Life Times Stories

Face from Atlantis


Somehow it wasn’t altogether a surprise when Waldeck Brand and his wife bumped into Carlitta at a theatre in New York in 1953. The Brands were six thousand miles away from their home in South Africa, and everywhere they had visited in England and Europe before they came to America they had met Waldeck’s contemporaries from Heidelberg whom he hadn’t seen for twenty years and never had expected to see ever again. It had seemed a miracle to Waldeck that all these people, who had had to leave Germany because they were liberals (like himself), or Jews, or both, not only had survived transplantation but had thrived, and not only had thrived but had managed to do so each in the manner and custom of the country which had given him sanctuary.

Of course, Waldeck Brand did not think it a miracle that he had survived and conformed to a pattern of life lived at the other end of the world to which he had belonged. (Perhaps it is true, after all, that no man can believe in the possibility of his own failure or death.) It seemed quite natural that the gay young man destined primarily for a good time and, secondly, for the inheritance of his wealthy father’s publishing house in Berlin should have become a director of an important group of gold mines in southernmost Africa, a world away from medieval German university towns where he had marched at the head of the student socialist group, and the Swiss Alps where he had skied and shared his log cabin with a different free-thinking girl every winter, and the Kurfürstendamm where he had strolled with his friends, wearing elegant clothes specially ordered from England. Yet to him – and to his South African wife, who had been born and had spent the twenty-seven years of her life in Cape Town, looking out, often and often, over the sea which she had now crossed for the first time – it was a small miracle that his Heidelberg friend, Siggie Bentheim, was to be found at the foreign editor’s desk of a famous right-of-centre newspaper in London, and another university friend, Stefan Rosovsky, now become Stefan Raines, was president of a public utility company in New York and had a finger or two dipped comfortably in oil, too. To Waldeck, Siggie was the leader of a Communist cell, an ugly little chap, best student in the Institut fur Sozialwissenschaften, whose tiny hands were dry-skinned and shrunken, as if political fervour had used up his blood like fuel. Stefan was the soulful-eyed Russian boy with the soft voice and the calm delivery of dry wit who tutored in economics and obviously was fitted for nothing but an academic career as an economist.

And to Eileen, Waldeck Brand’s wife, both were people who lived, changeless, young, enviable, in a world that existed only in Waldeck’s three green leather photograph albums. Siggie was the one who sat reading the Arbeiterpolitik, oblivious of the fact that a picture was being taken, in the photograph where a whole dim, underexposed room (Waldeck’s at Heidelberg) was full of students. Eileen had been to a university in South Africa, but she had never seen students like that: such good-looking, happy, bold-eyed boys, such beautiful girls, smoking cigarettes in long holders and stretching out their legs in pointed-toed shoes beneath their short skirts. Someone was playing a guitar in that picture. But Siggie Bentheim (you could notice those hands, around the edges of the pages) read a paper.

Stefan was not in that picture, but in dozens of others. In particular, there was one taken in Budapest. A flashlight picture, taken in a night club. Stefan holds up a glass of champagne, resigned in his dinner suit, dignified in a silly paper cap. New Year in Budapest, before Hitler, before the war. Can you imagine it? Eileen was fascinated by those photograph albums and those faces. Since she had met and married Waldeck in 1952, she had spent many hours looking at the albums. When she did so, a great yawning envy opened through her whole body. She was young, and the people pictured in those albums were all, even if they were alive, over forty by now. But that did not matter; that did not count. That world of the photograph albums was not lost only by those who had outgrown it into middle age. It was lost. Gone. It did not belong to a new youth. It was not hers, although she was young. It was no use being young, now, in the forties and fifties. She thought of the green albums as the record of an Atlantis.

Waldeck had never been back to Europe since he came as a refugee to South Africa twenty years before. He had not kept up a regular correspondence with his scattered student friends, though one or two had written, at intervals of four or five years, and so for some, when Waldeck took his wife to Europe and America, he had the address-before-the-last, and for others the vaguest ideas of their whereabouts. Yet he found them all, or they found him. It was astonishing. The letters he wrote to old addresses were forwarded; the friends whom he saw knew where other friends lived, or at least what jobs they were doing, so that they could be traced that way, simply by a telephone call. In London there were dinner parties and plain drinking parties, and there they were – the faces from Atlantis, gathered together in a Strand pub. One of the women was a grandmother; most of the men were no longer married to women Waldeck remembered them marrying, and had shed their old political faiths along with their hair. But all were alive, and living variously, and in them was still the peculiar vigour that showed vividly in those faces, caught in the act of life long ago, in the photograph albums.

Once or twice in London, Waldeck had asked one old friend or another, ‘What happened to Carlitta? Does anyone know where Carlitta is?’

Siggie Bentheim, eating Scotch salmon at Rules, like any other English journalist who can afford to, couldn’t remember Carlitta. Who was she? Then Waldeck remembered that the year when everyone got to know Carlitta was the year that Siggie spent in Lausanne.

Another old friend remembered her very well. ‘Carlitta! Not in England, at any rate. Carlitta!’

Someone else caught the name, and called across the table, ‘Carlitta was in London, oh, before the war. She went to America thirteen or fourteen years ago.’

‘Did she ever marry poor old Klaus Schultz? My God, he was mad about the girl!’

‘Marry him! No-o-o! Carlitta wouldn’t marry him.’

‘Carlitta was a collector of scalps, all right,’ said Waldeck, laughing.

‘Well, do you wonder?’ said the friend.

Eileen knew Carlitta well, in picture and anecdote. Eileen had a favourite among the photographs of her, too, just as she had the one of Stefan in Budapest on New Year’s Eve. The photograph was taken in Austria, on one of Waldeck’s skiing holidays. It was a clear print and the snow was blindingly white. In the middle of the whiteness stood a young girl, laughing away from the camera in the direction of something or someone outside the picture. Her little face, burnished by the sun, shone dark against the snow. There was a highlight on each firm, round cheekbone, accentuated in laughter. She was beautiful in the pictures of groups, too – in boats on the Neckar, in the gardens of the Schloss, in cafés and at student dances; even, once, at Deauville, even in the unbecoming bathing dress of the time. In none of the pictures did she face the camera. If, as in the ski picture, she was smiling, it was at someone in the group, and if she was not, her black pensive eyes, her beautiful little firm-fleshed face with the short chin, stared at the toes of her shoes, or at the smoke of her cigarette, arrested in its climbing arabesque by the click of the camera. The total impression of all these photographs of the young German girl was one of arrogance. She did not participate in the taking of a photograph; she was simply there, a thing of beauty which you could attempt to record if you wished.

One of the anecdotes about the girl was something that had happened on that skiing holiday. Carlitta and Klaus Schultz, Waldeck and one of his girls had gone together to the mountains. (‘Oh, the luck of it!’ Eileen had said to Waldeck at this point in his story, the first time he related it. ‘You were eighteen? Nineteen? And you were allowed to go off on your first love affair to the mountains. Can you imagine what would have happened if I had announced to my parents that I was going off on a holiday with a young lover? And in Austria, and skiing . . .’ Poor Eileen, who had gone, every year, on a five-day cruise along the coast to stay at a ‘family hotel’ in Durban, accompanied by her parents and young brother and sister, or had been sent, in the winter vacation, with an uncle and cousins to hear the lions roar outside a dusty camp in the Kruger Park. She did not know which to envy Waldeck, Carlitta and Klaus most – the sexual freedom or the steep mountain snows.) Anyway, it was on the one really long and arduous climb of that delightful holiday that Carlitta, who for some hours had been less talkative than usual and had fallen back a little, sat down in the snow and refused to move. Waldeck had lagged behind the rest of the party to mend a broken strap on his rucksack, and so it was that he noticed her. When he asked her why she did not hurry on with him to catch up with the other members of the party, she said, perfectly calm, ‘I want to sit here in the shade and rest. I’ll wait here till you all come back.’

