Life Times Stories

A Meeting in Space


Every morning he was sent to the baker and the French children slid out of dark walls like the village cats and walked in his footsteps. He couldn’t understand what they said to each other, but he thought he understood their laughter: he was a stranger. He looked forward to the half-fearful, disdainful feeling their presence at his back gave him, and as he left the house expected at each alley, hole and doorway the start of dread with which he would see them. They didn’t follow him into the baker’s shop. Perhaps the baker wouldn’t have them – they looked poor, and the boy knew, from the piccanins at home, that poor kids steal. He had never been into a bakery at home in South Africa; the baker-boy, a black man who rode a tricycle with a rattling bin on the front, came through the yard holding the loaves out of the way of the barking dogs, and put two white and one brown on the kitchen table. It was the same with fruit and vegetables; at home the old Indian, Vallabhbhai, stopped his greengrocer’s lorry at the back gate, and his piccanin carried into the kitchen whatever you bought.

But here, the family said, part of the fun was doing your own shopping in the little shops that were hidden away by the switchback of narrow streets. They made him repeat over and over again the words for asking for bread, in French, but once in the baker’s shop he never said them, only pointed at the loaf he wanted and held out his hand with money in it. He felt that he was someone else, a dumb man perhaps. After a few days, if he were given change he would point again, this time at a bun with a glazing of jam. He had established himself as a customer. The woman who served chattered at him, smiled with her head on one side while she picked the money out of his palm; but he gave no sign of response.

There was another child who sometimes turned up with the usual group. He would hail them loudly, from across a street, in their own language, and stalk along with them for a bit, talking away, but he looked different. The boy thought it was just because this one was richer. Although he wore the usual canvas shoes and cotton shorts, he was hung about with all sorts of equipment – a camera and two other leather cases. He began to appear in the bakery each morning. He stood right near, as if the dumb person were also invisible, and peering up experiencedly under a thick, shiny fringe of brown hair, looked along the cakes on top of the counter while apparently discussing them in a joking, familiar way with the woman. He also appeared unexpectedly in other places, without the group. Once he was leaning against the damp archway to the tunnel that smelled like a school lavatory – it was the quick way from the upper level of streets to the lower. Another time he came out of the door of the streaky-pink-painted house with the Ali Baba pots, as if he must have been watching at the window. Then he was balancing along the top of the wall that overlooked the pitch where in the afternoons the baker and other men played a bowling game with a heavy ball. Suddenly, he was outside the gate of the villa that the family were living in; he squatted on the doorstep of the house opposite, doing something to the inside of his camera. He spoke: ‘You English?’

‘Yes – not really – no. I mean, I speak English, but I come from South Africa.’

‘Africa? You come from Africa? That’s a heck of a way!’

‘Fifteen hours or so. We came in a jet. We actually took a little longer because, you see, something went wrong with the one engine and we had to wait three hours in the middle of the night in Kano. Boy, was it hot, and there was a live camel wandering around.’ The anecdote cut itself off abruptly; the family often said long-winded stories were a bore.

‘I’ve had some pretty interesting experiences myself. My parents are travelling round the world and I’m going with them. Most of the time. I’ll go back home to school for a while in the Fall. Africa. Fantastic. We may get out there sometime. D’you know anything about these darned Polaroids? It’s stuck. I’ve got a couple of pictures of you I must show you. I take candid shots. All over the place. I’ve got another camera, a Minox, but I mostly use this one here because it develops the prints right in the box and you can give them to people right off. It’s good for a laugh. I’ve got some pretty interesting pictures, too.’

‘Where was I – in the street?’

‘Oh I’m taking shots all the time. All over the place.’

‘What’s the other case?’

‘Tape recorder. I’ll get you on tape, too. I tape people at Zizi’s Bar and in the Place, they don’t know I’m doing it, I’ve got this minute little mike, you see. It’s fantastic.’

‘And what’s in here?’

The aerial was pulled out like a silver wand. ‘My transistor, of course, my beloved transistor. D’you know what I just heard? – “Help!” Are the Beatles popular down in Africa?’

‘We saw them in London – live. My brother and sister and me. She bought the record of “Help!” but we haven’t got anything to play it on, here.’

