Life Times Stories

The Smell of Death and Flowers


The party was an unusual one for Johannesburg. A young man called Derek Ross—out of sight behind the ‘bar’ at the moment—had white friends and black friends, Indian friends and friends of mixed blood, and sometimes he liked to invite them to his flat all at once. Most of them belonged to the minority that, through bohemianism, godliness, politics, or a particularly sharp sense of human dignity, did not care about the difference in one another’s skins. But there were always one or two – white ones – who came, like tourists, to see the sight, and to show that they did not care, and one or two black or brown or Indian ones who found themselves paralysed by the very ease with which the white guests accepted them.

One of the several groups that huddled to talk, like people sheltering beneath a cliff, on divans and hard borrowed chairs in the shadow of the dancers, was dominated by a man in a grey suit, Malcolm Barker. ‘Why not pay the fine and have done with it, then?’ he was saying.

The two people to whom he was talking were silent a moment, so that the haphazard noisiness of the room and the organised wail of the gramophone suddenly burst in irrelevantly upon the conversation. The pretty brunette said, in her quick, officious voice, ‘Well, it wouldn’t be the same for Jessica Malherbe. It’s not quite the same thing, you see . . .’ Her stiff, mascaraed lashes flickered an appeal – for confirmation, and for sympathy because of the impossibility of explaining – at a man whose gingerish whiskers and flattened, low-set ears made him look like an angry tomcat.

‘It’s a matter of principle,’ he said to Malcolm Barker.

‘Oh, quite, I see,’ Malcolm conceded. ‘For someone like this Malherbe woman, paying the fine’s one thing; sitting in prison for three weeks is another.’

The brunette rapidly crossed and then uncrossed her legs. ‘It’s not even quite that,’ she said. ‘Not the unpleasantness of being in prison. Not a sort of martyrdom on Jessica’s part. Just the principle.’ At that moment a black hand came out from the crush of dancers bumping round and pulled the woman to her feet; she went off, and as she danced she talked with staccato animation to her African partner, who kept his lids half lowered over his eyes while she followed his gentle shuffle. The ginger-whiskered man got up without a word and went swiftly through the dancers to the ‘bar’, a kitchen table covered with beer and gin bottles, at the other end of the small room.

‘Satyagraha,’ said Malcolm Barker, like the infidel pronouncing with satisfaction the holy word that the believers hesitate to defile.

A very large and plain African woman sitting next to him smiled at him hugely and eagerly out of shyness, not having the slightest idea what he had said.

He smiled back at her for a moment, as if to hypnotise the onrush of some frightening animal. Then, suddenly, he leaned over and asked in a special, loud, slow voice, ‘What do you do? Are you a teacher?’

Before the woman could answer, Malcolm Barker’s young sister-in-law, a girl who had been sitting silent, pink and cold as a porcelain figurine, on the window sill behind his back, leaned her hand for balance on his chair and said urgently, near his ear, ‘Has Jessica Malherbe really been in prison?’

‘Yes, in Port Elizabeth. And in Durban, they tell me. And now she’s one of the civil-disobedience people – defiance campaign leaders who’re going to walk into some native location forbidden to Europeans. Next Tuesday. So she’ll land herself in prison again. For Christ’s sake, Joyce, what are you drinking that stuff for? I’ve told you that punch is the cheapest muck possible—’

But the girl was not listening to him any longer. Balanced delicately on her rather full, long neck, her fragile-looking face with the eyes and the fine, short line of nose of a Marie Laurencin painting was looking across the room with the intensity peculiar to the blank-faced. Hers was an essentially two-dimensional prettiness: flat, dazzlingly pastel-coloured, as if the mask of make-up on the unlined skin were the face; if one had turned her around, one would scarcely have been surprised to discover canvas. All her life she had suffered from this impression she made of not being quite real.

‘She looks so nice,’ she said now, her eyes still fixed on some point near the door. ‘I mean she uses good perfume, and everything. You can’t imagine it.’

