The Late Bourgeois World (12 page)

He looked at the piece of cheese he had just taken and pushed it away with the knife and got up, turning from the table. His full belly in the white shirt strained over his belt and he lifted it, expanding his chest in a deep breath. When he spoke again it was from another part of his mind: ‘No' – softly, stiffly, as if it were none of my business – ‘No … not houses. That's … that's Reba's' – his hand made a loose, twirling gesture.

‘What d'you do – for a living, Luke?' I came and stood in front of him with my arms folded. (He had told me that he was once a salesman for ladies' underwear, in the townships.)

What a face, those extraordinary cloisonné eyes, you could put your finger on the eyeball to try the smooth surface. His chin lifted, to parry me, yet the smile, innocently blatant, would not be held back. The eyes filmed over as if someone had breathed on them. He grinned.

‘Oh, I know; you're not the sort of person one can ask that.'

‘I'm with Reba – you know –' He was laughing, fumbling.

‘No, no – I know you're fully occupied, but how do you
live
? Haven't you got a family somewhere?'

‘Not me. I travel solo.' It's taken for granted that we both know there's a wife and children. He's an expert at conveying what one might call sexual regret: the compliment of suggesting that he would like to make love to you, if time and place and the demands of two lives were different. I suppose he's found that this goes down very well with the sort of white women who get to know black men like him; they feel titillated and yet safe, at the same time. In sounding for the right note to strike with me, he naturally tries this out among other things; I can't very well tell him that I've had a black lover, years ago. He trailed the tips of his fingers along my ear and down my neck; a good move, if he'd only known it – I particularly like the rosy, almost translucent
pads on the inner side of black hands, that look as if light were cupped in them.

He put his arms round me and mine went round his warm, solid waist. We rocked gently. I teased him: ‘I suppose you're supported by the Communist Party' – like all PAC people, he accuses the ANC of being led by the nose, first by Moscow and then by Peking.

‘That's right, that's it.' And, laughing, we broke away and drifted round the room, he saying, ‘I admit everything,' ‘I confess,' and I bringing over our cups of coffee. He settled awkwardly, on a stool that was too low for him, legs bent apart at the knees. I took my corner of the sofa. ‘It's nice to be here,' he said. ‘This room. I run all around through this dirty town – ever since Thursday – and then this room. My, I remember the first night – you in your nightie, with a little red – red, was it? Red with just a little bit of a pattern, here and there –' (My raw silk gown that I don't usually wear, because you can't wash the thing, but I put it on if someone turns up and I'm not dressed.) ‘– but you came to the door calm as anything, not afraid at all of the two strange blacks on your doorstep.'

Was it money? Sometimes he pays back and sometimes he doesn't; I couldn't remember whether he owes me anything at present. ‘I knew Reba,' I put
in, from my vantage on the comfortable sofa, not to make it too easy for him. ‘I'd seen Reba before.'

‘But you didn't know who it was. You didn't recognize him, I saw it. And you politely asked us in, just the same' – a bit of business here – ‘and I even got a scrap of cold food from your supper … Liz …' He was smilingly reproaching me, in flattery, for my good nature. ‘Lizzie …' The play on my name, using incongruously, intentionally clumsily and quaintly, the form in which it is the kitchen girl's generic, made a love-name of it.

‘I just didn't know what else to say,' I said flippantly, and caught again behind his eyes the recording of a piece of intelligence in words I did not know: he was encouraged to hope again, this time, I shouldn't know what to say, and again I'd simply be bewildered into giving what was wanted of me.

He shifted heavily on the low seat and screwed up his eyes with a distressed movement of his head, as if someone were shining a light on him. It was a kind of pantomime of despair – for my benefit. He drew breath to speak, and then caught it up short, and let his hands express the attempt in a limp jerk. And yet behind the show he was putting on there was for me something real that he wasn't aware of – the sense of this young black bull in the white china shop, with its nice little dinners and bookshelves and bric-a-brac and coffee-cup talk.

