Nadine Gordimer - A World of Strangers

‘- It’s not much of a reason,’ she said, broodingly, raking a cigarette out of a tarnished silver cigarette box. She was referring to my remark about having come to the flat because I had recognized the name of the street ‘Ugh, these must be at least three months old.’

I got up to give her one of my cigarettes. She continued to look at me inquiringly.

‘I don’t know. I was homesick. I’ve been tied up. Anyway, you’ve been very busy yourself.’

‘Well, you’re not busy today, I gather,’ she commented. I had been there an hour already.

‘I say! Am I keeping you from something — I’m sorry!’

She laughed. ‘I’m as free as a bird. All I have to do is to be at Hamish and Marion’s for lunch. What about you?’

‘I can’t simply turn up there again,’ I said.

‘Nonsense; people turn up there all the time. It’s what they like.’

I said with a sudden rush of desire to talk about myself: ‘I’ve had some curious experiences lately.’

She said, with interest and mild envy, ‘Really? Tell me, whom do you know, anyway? Who are these mysterious friends with whom you occupy yourself?’

‘I’ve been into the townships quite a few times; they’re extraordinary, you know.’

‘Where? What townships?’ It was clear that she had no idea what I was talking about.

‘The African townships — Sophiatown and so on.’

‘Oh, I know,’ her voice at once took on the tone of the old Londoner being told by the visitor that the Tower is well worth a visit. ‘Everyone who comes here gets all het up about the locations. They are simply too awful. Marion helps to run a crèche out in one of them, you know; Alexandra, or one of the others, I’m not sure.’

‘Last night I went to a house-warming party, in Sophiatown — ’

She tucked her legs up on the sofa and sat back, intrigued, smiling. ‘Oh no! A “house-warming”, if you don’t mind!’

The impulse to talk closed away as suddenly as it had opened. ‘It was quite a party,’ I said lamely, and smiled.

‘You should see Eveline sometimes, when she’s got up in her best. She’s got one old white dress of mine that she looks marvellous in. She spends every penny of her wages on clothes, and honestly, she looks a lot smarter than many white women, when she really puts her mind to it.’

I said,’ By the way, how’s Kit and the Karoo?’ and, with a quick turn of interest, she began:’ I must tell you. Hamish has just been down there for two weeks. .’ and launched into a long mischievous gossip about the Baxters.

I bought a great bunch of lilies and roses from an Indian vendor on the corner of a street, on the way to the Alexanders’, without much hope that this gift of flowers with which Marion Alexander’s own garden was in any case filled, would soften the obvious fact that I had turned up at The High House again chiefly to seek the company of one of the more regular guests. But I need not have worried; like those publishers of paper-back novelettes who must keep a long list of titles in print, the Alexanders wanted to keep their guest list full and varied, and welcomed the presence of casual if presentable hangers-on like myself, who would and could never offer reciprocal hospitality. There was the usual luxurious lunch, this time, as it was high summer, served in the garden beside the pool — a kind of Watteau picnic, with iced strawberries trickling maraschino into bowls of cream, and a great deal of pale wine that the women left lying about in their glasses on the grass. There were the usual amiable people, with plenty to say about nothing in particular, in whose company the fear, joy, strangeness, and muddle of life seemed mastered by a few catch phrases, like a tiger confined in a cricket-cage. Shadow lay on the grass lightly as the lace of thin foam on a calm sea. Every now and then the pool gave an enormous bright wink in the sun, and the laughter and voices seemed suddenly louder.

I borrowed a pair of trunks and swam, and later I borrowed some jodhpurs, so that I could ride out with Cecil, who wanted to show off to me on her horse — or rather, one of the Alexanders’ horses. She watched me indulgently, as if she were torn between wishing me to make an ass of myself, and bridling at the idea that anyone might suggest, by a word or a look, that that was what I was doing. In fact, she wished me to succeed and to fail, which excited me in that underworld of unspoken, sometimes unrealized, exchanges in which people retreat from or advance toward each other. But in the overt world of the Alexanders’ paddock, it left me unconcerned, for as I have never been a sportsman of any kind, I truly have — out of indifference — that contentment in the activity for its own sake which sportsmen grit their ambitious teeth and try to assume. Cecil put the horse through its paces in a little dressage (this was not the famous Xantippe that she was riding) and jumped him a few times; she rode very well, of course, though a trifle grimly, I thought, as if she were only aware, through all the movements that led up to it, of the successful conclusion of each thing she and the horse did. A few of the guests had strolled along to the paddock to watch, and they murmured approval and commented to each other; the twins, who had just arrived, woffled cries of pleasure in conditioned reflex each time she landed on the other side of an obstacle: ‘Oh, good girl! Well done, sweetie!’ Yet she came out of the manège subdued and even sulky, like a jockey who, after a race, finds his feet on the ground and himself no part of the yelling crowd.

For myself, I was finding a particular lulled and sentient ease in the nature of my presence in the Alexanders’ garden that day; even the borrowed clothes contributed to the feeling that I was gratuitously dipping into the pleasures of a life for which I had to take no responsibility, pleasures for which I would not have to settle, even with myself. Pleasures, indeed, for which I perhaps would not have cared to have to settle.

I saw Cecil several times during the following week. I took her to a play that I don’t think she liked very much, and, on another night, to a new restaurant she knew about. Whenever I went to fetch her she was stunningly dressed and looking beautiful, and it was easy for me to escort her as if I were taking a lovely and entertaining exhibit about, minding that doors did not catch her dress nor the wind her hair; I was not troubled by her at all. Each time, as the door banged to, the flat was left behind her like a discarded chrysalis, and, as her little boy was always in bed by the time I came, all I saw of him was, once, a crayon picture of a sun with a smile and a creature with two legs as long as a late afternoon shadow, that was lying on the passage floor. When she had had a few drinks, Cecil unfailingly became gay, just as you can depend upon a cat to strike up a purr after milk, and we were both in that stage of acquaintance when to each the other’s small stock of stories and anecdotes is new, so that each seems to the other a fund of wit and charm.

Steven telephoned me, but I did not have a chance to see him; he turned up at the office one lunch-time with an Indian, to ask me to come to a boxing match. Steven’s elegance always amazed me; I could not imagine how those trousers creased to a fine line, those well-brushed suède shoes, that smoothly-hanging tie, could come out of the permanent makeshift of the sort of place he lived in. It made me ruefully conscious of the fact that I, by contrast, reflected only too truthfully the state of my flat; sometimes my shirt was none too clean, because I had forgotten to make up my bundle for the wash-woman, there were buttons missing on the sleeves of my suit, and so long as the holes in my socks were where they could not be seen once my shoes were on, I continued to wear them.