The whole month went by and still I made no effort to find another job for myself. By the time I had telephoned the Consulate for an interview, they had already engaged someone else. Later on, tomorrow, next week—I told myself—I shall go and speak to the man Laurie mentioned. I shall go and see the woman publisher John suggested; the advertising man Paul used to know in the army. I did not even go into town more than once. And when I did, I did not seem to know how to fill the time, although sometimes, when I had been working, I had longed for a whole free day to shop and stroll about. Somehow the shops did not offer any connection with my life; I saw them as one glances at the things in the shop windows of a strange town in which one finds oneself with half an hour to spare between trains: this hat, this piece of flowered silk, this gadget for sharpening knives—they will not be seen on, or belong in the houses of, any people I know; I shall not be here long enough to need to sharpen knives, buy a new hat, or choose material for another season’s dress.
So I stayed in the flat. As the traveler might decide for the station waiting room, after all. I find it difficult to remember how I passed the days, because I know I did so little to fill them. I don’t think I even read, except the daily papers. I would open the papers and read the “Readers’ Views” page and “Letters to The Editor”: letters about the riots, which were still coming in, still being published. “What sort of a country are we building where the gaps between the white Haves and the black Have-nots are shamelessly widened every day? Those people who, out of fear for their own precious skins, made the greatest talk and fuss about the Rand riots three weeks ago have now comfortably settled back into safety of their homes again, perfectly content to close their eyes to the disgusting squalor, poverty and frustration that gave rise to the riots and which exist, unchanged. Do they ever stop to think how, with the approach of winter …” “… must urge a stricter police control of the locations. Could not some system be devised whereby both native men and women would carry identity, or residents’, cards, which they would have to produce on entering a township? This would force hundreds of loafers and troublemakers to stay in their own homes at night, and get rid of a large shifting population that would then have to go back to the country. …” “… May I ask your correspondent how yet another card, pass, what-have-you, could be expected to be tolerated by a people already so restricted that they might as well be enemy aliens instead of being so indisputably an indigenous people in their own country that even Dr. Malan (supposing they were white instead of black, of course) would have to admit them to the first class of the pure-blood South African hierarchy?” The paper would blow about in the sun, slithering to the dusty corners of the balcony, and I would hear the voices of the workmen floating up from over the way: Hurry up, there, you bastard! Franz, you bastard, bring me the flat paint—d’you hear me—ahh, voetsak, go on, hurry up!—I never knew what the black men said back, when they talked among themselves in their own language; for that belonged to their own world, and I, I supposed—I must go along with the workmen.
The old sense of unreality would come down upon me again. A calm, listless loneliness, not the deep longing loneliness of night, but the loneliness of daylight and sunshine, in the midst of people; the loneliness that is a failure to connect. I would pick up, in my mind, Atherton, Paul, Johannesburg, my mother and father; Paul. Like objects taken out of a box, put back. But in the end there was only myself, watching everything, the street, the workmen, life below; a spectator.
This went on until the beginning of June. The autumn was suddenly gone; one morning the city came up out of the night as if it had been steeped in cold water: bright, clear, hard, it was winter. I walked out onto the balcony in a sweater, but I felt the air at my ears, and my hands were cold. I had been going to sew back the sleeve of my coat that had pulled away from the lining. I felt now it would be too chill to sit out there; there was a change. As I gathered up the coat and the cotton and scissors, I stopped, and saw that it was not only in the air. The building was finished. I had got so used to seeing the work going on over the way that it had existed in my mind as an end in itself. I had scarcely noticed that it was nearing completion, that it was no longer a framework gradually filling in with bricks and glass and paint, but a building, a place where people would live. Now it was finished. It blocked out much of the sky that I had sat and watched, some months back, after work in the evenings. It was quite finished, and the workmen were hauling down the material they had left on the roof. A lorry was being piled with the sand on the pavement, where the children had played.
The building was in front of me, five stories high, clean with fresh paint. On top, the chimney of the boiler room crooked a finger. A row of gleaming dustbins waited to be put into the kitchens. I thought, When I came here with Paul the first time that Sunday afternoon, they were just beginning the foundations, you could see right out over the hill, you could see the Magaliesburg.