‘Good God, some guys get all the breaks! You saw them. You notice how I’ve grown my hair? Say, look, I can bring down my portable player and your sister can hear her record.’

‘What time can you come?’

‘Any time you say. I’m easy. I’ve got to go for this darned French lesson now, and I have to be in at noon so that old Madame Blanche can give me my lunch before she quits, but I’ll be around indefinitely after that.’

‘Straight after lunch. About two. I’ll wait for you here. Could you bring the pictures, as well – of me?’





Clive came racing through the tiny courtyard and charged the flyscreen door, letting it bang behind him. ‘Hey! There’s a boy who can speak English! He just talked to me! He’s a real Amur-r-rican – just wait till you hear him. And you should see what he’s got, a Polaroid camera – he’s taken some pictures of me and I didn’t even know him – and he’s got a tiny little tape recorder, you can get people on it when they don’t know – and the smallest transistor I’ve ever seen.’

His mother said, ‘So you’ve found a pal. Thank goodness.’ She was cutting up green peppers for salad, and she offered him a slice on the point of her knife, but he didn’t see it.

‘He’s going round the world, but he goes back to America to school sometimes.’

‘Oh, where? Does he come from New York?’

‘I don’t know, he said something about Fall, I think that’s where the school is. The Fall, he said.’

‘That’s not a place, silly – it’s what they call autumn.’

The shower was in a kind of cupboard in the kitchen-dining room, and its sliding door was shaken in the frame, from inside. The impatient occupant got it to jerk open: she was his sister. ‘You’ve found what?’ The enormous expectancy with which she had invested this holiday, for herself, opened her shining face under its plastic mob-cap.

‘We can hear the record, Jen, he’s bringing his player. He’s from America.’

‘How old?’

‘Same as me. About.’

She pulled off the cap and her straight hair fell down, covering her head to the shoulders and her face to her eyelashes. ‘Fine,’ she said soberly.

His father sat reading Nice-Matin on one of the dining-table chairs, which was dressed, like a person, in a yellow skirt and a cover that fitted over its hard back. He had – unsuccessfully – put out a friendly foot to trip up the boy as he burst in, and now felt he ought to make another gesture of interest. As if to claim that he had been listening to every word, he said, ‘What’s your friend’s name?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. He’s American, he’s the boy with the three leather cases—’

‘Yes, all right—’

‘You’ll see him this afternoon. He’s got a Beatle cut.’ This last was addressed to the young girl, who turned, halfway up the stone stairs with a train of wet footprints behind her.





But of course Jenny, who was old enough to introduce people as adults do, at once asked the American boy who he was. She got a very full reply. ‘Well, I’m usually called Matt, but that’s short for my second name, really – my real names are Nicholas Matthew Rootes Keller.’

‘Junior?’ she teased, ‘The Third?’

‘No, why should I be? My father’s name is Donald Rootes Keller. I’m named for my grandfather on my mother’s side. She has one hell of a big family. Her brothers won five decorations between them, in the war. I mean, three in the war against the Germans, and two in the Korean War. My youngest uncle, that’s Rod, he’s got a hole in his back – it’s where the ribs were – you can put your hand in. My hand, I mean’ – he made a fist with a small, thin, tanned hand – ‘not an adult person’s. How much more would you say my hand had t’grow, I mean – would you say half as much again, as much as that? – to be a full-size, man’s hand—’ He measured it against Clive’s; the two ten-year-old fists matched eagerly.

‘Yours and Clive’s put together – one full-size, king-size, man-size paw. Clip the coupon now. Enclose only one box-top or reasonable facsimile.’

But the elder brother’s baiting went ignored or misunderstood by the two small boys. Clive might react with a faint grin of embarrassed pleasure and reflected glory at the reference to the magazine ad culture with which his friend was associated by his brother Mark. Matt went on talking in the innocence of one whose background is still as naturally accepted as once his mother’s lap was.