Her brother-in-law made as if to take the tumbler of alcohol out of the girl’s hand, impatiently, the way one might take a pair of scissors from a child, but, without looking at him or at her hands, she changed the glass from one hand to the other, out of his reach. ‘At least the brandy’s in a bottle with a recognisable label,’ he said peevishly. ‘I don’t know why you don’t stick to that.’

‘I wonder if she had to eat the same food as the others,’ said the girl.

‘You’ll feel like death tomorrow morning,’ he said, ‘and Madeline’ll blame me. You are an obstinate little devil.’

A tall, untidy young man, whose blond head outtopped all others like a tousled palm tree, approached with a slow, drunken smile and, with exaggerated courtesy, asked Joyce to dance. She unhurriedly drank down what was left in her glass, put the glass carefully on the window sill and went off with him, her narrow waist upright and correct in his long arm. Her brother-in-law followed her with his eyes, irritatedly, for a moment, then closed them suddenly, whether in boredom or in weariness one could not tell.

The young man was saying to the girl as they danced, ‘You haven’t left the side of your husband – or whatever he is – all night. What’s the idea?’

‘My brother-in-law,’ she said. ‘My sister couldn’t come because the child’s got a temperature.’

He squeezed her waist; it remained quite firm, like the crisp stem of a flower. ‘Do I know your sister?’ he asked. Every now and then his drunkenness came over him in a delightful swoon, so that his eyelids dropped heavily and he pretended that he was narrowing them shrewdly.

‘Maybe. Madeline McCoy – Madeline Barker now. She’s the painter. She’s the one who started that arts-and-crafts school for Africans.’

‘Oh, yes. Yes, I know,’ he said. Suddenly, he swung her away from him with one hand, executed a few loose-limbed steps around her, lost her in a collision with another couple, caught her to him again, and, with an affectionate squeeze, brought her up short against the barrier of people who were packed tight as a rugby scrum around the kitchen table, where the drinks were. He pushed her through the crowd to the table.

‘What d’you want, Roy, my boy?’ said a little, very black-faced African, gleaming up at them.

‘Barberton’ll do for me.’ The young man pressed a hand on the African’s head, grinning.

‘Ah, that stuff’s no good. Sugar-water. Let me give you a dash of Pineapple. Just like mother makes.’

For a moment, the girl wondered if any of the bottles really did contain Pineapple or Barberton, two infamous brews invented by African natives living in the segregated slums that are called locations. Pineapple, she knew, was made out of the fermented fruit and was supposed to be extraordinarily intoxicating; she had once read a newspaper report of a shebeen raid in which the Barberton still contained a lopped-off human foot – whether for additional flavour or the spice of witchcraft, it was not known.

But she was reassured at once. ‘Don’t worry,’ said a good-looking blonde, made up to look heavily suntanned, who was standing at the bar. ‘No shebeen ever produced anything much more poisonous than this gin-punch thing of Derek’s.’ The host was attending to the needs of his guests at the bar, and she waved at him a glass containing the mixture that the girl had been drinking over at the window.

‘Not gin. It’s arak – lovely,’ said Derek. ‘What’ll you have, Joyce?’

‘Joyce,’ said the gangling young man with whom she had been dancing. ‘Joyce. That’s a nice name for her. Now tell her mine.’

‘Roy Wilson. But you seem to know each other quite adequately without names,’ said Derek. ‘This is Joyce McCoy, Roy – and, Joyce, these are Matt Shabalala, Brenda Shotley, Mahinder Singh, Martin Mathlongo.’

They smiled at the girl: the shiny-faced African, on a level with her shoulder; the blonde woman with the caked powder cracking on her cheeks; the handsome, scholarly-looking Indian with the high, bald dome; the ugly light-coloured man, just light enough for freckles to show thickly on his fleshy face.

She said to her host, ‘I’ll have the same again, Derek. Your punch.’ And even before she had sipped the stuff, she felt a warmth expand and soften inside her, and she said the names over silently to herself – Matt Sha-ba-lala, Martin Math-longo, Ma-hinder Singh. Out of the corner of her eye, as she stood there, she could just see Jessica Malherbe, a short, plump white woman in an elegant black frock, her hair glossy, like a bird’s wing, as she turned her head under the light while she talked.

