The Late Bourgeois World

by Nadine Gordimer

  ‘Ma? Well, nobody told me you were coming!’

  He hugged me and we giggled, as we always do with the glee of being together and clandestine to school and everything else.

  ‘How’d you get in?’

  I hadn’t thought about what I was going to say to Bobo, and now it was too late. I gripped his hand and gestured hard, with it in mine, once or twice, to call us to attention, and said, ‘We’ve got to talk, Bo. Something about Max, your father.’

  At once he caught me out, as if he were the adult and I the child. He understood that I never referred to Max as anyone but ‘Max’. He was little when Max was on trial and in prison, but I have told him all about it since he’s been older. He nodded his head with a curious kind of acceptance. He knows there is always the possibility of trouble.

  We sat down together on the awful little settee, like lovers facing each other for a declaration in a Victorian illustration. He dragged at his collapsed socks – ‘Pull your socks up, your mother’s here, Jelly said.’

  ‘He died, Bobo. They sent me a telegram this morning. It’ll be in the papers, so I must tell you – he killed himself.’

  Bobo said, ‘You mean he committed suicide?’

  Amazement smoothed and widened his face, the flush left it except for two ragged patches, like the scratches of some animal, on the lower cheeks. What came to him in that moment must have been the reality of all the things he had read about, happening to other people, the X showing where on the pavement the body fell, the arrow pointing at the blurred figure on the parapet.

  I said, ‘Yes’ and to blot it all out, once and for all, to confine it, ‘He must have driven his car into the sea. He was never afraid of the sea, he was at home in it.’

  He nodded, but he kept his eyes wide open on me, the brows, over their prominent frontal ridge, scrolled together in concentration. What was he facing? The fact of his own death? Mine? Bobo and I didn’t have to pretend to each other that we were grieving over Max in a personal way. If you haven’t had a father, can you lose him? Bobo hardly knew him; and although I hadn’t, couldn’t explain all that to him, he knows that I had come to the end of knowing Max.

  Bobo said, ‘I somehow just can’t see his face.’

  ‘But it’s not so long since you saw him. Eighteen months, not more.’

  ‘I know, but then I hardly remembered what he looked like at all, and I was looking at him all the time the way you do with a new person. Then afterwards you can’t see their face.’

  ‘You’ve got a photograph, though.’ There on his locker, the upright leather folder with mother on one side, father on the other, just as all the other boys have.

  ‘Oh yes.’

  There didn’t seem to be anything else to say; at least, not all at once, and not in that room.

  ‘I brought you some nartjies. I forgot to get anything in town.’

  He said absently, making the show of pleasure that is his form of loving politeness, ‘Mmm … thanks. But I won’t take them now … just before you go, so’s when I’ve seen you off I can stick them in my desk before anyone sees.’

  Then he said, ‘Let’s go outside for a bit,’ and when I said, ‘But are we allowed to? I wanted to ask Mr Jellings –’ ‘Really, Mummy, what’s there to be so chicken about? I don’t know how you’d manage in this joint!’ As we closed the door of the visitors’ room behind us, I said, ‘We’ve never been in there, before.’ ‘It’s for long-distance parents, really, though I don’t know what it’s for – you can tell from the pong no one ever goes in there.’ I smiled at the jargon. Bobo has mastered everything; that place has no terrors for him.

  We kept to the formal, deserted front garden, away from the other boys. We walked up and down, talking trivialities, like people in hospital grounds who are relieved to have left the patient behind for a while. Bo told me he had written to me asking for new soccer boots, and whether it would be all right if Lopert came home with him next Sunday. I’d had a circular from the school about boxing lessons, and wanted to know if Bo were interested. Then we went to sit in the car, and he teased, ‘Why’n’t you just park in town and walk, Ma?’

  Like most boys Bobo has a feeling for cars akin to the sense of place, and when he gets into the car I can see that it’s almost as if he were home, in the flat. He noses through all the old papers that collect on the shelf beneath the dashboard and looks for peppermints and traffic tickets in the glove box. I am often called upon to explain myself.