And it came to me, quite simply, as if it had been there, all the time: I’ll go to Europe. That’s what I want. I’ll go away. Like a sail filling with the wind, I felt a sense of aliveness, a sweeping relief.
The lorry rolled down into the street and drove away.
Chapter 35
“Nothing left but all of Europe,” said Isa, putting her small, sharp-looking hands to warm round the teapot. She had met me in town, on my way to go and say good-by to Jenny Marcus, and had turned me off into a tearoom. “It’s a stage most of us get to. I wonder what the European equivalent is? Longing to get out to the wide open spaces, I suppose. Let us leave this damp and overcrowded England and go where the sun shines and men are men. Et cetera.”
She gave one of her little jumpy shrugs and picked up the bill. She pulled on her beautiful velvet coat, folded a scarf round her little throat, where you could always see the pulses through the thin skin; her head rose from her impressive clothes like the head of a bird from its plumage. She smiled with an unashamed acceptance of her own fascination, and said as if it followed out of my look: “You don’t have to worry about him and me. I’ve often meant to talk to you about it, but I don’t know … Now perhaps it doesn’t matter.—He’d never really want me because I’m too clever for him.” She laughed, raising her eyebrows and nodding her head to show me she meant it and must admit it, as we walked toward the door. She paid at the cashier’s grille and the door swung us out into the street, talking. “I’m too clever for him, and so I go in for debunking. I debunk him all the time, out of irritation mostly, because he can’t debunk me. Isn’t clever enough. If I could find a man who would have the brains and the guts to debunk me …” She moved her shoulders a little, under the flowing coat. “Because of this he couldn’t really love me, I mean it never could have been anything but an affair, even before the advent of you. You’re too clever for him, too—not with your head,” she added, as if she knew I couldn’t compare with her, “but in your emotions. I think you’re one of those women who have great talent for loving a man, but he’s not whole enough to have that love expended upon him. It’s too weighty for him. He likes to be all chopped up, a mass of contradictions, and he wants to believe they’re all right. He isn’t enough of a central personality to be able to accept the whole weight of a complete love: it’s integration, love is, and that’s the antithesis of Paul. You frighten him, I frighten him. Different ways, but all the same … And I couldn’t want him, not permanently. You need never have worried about that. Not that I flatter myself you did.”
We had reached her car and she unlocked the door for me. By the time she had gone round to the driver’s seat and got in beside me, her attention had been attracted back, with the brooding inevitability of a magnet, to herself. She said: “South African men. You can look and look. That’s the terrible thing for a clever woman here. She may find one who’s her equal—just. But she won’t find one who’s cleverer than she is, who can outtalk, outthink, beat her at it.” Her lips showed her teeth in a strange, lingering smile of pleasure that she abruptl
y dismissed, as one dismisses a daydream. “Unless he looks like something gestated in a bottle and brought up on ground book dust. But a real man; there’s always some point at which you feel them cave in. … Tom, Paul, even Arnold. …” She waved a hand in dissatisfaction at her husband and her lovers. “A woman like me needs the world. Like a boxer who can’t find any more opponents at home, he’s met ’em all. Match me—outside—away. I’d soon have the nonsense knocked out of me, they’d show me my place.” She turned to me, laughing.
I felt again the mixture of stirring antipathy and liking that I had always felt for Isa. I thought to myself, She’s a flirt, even with women, though with women the game is played differently. But today I warmed to her in another way; as she spoke I came to understand something about her, and so to feel the sympathy and even pity that divests others of the sense of their superiority that hardens us toward them. It was true; she was too clever; too clever for her own maddening primitive womanly instincts, the desire to be dominated and to look up to a man as a god. Household god. I smiled. “No household gods. That’s your trouble,” I said. I had forgotten the hostility and sense of distaste, almost, that had made me close away from her when she calmly took up discussion of what was to me my private and personal life, making it, as other people’s lives were, matter for social intercourse.
“Bloody little clay figurines,” she said. “Very nice. Made out of Vaal River mud.—You know, I think I’ll come in with you. I haven’t seen the baby yet and you know how Jenny feels about things like that. Should I turn into Claim Street?”
