The Smell of Death and Flowers
The party was an unusual one for Johannesburg. A young man called Derek Ross—out of sight behind the ‘bar’ at the moment—had white friends and black friends, Indian friends and friends of mixed blood, and sometimes he liked to invite them to his flat all at once. Most of them belonged to the minority that, through bohemianism, godliness, politics, or a particularly sharp sense of human dignity, did not care about the difference in one another’s skins. But there were always one or two – white ones – who came, like tourists, to see the sight, and to show that they did not care, and one or two black or brown or Indian ones who found themselves paralysed by the very ease with which the white guests accepted them.
One of the several groups that huddled to talk, like people sheltering beneath a cliff, on divans and hard borrowed chairs in the shadow of the dancers, was dominated by a man in a grey suit, Malcolm Barker. ‘Why not pay the fine and have done with it, then?’ he was saying.
The two people to whom he was talking were silent a moment, so that the haphazard noisiness of the room and the organised wail of the gramophone suddenly burst in irrelevantly upon the conversation. The pretty brunette said, in her quick, officious voice, ‘Well, it wouldn’t be the same for Jessica Malherbe. It’s not quite the same thing, you see . . .’ Her stiff, mascaraed lashes flickered an appeal – for confirmation, and for sympathy because of the impossibility of explaining – at a man whose gingerish whiskers and flattened, low-set ears made him look like an angry tomcat.
‘It’s a matter of principle,’ he said to Malcolm Barker.
‘Oh, quite, I see,’ Malcolm conceded. ‘For someone like this Malherbe woman, paying the fine’s one thing; sitting in prison for three weeks is another.’
The brunette rapidly crossed and then uncrossed her legs. ‘It’s not even quite that,’ she said. ‘Not the unpleasantness of being in prison. Not a sort of martyrdom on Jessica’s part. Just the principle.’ At that moment a black hand came out from the crush of dancers bumping round and pulled the woman to her feet; she went off, and as she danced she talked with staccato animation to her African partner, who kept his lids half lowered over his eyes while she followed his gentle shuffle. The ginger-whiskered man got up without a word and went swiftly through the dancers to the ‘bar’, a kitchen table covered with beer and gin bottles, at the other end of the small room.
‘Satyagraha,’ said Malcolm Barker, like the infidel pronouncing with satisfaction the holy word that the believers hesitate to defile.
A very large and plain African woman sitting next to him smiled at him hugely and eagerly out of shyness, not having the slightest idea what he had said.
He smiled back at her for a moment, as if to hypnotise the onrush of some frightening animal. Then, suddenly, he leaned over and asked in a special, loud, slow voice, ‘What do you do? Are you a teacher?’
Before the woman could answer, Malcolm Barker’s young sister-in-law, a girl who had been sitting silent, pink and cold as a porcelain figurine, on the window sill behind his back, leaned her hand for balance on his chair and said urgently, near his ear, ‘Has Jessica Malherbe really been in prison?’
‘Yes, in Port Elizabeth. And in Durban, they tell me. And now she’s one of the civil-disobedience people – defiance campaign leaders who’re going to walk into some native location forbidden to Europeans. Next Tuesday. So she’ll land herself in prison again. For Christ’s sake, Joyce, what are you drinking that stuff for? I’ve told you that punch is the cheapest muck possible—’
But the girl was not listening to him any longer. Balanced delicately on her rather full, long neck, her fragile-looking face with the eyes and the fine, short line of nose of a Marie Laurencin painting was looking across the room with the intensity peculiar to the blank-faced. Hers was an essentially two-dimensional prettiness: flat, dazzlingly pastel-coloured, as if the mask of make-up on the unlined skin were the face; if one had turned her around, one would scarcely have been surprised to discover canvas. All her life she had suffered from this impression she made of not being quite real.
‘She looks so nice,’ she said now, her eyes still fixed on some point near the door. ‘I mean she uses good perfume, and everything. You can’t imagine it.’