  He was sitting beside me touching a loose knob, probably noting with some part of his mind that he must fix it sometime, and he said, ‘I don’t suppose it was painful or anything.’

  I said, ‘Oh no. You mustn’t worry about that.’ Because all his life, he’s been made aware of the necessity to recognize and alleviate suffering; it’s the one thing he’s been presented with as being beyond questioning, since the first kitten was run over and the first street beggar was seen displaying his sores.

  ‘Just the idea.’ His head was low; now he looked round towards me without lifting it, sideways, and I knew quite well that what he was really asking about was the unknown territory of adult life where one would choose to die. But I wasn’t equal to that. He was. He blurted, ‘I feel sorry I didn’t love him.’

  I looked at him without excuses. The one thing I hope to God I’ll never do is fob him off with them.

  I said, ‘There may be talk among the boys – but you know he went after the right things, even if perhaps it was in the wrong way. The things he tried didn’t come off but at least he didn’t just eat and sleep and pat himself on the back. He wasn’t content to leave bad things the way they are. If he failed, well, that’s better than making no attempt. Some boys’ – I was going to say ‘fathers’ but I didn’t want him to go attacking all the scions of stock-broking houses – ‘some men live successfully in the world as it is, but they don’t have the courage even to fail at trying to change it.’

  He looked satisfied. He is only a little boy, after all; he said with a rough sigh, ‘We’ve had a lot of trouble through politics, haven’t we.’

  ‘Well, we can’t really blame this on politics. I mean, Max suffered a lot for his political views, but I don’t suppose this – what he did now – is a direct result of something political. I mean – Max was in a mess, he somehow couldn’t deal with what happened to him, largely, yes, because of his political actions, but also because … in general, he wasn’t equal to the demands he … he took upon himself.’ I added lamely, ‘As if you insisted on playing in the first team when you were only good enough – strong enough for third.’

  As he followed what I was saying his head moved slightly in the current from the adult world, the way I have sometimes noticed a plant do in a breath of air I couldn’t feel.

  In the end he has to take on trust what he is told; the only choice he can exercise is by whom. And he chooses me. At times I’m uneasy to see how sceptically he reports what he is told by others. But the reaction will come with adolescence, if I’m to believe what I’ve been told is ‘healthy development’. He’ll tear me down. But with what? Of course I’d craftily like to find out, so that I can defend myself in advance, but one generation can never know the weapons of the next. He picked up my hand and kissed it swiftly on the back near the thumb just as he used to do suddenly, for no reason I knew, when he was little. It must be five years since he stopped doing it, out of embarrassment or because he didn’t need to. But there was no one to see, in the empty car park. He said, ‘What are you going to do today? Is Graham coming over?’

  ‘I don’t think so. I saw him this morning, he was there for breakfast.’

  ‘I expect Jellings’ll put Max in prayers tonight. Usually when a relation dies he’s in prayers.’

  So Max would have a service for his soul in the school chapel. There wouldn’t be any other. It wasn’t likely they’d pray for him, the ones he worked with, the ones he betrayed. Max wasn’t anybody’s hero; and yet, who knows? When he made his poor lit
tle bomb it was to help blow the blacks free; and when he turned State witness the whites, I suppose, might have taken it as justification for claiming him their own man. He may have been just the sort of hero we should expect.

  I’ve noticed that Bobo always senses when I am about to go. He said, ‘Let me turn the car for you?’ and I didn’t dare suggest that he might get into trouble if anyone saw him, but obediently moved over to the passenger seat as he got out and came round to the driver’s side. He drove once right round the parking ground and then I said, ‘That’s enough. Hop out.’ He laughed and pulled a face and put the brake on. ‘See you Sunday week, then. And you’re bringing what’s-his-name –’

  ‘Lopert.’

  ‘I don’t think I’ve met him, have I? What about Weldon, doesn’t he want to come too?’ Weldon is another of the boys who live too far away to be able to go home on Sunday outings; all last term Bobo brought him to the flat.

