Nadine Gordimer - A World of Strangers

She hardly ever spoke of her marriage, except in the most casual fashion, not, I think, because the fact of its failure was too important and painful to her, but because she was ashamed that she thought of it so little. It was like one of those dresses that she said had ‘never been a success’, that I once found stuffed in the back of a cupboard to which she had sent me to look for a thermos flask. She lived in today, this minute, and if the past or the future caught at her, struggled helplessly in moods that, watching her, you could give a name to, but that she herself did not relate to the circumstances of her life. She had the blues: so she shifted her feelings from the particular to the general.

One Sunday afternoon we were riding together down the valley below Alexanders’, when we came upon a deserted house. It was during early November, when in Johannesburg an extraordinary theatrical light lay every afternoon between the sky and the city. The summer rains, sucked down so quickly that the earth was ringing hard again a day after storms and torrents, had produced a sudden, astonishing, deep-green luxuriance of foliage; all the trees, fir, gum, acacia and willow, sugar bush and poplar, had taken on full plumage. Between the black-blue greenness, like an optical illusion of bloom created by the damp air, there were huge purple smudges and pale mauve blurs — the jacaranda trees in flower, and behind them, over them, the sky, heavy with unshed rain, blue and purple with charged atmosphere, exchanged with the trees the colour of storm.

The air was cool and massive and the horses went slowly up the neglected drive under more jacarandas. As always on Sundays, there was drumming and far-off singing somewhere down among the trees, where groups of Africans who were servants in the nearby suburbs were having a prayer-meeting; and Cecil was telling me a long anecdote about the first wife of John Hamilton, the Alexanders’ crocodile-hunting friend (he was at Alexanders’ that day), with the peculiar relish women have for the iniquities of their own sex. The horses stopped of their own accord on the overgrown terrace where last year’s leaves rotted, and she said, gaily, as if in answer to a suggestion, ‘Come on, then — let’s go in.’ We hooked the reins on to an iron spike that must once have held the pole of an awning, and tramped over the flagstones. We peered in at the windows, rattled the front door, and Cecil said, ‘Oh look!’ and ran to pick a yellow rose from the bushes that had thrown a defence of barbed entanglements across the terrace steps. They scratched across her boots. Though it was not more than ten years old, and, from the condition of the paint, could not have been empty longer than six months, the place had the air of a ruin that all things that are the work of men have about them the instant men desert them.

‘Oh, I want to get in!’ she said, rattling at the french doors that led on to the terrace. I looked up and around. Someone had begun to make alterations to the upper story of the house, but had never finished; there were builders’ planks and ropes about, and raw brickwork gaped where half a gable had been taken away. We struggled and laughed while I tried to lift her to test a likely-looking window, with a broken pane, but it was round the side of the house where there was no terrace to shorten the distance from window to ground, and she couldn’t reach the latch. We became idiotically determined to get in. ‘Wait a minute! What if we brought Danny round and you got on his back?’ ‘No, let’s try the kitchen first.’ At this, she turned and ran ahead of me through the yard and shook at the kitchen door; it was fast, and she left it at once, in the manner of someone merely satisfying another that he will have to resort to her plan, and ran up the three steps to the next door and took its handle firmly in both hands. But as she touched it, it gave way. She looked round at me, astonished and smiling. And we trooped in. It was the scullery door, and from it we went into the kitchen. ‘Natives must have broken in,’ she said. There was a chaos of emptiness and smashed glass; the cupboards had been wrenched open, the light fittings lay spintered like hoar frost upon the floor: the moment when it had been ransacked seemed to grip it still. In the passage and the living-rooms, mice-pills were all about the floor, and everywhere, through all the empty rooms, drifts of silvery down, blown in from the catkins in the garden, lifted and sank in the draught of our passing.

‘This must have been a nice room,’ she said, placing herself at the french doors and looking out through the dirty glass from the context of some imaginary setting. Outside, we saw one of the horses snort, but could not hear it. She wandered from room to room, touching the dead wires that hung, wrenched loose, from the wall, the empty sockets and brackets. ‘The telephone must have been here.’ ‘This was for a lamp, I suppose.’ Sadness settled on her movements; wondering, she took my hand and clung to it without noticing me. Was she thinking of places she had left somewhere in her disregarded life, lights she had touched on, a pattern of rooms her feet had come to know as a blind man knows? Perhaps it was not as simple as that; the disquiet of the emptiness seemed to take a sounding in her; she was aware of depth and silence, communications the telephone could not carry, a need of assurance the electric light could not bring.

She had a strong fear of herself, as many active people do. I sensed this fear, and, excited by it, began to kiss her. She let me kiss and caress her with a kind of amazement; she was like one of those people who, called up by a conjuror from an audience and told, do this, do that, produces something unimaginable — a bunch of roses, a cage of mice, a Japanese flag. Her open eyes were watching me, her mouth did not participate with the practised pleasure-giving I had found there before. Only the nipples, those unflattering and indiscriminate responders who really never learn to know the hand of a lover from any other stimulus, automatically touched out at the palm of my hand through the stuff of her clothes. ‘For Christ’s sake!’ she said suddenly, recalled to herself. ‘Not here.’ Social caution, her only and familiar arbiter, restored her to a sense of her own known world. The fit of the blues was gone; I had provided her with a situation that she could deal with.

Someone who loved her would have done much more. But she did not know what she needed, and accepted, without knowledge of failed expectation, my preoccupation with the taste of nicotine and lipstick in her mouth.

As we rode back along the valley, a pile of livid light from the hidden sun showed along the grassy ridges. A black man wearing an old white sheet robe and carrying a long stick with a piece of blue cloth tied to it, passed us on his way to join the worshippers we could just see, going in a stooping, leaping, yelling procession round a drummer, where a knot of acacias made a meeting-place. He was singing under his breath, and he murmured ‘Afternoon, baas.’

When we got back to the Alexanders’, Cecil remarked, with the confidence of an order where dirt and chaos went with one side, and beauty and power went with the other, ‘We really ought to get hold of the agents for that empty house. All the out-of-work natives for miles around must be sleeping there. You should just see it, Marion.’

The first time I made love to her was one night in her living-room, after we had been to dinner at the house of some friends of hers. What a lack of spontaneity there is about the first act of love between two people who seem familiar enough with each other on other levels of association! In the dark each apprehends in the other a secret creature who never appeared across the dinner table, or bought a newspaper in the street, or leaned forward to make a point in a political discussion. I could imagine that becoming aware of a life after death might be something like that: all the accepted manifestations of the awareness of being, stilled, like an engine cut off, and then, out of a new element of silence, another way of being. She groped, at last, for the table beside the divan: ‘Can you find me a cigarette?’ ‘Let me find the lamp first.’ ‘No, no, don’t turn it on. Here’s the box.’ We sat up in the dark with the divan cover pulled round us, smoking, like people come to shelter after a disaster of some sort — shipwreck or storm. I dressed and left not long after midnight; people who had been visiting one of the flats along the corridor were making their farewells and we emerged from the building together — they were a grey-faced bald man with strong hair curling out of his nose and ears, as if it had turned and grown down into instead of out of that cranium, and one of those heavy women who, despite large bosoms, corsets, and jewellery, when they reach middle age suddenly look like men. The moment the last good-bye had left their lips they sank into the grimness that is one kind of familiarity. They came along behind me like jailers, and the slam of our car doors, theirs and mine, as we drove off, was the final locking-up of the night.