Her brother-in-law made as if to take the tumbler of alcohol out of the girl’s hand, impatiently, the way one might take a pair of scissors from a child, but, without looking at him or at her hands, she changed the glass from one hand to the other, out of his reach. ‘At least the brandy’s in a bottle with a recognisable label,’ he said peevishly. ‘I don’t know why you don’t stick to that.’
‘I wonder if she had to eat the same food as the others,’ said the girl.
‘You’ll feel like death tomorrow morning,’ he said, ‘and Madeline’ll blame me. You are an obstinate little devil.’
A tall, untidy young man, whose blond head outtopped all others like a tousled palm tree, approached with a slow, drunken smile and, with exaggerated courtesy, asked Joyce to dance. She unhurriedly drank down what was left in her glass, put the glass carefully on the window sill and went off with him, her narrow waist upright and correct in his long arm. Her brother-in-law followed her with his eyes, irritatedly, for a moment, then closed them suddenly, whether in boredom or in weariness one could not tell.
The young man was saying to the girl as they danced, ‘You haven’t left the side of your husband – or whatever he is – all night. What’s the idea?’
‘My brother-in-law,’ she said. ‘My sister couldn’t come because the child’s got a temperature.’
He squeezed her waist; it remained quite firm, like the crisp stem of a flower. ‘Do I know your sister?’ he asked. Every now and then his drunkenness came over him in a delightful swoon, so that his eyelids dropped heavily and he pretended that he was narrowing them shrewdly.
‘Maybe. Madeline McCoy – Madeline Barker now. She’s the painter. She’s the one who started that arts-and-crafts school for Africans.’
‘Oh, yes. Yes, I know,’ he said. Suddenly, he swung her away from him with one hand, executed a few loose-limbed steps around her, lost her in a collision with another couple, caught her to him again, and, with an affectionate squeeze, brought her up short against the barrier of people who were packed tight as a rugby scrum around the kitchen table, where the drinks were. He pushed her through the crowd to the table.
‘What d’you want, Roy, my boy?’ said a little, very black-faced African, gleaming up at them.
‘Barberton’ll do for me.’ The young man pressed a hand on the African’s head, grinning.
‘Ah, that stuff’s no good. Sugar-water. Let me give you a dash of Pineapple. Just like mother makes.’
For a moment, the girl wondered if any of the bottles really did contain Pineapple or Barberton, two infamous brews invented by African natives living in the segregated slums that are called locations. Pineapple, she knew, was made out of the fermented fruit and was supposed to be extraordinarily intoxicating; she had once read a newspaper report of a shebeen raid in which the Barberton still contained a lopped-off human foot – whether for additional flavour or the spice of witchcraft, it was not known.
But she was reassured at once. ‘Don’t worry,’ said a good-looking blonde, made up to look heavily suntanned, who was standing at the bar. ‘No shebeen ever produced anything much more poisonous than this gin-punch thing of Derek’s.’ The host was attending to the needs of his guests at the bar, and she waved at him a glass containing the mixture that the girl had been drinking over at the window.
‘Not gin. It’s arak – lovely,’ said Derek. ‘What’ll you have, Joyce?’
‘Joyce,’ said the gangling young man with whom she had been dancing. ‘Joyce. That’s a nice name for her. Now tell her mine.’
‘Roy Wilson. But you seem to know each other quite adequately without names,’ said Derek. ‘This is Joyce McCoy, Roy – and, Joyce, these are Matt Shabalala, Brenda Shotley, Mahinder Singh, Mar
tin Mathlongo.’
They smiled at the girl: the shiny-faced African, on a level with her shoulder; the blonde woman with the caked powder cracking on her cheeks; the handsome, scholarly-looking Indian with the high, bald dome; the ugly light-coloured man, just light enough for freckles to show thickly on his fleshy face.
She said to her host, ‘I’ll have the same again, Derek. Your punch.’ And even before she had sipped the stuff, she felt a warmth expand and soften inside her, and she said the names over silently to herself – Matt Sha-ba-lala, Martin Math-longo, Ma-hinder Singh. Out of the corner of her eye, as she stood there, she could just see Jessica Malherbe, a short, plump white woman in an elegant black frock, her hair glossy, like a bird’s wing, as she turned her head under the light while she talked.