She had offered to drive me to the Marcuses’ house. “No, carry straight on, there’s a shorter way. I’ll show you.”
“There was something I wanted to tell you—I’m damned if I can remember what it was,” she said, pulling up at a robot. A man crossed the street before us, and she followed him with her eyes, as if he would remind her. He was young, with the dark, handsome animal surliness of some young Afrikaners and he looked back at her. She forgot that she had been trying to remember something, in the little game of holding this young male with her eyes. We shot forward as the lights changed; “Doesn’t matter—You leave on Tuesday, you say? Train or plane?”
“No, Wednesday. Plane. I’m going East Coast, that’s why I’m boarding the ship at Durban.”
During the hour we spent at Jenny’s house, we chattered about my plans; the job I had been promised in London; the things I must see, the people I must look up. “Don’t forget Frederick at Sadler’s Wells,” warned Isa again. “I did have the address of the flat or whatever it is where he lives, but I can’t find it. The best thing to do is to send him a note to Sadler’s Wells.” In my notebook I had a whole list of expatriate South Africans who were storming the theater, the ballet and the art studios with the talents which they believed had outgrown South Africa.
Before I left I dutifully asked if I could have a last look at the new baby, and was surprised when Jenny led us into the children’s room and picked the little dangling creature nonchalantly out of his crib: when her first child was a baby, no one had been allowed to pick him up outside his specified play hours. But it appeared that she had changed her baby manual since then. This boy was being reared on the principle of what she called “the natural young animal”; he was hugged, carried about, and allowed to suckle at will, like a kitten. Jenny asked me whether I could find room in my luggage for a large photograph of him which she wanted to send to her mother in England. “Thanks, then. It won’t take any room at all, really. You can put it flat on the bottom. It’s being framed now, but I’ll get John to drop it with you on Wednesday morning, on the way to work.”
Isa was leaning over the baby, like a child looking down into a fishpool. She had two children of her own, but the special quality of children seemed to dawn on her only through the children of other people. “Ah, that’s it. Now I remember—it was about Joel Aaron I wanted to tell you, Helen. He’s going to Israel. You must look out for him when you get to Durban. He must be there already. I think he’s sailing about the same time as you. On one of those Italian boats, though.”
I turned to Isa with surprise, but while she was speaking, Gerald, Jenny’s elder child, came skipping in the doorway and at once brought himself up short at the sight of visitors. Jenny was questioning Isa about Joel, but I heard no more of what they said. The little old toy the child had been carrying had dropped, and hung from his hand. It was the plush rabbit that had been hanging from Paul’s hand the first day I saw him. Paul stood in the doorway of the Marcuses’ flat and in one hand he held a bottle of wine, in the other he held this rabbit, hanging by the ears.
I think it was there and then that I parted from Paul; not later, when he kissed me with those hard, long kisses and pretended that this was a holiday on which I was going, a holiday from which I would come back. Certainly it was then that I wept, and had to move quickly over to kneel at the little boy’s side, so that Jenny and Isa should not see the tears.
Chapter 36
In no time at all when the plane comes out of the hills behind Durban, the green seems to melt and dissolve in a mist and then suddenly it is the sea, there below. It is the sea, greenish, like the grasslands, moving, like the grass beneath the wind.
As the engines cut out the air seems to cut out, too; a warm heat, liquid, fills your lungs. The plane comes down and there you are, the figure of yourself providing another facet for the brilliant, glittering, soaring light of sea level.
I left Johannesburg on a cold, dusty July morning. The grit at the airport blew against me sharp as rime. When I landed in Durban less than two hours later, it was summer. The old airport on the Snell Parade was still in use then, and the taxi that took me to my hotel passed smoothly between the green of the airport with its fringe of umbrella trees on one side and the sea deep green behind a low bank of bush on the other. The sea was very calm and it turned onto the beach in slow coils, clear as spun glass. The very sight of the sea in this mood does something to one’s breathing; I began to breathe slowly and deeply, as if for months I had been wearing something tight that had now dropped away. And while I was being received into the big old cool hotel, while I signed the register and went up in the lift with the young Indian page whose dark forehead matched the polished panels, and wore, as if unable to forget the humidity of the summer months, a beading of sweat; while I hung a dress or two in the stiff old-fashioned wardrobe that smelled of cockroach repellent, and sat a moment in the soft, limp-smelling armchair, a kind of shaky happiness came over me. It was the kind of happiness that has little to do with one’s mind.