Then it happened, just when the girl was most ready for it, just when the time had come. The little African named Matt said, ‘This is Miss Joyce McCoy – Eddie Ntwala,’ and stood looking on with a smile while her hand went into the slim hand of a tall, light-skinned African with the tired, appraising, cynical eyes of a man who drinks too much in order to deaden the pain of his intelligence. She could tell from the way little Shabalala presented the man that he must be someone important and admired, a leader of some sort, whose every idiosyncrasy – the broken remains of handsome, smoke-darkened teeth when he smiled, the wrinkled tie hanging askew – bespoke to those who knew him his distinction in a thousand different situations. She smiled as if to say, ‘Of course, Eddie Ntwala himself, I knew it,’ and their hands parted and dropped.

The man did not seem to be looking at her – did not seem to be looking at the crowd or at Shabalala, either. There was a slight smile around his mouth, a public smile that would do for anybody. ‘Dance?’ he said, tapping her lightly on the shoulder. They turned to the floor together.

Eddie Ntwala danced well and unthinkingly, if without much variation. Joyce’s right hand was in his left, his right hand on the concavity of her back, just as if – well, just as if he were anyone else. And it was the first time – the first time in all her twenty-two years. Her head came just to the point of his lapel, and she could smell the faint odour of cigarette smoke in the cloth. When he turned his head and her head was in the path of his breath, there was the familiar smell of wine or brandy breathed down upon her by men at dances. He looked, of course, apart from his eyes – eyes that she had seen in other faces and wondered if she would ever be old enough to understand – exactly like any errand ‘boy’ or house ‘boy’. He had the same close-cut wool on his head, the same smooth brown skin, the same rather nice high cheekbones, the same broad-nostrilled small nose. Only, he had his arm around her and her hand in his and he was leading her through the conventional arabesques of polite dancing. She would not let herself formulate the words in her brain: I am dancing with a black man. But she allowed herself to question, with the careful detachment of scientific inquiry, quietly inside herself: ‘Do I feel anything? What do I feel?’ The man began to hum a snatch of the tune to which they were dancing, the way a person will do when he suddenly hears music out of some forgotten phase of his youth; while the hum reverberated through his chest, she slid her eyes almost painfully to the right, not moving her head, to see his very well-shaped hand – an almost feminine hand compared to the hands of most white men – dark brown against her own white one, the dark thumb and the pale one crossed, the dark fingers and the pale ones folded together. ‘Is this exactly how I always dance?’ she asked herself closely. ‘Do I always hold my back exactly like this, do I relax just this much, hold myself in reserve to just this degree?’

She found she was dancing as she always danced.

I feel nothing, she thought. I feel nothing.

And all at once a relief, a mild elation, took possession of her, so that she could begin to talk to the man with whom she was dancing. In any case, she was not a girl who had much small talk; she knew that at least half the young men who, attracted by her exceptional prettiness, flocked to ask her to dance at parties never asked her again because they could not stand her vast minutes of silence. But now she said in her flat, small voice the few things she could say – remarks about the music and the pleasantness of the rainy night outside. He smiled at her with bored tolerance, plainly not listening to what she said. Then he said, as if to compensate for his inattention, ‘You from England?’

She said, ‘Yes. But I’m not English. I’m South African, but I’ve spent the last five years in England. I’ve only been back in South Africa since December. I used to know Derek when I was a little girl,’ she added, feeling that she was obliged to explain her presence in what she suddenly felt was a group conscious of some distinction or privilege.

‘England,’ he said, smiling down past her rather than at her. ‘Never been so happy anywhere.’

‘London?’ she said.

He nodded. ‘Oh, I agree,’ she said. ‘I feel the same about it.’

‘No, you don’t, McCoy,’ he said very slowly, smiling at her now. ‘No, you don’t.’

She was silenced at what instantly seemed her temerity.

He said, as they danced around again, ‘The way you speak. Really English. Whites in SA can’t speak that way.’

