The Late Bourgeois World (2 page)

Just before I reached the school there was one of those lorries that sell fruit at the side of the road, and a black man jumped up from a little fire he'd made himself and pranced out with an orange stuck on a stick. I bought a packet of nartjies for Bobo.

The school has very large grounds with a small dam and a plantation of eucalyptus trees – that was
one of the reasons why I chose it: so that he would have somewhere that at least he could pretend was wild, to get away from playing fields and corridors. It's difficult to remember what it was like being a child, but I do know that it was essential to have such a place. The buildings (and the gateposts with their iron arch bearing the school crest, and name in Celtic lettering) are of yellow brick that breaks out in crosses, raised like Braille bumps, all over the place. The sight of the school produces a subdued and cowed mood in me; I go on mental tiptoe from the moment I enter that gateway. Black men in neat overalls are always busy in the grounds trimming the hedges at sharp right angles and digging round the formal beds and clipped shrubs; they were sweeping up leaves, this time. Tin signs cut in the shape of a hand with pointing forefinger and painted in the headmaster's wife's Celtic lettering, indicate ‘Visitors' Parking', ‘Staff Only', ‘Office'. The whole curve of the drive before the main building was empty but in the subservient anxiousness to do right that comes over me, I left the car in the visitors' parking ground. It was about eleven o'clock and the cries of the boys at break came from the quadrangles and playing fields behind the buildings. I know that my view of the place is absurdly subjective, but how like a prison it was! Behind the clean and ugly bricks, a great shout of life going up, fading into
the sunlit vacuum. I went up the polished steps and dropped the heavy knocker on the big oiled door.

It was opened by what must have been a new junior master, heavy-jawed, nice-looking, with the large, slightly shaky hands, powerful but helpless, of the young man who is going through the stage of intense desire for women without knowing how to approach any. He wore shabby, fashionably narrow-legged pants and a knitted tie and was obviously one of the Oxford or Cambridge graduates working their way round Africa who are counted on to bring a healthy blast of contemporaneity into the curriculum. (Bobo has told me about one who played the guitar and taught the boys American anti-bomb and anti-segregation folk songs.)

The headmaster was at tea in the staffroom, but the young man took me to the headmaster's study and asked me to sit down while he fetched him. I've been in that study a number of times; hostilely clean, hung with crossed-armed athletic groups, the shiny brown plastic flooring covered with a brown carpet in the standard concession to comfort to be found in the rooms of administrators of institutions. There was even a framed cartoon of the headmaster, cut from the school magazine; everyone said what an ‘approachable', ‘human' man he was.

He said how nice it was to see me – just as if one could drop in to the school any old time, instead
of being sternly discouraged to appear outside the prescribed visiting days. And although he must have known I had something serious to say, his quick, peg-on-the-nose voice dealt out a succession of pleasantries that kept us both hanging fire. But no doubt the poor devil dreads parents' problems, and this is just an unconscious device to stave off their recital. I told him that Bobo's father had died, and how. He was understanding and sensible, according to the manual of appropriate behaviour for such an occasion, but in his face with its glaze of artificial attentiveness there was certainty of his distance from people like us. He knew the circumstances of Bobo's background; divorce, political imprisonment, and now this. He knew it all the way, as a broad-minded man and a good Christian, I suppose he follows in the papers the Church's self-searching over homosexuality or abortion. He and Mrs Jellings, who teaches art at the school, must have been married for at least twenty-five years, and last year their daughter was married from the school with a guard of honour of senior boys.

He got up and opened the door and stopped a boy who was passing in the corridor. ‘Braithwaite! Send Bruce Van Den Sandt here, will you? D'you know him? He's in fourth.' ‘Yes, sir, I know Van Den Sandt, sir. I think he's on library duty.' And he
skidded off in a way that automatically drew a quick dent between the headmaster's eyebrows.

