Nadine Gordimer - A World of Strangers

The ship’s first officer, a dapper Triestino, more like a Frenchman than Italian in appearance, strolled past and was invited to join us. He was an obvious admirer of Stella, and complimenting her graciously in Italian as he sat beside her, brought a happy blush to her bosom and neck, as if her body had never learned the cultivated decorum of her face. Even the consul’s wife, coming bewilderedly and cautiously from the direction of her cabin, outrageously painted and in an ‘afternoon’ frock, fitted in somehow, and after changing her mind twice about her choice of a drink, settled beside me.

‘He seems a lot better since we sailed,’ she said to her husband, not noticing that she was interrupting. He shook two olive pits together in his hand and screwed up his face in her direction: ‘What is it you say?’ ‘I said Flopsy’s a lot better, dear.’

The consul said with rasping pity,’ My wife’s cat appeared to have some difficulty in digesting his luncheon fish, or whatever-it-was.’

It was clear that he intended the subject to be closed, so far as the general company was concerned, and so she turned to me and said, confidentially, ‘It was not fish, it was mince. But not ordinary mince, some spice was in it.’

Was she Welsh, perhaps, I wondered? There was a stilted-ness, an absence of elision in her speech which somehow was not English. Stella had suggested that she was an early indiscretion of the consul’s, from Turkey, or perhaps the Middle East; an indiscretion with which he found himself saddled, in honour bound, for the rest of his life. Certainly there was something Levantine if not Eastern in her appearance.

The consul grew positively gallant with Stella — the nearest he could ever get toward being flirtatious — and the eyes of old Montecelli, or whatever the first officer’s name was, swam bright and bulging as a Pekinese’s with smiling Mediterranean maleness. Everard (in English, astonishingly) told some really funny stories about her Indian prince and his household. Our laughter and our raised voices had the effect of isolating us rather enviably from the other passengers; they strolled past, or sat apart in their own little groups, like children who pretend not to know that there is a party in the next-door garden. How ridiculously much these trivial things matter in hotels and ships, how they reproduce in miniature the whole human situation, the haves and the have-nots, the chosen and the rejected, the prestige of the successful fight for the female, the singling out of their leader by the herd! All there, on the air-conditioned, safe, and sanitary liner, being worked out in the form of shuffle-board championships, the crossing-the-line ceremony, and the parties made up for the Captain’s ball. Psychologists say that the activities of children at play are one long imaginative rehearsal for life; adults, too, never stop muttering the lines and reproducing the cues, even on holiday; even between performances. Though none of these people with whom I sat drinking were people whom I would choose as friends, I was surprised and a little inclined to sneer at myself to find that I enjoyed the warm feeling of being one of the group, of belonging. Long after most of the other passengers had gone down to dress for dinner, we continued to sit on, drinking and laughing and talking noisy nonsense. When at last we rose we were agreed, with rather gin-borne accord and enthusiasm, that we should gather after dinner and make something of a party, so far as we were concerned, of the decorous dancing to the ship’s band which took place on those nights on which there was no cinema show.

‘I think Hugh has an arrangement for bridge,’ said the consul’s wife, the only hesitant voice. On dance nights she always put on silver sandals, and then if she was asked to dance blushed a refusal, not liking to deprive other wives or single women of a partner. The consul did not attend dances with her.

But this time the consul, brown knees together, rising elegantly from his chair as Stella, Rina, and Everard rose, said, with a handsome narrowing of his deep eyes, ‘Oh I think we might postpone the bridge, just this once.’

Stella, dragging Rina down the corridor which separated our cabins, blew me a mocking kiss as she disappeared, laughing.

I sat at the other end of the dining-room, far away from the Turgells and Miss Everard and the consul’s family. While I ate I saw Everard sweep in in green and gold, resplendent as the howdah with the foam-rubber cushions she had described earlier, but I did not catch a glimpse of any of the others. After dinner, in the lounge, the consul beckoned me over to a collection of chairs round two or three small tables he had had prepared for our party. He wore a black tie, but politely ignored my rather rumpled blue suit, too short over the behind, as all my suits seem to be. Mamma was absent, playing bridge, and the wife sat with the expectant face of a girl at her first party and the dreadful clothes of a provincial mayoress at a reception. The band was playing some jaunty old fox-trot from a Fred Astaire film I dimly remembered having been taken to see once with some cousins in the school holidays. One or two couples were hopping mildly round as if they were climbing, counter to the slight tilt of the floor, first this way then that. Everard came in, signalled that she would be with us at once, hung over the backs of the chairs of a group of Italians, declaiming in high-pitched Italian, and then swept out again as if with a sudden recall to purpose. Like the other member of the weather couple, rain and shine, Rina swept in through the other door and made for us. She wore one of those chiffon dresses, vaguely flowered, vague in cut, vague in fit, which so many of my young female compatriots own, a dress about as becoming, though much less revealing of the lines of the body than a winding-sheet. Round her neck was a thin chain with some weakly blue stone pendent from it. Only the tips of her ears, unexpectedly showing under her brushed-back hair, and unexpectedly adorned with little gold gipsy rings, gave a hint of life.

‘I must apologize for mummy,’ she said, rather breathless, pausing at the back of the consul’s wife’s chair a moment before she sat down beside me, dropping a limp beaded bag in her thin lap. ‘Fruit cup? How simply lovely.’ She lifted the plastic stirrer out of my Pimm cup and licked it. ‘She won’t be up, I’m afraid. She’s gone to bed.’ She shrugged her shoulders and her face, as if to say, well, that’s that. ‘What’s wrong with Stella?’ I said, amazed.

‘Is your mother not well?’ The consul’s wife leaned forward.

‘I say! I am sorry!’ said the consul.

‘Oh no,’ said the girl, with the air of someone in charge of a familiar crisis.’ She’s all right. She’s not ill. I’ve ordered a brandy for her. I’ll dash down again directly and make her take a sedative. It’s Africa,’ she added, matter-of-fact. ‘First day back in Africa, ashore today.’

‘But I thought Stella enjoyed today,’ I said. ‘She did enjoy it.’ I remembered the gaiety with which she had scuttled off to dress for the evening, blowing me a kiss from the corridor.

‘Just Africa,’ the child said wisely, almost bored. ‘It’s all right. I’ll give her a sedative and she’ll calm down and it’ll be out of her system.’ I realized that this old-young girl, this child-parent had made this journey with her mother many times since childhood. She was an old hand at — whatever it was that ailed her mother.

Rina danced with me, and then with the consul, and then excused herself, going serenely out to her charge and reappearing ten minutes later. ‘Reading,’ she said. ‘I’ve given her her pill.’ A little later, the girl disappeared again. This time she said to me on her return, ‘Asleep.’ There was a Paul Jones in progress and I saw that she was eager to be in it; I led her to the floor, lost her, and went back to my drink. She was obviously enjoying herself; she preferred a dance that was more of a boisterous game than a tête-à-tête contact between a man and a woman.