For a moment, one of the old, blank, impassively pretty-faced silences threatened to settle upon her, but the second glass of arak punch broke through it, and, almost animated, she answered lightly, ‘Oh, I find I’m like a parrot. I pick up the accent of the people among whom I live in a matter of hours.’

He threw back his head and laughed, showing the gaps in his teeth. ‘How will you speak tomorrow, McCoy?’ he said, holding her back from him and shaking with laughter, his eyes swimming. ‘Oh, how will you speak tomorrow, I wonder?’

She said, immensely daring, though it came out in her usual small, unassertive feminine voice, a voice gently toned for the utterance of banal pleasantries, ‘Like you.’

‘Let’s have a drink,’ he said, as if he had known her a long time – as if she were someone like Jessica Malherbe. And he took her back to the bar, leading her by the hand; she walked with her hand loosely swinging in his, just as she had done with young men at country-club dances. ‘I promised to have one with Rajati,’ he was saying. ‘Where has he got to?’

‘Is that the one I met?’ said the girl. ‘The one with the high, bald head?’

‘An Indian?’ he said. ‘No, you mean Mahinder. This one’s his cousin, Jessica Malherbe’s husband.’

‘She’s married to an Indian?’ The girl stopped dead in the middle of the dancers. ‘Is she?’ The idea went through her like a thrill. She felt startled as if by a sudden piece of good news about someone who was important to her. Jessica Malherbe – the name, the idea – seemed to have been circling about her life since before she left England. Even there, she had read about her in the papers: the daughter of a humble Afrikaner farmer, who had disowned her in the name of a stern Calvinist God for her anti-nationalism and her radical views; a girl from a back-veld farm – such a farm as Joyce herself could remember seeing from a car window as a child – who had worked in a factory and educated herself and been sent by her trade union to study labour problems all over the world; a girl who negotiated with ministers of state; who, Joyce had learned that evening, had gone to prison for her principles. Jessica Malherbe, who was almost the first person the girl had met when she came in to the party this evening, and who turned out to look like any well-groomed English woman you might see in a London restaurant, wearing a pearl necklace and smelling of expensive perfume. An Indian! It was the final gesture. Magnificent. A world toppled with it – Jessica Malherbe’s father’s world. An Indian!

‘Old Rajati,’ Ntwala was saying. But they could not find him. The girl thought of the handsome, scholarly-looking Indian with the domed head, and suddenly she remembered that once, in Durban, she had talked across the counter of a shop with an Indian boy. She had been down in the Indian quarter with her sister, and they had entered a shop to buy a piece of silk. She had been the spokeswoman, and she had murmured across the counter to the boy and he had said, in a voice as low and gentle as her own, no, he was sorry, that length of silk was for a sari, and could not be cut. The boy had very beautiful, unseeing eyes, and it was as if they spoke to each other in a dream. The shop was small and deep-set. It smelled strongly of incense, the smell of the village church in which her grandfather had lain in state before his funeral, the scent of her mother’s garden on a summer night – the smell of death and flowers, compounded, as the incident itself came to be, of ugliness and beauty, of attraction and repulsion. For just after she and her sister had left the little shop, they had found themselves being followed by an unpleasant man, whose presence first made them uneasily hold tightly to their handbags but who later, when they entered a busy shop in an attempt to get rid of him, crowded up against them and made an obscene advance. He had had a vaguely Eurasian face, they believed, but they could not have said whether or not he was an Indian; in their disgust, he had scarcely seemed human to them at all.

She tried now, in the swarming noise of Derek’s room, to hear again in her head the voice of the boy saying the words she remembered so exactly: ‘No, I am sorry, that length of silk is for a sari, it cannot be cut.’ But the tingle of the alcohol that she had been feeling in her hands for quite a long time became a kind of sizzling singing in her ears, like the sound of bubbles rising in aerated water, and all that she could convey to herself was the curious finality of the phrase: can-not-be-cut, can-not-be-cut.

She danced the next dance with Derek. ‘You look sweet tonight, old thing,’ he said, putting wet lips to her ear. ‘Sweet.’

