The Late Bourgeois World (3 page)

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.

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, industrial 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.

At the recess as we all clattered into the echoing corridors of the courts, I smelt her perfume. People talking as they went, forming groups that obstructed each other, had squeezed us together. The jar of
coming face to face opened her mouth after years of silence between us. She spoke. ‘What have we done to deserve this!' Under each eye and from lips to chin were deep scores, the lashes of a beauty's battle with age. I came back at her – I don't know where it came from – ‘You remember when he burned his father's clothes.'

Footsteps rang all about us, we were being jostled.

‘What? All children get up to things. That was nothing.'

‘He did it because he was in trouble at school, and he'd tried to talk about it to his father for days, but his father was too busy. Every time he tried to lead round to what he wanted to say he was told, run away now, your father's busy.'

Her painted mouth shaped an incredulous laugh. ‘What are you talking about?'

‘Yes, you don't remember. But you'll remember it was the time when your husband was angling to get into the Cabinet. The time when he was Chief Whip, and was so busy?'

I was excited with hatred of her self-pity, the very smell of her stank in my nostrils. Oh we bathed and perfumed and depilated white ladies, in whose wombs the sanctity of the white race is entombed! What concoction of musk and boiled petals can disguise the dirt done in the name of that sanctity? Max took that dirt upon himself, tarred
and feathered himself with it, and she complained of her martyred respectability. I wanted to wound her; could nothing wound her? She turned her back as one does on someone of whom it is useless to expect anything.

And yet, at the beginning, the Van Den Sandts regarded me as an ally. Not personally, but in my capacity as a ‘normal' interest for a boy who didn't have many. If their Max wouldn't join the country club or pull his weight as a member of the United Party Youth, then at least he'd found himself a ‘little girl'. The ‘little' was used as indicative of my social standing, not my size; I was a shopkeeper's daughter from a small town, while Max's father not only had been a frontbencher in the Smuts government but was also a director of various companies, from cigarette manufacture to plastic packaging. When Max was a student they didn't take him very seriously, of course, and regarded what they knew of his activities in student politics, along with his pointed non-appearance at dinner parties and his shabby clothes, as youthful Bohemianism. I don't know whether they ever knew that he was a member of a Communist cell, probably not. To them it was all a game, a fancy dress ball like the ones
they
used to go to in the thirties. Soon he would put away the costume, wear a suit, join one of his father's companies, invest in the share market and build a nice home for the little
girl he would marry. They had no idea that he was spending his time with African and Indian students who took him home where he had never been before, to the locations and ghettoes, and introduced him to men who, while they worked as white men's drivers and cleaners and factory hands, had formulated their own views of their destiny and had their own ideas of setting about to achieve it. For the Van Den Sandts none of this existed; when Mrs Van Den Sandt spoke of ‘we South Africans' she meant the Afrikaans- and English-speaking white people, and when Theo Van Den Sandt called for ‘a united South Africa, going forward to an era of progress and prosperity for all' he meant the unity of the same two white groups, and higher wages and bigger cars for them. For the rest – the ten or eleven million ‘natives' – their labour was directed in various Acts of no interest outside Parliament, and their lives were incidental to their labour, since until the white man came they knew nothing better than a mud hut in the veld. As for the few who had managed to get an education, the one or two outstanding ones who were let into the University alongside her own son – Mrs Van Den Sandt thought it ‘marvellous, how some of them can raise themselves if they make the effort'; but the ‘effort' was not related in her mind to any room in a location yard where somebody else's son puzzled through his work by the light of a bit of candle, squashing with
his thumbnail (I always remember this description of his student days given by one of our friends) the bugs as they crawled out of their cracks.