Nadine Gordimer - A World of Strangers

‘Keeping a tag on you,’ she said, smiling with pleasure.

‘How was I to know you, in that hat?’

John Hamilton, who was also in Hamish’s party, came up as he left the umpteenth group of friends he had paused to talk to as he lagged behind the rest of our party. He had had a lot to drink and his down-to-earth debonair manner, a cross between Father Christmas in a department store and man-about-town, was in spate. ‘Toby, there’s no dragging you away from the girls. Come on now, who’s this delightful young lady you’ve been keeping to yourself. — He’s a dark horse, my dear, always keeps the good things to himself. — Why don’t you bring her along to Hamish’s eh? Proper Don Juan and pretty darned selfish about it. D’you ride, my dear? Well, what does it matter, you can just sit and look charming. . ’ He drifted on again, greeting people everywhere along the tables.

‘Bubbly drinks at lunch have a hideous effect on people,’ I said, awkwardly. ‘I think he’s rather a nice man,’ said Anna. ‘Oh he is, he is.’ I felt rebuked.

‘Did you have a good lunch?’ I asked. She and I had never had a conversation like this before.

‘Asparagus, turkey, ice-cream and chocolate sauce,’ she announced. I felt she was laughing at me. I should have liked to have taken off that hat of hers.

‘You sound as if you enjoyed it.’

‘Toby, man, there’s something fascinating about people like this, you know.’

‘You don’t really think so.’

‘Oh yes. It’s natural to be like them. If you’re a whole person, perfectly adapted to your own functions, like a fish in the sea or a lion in the jungle, you don’t give a damn for anybody else. There’s something queer about people like me, haven’t you noticed it? We want to change things because we haven’t got the divine selfishness of really healthy beings. We’re not enough to ourselves.’

They were waiting, the faces of Hamish’s party, searching for me impatiently across the crowd. Cecil had her little whip authoritatively between her two hands, the winner’s smile, not directed towards anyone, but meant for herself, lifted her head. John Hamilton beckoned with a high wave like a man casting a lasso.

One night in July, in late winter, the ‘opera’ that Sam had written and composed in collaboration with a white man was given in the dreary hall of a Bantu social centre. The new kind of fashionable audience had come to see it; the people who had ‘discovered’ the Africans artistically and were making the most of the distinction. And, automatically, since, as I’ve said before, the range of mixed society was so limited, they had drawn in people who had always worked with and had friends among Africans — even one famous man, who had championed the African cause in Europe and America.

The opera was really more of a musical play than an opera, and yet too much like an opera to be a musical play; it just missed being either. It was also more of a white man’s idea of what a black man would write, and a black man’s idea of what a white man would expect him to write, than the fusion of a black man’s and a white man’s worlds of imagination. It missed being Sam’s work, and it missed being the other man’s too — for what that might have been worth. There were one or two good moments in it — especially in the music — but its general impression was that of one of those old-fashioned gipsy operettas that, so feebly wild and gay, never come alive, and it seemed to me to have about as much Africa in it as Ruritania ever resembled any Balkan country that’s ever been on a map. Of course, there was a mixed audience of black and white men and women, and that, in Johannesburg, gave us all a strange, embarrassed pleasure; you couldn’t help noticing it.

It’s not supposed to rain in the Transvaal in winter but it was raining when we left the hall, and the winter wind of Johannesburg, the wind of high places, slapped at your face like a wet towel. Steven was with a few friends — Peter was there that night, and a shy little hospital nurse; Betty Ntolo, the singer, resplendent and giggling; and the man who owned the car that had brought them all, a fat man with a fat man’s deep voice, Elias Shomang.

We stood, pressed back against the shelter of the hall’s entrance with the rest of the audience, chattering, a glitter of eyes catching the mirror-light of the downpour, shoulders tightened against the cold, the planes of many faces, Indian, African, Caucasian, pleasantly contrasting. I could not help thinking that we seemed less sheep-like than most crowds just let out from an entertainment; I suppose it was the novelty, for although in Johannesburg I’d been in crowds composed of white men, and crowds composed of black, I’d never seen more than a roomful of both mingled. I asked Steven and the others to come to my flat for a drink on their way home. People kept making sudden dashes, driven before the wind, to their cars, and soon we found our opportunity and rushed out, too.

Our two cars reached the building where I lived at almost the same moment, and we clattered up the stairs and into my flat together in the mild relief and excitement of getting in out of the cold. Steven had no coat and his jacket had been pretty thoroughly wetted even in the short exposure to and from Elias’s car, so he took it off and hung it over a magazine rack before the electric fire, to dry. He hadn’t liked the opera at all. He and I argued while we poured the gin and brandy, and gave each person one of the hollow ice cubes — they were thin shapes of ice with water inside them — that, for some curious reason, probably old age, were the best my refrigerator could do.

‘What’s the good of a thing like that, to Sam. He can do much better on his own; what does he want that chap Brunner for? I get so wild when I see him panting after these whites, holding out his hand, let’s be pals, thanks for the chance to work with you — and all they want to do is pick his brains and pinch his music. It makes me sick, man, I tell you.’ Steven dismissed the whole evening.

‘Right, it wasn’t much good. But you can’t say that Sam doesn’t get anything out of it, he’s had the chance to see the thing performed, and that’s something. Without Brunner it wouldn’t have happened.’

‘Brunner!’ said Steven. He broke a match between his teeth.

‘Of course, he’s a bit of a bloody fool; but what does that matter. Look here, Steve, Sam’s got good ideas and some of his music’s wonderful, but he doesn’t know anything about the conventions of the stage, you know what I mean? He doesn’t know how to combine his ideas into a whole, he doesn’t even know how to get people on and off a stage. He doesn’t know what the limitations of a stage are. How could he? How many plays has he seen in his life?’

‘A few,’ said Steven. ‘Quite a few.’

I knew that even to Steven, who had been to England, the definition of a formal stage presentation was loose; he might count revues and even a concert or two as being part of Sam’s experience.

‘A very few. Twice since I’ve been in Johannesburg I’ve read that the cast of some theatrical company was going to give a performance for Africans in some location township, or in the University Hall. Has Sam ever been inside a theatre?’

Steven was mimicking: ‘The Africans were an absolutely marvellous audience. Quite the best audience we’ve ever had. D’you know that they actually picked up points that white audiences missed?’ — This was the standard comment of white companies when interviewed by the Press after a performance before a black audience, even if they had presented Anouilh to a hall full of black schoolchildren.

‘Has Sam ever been inside a theatre?’