He came to the villa often after that afternoon when the new Beatle record was heard for the first time on his player. The young people had nothing to do but wait while the parents slept after lunch (the place, where Jenny liked to stroll, in the evenings, inviting mute glances from boys who couldn’t speak her language, was dull at that time of day) and they listened to the record again and again in the courtyard summerhouse that had been a pigsty before the peasant cottage became a villa. When the record palled, Matt taped their voices – ‘Say something African!’ – and Mark made up a jumble of the one or two Zulu words he knew, with cheerleaders’ cries, words of abuse and phrases from familiar road signs, in Afrikaans. ‘Sakabona! Voetsak hambakahle hou links malingi mushle – Vrystaat!’

The brothers and sister rocked their rickety chairs back ecstatically on two legs when the record was played, but Matt listened with eyes narrowed and tongue turned up to touch his teeth, like an ornithologist who is bringing back alive the song of rare birds. ‘Boy, thanks. Fantastic. That’ll go into the documentary I’m going to make. Partly with my father’s movie camera, I hope, and partly with my candid stills. I’m working on the script now. It’s in the family, you see.’ He had already explained that his father was writing a book (several books, one about each country they visited, in fact) and his mother was helping. ‘They keep to a strict schedule. They start work around noon and carry on until about one a.m. That’s why I’ve got to be out of the house very early in the morning and I’m not supposed to come back in till they wake up for lunch. And that’s why I’ve got to keep out of the house in the afternoons, too; they got to have peace and quiet. For sleep and for work.’





Jenny said, ‘Did you see his shorts – that Madras stuff you read about? The colours run when it’s washed. I wish you could buy it here.’

‘That’s a marvellous transistor, Dad.’ Mark sat with his big bare feet flat on the courtyard flagstones and his head hung back in the sun – as if he didn’t live in it all the year round, at home; but this was France he basked in, not sunlight.

‘W-e-ll, they spoil their children terribly. Here’s a perfect example. A fifty-pound camera’s a toy. What’s there left for them to want when they grow up.’

Clive would have liked them to talk about Matt all the time. He said, ‘They’ve got a Maserati at home in America, at least, they did have, they’ve sold it now they’re going round the world.’

The mother said, ‘Poor little devil, shut out in the streets with all that rubbish strung around his neck.’

‘Ho, rubbish, I’m sure!’ said Clive, shrugging and turning up his palms exaggeratedly. ‘Of course, hundreds of dollars of equipment are worth nothing, you know, nothing at all.’

‘And how much is one dollar, may I ask, mister?’ Jenny had learned by heart, on the plane, the conversion tables supplied by the travel agency.

‘I don’t know how much it is in our money – I’m talking about America—’

‘You’re not to go down out of the village with him, Clive, ay, only in the village,’ his father said every day.

He didn’t go out of the village with the family, either. He didn’t go to see the museum at Antibes or the potteries at Vallauris or even the palace, casino and aquarium at Monte Carlo. The ancient hill village inside its walls, whose disorder of streets had been as confusing as the dates and monuments of Europe’s overlaid and overlapping past, became the intimate map of their domain – his and Matt’s. The alley cats shared it but the people, talking their unintelligible tongue, provided a babble beneath which, while performed openly in the streets, his activities with Matt acquired secrecy: as they went about, they were hidden even more than by the usual self-preoccupation of adults. They moved from morning till night with intense purpose; you had to be quick around corners, you mustn’t be seen crossing the street, you must appear as if from nowhere among the late afternoon crowd in the place and move among them quite unobtrusively. One of the things they were compelled to do was to get from the church – very old, with chicken wire where the stained glass must have been, and a faint mosaic, like a flaking transfer – to under the school windows without attracting the attention of the children. This had to be done in the morning, when school was in session; it was just one of the stone houses, really, without playgrounds: the dragging chorus of voices coming from it reminded him of the schools for black children at home. At other times the village children tailed them, jeering and mimicking, or in obstinate silence, impossible to shake off. There were fights and soon he learnt to make with his fingers effective insulting signs he didn’t understand, and to shout his one word of French, their bad word – merde!

