The Wrong Set and Other Stories

by Angus Wilson

  Minnie at any rate was determined that her smart English brother-in-law should remember their earlier flirtation. ‘But you’re not changed at all, Harry’ she said ‘not one tiny bit. Is he still as wicked as ever, Laura? But you needn’t tell me, I can see he is. Well, you mustn’t think you’re going to play any of your tricks with the Durban girls of today. They’re up to everything, they’re not little schoolgirls like I was when I listened to all your stories. But still it was rather nice not knowing any better’ she added, looking at Laura to see the effect of her words ‘You’ve no right to have such an attractive husband, Laura, and if you have you should keep him under control. Laura hasn’t changed either’ she continued less confidently ‘but then we knew she’d be the same dear old Laura as ever’ and she pressed her sister-in-law’s arm. The family seized upon the formula eagerly.

  Although Stanley and the other sisters-in-law had already seen Laura and Harry at the docks, this was the first family celebration of their visit. They had been awaiting this moment with nervous expectancy, there seemed to be so little in common except memories and yet it was not as if they could move immediately into the world of the past. After all they were not old people like Aunt Liz for whom past and present were irrevocably confused in a haze of sweet satisfaction. The contemplation of the past years still gave an immediate answer to them, the sum of what lay behind still added up to the mood of today, the business deal of tomorrow, the trip to the Cape next month. Unconsciously they had hoped that all difficulties would vanish in the mists of sentiment. It would give Aunt Liz such pleasure to hold a family reunion at her home, one was not eighty-eight every day; and then there was dear old Laura, she had had so many knocks, losing little David like that and if all the stories were true leading a dog’s life with old Harry, having to put up with other women and his gambling and extravagance, she deserved a break if anyone did, always so proud and never letting on about her troubles, it would do her good to feel the family were gathered round her. So Stanley, the only living brother, reasoned and the women fell in with the plan, partly from sentiment and partly from curiosity, but chiefly as an exercise of their matriarchal power. It was they who had declared war, and now they would arrange a truce. If the meeting provided nothing else, it would be an opportunity for acquiring ammunition for the future – first-hand observation and scandal to replenish the decreasing stock of hearsay.

  The actual meeting, however, had not gone smoothly, there were too many suspicions and jealousies to allow conversation to flow freely, so that they had awaited Laura’s arrival to set the wheels in motion. Yet as soon as they had seen her coming up the drive they had realized that she too was a stranger, and something worse than a stranger, an alien. Whatever their dissensions and hatreds, and these still remained, they were South Africans not only by birth but by life and habit, a feeling of unity was sensed among them. Though Edie frowned and turned aside when Flo whispered to her ‘She’s still very much the Duchess,’ Flo had hit upon the general sentiment. Let Laura and Harry think them Colonials, under the weight of that judgement they were at once proud and ill at ease. Their childhood in common with Laura was overshadowed by their memories of her as they had seen her in London on their trips ‘home’. Time was needed before the community of the past, the ties of kinship could be revived and Minnie had provided the magic phrase to cover those first uneasy minutes when a heightened awareness of what they were today seemed to banish all hope of recapturing the sense of what they once had been. ‘The same dear old Laura as ever,’ the words bridged the gap between past and present. For the first few moments they all kept repeating it, and the fact that they none of them believed it seemed of no importance.

  Rapidly the uneasiness and friction vanished as the drinks were handed round by the umfaan in his white cotton vest and shorts with their red edgings. The conflicting emotions of strangeness and of too great intimacy dissolved into the badinage and trivialities of the conventional middle-class party.

  The men stood in a group at the back of the veranda, helping themselves liberally to whiskies and sodas. Stanley with his pink, smooth, podgy face, his white trousers stretched like a drum over his swollen belly and fleshy rump, the two top fly buttons undone where the waistband would not meet, acted the genial host. Edie’s two boys sprawled in deck chairs, bronzed, with a hidden and nervous virility, but with so great an external passivity that they appeared a neutral breed beside the aggressive self certainty of Harry’s English raffishness as he chaffed his brother-in-law, patronized his nephews, and laid down the law in consciousness of a superior sophistication. They were soon engaged in a series of arguments about sports and politics amid loud, boisterous laughter at jokes which came near to insults, their voices rising now and again in dogmatic assertions which trembled on the edge of loss of temper.

