Nadine Gordimer - A World of Strangers

I had picked up Cecil at her flat. Her little boy hung round the doorway as she prepared to leave. ‘Are you going in the car?’ ‘Are you going to swim?’ he kept asking me.

‘Why not bring him along?’

She signed an impatient warning. ‘No, no. He’s going out later. He’ll be fetched after lunch.’

In the car, she grumbled about the time she had spent with her family, but before we reached the Alexanders’ she had sighed, stretched, fidgeted, lit a cigarette in pleased relaxation. She lifted her arm and put her hand round the nape of my neck, pinching my ear. One of her ways of making love was to lick my ear, like a dog, and I supposed she wanted to remind me. I slid my left hand into the warmth behind her bare knee, just to remind her. She laughed and demanded: ‘And where did you decide to go, after all?’ At once, it seemed absolutely necessary to belong along with her, I did not want to be even the remove of a surprised or baffled look from her. I mentioned the name of a bookseller and his wife of whom she had heard me speak before.

‘What was it like?’

‘All right.’

‘Couldn’t have been as bad as my collection of old crows.’

She sat on the grass beside the pool, opening the presents that had been kept for her from the day before. There was a piece of jewellery from Hamish and Marion that she unwrapped with a deep sigh of achievement; while she exclaimed and hugged them, while she cried to Kit and others with perfect surprise, I had the feeling that she had been almost sure she would get the ring, had made sure she would get it. Coloured and tinselled packages lay, burst open, all round her. Perfume, cosmetics, smoking gadgets, satin, and nylon; John Hamilton picked out a giant pencil that looked like bamboo and had a fur tassel, and began autographing the legs of the women sunbathing; Kit went through the loot with expert fingers; one of the Peever twins came over, hale and dripping, smelling of wet hair and the chlorine of the pool, and kissed Cecil in a scatter of water. ‘Sweetie! My one and only! Happy Chrissie!’ Donald Alexander had a girl at last, a soft little girl of twenty or so, who slithered away into the pool with a splash when John tried to write on her brown thigh. Archie Baxter called encouragement; in swimming trunks he exposed a stricken-looking body and dwindling legs, like a splendidly-furred dog shorn of its pelt Kit seemed guardedly snappy with him; perhaps the strain of a three-day party made the front of the handsome, amusing couple wear thin. She had made as good a job of herself as usual and was bright as a cinema façade where the name of the next ‘attraction’ has just been newly put up in lights. John Hamilton was paying her a good deal of attention. His was a practical kind of court: ‘Look here, Kit, d’you know what you want to do? You want to get one of your boys to blow through that pipe, a bicycle pump’d do it. .’ he said, advising her with the air of wanting to get down and do it himself, about the maintenance of the filter plant just installed for the swimming pool she’d had built at the farm.

I’d been given a silk shirt (from Marion), an expensive bottle of after-shave lotion (from the Baxters), and, from Cecil, one of those sumptuous-looking picture books that publishers bring out specially for Christmas, and which go vaguely under the name of ‘art’. I’d never worn a silk shirt, never put scented stuff on my face, would probably never open the book again after that day. I lay idly in a big chair, talking now and then, listening; listening, sometimes with my eyes closed, to the slap and plunge of people in the water, and the talk of the Christmas Handicap that had been run the previous Saturday. There was a woman with blued white hair, the upper half of whose body swelled splendidly as a caryatid’s; she had an affected, absent way of talking — ‘Absolutely glamorous’ was her standard comment. But the moment someone mentioned racing, I heard her voice change, her languor drop, and she spoke shrewdly, intelligently, and imaginatively; I opened my eyes because I couldn’t believe my ears — and even after only a minute in the shelter of the explosive dark of my eyelids, the garden and the people sprang up with strong variety and brightness, a deep texture of colour and shadow through which I seemed to look down. I went into the pool before lunch, floating in a stream of pleasant sensations, a current that touched only the nerve-endings; the lave of cool water, the astringent prickle of midday sun, the smell of plums and hot grass, and the perfume on the skin of a woman as she rose out of the water a moment, beside me.

I succumbed completely to such moods. This one took me on the instant, enclosing as a bubble, and I did not compare or relate it to what had gone before; an Orpheus, I passed from one world to another — but neither was real to me. For in each, what sign was there that the other existed?

Cecil and I left about five o’clock and drove home in gathering silence. The summer sun was at a level to strike us right in the eyes, an impaling glare you couldn’t escape. Cecil was like a bird suddenly quenched by the blanket thrown over its cage; all her gaiety went out under the sense of the holiday over. The ebb of animation from drinks and the atmosphere of playful admiration with which she and her friends surrounded each other, left her stranded. The idea of the New Year, only a week away, seemed to depress her. ‘I’ll be twenty-nine,’ she said. She wondered what the year would be like; I said, meaning to reassure her, like any other year. She hardly spoke again.

I realized that I was incapable of generating the kind of atmosphere that we had just left, and which, like some drug without which an addict cannot live, though it brought her to the doldrums in which she was now, was also the only thing likely to float her clear again. I fell silent, too. And she sat like a child for whom the end of the party is the end of the world; that was how she lived, from one treat to the next, free of a job, free of her child, free of all the every-day ballast that, I suppose, makes life possible for most people.

Her flat smelled stale from being shut up through the heat of the day. She treated me with the absent, dependent, grateful manner of the convalescent who wakes and is glad to find someone sitting at the bedside. When we had opened the windows and the balcony doors, we simply sat about, for a while, talking desultorily and looking through a couple of the American picture magazines to which she subscribed and which usually lay about unopened. The building, the whole street, were not so much quiet as abandoned, with the gone-dead feeling of places awaiting the return of holiday-makers. She came and sat beside me and leaned against me, kicking off her shoes and putting her feet up on the stained table where I and my predecessors had rested their glasses. It was one of those hours when you feel that you will never be hungry again, nor want to make love again.

I got interested in an article that whipped familiarly through the Stone Age with a character named Prehistoric Jones, the prototype man-in-a-grey-flannel-suit, and Cecil decided to go off and have a bath.

I didn’t realize how long she’d been gone — she must have been soaking for more than twenty minutes, the sun had dropped and the air seemed to breathe again — when she suddenly appeared at the doorway wrapped in her bath-towel and looking stunned, as if she could not believe what had alarmed her. ‘Come and listen,’ she said. ‘Quickly.’

She took my hand tightly and led me to the bathroom. ‘Listen.’ She jerked my hand to be still. There was nothing, for a moment, except the drizzle of a tap, but when I made to speak she stopped me urgently. Then I heard the panting of a dog, somewhere on the other side of the wall, in the street. But as I identified the sound it grew, it was the panting of something else. What? It grew in volume, it quick-ended, it harshly filled and emptied some unimaginable cavern of a breast, while Cecil, dripping wet, stared at the wall in horror. Then, as she turned to warn me of the anguish of what was to come, it came: the last roaring pant, a breath taken in hell, burst into a vast, wailing sobbing, the terrible sorrow of a man. A man! I jumped up and opened the window, and she leapt up behind me to see me do what she had been afraid to do for herself. I looked. The street seemed empty, commonplace, peaceful. Some broken paper streamers, yellow and pink, lay in the road. A bicycle was propped against a tree. And then we saw him sitting with his head on his arms, in the gutter, just below us. He was a tall Zulu — the stretched lobes of his ears hung loose where he had once worn fancy disks in them — and he had on only a pair of trousers.