A World of Strangers (23 page)

When I met Cecil at the Stratford after one of her visits to the hairdresser, or she came frowning out into the sun on horseback at Alexanders', all dash and style, it was difficult to believe that the effect had been produced in that flat, with the rumpled drawers, the bills lying about, and the urgent appeals to the untidy kitchen. But, like Steven, whom she would never meet, her appearance was contrived in indifference to and independence of her background. This was not the only point of resemblance between them. Like Steven, she kept up a fiction of importance; she would suddenly suggest that we should change our plans for a particular day because on that day she had committed herself to some (unspecified) arrangement, a mysterious ‘something she couldn't very well get out of. Once or twice she announced that it was a damned nuisance, but she'd had a week-end invitation she couldn't refuse. Sometimes the mere mention of these engagements was enough to fulfil whatever their purpose was, and she forgot about them, at other times she did disappear for an evening or a week-end. On one of these occasions, when I had gone with Sylvia Danziger, Anna, and a man who was a friend of theirs from Capetown, to a cinema, I looked over the balcony and saw Cecil moving out of the foyer with John Hamilton, Rosamund Bell, and another man who came quite often to Alexanders'. They were in evening dress, so I supposed they must be going on to a nightclub. Why she should think it necessary to make a secret of an evening spent with these people, I did not know. Did she think I should be jealous? But that was ridiculous; it was not as if she were going out with some new man she'd found for herself: these people were all old friends.

In their different ways, and in their one country where they pursued them, both Cecil and Steven were people who had not found commitment. Theirs was a strange freedom; the freedom of the loose end. They made the hour shine; but now and then they leapt up in half-real, half-mock panic and fled – perhaps, at that very moment, something better was waiting, somewhere else?

I respected this; for hadn't I, for
my
reasons, felt myself a stranger, uncommitted, in my own world in England; and wasn't that the reason why, in this African country, I had come to feel curiously at home, a stranger among people who were strangers to each other?

In the few houses in Johannesburg where people of different colours met, you were likely to meet the same people time after time. Many of them had little in common but their indifference to the different colours of their skins; there was not room to seek your own kind in no man's land: the space of a few rooms between the black encampment and the white.

I got asked to these houses because it was known that I had made black as well as white friends since I had come to Johannesburg. It was not easy for people who did not want to keep their lives and hospitality exclusive to one race, to find new blood; most of these people found that they had two sets of white friends and acquaintances, those who could be invited along with coloured people, and those, sometimes very close friends, who could not.

But of course it was natural that a particular phenomenon should arise, and this was just beginning to happen, while I was in Johannesburg that summer. On the one side, there was the great mass of whites for whom the colour bar was not a piece of man-devised legislation, but a real and eternal barrier; on the other, there were the people who, through
social conscience, or (like myself) impatience with restrictive distinctions which they, personally, found meaningless, mixed with coloured people. It was inevitable, with all the books and newspaper reports being written about South Africa, that the forbidden fraternization should become, in a sense, fashionable, and attract certain white people who might never, otherwise, have overcome their prejudices against or indifference to the races on the periphery of their lives. They were often people who had failed to secure attention in other ways; by identifying themselves with Africans, they were able to feel the limelight on their faces for the first time, even if it was only a refraction of that brilliance which was falling on black faces. They ‘discovered* African painters, theatre groups, dancers and crafts; they collaborated with Africans in all sorts of arty ventures in which their own shaky talents were disguised by the novelty, the importance of the fact that their material was genuine African. It began to be fashionable (in a very small,
avant-garde
way, I may say; on a par, perhaps, with the personal exploration of the effects of mescalin, in other countries) to have at least one African friend. A pet-African, whose name you could drop casually: ‘Tom Kwaza was telling me at our house the other day. . .'

