Nadine Gordimer - A World of Strangers

‘The one about institutional personality — children in orphanages?’

Her frown rejected this as outlandish.’ You know, the book about the natives, the one that was banned — ’

‘Oh, you mean White Cain, Black Abel — no, unfortunately, that wasn’t ours.’ The book, brought out about six months ago by Aden Parrot’s closest rival, had sold over fifty thousand copies. It was written by a missionary who lived for six years in the Native Reserves, and was a passionate attack, from the standpoint of a deeply religious man, on the failure of Christianity to influence the policy of white people toward black in South Africa. ‘What did you think of it? Did you read it?’

She cut herself a slice of Bel Paese and said,’ Oh I thought it was jolly good,’ as if she were talking of a novel that had served to pass an evening. ‘I must have a cigarette. D’you mind?’

All up and down the table, people were smoking; the meal was at an end, and we all got up and went into the room I had caught a glimpse of from the front door. There was coffee and also old brandy and liqueurs, and the smell, like the smell of fine leather, of cigars; a warm fug of well-being filled the room, in which, in my slightly hazy state, I saw that every sort of efficient indulgence lay about, like in those rooms conjured up by Genii for people in fairy stories who always seem to wish for the same sort of thing, as if, given the chance, nobody really knows anything else to wish for: there were silver or limoges cigarette lighters on every other table, as well as the little coloured match-books on which were printed ‘Hamish’ or ‘Marion’, silver dishes of thin mints and huge chocolates, jade boxes and lacquer boxes and silver boxes filled with cigarettes, silver gadgets to guillotine the cigars, even amethyst, rose, and green sugar crystals to sweeten the coffee.

Most of the guests were drawn to look at Marion Alexander’s new ‘find’ — a picture she had evidently just bought. ‘Come and tell me what you think of this,’ she said, with the faintest emphasis, as if I didn’t need any more, on the last word. It was a small and rather dingy Courbet, deeply set in a frame the colour and texture of dried mud.’ Interesting,’ I murmured politely. ‘They’re not easily come by, I imagine.’ ‘Here!’ she said. ‘Can you believe it? I found it here, in Johannesburg!’ I attempted to look impressed, although I couldn’t imagine why anyone should want to find such a thing anywhere. ‘How do you spell the name?’ a woman asked me, quietly studying the picture. I spelled it. The woman nodded slowly. ‘I love it, Marion, I think it’s the most exciting thing you’ve bought yet!’ said someone else.

‘Well I can tell you I couldn’t believe it when my little man told me there was a Courbet to be bought in Johannesburg,’ Mrs Alexander said for the third or fourth time. I managed to drift out of the group of admirers, back to a chair. ‘. . of course, I still think that’s a wonderful thing,’ I heard, and saw one of the bulls straddling his heavy body on two thin legs before an enormous oil that must surely have been painted with the offices of the Union Castle shipping company in mind — it showed a great duck-bosomed mail-ship, tricked out with pennants, in what I recognized as Table Bay, with Cape Town and Table Mountain behind it. Now that I noticed, there was quite a variety of pictures in the room; most of them were in the Table Bay genre ; the genre of the room, generally: not a discomforting brush-stroke in any of them. I decided that I didn’t mind; I didn’t mind any more than I did my mother’s collection of charcoal drawings, woodcuts, lithographs, pastels, oils, collages, mosaics, and wire-and-cardboard compositions that she had bought from unknown, unsung, and unhung prophets of art over the last thirty years.

Cecil Rowe wandered over and sat on a low chair beside me. Her legs, unsexed by gaberdine jodhpurs, rolled apart and she looked down at them, stirring her toes. ‘Well, how do you like it here so far?’ she said, managing not to yawn. ‘Think our policemen wonderful? No? That’s fine — nobody does.’

‘You know, the thing one never remembers is how much the same things are likely to be, rather than how different,’ I said.

‘How’s that?’ With her face in repose, I noticed that, although she was too young to have lines, I could see the pull, beneath the skin, of the muscle that always exerted the same tension when she smiled; her mouth, too, though pretty enough in its fresh paint in contrast to the patchy look of the worn make-up on her cheeks and chin, had about it when she talked the practised mobility of having expressed much, and not all of it pleasant.

‘Well, when you arrive in a new country, you generally find yourself living in a hotel, and hotels tend to follow the same pattern everywhere, and then, at the beginning at least, you meet people to whom you’ve been given an introduction by friends at home — and so you meet the same sort of people everywhere, too.’

‘You mean this’, she lifted her chin to indicate the room and the guests, ‘is the same as being in England.’

‘It could be. It doesn’t necessarily follow that I should be a guest in this house, if it were in England’ — I did not like to say that it would be most unlikely — ‘but the point is that this house could be there. You and your sister and Mrs Baxter — pretty girls who are nice to lunch with, who go to each other’s parties, and live, eat, and sleep horses,’ I was laughing, but she listened seriously, ‘you might be in any English county.’

‘I’m a butcher’s daughter,’ she said. ‘My sister Margaret and I. It’s funny, all the big butchers here seem to keep horses. Two or three wealthy butchers in this town have fine stables. Of course I don’t mean the sort who stand behind the counter in a striped apron! Wholesale butchers, who control prices and whatnot. We start riding when we’re small and go to the kind of school where riding’s the thing, and then we grow up among riding people. As you said — they do what riding people do anywhere else, same old thing: hunt, and go to hunt balls and so on. Know other sporty people and belong to country clubs.’ She pulled a face. ‘That’s how we end up looking, speaking, dressing, even behaving like a class we don’t belong to in a country we don’t live in. — It’s sort of the wrong way round, isn’t it?’

‘Oh come, now. Why shouldn’t people ride simply because they like to?’

‘But they don’t,’ she said, grumpily, in the tone of telling me something she knew quite well that I knew. ‘That’s the trouble. They can’t.’

‘Well, I used to, sometimes, when I found myself near horses.’

‘Oh you. Exactly. You could. You’re not the kind who can’t ride, and you’re not the kind who has to.’

She said it with the air of paying me an enormous, terse, reluctant compliment.

‘I take back what I said about you being found in an English county,’ I said. ‘You’re not a bit like any of the young county ladies I’ve ever known.’

‘I don’t think you know any, anyway.’

And then she was carried off by the inevitable conversational scene-shifter whose reputation for popularity seems to rest on the confidence with which he interrupts everyone.

I found somewhere to live; a flat, ugly but cheap, in the steep suburb of boarding-houses and flat buildings that was more an extension of the city than a suburb. At the corner, trams lurched down or struggled up, screeching. The street was one of those newly old streets that I saw all over Johannesburg — a place without a memory; twenty-year-old houses seemed to be considered not worth repair, and blocks of flats ten years old had sunk into their own shoddiness in a way that everyone seemed satisfied was commensurate with their age. The building itself smelled of frying and the stairs were of uneven depth, so that you kept putting your foot down and missing the step that wasn’t where you expected it to be; this much remained of my impressions after I’d been to look over the place. There was a fair-sized room with a small balcony that had been glassed-in to make it a room-and-a-half, and a pitch-dark bathroom in which, coming to it out of the sun of the street, I could make out nothing; but I supposed what the estate agents called the ‘usual offices’ would prove to be there.