The Late Bourgeois World (7 page)

Then Max began suddenly to rummage among our books and piles of newspapers, and he handed him Nyerere's book.

‘Yes, yes – I know – but African socialism can't be the work of one man. The doctrine of African socialism must be made by different thinkers, all adding to it. We must put it down, man. We've got political heroes, no thinkers. Mbeki, yes, all right, perhaps. We'll have plenty political martyrs, plenty more; no thinkers! We must put it down, man!'

When Max was deeply interested, he had a way of standing before the person with whom he was in conversation, literally closing in for an exchange. I remember how he stood above the man in the
dirty raincoat (even on the hottest day Spears held about him the late loneliness of a rainy three in the morning) saying, ‘Yes … but the two must run together, African socialism must be the philosophy of the struggle, it must be in at the struggle
now
– if it's going to mean anything –'

I liked Spears. He drank but although he couldn't always manage his legs he never lost the use of his tongue. He had a small coterie and they started calling themselves ‘Umanyano Ngamandla', which meant something like ‘Let's pull together', as a colloquial name for an African socialist movement. Most of them were men who had broken away from the African National Congress or Pan African Congress. Max became their guru, or Spears became his; it doesn't matter. COD ceased to exist in Max's consciousness, he didn't manage to return in decent order the papers that belonged to work he had been doing. I know that I went through our things to try and find them, but months dragged by, we moved house, and I grew more and more embarrassed at being asked for them. I had continued to work with COD because I thought Max was wrong – it frightened me to see him simply
forget about
the people we had worked with there. But I began to see in the work COD did, if not in my friends who did it, limitations that were in the nature of such an organization and
that had always been there: I needed Max to be right.

Spears was with us most of the time. He and Max were formulating his methodology of African socialism. Max saw it as a series of pamphlets that would become the handbook, anyway, if not the bible, of the African revolution. We must put it down, man. The phrase was at once the purpose Spears lived by and the net of catchwords in which he tried to collect purpose when he was drinking; you could laugh at him when he repeated it drunk, go ahead and laugh at the infirmity of him: but it was like the name of a God, that does not alter in its omnipotence whether used as a curse or a blessing.
We must put it down, man
. I heard it all the time. It was the beat in his voice spacing the political clichés, grammatical constructions translated from Xhosa and literal translations from Afrikaans, of his strong-flavoured English.

And yet he did not see ‘getting it down' in quite the literal terms that Max did, that Max could not escape from. Max planned point by point, chapter by chapter (at one time he thought of writing the whole thing in the form of Platonic dialogues); but Spears' thinking erupted in a lava that, cooled to the process of note-taking, was difficult to break down into its component dissertation and analysis. Max and Spears talked late into the nights and every day
Max wrote and recast from notes and memory. That was the time I came home from work and found Max yelling back at screaming Bobo. He had been trying to work all afternoon against the baby's noisy games and interruptions. Max's face was a child's mask of hysterical frustration: I took Bobo and walked in the streets with him, but there was nothing I could do for the face of Max.

For hours he stood planted, arguing in front of Spears, he couldn't stay put, in a chair. Spears was intense but quite without Max's tension; he could talk just as well sitting on the kitchen table while I fried sausages, or while Bobo climbed up and used his shoulders as a road for a toy car. He used to call me ‘Honey' and once or twice, when he was only a little drunk, he cornered me in the kitchen, but I told him I didn't like the smell of brandy, and he kneaded my hand regretfully and said, ‘Forget it, honey'; I think that most of his drive towards women had washed away in brandy, but the residue was an unspecified casual tenderness to which Bobo and I responded. And Max. Max most of all. There was Max standing urgently over him, protesting, arguing, pressing – it was not just the determination to
get it all down
that held Max there; he hovered irresistibly towards what could never be got down, what Spears didn't need to get down because it was his – an identity with millions like him, an abundance chartered
by the deprivation of all that Max had had heaped upon himself. Some of the white people I know want the blacks' innocence; that innocence, even in corruption, of the status of victim; but not Max. And everyone knows those whites who want to be allowed to ‘love' the blacks out of guilt; and those who want to be allowed to ‘love' them as an aberration, a distinction. Max wasn't any of these. He wanted to come close; and in this country the people – with all the huddled warmth of the phrase – are black. Set aside with whites, even his own chosen kind, he was still left out, he experienced the isolation of his childhood become the isolation of his colour.

