Nadine Gordimer - A World of Strangers

(Not one of Dickens’s slim Copperfields, but a friend of one of the heroes, one of those staunch friends with large, intelligent dark eyes to make up for their unattractiveness, etc. This was pointed out to me at Oxford, but I confirm it for myself.) The consul was tall — inevitably — sharp-kneed, large-footed, and broad-shouldered, and he had a long patrician face with thick eyebrows over fine grey eyes which looked blue when he was looking at the sea or the sky. He had all his hair and it was straight and grey. He was a Celtic type and I suppose was once dark-haired. His mother was exactly like him (I let the situation rather than biological correctness decide precedent here), almost as tall, every bit as distinguished. They used each other’s names all the time, like people in a play: ‘Mother, would you like your tea now?’ ‘Yes, Hugh, I think so.’ They never called the wife anything at all: ‘Where is she?’ ‘Down in the cabin, I suppose.’ Sometimes when the consul was forced, as he seemed to feel himself to be, to answer for her in her presence, he referred to her as ‘my wife’, giving a curiously legal ring to the designation, as a judge might speak of the defendant or the plaintiff. For the first few days, when we were passing through the Red Sea and lived in a spell of heat anyway, as if the world had stopped turning, so that recollection of whom we saw or what we did was dreamlike, she did not appear at all, so far as I knew. Heat or seasickness must have kept her to her cabin. The consul and his mother were alone at meals, and I played bridge with them several times in the air-conditioned card-room, where we sat around numbly like so much refrigerated food, and if our hands touched accidentally, recoiled at the fish-like contact of chilled flesh.

I had no idea of the existence of the wife until, on the first day on which we woke up in the Indian Ocean and the streaming, flapping, gusty life of the monsoon, I was attracted to a remote upper deck by the yapping of a dog, and found that there was indeed, not one dog, but three, housed in special kennels up there. All three were out of their kennels and were fawning in joy over a dumpy, lumpy little woman with tiny features buried in a big, round face. Bunches of curly brown hair, to which some sort of reddish dye gave a bright nimbus, made her face seem even bigger, and even I, who know nothing about the subtleties of women’s make-up, could see that there was something very wrong with the way she had applied hers. Her florid cheeks had rounds of another tone of red overlaying them. It was an astonishingly innocent face, in all its coarse crudity. She introduced me to the dogs and squatted, bunched up, on the deck, her arms round the neck and her cheek against the ears of the biggest one, a brown retriever. Like Rina, I supposed, she must be one of those women who love only dogs; but somehow I felt that this was in a different way and for different reasons — the woman hung round that retriever’s neck the first day I saw her the way a child communes in silent love with an animal when humans fail him. With her I should say it was not that she could not love anything other than animals, but that animals were all she had to love.

She certainly did look grotesquely out of place beside the consul and his mother. She always wore a great assortment of varied jewellery, as if in nervous confusion, not knowing which piece to choose, and that day in Mombasa, perhaps in honour of the jaunt ashore, she was even more recklessly adorned than usual. A tourist’s Egyptian necklace made after the style of the huge fringed bead collars from Tutankhamen’s tomb warred with a violently patterned dress, and there was a diamond fox-head with ruby eyes pinned on her bosom, and plastic cornflowers under the gay hair curling round her ear-lobes. In the Indian jeweller’s she sidled timidly and excitedly up to her husband and his mother where they stood, very tall and cool and pastel, near the door. In her little plump beringed hand she held cupped, like a drop of rain-water faintly tinged with rust, a large topaz. The consul looked down at her, his hands crossed on the walking-stick held in front of his white tropical suit. His mother held her white parasol similarly at rest. ‘Please to remember your size, ’ he said. His voice, like his eyes, was fixed somewhere above the frizz of the reddish head. His wife went back to the counter, carefully keeping her hand level. I don’t know whether or not he bought her a topaz, in keeping with her stature or not, because, to my surprise and relief, Stella came up to me at that moment and whispered — ‘Let’s go. It’s a pity to waste the morning haggling in here. I don’t suppose they’re genuine anyway.’

