Nadine Gordimer - A World of Strangers

A burst of laughter was interrupted by my appearance; five people looked up, and a thick-set man with a bald, sunburned head struggled from his chair and came over to greet me. ‘You’ll be Toby Hood,’ he said. ‘Come and have a drink. Marion’s not back yet.’ He seemed to think that his own identity, that of Hamish Alexander, was self-evident, and he began to introduce me to the others. ‘Archie Baxter’ — a thin, youngish man with the good looks of the distinguished drinker in the whisky advertisements. ‘Kit Baxter’, an equally good-looking young woman, also with a commercial finish about her; they were the kind of couple whose clothes — in this instance, riding clothes — might have been donated by some firm in return for having them worn to advantage, and in the right company. ‘And this is Margaret Gerling and her big sister, Cecil Rowe.’ At this they laughed, and looked alike, the two pretty girls who were also in riding clothes. It seemed a bit ridiculous to stretch myself out, almost supine, the moment I walked into a stranger’s house, and so I sat on the foot-rest of one of the long chairs, between Mrs Baxter and what I now saw was the elder of the two sisters, Cecil Rowe. Baxter, who was over at the little bar, said, ‘Won’t you try one of my Martinis?’ and Mrs Baxter pushed a tray of olives and nuts along a low table, within my reach.

Once I had a drink and was seated, they took up their chatter again; Hamish Alexander had the totally impersonal welcome and perpetual smile of the man who has many guests, most of them not invited by himself. The women were animated and talkative, especially Margaret Gerling and Mrs Baxter. All three had short, bright fashionable hair, not blonde and yet not brown, the blue eyes, the sunburned necks and brilliant finger-nails, the high actressy voices and oddly inarticulate vocabulary — vogue words, smart clichés, innuendo, and slang — of young upper-class Englishwomen. Nice girls, I should say. Gay, quite witty, and decorative. A shade more sophisticated, a shade less intelligent, a shade more sexy than Rina Turgell. I laughed at their stories — mostly riding stories, against themselves — that were not very good but were well told, along with the others. I contributed a story, not a riding one, but also against myself. A number of other guests came, and the elaborate outdoor room began to fill up.

There were middle-aged couples, the wives looking far younger than they could have been, in cotton dresses which displayed a lot of well-preserved flesh. But they were good-looking women who smelled luxurious. The men wore the clothes of whatever sport they had just left off playing, or, pasty and wattled, sat, stranded, in a well-pressed get-up of flannels, silk shirts, and scarves that covered the ruin of the hardened arteries, the damaged liver, or the enlarged heart that lay heavily in the breast. One of these last sat next to me, eventually; and I felt myself moved to a kind of disgusted pity, as I always am by the sight of one of these old bulls of finance, still sniffing the sawdust, with the broken shafts of money-tussles, overwork, overeating, over-drinking stuck fast in their thick necks. There was a thin, tall man with thick white hair — the sort of man who plays a fast game of tennis at sixty, and marries a twenty-five-year-old at seventy. He had just been on a crocodile-shooting safari in Northern Rhodesia, and he talked about it in a loud, natural, overbearing voice that had the effect of breaking up minor conversations by the sheer contrast of its absolute confidence in the interest of what it was saying.

‘Is it true that you must get them between the eyes, John?’ asked Mrs Baxter.

‘I don’t know about that, but I don’t mind telling you, they’ve got to be pretty damn well dead before you can count on ’em to be dead,’ he said. ‘You think you’ve got them, and then they just knife off through the water and you never find them again. We must’ve shot a dozen for every one we got aboard. But what beasts they are; you feel you’re doing ’em a favour by killing them. And when the boys slit ’em open-’ he put his hand — with one of those expensive watches that tell the time, date, and phases of the moon, on the wrist — over his face, hiding it to the wiry, tangled black eyebrows.

Hamish Alexander, who obviously enjoyed him, sat forward grinning, his strong, patchy yellow teeth oddly matching the gingerish bristles on his red neck. ‘I’ve heard about that,’ he said gleefully. ‘I’ve heard people. .’

‘Hamish, hearing about it couldn’t give you the least idea. . The whole boat, I mean. It stank like a — a,’ his mouth pursed itself but stopped in time.