There was no shade. The party intended to sleep in a rest hut up the mountain, and would not pass that way again till next day. At first Waldeck laughed; Carlitta was famous for her gaiety and caprice. Then he saw that in addition to being perfectly calm, Carlitta was also perfectly serious. She was not joking, but suffering from some kind of peculiar hysteria. He begged and begged her to get up, but she would not. ‘I am going to rest in the shade’ was all she would answer.

The rest of the party was out of sight and he began to feel nervous. There was only one thing he could try. He went up kindly to the beautiful little girl and struck her sharply, twice, in the face. The small head swung violently this way, then that. Carlitta got up, dusted the snow from her trousers, and said to Waldeck, ‘For God’s sake, what are we waiting for? The others must be miles ahead.’

‘And when Klaus heard what had happened,’ Waldeck’s story always ended, ‘he could scarcely keep himself from crying, he was so angry that he had not been the one to revive Carlitta, and Carlitta saw his nose pinken and swell slightly with the effort of keeping back the tears, and she noted how very much he must be in love with her and how easy it would be to torment him.’

Wretched Klaus! He was the blond boy with the square jaw who always frowned and smiled directly into the camera. Eileen had a theory that young people didn’t even fall in love like that any more. That, too, had gone down under the waves.





Waldeck and his young wife arrived in New York on a Tuesday. Stefan Raines came to take them out to dinner that very first night. Eileen, who had never seen him before in her life, was even more overjoyed than Waldeck to find that he had not changed. As soon as they came out of the elevator and saw him standing in the hotel lobby with a muffler hanging down untied on the lapels of his dark coat, they knew he had not changed. He wore the presidency of the public utility company, the wealth and the Fifth Avenue apartment just as he had worn the paper cap in the Budapest night club on New Year’s Eve long ago. Stefan’s American wife was not able to accompany them that night, so the three dined alone at the Pierre. After dinner Stefan wanted to know if he should drive them to Times Square and along Broadway or anywhere else they’d read about, but they told him that he was the only sight they wanted to see so soon after their arrival. They talked for two hours over dinner, Stefan asking and Waldeck answering eager questions about the old Heidelberg friends whom Waldeck and Eileen had seen in London. Stefan went to London sometimes, and he had seen one or two, but many whom he hadn’t been able to find for years seemed to have appeared out of their hiding places for Waldeck. In fact, there were several old Berlin and Heidelberg friends living in New York whom Stefan had seen once, or not at all, but who, on the Brands’ first day in New York, had already telephoned their hotel. ‘We love Waldeck. Better than we love each other,’ said Stefan to his friend’s wife, his black eyes looking quietly out over the room, the corners of his mouth indenting in his serious smile that took a long time to open out, brightening his eyes as it did until they shone like the dark water beneath a lamplight on a Venetian canal where Eileen had stood with her husband a few weeks before.

Eileen seemed to feel her blood warm in the palms of her hands, as if some balm had been poured over them. No man in South Africa could say a thing like that! The right thing, the thing from the heart. You had to have the assurance of Europe, of an old world of civilised human relationships behind you before you could say, simply and truthfully, a thing like that.

It was the moment for the mood of the conversation to take a turn. Waldeck said curiously, suddenly remembering, ‘And whatever became of Carlitta? Did you ever see Carlitta? Peter told me, in London, that she had come to live in America.’

‘Now that’s interesting that you should ask,’ said Stefan. ‘I’ve wondered about her, too. I saw her once, twelve – more – thirteen years back. When first she arrived in America. She was staying quite near the hotel where you’re living now. I took her out to lunch – not very sumptuous; I was rather poor at the time – and I never saw her again. She was beautiful. You remember? She was always beautiful—’ he crinkled his eyes to dark slits, as if to narrow down the aperture of memory upon her – ‘even in a bad restaurant in New York, she was – well, the word my son would use is the best for her – she was terrific. Minute and terrific.’

‘That’s it. That’s it.’ Waldeck spoke around the cigar he held between his teeth, trying to draw up a light.

‘We adored her,’ said Stefan, shaking his head slowly at the wonder of it.

‘So you too, Stefan, you too?’ said Eileen with a laugh.

‘Oh, none of us was in love with Carlitta. Only Klaus, and he was too stupid. He doesn’t count. We only adored. We knew it was useless to fall in love with her. Neither she nor we believed any one of us was good enough for her.’

‘So you don’t think she’s in New York?’ asked Waldeck.

Stefan shook his head. ‘I did hear, from someone who knew her sister, that she had married an American and gone to live in Ohio.’ He stopped and chuckled congestedly. ‘Carlitta in Ohio. I don’t believe it . . . Well, we should move along from here now, you know. Sure there isn’t anywhere you’d like to go before bedtime?’

The girl from South Africa remembered that one of the things she’d always wanted to do if ever she came to New York was to hear a really fat Negro woman singing torch songs, so Stefan took them to a place where the air-conditioning apparatus kept the fog of smoke and perfume and liquor fumes moving around the tables while an enormous yellow blubber of a woman accompanied her own voice, quakingly with her flesh and thunderously on the piano.





It was only two nights later that Eileen came out of the ladies’ room to join her husband in a theatre foyer during the interval and found him embracing a woman in a brown coat. As Waldeck held the woman away from him, by the shoulders, as if to take a good look at her after he had kissed her, Eileen saw a small face with a wide grin and really enormous eyes. As Eileen approached she noticed a tall, sandy-haired man standing by indulgently. When she reached the three, Waldeck turned to her with the pent-up, excited air he always had when he had secretly bought her a present, and he held out his hand to draw her into the company. In the moment before he spoke, Eileen felt a stir of recognition at the sight of the woman’s hair, smooth brown hair in which here and there a grey filament of a coarser texture showed, refusing to conform to the classic style, centre-parted and drawn back in a bun, in which the hair was worn.

‘Do you know who this is?’ said Waldeck almost weakly. ‘It’s Carlitta.’

Eileen was entitled to a second or two in which to be taken aback, to be speechless in the face of coincidence. In that moment, however, the coincidence did not even occur to her; she simply took in, in an intense perception outside of time, the woman before her – the brown coat open to show the collar of some nondescript silk caught together with a little brooch around the prominent tendons of the thin, creased neck; the flat, taut chest; the dowdy shoes with brown, punched-leather bows coming too high on the instep of what might have been elegant feet. And the head. Oh, that was the head she had seen before, all right; that was the head that, hair so sleek it looked like a satin turban, inclined with a mixture of coquetry, invitation, amusement and disdain towards a ridiculously long cigarette holder. That hair was brown, after all, and not the Spanish black of the photographs and imagination. And the face. Well, there is a stage in a woman’s life when her face gets too thin or too fat. This face had reached that stage and become too thin. It was a prettily enough shaped face, with a drab, faded skin, as if it was exposed to but no longer joyously took colour from the sun. Towards the back of the jaw line, near the ears, the skin sagged sallowly. Under the rather thick, attractive brows the twin caves of the eyes were finely puckered and mauvish. In this faded, fading face (it was like an old painting of which you are conscious that it is being faded away by the very light by which you are enabled to look at it) the eyes had lost nothing; they shone on, greedily and tremendous, just as they had always been, in the snow, reflecting the Neckar, watching the smoke unfurl to the music of the guitar. They were round eyes with scarcely any white to them, like the beautiful eyes of Negro children, and the lashes, lower as well as upper, were black and thick. Their assertion in that face was rather awful.

The woman who Waldeck said was Carlitta took Eileen’s hand. ‘Isn’t it fantastic? We’re only up from Ohio this morning,’ she said, smiling broadly. Her teeth were small, childishly square and still good. On her neglected face the lipstick was obviously a last-minute adornment.

‘And this is Edgar,’ Waldeck was saying, ‘Edgar Hicks. Carlitta’s husband.’