  ‘I expect he’ll be going with the Pargiters.’

  ‘Have you two quarrelled or something?’

  ‘No, well, he’s always talking about “munts” and things – and when we get hot after soccer he says we smell like kaffirs. Then when I get fed up he thinks it’s because I’m offended at him saying I’m like a kaffir – he just doesn’t understand that it’s not that at all, what I can’t stand is him calling them kaffirs and talking as if they were the only ones who ever smell. He just laughs and is as nice as anything … He doesn’t understand. There’s nothing wrong in it, to him. Nearly all the boys are like that. You get to like them a hell of a lot, and then they say things. You just have to keep quiet.’ He was looking at me frowningly, his face stoical, dismayed, looking for an answer but knowing, already, there wasn’t one. He said, ‘Sometimes I wish we were like other people.’

  I said, ‘What people?’

  ‘They don’t care.’

  ‘I know’. In full view of blank school buildings we exchanged the approved cheek-kiss expected of mothers and sons. ‘Next Sunday.’

  ‘Don’t be late. Don’t forget to get up, the way you always do.’

  ‘Ne-ver! The nartjies!’ He turned back for me to thrust the paper carrier through the window, and I saw him career off up the drive with the bulge buttoned under his blazer, feet flying, whorl of hair sticking up on the crown. I felt, as I sometimes do, an unreasonable confidence in Bobo. He is all right. He will be all right.

  In spite of everything.

  Chapter 2

  From a long way off the city on a Saturday sounded like the roar of a giant shell pressed against my ear. I had absently taken a wrong turning on the way back and approached by a route that went through one of the new industrial areas that are making the country rich – or rather, richer. Caterpillar tractors were grouped as statuary in the landscaped gardens of the factory that made them. For more than a mile I was stuck behind a huge truck carrying bags of coal and the usual gang of delivery men, made blacker by gleaming coal-dust, braced against the speed of the truck round a blazing brazier. They always look like some cheerful scene out of hell, and don’t seem to care tuppence about the proximity of the petrol tank. Then when I got into the suburbs I had another truck ahead of me, loaded with carefully padded ‘period’ furniture to which black men clung with precarious insouciance. They didn’t care a damn, either. There was a young one with a golfer’s cap pulled down over his eyes who held on by one hand while he used the other to poke obscene gestures at the black girls. They laughed back or ignored him; no one seemed outraged. But when he caught my smile he looked right through me as though I wasn’t there at all.

  In the suburban shopping centre I stopped to pick up cigarettes and something from the delicatessen. I had a cup of coffee in a place that had tables out on the pavement among tubs of frostbitten tropical shrubs. It was almost closing time for the shops and the place was crowded with young women in expensive trousers and boots, older women in elegant suits and furs newly taken out of storage, men in the rugged weekend outfit of company directors, and demanding children shaping ice cream with their tongues. A woman at the table I was sharing was saying, ‘… I’ve made a little list … he hasn’t got a silver cigarette case, you know, for one thing … I mean, when he goes out in the evening, to parties, he really needs one.’

  And when he goes down to the bottom of the sea? Will he need a silver cigarette case there?

  She was exactly like Max’s mother, pink-and-white as good diet and cosmetics could make her, the fine lines of her capacity to be amused crinkling her pretty blue eyes, her rose fingernails moving confidently. She even had Mrs Van Den Sandt’s widow’s peak that showed up so well in the big pastel that hung above the fireplace in the yellow sitting room. How she impressed me the first time Max took me to the farm, when I was seventeen! She was so charming, and I had not known that everyday life could be made so pretty and pleasant. The cupboards were scented and the bathrooms had fluffy rugs and tall flagons of oils and colognes that anyone could use. (‘Yes,’ Max said, ‘my mother puts a frilly cover over everything; the lavatory seat, her mind –’) You could have your clothes pressed or ring for a glass of fresh orange juice or tea or coffee any time you liked. There were menservants in starched white with red sashes to whom Mrs Van Den Sandt spoke Xhosa, and a Cape Coloured cook with whom Mrs Van Den Sandt talked Afrikaans, using all the wheedling diminutives and terms of respect of the Cape patois. ‘I know these people as if they were my own,’ she would say, when guests remarked that they envied her her excellent servants. ‘I was brought up among them. I can still remember how the natives used to come from miles around to visit my mother. There was one old man, supposed to have once been a headman of Sandile, the Gaika chief, he used to come once a month regularly. He would sit under the ysterhout tree and my mother would bring him a mug of coffee with her own hands. I can see it now.’