She said, ‘Derek, which is Rajati?’

He let go her waist. ‘Over there,’ he said, but in an instant he clutched her again and was whirling her around and she saw only Mahinder Singh and Martin Mathlongo, the big, freckled coloured man, and the back of some man’s dark neck with a businessman’s thick roll of fat above the collar.

‘Which?’ she said, but this time he gestured towards a group in which there were white men only, and so she gave up.

The dance was cut short with a sudden wailing screech as someone lifted the needle of the gramophone in the middle of the record, and it appeared that a man was about to speak. It turned out that it was to be a song and not a speech, for Martin Mathlongo, little Shabalala, two coloured women and a huge African woman with cork-soled green shoes grouped themselves with their arms hanging about one another’s necks. When the room had quietened down, they sang. They sang with extraordinary beauty, the men’s voices deep and tender, the women’s high and passionate. They sang in some Bantu language, and when the song was done, the girl asked Eddie Ntwala, next to whom she found herself standing, what they had been singing about. He said as simply as a peasant, as if he had never danced with her, exchanging sophisticated banter, ‘It’s about a young man who passes and sees a girl working in her father’s field.’

Roy Wilson giggled and gave him a comradely punch on the arm. ‘Eddie’s never seen a field in his life. Born and bred in Apex Location.’

Then Martin Mathlongo, with his spotted bow tie under his big, loose-mouthed, strong face, suddenly stood forward and began to sing ‘Ol’ Man River’. There was something insulting, defiant, yet shamefully supplicating in the way he sang the melodramatic, servile words, the way he kneeled and put out his big hands with their upturned pinkish palms. The dark faces in the room watched him, grinning as if at the antics of a monkey. The white faces looked drunk and withdrawn.

Joyce McCoy saw that, for the first time since she had been introduced to her that evening, she was near Jessica Malherbe. The girl was feeling a strong distress at the sight of the coloured man singing the blackface song, and when she saw Jessica Malherbe, she put – with a look, as it were – all this burden at the woman’s feet. She put it all upon her, as if she could make it right, for on the woman’s broad, neatly made-up face there was neither the sullen embarrassment of the other white faces nor the leering self-laceration of the black.

The girl felt the way she usually felt when she was about to cry, but this time it was the prelude to something different. She made her way with difficulty, for her legs were the drunkest part of her, murmuring politely, ‘Excuse me,’ as she had been taught to do for twenty-two years, past all the people who stood, in their liquor daze, stolid as cows in a stream. She went up to the trade-union leader, the veteran of political imprisonment, the glossy-haired woman who used good perfume. ‘Miss Malherbe,’ she said, and her blank, exquisite face might have been requesting an invitation to a garden party. ‘Please, Miss Malherbe, I want to go with you next week. I want to march into the location.’





Next day, when Joyce was sober, she still wanted to go. As her brother-in-law had predicted, she felt sick from Derek’s punch, and every time she inclined her head, a great, heavy ball seemed to roll slowly from one side to the other inside her skull. The presence of this ball, which sometimes felt as if it were her brain itself, shrunken and hardened, rattling like a dried nut in its shell, made it difficult to concentrate, yet the thought that she would march into the location the following week was perfectly clear. As a matter of fact, it was almost obsessively clear.

She went to see Miss Malherbe at the headquarters of the Civil Disobedience Campaign, in order to say again what she had said the night before. Miss Malherbe did again just what she had done the night before – listened politely, was interested and sympathetic, thanked the girl, and then gently explained that the movement could not allow anyone but bona-fide members to take part in such actions. ‘Then I’ll become a member now,’ said Joyce. She wore today a linen dress as pale as her own skin, and on the square of bare, matching flesh at her neck hung a little necklace of small pearls – the sort of necklace that is given to a girl child and added to, pearl by pearl, a new one on every birthday. Well, said Miss Malherbe, she could join the movement, by all means – and would not that be enough? Her support would be much appreciated. But no, Joyce wanted to do something; she wanted to march with the others into the location. And before she left the office, she was formally enrolled.