And Matt talked all the time. His low, confidential English lifted to the cheerful rising cadence of French as his voice bounced out to greet people and rebounded from the close walls back to the privacy of English and their head-lowered conclave again. Yet even when his voice had dropped to a whisper, his round dark eyes, slightly depressed at the outer corners by the beginning of an intelligent frown above his dainty nose, moved, parenthetically alert, over everyone within orbit. He greeted people he had never seen before just as he greeted local inhabitants. He would stop beside a couple of sightseers or a plumber lifting a manhole and converse animatedly. To his companion standing by, his French sounded much more French than when the village children spoke it. Matt shrugged his shoulders and thrust out his lower lip while he talked, and if some of the people he accosted were uncomfortable or astonished at being addressed volubly, for no particular reason, by someone they didn’t know, he asked them questions (Clive could hear they were questions) in the jolly tone of voice that grown-ups use to kid children out of their shyness.

Sometimes one of the inhabitants, sitting outside his or her doorway on a hard chair, would walk inside and close the door when Matt called out conversationally. ‘The people in this town are really psychotic, I can tell you,’ he would say with enthusiasm, dropping back to English. ‘I know them all, every one of them, and I’m not kidding.’ The old women in wrinkled black stockings, long aprons and wide black hats who sat on the place stringing beans for Chez Riane, the open-air restaurant, turned walnut-meat faces and hissed toothlessly like geese when Matt approached. Riane (‘She topped the popularity poll in Paris, can you believe it? It was just about the time of the Flood, my father says’), a woman the size of a prize fighter who bore to the displayed posters of herself the kinship of a petrified trunk to a twig in new leaf, growled something at Matt from the corner of her vivid mouth. ‘I’ve got some great pictures of her. Of course, she’s a bit passé.’

They got chased when Matt took a picture of a man and a girl kissing down in the parking area below the chateau. Clive carried his box camera about with him, now, but he only took pictures of the cats. Matt promised that Clive would get a shot of the dwarf – a real man, not in a circus – who turned the spit in the restaurant that served lamb cooked the special way they did it here, but, as Matt said, Clive didn’t have the temperament for a great photographer. He was embarrassed, ashamed and frightened when the dwarf’s enormous head with its Spanish dancer’s sideburns reddened with a temper too big for him. But Matt had caught him on the Polaroid; they went off to sit in someone’s doorway hung with strips of coloured plastic to keep out flies, and had a look. There was the dwarf’s head, held up waggling on his little body like the head of a finger-puppet. ‘Fantastic.’ Matt was not boastful but professional in his satisfaction. ‘I didn’t have a good one of him before, just my luck, we hadn’t been here a week when he went crazy and was taken off to some hospital. He’s only just come back into circulation, it’s a good thing you didn’t miss him. You might’ve gone back to Africa and not seen him.’





The family, who had admired the boy’s Madras shorts or his transistor radio, enjoyed the use of his elegant little record player, or welcomed a friend for Clive, began to find him too talkative, too often present, and too much on the streets. Clive was told that he must come along with the family on some of their outings. They drove twenty miles to eat some fish made into soup. They took up a whole afternoon looking at pictures.

‘What time’ll we be back?’ he would rush in from the street to ask.

‘I don’t know – sometime in the afternoon.’

‘Can’t we be back by two?’

‘Why on earth should we tie ourselves down to a time? We’re on holiday.’ He would rush back to the street to relay the unsatisfactory information.

When the family came home, the slim little figure with its trappings would be ready to wave at them from the bottom of their street. Once in the dark they made him out under the street light that streaked and flattened his face and that of the village halfwit and his dog; he looked up from conversation as if he had been waiting for a train that would come in on time. Another day there was a message laid out in the courtyard with matches end-to-end: WILL SEE YOU LATER MATT.

‘What’s the matter with those people, they don’t even take the child down to the beach for a swim,’ said the mother.

Clive heard, but was not interested. He had never been in the pink house with the Ali Baba pots. Matt emerged like one of the cats, and he usually had money. They found a place that sold bubblegum and occasionally they had pancakes – Clive didn’t know that that was what they were going to be when Matt said he was going to buy some crêpes and what kind of jam did Clive like? Matt paid; there was his documentary film, and he was also writing a book – ‘There’s a lot of money in kids’ books actually written by a kid,’ he explained to the family. It was a spy story – ‘Really exotic.’ He expected to do well out of it, and he might sell some of his candid shots to Time and Life as well.

