A World of Strangers (13 page)

‘You've been much occupied.'

As we danced, she leant her head back to talk and her two breasts touched my chest firmly and distinctly, buttonholing me.

‘Stanley's a bloody leech,' she said. ‘You drunk?'

‘No.'

‘So'm I. Let's have some wine.'

We went, clumsily arm-about, like two boxers after a fight, to the drinks. ‘How'd you like to have a picture like that of yourself in your room, Sam?' Steven Sitole was saying. ‘Oh I know it's revolting to have oneself staring at oneself all the time,' said Sylvia, hiding her face in her glass of wine. When she suddenly spoke fluently, it was as if some other self were speaking up inside her. ‘Oh, I don't know,' said Sam, admiring a foreign custom. ‘I think, for a woman, it's rather nice.' ‘A rep-proach to me, a reproach to i-idiotic vanity-did I ever look like that? Or d-do I only think n-now that I did? Now that I can blame the difference on baggy eyes and wrinkles and a jacket crown on a tooth?'

I am bad at caressing women publicly; I looked foolishly encumbered by the redhead, and I knew it, and so all the pleasure was gone from the contact with her tall, warm body. We dropped apart and she went to Stanley, murmuring up to him in relief at the escape. I drank somebody's glass of wine and looked from Sylvia to her portrait. ‘When was it done?' ‘Oh don't be so bloody t-tactless!' There was laughter. The portrait looked right into your eyes, the way she herself did; but she must have been much more self-centred then: the face looked aware of the feather curving down from the hat, the shadows exchanged by the black hair and the wine-coloured dress. It was a portrait of a woman thinking about herself. ‘A Spanish or Italian beauty,' I said.

‘Why is that always considered the compliment?' Sylvia asked the company. ‘I'm a Jewess; couldn't one say I used to be a beautiful one?'

‘Berenice, then,' I said, looking at her. ‘That's exactly it. The beautiful queen.' Talk and laughter and argument swept another way. I could not follow it because of a pressing need; I wandered through the house but did not come
upon the bathroom, so I went out into the dark garden, beyond the light of the windows. The physical relief, the fresh night air after the close room, and slow, pleasant turning of the wine in my head brought me to peace with myself. I staggered a little, but I was at home on this earth. A shape like my own brushed past the shrubs, and I was joined by someone. It was Steven Sitole. ‘What are you doing here?' he said, as we stood companionably. I laughed. ‘Same as you.'

He found this very funny. ‘- I'm selling books, I'm connected with a publishing firm.'

He took out a packet of cigarettes and we strolled down to the gate, smoking. ‘I used to be a journalist,' he said. ‘I know, Anna Louw told me. What made you give it up?' ‘Various things,' he said, in the vague, jaunty tone, mysterious and important, that I recognized as the tone of the man whom many jobs give up. ‘I had other things on the go. I couldn't manage everything at once.' ‘So what do you do now?' Anna had told me, but I had forgotten already. ‘Insurance. Much more money in it.' ‘You mean the usual sort of thing, life policies and so on.' ‘That's right,' he laughed pleasantly. ‘Fire, funeral, accident, loss – all that stuff. Of course, we're not like you people, mostly we insure against things we're sure will happen, funerals mainly. Yes, I exploit the poor simple native, and in return he gets a lovely funeral – what do you say, a slap-up do.'

‘Did you really like England?'

‘I shouldn't ever have come back here.' He stumbled and I caught his arm. The darkness accepted him; his face and hands were gone in it; he sat down on the grass. ‘If you'd stayed,' I said, searching for the right kind of meaningless reassurance, ‘if you'd stayed, you would have longed to come back.'

‘Man, there's nothing in Africa I want,' he said, grinning, and I became aware of his face again, though I could not see anything but his teeth; that smooth, polished-wood face with the withdrawn eyes, the delicate nose, the gathering-up of planes toward the mouth. Suppose he had been born to the old Africa, before the Arab and the white man came,
suppose he had had a tribe, and a place in that tribe, and had known that his life was to hunt and fight and reproduce and live in the shelter of fear of the old gods – would that have been what he wanted? I thought of him in the room from where the blur of music and voices sounded, lean and gangling and befuddled, with a glass of brandy in his pink-palmed hand with the too-long nails. The idea was sad and ridiculous. And then I thought of myself, and what I wanted: a house lived in, a place made, a way of life created for me by my fathers, a destiny I could accept without choice or question. That was not sad and ridiculous. The wine closed over my head, and, sunk in myself, I fiercely and dismayedly resisted the idea; that could not be sad and ridiculous. It was what I wanted and could not get.