‘- Charnel-house,’ said Kit Baxter, sweetly.

Everyone laughed. ‘Tactful Kit,’ said Baxter.

John leant over and kissed Kit on her round, smooth brow. ‘And how good she smells — ’ There was more laughter. ‘But honestly, I don’t mind telling you, though you know how dignified and all that my behaviour usually is — ’

‘Did you dress for dinner every night, John?’ someone called.

‘‘- I wanted to jump off that boat and swim ashore. Honest to God, nothing would have kept me on that boat but crocodiles still in the water!’

Lifting her glass, against which the rows of bracelets on her wrist slid tinkling, in a call for attention, one of the women said, ‘I remember once going out to the whaling station at Durban. — Why, of course, you were there too, Peggy; and Ivan — That was a smell to beat all smells; a real eighty-per-cent proof distillation of disgusting fishiness, oiliness, oh, I don’t know what.’

‘My dear Eve,’ said the man John, ‘I’m sorry, but we just can’t have evasions in this, this — ’

‘Context,’ said Kit.

‘This context —’

Kit seemed sure she could say it better for him: ‘You must call a stink a stink.’

In the shrieks of laughter that followed, the hostess, Marion Alexander, arrived, and with a general greeting to her guests, came straight over to where I had risen from my chair.

‘It’s Toby!’ and she kissed me. ‘I’m so glad you’re here. I hope they’ve been looking after you. I had a match this morning, so you must forgive my rudeness. There, I’ve put my lipstick on you. No, a little lower. That’s it.’ She took my arm, and then repeated her apologies, in a clear, singing voice, for the benefit of everyone: ‘Please forgive me — I didn’t think I’d be the last luncheon guest, I did believe I’d be home by half past twelve.’ I thought she looked extraordinary: she wore a white linen dress and a panama hat with a band round it. For the first few moments I did not realize that this was the outfit that women wear when they play bowls, and wondered why she should choose to look like a horribly ageing schoolgirl. I did not remember her, though on the telephone she had said that she remembered seeing me just before the war, when I was already a schoolboy, but I could see that she must once have been a pretty woman, and was much older than my mother. Or maybe it was just that she had grown older badly, and self-consciously. Underneath that hat, her face was painted whiter and pinker than it could ever have been when she was young; yet no doubt that was how she imagined she had looked, and so was what she chose to fake. She went to change, and Kit Baxter, with the pleading air of asking for a treat, jumped up and followed her, saying, ‘I want to come and talk to you, Marion!’

While they were gone, the last three guests arrived, and with them the Alexanders’ son, Douglas. He had come from golf; and the two new male guests were in riding clothes. Along with the old bulls, I was the only male guest not fresh from conquest of field or ball. The two latest were youthfully apoplectic, blond, with small, flat, lobeless ears, short noses, and bloodshot blue eyes. Every feature of their faces looked interchangeable; they burst in crying, ‘Hullo! Hullo! Hullo there, you people,’ like a comedy duo. They were, in fact, a duo: identical twins; looking at them was disturbing, like looking at someone after you’ve had a blow in the eye, and you keep seeing the outline of head, gestures, and talking mouth, duplicated. But they had with them a stunning American girl, thin as a Borzoi, in what looked to me like black tights (anyway, they were women’s trousers that didn’t hang down at the seat) and a thing like a man’s striped shirt that enveloped her but got caught on the two little shaking peaks of small breasts as she moved. She was very fair, without a hint of yellowness, and her hair was drawn back and held by a strand of the hair itself, twisted round it. Her face was very young and made up to look pale and downy, and her expression was as old as the hills. As she was introduced to the company, she flickered a kind of lizard-look over everyone, then put her long cigarette holder back in her mouth, like a dour man with a pipe. I got the impression that Tim and Tom (or whatever their names were) hardly knew her; that women caught on to their ruddy hide like burrs on wool. They were off again almost as soon as they came, waving away Archie Baxter: ‘No, no, old boy, before we have any of your stuff, we must have a swim. Have we time for a swim before lunch?’ ‘Course we’ve got time. Always time in Hamish’s house, isn’t there?’