mrs Baxter. All three had short, bright fashionable hair, not blonde and yet not brown, the blue eyes, the sunburned necks and brilliant finger-nails, the high actressy voices and oddly inarticulate vocabulary – vogue words, smart clichés, innuendo, and slang – of young upper-class Englishwomen. Nice girls, I should say. Gay, quite witty, and decorative. A shade more sophisticated, a shade less intelligent, a shade more sexy than Rina Turgell. I laughed at their stories – mostly riding stories, against themselves – that were not very good but were well told, along with the others. I contributed a story, not a riding one, but also against myself. A number of other guests came, and the elaborate outdoor room began to fill up.

There were middle-aged couples, the wives looking far younger than they could have been, in cotton dresses which displayed a lot of well-preserved flesh. But they were good-looking women who smelled luxurious. The men wore the clothes of whatever sport they had just left off playing, or, pasty and wattled, sat, stranded, in a well-pressed get-up of flannels, silk shirts, and scarves that covered the ruin of the hardened arteries, the damaged liver, or the enlarged heart that lay heavily in the breast. One of these last sat next to me, eventually; and I felt myself moved to a kind of disgusted pity, as I always am by the sight of one of these old bulls of finance, still sniffing the sawdust, with the broken shafts of money-tussles, overwork, overeating, over-drinking
stuck fast in their thick necks. There was a thin, tall man with thick white hair – the sort of man who plays a fast game of tennis at sixty, and marries a twenty-five-year-old at seventy. He had just been on a crocodile-shooting safari in Northern Rhodesia, and he talked about it in a loud, natural, overbearing voice that had the effect of breaking up minor conversations by the sheer contrast of its absolute confidence in the interest of what it was saying.

‘Is it true that you must get them between the eyes, John?' asked Mrs Baxter.

‘I don't know about that, but I don't mind telling you, they've got to be pretty damn well dead before you can count on 'em to
be
dead,' he said. ‘You think you've got them, and then they just knife off through the water and you never find them again. We must've shot a dozen for every one we got aboard. But what beasts they are; you feel you're doing 'em a favour by killing them. And when the boys slit 'em open-' he put his hand – with one of those expensive watches that tell the time, date, and phases of the moon, on the wrist – over his face, hiding it to the wiry, tangled black eyebrows.

Hamish Alexander, who obviously enjoyed him, sat forward grinning, his strong, patchy yellow teeth oddly matching the gingerish bristles on his red neck. ‘I've heard about that,' he said gleefully. ‘I've heard people. . .'