The shop was full of people from the ship now — they kept coming in, as, in passing, they saw fellow passengers already inside, and soon every woman was fired with the desire to own a topaz. Some were arguing over carats and price, and one man, proud of his ability to deal with ‘the natives’ of any country, was informing the jeweller that if an expert in Johannesburg pronounced the stones synthetic, he would sue the Indian jeweller. Rina, long hip jutting as she leaned against the counter, was giving her opinion of each purchase in her loudest, highest English voice, and swooping about from group to group. ‘What?’ she called, looking up over the huddled bargaining heads. ‘No, I’m not coming. Mummy, you are frightfully mean! Can’t I have even a weeny one? Look at this smoky little thing.’ Her mother went over to her and they spoke in the low voices of controlled argument for a moment, but Stella joined me at the door, without her. ‘Come. Let’s be off,’ she said, shortly, because she was angry. But her good manners and the pleasing facade of even temperament she had been taught as a girl immediately gave cover to irritation. She said lightly, ‘I wonder what the story is behind the consul and that poor little creature?’

‘Well, she is rather awful, isn’t she? I mean you feel annoyed at his being so obviously ashamed of her, and at the same time you wouldn’t really care to have a wife like that for yourself.’

‘Oh she’s vulgar, all right,’ said Stella. ‘But so are they in their way — don’t you think? — Such official-looking impeccability, such diplomatic immunity from life itself! And that dragonish queenly old lady, with china tea in her veins and venom in her heart, I’m sure. Have you looked at their nostrils, those two? Positively curled back.’

I laughed. ‘What’s that significant of?’

‘I’m always afraid of those nostrils,’ she said wisely. Of course, Stella was just the sort of woman to believe in physiognomy and signs and portents, too.

‘Oh I do think people are fascinating! Don’t you?’ She was instantly buoyant again at the thought; she paused as we walked, overcome with an urgency of eagerness. I had noticed in her these very real moments of excitement and relief, when as now, by the pronouncement afresh of some commonplace generality, she reaffirmed or rediscovered for herself some concept of life that was important to her and which she sometimes lost or feared to lose.

As I have said, there was something about this woman which made one feel surly if one did not respond, as it was so easy to do, to the mood generated by her enthusiasms, even if one did not happen to share the enthusiasms themselves. I don’t think I find people ‘fascinating’ in quite the way she meant, but, just the same, we talked and laughed in a shared inconsequential lightheartedness all the way in the taxi that took us to Nyali Beach.

She was undressed before I was — I suppose she must have had her swimming suit on under her dress — and by the time I came out from behind my clump of bushes, clutching the rolled-up bundle of my shirt and trousers, she was already in the pale turquoise, transparent sea. Although (I calculated) she would be of the generation of the Twenties, when girls ‘did everything’ perhaps even more determinedly than they do now, her demeanour in the water immediately set her apart from the generation of the girls I knew and with whom I had swum at home, or on holidays in Italy or France. She did not swim at all, but floated gently, tamely, and conversationally, close in-shore. She did not wear a bathing cap, and her short, pretty blonde hair, like the make-up on her pretty face, remained perfect. You could see that all her life her body had been carefully shielded from the sun, and in place of the tanned legs and arms and the yellowish-brown necks I was used to associating with women, all her flesh shone pale and pearly under the shallow water and against the swimming suit which was a darker tone of the water colour. It was a remarkably youthful and pretty body (I’m afraid forty seemed old to me, for a woman), though not like a girl’s, softer than a young girl’s, and I admired it, though oddly enough I didn’t find I desired it I felt sorry I didn’t desire it; I supposed I was conditioned for ever to firm-fleshed girls with the limits of carefully-cultivated sunburn imposing a pattern counter to the pattern of their bodies.

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