A hotel, an airways service, have something in common with a hospital in that they reduce one’s life to a program of needs, to which they minister. Handed a magazine at the start of a journey, summoned to dinner by a gong, this outer simplification of living tends to produce a corresponding inner one: Your life really does become simply that: a time for mild diversion, a time to eat, a time to sit on the chairs comfortably provided, and look at the sea, to which the hotel is thoughtfully turned. I thought that this mild assumption of one’s needs would take care of me very well for the few days before my boat sailed.
When I had unpacked, and lunched, I walked down to the South Beach. It was not the fashionable beach—that was on the north side—and even so early in the afternoon, when most holiday people were having a siesta, there were family parties on the sand, the parents drowsing and the children, ignoring the seasons of the day, shrill and dripping. I took off my sandals and walked away up the beach toward the long arm of furzy green that curves round the entrance to the harbor; away to the right I could see cranes gesticulating above the hidden docks. I remembered my father, talking about the “bar.” Out over the bar. That calm, heavy-looking stretch of water on which the little lighthouse looked down; what would it be like when the ship slid through it? And as I watched, a ship did just that, came past the conglomeration of waving steel antennae, left the escort of tugs spinning vaguely in
her wash, and, breasting, busy, silent, was out. There was a bleat. It came perhaps from her. (A bleat like the hooter at the Mine.) Her profile of orange-striped black funnels and up-curving bows moved slowly against the green arm. I watched her, climbing up the sea to the horizon. And then she was a paper shape, a cutout, very clear, and apparently being pulled along like Lohengrin’s swan in a theater, by strings off stage—straight along the straight line of the sea’s horizon.
I came back slowly along the sand, and went up to the hotel for tea. Afterward I took a bus into the town (the plan of Durban is very simple and sensible: the visitors live in a long strip of hotels, spread for more than a mile along the beach front; the town lies immediately behind that, on either side of West Street which lifts up from the sea; the residents live behind that, up in the hills) and went to the shipping office. Again there was the calm assumption of one’s needs. The young man across the mahogany counter showed me a plan of the ship: my cabin, here; my berth, this one. The ship would dock tomorrow and I must be on board by ten o’clock on Monday morning. Sailing time, four-thirty P.M. I wandered about the pleasant town, bought myself a cake of fine, hard, perfumed soap of an imported brand that was unobtainable in Johannesburg, and a green scarf to tie round my hair; it might be windy on deck. The afternoon was not too hot, and every now and then the usual city smell of petrol, stale sourness from bars, and stuffy sweetness from beauty parlors parted to a breath from the sea.
Back in my hotel room, I found some flowers on the bedside table.
The maid had put them in water for me, but she had left the cellophane wrapping and the card on my bed. On the card, a childish hand had copied out “WITH LOVE FROM BRUTON HEIGHTS, PAUL.” They were florist’s roses, long-stemmed, denuded of leaves and thorns, the petals of the long buds a little crushed and crepy, though still beautiful, like the eyelids of a lovely woman who is no longer really young. I loosened them in the vase, but they still looked as if they belonged in the foyer of a cinema. WITH LOVE FROM BRUTON HEIGHTS. What was that, a reminder, a claim? A sudden perverse desire to put a hand on something because it was no longer there; an impulse to test out whether it really had gone; irresistible, just to make sure? But the flowers, ordered by telegram, the card, written by the hand of the junior shop assistant, defeated everything, as gifts that have to be made through the paid agency of others do always, impartially, whether the original intention was merely a social gesture, or a desperate symbol of the deepest feeling. These flowers standing on the dressing table were somebody’s work, carried out unperturbed and mechanically. I was safe from them.
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