But one particularly lovely morning Clive’s mother said as if she couldn’t prevent herself, perhaps Matt would like to come with the family to the airport? The boys could watch the jets land while the grown-ups had business with the reservation office.

‘Order yourselves a lemonade if you want it,’ said the father; he meant that he would pay when he came back. They drank a lemonade-and-ice-cream each and then Matt said he’d like a black coffee to wash it down, so they ordered two coffees, and the father was annoyed when he got the bill – coffee was nothing at home, but in France they seemed to charge you for the glass of water you got with it.

‘I can drink five or six coffees a day, it doesn’t bother my liver,’ Matt told everyone. And in Nice, afterwards, trailing round the Place Masséna behind Jenny, who wanted to buy a polo shirt like the ones all the French girls were wearing, the boys were not even allowed to go and look at the fountain alone, in case they got lost. Matt’s voice fell to a whisper in Clive’s ear but Clive hardly heard and did not answer: here, Matt was just an appendage of the family, like any other little boy.

It was Saturday and when they drove home up the steep road (the halfwit and his dog sat at the newly installed traffic light and Matt, finding his voice, called out of the window a greeting in French) the village was already beginning to choke with weekend visitors.

Directly lunch was down the boys raced to meet beneath the plaque that commemorated the birth in this street of Xavier Duval, Resistance fighter, killed on 20 October 1944. Clive was there first and, faithfully carrying out the technique and example of his friend, delightedly managed to take a candid shot of Matt before Matt realised that he was observed. It was one of the best afternoons they’d had.

‘Saturdays are always good,’ said Matt. ‘All these psychotic people around. Just keep your eyes open, brother. I wrote Chapter Fourteen of my book at lunch. Oh, it was on a tray in my room – they were out until about four this morning and they didn’t get up. It’s set in this airport, you see – remember how you could just see my mouth moving and you couldn’t hear a thing in the racket with that jet taking off? – well, someone gets murdered right there drinking coffee and no one hears the scream.’

They were walking through the car park, running their hands over the nacre-sleek hoods of sports models, and half-attentive to a poodle fight near the pétanque pitch and a human one that seemed about to break out at the busy entrance to the men’s lavatories that tunnelled under the place. ‘Ah, I’ve got enough shots of delinquents to last me,’ Matt said. In accord they went on past the old girl in flowered trousers who was weeping over her unharmed, struggling poodle, and up the steps to the place, where most of the local inhabitants and all the visitors, whose cars jammed the park and stopped up the narrow streets, were let loose together, herded by Arab music coming from the boutique run by the French Algerians, on the chateau side, and the recorded voice, passionately hoarse, of Riane in her prime, from the direction of Chez Riane. The dwarf was there, talking between set teeth to a beautiful blonde American as if he were about to tear her apart with them; her friends were ready to die laughing, but looked kindly in order not to show it. The old women with their big black hats and apron-covered stomachs took up space on the benches. There were more poodles and an Italian greyhound like a piece of wire jewellery. Women who loved each other sat at the little tables outside Riane’s, men who loved each other sat in identical mauve jeans and pink shirts, smoking, outside Zizi’s Bar. Men and women in beach clothes held hands, looking into the doorways of the little shops and bars, and pulling each other along as the dogs pulled along their owners on fancy leashes. At the Crêperie, later, Matt pointed out Clive’s family, probably eating their favourite liqueur pancakes, but Clive jerked him away.

They watched pétanque for a while; the butcher, a local champion, was playing to the gallery, all right. He was pink and wore a tourist’s fishnet vest through which wisps of reddish chest-hair twined like a creeper. A man with a long black cape and a huge cat’s-whisker moustache caused quite a stir. ‘My God, I’ve been trying to get him for weeks—’ Matt ducked, Clive quickly following, and they zigzagged off through the pétanque spectators. The man had somehow managed to drive a small English sports car right up on to the place; it was forbidden, but although the part-time policeman who got into uniform for Saturday afternoons was shouting at him, the man couldn’t be forced to take it down again because whatever gap it had found its way through was closed by a fresh influx of people. ‘He’s a painter,’ Matt said. ‘He lives above the shoemaker’s, you know that little hole. He doesn’t ever come out except Saturdays and Sundays. I’ve got to get a couple of good shots of him. He looks to me the type that gets famous. Really psychotic, eh?’ The painter had with him a lovely, haughty girl dressed like Sherlock Holmes in a man’s tweeds and deerstalker. ‘The car must be hers,’ said Matt. ‘He hasn’t made it, yet; but I can wait.’ He used up almost a whole film: ‘With a modern artist, you want a few new angles.’

