Nadine Gordimer - The Late Bourgeois World

And this time the growl of laughter was confident. Max became inaudible, though I guessed he was probably saying something about the beauty being in spite of the way she’d been got up for the day. The guests had decided that his ignoring of their response was some sort of dead-pan wit and their laughter surged appreciatively into every pause or hesitation as he went on, ‘… between the two of them. But the kind of life they’ll live, the way they’ll live among other people — that’s another thing again, and here one can have something to say. I know I’m supposed to be speaking for everybody here’ (there was an emotional murmur of support) ‘all these people who have known Queen since she was born, and who have known her husband, known Allan — and who have come here full of the good feeling they get when they get together and drink each other’s health — your health, Queen and Allan — but I’d like to say off my own bat’ (eyes were on him with the indulgent, smiling attention good manners decreed) ‘don’t let the world begin and end for you with the — how many is it? Four hundred? — people sitting here in this — the Donnybrook Country and Sporting Club today. These good friends of our parents and Allan’s parents, our father’s regional chairman and the former ministers of this and that (I don’t want to make a mistake in the portfolios) and all the others, I don’t know the names but I recognize the faces, all right — who have made us, and made this club, and made this country what it is.’ (There was prolonged clapping, led by someone with loud, hard palms.) ‘There’s a whole world outside this.’ (Applause broke out again.) ‘Shut outside. Kept out. Shutting this in … Don’t stay inside and let your arteries harden, like theirs … I’m not talking about the sort of thing some of them have, those who have had their thrombosis, I don’t mean veins gone furry through sitting around in places like this fine club and having more than enough to eat —’ (Clapping began and spattered out, like mistaken applause between movements at a concert.) ‘What I’m asking you to look out for is — is moral sclerosis. Moral sclerosis. Hardening of the heart, narrowing of the mind; while the dividends go up. The thing that makes them distribute free blankets in the location in winter, while refusing to pay wages people could live on. Smugness. Among us, you can’t be too young to pick it up. It sets in pretty quick. More widespread than bilharzia in the rivers, and a damned sight harder to cure.’

There was a murmurous titter. The uncle beside me whispered anxiously, ‘He’s inherited his father’s gifts as a speaker.’

‘It’s a hundred per cent endemic in places like this Donnybrook Country and Sporting Club, and in all the suburbs you’re likely to choose from to live in. Just don’t be too sure they’re healthy, our nice clean suburbs for whites only.’

They were smiling blindly, deafly, keeping their attitudes of bland attention as they would have done if the hostess had lost her panties on the dance floor, or they had suddenly overheard an embarrassing private noise.

‘— and your children. If you have babies, Queenie and Allan, don’t worry too much about who kisses them — it’s what they’ll tell them later that infects. It’s what being nicely brought up will make of them that you’ve got to watch out for. Moral sclerosis — yes, that’s all I wanted to say, just stay alive and feeling and thinking — and that’s all I can say that’ll be of any use …’

Max suddenly became aware of the people about him, and sat down. There was a second of silence and then the same pair of hard palms began to clap and a few other hands followed hollowly, but someone at the bride’s table at once leapt up and thrust out his glass in the toast that Max had forgotten — ‘The bride and groom!’ All the gilded folding chairs shuffled and all the figures rose in solidarity — ‘To the bride and groom!’ I saw the determinedly smiling faces behind the glasses of wine as if they had turned on him. But the voices of congratulation clashed over my head, the band struck up ‘For They Are Jolly Good Fellows’, and the din swept over him, ignoring him, asserting them. In a little while nobody seemed to remember that the speech had been any different from dozens of others they’d sat through and didn’t remember. Only Mrs Van Den Sandt’s make-up stood out like a face drawn on her face as she leant vivaciously across the table to receive kisses and congratulations; the skin beneath must have been drained of blood.

Poor Max — moral sclerosis ! The way he fell in love with that prig’s phrase and kept repeating it: moral sclerosis . Where on earth had he got it from? And all the analogies he kept raking up to go with it. Like our old Sunday school lessons — the world is God’s garden and we are all His flowers, etc. (The Blight of Dishonesty, Aphids of Doubt.) And could there have been a more unsuitable time and place for such an attempt? What sort of show could his awkward honesty make against the sheer rudeness of him? They were all in the right, again, and he was wrong; and I could have kicked him for it. We did not leave the wedding. We stayed on and got rather tight and danced together in an ostentatious solidarity of our own, but I couldn’t say a word to him about the speech, it was so horribly funny, and I suppose that made him ashamed, and he sulked for days.

As for the bride, his sister Queenie, home and school had succeeded with her so completely that she did not understand his strange, muddled outburst sufficiently to feel the need to ignore it. ‘What a jawing to give us at our wedding!’ she complained good-naturedly. ‘I thought I was back at school or something! You think because you got married first you can lecture me like an old grandpa!’

Moral sclerosis ; good God.

After all this time, the idiotic term still makes me squirm — and apparently express the embarrassment outwardly, in a smile: when I drew up before the raised glove of the traffic policeman who’s on duty at my corner on Saturdays, I realized that he was smiling back at the female behind glass in the manner of one responding to the unexpected, but never unwelcome overture.

Chapter 3

The telephone was ringing as I came into the flat, but when I reached it, it stopped. I was sure it was Graham and then I saw a bunch of flowers under cellophane, on the table; he’d got the florist to send them here instead of to the Home. But my name was on the finicky little envelope — he had sent me flowers at the same time as he ordered them for the old lady. Samson the cleaner must have been working in the flat when they were delivered, and had taken them in. They were pressed like faces against glass; I ripped them free of the squeaky transparency and read the card: With love, G. Graham and I have no private names, references, or love-words. We use the standard vocabulary when necessary. A cold bruised smell came up from the flowers; it was the snowdrops, with their onion-like stems and leaves, their chilly greenness. He knows how crazy I am about them. And about the muguet-du-bois that we bought when we met for a week in the Black Forest in Europe last year. There is nothing wrong with a plain statement: With love. He happened to be in the florist’s and so he sent me some flowers. It’s not a thing he would do specially, unless it were on a birthday or something. It might have been because of Max; but good God, no, surely not, that would have been awful, he wouldn’t have done it. We had made love the night before, but there was nothing special about that. One doesn’t like to admit to habit, but the fact is that he doesn’t have his mind on court the next day, on Friday evenings, and I don’t have to get up next morning to go to work.