Nadine Gordimer - A World of Strangers

‘What are they like?’

I told her about the people at The High House, colouring the picture a little, at once feeling disloyal and at the same time mildly, enjoyably revengeful, as if I’d just discovered I’d been taken in by them. They were as unfamiliar to her as people of another country; I don’t suppose she would have wanted to know them, anyway, but it was another reminder to me of the boundaries she had left, and probably could never re-enter. Her face, chin lifted to pull at a cigarette, or bent, with the shadows streaking down it, over the glass cupped in her hands, was the face of burned boats, blown bridges; one of those faces you suddenly see, by a trick of the light, in the rock formation of the side of a mountain. I felt suddenly afraid of her, I put out my hand and touched, with the touch of fear, the thing I fled from. I had no desire for her but I kissed her. The rain had stopped as if to listen; the whole night was still. She did not shut her eyes for an instant; every time I opened mine, she was looking at me, as if she were waiting for something to be over, to have done. She went on talking while she took my hand, turned it palm up, then down, then pressed the nails, one by one: ‘You think you’ll keep free, with one foot here and another there, and a look in somewhere else, but even you, even a stranger like you, Toby — you won’t keep it up.’ She stood up and wiped the windowsill dry of the rain that lay on it in a scatter of magnifying lenses, thick and glassy. We were both standing about the room as if the night were breaking up. I thought of Cecil with a flash of longing, but she was like one of those women you imagine before you have ever had a woman. I made love to Anna at last, slowly because I had had so much to drink, and pleasure came to me as if wrung from my grasp. When our excitement was over the rain began again as if it had never stopped.

I suppose there’s no use trying to explain oneself, so far as one’s feelings about women are concerned. The whole mysterious business may be influenced by, even spoiled by one’s idea of what one should feel, what one’s code is, but the fact remains that old Adam has a code of his own that sometimes makes nonsense of the imposed one. You do something cheap, goatish, or foolish, and it feels right. That’s all. And if you feel right and comfortable, reason — all the reasons why you shouldn’t — cannot discomfit you. My extension of conversation with Anna (that’s no polite euphemism — that was exactly what it seemed to be, the moment it was past) had the effect of deepening my interest in Cecil. For weeks, there was a gentle madness for me in the mention of her name; her faults entranced me, an inch of darker colour grown out at the roots of her hair touched me, her laugh, in the next room, astonished me, like a secret called aloud. A season of love seized me; and it was Christmas, Christmas in midsummer.

A christmas party at The High House seemed to have no beginning and no end. When I picked up Cecil and took her out there for lunch on Christmas Eve — this was to celebrate the arrival, from the Karroo, of the Baxters, whom Marion had talked out of Kit’s idea of a house party in Neksburg — the pool was full of young men and girls, and roars of whisky-released laughter came up from the shade of the veranda, where Hamish Alexander sat in white bowling flannels and brown suède shoes, drum-bellied, bristling with good humour, surrounded by the older guests. When we left in the afternoon, some had gone but others were newly-arrived. Then there was to be a dinner-party in the evening, to which neither Cecil nor I were going. She had to take her child to a children’s party at her parents’; I was going to a celebration arranged by Steven. She was to spend Christmas Day with her family too, and I had plans of my own to fulfil. So I did not see her again until Boxing Day, when we had been invited to go to Alexanders’ again, and arrived at midday to find the party in its third day, the pool still lively as the seal enclosure at a zoo, the veranda still dispensing laughter from the bar.

It seemed hotter than it had ever been, all summer, so far, in Johannesburg. Sun and wine and beer and whisky made the atmosphere of a fiesta; it was not Christmas, to me, but I liked it. Outside my flat, piccanins shuffled and jerked their backsides to tin whistles and a banging on old tins. While the shops were open, a weary, sweating concourse streamed the streets, thick as a trail of ants following the scent of sugar; then, except for cinema crowds, the city was left to the drunks. Church bells jangled and, on the balconies of flats, the hot sun turned on the baubles of Christmas trees in tubs. Black men who delivered clinking cases from the bottle store wore paper hats. If the place was not gay, at least it had let itself go. At Alexanders’, presents, flowers, glasses, and food covered luxury with abundance; even the garden, in the swell of midsummer sap, was heaped with so much colour, so pollen-thick, so vibrant with bees, criss-crossed by birds, so heavy with peaches and plums whose delicious over-ripeness smelled headier even than the perfumes of the women, that the very texture of the air was plenty. The cornucopia jammed down over your head. Cecil flashed and turned in this atmosphere, a creature in its own element: she seemed to me to exist, and rightly so, for no other purpose than to laugh, her eyes brilliant with alcohol, her lap full of presents, among flowers and drunken bees.

My Christmas Eve with Steven started at about ten o’clock at a club run by Indians some miles out of Johannesburg. Lucky Chaputra had insisted that we come, Steven said, but when we left the club, shortly before midnight, Lucky still had not turned up himself, though we had been well looked after, no doubt on his instructions. The club was one of those places one could never find again; I drove to it blindly, turning when Steven told me, following landmarks invisible to me, down dirt-tracks and through dongas, over the dark veld. Steven chattered all the time, and sometimes could not bear to spoil a story by interrupting it with a direction, so that, a minute or two late, he would suddenly call out, sensing something unfamiliar about our progress: ‘Wait a minute! Stop, man! We’ve missed the turning.’

There was a concert on at the club when we got there. The programme went very slowly, because after every few items the audience, Muslim and Hindu men, drifted out to their cars. They would drift into the hall again in ten or fifteen minutes, each time a little more vociferous and critical in their calls for the entertainment to recommence. The reason was that the club — which had, like other country clubs, a swimming pool and tennis courts — could not, of course, get a licence to serve liquor. The members drank in their cars, fast and neat.

Steven and I, the only white man and the only African there, were hustled into an anteroom lit by a candle, where, first, the fat, pale organizer of the show, an anxious man named Jayasingh, and a thin business man named Mia and, as the evening went on, a number of other club personages, gave us Haig and water. When the others ate dry triangular sandwiches of the kind served at wedding receptions, we got plates of hot vermicelli with cinnamon and sugar. As usual, there were not enough glasses to go round, and we politely drank up quickly so that the others could get a drink in before it was time to get back into the hall. In this anteroom there was no furniture except an iron bed empty of a mattress and a table. There was a plaster figurine among the whisky bottles on the mantelpiece; I went over to look at it, and Mia, solicitously kind, rushed up with the candle: ‘Ghandiji’ he cried,’ I’ll show you.’ The plaster figure wore a tiny pair of wire spectacles. The candle lit up, too, on the wall, two or three group photographs of Indian business men with striped suits and important expressions.