Matt was particularly talkative, even going right into Zizi’s Bar to say hello to her husband, Emile. The family were still sitting at the Crêperie; the father signed to Clive to come over and at first he took no notice. Then he stalked up between the tables. ‘Yes?’

‘Don’t you want some money?’

Before he could answer, Matt began jerking a thumb frantically. He ran. His father’s voice barred him: ‘Clive!’

But Matt had come flying: ‘Over there – a woman’s just fainted or died or something. We got to go—’

‘What for?’ said the mother.

‘God almighty,’ said Jenny.

He was gone with Matt. They fought and wriggled their way into the space that had been cleared, near the steps, round a heavy woman lying on the ground. Her clothes were twisted; her mouth bubbled. People argued and darted irresistibly out of the crowd to do things to her; those who wanted to try and lift her up were pulled away by those who thought she ought to be left. Someone took off her shoes. Someone ran for water from Chez Riane but the woman couldn’t drink it. One day the boys had found a workman in his blue outfit and cement-crusted boots lying snoring near the old pump outside the Bar Tabac, where the men drank. Matt got him, too; you could always use a shot like that for a dead body, if the worst came to the worst. But this was the best ever. Matt finished up what was left of the film with the painter on it and had time to put in a new one, while the woman still lay there, and behind the noise of the crowd and the music the see-saw hoot of the ambulance could be heard, coming up the road to the village walls from the port below. The ambulance couldn’t get on to the place, but the men in their uniforms carried a stretcher over people’s heads and then lifted the woman aboard. Her face was purplish as cold hands on a winter morning and her legs stuck out. The boys were part of the entourage that followed her to the ambulance, Matt progressing with sweeping hops, on bended knee, like a Russian dancer, in order to get the supine body in focus at an upward angle.

When it was all over, they went back to the Crêperie to relate the sensational story to the family; but they had not been even interested enough to stay, and had gone home to the villa. ‘It’ll be really something for you to show them down in Africa!’ said Matt. He was using his Minox that afternoon, and he promised that when the films were developed, he would have copies made for Clive. ‘Darn it, we’ll have to wait until my parents take the films to Nice – you can’t get them developed up here. And they only go in on Wednesdays.’

‘But I’ll be gone by then,’ said Clive suddenly.

‘Gone? Back to Africa?’ All the distance fell between them as they stood head-to-head jostled by the people in the village street, all the distance of the centuries when the continent was a blank outline on the maps, as well as the distance of miles. ‘You mean you’ll be back in Africa?’





Clive’s box camera went into his cupboard along with the other souvenirs of Europe that seemed to have shed their evocation when they were unpacked amid the fresh, powerful familiarity of home. He boasted a little, the first day of the new term at school, about the places he had been to; but within a few weeks, when cities and palaces that he had seen for himself were spoken of in history or geography classes, he did not mention that he had visited them and, in fact, the textbook illustrations and descriptions did not seem to be those of anything he knew. One day he searched for his camera to take to a sports meeting, and found an exposed film in it. When it was developed, there were the pictures of the cats. He turned them this way up and that, to make out the thin, feral shapes on cobblestones and the disappearing blurs round the blackness of archways. There was also the picture of the American boy, Matt, a slim boy with knees made big out of focus, looking – at once suspicious and bright – from under his uncut hair.

The family crowded round to see, smiling, filled with pangs for what the holiday was and was not, while it lasted.

‘The Time-Life man himself!’

‘Poor old Matt – what was his other name?’

‘You ought to send it to him,’ said the mother. ‘You’ve got the address? Aren’t you going to keep in touch?’

But there was no address. The boy Matt had no street, house, house in a street, room in a house like the one they were in. ‘America,’ Clive said, ‘he’s in America.’