Nadine Gordimer - A World of Strangers

‘Heavens, no, Kit couldn’t write anything. You’re quite safe there. It’s just that Marion tells me you’re likely to be in this country quite a while, and she and I thought you might like to come down to the farm some time — see something of the country. Not that it’s beautiful — though it is, to me, in a way — but it’s characteristic.’

‘What farm?’

‘Hamish’s. The Alexander stud farm, in the Karoo.’

‘Oh, I see. I didn’t know about it. What does he breed?’

‘Horses. Hamish started it more for fun than anything else. But now it’s turning into a big thing. Archie and I have been there since the beginning of the year.’

‘You and your husband live there?’

‘Hamish asked us to go down and take over, more or less permanently.’ She phrased it in order to make it clear that her husband’s appointment as manager of the Alexanders’ stud farm was a matter of friendship and patronage, rather than an ordinary job.

‘And how do you like that?’ I said.

She laughed, and the skin crinkled prettily round her painted eyes. ‘You don’t think I’m the type for the farmer’s wife! But you’re wrong you know, quite wrong. I’m not a city person at all, really, I’m an absolute bumpkin in towns. I’ve always led a country life at home, and I hate London — Archie and I lived there for two years after the war and I couldn’t wait to get out of it. Our time in Johannesburg has really only been bearable because of Hamish and Marion — they’re such fantastic darlings, and we’ve been able to come out and ride whenever we like, and they’ve whisked us off down to the farm whenever we could get away’ — a dish held in a white-gloved hand that showed an inch of matt-black skin between cuff and sleeve, came between us — ’ (Won’t you have some more mousse? Marion’s cook makes the best mousse you’ve ever tasted.) — It’s absolutely in the bundu, of course, forty-three miles from Neksburg and that’s not much to speak of, itself, I may say. I can’t describe these Karoo villages as “villages”, unless the person I’m talking to has seen them. They’re nothing at all like our idea of a village. Don’t start thinking of cottage gardens, mossy churchyards, and the rest of it. . Just think of dust and stones, that’s all, dust and stones, and a flybitten “hotel” with a couple of big shiny cars belonging to commercial travellers outside — also covered in dust.’

‘And the farm — also dust and stones?’

‘Oh no,’ she said; and I realized — not without comfort, for the delicious lunch and the wines had, as usual, awakened in me a great respect for life lived in the exquisite orderliness of wealth — that nothing in Hamish Alexander’s empire would be dust and stones.

‘There’s water on the farm, of course; all sorts of pumps and gadgets huffing and puffing to keep it irrigated. And there are huge trees round the house, cypress and pepper trees — it should be quite charming when we’ve got it fixed up more or less the way we want it. I hope that by the time you come there’ll be a second bathroom built on, and the painting will be done.’ She said this with the complacent, determined air of a woman who is making a house over to conform as closely as possible to the setting for herself that she always carries in her mind. Uproot her again tomorrow and she will begin again at once to attempt to make the next shell of habitation conform to this master setting. In this primitive cause those waxy, inutile, decorated hands would work as tirelessly and instinctively as any animal’s claws making ready the nest; and in the nest would be — she herself. It was a perversion of the nesting instinct that you see often in sophisticated women; the drive remains, crazily fixed, while the purpose for which it was rooted in human nature has been lost, truly forgotten.

‘I work a lot with the young horses,’ she was saying. ‘Archie’s time is taken up with the administrative side, mostly. But I play around, helping to break them in, making a fuss of them, generally acting Mama. They’re fantastic darlings! Adorable! The dogs are quite unhappy sometimes, they’re so jealous, you know, Cecil,’ she said to the other girl.

‘Are they?’ the girl said, raising her eyebrows while she ate.

‘Two funny old sealyhams,’ Kit Baxter confessed to me, as if I were sure to be disgusted at the idea, ‘quite moth-eaten and lazy and not very bright, I know; and a Siamese whose eyes are much too light. But they adore me, I say it quite immodestly, they adore me. Kit’s own regiment, that’s what I call them, Kit’s own.’

It was impossible to think of anything to say to this forlorn piece of whimsy. It was one of those thin places in conversation through which one suddenly sees something one isn’t meant to see. Cecil Rowe saved me by catching my eye with the friendly opening of a smile struggling against the disadvantage of a mouthful of braised pigeon and rice. You would never have caught the exquisite American out in a smile like that; I warmed to it, all the same. When the girl could speak, she said,’ I was so hungry I was quite drunk. I had to eat quickly to give myself some ballast.’

Kit Baxter and I laughed with her. ‘People here certainly do eat a substantial lunch,’ I said, ‘but you’ve all had such an energetic morning, I suppose you must.’

‘Restaurateurs wouldn’t agree with you,’ said Kit. ‘They complain that people in Johannesburg hardly eat at all, in the European sense. A meal is always simply a necessary prelude to be got over in good time for some other entertainment, not an evening’s pleasure in itself.’

‘Do you find South Africans eat more than we do?’ I said to Cecil Rowe.

‘How would I know? I’m not English,’ she said.

I was surprised; she looked and dressed like any upper-middle-class English girl, and what was more, she did not have the flat, unmistakable South African speech that I had heard all about me in the town, and that I had noticed at once in the Alexanders’ son, Douglas, and the crocodile-hunting John, for example.

‘Then you’re an Afrikaner,’ I said, taking care to pronounce the word of identification correctly, like a naturalist coming upon a species of which he has heard, but never before encountered.

‘No, no,’ she said, laughing and indignant, ‘I’m not. I’m not that.’

‘Of course you’re English,’ said Kit.’ Your parents are English. You happen to be born here. Just as you might have been born in India, or Egypt — that’s all.’

‘I’ve never met a publisher before,’ said the girl. ‘Have you, Kit? I’ve somehow never thought about publishers — you know, I mean, you read a book and it’s the author who counts, the publisher’s simply a name on the jacket. It’s difficult to think of the publisher as a person sitting beside you at lunch.’

‘Rightly so, too,’ I said, ‘when the person is really only a sort of publisher’s office boy.’

‘But aren’t you a son or something of the people who own the publisher’s?’

‘Nephew.’

‘Well, there you are.’

‘I’m being trained from the Ground Up. And I haven’t got very far.’

‘How far?’

‘Trade relations. I’ve come to South Africa as the agent for our firm.’

She nodded her head, thinking a moment. ‘Didn’t you bring out that book there’s been such a fuss about?’

My mind skimmed over the last three or four Aden Parrot titles that had filled the correspondence columns of the papers with protagonist letters. ‘You mean God’s Creatures? The anti-vivisection one?’

She looked faraway, shook her head, ‘M-mh. Nobody would know about that here.’