‘Let's go,' he said. I turned, in agreement, toward the house.

‘Let's go and drink. I'll take you to a place. You're an Englishman, I can take you. Show you round. “Can I show you around?” Do the honours.' The phrase pleased him and he repeated it, shaking his head and making a clicking sound of approval.

‘I came with Anna Louw. How can I?'

‘Woman'll get herself home,' he said. He stood up, threw his cigarette into the hedge, and a dog, scavenging along the gutter in the deserted street, stiffened into hostility and began to bark at him. He cursed it amiably. ‘They always bark at us. You don't have to teach them, they know. People like Sylvia don't know what to do to stop them. Hers is locked up, so he won't embarrass her.'

When we got inside again, he seemed to forget his suggestion. He got into a political argument with Sam, Dorothea Welz, and the Englishman, Stanley, against whom the redhead leaned, silent. I danced, dazedly, with Sylvia, and, her tongue loosened by wine, we talked about London and Aden Parrot paper-backs. Anna Louw came up and said, ‘Darling, I have to be in court at nine tomorrow and I haven't even finished preparing my stuff.' ‘Anna!' Sylvia was concerned. ‘Honestly, I must go. But you don't have to come,' she said to me. ‘Don't you come because of me.
Someone else will always take you home.' I protested my willingness to go, but she knew I didn't want to. I thanked her, tried to tell her across the restlessness of the room that I would telephone her to do so properly, but she slipped out with the considerateness of one who does not want to break up a party. Old Welz went with her: Dorothea had rushed up, when she saw Anna leaving, and begged: ‘For heaven's sake, take poor Egon with you, will you, Anna? He's had a long day and he's quite dead.' ‘Thank God.' The little man put his arm round Anna. ‘It's enough. Let's go. Sylvia, Sylvia, thenk you. You are a woman of qvality. Look how you last; the others,' his chin jerked in the direction of the redhead, ‘they droop, their paint runs. . . .' ‘Oh, go
on,
Egon, do,' said Dorothea. ‘As soon as I've proved myself unquestionably right, I'll follow. . . .' Steven had dropped out of the argument and was singing, a soft, two-part Bantu song, with Sam. Sam waved his hand gently, to keep Steven in time. Steven's cigarette held its shape in ash, burnt down in his forgotten fingers. ‘Come on; again,' Sam coaxed. When Sitole saw me, he stopped the song abruptly and the ash fell on his shoe. ‘Let's go and drink. I'll take you,' he grinned.

‘In what?'

‘Your car.'

‘I haven't got a car,' I said. Peter had just put on a particularly loud record, and he was trying to persuade the African woman to sing again.

‘No car.' Steven put a hand down on Sam's shoulder and laughed. ‘He hasn't got a car.'

‘Don't all white men have cars?' said Sam, with obedient good humour, giving his line.

‘Once upon a time,' said Steven, ‘dear children, there was a man who didn't have a car. All right. We'll use Sam's.'

‘Steve, I have to go straight home.'

‘He's married,' said Steven, in a high voice,' Sam's a married man. Ah, go on, Sam.'

A few minutes later, when I was talking to someone else, he came up and said: ‘Sam wants to go now, Mr Hood.' I excused myself and went with Steven back to the table
where Sam was. ‘Sam'll drop us off where we're going,' said Steven. We had one more drink, and then left, with Peter and the woman singer. We went almost unnoticed, for the party had suddenly blazed up again, as a dead fire will when a handful of crumpled letters catches the last spark. I know that I kissed Sylvia, and her cheek smelled of powder, and the others shook hands with her. The stray dog was still in the street, and he circled the car with a stiff tail, gurgling threateningly.

Sam's little Morris was new and went with the smoothness of a car that is taken care of, though it was heavily loaded. I sat in front, beside him, and Steven, Peter, and the woman were pressed into the back. It was nearly one o'clock in the morning and all life was withdrawn from the streets in the white suburbs through which we drove, and the town. We followed tram-car tracks, we skirted the sharp corners of darker, meaner streets; the car took me along as the world whirls and turns through space: I had neither recognition nor volition in its progress. The street-lights ended. We went down, into the dark. There were shapes, darker against the darkness; there was the moon, half-grown, spreading a thin, luminous paint on planes that reflected her. A graveyard of broken cars and broken porcelain; an old horse sleeping, tethered, on a bare patch; mute shops patched about with signs you could not read; small, closed houses whose windows were barred with tin strips against the street; a solitary man stooping to pick up something the day had left; a sudden hysterical gabble behind a rickety fence, where a fowl had started up. Sam stopped the car. ‘You're sure this is what you want, Steven,' he said. Steven laughed and answered in their own language. He struggled out of the back, and I got out. We said goodnight. Sam seemed uncertain about leaving us there; he stood looking at us for a moment, and then he revved the engine rather longer than was necessary before he drove away.

