Nadine Gordimer - A World of Strangers

They went off over the grass to the pool, and in a few minutes we could see them, hugging their arms round themselves on the edge, waving, then exploding the surface of the water, shouting at each other in their identical voices, as if someone were holding a conversation with himself out loud.

I felt inkstained and rather stale inside my hairy old suit, and, with my third drink disappearing, contented in this. Almost everyone had had a number of drinks by now (Hamish did not stir from his chair, and Archie Baxter managed the little bar, with the help of two Africans in white suits and gloves who passed endlessly into the house and out again, bearing soda and ice and cigarettes, and carrying away dirty glasses and ashtrays) and this, added to the anticipation of lunch, raised the pitch of the company. Mrs Alexander and Kit Baxter had returned. Mrs Alexander went about her guests with the warmth of a hostess who enjoys people and knows how to bring them together in a paper-lantern glow. She flattered, she exaggerated, you could see that, but the effect was to make one more agreeable; with the result that the whole conglomerate — guests, alcohol, gossip, and, later, enjoyable food — was agreeable. This is quite a different sort of success from that of the hostess who brings people of ideas together. This, in fact, was making something out of nothing very much.

The twins, freshly doused and towelled, came up and clamoured round the bar, with their American and Kit Baxter and the two sisters Cecil and Margaret. They spoke actor’s English, with exaggerated stresses. They showed off, I felt, rather than flirted, with the women. Marion Alexander kept taking me by the arm and presenting me to people: ‘Have you talked to this boy? I do wish you would, before I get a chance to, so that you can tell me if he’s altogether too bright for me. He’s Althea Thomas’s boy — Aden Parrot, the publishers, such a brainy family.’

‘This is a very special day for me. This boy’s the son of my friend Althea Thomas, and Graham Hood. — I was devoted to them.’ She made it sound as if my mother and father were a cause; and perhaps, to her, they were: the embodiment of the causes of the Thirties, to which she remembered herself responding for a time, just as she had taken to cloche hats a year or two earlier. Anyway, the name of my father cheerfully meant nothing to these people, just as, I suppose, the names of his more illustrious contemporaries — a Spender or a Toller — would have meant nothing. But I could see that Marion Alexander’s insistence on my parentage suggested to some of the sharper women that mine must be a family that featured in the Tatler. Some of those who were English accepted me with the airy freemasonry of those who know the privileges and disadvantages, for whatever they are worth, of their own order. Those who were not English all seemed to take travel in Britain and Europe as much for granted as a journey in a suburban train, and talked to me of most Continental countries as if they assumed my familiarity with these places was as easy as their own. One flew from here to there; hired a car; met one’s daughter in Switzerland; one’s husband flew in from Rome; sister met one in Vienna; fjords and alps, casinos and cruises, palazzos and espadrilles. .

One of the black men in a white suit came out and beat a gong through all this.

As the people rose to trail in to lunch, conversations took a final turn: the last word was said on English furniture, on someone’s wedding the week before, on the values in real estate in Johannesburg, on the merits of a new golf course being laid out by someone named Jock, and the cannon bones of a horse named Tom Piper.

On the way to the dining-room, I had a ridiculous encounter with the American girl, who happened to be the last of the women shepherded before me. She turned her head and said in a low, dead, American voice, ‘I hear you’re a gread wrider?’ ‘No, no, just a publisher,’ I said, embarrassed, because I wasn’t really even that, yet. At which she burst out laughing — a bold, full laugh, surprising in contrast to her speaking voice — and said: ‘I guess I’ve got the wrong purson.’ But she offered no explanation, and the conversation promptly died. It was only later, when I was studying her where she sat, across the table from me, beside Douglas Alexander and one of the twins, that I suddenly realized that what she had said was not ‘writer’ but ‘rider’. I had an agitated impulse to lean across the glasses and silver and the Italian bread basket and explain; but it was obviously no good. Explain that I was neither writer nor rider? I was the wrong person, anyway. She’d accepted the fact, that was that. Bored and indifferent to their company, she belonged and could belong only to the twins, part of their cutting a dash. Yet she ate and drank steadily without the lipstick coming off her beautiful mouth; which seemed to me wonderful: the casual mark of a special kind of girl, not quite real, whom I would never get; perhaps would never try or really want to get.

Douglas Alexander, as the children of self-assured, temperamentally vigorous parents often are, was a rather blank youngster, with the look of a perpetual listener on his face; as if, since childhood, he had been taking in conversations to which he was not expected to make a contribution, and long habit had vitiated his desire to do so, although he was not longer disqualified by being under age. He certainly did not behave like any sort of popular concept of a gold-mining millionaire’s son that I could think of; all the time that he was keeping up an apparently lame and stilted conversation (about New York, I gathered) with the American beauty, his eyes kept gliding out of their polite focus on her and looking sharply to the other side, as if there were something there attracting his urgent attention. On the girl’s left, the one twin jounced and twisted, waving his glass about, bumping her frequently with shoulder or elbow, as he chattered to his neighbour and audience. Every now and then he would notice her, and with the impersonal, momentary, instinctive recall to sex with which a dog will briefly lick, once or twice, another dog, would pass his hand down her arm or pat her hair.

I was at Hamish Alexander’s end of the table, with Kit Baxter on my left and Cecil Rowe on my right. Mrs Baxter had a voice of great conscious charm, that she used, with purpose and efficiency, as if it were some piece of high fidelity equipment rather than the final, faulty evolution of those grunts and cries with which man first tried to give expression to the awful teeming of his brain. She was carrying on an exchange of banter and flattery with old Hamish, who was too far away for conversation to be comfortable. While her head was turned from me, the long fingers of her smooth hand with its uniform of red nails and rings felt blindly up and down the mother-of-pearl handle of a small knife, quite near me, carrying on some secret life of its own. Hamish Alexander’s red face, with the simple, short, plump-featured, retroussé profile of a child and the teary grin of his blue eyes, was cocked toward her along the table; but someone suddenly passed a question to him about uranium deposits, and immediately his face not only came to itself, but took on the close, guarded reasonableness, the poker-face frankness, of a man asked about something important and not to be disclosed. He gave himself the second or two of a peculiarly Scotch clearing of his throat, and then he began a long, blunt, bland, confidential red herring, with the words: ‘Now it’s not as simple as all that. . As far back as nineteen forty-one — ’

Kit Baxter turned to me with perfectly convincing and certainly assumed delight. ‘I’ve been waiting to talk to you!’ she said. I grinned at her disbelievingly.’ I hope you haven’t written a book,’ I said, ‘because I’m afraid I haven’t much influence with Aden Parrot, in spite of what Mrs Alexander may have told you.’