Bruce Van Den Sandt. I hardly ever hear the name spoken. This is the other Bobo, whom I will never know. Yet it always pleases me to hear it; a person in his own right, complete, conjured up in himself. It was Max's name; Max was dead, but like a word passed on, his name was called aloud in the school corridor.

The headmaster said, ‘Come in here. I suppose you'll want to talk to him alone; that'll be best.' And he opened a door I'd seen, but never been through before, marked ‘Visitors' Room'. I'd cowardly lost the moment to say, ‘I'd like to take him out and talk to him while we drive.' Why am I idiotically timid before such people, while at the same time so critical of their limitations?

I sat in this shut-up parlour whose purpose I had now gained entry to and waited quite a little while before the door flung open and he filled the doorway – Bobo. He had the glowing ears and wide nostrils of a boy brought from the middle of a game, his hands were alert to the catch, his clothes were twisted, his smile was a grin of breathlessness. The high note of this energy might, like a certain pitch in music, have silently shattered the empty vase and the glass on the engravings of Cape scenes.

‘Ma? Well, nobody told me you were coming!'

He hugged me and we giggled, as we always do with the glee of being together and clandestine to school and everything else.

‘How'd you get in?'

I hadn't thought about what I was going to say to Bobo, and now it was too late. I gripped his hand and gestured hard, with it in mine, once or twice, to call us to attention, and said, ‘We've got to talk, Bo. Something about Max, your father.'

At once he caught me out, as if he were the adult and I the child. He understood that I never referred to Max as anyone but ‘Max'. He was little when Max was on trial and in prison, but I have told him all about it since he's been older. He nodded his head with a curious kind of acceptance. He knows there is always the possibility of trouble.

We sat down together on the awful little settee, like lovers facing each other for a declaration in a Victorian illustration. He dragged at his collapsed socks – ‘Pull your socks up, your mother's here, Jelly said.'

‘He died, Bobo. They sent me a telegram this morning. It'll be in the papers, so I must tell you – he killed himself.'

Bobo said, ‘You mean he committed suicide?'

Amazement smoothed and widened his face, the flush left it except for two ragged patches, like the scratches of some animal, on the lower cheeks.
What came to him in that moment must have been the reality of all the things he had read about, happening to other people, the X showing where on the pavement the body fell, the arrow pointing at the blurred figure on the parapet.

I said, ‘Yes' and to blot it all out, once and for all, to confine it, ‘He must have driven his car into the sea. He was never afraid of the sea, he was at home in it.'

He nodded, but he kept his eyes wide open on me, the brows, over their prominent frontal ridge, scrolled together in concentration. What was he facing? The fact of his own death? Mine? Bobo and I didn't have to pretend to each other that we were grieving over Max in a personal way. If you haven't had a father, can you lose him? Bobo hardly knew him; and although I hadn't, couldn't explain all that to him, he knows that I had come to the end of knowing Max.

Bobo said, ‘I somehow just can't see his face.'

‘But it's not so long since you saw him. Eighteen months, not more.'

‘I know, but then I hardly remembered what he looked like at all, and I was looking at him all the time the way you do with a new person. Then afterwards you can't see their face.'

‘You've got a photograph, though.' There on his locker, the upright leather folder with mother on one side, father on the other, just as all the other boys have.

‘Oh yes.'

There didn't seem to be anything else to say; at least, not all at once, and not in that room.

‘I brought you some nartjies. I forgot to get anything in town.'

He said absently, making the show of pleasure that is his form of loving politeness, ‘Mmm … thanks. But I won't take them now … just before you go, so's when I've seen you off I can stick them in my desk before anyone sees.'

Then he said, ‘Let's go outside for a bit,' and when I said, ‘But are we allowed to? I wanted to ask Mr Jellings –' ‘Really, Mummy, what's there to be so chicken about? I don't know how you'd manage in this joint!' As we closed the door of the visitors' room behind us, I said, ‘We've never been in there, before.' ‘It's for long-distance parents, really, though I don't know what it's
for
– you can tell from the pong no one ever goes in there.' I smiled at the jargon. Bobo has mastered everything; that place has no terrors for him.