  ‘My dear old pot-bellied, fat-headed friend’ Harry was saying in answer to a poker story of Stanley’s ‘if you care to raise the game on a busted flush you bloody well deserve to lose. You should give up poker, old boy, and take to tiddleywinks. Tiddleywinks would be your uncle’s strong suit,’ he added, turning to one of the boys. A moment later and they were involved in an argument upon a point of fact, each asserting the superiority of his memory with a clamour that would have done credit to the Greens and Blues.

  ‘No, no, Harry, you’ve got it wrong’ Stanley asserted. ‘Maclaren never made a century during the whole of that tour. You’re thinking of that famous innings of Lord Hawke’s.’

  ‘Well since both Archie Maclaren and Martin Hawke are extremely old pals of mine I suppose I might be allowed to know something about it.’

  ‘You mustn’t scare us with big names’ said Stanley ‘we’re only poor Colonials you know, Harry’ and he winked at his nephews. But Harry knew when to take a joke against himself, in a moment he was expansive Britannia putting out a hand to pat the prize pupil on the head.

  ‘Good God, Stanley, I don’t know what we’d have done without you in ’16, Colonials or not’ he said, his shoulders squared and his eyes staring straight ahead. ‘You put up a damned fine fight at Delville Wood. Don’t think you aren’t appreciated at home. Why they tell me the South Africans have put on the best show of the whole lot at Wembley. They’re keeping it on next year, so you’ll all have to came back with us, if they can find room for old Stanley in Piccadilly with all the traffic’ he added laughing.

  It was the Union’s turn to be handsome now. ‘I’m afraid our racing’s going to be small beer to you, Harry’ said Stanley ‘but you must let me make you a member while you’re here. I’ve bought one or two horses myself lately and I’d like to have your opinion on them.’

  ‘Glad to give it, old boy. As a matter of fact I was talking to a pal of mine connected with the Manton stables just before we left and he asked me to keep my eyes skinned while I was over here. Said he’d heard you’d got one or two promising two-year-olds.’

  It was a proud moment and they all felt happy as they thought of praise from such a quarter. Emboldened by the conversation, Edie’s younger boy ventured a question.

  ‘What do you think of our Natal boys’ rugger, Uncle Harry?’ he inquired.

  But Harry felt he had conceded enough. ‘Too busy studying the form of the Thirsty Tiddlers’ he replied.

  ‘Perhaps you don’t know much about South African rugger’ said the boy angrily. ‘I think …’

  ‘Don’t laddie, don’t’ interrupted his uncle ‘it can be a very painful process if you haven’t the requisite grey matter.’

  They were soon united again as the conversation turned to politics, for there was no Nationalist nonsense about Natal, everyone believed in Smuts and the S.A.P., everyone stood by the old country, yet what was the meaning of all this Labour and strikes, were the people at home turning Bolshie?

  ‘Don’t you worry about that’ Harry answered them ‘It’s just a crowd of agitators, like this Indian Saklatavala. He’s a nasty piece of work –’

  ‘That’s our trouble’
said Stanley ‘the Indians. We ought never to have allowed them to stay when their indentures were up. It was all due to master bloody Gandhi. We pretty near tarred and feathered him, you know, Harry, and we’d have slung him in the Bay as sure as life if Old Sir Joseph hadn’t stopped us. More’s the pity. The trouble is it makes the native boys so difficult to handle. They have to be indoors at curfew and the coolies don’t. You can’t blame the Kaffirs for not liking it, but it’s making them cheeky. You can’t get a decent houseboy now, what with the missions and one thing and another.’

  ‘I’m sorry Stanley should choose to speak against the Mission boys’ said Edie, her little bloodless lips compressed together in her sharp, yellowed and lined face.

  ‘Take no notice of anything Stanley says, he just likes to hear himself talk. I know, I’m married to him’ Flo drawled in her slow South African whine.

