Nadine Gordimer - A World of Strangers

Embarrassment settled like dust upon the room.

‘I know I have to give you two weeks’ notice,’ said the girl in her faint voice, ‘but I would like you to let me go. I mean, without waiting.’

The young man moved up a little closer behind her, looking straight at me. He had that look about his mouth which suggested that he was saying, silently, things to himself that would encounter some break in the impulse between brain and tongue, and would never come out, except as some kind of shameful, strangled cry.

I said, ‘I see. When would you like to leave?’

‘I want to finish now, tonight.’

I said, trying to keep the balance of my indifference from exaggeration,’ Have you worked out your pay, with holiday pay, and so on?’

She whispered, with a hint of tears to come, ‘Yes.’

I had a sudden thought of how ugly she would be if she cried; perhaps her face, so nondescript now, would wash away altogether. I pitied the stocky, resentful young man.

She handed me a slip of paper on which she had neatly typed the sum. I made out a cheque, and there was no sound in the room but the slither of the pen and the young man’s breathing. She took the cheque and went out, the young man trooping behind her, like a bull that has been led into the ring and out again, without using the blind urges in his breast. Before he closed the door he turned and paused a second, a pause that was directed at me. I said, ‘Yes?’ but, as I had thought, the impulse that stirred in him was too muddled, too little understood to find words or action. They were gone.

For minutes I felt a tingling braggadocio, I wanted to feel that, truly, I had insulted and menaced the girl. I walked up and down the small room in a kind of nervous turmoil that some other, confusedly detached part of myself watched with excitement, as a scientist might observe in himself the phenomena of the fever which at last he is able to record subjectively. Why didn’t I dismiss without a second thought the idiotic girl and the whole stupid incident? It was an incident which, in the given set of circumstances and with the given participants, was so completely predictable that it was nothing but a cliché. On the face of it, I should have been bored by the whole thing. But the fact was that, once in it, it was not boring, it was not to be experienced as a standard social situation, because, once in it, all the unguessed-at things that underlie one’s predictable reactions leap up and take over; one cannot take them into account before, because they can only be touched off by certain situations — if those situations do not happen to arise around one, one could go through one’s life innocent and ignorant of their potential existence.

How was I, how was anyone to know it was like this? This evil embarrassment, a thing like a spell, like the moment in a dream when you wish urgently to speak and nothing comes out of your open mouth, that had suddenly sucked all the normality out of a room in which I sat between two men and a drab girl whose maximum assertion in life would not exceed the making of a crocheted tea-cosy. How could we, all of us in that room, have generated it? The skunk-odour of the spirit, down into which my head had been thrust and out of which I had now come up smarting-eyed and gasping, there’s a snoutful of it for you, my boy. And it was all so stupid and petty. A nobody of a girl thinks she’s too good to come into a room where a white man is sharing lunch with two black men. That’s all. Yet there I was, in a strange thrill of irritation, contemptuous of the girl, longing to punch the young white man on the nose, impatient and angry with the black man. Like a savage! I kept saying to myself. Like a savage! And I did not know whether I meant Steven (I kept having a consciously cruel picture of him, dressed up — I thought — as he imagines a gentleman to dress, a fatuous cinema-smirk of worldliness on his black face) or the inarticulate, red-faced suitor of Miss McCann, or myself, in my state of unaccustomed belligerent excitement.

There is no distraction in the world to equal the pursuit of a woman, as men great and small have been demonstrating since Antony, and, as I had an arrangement to meet Cecil in the Stratford at six, my conscious preoccupation with the thought of her, as I made preparations to leave the office and join her, soon thrust down the incident beneath the lid of the past day. To hell with black men and white men and, indeed, all men. Oh the delightful, narrowing orbit of the evening, with the first whisky dissolving into peace and expectancy inside, the ice bobbing in the glass, and the woman, who, after so much thought, so much speculation, so much concentration of recollection in absence, really cannot be seen any more, so that you could not describe her face or the dress she is wearing, even if you had to — the total presence of the woman, imagined and real, all in one, beside you.

As the lift fell through the layers of the building, the thought came to me, almost from outside, that perhaps I wouldn’t talk to Cecil about what had happened; it was quite honestly a relief to think I didn’t have to, without going into any reasons with myself. I had, I supposed, an Eastern equation of women with pleasure; I fiercely resisted any impingement on this preserve.

Cecil would not have to go through the tests which Miss McCann had failed. There was no need to know how she would have met them.

She was sitting at the same table at which we had already sat several times before. She watched me come in with the down-turned smile that was always like a challenge putting you on your mettle for you did not quite know what. She said, ‘Where is Chibuluma?’

‘Why?’

‘I’ve been listening to that couple over there. They’re having a wonderful quarrel. She wants him to take a job at this place, and he says even though he doesn’t like “the flicks” he likes to know that in Johannesburg there are forty “flicks” for him to choose from if he does want to go.’

‘I think it’s right up in Northern Rhodesia somewhere.’

‘Just let me listen another minute. When I was a child, I could never eat at all in a hotel dining-room, I was so busy listening to other people. They say you never hear any good of yourself, but think of the things you hear about other people.’

My relationship with Cecil moved with queer inconsequence. We dropped apart for days and met again. This did not slow, or change, or damp what was happening between us. She was very much a stranger to me, I realized; much different from the two or three women with whom I had had affairs at Oxford, and the girl in London with whom I had been in love. If any of those women had had a background and childhood entirely dissimilar to mine (and this was true of the Ebury street girl, certainly) at least we were both part of the old, old pattern of an ancient country, and our bones shared with its stones an ancestral memory. If we did not know what we were, we knew what we had been, and this continuity was unbroken by the trauma of the birth of several generations in a new civilization.

Like many people who are young now, Cecil apparently had been brought up into a life that did not have much meaning for her; the only difference was that she believed unquestioningly that meaningful ways of life existed, unchanged. For her, the trouble was that when she tried to follow one or the other, it was like reading from a formula from which one of the ingredients has always been left out. She seemed to have no doubts about the worthwhileness of the things she attempted, whether she wanted to be a mannequin in Rome or a champion show jumper; but like a bloodhound that has had no nose bred into it, she was guessing at the trail, and ran helter-skelter, looking back inquiringly all the time, uncertain if she were going the right way about her pursuit, and in the right style. Nothing came naturally to her.