‘These few days,' he said, ‘I've racked my brains … these few days! Morning to night, going here and going there. I'm telling you, it's been a time …'

I said nothing, but waited, and he picked up the cue. ‘You see, if we're going to keep anything alive, if we're going to look after the chaps – there's lawyers to pay all the time – now all these cases in the Eastern Cape –'

He drew me in with a look, and I nodded; twenty-one PAC men were charged with sabotage this week – it was a small mention in the paper, there are so many of these cases, all people who were detained a year ago and are only now beginning to be charged.

‘But doesn't Defence and Aid provide lawyers?' Always the orderly white mind, accustomed to dealing with disaster through the proper professional channels.

He put up a hand as if to say, not so fast. ‘They do, they do, to a certain extent – but you know how it is, there're all sorts of snags, man. You know how these things are; it's all got to be cut and dried and investigated and approved. And it's not only legal defence you've got to worry about. It's the families and so on.' He looked straight at me for a moment with calm, oval eyes from which all communication seemed to slide wide away. ‘There are other problems.' He saw nothing, while a fact was laid swiftly under my gaze.

I said, ‘I know so little these days. I have to believe what the papers say, there's nothing going on in the townships, the underground's broken for the time being.'

‘That's right,' he said. ‘That's all you know, Liz, that's all you need to know.' He was flattering again. He knows we whites love to feel we are ‘all right', to be trusted; and sufficiently ‘in' to understand an unspoken confidence.

He said suddenly, ‘You remember Colonel Gaisford, hey?' and I laughed and was about to say, God, that poor old codger – but it was a good thing I didn't, because he went on – ‘He was a grand old man, one of the best, a good friend to us, a true friend' – the sort of missionary phraseology that the colonel himself might have used. Colonel Gaisford was a man whose kind of goodness becomes naïvety in a situation whose realities he doesn't understand. He went to jail last year, protesting quite truthfully that he didn't know that the money in the charitable fund he was administering was being used to send people out of the country for military training. But I saw that Luke's feeling for the old man, the man they used quite shamelessly, was genuine, and the hearty epithets were the only ones he had to convey a sense of nobility. ‘I'm telling you, you can't replace a man like that. I mean we've had a few people helping us since then' – he delicately mentioned one
or two names; and now I had heard them, now I was aware of being drawn still further in – ‘but it hasn't worked out too well.'

It was a curious way of putting it; one of the names has fled the country, another, of course, is under house arrest. In fact, that was the very difficulty he was coming to – ‘He's under house arrest and it's pretty impossible for him to handle the money.'

‘There's still money coming into the country?'

It wasn't a matter for my curiosity, but he had drawn me along so far, and I suppose he felt he owed me something. ‘Coming in, all right. At least it would if we could arrange for it. Good God, Liz, if you knew what I've tried, these few days. I've been battling to fix something up, but wherever I go, from this one to that one, there's a snag –'

‘It's dangerous! Don't you think they know about you, by now?'

He didn't answer, only smiled as if to say, debonairly, let's leave that one alone. If he hasn't someone on his tail, he would never admit it, and if he has, well, the fact has long since been accepted by both trailed and trailer, they will run their course together.

‘It's such an easy thing, too, Liz man' – as if I could banish the obtuseness, the unwillingness of ‘this one and that one' – ‘it's just somebody with a bank account with a bit of money in it. Somebody
who gets cash from overseas sometimes – that's all you need. Don't you know someone who'll take a few extra credits for the next few months?'

So that was it. I was caught out; like that game we used to play as children, when the one who was ‘he' would drop a handkerchief behind your back and you would suddenly find yourself ‘on'; it doesn't matter how alert you think you're being, you still get the handkerchief served on you.

There was a quickening of wits between us. ‘Who on earth would I know!' I made it sound ridiculous.

‘Some friend –' If I had drawn back, he had stepped up to confront me. He had that expression again, as if the sun were in his eyes; dazzled but not deflected.

‘But what friend?'

His large eyes took in, barred in advance, any way out I might try. He waited.

‘I don't know anybody – and what about the colonel?' Anyone who received this money would go the same way as old Gaisford.

‘No, there's no chance of that – we've got it taped, now.' He gave the fatally easy assurance you always get from people like him. ‘And we won't use one account for more than six months or so, from now on.'