The tall, sandy-haired man shook Eileen’s hand with as much flourish as a stage comedian. ‘Glad to know you,’ he said. Eileen saw that he wore hexagonal rimless glasses, and a clip across his tie spelled in pinkish synthetic gold ‘E.J.H.’

‘Carlitta Hicks—’ Waldeck put out a hand and squeezed Carlitta’s elbow. ‘I can’t believe it.’

‘Sure is extraordinary,’ said Mr Hicks. ‘Carlitta here and I haven’t been up to New York for more than three years.’

‘Ach, no, darling,’ said Carlitta, frowning and smiling quickly. She used her face so much, no wonder she had worn it out. ‘Four at least. You remember, that last time was at Christmas.’ She added to Waldeck, ‘Once in a blue moon is enough for me. Our life . . .’ She half lifted a worn hand, gave a little sudden intake of breath through her fine nostrils, as if to suggest that their life, whatever it was, was such that the pleasures of New York or anywhere else offered no rival enticement. She had still a slight German accent to soften the American pronunciation of her speech.

Everyone was incoherent. Waldeck kept saying excitedly, ‘I haven’t been out of South Africa since I arrived there twenty years ago. I’m in New York two days and I find Carlitta!’

There was time only to exchange the names of hotels and to promise to telephone tomorrow. Then the theatre bell interrupted. As they parted, Waldeck called back, ‘Keep Sunday lunch free. Stefan’s coming. We’ll all be together . . .’

Carlitta’s mouth pursed; her eyes opened wide in a pantomime ‘Lovely’ across the crowd.

‘And yet I’m not really entirely surprised,’ Waldeck whispered to his wife in the darkening theatre. ‘It’s been happening to us in one way or another all the time. What do you think of the husband? What about Mr Edgar Hicks from Ohio?’ he added with a nudge.

In the dark, as the curtain rose, Eileen followed it with her eyes for a moment and then said, ‘I shouldn’t have known her. I don’t think I should ever have known her.’

‘But Carlitta hasn’t changed at all!’ said Waldeck.





Waldeck was on the telephone, talking to Stefan, immediately after breakfast next morning. Passing to and fro between the bedroom and the bathroom, Eileen could see him, his body hitched up on to the corner of the small desk, smiling excitedly at what must have been Stefan’s quiet incredulity. ‘But I tell you he actually is some sort of farmer in Ohio. Yes. Well, that’s what I wanted to know. I can’t really say – very tall and fairish and thin. Very American . . . Well, you know what I mean – a certain type of American, then. Slow, drawling way of speaking. Shakes your hand a long time. A weekend farmer, really. He’s got some job with a firm that makes agricultural implements, in the nearby town. She said she runs pigs and chickens. Can you believe it? So is it all right about Sunday? I can imagine you are . . . Ach, the same old Carlitta.’

Sunday was a clear, sharp spring day in New York, exactly the temperature and brightness of a winter day in Johannesburg. Stefan rang up to say he would call for the Brands at about eleven, so that they could drive around a little before meeting Carlitta and her husband for luncheon.

‘Will it be all right if I wear slacks?’ asked Eileen. She always wore slacks on Sundays in Johannesburg.

‘Certainly not,’ said Stefan gravely. ‘You cannot lunch in a restaurant in New York in slacks.’

Eileen put on a suit she had bought in London. She was filled with a childlike love and respect for Stefan; she would not have done the smallest thing to displease him or to prejudice his opinion of her. When he arrived to fetch the Brands he said, equally gravely, ‘You look very well in that suit,’ and led them to his car, where his wife, whom they had met in the course of the week, sat waiting.

His wife was perhaps an odd choice for Stefan, and then again perhaps she was not; she went along with the presidency, the wealth and the Fifth Avenue apartment, and left his inner balance unchanged. She was not so young as Eileen, but young, and a beauty. An American beauty, probably of Swedish or Norwegian stock. Hers was the style of blonde beauty in which the face is darker than the hair, which was not dyed but real. It was clean and shiny and almost silvery-fair, and she wore it as such women do, straight and loose. She wore black, and when she stood up you noticed that hers was the kind of tall figure that, although the shoulders are broad and the breasts full, tapers to too-narrow hips and too-thin legs. Her eyes were green and brilliant, and crinkled up, friendly, and on the wrist of one beautiful ungloved hand she wore a magnificent broad antique bracelet of emeralds and diamonds. Otherwise she was unadorned, without even a wedding ring. As she shifted along the seat of the car, a pleasant fragrance stirred from her, the sort of fragrance the expensive Fifth Avenue stores were then releasing into the foyers of their shops, to convince their customers of the arrival of the time to buy spring clothes. When she smiled and spoke, in a soft American voice without much to say, her teeth showed fresh as the milk teeth of a child.

Eileen thought how different were this woman and herself (with her large, Colonial, blue-eyed, suburban prettiness) from the sort of girls with whom Waldeck and Stefan had belonged in the world that was lost to them – girls of the twenties, restlessly independent, sensual and intellectual, citizens of the world with dramatic faces, girls such as Carlitta, inclining her dark Oriental head, had been.

The four drove through Central Park, rather threadbare after the snow and before the blossom. Then they went down to the East River, where the bridges hung like rainbows, glittering, soaring, rejoicing the heart in the sky above the water, where men have always expected to find their visions. They stopped the car at the United Nations building, and first walked along on the opposite side of the street, alongside the shabby, seedy shops, the better to see the great molten-looking façade of glass, like a river flowing upwards, on the administrative block. The glass calmly reflected the skyline, as a river reflects, murky green and metallic, the reeds. Then they crossed the street and wandered about a bit along the line of flagstaffs, with the building hanging above them. The Brands resolved to come back again another day and see the interior.

‘So far, there’s nothing to beat your bridges,’ said Eileen. ‘Nothing.’

They drove now uptown to an elegant, half-empty restaurant which had about it the air of recovering from Saturday night. There they sat drinking whisky while they waited.

‘I don’t know what we can do with the husband,’ said Waldeck, shrugging and giggling.

‘That’s all right,’ said Stefan. ‘Alice will talk to him. Alice can get along with anybody.’ His wife laughed good-naturedly.

‘You know, he’s worthy . . .’ said Waldeck.

‘I know,’ said Stefan, comforting.

‘Same old Carlitta, though,’ said Waldeck, smiling reminiscently. ‘You’ll see.’

His wife Eileen looked at him. ‘Oh, she’s not,’ she said, distressed. ‘She’s not. Oh, how can you say that to Stefan?’ The girl from South Africa looked at the two men and the woman who sat with her, and around the panelled and flower-decorated room, and suddenly she felt a very long way from home.

Just at that moment, Carlitta and Mr Edgar Hicks came across the room towards them. Stefan got up and went forward with palms upturned to meet them; Waldeck rose from his seat; a confusion of greetings and introductions followed. Stefan kissed Carlitta on both cheeks gently. Edgar Hicks pumped his hand. In Edgar Hicks’s other hand was the Palm Beach panama with the paisley band which he had removed from his head as he entered. The hovering attendant took it from him and took Carlitta’s brown coat.

Carlitta wore the niggly-patterned silk dress that had shown its collar under the coat the night at the theatre, the same shoes, the same cracked beige kid gloves. But above the bun and level with the faded hairline, she had on what was obviously a brand new hat, a hat bought from one of the thousands of ‘spring’ hats displayed that week before Easter, a perky, mass-produced American hat of the kind which makes an American middle-class woman recognisable anywhere in the world. Its newness, its frivolous sense of its own emphemerality (it was so much in fashion that it would be old-fashioned once Easter was over) positively jeered at everything else Carlitta wore. Whether it was because she fancied the sun still painted her face the extraordinary rich glow that showed against the snow in the picture of herself laughing in Austria years ago, or whether there was some other reason, her face was again without make-up except for a rub of lipstick. Under the mixture of artificial light and daylight, faint darkening blotches, not freckles but something more akin to those liver marks elderly people get on the backs of their hands, showed on her temples and her jawline. But her eyes, of course, her eyes were large, dark, quick.