The street had the comforting, out-dated sinisterness of a back-alley habitation, deserted and late at night. I have grown up to a world whose bogeys are bombs and the horrors of atomic radiation; in people like me there is a certain
nostalgia about the personal, palpable threat of flesh-and-blood robbers and assassins, those bogeys of the past, long out-shadowed in evil. I felt a mild and pleasant excitement, adjunct to my drunkenness. Steven went along with the happy ease of a man who could have found his way in his sleep; he was at home in a dark and lonely street. He sang softly, under his breath, in his own language; so softly, he might have been breathing music. There was a little street-light, rheumy and high up, on the corner, and he took the top of my arm in his thin, hard hand and guided me to the right. There was some light here and there, behind windows – as if the dark had worn thin. And one door, leading right out on to the pavement, was open. From it, light the colour of orangeade made a geometrical shape of brightness in the dark. ‘No good,' murmured Steven, and turned me sharply round again. ‘What's wrong?' ‘If the door's open, the place is shut; that's wrong.' At the corner once more, I saw him grinning at me affectionately under the pale splash of the street-lamp: ‘I'm looking after you, Mr Hood.' We felt we understood each other very well, in the manner that drunks do; just as they may equally suddenly feel curdled with long-borne grievances against each other, and may be compelled to fight.

‘Here.' We turned into an unlit yard, with two rows of rooms or cottages – each row seemed to be under one continuous roof, but there were four or five doors in the length of each. They were shut against the night as if they were deserted and empty, but our feet were sucked by mud round a tap that snivelled and drizzled, and there was a strong smell of rotting vegetables, and the general sourness of a much-used place. Beyond and slightly behind the end wall of the right-hand row, there was a small detached building with some kind of lean-to porch attached – a creeper grew over it like a fishnet draped to dry. Steven pushed me up three broken steps and knocked on the door. The knock gave back its own sound; but in a moment the door opened the width of a face and a voice spoke, sleepily it seemed to me, and then changed its tone with recognition when Steven murmured. Of course I could not understand what was said.
But we went in, past a woman's face with a woollen scarf wrapped round the head, under the candle she held against the wall. I remember noticing that it was the swollen-looking face of a stupid woman. We went through a cave of a room where something smallish, probably a child, was asleep on an iron bed, and the candle caught, in passing, a bunch of paper roses and a primus stove, and then into a larger room with walls painted olive green half-way up like the waiting room in a station, and an electric bulb with a celluloid shade hanging over a table where four or five men did not look up. There was also another group, sitting on a bed, and they stubbed out their laughter, almost with relief, as if it had gone on too long beyond the merit of what had occasioned it, as we came in, and started talking in what, even in a language I didn't understand, I could recognize as the interrogatory tone of a change of subject. Everyone was drinking, but there were no bottles in sight. On the walls, a huge Coca-Cola calendar – a girl on a beach, in bathing costume and accompanied by a tiny radio and a carrier of Coca-Cola – hung with the look of inevitability of a holy picture given its niche. It was the barest room I had ever been in in my life; it depended entirely on humans.

Most of the men seemed to know Steven. If they happened to catch his eye they nodded; one or two said something. A man in American-looking trousers and a pastel shirt with a bow tie got up. Steven asked him a question; he answered; Steven nodded. The man went out of the door – not the door by which we had entered, but another next to the chimney that had no fireplace beneath it, and in a moment came back with two tumblers. ‘Have you got two dollars?' said Steven, taking a half-crown out of his pocket. I gave him a pound; ‘Ten bob'll do,' he said, as he took it. He paid for the drinks and for a moment, as the change was counted out, I saw, very close, the face of the man who had brought them; a broad face, smooth and the colour of olive oil, almost Chinese-looking, with a very large straight mouth whose width was accentuated by a pitch-black moustache that followed the outline of the upper lip closely, and even went down, parenthetically, round the two sides.