He went on looking at me, half-smiling, satisfied I couldn't get away.

‘You're not thinking of me!'

It was absurd, but he saw the absurdity as another attempt at evasion, and made me feel as if I were concealing something by it. But what? It's true that I have no money coming to me from abroad, in fact nothing in the bank more than the small margin – which often dwindles into the red – between the salary I deposit at the beginning of a month and the bills I pay by the end. He laughed with me, at last, but beneath it, I saw his purpose remain; the laughter was an aside.

‘Ah, come on, Liz.'

I told him he must be mad. I didn't know of anyone, anyone at all whom I could even approach. I said I was out of that sort of circle long ago – a meaningless thing to say since we both knew he wouldn't have come to me, couldn't have come to me, otherwise. But everything I was saying was meaningless. What I was really telling him and what he understood was that I should be afraid to do what he asked, should be afraid even if I knew ‘someone', even if I had some feasible explanation for money suddenly coming in to my bank account. We kept up the talk on a purely practical level, and it was a game that both of us understood – like the holding and flirting. The flirting is even part of this other game; there was a sexual undertone to his wheedling, cajoling, challenging confrontation of me, and that's all right, that's honest enough.

I said I'd think about it; I'd try and come up with a suggestion. If I could think of someone, I'd perhaps even sound out whoever it was, to see. He told me a few more details – ‘Just let me brief you' (he likes that sort of phrase) – as if the person would ever exist.

And while we talked, the thought was growing inside me, almost like sexual tumescence, and like it – I was nervous – perhaps communicating its tension: there's my grandmother's account. She always has had dividends coming in from all over the place. For more than a year, now, in order to make payments (for the Home, and other odd expenses) independent of her unreliable mental state, I have had her power of attorney. I was afraid Luke would somehow divine – not the actual fact, but that there was a
possibility
; that there really was something for me to conceal. His hand, his young, clumsy presence (there at my pleasure, I could ask him to leave whenever I wanted) hung over it. And at the same time I had the feeling that he had somehow known all along, all evening, that there was a possibility, some hidden factor, that he would get me to admit to myself. Probably just the black's sense that whites, who have held the power so long, always retain somewhere, even if they have been disinherited, some forgotten resource – a family trinket coming down from generations of piled-up possessions.

‘Even for say six months, good God, you don't know how important it would be for us – even just a few months.' We went on talking as though the non-existent ‘someone' I should never approach were already found.

I kept saying, ‘Well, I can't promise anything – maybe as I think about it … there might be a name I can't think of straight off. But I doubt it …' and he hovered on the margin of my uncertainties and excuses, snapping them up like a bird swooping on mosquitoes: ‘It'd be marvellous, man. Our hands are tied, tied! The money's there in London, waiting for us, but for eight months now – eight months! – we haven't been able to move, our hands are tied!'

‘Well, I'll look around and let you know.'

‘You'll let me know?'

I said, yes, we'd be in touch; we always say that when he comes; it means that perhaps in six weeks, three months, he will turn up again, and I'll tell him that I'm awfully sorry, I couldn't find anyone.

He said, ‘Tomorrow night?'

But I could say with a laugh at his impatience, ‘It's tomorrow already – give me a chance. I'll have to think.'

So he said, affectionately, watchfully, ‘All right, Tuesday or Wednesday, maybe. You see I've got to get back, I can't hang around here too long.' He kept looking at me with a jaunty, admiring male pride,
as if I were displaying some special audacity that charmed him. ‘I'd better let you get some sleep,' he said, coming over and putting out a hand to pull me up from the sofa. I was chilly and wrapped my arms round myself. ‘What'll you do now' – his eyes took in the room again – ‘phone the boyfriend?' I looked at him and smiled. ‘He's fast asleep long ago.' We spoke softly at the door, and when I opened it, signalled goodnight, because of the light still showing behind the glass door of the flat opposite. The soles of his shoes creaked, and I wanted to laugh. He grinned and, with just the right, light regret, put the palm of his hand a moment on my backside, with the gesture with which one says, wait there.