Sam had been taken up by one of these people, an amateur composer, with whom he was ‘collaborating' in the writing of a one-act ‘African' opera, and, through him, I found myself at the composer's house. There was a mixture of people, gathered for drinks; some of the old guard, who had always moved indiscriminately between black and white worlds – Dorothea Welz, a jolly priest in a dishevelled cassock – two young University lecturers who were married, the correspondent of an English newspaper, and an unidentified pretty girl, Sam, Steven, his friend Peter, and a young coloured man from the Cape. The hostess moved about in a state of suppressed high excitement, offering sausages and cold potato chips; she hung beggar-like at the edge of every conversation, with her plate and her entreating smile. The host raced from glass to glass, chivvying people to drink faster, filling up for those who had. Theirs was the desperate
hospitality of people who are unsure of themselves. They communicated their ill-ease to the guests; at first it seemed that this was going to be an evening of stunted conversation: Dorothea Welz smoked, Sam sat on the edge of his chair, ready to raise himself a few inches, politely, every time the hostess approached with her plate, Steven sat back looking down under arched brows at his shoes, with the expression of a man who is thinking his own thoughts and doesn't care who knows it. But if the hospitality was overdone, it was, literally, intoxicating. We all passed swiftly from sluggish reserve to the slightly theatrical confidential mood common to drinking parties. The newspaperman told the lecturer's wife: ‘What enchanting feet you have. I noticed them the moment you came in. If I were your husband I would give you rings to wear on your toes. Perfectly beautiful little feet.' And, in her fancy sandals, she curled her toes with pleasure: ‘Bells on my toes, don't you mean?'

In a huddle with Dorothea and the host, the priest – on one beer – listened open-mouthed and laughing, protesting, ‘Lovely! lovely!' to the young coloured from the Gape, who was giving an imitation of coloured speakers at a political meeting. Peter, the university lecturer, and I were part of an exchange that centred on the newspaperman's pretty girl, Sam, and Steven. Her particular style was that while she looked and dressed like a conventionally fashionable young woman, and had the sophisticated, consciously charming and slightly deferential manner with men that such women practise, she carried this into situations where such women would never be found. She was the progressive young woman in disguise, like the poet in the clerk's neat suit. The disguise was so successful that Steven was clearly taken in; she seemed to him to be the one kind of white woman whom he would never meet, the private ornament of the white man's house which represented to the white man the purity of his race and the height of his privilege. She and Steven got on particularly well together, but there was an edge of haughtiness to Steven's voice, an extra-careless twist to his banter that suggested that he could not really bring himself
to believe that she regarded him, as she treated him, like any other man.

There was a general sort of disagreement about the respective merits of newspapers, which somehow became an exchange of personal spelling idiosyncrasies, and, in turn, became a discussion about languages, and accents. We had all (except the priest) had so much to drink that all our talk veered to the personal. As the discussion sub-divided into smaller conversations, I heard the girl say to Steven, ‘Now take the way you speak. You speak English much more like an Indian than an African.'

Sam giggled and said to Steven and the girl,' It would be a good idea to have a competition, you know. Like they have competitions for the beauty queens with the best legs, and the rest of them is covered up. We should all stand behind a screen and talk and get someone to guess what we are.'

‘It'll be interesting to see what kind of English comes out of Africa, eventually,' the girl said, with her easy manner of deep interest. ‘Don't you think it may be almost a new language, as it is in America?'

‘That may be,' said Steven condescendingly. ‘That may very well be, eh, Sam? We are talking it already,' and as the others laughed, added, ‘But seriously, in Sophiatown the tsotsis have got a language of their own, a mixture of English, Afrikaans, Zulu, anything. Perhaps we should all learn to talk it.'

The girl picked up her drink and leaned forward. ‘That must be a kind of local Cockney, eh?'

‘Perhaps we should all understand each other,' persisted Steven, sniggering and drinking down the rest of his brandy.

‘D'you remember Esperanto?'

‘It's still going strong, I imagine.'

The hostess, now so delighted with her party that she was recklessly swallowing drinks at the pace she had imposed on her guests, said out of her stock of bold phrases: ‘It won't be the whites who'll decide what language is going to be spoken here it'll be you fellows.'