I don't know whether Max loved me. He wanted to make love with me, of course. And he wanted to please me – no, he wanted my approval, my admiration for whatever he did. These pass as definitions of love; I can think of others that are neither more nor less acceptable. This business of living for each other, that one hears about; it can just as well be living for the sight of one's self in the other's eyes. Something keeps two people together; that's as far as I'd go. ‘Love' was the name I was given for it, but I don't know that it always fits my experience. Someone has given Bobo the name, too; didn't he say, ‘I'm sorry I didn't love him?' What did he mean? Did he mean that he didn't need his father? Or that he didn't stop his father from dying?

I wanted to make love to Max, and I wanted to give him the approval he wanted, I wanted to please him. But it wasn't a matter of watching your husband rising a notch in the salary scale. What I wanted was for him
to do the right things so that I could love him
. Was that love?

Max was wonderful in bed because there was destruction in him. Passion of a kind; demonic sex. I've had it with others, since. With every orgasm I used to come back with the thought: I could die like that. And of course that was exactly what it was, the annihilation, every time, of the silences and sulks, the disorder and frustration of the days. We moved four times in the first three years, each time in response to having reached another impossible situation – living in a one-room flat with a baby; working at home in a two-room flat with a baby; not being able to afford a larger flat on my salary; not being allowed to have Africans visit us in the building – and there was never time or money to make each place more than habitable. Everything had happened to us too soon; before we'd collected enough chairs to sit on the ones we had had begun to fall to bits.

It was Felicity Hare who tacked cotton cloth she had brought from Kenya round the packing cases our stuff was moved in to a converted outhouse in someone's backyard. We used them as cupboards
and tables. We had space there, and she lived with us for a time – a big, red-faced girl just down from Cambridge who wanted to ‘do something' in Africa. She had been handed on down the continent from territory to territory by introductions from friends of friends and always either in danger of being deported by a British colonial government when she became too friendly with African nationalists, or appealing to a British consulate for protection when African governments wanted her deported for becoming too friendly with members of their Opposition. She wore shorts and would follow you from room to room, talking, whatever you were doing, hitching herself on some ledge or table corner too small to support her, with her enormous, marbled legs doubled up in a great fleshy pedestal. Her conversation was confused and conspiratorial – ‘Actually, the woman in charge of the place wasn't American at all, she was a Dane, and the girls couldn't stick her. Couldn't understand what she was saying d'y'know. That's another thing I didn't tell you – they came from about twenty different tribes and could scarcely understand English anyway. But there'd been some fiddle in the State Department – that's clear – and she wasn't the one who was supposed to be there, at all. The girls weren't learning a thing, but old Alongi Senga –' ‘Who's that?' ‘– Senga, Minister of Education, d'y'know, stupid old bastard, Matthew
Ochinua says they say all he wants to do is inspect high schools so's he can pinch the boys' bottoms. Anyway, he'd had a row with the Field Service people –' Most of the stories ended with a shrug of the breasts and the big face gazing away, as if she had just discovered them, at her tiny hands with their little shields of bitten-down nail pressed into the plump pad of each finger: ‘So that was that …' ‘So I was off …'

