Nadine Gordimer - A World of Strangers

It was then that I noticed the street-name and realized that I must be quite near where Cecil Rowe had told me she had a flat. On an impulse I let the steep gradient push me down the hill like a hand in my back, and, half way down, there it was — a building that was newer and more pretentious-looking, if not better than the one in which I lived. In the front, there were wind-torn rubber plants in bright pots, and a mosaic mural in the foyer representing a Zulu girl, a water-pot, and a beehive hut against a lot of saw-tooth greenery; but, as I thought, the open corridors behind, which led to the flats, were the usual grimly functional thoroughfares, full of drifts of soot and dirty fluff, empty milk bottles and garbage bins.

The Rowe girl’s flat was on the ground floor. I rang and rang and was just about to turn away, when I heard the soft slap of bare feet coming down a passage and someone struggled with the lock, giving muffled exclamations of exasperation, and at last flung the door open.

‘My God, I thought it was the Salvation Army,’ she said. ‘Hullo, it’s you — come in. Where’ve you sprung from?’

‘I’ve been to church, it’s just near here.’

She looked at me as if I were joking; then her expression changed to one of curiously feminine curiosity, that expression women get when they think you may be about to give away some aspect of yourself you really had not intended to let slip.’ Church? You don’t mean to say you go to church?’ She sounded most disbelieving.

‘Yes of course I do. At home I go quite regularly.’

She burst out laughing; embarrassed, gleeful laughter, as if she’d discovered that I wore corsets.’ Well, I’m surprised at you,’ she said. ‘I mean, you’re such an intellectual and all that.’

I can’t explain why, but I was somehow touched and reassured, in myself, by her out-of-date, six-thousand mile distant, colonial notion of an ‘intellectual’ as a free-thinking, Darwinian rationalist. It pleased me to think that to her, God was simply old-fashioned; it was better than to suspect, as I sometimes did of myself, that God was merely fashionable again.

‘Come in,’ she said, and certainly she was not dressed for lingering conversation in the doorway. She trailed before me into the living-room, in a splendidly feminine but grubby dressing-gown, and settled herself on a hard chair at the table, her bare feet hooked behind the bar of the chair, and her hand going out at once for a cigarette. (I imagined how it was with just that gesture that she would grope for a cigarette the moment she woke up in the morning.) It was over’a month since I had seen her, and if she had appeared in a different guise each time I had encountered her before, these were nothing to the change in her now. I suppose no man ever realizes how much of what he knows as a woman’s face is make-up; I know that my sister has often hooted in derision when I have remarked on some girl’s wonderful skin (You could take an inch off with a palette knife, my poor simpleton!) or the colour of another’s hair (It costs pounds to keep it like that!). This waxy, sunburned face with the pale lips and the sooty smudges round the eyes was older and softer than the other versions of it I had seen, there were imperfections of the skin, and habits of expression which grew out of the prevailing states of feeling in her life that I did not know, had made their fine grooves. Yet I recognized this face instantly; it was the one that had attracted me, all the time, beneath the others.

‘I drank a lot of vodka last night,’ she said. ‘Have you ever tried it? It’s true it doesn’t give you a hangover, but I feel as if my blood had evaporated, like a bottle of methylated spirits left uncorked. Do you know any Poles? There are a lot of Poles here, now. Perhaps, you’ve met the Bolnadoskys — Freddie and Basha, a lovely blonde? We were in their party and of course Poles can drink any amount of anything.’

‘How’s the modelling been going? Not off to Italy yet?’

‘Oh that.’ I might have been referring to something out of her remote past.’ I’ve been riding morning noon and night, training for the show. You knew that Colin and Billy asked me to jump Xantippe? I came third with her, two faults, in the Open.’

I remembered that Colin and Billy were the names of the twins I had met at the Alexanders’, but I was not sure about Xantippe. She saw this and said,’ You’ve heard of Xantippe, of course?’

‘What a shrew.’

She frowned. ‘Nonsense, people are jealous of her. Once she knows you won’t stand any cheek, she’s the most obedient horse in the world.’

‘I was talking nonsense. What about Xantippe?’

‘Well, she’s the most famous horse in this country, like Foxhunter in England — surely you’ve heard of him?’

We had some coffee, brought in by a pretty, giggling African girl who wore a lot of jewellery, and Cecil said, ‘Oh Eveline, you are a pet,’ and talked on about the horse show in which she had taken part.

‘So your modelling career is completely shelved,’ I said, at last.

She answered quickly, as if the subject bored her: ‘I’m really not the type to sit about posing indoors.’

‘It’s all very horsey, at the moment, eh?’

She jerked her chin on to her hand and blew a great smoke-screen between herself and her coffee-cup. ‘That’s the kind of life I was born to.’ I was delighted to see how she looked every inch the hard-riding, hard-drinking bitch, just as, in the Stratford, she had unconsciously assumed the spectacular narcissism of the mannequin.

I planted my feet stolidly before me and said, ‘That’s not what you told me. You said you were a butcher’s daughter, that just because your father had a few horses you’d drifted into a way of life that went with a class and a country you didn’t belong to.’

She was unperturbed. ‘I must have been mad. Drunk, more likely.’

Our talk picked up, slipped into naturalness, and we began to enjoy ourselves. Later the front-door bell rang again, and this time it really was the Salvation Army. She begged sixpence from me for the collection, and when she came back into the room she was suddenly stricken with a kind of helpless consciousness of her dishabille, and stood there running her hands through her hair and lifting the corners of her eyes with her fingers on her temples. ‘I should get dressed, I must get dressed,’ she kept saying. She held her dressing-gown tightly, exclaiming over its stains as if they had appeared since I’d come, and curling her toes as if she were ashamed of her bare feet. I knew she felt me looking at her, but I could not stop. Then she went away, and when she came back, bathed and dressed, she was the conventionally pretty, unremarkable girl I had met that first day at the Alexanders’.

Each spoke out of the train of thought with which he had been preoccupied while we were in separate rooms. ‘What made you come, after all this time?’ she said, fastening a bracelet on her wrist, and shaking her arm, as a dog settles into the feel of its collar. ‘I saw the name of your street. Where’s your child — it’s a girl, isn’t it?’ ‘A boy. Spending the week-end with the grandparents,’ she said, absently.

‘Don’t you care for him at all?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous! I adore him.’

From where she sat, with her beautiful, thin-ankled legs crossed, on the sofa, she regarded her living-room with the same kind of critical helplessness she had shown toward herself, before she was dressed. It was an unsatisfactory room. A florist’s bouquet was dead in its vase. (I wondered who had sent it, and why.) The modern print on the cushions and the curtains that blew limply at the balcony door was a design of masks and faces in yellow and black, cross-eyed and mean, like Hallowe’en pumpkin cutouts. There were two table lamps of black porcelain with irregular-shaped holes in their torsos, as if someone had dreamed of Henry Moore in an art china shop, and a large print of a vase of magnolias, all watery sheen and pastel light, like a reflection in a flattering mirror. It seemed to be a room of many attempts, all of which had petered out into each other.