The conversation became even freer and more confidential; cigarettes smouldered on the floor, someone stepped on someone else's drink; the old phrases began to come up, in the old, frank, confessional tones: ‘The trouble with the whites is. . . .' ‘At least the Afrikaner says to you straight out, look here Kaffir.' ‘I've always wanted to know what Africans really think about mixed marriage.' ‘And what's the good of the Liberals opening party membership to us Africans if we haven't got votes?' ‘How do you really feel. . .' ‘What do you honestly think. . .' The young coloured was railing against coloureds who wouldn't identify themselves with the Africans and Indians. Sam was saying urgently: ‘Don't you believe there isn't still time. Don't you believe it.'

‘For God's sake,' said Steven, accepting another brandy, ‘must we always talk about it?' ‘By all means,' said the pretty girl, spreading out her hands as if to draw the company closer, ‘Let's talk about anything you like. Hundreds of things I always want to talk about.' ‘You see,' Peter suddenly contributed, giggling, ‘we always think
you
want to talk about it.'

‘And
we
always think you want to!' said the lecturer.

‘There it sits,' said Sam excitedly, ‘the uninvited guest, wherever you go -'

‘Hey, we should write a song about that,' the host looked in proudly upon the conversation.

‘Can't we talk about something else?'

The hostess looked at us all, fondly. There were almost tears in her eyes. She felt so released, accepted, that she said, arch and wordly, to Sam and Steven: ‘I'm going to see if our black brothers in the kitchen can't rustle up some tinned soup for us.'

The female member of the university couple had appeared on the arm of my chair: ‘May I perch next to you?' and when I had persuaded her to take the chair instead, I turned back to the company just as the newspaperman's pretty girl was asking, ‘Cigarette, anybody? Has anyone got a cigarette for me?' Mine were finished. So were the university lecturer's. While we fumbled, the girl sat forward, expectantly,
her lovely grey eyes exaggerating her need, in response to the audience. I suppose if a woman is beautiful and greatly appealing, it is almost impossible for her
not
to use the virtuosity of her charm, sometimes simply for the careless pleasure of using it, as an acrobat might turn a masterly somersault at home on his own lawn, or a peacock shake out his splendid tail when there was no hen about to be impressed. She was dressed up – as it were – in the look of a woman cajoling a favour from a lover; there it was, that look she could do so easily, in a minute, anywhere.

Sam said, ‘Here, Steven, you've got some cigarettes –' And Steven raised his eyebrows in inquiry, already twisting in his chair to get at his pocket. ‘Sure thing, somewhere here.' He found the paper pack, and talking, dividing his attention, opened the torn top; there was one cigarette in it. The girl, following what he was saying, held out her hand in a charming mock supplication and relief. And then I saw, quite distinctly, an exact moment, between one word and the next, when Steven's mind cut out from what he was saying – he saw the girl, saw the feathers of her charm all spread out in complacent display – and then cut back to the sound of his own voice again. He went on talking without a pause, and while he did so, he carefully took the single cigarette out of the crumpled pack, tapped it on the table to settle the tobacco, and put it in his mouth. Peter, the lecturer, Sam, the lecturer's wife, myself, and the girl with her hand still held out before her, watched his hand go out to the cigarette lighter on the table, pick it up, and light the cigarette, pinching in his nostrils with the first draw.

No one said, ‘Hey, what's the idea? What about that cigarette?' No one laughed. No one acknowledged, made of the incident a moment's absentmindedness on the part of a man who had had rather a lot to drink. We exempted him, and so gave away what he and all black men must always suspect of the company of white men: he was not like us, after all; after all, he was black.

The girl's hand came slowly back to her; she covered it with her other one, in her lap. And she too, went on talking, smiling, asking questions with an air of intense interest,
confessing her own opinions self-critically and with laughter. A little later, when I had drifted into another group and out again, I heard her say, detaining the host with a dove-like inclination of her head, ‘Sweetie, do you think you've got a filter tip in the house for me?'