We kept to the formal, deserted front garden, away from the other boys. We walked up and down, talking trivialities, like people in hospital grounds who are relieved to have left the patient behind for a while. Bo told me he had written to me asking for new soccer boots, and whether it would be all right if Lopert came home with him next Sunday. I'd had a circular from the school about boxing lessons,
and wanted to know if Bo were interested. Then we went to sit in the car, and he teased, ‘Why'n't you just park in town and walk, Ma?'

Like most boys Bobo has a feeling for cars akin to the sense of place, and when he gets into the car I can see that it's almost as if he were home, in the flat. He noses through all the old papers that collect on the shelf beneath the dashboard and looks for peppermints and traffic tickets in the glove box. I am often called upon to explain myself.

He was sitting beside me touching a loose knob, probably noting with some part of his mind that he must fix it sometime, and he said, ‘I don't suppose it was painful or anything.'

I said, ‘Oh no. You mustn't worry about that.' Because all his life, he's been made aware of the necessity to recognize and alleviate suffering; it's the one thing he's been presented with as being beyond questioning, since the first kitten was run over and the first street beggar was seen displaying his sores.

‘Just the idea.' His head was low; now he looked round towards me without lifting it, sideways, and I knew quite well that what he was really asking about was the unknown territory of adult life where one would choose to die. But I wasn't equal to that. He was. He blurted, ‘I feel sorry I didn't love him.'

I looked at him without excuses. The one thing I hope to God I'll never do is fob him off with them.

I said, ‘There may be talk among the boys – but you know he went after the right things, even if perhaps it was in the wrong way. The things he tried didn't come off but at least he didn't just eat and sleep and pat himself on the back. He wasn't content to leave bad things the way they are. If he failed, well, that's better than making no attempt. Some boys' – I was going to say ‘fathers' but I didn't want him to go attacking all the scions of stock-broking houses – ‘some men live successfully in the world as it is, but they don't have the courage even to fail at trying to change it.'

He looked satisfied. He is only a little boy, after all; he said with a rough sigh, ‘We've had a lot of trouble through politics, haven't we.'

‘Well, we can't really blame this on politics. I mean, Max suffered a lot for his political views, but I don't suppose this – what he did now – is a
direct
result of something political. I mean – Max was in a mess, he somehow couldn't deal with what happened to him, largely, yes, because of his political actions, but also because … in general, he wasn't equal to the demands he … he took upon himself.' I added lamely, ‘As if you insisted on playing in the first team when you were only good enough – strong enough for third.'

As he followed what I was saying his head moved slightly in the current from the adult world, the
way I have sometimes noticed a plant do in a breath of air I couldn't feel.

In the end he has to take on trust what he is told; the only choice he can exercise is
by whom
. And he chooses me. At times I'm uneasy to see how sceptically he reports what he is told by others. But the reaction will come with adolescence, if I'm to believe what
I've
been told is ‘healthy development'. He'll tear me down. But with what? Of course I'd craftily like to find out, so that I can defend myself in advance, but one generation can never know the weapons of the next. He picked up my hand and kissed it swiftly on the back near the thumb just as he used to do suddenly, for no reason I knew, when he was little. It must be five years since he stopped doing it, out of embarrassment or because he didn't need to. But there was no one to see, in the empty car park. He said, ‘What are you going to do today? Is Graham coming over?'

‘I don't think so. I saw him this morning, he was there for breakfast.'

‘I expect Jellings'll put Max in prayers tonight. Usually when a relation dies he's in prayers.'

So Max would have a service for his soul in the school chapel. There wouldn't be any other. It wasn't likely they'd pray for him, the ones he worked with, the ones he betrayed. Max wasn't anybody's hero; and yet, who knows? When he made his poor little
bomb it was to help blow the blacks free; and when he turned State witness the whites, I suppose, might have taken it as justification for claiming him their own man. He may have been just the sort of hero we should expect.