  But the common topic of the natives had broken down the barrier between the two sexes, overshadowing the fascinations of sport and gambling for the men, of clothes and operations for the women. Only Laura and Harry remained unaffected, attempting to maintain the former flow of chatter. But Harry’s jokes and Laura’s oblique movements towards the other field of feminine interest – domestic service – were not proof against the intensity of emotions that welled up in the others. Pride and courage were high as they thought of all that had been achieved by the whites; yet, for a moment the anxieties and fears that were buried so deep shot through them with cruel sharpness as they thought of their small numbers and the thread by which their security hung. It was but a faint glimmer of their historical position that came to them, but, faint as it was, it was enough to outshine the selfishness of their everyday materialism. They sensed the brutal nature of their power, yet realized that if it was for a moment relaxed the answer would be swift and yet more brutal. The thought of the violence and the force upon which their lives rested excited them all, helping the gin and the whisky to thaw the gentility and pretension which ordinarily froze them, allowing the common crudity of their minds and feelings to flow and mingle. To the women, in particular, this sense of danger, of brutal, even sexual violence was most strongly appealing and the nature of their answer to it least ashamed.

  ‘I wonder you don’t worry about your sister’ said Flo to Edie. ‘I hear she’s over fifty miles from the nearest white station, and I suppose her husband has to be away an awful lot.’

  ‘My sister’s in God’s hands and her own’ said Edie grimly. ‘She doesn’t fear for herself, that’s why she’s so respected. Norman says the natives are more afraid of her than they are of him.’

  ‘Well I should be terrified if my man wasn’t there’ drawled Flo ‘you hear of such dreadful cases in Zululand these days. It’s always these educated boys, of course. An old school friend wrote me that she sleeps with a revolver under the pillow.’

  ‘That’s because people have spoilt the natives’ said Minnie. ‘We had over fifty boys on our farm in the old days and my father never had any trouble with them. If he had a boy who seemed cheeky, he gave him a taste of the sjambok. My brother does just the same now and he never has any trouble.’

  Even Aunt Liz’s scattered memory was disturbed into some sort of equilibrium by the excitement of the topic.

  ‘The sjambok isn’t always enough’ she croaked. ‘I shall never forget that boy we had called Whiskers, he was a real skellum. Your cousin was only a girl at the time, a skinny little thing. She was for ever complaining of faces looking in at her window, so your uncle and I waited outside all one night. Not that I was much size to deal with a man, but my blood was up and I’d have given him something to remember me by. It wasn’t until early morning that he came creeping through the bushes by the back veranda. He must have seen us, I think, for he suddenly bolted, but your uncle didn’t hesitate, he shot him through the foot. Oh, there’s no doubt God watched over us in those days.’

  ‘And He does now, Auntie’ said Edie piously.

  The others, who had put off their nonconformity with their childhood, became embarrassed by the religious turn of the talk. Nevertheless they were proud as they looked at Aunt Liz, so frail and bent and shrivelled, what fine brave people they had been; those old pioneers! Really one felt ashamed to be so impatient with the old girl, even if she did forget who one was, and whine and complain so; they wouldn’t see her like again, it was a dying breed. Laura, too, felt drawn back to the community of her family as she remembered the early days when Aunt Liz and Mother had come out from England, they had been windbound for six weeks or was it six days? anyway, for a very long time and eventually they had landed from the boat in baskets, fancy that, in baskets. There was no doubt that she came from a tough, pioneering stock who could hold their heads high. She looked proudly across at Harry as she turned to Aunt Liz.

  ‘You certainly had hard times, Auntie’ she said, smiling at the old lady, who had so far failed to recognize her. ‘Why I remember so well when the Zulus were coming south, though I was only five. Father was all ready to shoot us children if they should get as near as Maritzburg. Those were terrible days.’

