Nadine Gordimer - A World of Strangers

Marion Alexander came out across the lawn dressed for town, from where she had just come. Like many women who aren’t young any more, when she was high-heeled and pulled in here and there and wore an elaborate hat and all the glittering, distracting surface of jewellery, veils, furs that such women employ, she looked, from a distance, almost beautiful. A quick look rapidly taking in all the adornments of beauty suggested a beautiful woman, and so, for a moment, you saw one. Then, as she came nearer, the components fell apart; there was a thick neck under the pearls, the legs were spindly, there were ropes of veins on the backs of the beringed hands.

‘Have you had everything you want, darlings?’ she called, and again, as she came up to us, ‘Has Jonas been looking after you?’

‘The lot,’ said John, gesturing to the tray of used cups on the grass, and the table with glasses and a jug of orange juice.

‘We could do with something a little stronger than that,’ said Marion in reproof of the absent servant, Jonas. The Alexanders took it for granted that their guests needed a constant stream of refreshment, that the only way they could be expected to continue functioning as guests was by something approximating to the system whereby failing patients are kept alive by a night-and-day saline drip into their veins. Jonas was called and told to bring whisky and gin and all the things that went with them. Marion kissed Cecil’s child, marvelling over him as she did over everything: ‘Isn’t that the most enchanting. .’ she said to us as she settled carefully to rest in one of the low garden chairs. ‘That is the most adorable thing.’

‘D’you know,’ John agreed, ‘he’s got absolutely no fear of the water at all? He’s ready to slip out of your hand and drown himself the moment you get him in.’

‘He’s exactly Cecil, isn’t he?’ said Marion, conjuring up for us a picture of touching maternal charm, Cecil and her son. ‘Just exactly her spirit, her way of going at things, and her smile — too amazing, the smile.’

They built up this picture which I did not recognize; though I suppose, on appearances, it was recognizable. It did not exist, but it could seem to exist, as people or objects can be brought into relationship with each other in a faked photograph. I felt suddenly jealous and wanted to assert my own familiarity with Cecil by exposing the fake, denigrating her. It was on the tip of my tongue to say, womanishly,’ It’s a pity she dislikes the boy so much.’

Marion was going to Europe in a week or two — ‘You must look after Hamish,’ she said to John and me; she said it to everyone, in that absent affectation of simplicity and childishness that the sprightly elderly rich love to adopt. She talked enthusiastically about how she would be seeing my mother; I could see her, telephoning my mother from a suite at Claridge’s, talking about me as she talked about Cecil. And my mother, slightly appalled, trying to recognize me; my mother, at lunch with Marion, looking at Marion’s clothes and diamonds, listening to her chatter, puzzled and even a little hurt (my mother always dutifully took the shortcomings of her children on herself) that I should choose to spend my time in South Africa with people like that. Then she would decide not to invite Marion to dinner after all — she was not young and pretty enough for Faunce to overlook her uselessness, nor was she clever enough for Faunce to forgive her age.

Soon Hamish Alexander came home — we had dressed, and moved with Marion up to the veranda by then. He gave us the formula of greeting and interest that always rolled off his tongue; Had we had a swim (or a ride)? Was the water not too warm, too cold (according to the season)? Had we had a drink? We would stay for lunch, of course. For himself, he never did any of the things he expected his guests to have done, except, of course, eat and drink. With all people who were not mining men or financiers, he kept a don’t-bother-your-head-about-it attitude toward discussions about finance, and what he called ‘precious metals’. When he was talking with his own kind about these things, he always gave his opinions the backing of the editorial or royal ‘we’ — it was never what he thought — as if he reported for another self, a corporate self, left behind in the great building in the city which housed the head offices of his company.

Politics sometimes gathered a little group of men into a huddle at The High House — the women there never contributed except for the rare passing interruption of some piercing and paralysing generality — but Hamish did not encourage the talk. In fact, he seemed to have some special sensory awareness of it, and he would call across, almost warningly, ‘What’s that you say? I don’t think people quite realize the particular difficulty — ’ as if he resented the mere useless airing of views of men who had no knowledge behind-the-scenes. Perhaps all this was a device to protect his leisure; anyway, I know that a big strike of African mine-workers on the Rhodesian Copperbelt, that sent him up there to confer with people from the Oppenheimer group, was simply ‘this Rhodesian nuisance’ that absented him from a big theatre party arranged by Marion, and uranium — the discovery of which had been confirmed in some of the worked-out gold mines of his group — was practically a dirty word in the house, or a sacred one — it took some daring to bring it out, at any rate.

The few times I had heard politics talked at The High House, it had hardly seemed to be concerned with the same country or spoken by people in the same situation as the talk I heard in Sophiatown or in houses where black and white people met. The people at Alexanders’ were almost entirely preoccupied with the struggle between the Afrikaner and the Englishman; that is, the Nationalists and themselves. To the other people I knew, the squabbling of the two white peoples was simply picayune; dwarfed by the towering bout between black and white. When an important Nationalist recanted and turned on his old Party colleagues, making speeches of high emotion calling for unity (between English-and Afrikaans-speaking whites) instead of a divided people, there was an air of triumph about politics at The High House; in fact, for the first time, politics came out of the corner and was generally talked. They discussed a possible refurbishing of their United Party as they might have considered doing up a perfectly livable room they hadn’t used much lately, or reconditioning a plant that hadn’t been in production for a while.

In Anna Louw’s house, where the event wasn’t mentioned until I brought it up myself, Sam said, ‘United people? What’s the paper mean? United against us?’ And Sylvia Danziger, who was there too, went off into a peal of stuttering laughter.

Cecil did well at the show, but not quite well enough to keep her in the triumphant euphoria in which she was most attractive. I went along to see her compete, twice; when she came out, needle-straight above Hamish’s prancing mare, I felt again in a flash the moment when I had noticed her first in the Stratford Bar, months before: she had the exciting, self-absorbed remoteness of a woman whom one does not know. But my attention wandered from the spectacle of one rider after another, uniformly the same, urging their horses to the same performance round the same course; beyond the creak of saddle-leather, a band bumbled somewhere nearby, flags stirred limply, prize cows lowed over in the agricultural section, and, farther away still, there was the vast snore of city traffic, rising and falling and twining. I found Cecil sitting beside me, grim under the black velvet cap, smelling of horse sweat. I gave her a cigarette and her hand was trembling. When someone did worse than she had done, she had difficulty in keeping her flushed face impassive, and looked swiftly sideways at Hamish and Kit. When someone did better than she had, she looked at no one, and fidgeted with the cloth of her breeches stretched tight over her knees. The day she won an event, we all had lunch together at the members’ restaurant; Hamish hardly ever went to places that did not carry some sort of privilege. It was a poor lunch, but there was plenty of champagne and a great crowd of well-dressed people in an atmosphere of perfume and cigar-smoke. I was astonished, when I looked up across the heads, to see Anna Louw looking at me. She had a hat on (I had never seen her wear a hat before) and she was smiling, like a child smiling from the top of the big wheel. When Hamish’s party was on its way out, and I had left the others to go and get Marion’s coat for her from the counter where such things were handed for safe keeping, I found myself near enough Anna to go and speak to her. She was alone; waiting for her escort, I supposed.