Nadine Gordimer - A World of Strangers

‘But of course,’ I said. ‘He could’ve asked me himself, for that matter. He can go off whenever he’s needed.’

‘That’s very nice of you, Mr Hood. I think he didn’t want to ask in case you thought it was just another one of the grandmother tales, and refused.’

‘Grandmother tales?’

‘You know — I’ve had a letter saying my grandmother’s sick, and I must go home. . ’ She stood up to take her leave.

I said, conversationally, ‘I must say, Amon is about the last person I’d imagine as a cause célèbre.’

‘It’s not quite that’ she said.

‘I mean I haven’t felt much interest in him, as a person; he’s simply a part of the office set-up.’

‘Of course’ she said. But I felt sure she misunderstood me; surely that very non-committal politeness stemmed from a sense of moral superiority; she would be one of those for whom every utterance was a move to a black square or a white square.

‘He reminds me of someone in our London office — only, of course, he happens to be an old chap of sixty-eight or nine, he’s got too old for his job in the dispatch room, and he’s gone full circle back to a kind of working second childhood, making tea and licking stamps. But he’s like Amon; doing his work, but scarcely there at all. So it’s difficult to believe that he’s there anywhere else, either. You couldn’t imagine meeting Johnson in a pub, having his pint of beer, for example.’

‘Well, you certainly won’t meet Amon in a bar!’ She spoke gently, with her head a little on one side.

‘I’m coming down too’ I said, as she walked to the door. ‘Let me collect my parcels and we’ll continue this in the lift.’

‘Isn’t it finished?’ she said, laughing.

She stood waiting for me; she had no hat, no gloves, none of the usual paraphernalia that women usually have to grapple with before they are ready to go out into the street, and so, oddly, the roles were reversed, and she stood as I was used to standing, while I loaded myself with packets and boxes. Miss McCann had the cover on her typewriter and was setting off with soap and towel for the cloakroom down the corridor. I asked her to lock up, and said good-bye. ‘- Where’s Amon?’ I asked.

‘He’s run down to the Post Office with that registered letter for Better Books in Cape Town.’

But in the lift we talked of other things. ‘I’ve just got myself a flat,’ I told the neat dark head and little, tough face beside my elbow. The drop of the lift gave her that apprehensive, listening air that I often notice in people in lifts. I thought, irrelevantly, but with pleasure at being reminded of something I’d forgotten so long, of a Rilke poem I had once regarded as something awful and comforting:

And night by night, down into solitude

the heavy earth falls far from every star.

We are all failing. This hand’s falling too -

all have this falling-sickness none withstands.

And yet there’s always One whose gentle hands

this universal falling can’t fall through.

When we got outside, the street was full of men and women hurrying with the bent backs of city people, hurrying against the crowded bus, the brief evening of leisure. It was the time to seek the delay of a pub. I wondered whether I should ask her to have a drink with me; I felt in myself the restlessness, the inclination to let myself be carried away by cheap music, the shoddy titillation of dim corners, the swimming, fish-eye view of the world after a few drinks, that usually presages in me that other and deeper hunger, for love; so I pass from being too easily pleased to the greatest of all dissatisfactions.

She said ‘If your car’s a long way, I can take you to it. Mine’s just on the corner.’

‘Thanks, but I have no car. I’m going to the bus.’

‘Oh, then I’ll give you a lift; it’s easy for me.’

I decided that her company would be better than nothing; even if she annoyed me a little, she was pleasant. ‘Thank you very much. I wasn’t looking forward to bashing my way through the bus with this lot. But if you’re not in a great rush, won’t you come and have a drink first?’

We went, of course, into the Stratford; we were standing almost at the door, in any case. We went into the bar lounge — bars are for men only, all over South Africa — and sat at one of the yellow wooden tables with the scratched glass tops. The chairs had plastic-covered seats but the tall backs were stoutly Tudor and pressed hard between your shoulder-blades. Henry VIII in a muffin hat and a beard that looked superimposed on his face, like the beards small boys scribble on the faces of women on advertisement hoardings, stared at a gilt plaster lion that was the symbol of a South African brewery. Rings of wet shone up from the table.

She had two brandies and I drank gin, and we talked about flats — she had lived in three or four, and now had a cottage in the grounds of someone’s house — and about her Legal Aid Bureau. She told me some amusing stories about divorce cases she had handled for the Bureau, and I found myself telling her something of the lighter side of my mother’s and Faunce’s preoccupation with the world’s wrongs. I told her how Faunce had invited an ex-prisoner to dinner who entertained us by teaching us how to pick a lock, and how, another time, my mother had dashed all over London to get chickens killed according to Muslim ritual, in order to provide appropriate food for some Indian guests, only to find that the guests were Hindus and didn’t eat meat anyway.

‘It’s so easy to be ridiculous when you’re trying to identify yourself with the other person.’

‘Of course,’ she said, smiling reminiscently. ‘But it’s a risk you have to take, sometimes.’

‘Oh, there are ways and ways. Thing is, not to presume too much on your own understanding; never meet the other one more than half-way.’

She continued to smile attentively, looking down into her glass; she was clearly the land of person who often disagreed, but seldom argued: the sort of person who lets one run on.

My case for reserve against presumption began to take on some of the eager bombast I was decrying. I was aware of this, but, because she gave me the space of her attention in which to go on and make a fool of myself, somehow I could not stop. What did stop me instantly, what took my mind from what I was saying as surely as if a nerve had been cut between my brain and my tongue, was a snatch of voice that I knew. ‘We could do some mud-slinging, too,’: the phrase came to me clearly out of all the criss-crossed sibilants, laughs, and exclamations of the room. Who had spoken? In this town where I was a stranger, how could I know a voice? While I went on talking, my attention went all about the room, over the faces and the glasses and the cigarette smoke. And there was Cecil Rowe.

I hadn’t even noticed, that day at Hamish Alexander’s what sort of voice the girl had. She was sitting, half-turned away from me, at a table with two men; they must have come in after we had, but people were going and coming all the time, and her entry must have been screened from us. She looked, too, quite different from the way she had looked at the Alexanders’. Even her hair was a different colour. She wore a very small black hat in a straight line on her forehead, and a black dress that showed her collar-bones. From where I sat, her face had the poster-like vividness of a woman who is heavily made-up. She was talking and gesturing animatedly, conscious of success with her companions.

She did not see me, but when Anna Louw and I rose to go, and had to walk past her half-turned back as we went out, she turnned and stopped me, looking up. She had just taken a sip of her drink, and her mouth was parted. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘And how are you?’ The commonplace greeting was spoken like a challenge; as if I were someone from whom she had last parted in some extreme situation: drunk, angry, or in love.