She and her husband consulted together over what they should eat, he suggesting slowly, she deciding quickly, and from then on she never stopped talking. She talked chiefly to her two friends Waldeck and Stefan, who sat on either side of her. Edgar Hicks, after a few trying minutes with Eileen, who found it difficult to respond to any of his conversational gambits, discovered that Alice Raines rode horses and, like a swamp sucking in fast all around its victim, involved her in a long, one-sided argument about the merits of two different types of saddle. Edgar preferred the one type and simply assumed that Alice must be equally adamant about the superiority of the other. Although his voice was slow, it was unceasing and steady, almost impossible to interrupt.

Eileen did not mind the fact that she was not engaged in conversation. She was free to listen to and to watch Carlitta with Stefan and Waldeck. And now and then Carlitta, forking up her coleslaw expertly as any born American, looked over to Eileen with a remark or query – ‘That’s what I say, anyway,’ or ‘Wouldn’t you think so?’ Carlitta first told briefly about her stay in London when she left Germany, then about her coming to the United States, and her short time in New York. ‘In the beginning, we stayed in that hotel near Grand Central. We behaved like tourists, not like people who have come to stay. We used to go to Coney Island and rowing on the lake in Central Park, and walking up and down Fifth Avenue

– just as if we were going to go back to Germany in a few weeks.’

‘Who’s we?’ asked Stefan. ‘Your sister?’

‘No, my sister was living in a small apartment near the river. Klaus,’ she said, shrugging her worn shoulders with the careless, culpable gesture of an adolescent. Stefan nodded his head in confirmation towards Waldeck; of course, he remembered, Klaus had followed her or come with her to America. Poor Klaus.

‘What happened to him?’ asked Stefan.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘He went to Mexico.’

Her audience of three could guess very well how it had been. When she had tired of Coney Island and the outside of Fifth Avenue shops and the rowing in Central Park, Klaus had found out once again that in the new world, as in the old, he had nothing more than amusement value for her.

‘After three months—’ Carlitta had not paused in her narrative

– ‘I went to stay with my sister and brother-in-law – she had been here some years already. But he got a job with a real-estate scheme, and they went to live on one of the firm’s housing projects – you know, a little house, another little house next door, a swing for the kids, the same swing next door. I came back to New York on my own and I found a place in Greenwich Village.’

Ah, now, there was a setting in which one could imagine the Carlitta of the photographs, the beautiful, Oriental-looking German girl from Heidelberg, with the bold, promising eyes. And at the moment at which Eileen thought this, her ear caught the drawl of Edgar Hicks. ‘. . . now, our boy’s the real independent type. Now, only the other day . . .’ Edgar Hicks! Where had Edgar Hicks come in? She looked at him, carefully separating the flesh from the fine fringe of bone in his boiled trout, the knife held deliberately in his freckled hand.

‘Did you live in Greenwich Village?’ Eileen said to him suddenly.

He interrupted his description of his boy’s seat in the saddle to turn and say, surprised, ‘No, ma’am, I certainly didn’t. I’ve never spent more than two consecutive weeks in New York in my life.’ He thought Eileen’s question merely a piece of tourist curiosity, and returned to Alice Raines, his boy and the saddle.

Carlitta had digressed into some reminiscence about Heidelberg days, but when she paused, laughing from Stefan to Waldeck with a faltering coquettishness that rose in her like a half-forgotten mannerism, Eileen said, ‘Where did you and your husband meet?’

‘In a train,’ Carlitta said loudly and smiled, directed at her husband.

He took it up across the table. ‘Baltimore and Ohio line,’ he said, well rehearsed. There was the feeling that all the few things he had to say had been slowly thought out and slowly spoken many times before. ‘I was sittin’ in the diner havin’ a beer with my dinner, and in comes this little person looking mighty proud and cute as you can make ’em . . .’ So it went on, the usual story, and Edgar Hicks spared them no detail of the romantic convention. ‘Took Carlitta down to see my folks the following month and we were married two weeks after that,’ he concluded at last. He had expected to marry one of the local girls he’d been to school with; it was clear that Carlitta was the one and the ever-present adventure of his life. Now they had a boy who rode as naturally as an Indian and didn’t watch television; he liked to raise his own chickens and have independent pocket money from the sale of eggs.

‘Carlitta,’ Stefan said, aside, ‘how long were you in Greenwich Village?’

‘Four years,’ she said shortly, replying from some other part of her mind; her attention and animation were given to the comments with which she amplified her husband’s description of their child’s remarkable knowledge of country lore, his superiority over town-bred children.

Eileen overheard the low, flat reply. Four years! Four years about which Carlitta had said not a word, four years which somehow or other had brought her from the arrogant, beautiful, ‘advanced’ girl with whom Waldeck and Stefan could not fall in love because they and she agreed they were not good enough for her, to the girl who would accept Edgar Hicks a few weeks after a meeting on a train.

Carlitta felt the gaze of the girl from South Africa. A small patch of bright colour appeared on each of Carlitta’s thin cheekbones. Perhaps it was the wine. Perhaps it was the wine, too, that made her voice rise, so that she began to talk of her life on the Ohio farm with a zest and insistence which made the whole table her audience. She told how she never went to town unless she had to; never more than once a month. How country people, like herself, discovered a new rhythm of life, something people who lived in towns had forgotten. How country people slept differently, tasted their food differently, had no nerves. ‘I haven’t a nerve in my body, any more. Absolutely placid,’ she said, her sharp little gestures, her black eyes in the pinched face challenging a denial. ‘Nothing ever happens but a change of season,’ she said arrogantly to people for whom there were stock-market crashes, traffic jams, crowded exhibitions and cocktail parties. ‘Birth and growth among the animals and the plants. Life. Not a cement substitute.’ No one defended the city, but she went on as if someone had. ‘I live as instinctively as one of our own animals. So does my child. I mean, for one thing, we don’t have to worry about clothes.’

Eileen said rather foolishly, as if in reflex, ‘Stefan said I couldn’t wear slacks to a New York restaurant today.’

‘Stefan was always a snob.’ Carlitta’s little head struck like a snake.

Eileen was taken aback; she laughed nervously, looking very young. Carlitta grinned wickedly under the hat whose straw caught the light concentrically, like a gramophone record. Stefan’s wife smiled serenely and politely, as if this were a joke against her husband. She had taken off the jacket of her suit, and beneath it she wore a fine lavender-coloured sweater with a low, round neck. She had been resting her firm neck against her left hand, and now she took the hand away; hers was the kind of wonderful blood-mottled fair skin that dented white with the slightest pressure, filled up pink again the way the sea seeps up instantly through footprints in wet sand. She looked so healthy, so well cared for that she created a moment of repose around herself; everyone paused, resting his gaze upon her.

Then Carlitta’s thin little sun-sallow neck twisted restlessly. ‘I don’t know how you stand it,’ she said. ‘I don’t know how you can live in New York year after year.’

‘We go away,’ Stefan said soothingly. ‘We go to Europe most summers, to Switzerland to my mother, or to Italy. Alice loves Italy.’

‘Italy,’ said Carlitta, suddenly turning over a piece of lobster on her plate as if she suspected that there must be something bad beneath it. ‘Spain.’

‘You remember how you went off to the Pyrenees?’ Waldeck said to her. From his tone it was clear that this was quite a story, if Carlitta cared to tell it.

‘You can’t imagine how time flies on the farm,’ said Carlitta. ‘The years . . . just go. Sometimes, in summer, I simply walk out of the house and leave my work and go and lie down in the long grass. Then you can hear nothing, nothing at all.’

