Nadine Gordimer - A World of Strangers

I found that flat through, of all people, John Hamilton, the crocodile hunter, who was going into town after that Sunday lunch at the Alexanders’ and gave me a lift back to the hotel. He drove as if his car were a missile it was his pleasure to guide through the streets, and he talked all the time. When he was held up by the traffic lights, he looked about him with restless interest, commenting on whatever caught his eye — a new car: ‘That’s a lovely job for you! The Stud, see it? I wonder how good the lock is in this model. .’ — an African in a beige fedora, and a suit of exaggerated cut, carrying a rolled umbrella and escorting an elaborately dressed black woman with the haunches of a brewer’s dray-horse: ‘Look at that pair! God these natives are dead keen on clothes! Dressed to kill!’ Then, as he let the clutch out, and the car sprang ahead, he released again the main stream of his talk. He was a great enthusiast about his country, and all that it offered in the way of physical challenge; there was hardly a mountain he hadn’t climbed, a piece of coast or trout stream he hadn’t fished, an animal he hadn’t stalked. He told me about abalone diving near Cape Town, angling for giant barracuda off the East African coast, riding a pony through the passes of Basutoland, and outwitting wily guinea-fowl in the Bushveld. Also about the things he had only looked at: the flowers in Namaqualand in the spring, the wild beasts in the game reserves, the great rivers and deserts from the Cape to the Congo. He regarded Africa as he might a woman who gave him great pleasure; an attitude unexpected and unaffected.

I asked him if he’d been to Hamish Alexander’s farm in the Karoo.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Nothing much to tempt me there. Poor old Archie’s having a go at it now, of course. Or rather Kit is, as usual.’

I said that Kit Baxter had seemed very enthusiastic about the farm.

‘Kit’s a great girl,’ he said. ‘That girl’s always trying to make something of Archie. Unfortunately, there’s nothing much to work on,’ he indicated Archie.’ I hate to see a person wasting their energies. All you can say about Archie, he’s a good-looking chap, always has been and always will be; prop him up in a lounge or bar and he’ll look right. You know those ventriloquists who have marvellous dolls, and the ventriloquist’s the stooge, and the clever things come out of the mouth of the doll? — Well, that’s Kit and Archie. Whatever he seems to think or do, it’s Kit pulling the strings and thinking for him. Now this whole last year she’s been around the Alexanders, Marion loves her to death, Hamish loves her to death, they can’t move without the Baxters. Next thing, Kit’s got them believing Archie’s a great horse breeder, got them believing they love Archie, and she’s all set on the Karoo farm, making something of Archie again. — You did say the Plaza, didn’t you?’

‘Unfortunately, yes.’

‘I hear it’s not too bad,’ he said with the careless air of disposing of someone else’s expense account.

‘Our agent here booked me in. But I must get out of the place within the next few days; I can’t afford it, anyway. I must start hunting for a flat or a room somewhere, tomorrow.’

‘I’ll give you a note to someone who’ll fix you up,’ he said practically and sympathetically, and when he stopped the car at the hotel, he lifted his lean body and fished a card out of his pocket. He wrote on it quickly.’ Barlow’s a good chap. I’m sure he’ll find something for you. — No trouble; I’m glad you mentioned it. Good-bye, boy; we’ll bump into you again some time.’ And with the alert look of a man who is always expected somewhere, he drove off.

Once I’d got the flat, I felt I ought to telephone and thank him, perhaps ask him to have a drink with me. On the other hand, his unhesitating offer of help was so casual, that my imposing myself on him with thanks might provide, for him, the only burdensome thing about his gesture.

I felt mildly elated at the idea of the flat. I still hadn’t caught up with a sense of my own reality, here in this country; perhaps once I’d got my personal squalor around me, I should be convinced of my validity. I remembered how comfortingly that used to happen at school: you would go back after the holidays, and for the first day, in the bare, institutional cubicle, you didn’t seem to exist at all; then the books unpacked, the pullover and shoes lying about, the picture of the lolling-tongued dog stuck up on the wall, the smell of the raincoat behind the door — these would combine in sudden assurance of your identity and its firm place in the life of school. I should have to buy a divan, I supposed, and a table and chairs. Then, the next week, when Arthur was gone, I’d take the easy-chair out of the office; oh, and a rug, I’d have to get a rug. .

I woke up very early one morning at the hotel and kept thinking about all this, quite idiotically. In fact, I’d been wakened early several mornings that week by the sound of hurrying footsteps and voices that didn’t bother to keep low. The first couple of times, though I was awake, I couldn’t muster the weak weightlessness of my still sleeping body and get up to see what was going on, but on this morning I did. Behind the curtain that smelled of dust and clung to me with static electricity, I struggled with the catch of the window and pushed it wide; down below in the grey street, black men were on their way to work. They coughed, shouted, and chattered in their ringing Bantu languages. I could not see the sun, but light ran like water along the steel shopfronts opposite and a gob of spit shone in the gutter. No one else was about.

Arthur dragged me round the bookshops those first few weeks. Like all the booksellers I’ve ever come across, these were either cheerful businessmen who sold books like so many pounds of cheese, or scornful intellectuals whose lips were perpetually curled in contempt for their customers’ tastes. I lunched with one of these last. At his suggestion we went to a coffee bar, where we ordered Parma ham and Gamembert with our espresso; after a long time, during which he told me how he had educated public taste in Johannesburg, and greeted, with a curious lift of the hand that was more like a dismissal, the number of good-looking young women who swept in and out of the crowded little place, a harassed Indian brought us goulash and apple strudel. Near us two greenfaced Italians argued and, with their black eyes, gave the passing girls a merciless anatomical appraisal. Outside on the pavement a squawking, gibbering band of filthy black children, ragged and snot-encrusted, sang the theme sob-song from a popular film. People fumbled for pennies to throw, and the brats scuttled like cockroaches to retrieve them. My friend the bookseller apologized for the bad service and explained that the place had only recently been opened and was rather too popular for the time being. ‘It’s pathetic,’ he said. ‘They’ve got so little to hold them together, they’ll rush to any new rallying point you offer them like dogs tearing after a bitch. Specially if they can pretend they’re somewhere else; Italy, for example,’ he waved a hand at the abstract mosaics, the black, bitter brew in our cups. ‘Anyway it does give one the illusion one’s in a civilized country,’ he added, for himself.

That was the first time I encountered what I was soon to recognize as a familiar attitude among South Africans; an unexpressed desire to dissociate themselves from their milieu, a wish to make it clear that they were not taken in, even by themselves. It was a complex attitude, too, and it took many forms and affected many different kinds of people. On second thoughts, I had met with it even before that: the girl at the Alexanders’, the rider, had, in a way, shown the same uneasy desire.