  She was the descendant of an old Cape Dutch family who had intermarried with English-speaking people, and had served at various South African embassies in Europe. Although her quick, light speech was sprinkled with the ‘darlings’ of fashionable English women of her generation, she kept a slight Afrikaans intonation here and there, as a French diseuse who has been performing for years in English is careful not to lose entirely the quaint distinction of her accent. People also found it beguiling when she gave the lie, with naïve, playful pride, to her English ‘county’ appearance – the sweaters and pearls – by saying stoutly, simply, ‘I’m a Boer girl, you know. I must go out and get my feet dirty among the mealies now and then.’ Max’s father – despite the Flemish name – came from an English family that emigrated to South Africa when the gold mines started up. He was a small man with a big red face shining as if it had been left to dry without being towelled, stiff hair varnished back flat to his head in one piece, and a cleft chin. He had the gift of being particularly friendly towards people whom he disliked or feared, and with one short stiff arm up on the shoulder of a political rival on either side of him, would go off into chesty laughter at the anecdote he was telling.

  Even that first time I went to the house there were people there. There were always parties or bridge evenings – gatherings of people it was necessary to entertain, rather than friends – or meetings that ended with the drinks and snacks being carried through the cigar smoke by Jonas and Alfred wearing their red sashes. Later, when I became a regular visitor to the house, Mrs Van Den Sandt would descend on us from the chattering, drinking, eating company: ‘The children, the children! Come and have some food!’ But after we’d shouldered our way in among the behinds in black cocktail dresses and the paunches in pinstripe, and had been introduced to a few people here and there: ‘Of course you know Max, my son? And this is little Elisabeth – eat something, my pet, Max, you don’t look after this girl, she looks pinched –’ we were forgotten. The talk of stocks and shares, the property market, the lobbying for support for Bills that would have the effect of lowering or raising the bank rate, on which they depended for their investments, indus
trial Bills on which they depended for cheap labour, or land apportionment on which they depended to keep the best for themselves – all this grew together in a thicket of babble outside which we finished our plates of chicken en gêlée and silently drank our glasses of chilled white wine. Max had grown up in that silence; the babble was perhaps what he heard in the distant conversation of the ducks, when he approached the farm alone over the veld.

  I say of the Van Den Sandts that they ‘were’ this or that; but, of course, they are. Somewhere in the city while I was drinking my coffee, Mrs Van Den Sandt, with her handbag filled, like the open one of the woman sitting beside me, with grown-up toys – the mascot key ring, the tiny gilt pencil, the petit-point address book, the jewelled pillbox – was learning that Max was dead – again. Their son was dead for them the day he was arrested on a charge of sabotage. Theo Van Den Sandt resigned his seat in Parliament, and he never came to court, though he made money available for Max’s defence. She came several times. We sat there on the white side of the public gallery, but not together. One day, when her hair was freshly done, she wore a fancy lace mantilla instead of a hat that would disturb the coiffure. Her shoes and gloves were perfectly matched and I saw with fascination that some part of her mind would attend to these things as long as she lived, no matter what happened. She sat rigidly upright on the hard bench with her mascaraed eyelashes lowered almost to her cheeks, and never once looked round, not at the rest of us on the white side, wives and mothers and friends of the white accused (Max was charged with accomplices) with our parcels of food that we were allowed to provide for their lunch every day, nor to her left, across the barrier, where old black men in broken overcoats and women with their bundles sat in patience like a coiled spring.