‘Maybe the old cow chewing away under the pear tree,’ said Edgar tenderly. Then with a chuckle that brought a change of tone: ‘Carlitta takes a big part in community affairs, too, you know. She doesn’t tell you that she’s on the library committee in town, and last year she was lady president of the Parent-Teacher Association. Ran a bazaar made around three hundred dollars.’ There was a pause. Nobody spoke. ‘I’m an Elk myself,’ he added. ‘That’s why we’re going to Philadelphia Thursday. There’s a convention on over there.’

Carlitta suddenly put down her fork with a gesture that impatiently terminated any current subject of conversation. (Eileen thought: she must always have managed conversation like that, long ago in smoky, noisy student rooms, jerking the talk determinedly the way she wanted it.) Her mind seemed to hark back to the subject of dress. ‘Last year,’ she said, ‘we invited some city friends who were passing through town to a supper party. Now it just so happened that that afternoon I could see a storm banking up. I knew that if the storm came in the night it was goodbye to our hay. So I decided to make a hay-making party out of the supper. When those women came with their high-heeled fancy sandals and their gauzy frocks I put pitchforks into their hands and sent them out into the field to help get that hay in under cover. Of course I’d forgotten that they’d be bound to be rigged out in something ridiculous. You should have seen their faces!’ Carlitta laughed gleefully. ‘Should have seen their shoes!’

The young girl from South Africa felt suddenly angry. Amid the laughter, she said quietly, ‘I think it was an awful thing to do. If I’d been a guest, I should flatly have refused.’

‘Eileen!’ said Waldeck mildly. But Carlitta pointedly excluded from her notice the girl from South Africa, whom Waldeck was apparently dragging around the world and giving a good time. Carlitta was sitting stiffly, her thin hands caught together, and she never took her eyes off Alice Raines’s luxuriantly fleshed neck, as if it were some object of curiosity, quite independent of a human whole.

‘If only they’d seen how idiotic they looked, stumbling about,’ she said fiercely. Her eyes were extraordinarily dark, brimming with brightness. If her expression had not been one of malicious glee, Eileen would have said that there were tears in them.





After lunch, the Brands and the Raineses parted from the Hickses. Carlitta left the restaurant with Waldeck and Stefan on either arm, and that way she walked with them to the taxi stand at the end of the block, turning her small head from one to the other, tiny between them. ‘I just couldn’t keep her away from her two boyfriends today,’ Edgar said indulgently, walking behind with Eileen and Alice. At this point the thin, middle-aged woman between the two men dropped their arms, bowed down, apparently with laughter at some joke, in the extravagant fashion of a young girl, and then caught them to her again.

Edgar and Carlitta got into a taxi, and the others went in Stefan’s car back to his apartment. It was three o’clock in the afternoon, but Stefan brought in a bottle of champagne. The weak sunlight coming in the windows matched the wine. ‘Carlitta,’ said Stefan before he drank. ‘Still “terrific”. Beautiful.’ Eileen Brand, sitting on a yellow sofa, felt vaguely unhappy, as if she had wandered into the wrong room, the wrong year. She even shook her head sadly, so slowly that no one noticed.

‘I told you, same old Carlitta,’ said Waldeck. There was a silence. ‘And that husband,’ Waldeck went on. ‘The life they lead. So unlike Carlitta.’

‘And because of that, so like her,’ said Stefan. ‘She always chose the perverse, the impossible. She obviously adores him. Just like Carlitta.’

Eileen Brand wanted to stand up and beg of the two men, for their own sake – no, to save her, Eileen, from shame (oh, how could she know her reasons!) – see she is changed; see Carlitta is old, faded, exists, as Carlitta, no more!

She had stood up without knowing it. ‘What’s the matter, Eileen?’ Waldeck looked up. As she opened her mouth to tell him, to tell them both, a strange thing happened. It seemed that her whole mind turned over and showed her the truth. And the truth was much worse than what she had wanted to tell them. For they were right. Carlitta had not changed. They were right, but not in the way they thought. Carlitta had not changed at all, and that was why there was a sense of horror about meeting her; that was why she was totally unlike any one of the other friends they had met. Under that faded face, in that worn body, was the little German girl of the twenties, arrogant in a youth that did not exist, confidently disdainful in the possession of a beauty that was no longer there.

And what did she think of Ohio? Of good Edgar Hicks? Even of the boy who raised chickens and didn’t look at television?

‘Nothing,’ said Eileen. ‘I’d like a little more wine.’





It so happened that a day or two later, Stefan’s business took him to Philadelphia. ‘Don’t forget Carlitta and her husband are staying at the Grand Park,’ Waldeck said.

‘Oh, I’ll find them,’ said Stefan.

But when he came back to New York and dined with his wife, Waldeck and Eileen the same night, he seemed entirely to have forgotten his expressed intention. ‘I had a hell of a job dodging that Edgar Hicks,’ he said, by the way. ‘Wherever I went I seemed to bump into that Elk convention. They were everywhere. Every time I saw a panama hat with a paisley band I had to double on my tracks and go the other way. Once he nearly saw me. I just managed to squeeze into an elevator in time.’

And they all laughed, as if they had just managed it, too.





Which New Era Would That Be?


Jake Alexander, a big, fat coloured man, half Scottish, half

African, was shaking a large pan of frying bacon on the gas stove in the back room of his Johannesburg printing shop when he became aware that someone was knocking on the door at the front of the shop. The sizzling fat and the voices of the five men in the back room with him almost blocked out sounds from without, and the knocking was of the steady kind that might have been going on for quite a few minutes. He lifted the pan off the flame with one hand and with the other made an impatient silencing gesture, directed at the bacon as well as the voices. Interpreting the movement as one of caution, the men hurriedly picked up the tumblers and cups in which they had been taking their end-of-the-day brandy at their ease, and tossed the last of it down. Little yellow Klaas, whose hair was like ginger-coloured wire wool, stacked the cups and glasses swiftly and hid them behind the dirty curtain that covered a row of shelves.

‘Who’s that?’ yelled Jake, wiping his greasy hands down his pants.

There was a sharp and playful tattoo, followed by an English voice: ‘Me – Alister. For heaven’s sake, Jake!’

The fat man put the pan back on the flame and tramped through the dark shop, past the idle presses, to the door, and flung it open. ‘Mr Halford!’ he said. ‘Well, good to see you. Come in, man. In the back there, you can’t hear a thing.’ A young Englishman with gentle eyes, a stern mouth and flat, colourless hair, which grew in an untidy, confused spiral from a double crown, stepped back to allow a young woman to enter ahead of him. Before he could introduce her, she held out her hand to Jake, smiling, and shook his firmly. ‘Good evening. Jennifer Tetzel,’ she said.

‘Jennifer, this is Jake Alexander,’ the young man managed to get in, over her shoulder.

The two had entered the building from the street through an archway lettered NEW ERA BUILDING. ‘Which new era would that be?’ the young woman had wondered aloud, brightly, while they were waiting in the dim hallway for the door to be opened, and Alister Halford had not known whether the reference was to the discovery of deep-level gold mining that had saved Johannesburg from the ephemeral fate of a mining camp in the nineties, or to the optimism after the settlement of labour troubles in the twenties, or to the recovery after the world went off the gold standard in the thirties – really, one had no idea of the age of these buildings in this run-down end of the town. Now, coming in out of the deserted hallway gloom, which smelled of dust and rotting wood – the smell of waiting – they were met by the live, cold tang of ink and the homely, lazy odour of bacon fat – the smell of acceptance. There was not much light in the deserted workshop. The host blundered to the wall and switched on a bright naked bulb, up in the ceiling. The three stood blinking at one another for a moment: a coloured man with the fat of the man of the world upon him, grossly dressed – not out of poverty but obviously because he liked it that way – in a rayon sports shirt that gaped and showed two hairy stomach rolls hiding his navel in a lipless grin, the pants of a good suit, misbuttoned and held up round the waist by a tie instead of a belt, and a pair of expensive sports shoes, worn without socks; a young Englishman in a worn greenish tweed suit with a neo-Edwardian cut to the waistcoat that labelled it a leftover from undergraduate days; a handsome white woman who, as the light fell upon her, was immediately recognisable to Jake Alexander.