  ‘If the Kaffirs attacked “The Maples”’ thought Minnie ‘I should have no man to defend me. Flo has Stanley and Laura has Harry, and Edie has her boys. I have no man. No woman was made to be petted and cared for more than me and yet I have no one. My hair is a lovely corn colour and my figure is beautiful; Mother always saw to it that I held myself well. I have to smile at the way they run round me. Even these raw Colonial boys see that I am a grand lady. It might be an English General or a foreign count. “How can so small a hand be so lovely?” I trace figures in the sand with the tip of my cream lace parasol, but I do not look up. I am playing with him as Woman must. “Why is she so mysterious, so enigmatic?” He has snatched a kiss and I am in my white muslin ball dress ’midst the scent of the geraniums, just a crazy girl after her first dance. No, perhaps more interesting than that, a woman of the world, lovely, with her white satin night dress clinging loosely about her limbs. “You should not have come to my room. You may kiss my hand and then you must go.” Nothing nasty, no horrid contact, just a long flirtation, Woman’s eternal spell cast over Man. I used to have such beautiful attachments, such wonderful affaires, only men always spoilt it, wanting to rush into bed, treating one so brutally, never content to worship at arm’s length. And now there is not even that, no one even wanting my body now as Bert did, and Harry too, for all that Laura looks so proud. Now I am fat and shapeless and Harry hasn’t noticed me, but I have not altered, I am still there smiling with my round blue eyes, kitten’s eyes you used to call them, Harry. I should like to talk to him in our old baby language, to say “Oo’s naughty, Hawy, Minnie won’t love ’oo if ’oo’s so cruel.” They would all laugh at me. I shall scream and scream until he takes notice of me, he can’t just let me scream. Dr Gladstone did. I lay on the bed in my pink crêpe de chine and kicked and screamed. He said I disgusted him, that I looked like a pink jellyfish. Why am I unhappy? It ought to be so lovely for me, I was born for beauty and happiness. I can’t bear it, I can’t bear it. I won’t face it. Come along Minnie, you’re exaggerating, it’s true you’re not a girl any longer, but you’re a woman of experience. Harry has made no sign yet because of Laura, but he will. “You’re grown up, Minnie, you’re not my Baby any longer, but you’re something much more, something that a mere man can only stand before in humble silence.’ How kind and thoughtful Edie is, for all her narrow religion, she has put me next to Harry for dinner, it is now he will whisper to me under cover of the conversation.’

  The long dining table was so richly decked that hardly a trace of the white tablecloth could be seen beneath the array of polished silver, the napkins folded like rosebuds, and the scarlet and cream poinsettias twining their way among the cutlery. The old lady, though nominally hostess, had soon lost any real understanding of what was taking place. Stanley however had felt that a woman’s hand was needed for so festive an occasion, so Flo had indulged to the
full her taste for colour and decoration. The young people sat at a side table which was embellished with china models of Bonzo and Felix the cat. Stanley himself had seen to the menu and had ordered a massacre in the poultry yard that would have challenged Herod – a goose, a turkey, two ducks, and two fowls had all shed their blood that Laura might feel welcome and Aunt Liz’s eighty-eighth birthday not pass unhonoured. Edie presided over the vegetables, doling great heaps indiscriminately upon each plate – pumpkin, boiled rice, sweet potato, English potato, mealie cobs and peas and over all a thick brown gravy. If there were any protests she would put them aside with one of her dry little chapel jokes. ‘Nonsense, the Inner Man must be fed’ she would say, or ‘You can’t help your neighbour on an empty stomach.’ Laura at first felt a little shy at such profusion, remembering the toast Melba and vol au vent of Lady Amplefield’s luncheons in Hans Crescent, but the effect of three dry martinis and her childhood memories soon brought back the appetite of her youth. Aunt Liz ate greedily from her wheel chair, picking the wishbones in her fingers, and then dozed off before the second course. Everyone was anxious to know what Harry thought of the South African hock, and was relieved when he passed it as capital, though perhaps a shade sweet. Wait, they cried, till he tasted the Van Der Hum after the meal, then he would see what the Union could do. Apple pies, peach and apricot tarts, bright pink stewed guavas, bowls of pulpy salad made from pawpaw and granadilla followed, all covered with cream. Not until the fruit was on the table however did the clash of of colour reach its highest note. In one bowl were the lichees with strange coral-like skins, and next to them the round granadillas, their wine-coloured shells cracked and dented like broken pingpong balls. In a third bowl were heaped the tawny mangoes flecked with black and smelling of the sugar refineries. In the centre of the table stood a cluster of pineapples, their tawny squares contrasting with the dozens of oranges of all sizes that surrounded them, from the tiny nartjies, through tangerines and green mandarins to the great navel oranges with their umbilical tops. For the discriminating palate there was savoury salad of avocado pear with its oily texture and its taste of dressed crab. But few palates were so discriminating as this and the avocado pear was eaten up in the mechanical round in which everything else was consumed, a deliberate locust-like advance that finally left the table a battlefield of picked bones, broken shells, dry skins and seeds.