Nadine Gordimer - A World of Strangers

‘Why, well, as you see. .’ I said, foolishly. She did look different. Standing a foot or two from her upturned face, I saw that her eyes were orientalized with blue shading and black lines, her hair showed her ears and lay in short, silvery feathers against the velvet of her hat, the shape of her mouth had somehow been altered by lipstick. I noticed that just in front of her right ear she had a raised mole; it had been covered with the warm-looking extra skin provided by an opaque make-up, but it showed itself just the same. So, oddly enough, beneath all this, the woman showed herself too. She looked very attractive; knowing, greedy, unsentimental. I wondered which of the men, the thick fair one with the tight-filled skin, or the thinner one, also fair, was her husband. She did not introduce me, and so, although I was about to do so, I did not introduce Anna Louw, either, and, with a smile, walked on. But she remained turned in her chair and included Anna Louw in the smiling movement that said good-bye. When I saw her looking at Anna Louw, I remembered how, a month ago, I had thought that I would only have to be in the Stratford once, with a girl, in order to feel attached to the place. Cecil Rowe was that kind of girl. Sitting there among the men in their office suits and the briefcases laid by the Tudor chairs, she was as much the charm of the queer, public yet furtive life of town as a shepherdess, all ribboned crooks and roses, is of a pastoral idyll.

Even Anna Louw’s car bore the signs of a woman who was accustomed to look after herself; in the dashboard cubby-hole there was a road map, a first-aid kit, and a card of fuse wire.

She said: ‘What’s your time?’ And when I told her, five past six, ‘Would you give me my cigarettes — they’re in there somewhere.’ I gave her one of mine, and she drew the first breath of it deep in as she drove, so that her small, compact body seemed to grow. ‘That’s the great thing about denying oneself something — the pleasure of having it again at last,’ I said.

‘Oh this first cigarette!’ she said. ‘The whole day seems to melt away.’

‘I think perhaps that’s why people make these rules for themselves; the emotional, equivalent of dumping thousands of tons of coffee in the sea, in order to keep the price up.’

‘That’s a nice idea,’ she said.’ It’s much nicer than saying that you do it for your liver, if it’s drink, or your lungs, if it’s cigarettes.’

‘But I believe it’s true; mostly the health reason is the least of it. And it’s the sort of subterfuge titillation that only arises out of plenty. The Africans you deal with — I’m sure they don’t have to break a diet in order to appreciate a good meal, or go on the wagon for a week to make a drink taste wonderful. It’s only people like us, who are sated with comfits of one kind and another, who have to go in for these dodges.’

‘Poverty without boredom.’

‘Yes.’

She smoked concentratedly for a moment before she took the cigarette out of her mouth and said, with her customary mildness (as if she had added up a line of figures and found an error), ‘I think there’s something wrong there. Poor people’ — I wondered if she deliberately broadened the reference — ‘can’t afford things; and that makes anything you want seem marvellous. Wouldn’t a cigarette seem just as wonderful to a man who couldn’t afford to buy himself one all day, as it does to me, who have kept myself from one all day on purpose? — You see?’

‘Ah, but his has been a real situation of want — yours is play.’

‘He doesn’t want to want; I do?’

‘That’s it.’

She laughed and shifted expressively in her seat: ‘Oh, my friend, you don’t know a thing about how I feel about smoking.’

A minute later she went on, ‘But I think, so far as other things are concerned, there’s something in what you say. I often think how it is that Africans don’t have as many made-up troubles as my white friends. — You know the sort of troubles that people have, women particularly, women with not much to do. — Anyway, it’s nonsense to generalize.’

‘Do you know a lot of Africans?’

‘I told you, most of our clients are Africans.’

‘That’s not what I meant.’

‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘I know some. Quite a few.’

I offered her another cigarette, and there was the business of lighting it and throwing the match out the window.

‘Why don’t you want to talk about it?’

She said, for time, as people do, ‘What. Oh, it’s not that I don’t want to talk about anything. But you must understand that you are in a country where there are all sorts of different ways of talking about or rather dealing with this thing. One of the ways is not to talk about it at all. Not to deal with it at all. Finished. That’s possible, you know; you’ll find out.’

‘I have. I’ve seen it. And apparently functioning perfectly,’ I said. Archie Baxter poured the drinks, the twins dived into the Reckitts-coloured pool, someone blew a cloud of cigar smoke through which a Courbet landscape appeared as a mirage. Uranium, cannon bones, Kit’s own regiment. ‘I’m afraid I wasn’t shocked at all. It was pleasant. It was like being anywhere else, only perhaps more comfortable.’

‘There you are’ she said, as if I were a child who had followed so far in a difficult lesson. In turn, I thought I recognized sweet reasonableness, that wide-eyed dissembler at Faunce’s dinner-table; but, in all fairness, I had to admit that she did seem quite bluntly to agree.’ There you are. And there are the other ways. . You’re a person I don’t know, someone from whom I’ve asked a favour for a client. Isn’t it better for me to leave it at that, rather than force upon you a consideration of my particular way? Force you into hostility, perhaps, because yours may be another?’

‘But you must know that I haven’t a way. I’ve only just got here.’

She looked at me quickly, as she drove. ‘You will have, soon, and that adds up to the same embarrassment. Anyway, you must have arrived with some idea, all ready. Even if it’s one that’s impossible now you’re here.’

I thought how steadily she spoke. The people whom I knew, I myself, seemed always to speak in rushes and checks, as if nothing ran clear in us, but struggled past uncertainties, squeezed thinly through doubts, and kept bursting the banks of conviction. She had an intonation and a rhythm of speech that was foreign to English, too, but was not the nagging sing-song of Miss McCann, the sing-song that seemed to me to be the dialect of Johannesburg.

I said, ‘It’s like love, or God; and I thought that here everyone would be discussing it over coffee cups, the way we do Russian foreign policy or expense accounts.’

The car had come to a standstill under the jacarandas in my street; we sat in a natural silence for a moment or two. There ought to be some punctuation mark specially to indicate such pauses, like the sign that indicates a rest in music. ‘Where are you?’ she asked. ‘Oh, just over there, the one with the pillars.’

She started up the car again. ‘I’ll turn round and get right outside the door.’ ‘No, don’t please, this is fine.’

‘Do you find it very dull here?’ she said, as she handed my parcels to me through the window.

‘Well, I don’t know. I don’t seem to have any definite sort of life, yet. There are very few cities in the world that can stand up to being taken neat.’

‘We always feel so apologetic about it,’ she smiled. ‘You get used to hearing people from England and Europe telling you that there’s nothing here — rolling their eyes and throwing up their hands. . You don’t know exactly what they mean, but you feel they’re right.’