Then it happened, just when the girl was most ready for it, just when the time had come. The little African named Matt said, ‘This is Miss Joyce McCoy – Eddie Ntwala,’ and stood looking on with a smile while her hand went into the slim hand of a tall, light-skinned African with the tired, appraising, cynical eyes of a man who drinks too much in order to deaden the pain of his intelligence. She could tell from the way little Shabalala presented the man that he must be someone important and admired, a leader of some sort, whose every idiosyncrasy – the broken remains of handsome, smoke-darkened teeth when he smiled, the wrinkled tie hanging askew – bespoke to those who knew him his distinction in a thousand different situations. She smiled as if to say, ‘Of course, Eddie Ntwala himself, I knew it,’ and their hands parted and dropped.
The man did not seem to be looking at her – did not seem to be looking at the crowd or at Shabalala, either. There was a slight smile around his mouth, a public smile that would do for anybody. ‘Dance?’ he said, tapping her lightly on the shoulder. They turned to the floor together.
Eddie Ntwala danced well and unthinkingly, if without much variation. Joyce’s right hand was in his left, his right hand on the concavity of her back, just as if – well, just as if he were anyone else. And it was the first time – the first time in all her twenty-two years. Her head came just to the point of his lapel, and she could smell the faint odour of cigarette smoke in the cloth. When he turned his head and her head was in the path of his breath, there was the familiar smell of wine or brandy breathed down upon her by men at dances. He looked, of course, apart from his eyes – eyes that she had seen in other faces and wondered if she would ever be old enough to understand – exactly like any errand ‘boy’ or house ‘boy’. He had the same close-cut wool on his head, the same smooth brown skin, the same rather nice high cheekbones, the same broad-nostrilled small nose. Only, he had his arm around her and her hand in his and he was leading her through the conventional arabesques of polite dancing. She would not let herself formulate the words in her brain: I am dancing with a black man. But she allowed herself to question, with the careful detachment of scientific inquiry, quietly inside herself: ‘Do I feel anything? What do I feel?’ The man began to hum a snatch of the tune to which they were dancing, the way a person will do when he suddenly hears music out of some forgotten phase of his youth; while the hum reverberated through his chest, she slid her eyes almost painfully to the right, not moving her head, to see his very well-shaped hand – an almost feminine hand compared to the hands of most white men – dark brown against her own white one, the dark thumb and the pale one crossed, the dark fingers and the pale ones folded together. ‘Is this exactly how I always dance?’ she asked herself closely. ‘Do I always hold my back exactly like this, do I relax just this much, hold myself in reserve to just this degree?’
She found she was dancing as she always danced.
I feel nothing, she thought. I feel nothing.
And all at once a relief, a mild elation, took possession of her, so that she could begin to talk to the man with whom she was dancing. In any case, she was not a girl who had much small talk; she knew that at least half the young men who, attracted by her exceptional prettiness, flocked to ask her to dance at parties never asked her again because they could not stand her vast minutes of silence. But now she said in her flat, small voice the few things she could say – remarks about the music and the pleasantness of the rainy night outside. He smiled at her with bored tolerance, plainly not listening to what she said. Then he said, as if to compensate for his inattention, ‘You from England?’
She said, ‘Yes. But I’m not English. I’m South African, but I’ve spent the last five years in England. I’ve only been back in South Africa since December. I used to know Derek when I was a little girl,’ she added, feeling that she was obliged to explain her presence in what she suddenly felt was a group conscious of some distinction or privilege.
‘England,’ he said, smiling down past her rather than at her. ‘Never been so happy anywhere.’
‘London?’ she said.
He nodded. ‘Oh, I agree,’ she said. ‘I feel the same about it.’
‘No, you don’t, McCoy,’ he said very slowly, smiling at her now. ‘No, you don’t.’
She was silenced at what instantly seemed her temerity.