He had never met her before, but he knew the type well – had seen it over and over again at meetings of the Congress of Democrats, and other organisations where progressive whites met progressive blacks. These were the white women who, Jake knew, persisted in regarding themselves as your equal. That was even worse, he thought, than the parsons who persisted in regarding you as their equal. The parsons had had ten years at school and seven years at a university and theological school; you had carried sacks of vegetables from the market to white people’s cars from the time you were eight years old until you were apprenticed to a printer, and your first woman, like your mother, had been a servant, whom you had visited in a backyard room, and your first gulp of whisky, like many of your other pleasures, had been stolen while a white man was not looking. Yet the good parson insisted that your picture of life was exactly the same as his own: you felt as he did. But these women – oh, Christ! – these women felt as you did. They were sure of it. They thought they understood the humiliation of the pureblooded black African walking the streets only by the permission of a pass written out by a white person, and the guilt and swagger of the coloured man light-faced enough to slink, fugitive from his own skin, into the preserves – the cinemas, bars, libraries that were marked EUROPEANS ONLY. Yes, breathless with stout sensitivity, they insisted on walking the whole teeter-totter of the colour line. There was no escaping their understanding. They even insisted on feeling the resentment you must feel at their identifying themselves with your feelings . . .

Here was the black hair of a determined woman (last year they wore it pulled tightly back into an oddly perched knot; this year it was cropped and curly as a lap dog’s), the round, bony brow unpow-dered in order to show off the tan, the red mouth, the unrouged cheeks, the big, lively, handsome eyes, dramatically painted, that would look into yours with such intelligent, eager honesty – eager to mirror what Jake Alexander, a big, fat slob of a coloured man interested in women, money, brandy and boxing, was feeling. Who the hell wants a woman to look at you honestly, anyway? What has all this to do with a woman – with what men and women have for each other in their eyes? She was wearing a wide black skirt, a white cotton blouse baring a good deal of her breasts, and earrings that seemed to have been made by a blacksmith out of bits of scrap iron. On her feet she had sandals whose narrow thongs wound between her toes, and the nails of the toes were painted plum colour. By contrast, her hands were neglected-looking – sallow, unmanicured – and on one thin finger there swivelled a huge gold seal ring. She was beautiful, he supposed with disgust.

He stood there, fat, greasy, and grinning at the two visitors so lingeringly that his grin looked insolent. Finally he asked, ‘What brings you this end of town, Mr Halford? Sightseeing with the lady?’

The young Englishman gave Jake’s arm a squeeze, where the short sleeve of the rayon shirt ended. ‘Just thought I’d look you up, Jake,’ he said, jolly.

‘Come on in, come on in,’ said Jake on a rising note, shambling ahead of them into the company of the back room. ‘Here, what about a chair for the lady?’ He swept a pile of handbills from the seat of a kitchen chair on to the dusty concrete floor, picked up the chair, and plonked it down again, in the middle of the group of men, who had risen awkwardly, like zoo bears to the hope of a bun, at the visitors’ entrance. ‘You know Maxie Ndube? And Temba?’ Jake said, nodding at two of the men who surrounded him.

Alister Halford murmured with polite warmth his recognition of Maxie, a small, dainty-faced African in neat, businessman’s dress, then said inquiringly and hesitantly to Temba, ‘Have we? When?’

Temba was a coloured man – a mixture of the bloods of black slaves and white masters, blended long ago, in the days when the Cape of Good Hope was a port of refreshment for the Dutch East India Company. He was tall and pale, with a large Adam’s apple, enormous black eyes, and the look of a musician in a jazz band; you could picture a trumpet lifted to the ceiling in those long yellow hands, that curved spine hunched forward to shield a low note. ‘In Durban last year, Mr Halford, you remember?’ he said eagerly. ‘I’m sure we met – or perhaps I only saw you there.’

‘Oh, at the Congress? Of course I remember you!’ Halford apologised. ‘You were in a delegation from the Cape?’

‘Miss—?’ Jake Alexander waved a hand between the young woman, Maxie and Temba.

‘Jennifer. Jennifer Tetzel,’ she said again clearly, thrusting out her hand. There was a confused moment when both men reached for it at once and then hesitated, each giving way to the other. Finally the handshaking was accomplished, and the young woman seated herself confidently on the chair.

Jake continued, offhand, ‘Oh, and of course Billy Boy—’ Alister signalled briefly to a black man with sad, bloodshot eyes, who stood awkwardly, back a few steps, against some rolls of paper – ‘and Klaas and Albert.’ Klaas and Albert had in their mixed blood some strain of the Bushman, which gave them a batrachian yellowness and toughness, like one of those toads that (prehistoric as the Bushman is) are mythically believed to have survived into modern times (hardly more fantastically than the Bushman himself has survived) by spending centuries shut up in an air bubble in a rock. Like Billy Boy, Klaas and Albert had backed away, and, as if abasement against the rolls of paper, the wall or the window were a greeting in itself, the two little coloured men and the big African only stared back at the masculine nods of Alister and the bright smile of the young woman.

‘You up from the Cape for anything special now?’ Alister said to Temba as he made a place for himself on a corner of a table that was littered with photographic blocks, bits of type, poster proofs, a bottle of souring milk, a bow tie, a pair of red braces and a number of empty Coca-Cola bottles.

‘I’ve been living in Durban for a year. Just got the chance of a lift to Jo’burg,’ said the gangling Temba.

Jake had set himself up easily, leaning against the front of the stove and facing Miss Jennifer Tetzel on her chair. He jerked his head towards Temba and said, ‘Real banana boy.’ Young white men brought up in the strong Anglo-Saxon tradition of the province of Natal are often referred to, and refer to themselves, as ‘banana boys’, even though fewer and fewer of them have any connection with the dwindling number of vast banana estates that once made their owners rich. Jake’s broad face, where the bright pink cheeks of a Highland complexion – inherited, along with his name, from his Scottish father – showed oddly through his coarse, coffee-coloured skin, creased up in appreciation of his own joke. And Temba threw back his head and laughed, his Adam’s apple bobbing, at the idea of himself as a cricket-playing white public-school boy.

‘There’s nothing like Cape Town, is there?’ said the young woman to him, her head charmingly on one side, as if this conviction was something she and he shared.

‘Miss Tetzel’s up here to look us over. She’s from Cape Town,’ Alister explained.

She turned to Temba with her beauty, her strong provocativeness, full on, as it were. ‘So we’re neighbours?’

Jake rolled one foot comfortably over the other and a spluttering laugh pursed out the pink inner membrane of his lips.

‘Where did you live?’ she went on, to Temba.

‘Cape Flats,’ he said. Cape Flats is a desolate coloured slum in the bush outside Cape Town.

‘Me, too,’ said the girl, casually.

Temba said politely, ‘You’re kidding,’ and then looked down uncomfortably at his hands, as if they had been guilty of some clumsy movement. He had not meant to sound so familiar; the words were not the right ones.

‘I’ve been there nearly ten months,’ she said.

‘Well, some people’ve got queer tastes,’ Jake remarked, laughing, to no one in particular, as if she were not there.

‘How’s that?’ Temba was asking her shyly, respectfully.

She mentioned the name of a social rehabilitation scheme that was in operation in the slum. ‘I’m assistant director of the thing at the moment. It’s connected with the sort of work I do at the university, you see, so they’ve given me fifteen months’ leave from my usual job.’

Maxie noticed with amusement the way she used the word ‘job’, as if she were a plumber’s mate; he and his educated African friends – journalists and schoolteachers – were careful to talk only of their ‘professions’. ‘Good works,’ he said, smiling quietly.

