Nadine Gordimer - A World of Strangers

For I knew that if I told Cecil that my closest friends in Johannesburg were black men, and that I ate with them and slept in their houses, I would lose her. That was the fact of the matter. And I was damned if I was going to lose her. There was a good chance that her sophistication would save her from the classic reaction of horror and revulsion, but her strong instinct for the conventionally unconventional mores of the wealthy ‘smart’ set would have labelled me queer (not in the accepted, fashionable sense) and ruled me out. I knew that it was natural and unremarkable that I should sleep at Sam’s, in the township, on Sunday night, and in Cecil’s bed on Monday, since it is natural and unremarkable for a man to have friends and a woman to love. What did it matter that, because she did not know that it was natural and un-remarkable, she was not told about it. The facts of my having been there, at Sam’s, and being here, at Cecil’s, existed whether accepted or not. So, unaware, in her own life, Cecil demonstrated the truth she would have denied with every drop of blood in her body, had she been confronted with it openly.

For herself, she was often secretive and vague about her movements. She was hiding, I thought, not something, but nothing; she did not want me to know how she spent her days, because she herself suspected the style and rightness of what she did, and in imagination, she transferred her own judgement of herself, to me. She wanted no confirmation of this from outside. In fact, she wanted assurance that she was not as she suspected herself to be; and anyone who could have presented her to herself, strongly enough, as something other, could have made her into that other. She saw almost nothing of her family, even of her younger sister Margaret, whose clean pretty face was troubled by none of the ambiguities that had endeared her elder sister’s to me, and she spent more time than she always admitted with her great friend Rosamund Bell. The Bell woman was divorced, too, and had been left in possession of a splendid establishment so well-stocked with servants, children, and animals that it did not seem there could ever have been room for the husband who had provided all this. For women of a certain economic level, living on alimony seemed quite a profession in Johannesburg; it was taken for granted by many that, once having been married, they were entitled to be provided for, for life, in idleness. Another woman whom I met sometimes at the Alexanders’, a lively and charming woman, had been living for ten years with a man whom she admitted she could not afford to marry, because she would then lose the income of her ex-husband’s alimony — she and her lover used it to finance their trips to Europe. Like these women, Cecil lived on alimony, too, but either she was a bad manager, or the alimony was not as generous as theirs, for she grumbled continually about lack of money. It was true that though she had (what seemed to me to be, anyway) luxurious clothes, the flat was poorly stocked and shabby; the glass shelf in the bathroom was crowded with perfumes and elaborate cosmetics for the bath, but the towels were threadbare and too few, and, although there was always plenty of whisky and a bottle or two of good wine in the cupboard, she would make a great, despairing to-do, every now and then, in the kitchen, because too much butter had been used, or the maid, Eveline, had ordered a particular kind of fruit for the child, before the season of plenty had brought the price down. I remember a fuss about peaches. ‘Why can’t he eat bananas? Why must a child have fancies for peaches at sixpence each? Bananas are nourishing and I don’t want to hear any more nonsense about peaches, d’you hear? Honestly, Eveline, you seem to think I’m made of money.’

The servant, Eveline, laughed, and shouted to the little boy, Keith, in her loud, affectionate voice, ‘Come on, Cookie, let’s go up to the vegetable place. Mommy says we must eat bananas, bananas.’ The child trailed along beside her, hanging from her hand, while she laughed and swung the basket, and called to friends and delivery men as she went. Standing beside me on the balcony, Cecil watched them crossly. The boy turned and waved, fingers moving stiffly from the knuckle, a baby’s wave. She waved back. ‘If only he didn’t look exactly like me,’ she said, in irritation. ‘Why shouldn’t he?’ I asked, but she was serious. ‘You don’t know how horrible it is to reproduce yourself, like that. Every time he looks at me, and I see that face. . ’ It was as if all the distrust she had of herself was projected into the way she saw the little boy.

‘Women are strange,’ I smiled at her. ‘I should have thought it would have pleased you.’ What I was really thinking was that surely she would prefer the child to resemble her, rather than his father, from whom she was divorced, and for whom she felt, at best, indifference.

The servant, Eveline, shielded Cecil from the irritation of the child, and the child from Cecil’s irritation. Cecil was always saying, with the air and vocabulary of wild exaggeration that was the lingua franca of her friends, ‘I simply couldn’t live without my Eveline.’ She had no idea, of course, that this was literally true. Not only did the warm, vulgar, coquettish, affectionate creature keep ‘Cookie’ trailing at her heels all day long; all that was irresponsibly, greedily life-loving in her own nature leapt to identify itself with and abet Cecil in Cecil’s passionate diversions. Eveline, who herself wore a fashionable wedding ring although she had no husband, would drop her work and carry off Cecil’s earrings to the kitchen for a polish, while Cecil was dressing to go out. Cecil, feverishly engrossed in her hair, her face, or the look of a dress, often padded about in her stockings until the very second before the front door closed behind her, because Eveline had seen, at the last moment, that Cecil’s shoes could not be worn unless they were cleaned first. Cecil bribed, wheedled, and quarrelled with Eveline, to get her to stay in and look after the child on those days or nights when her time off clashed with some engagement Cecil wanted to keep. She appealed to her in desperation a dozen times a day: don’t call me to the telephone, please, Eveline, d’you hear — tell them I’m out, whoever it is, take a message, anything; please take Keith out for a walk and don’t come back till five — I’ve got to get some sleep; oh, Eveline, be a good girl and see if you can find something for us to eat, won’t you, we don’t feel like going out, after all. ‘Eveline adores Keith,’ she would say; as if that, too, she had delegated to hands more willing and capable than her own. I didn’t think Eveline did; but she didn’t mind the child, she took his presence around her ankles as the most natural thing in the world, and that, I imagine, is what a child needs more than ‘adoration’. Cecil regarded Eveline as a first-rate servant, and took this, as I have noticed people who have a good servant tend to, as some kind of oblique compliment to herself: as if she herself deserved or inspired Eveline’s first-rateness. In fact, the woman was her friend and protector, and, breezily unconscious of this role, stood between her and the realities of her existence.

When I met Cecil at the Stratford after one of her visits to the hairdresser, or she came frowning out into the sun on horseback at Alexanders’, all dash and style, it was difficult to believe that the effect had been produced in that flat, with the rumpled drawers, the bills lying about, and the urgent appeals to the untidy kitchen. But, like Steven, whom she would never meet, her appearance was contrived in indifference to and independence of her background. This was not the only point of resemblance between them. Like Steven, she kept up a fiction of importance; she would suddenly suggest that we should change our plans for a particular day because on that day she had committed herself to some (unspecified) arrangement, a mysterious ‘something she couldn’t very well get out of. Once or twice she announced that it was a damned nuisance, but she’d had a week-end invitation she couldn’t refuse. Sometimes the mere mention of these engagements was enough to fulfil whatever their purpose was, and she forgot about them, at other times she did disappear for an evening or a week-end. On one of these occasions, when I had gone with Sylvia Danziger, Anna, and a man who was a friend of theirs from Capetown, to a cinema, I looked over the balcony and saw Cecil moving out of the foyer with John Hamilton, Rosamund Bell, and another man who came quite often to Alexanders’. They were in evening dress, so I supposed they must be going on to a nightclub. Why she should think it necessary to make a secret of an evening spent with these people, I did not know. Did she think I should be jealous? But that was ridiculous; it was not as if she were going out with some new man she’d found for herself: these people were all old friends.