He said, as they danced around again, ‘The way you speak. Really English. Whites in SA can’t speak that way.’
For a moment, one of the old, blank, impassively pretty-faced silences threatened to settle upon her, but the second glass of arak punch broke through it, and, almost animated, she answered lightly, ‘Oh, I find I’m like a parrot. I pick up the accent of the people among whom I live in a matter of hours.’
He threw back his head and laughed, showing the gaps in his teeth. ‘How will you speak tomorrow, McCoy?’ he said, holding her back from him and shaking with laughter, his eyes swimming. ‘Oh, how will you speak tomorrow, I wonder?’
She said, immensely daring, though it came out in her usual small, unassertive feminine voice, a voice gently toned for the utterance of banal pleasantries, ‘Like you.’
‘Let’s have a drink,’ he said, as if he had known her a long time – as if she were someone like Jessica Malherbe. And he took her back to the bar, leading her by the hand; she walked with her hand loosely swinging in his, just as she had done with young men at country-club dances. ‘I promised to have one with Rajati,’ he was saying. ‘Where has he got to?’
‘Is that the one I met?’ said the girl. ‘The one with the high, bald head?’
‘An Indian?’ he said. ‘No, you mean Mahinder. This one’s his cousin, Jessica Malherbe’s husband.’
‘She’s married to an Indian?’ The girl stopped dead in the middle of the dancers. ‘Is she?’ The idea went through her like a thrill. She felt startled as if by a sudden piece of good news about someone who was important to her. Jessica Malherbe – the name, the idea – seemed to have been circling about her life since before she left England. Even there, she had read about her in the papers: the daughter of a humble Afrikaner farmer, who had disowned her in the name of a stern Calvinist God for her anti-nationalism and her radical views; a girl from a back-veld farm – such a farm as Joyce herself could remember seeing from a car window as a child – who had worked in a factory and educated herself and been sent by her trade union to study labour problems all over the world; a girl who negotiated with ministers of state; who, Joyce had learned that evening, had gone to prison for her principles. Jessica Malherbe, who was almost the first person the girl had met when she came in to the party this evening, and who turned out to look like any well-groomed English woman you might see in a London restaurant, wearing a pearl necklace and smelling of expensive perfume. An Indian! It was the final gesture. Magnificent. A world toppled with it – Jessica Malherbe’s father’s world. An Indian!
‘Old Rajati,’ Ntwala was saying. But they could not find him. The girl thought of the handsome, scholarly-looking Indian with the domed head, and suddenly she remembered that once, in Durban, she had talked across the counter of a shop with an Indian boy. She had been down in the Indian quarter with her sister, and they had entered a shop to buy a piece of
silk. She had been the spokeswoman, and she had murmured across the counter to the boy and he had said, in a voice as low and gentle as her own, no, he was sorry, that length of silk was for a sari, and could not be cut. The boy had very beautiful, unseeing eyes, and it was as if they spoke to each other in a dream. The shop was small and deep-set. It smelled strongly of incense, the smell of the village church in which her grandfather had lain in state before his funeral, the scent of her mother’s garden on a summer night – the smell of death and flowers, compounded, as the incident itself came to be, of ugliness and beauty, of attraction and repulsion. For just after she and her sister had left the little shop, they had found themselves being followed by an unpleasant man, whose presence first made them uneasily hold tightly to their handbags but who later, when they entered a busy shop in an attempt to get rid of him, crowded up against them and made an obscene advance. He had had a vaguely Eurasian face, they believed, but they could not have said whether or not he was an Indian; in their disgust, he had scarcely seemed human to them at all.
She tried now, in the swarming noise of Derek’s room, to hear again in her head the voice of the boy saying the words she remembered so exactly: ‘No, I am sorry, that length of silk is for a sari, it cannot be cut.’ But the tingle of the alcohol that she had been feeling in her hands for quite a long time became a kind of sizzling singing in her ears, like the sound of bubbles rising in aerated water, and all that she could convey to herself was the curious finality of the phrase: can-not-be-cut, can-not-be-cut.
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