She planted her feet comfortably before her, wriggling on the hard chair, and said to Temba with mannish frankness, ‘It’s a ghastly place. How in God’s name did you survive living there? I don’t think I can last out more than another few months, and I’ve always got my flat in Cape Town to escape to on Sundays, and so on.’

While Temba smiled, turning his protruding eyes aside slowly, Jake looked straight at her and said, ‘Then why do you, lady, why do you?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Because I don’t see why anyone else – any one of the people who live there – should have to, I suppose.’ She laughed before anyone else could at the feebleness, the philanthropic uselessness of what she was saying. ‘Guilt, what-have-you . . .’

Maxie shrugged, as if at the mention of some expensive illness, which he had never been able to afford and whose symptoms he could not imagine.

There was a moment of silence; the two coloured men and the big black man standing back against the wall watched anxiously, as if some sort of signal might be expected, possibly from Jake Alexander, their boss, the man who, like themselves, was not white, yet who owned his own business, and had a car, and money, and strange friends – sometimes even white people, such as these. The three of them were dressed in the ill-matched cast-off clothing that all humble workpeople who are not white wear in Johannesburg, and they had not lost the ability of primitives and children to stare, unembarrassed and unembarrassing.

Jake winked at Alister; it was one of his mannerisms – a bookie’s wink, a stage comedian’s wink. ‘Well, how’s it going, boy, how’s it going?’ he said. His turn of phrase was bar-room bonhomie; with luck, he could get into a bar, too. With a hat to cover his hair, and his coat collar well up, and only a bit of greasy pink cheek showing, he had slipped into the bars of the shabbier Johannesburg hotels with Alister many times and got away with it. Alister, on the other hand, had got away with the same sort of thing narrowly several times, too, when he had accompanied Jake to a shebeen in a coloured location, where it was illegal for a white man to be, as well as illegal for anyone at all to have a drink; twice Alister had escaped a raid by jumping out of a window. Alister had been in South Africa only eighteen months, as correspondent for a newspaper in England, and because he was only two or three years away from undergraduate escapades, such incidents seemed to give him a kind of nostalgic pleasure; he found them funny. Jake, for his part, had decided long ago (with the great help of the money he had made) that he would take the whole business of the colour bar as humorous. The combination of these two attitudes, stemming from such immeasurably different circumstances, had the effect of making their friendship less self-conscious than is usual between a white man and a coloured one.

‘They tell me it’s going to be a good thing on Saturday night?’ said Alister, in the tone of questioning someone in the know. He was referring to a boxing match between two coloured heavyweights, one of whom was a protégé of Jake’s.

Jake grinned deprecatingly, like a fond mother. ‘Well, Pikkie’s a good boy,’ he said. ‘I tell you, it’ll be something to see.’ He danced about a little on his clumsy toes, in pantomime of the way a boxer nimbles himself, and collapsed against the stove, his belly shaking with laughter at his breathlessness.

‘Too much smoking, too many brandies, Jake,’ said Alister.

‘With me, it’s too many women, boy.’

‘We were just congratulating Jake,’ said Maxie in his soft, precise voice, the indulgent, tongue-in-cheek tone of the protégé who is superior to his patron, for Maxie was one of Jake’s boys, too – of a different kind. Though Jake had decided that for him being on the wrong side of a colour bar was ludicrous, he was as indulgent to those who took it seriously and politically, the way Maxie did, as he was to any up-and-coming youngster who, say, showed talent in the ring or wanted to go to America and become a singer. They could all make themselves free of Jake’s pocket, and his printing shop, and his room with a radio in the lower end of the town, where the building had fallen below the standard of white people but was far superior to the kind of thing most coloureds and blacks were accustomed to.

‘Congratulations on what?’ the young white woman asked. She had a way of looking up around her, questioningly, from face to face, that came of long familiarity with being the centre of attention at parties.

‘Yes, you can shake my hand, boy,’ said Jake to Alister. ‘I didn’t see it, but these fellows tell me that my divorce went through. It’s in the papers today.’

‘Is that so? But from what I hear, you won’t be a free man long,’ Alister said teasingly.

Jake giggled, and pressed at one gold-filled tooth with a strong fingernail. ‘You heard about the little parcel I’m expecting from Zululand?’ he asked.

‘Zululand?’ said Alister. ‘I thought your Lila came from Stellenbosch.’

Maxie and Temba laughed.

‘Lila? What Lila?’ said Jake with exaggerated innocence.

‘You’re behind the times,’ said Maxie to Alister.

‘You know I like them – well, sort of round,’ said Jake. ‘Don’t care for the thin kind, in the long run.’

‘But Lila had red hair!’ Alister goaded him. He remembered the incongruously dyed, artificially straightened hair on a fine coloured girl whose nostrils dilated in the manner of certain fleshy water plants seeking prey.

Jennifer Tetzel got up and turned the gas off on the stove, behind Jake. ‘That bacon’ll be like charred string,’ she said.

Jake did not move – merely looked at her lazily. ‘This is not the way to talk with a lady around.’ He grinned, unapologetic.

She smiled at him and sat down, shaking her earrings. ‘Oh, I’m divorced myself. Are we keeping you people from your supper? Do go ahead and eat. Don’t bother about us.’

Jake turned around, gave the shrunken rashers a mild shake, and put the pan aside. ‘Hell, no,’ he said. ‘Any time. But—’ turning to Alister – ‘won’t you have something to eat?’ He looked about, helpless and unconcerned, as if to indicate an absence of plates and a general careless lack of equipment such as white women would be accustomed to use when they ate. Alister said quickly, no, he had promised to take Jennifer to Moorjee’s.

Of course, Jake should have known; a woman like that would want to be taken to eat at an Indian place in Vrededorp, even though she was white, and free to eat at the best hotel in town. He felt suddenly, after all, the old gulf opening between himself and Alister: what did they see in such women – bristling, sharp, all-seeing, knowing women, who talked like men, who wanted to show all the time that, apart from sex, they were exactly the same as men? He looked at Jennifer and her clothes, and thought of the way a white woman could look: one of those big, soft, European women with curly yellow hair, with very high-heeled shoes that made them shake softly when they walked, with a strong scent, like hot flowers, coming up, it seemed, from their jutting breasts under the lace and pink and blue and all the other pretty things they wore – women with nothing resistant about them except, buried in white, boneless fingers, those red, pointed nails that scratched faintly at your palms.

‘You should have been along with me at lunch today,’ said Maxie to no one in particular. Or perhaps the soft voice, a vocal tiptoe, was aimed at Alister, who was familiar with Maxie’s work as an organiser of African trade unions. The group in the room gave him their attention (Temba with the little encouraging grunt of one who has already heard the story), but Maxie paused a moment, smiling ruefully at what he was about to tell. Then he said, ‘You know George Elson?’ Alister nodded. The man was a white lawyer who had been arrested twice for his participation in anti-discrimination movements.

‘Oh, George? I’ve worked with George often in Cape Town,’ put in Jennifer.

‘Well,’ continued Maxie, ‘George Elson and I went out to one of the industrial towns on the East Rand. We were interviewing the bosses, you see, not the men, and at the beginning it was all right, though once or twice the girls in the offices thought I was George’s driver – “Your boy can wait outside”.’ He laughed, showing small, perfect teeth; everything about him was finely made – his straight-fingered dark hands, the curved African nostrils of his small nose, his little ears, which grew close to the sides of his delicate head. The others were silent, but the young woman laughed, too.

‘We even got tea in one place,’ Maxie went on. ‘One of the girls came in with two cups and a tin mug. But old George took the mug.’

Jennifer Tetzel laughed again, knowingly.

