Nadine Gordimer - The Late Bourgeois World

We size each other up entirely without malice. I don’t pretend to know anything about him, except what I can pick up in his innocent, calculating, good-looking plump face, he interprets me entirely as an outsider — I the outsider — by the exigencies of the life he belongs to.

Slowly he began to eat again, we both went on eating, as if I had persuaded him to it. He said, ‘Wha’d’you think made him do it? Political reasons?’ He knows, of course, that Max turned State witness, that time.

‘If he’d been one of your chaps he wouldn’t have needed to do it himself, ay? Someone else would have stuck a knife in him and thrown him in the harbour.’

He said, ‘Hell, Liz, man, take it easy’ — with a short snort of a laugh. But it’s true; it’s all so much simpler if you’re black, even your guilt’s dealt with for you. African State witnesses appear masked in court, but they can’t count on lasting long.

‘You think he couldn’t get it off his mind?’

I said, ‘Oh I don’t know, Luke, I really don’t know.’

‘But, man, you knew him from way back, you knew what sort of person he was, even if you haven’t seen him lately.’

‘He wasn’t the sort of person he thought he was.’

‘Ah, well.’ He didn’t want to risk speaking ill of the dead. I said, by way of comfort, ‘There are people who kill themselves because they can’t bear not to live for ever’ — I smiled with my lips turned down, in case he thought I was talking about an afterlife in heaven — ‘I mean, they can’t put up with the limitations of the time they’re alive in. Saints and martyrs are the same sort.’ But he just said, ‘The poor chap, ay,’ and I had a glimpse of myself as another white woman who talks too much. I offered him wine again. ‘No, I’ll stick to this,’ he said, so I filled up my own glass; drinks too much, too, I thought. But I was in a calm, steady mood, I never drink when I am in a bad one. We helped ourselves to more food, a to and fro of hands and dishes and no ceremony. He was telling me about Reba’s scheme to build six freehold houses for better-off Africans round the Basutoland capital. ‘If Reba could only get someone to back him, he could really go ahead. He can get cheap bricks and cheap timber —’

‘But what sort of houses will they be!’

‘No, they’re all right. Reba knows what he’s doing. Did you ever know that fellow Basil Katz? Yes, he’s up there now and he’s done some drawings and everything for Reba.’

I wasn’t much interested, and it was easy to sound sympathetic. ‘The building societies won’t play?’

‘No, man, of course not, they won’t do it for a black. It’s a shame. I’m sorry for Reba, he’s dead keen and he knows he can get the cement and the bricks, and the timber — cheap, really cheap. And he’s got the labour — you know, it’s a good thing to show the Basutos you’re providing employment — it’s a good thing.’

‘I don’t suppose he can offer enough security — what’s it?’

‘Collateral. Yes, that’s it. But if he was a white, it’d be a different story —’ Talking business, he assumed, perhaps unconsciously, the manner that he thought appropriate, chair tipped back, body eased casually. ‘On, say, thirty thousand rand, reckoning on a return of ten per cent — well, call it eight — you can expect a profit of close to three thousand, d’you realize that?’

‘But is there anyone there to buy houses like that? Have they got the money — I mean I should have thought it would have to be a sub-economic scheme of some kind.’

‘They’ve got it, they’ve got it. And Reba knows how to get it out of them.’ He spoke with the city man’s contempt for country people. ‘Reba’s in with the Chiefs, man. You should see the cattle they’ve got. Not the poor devils up in the mountains! Reba goes and sits and drinks beer with them, and talks and talks, man, and he tells them how when independence comes the new African government’s going to need houses for the ministers and people, in the town … he t-a-l-k-s to them …’ Breaking into Sotho, he showed me Reba palavering with the yokels — watching, with a white flick of his long eyes, my laughter. I wondered what he was putting up the performance for; what he had come for. But I had forgotten about this at the moment when I said, ‘And that’s what you’re doing in Johannesburg, trying to raise money for the tycoon’s houses’ — and neatly gave away to him the opening he wanted.

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.’