She made herself useful doing some typing for Max and spent a lot of time getting people out of what she called ‘messes' – mostly the aftermath of parties she went to – taking home in her little borrowed car the corpses that piled up, staying the night with girls whose men had gone off with someone else. She patched the lining of Spears' raincoat and drove him on his complicated errands. There was the night I got up and found her dressed as if for a picnic, carrying a spray gun. ‘Going slogan-painting,' she said. She went off with a tiny torch to wait to be picked up by whomever it was she was working with. I went back to bed and told Max. ‘A midnight feast for Sunnybunny! O wacko!' he said. The absurd play on her name was his invention; he and Spears treated her with the comradely mock-flirtatiousness that men show towards unattractive girls. I said, ‘Spears shouldn't tease her, it'll set her after him. She worships the two of you.' ‘Why on
earth not? Do Spears no harm, and she needs a man, our Sunbun.'

She was always urging us to go to parties with her, but these were the parties where white liberals and black tarts and toughs went for what each could get out of the other. It surprised me that Max, once or twice, seemed willing to go. The work he and Spears were doing was going badly; Max was finding Spears evasive. Yet it became a sort of craze for the three of them – Max, Spears and Sunbun – to appear at these parties as a weird trio. I dropped out because I couldn't last till three in the morning without drinking too much, and if I drank too much I couldn't work next day; if Max and Spears couldn't get on with their work, then, at least the parties provided a reason.

Often when I came home from the laboratory Max would be sitting waiting; punishing Spears with his waiting as a child believes he is punishing the grown-up who is not even aware of being the object of resentment. When Bobo's voice rose in the kitchen, or shrieked in the bath, Max gave me one of his seizing looks. The calm of white coats and routine work, life apprehended as a neat smear under a microscope, came from me like the bar on the breath of a drunkard.

Felicity used to hover, importantly self-effacing. ‘I was desperate, d'y'know, he hasn't turned up
all day. I made some excuse to go out and scout around but no one knew where he was.' She spoke to me out of Max's earshot, as if he must not hear his condition discussed. Then Spears would arrive, and the casual tone of his excuses and apologies was not altered, whether Max was angry and sulky, or whether he suddenly was in a warm good mood and behaved as though Spears had not been expected until that particular moment. One night when this happened – the arrival of Spears at long last, and a quick rise in Max's mood – Max was moving about the room like a cork caught up off the sand by the tide, opening beer, offering cheese on the point of a knife, talking, putting papers together, and he pointed the knife at Felicity, saying in a cheerful impatient aside. ‘Come on, move that big arse, Sunbun, you know where you put the list I gave you –'

It was his way of talking to her and I was astonished, this time, to see her cry. I suddenly understood that he had made love to her.

He stood there with the steel blade dulled with the grease of cheese, gesturing at her, and she rushed out of the room with all her flesh – buttocks, breasts – quaking; it was somehow specially moving, as if some poor peaceful browser had been stuck with a spear. I went after her and bumped into Daphne, holding a freshly ironed dress that she must have tried to hand to her. I said quickly, ‘I'll take it.'

‘What she got to cry for?' Daphne lifted her chin, she wanted me to know she knew, too.

Max said, ‘She bloody well wouldn't leave me alone. It started after a party and I was drunk anyway. She smothers you with her bloody great tits, you've got to fight your way out and that's the easiest way.' It was true that one couldn't be jealous of Felicity. If she'd been a woman I had been jealous of it would have been different. But there was only one reason why Max made love to her. He knew it and I knew it. He needed approval and admiration so much that he was prepared to throw in a good fuck as payment. I could have forgiven him sleeping with a woman he wanted, but I couldn't forgive him the humiliation in her big shaking body when she ran out of the room. I used to think of it when we were making love. And I couldn't tell him because I myself couldn't give the approval and admiration.

Max shunned the Van Den Sandt's standards of success but in a way they triumphed in him, passing on, like a family nose or chin, the rage to succeed. He did not weigh in on their scale, but he retained the revengeful need
to be acknowledged
. It came from them: the desire to show somebody. What? The objects of his purpose were not demonstrable in the way that money and social prestige are. Why is it that these people always win, even if only by destruction?