‘Then, just about lunchtime, we came to this place I wanted to tell you about. Nice chap, the manager. Never blinked an eye at me, called me Mister. And after we’d talked, he said to George, “Why not come home with me for lunch?” So of course George said, “Thanks, but I’m with my friend here.” “Oh, that’s OK,” said the chap. “Bring him along.” Well, we go along to this house, and the chap disappears into the kitchen, and then he comes back and we sit in the lounge and have a beer, and then the servant comes along and says lunch is ready. Just as we’re walking into the dining room, the chap takes me by the arm and says, “I’ve had your lunch laid on a table on the stoep. You’ll find it’s all perfectly clean and nice, just what we’re having ourselves.” ’

‘Fantastic,’ murmured Alister.

Maxie smiled and shrugged, looking around at them all. ‘It’s true.’

‘After he’d asked you, and he’d sat having a drink with you?’ Jennifer said closely, biting in her lower lip, as if this were a problem to be solved psychologically.

‘Of course,’ said Maxie.

Jake was shaking with laughter, like some obscene Silenus. There was no sound out of him, but saliva gleamed on his lips, and his belly, at the level of Jennifer Tetzel’s eyes, was convulsed.

Temba said soberly, in the tone of one whose goodwill makes it difficult for him to believe in the unease of his situation, ‘I certainly find it worse here than at the Cape. I can’t remember, y’know, about buses. I keep getting put off European buses.’

Maxie pointed to Jake’s heaving belly. ‘Oh, I’ll tell you a better one than that,’ he said. ‘Something that happened in the office one day. Now, the trouble with me is, apparently, I don’t talk like a native.’ This time everyone laughed, except Maxie himself, who, with the instinct of a good raconteur, kept a polite, modest, straight face.

‘You know that’s true,’ interrupted the young white woman. ‘You have none of the usual softening of the vowels of most Africans. And you haven’t got an Afrikaans accent, as some Africans have, even if they get rid of the Bantu thing.’

‘Anyway, I’d had to phone a certain firm several times,’ Maxie went on, ‘and I’d got to know the voice of the girl at the other end, and she’d got to know mine. As a matter of fact, she must have liked the sound of me, because she was getting very friendly. We fooled about a bit, exchanged first names, like a couple of kids – hers was Peggy – and she said, eventually, “Aren’t you ever going to come to the office yourself?”’ Maxie paused a moment, and his tongue flicked at the side of his mouth in a brief, nervous gesture. When he spoke again, his voice was flat, like the voice of a man who is telling a joke and suddenly thinks that perhaps it is not such a good one after all. ‘So I told her I’d be in next day, about four. I walked in, sure enough, just as I said I would. She was a pretty girl, blonde, you know, with very tidy hair – I guessed she’d just combed it to be ready for me. She looked up and said “Yes?,” holding out her hand for the messenger’s book or parcel she thought I’d brought. I took her hand and shook it and said, “Well, here I am, on time – I’m Maxie – Maxie Ndube.” ’

‘What’d she do?’ asked Temba eagerly.

The interruption seemed to restore Maxie’s confidence in his story. He shrugged gaily. ‘She almost dropped my hand, and then she pumped it like a mad thing, and her neck and ears went so red I thought she’d burn up. Honestly, her ears were absolutely shining. She tried to pretend she’d known all along, but I could see she was terrified someone would come from the inner office and see her shaking hands with a native. So I took pity on her and went away. Didn’t even stay for my appointment with her boss. When I went back to keep the postponed appointment the next week, we pretended we’d never met.’

Temba was slapping his knee. ‘God, I’d have loved to see her face!’ he said.

Jake wiped away a tear from his fat cheek – his eyes were light blue, and produced tears easily when he laughed – and said, ‘That’ll teach you not to talk swanky, man. Why can’t you talk like the rest of us?’

‘Oh, I’ll watch out on the “missus” and “baas” stuff in future,’ said Maxie.

Jennifer Tetzel cut into their laughter with her cool, practical voice. ‘Poor little girl, she probably liked you awfully, Maxie, and was really disappointed. You mustn’t be too harsh on her. It’s hard to be punished for not being black.’

The moment was one of astonishment rather than irritation. Even Jake, who had been sure that there could be no possible situation between white and black he could not find amusing, only looked quickly from the young woman to Maxie, in a hiatus between anger, which he had given up long ago, and laughter, which suddenly failed him. On his face was admiration more than anything else – sheer, grudging admiration. This one was the best yet. This one was the coolest ever.

‘Is it?’ said Maxie to Jennifer, pulling in the corners of his mouth and regarding her from under slightly raised eyebrows. Jake watched. Oh, she’d have a hard time with Maxie. Maxie wouldn’t give up his suffering-tempered blackness so easily. You hadn’t much hope of knowing what Maxie was feeling at any given moment, because Maxie not only never let you know but made you guess wrong. But this one was the best yet.

She looked back at Maxie, opening her eyes very wide, twisting her sandalled foot on the swivel of its ankle, smiling. ‘Really, I assure you it is.’

Maxie bowed to her politely, giving way with a falling gesture of his hand.

Alister had slid from his perch on the crowded table, and now, prodding Jake playfully in the paunch, he said, ‘We have to get along.’

Jake scratched his ear and said again, ‘Sure you won’t have something to eat?’

Alister shook his head. ‘We had hoped you’d offer us a drink, but—’

Jake wheezed with laughter, but this time was sincerely concerned. ‘Well, to tell you the truth, when we heard the knocking, we just swallowed the last of the bottle off, in case it was someone it shouldn’t be. I haven’t a drop in the place till tomorrow. Sorry, chappie. Must apologise to you, lady, but we black men’ve got to drink in secret. If we’d’ve known it was you two . . .’

Maxie and Temba had risen. The two wizened coloured men, Klaas and Albert, and the sombre black Billy Boy shuffled helplessly, hanging about.

Alister said, ‘Next time, Jake, next time. We’ll give you fair warning and you can lay it on.’

Jennifer shook hands with Temba and Maxie, called ‘Goodbye! Goodbye!’ to the others, as if they were somehow out of earshot in that small room. From the door, she suddenly said to Maxie, ‘I feel I must tell you. About that other story – your first one, about the lunch. I don’t believe it. I’m sorry, but I honestly don’t. It’s too illogical to hold water.’

It was the final self-immolation by honest understanding. There was absolutely no limit to which that understanding would not go. Even if she could not believe Maxie, she must keep her determined good faith with him by confessing her disbelief. She would go to the length of calling him a liar to show by frankness how much she respected him – to insinuate, perhaps, that she was with him, even in the need to invent something about a white man that she, because she herself was white, could not believe. It was her last bid for Maxie.

The small, perfectly made man crossed his arms and smiled, watching her out. Maxie had no price.

Jake saw his guests out of the shop, and switched off the light after he had closed the door behind them. As he walked back through the dark, where his presses smelled metallic and cool, he heard, for a few moments, the clear voice of the white woman and the low, noncommittal English murmur of Alister, his friend, as they went out through the archway into the street.

He blinked a little as he came back to the light and the faces that confronted him in the back room. Klaas had taken the dirty glasses from behind the curtain and was holding them one by one under the tap in the sink. Billy Boy and Albert had come closer out of the shadows and were leaning their elbows on a roll of paper. Temba was sitting on the table, swinging his foot. Maxie had not moved, and stood just as he had, with his arms folded. No one spoke.

Jake began to whistle softly through the spaces between his front teeth, and he picked up the pan of bacon, looked at the twisted curls of meat, jellied now in cold white fat, and put it down again absently. He stood a moment, heavily, regarding them all, but no one responded. His eye encountered the chair that he had cleared for Jennifer Tetzel to sit on. Suddenly he kicked it, hard, so that it went flying on to its side. Then, rubbing his big hands together and bursting into loud whistling to accompany an impromptu series of dance steps, he said ‘Now, boys!’ and as they stirred, he plonked the pan down on the ring and turned the gas up till it roared beneath it.