When she had been a member for two days, she went to the headquarters to see Jessica Malherbe again. This time, there were other people present; they smiled at her when she came in, as if they already had heard about her. Miss Malherbe explained to her the gravity of what she wanted to do. Did she realise that she might have to go to prison? Did she understand that it was the policy of the passive resisters to serve their prison sentences rather than to pay fines? Even if she did not mind for herself, what about her parents, her relatives? The girl said that she was over twenty-one; her only parent, her mother, was in England; she was responsible to no one.

She told her sister Madeline and her brother-in-law nothing. When Tuesday morning came, it was damp and cool. Joyce dressed with the consciousness of the performance of the ordinary that marks extraordinary days. Her stomach felt hollow; her hands were cold. She rode into town with her brother-in-law, and all the way his car popped the fallen jacaranda flowers, which were as thick on the street beneath the tyres as they were on the trees. After lunch, she took a tram to Fordsburg, a quarter where Indians and people of mixed blood, debarred from living anywhere better, lived alongside poor whites, and where, it had been decided, the defiers were to foregather. She had never been to this part of Johannesburg before, and she had the address of the house to which she was to go written in her tartan-silk-covered notebook in her minute, backward-sloping hand. She carried her white angora jacket over her arm and she had put on sensible flat sandals. I don’t know why I keep thinking of this as if it were a lengthy expedition, requiring some sort of special equipment, she thought; actually it’ll be all over in half an hour. Jessica Malherbe said we’d pay bail and be back in town by 4.30.

The girl sat in the tram and did not look at the other passengers, and they did not look at her, although the contrast between her and them was startling. They were thin, yellow-limbed children with enormous sooty eyes; bleary-eyed, shuffling men, whom degeneracy had enfeebled into an appearance of indeterminate old age; heavy women with swollen legs, who were carrying newspaper parcels; young, almost white factory girls whose dull, kinky hair was pinned up into a decent simulation of fashionable style, and on whose proud, pert faces rouge and lipstick had drawn a white girl’s face. Sitting among them, Joyce looked – quite apart from the social difference apparent in her clothes – so different, so other, that there were only two possible things to think about her, and which one thought depended upon one’s attitude: either she was a kind of fairy – ideal, exquisite, an Ariel among Calibans – or she was something too tender, something unfinished, and beautiful only in the way the skin of the unborn lamb, taken from the belly of the mother, is beautiful, because it is a thing as yet unready for this world.

She got off at the stop she had been told to and went slowly up the street, watching the numbers. It was difficult to find out how far she would have to walk, or even, for the first few minutes, whether she was walking in the right direction, because the numbers on the doorways were half-obliterated, or ill-painted, or sometimes missing entirely. As in most poor quarters, houses and stores were mixed, and, in fact, some houses were being used as business premises, and some stores had rooms above, in which, obviously, the storekeepers and their families lived. The street had a flower name, but there were no trees and no gardens. Most of the shops had Indian firm names amateurishly written on homemade wooden signboards or curlicued and flourished in signwriter’s yellow and red across the lintel: Moonsammy Dadoo, Hardware, Ladies Smart Outfitting & General; K. P. Patel & Sons, Fruit Merchants; Vallabhir’s Bargain Store. A shoemaker had enclosed the veranda of his small house as a workshop, and had hung outside a huge black tin shoe, of a style worn in the twenties.

The gutters smelled of rotting fruit. Thin café-au-lait children trailed smaller brothers and sisters; on the veranda of one of the little semi-detached houses a lean light-coloured man in shirtsleeves was shouting, in Afrikaans, at a fat woman who sat on the steps. An Indian woman in a sari and high-heeled European shoes was knocking at the door of the other half of the house. Farther on, a very small house, almost eclipsed by the tentacles of voracious-looking creepers, bore a polished brass plate with the name and consulting hours of a well-known Indian doctor.

The street was quiet enough; it had the dead, listless air of all places where people are making some sort of living in a small way. And so Joyce started when a sudden shriek of drunken laughter came from behind a rusty corrugated-iron wall that seemed to enclose a yard. Outside the wall, someone was sitting on a patch of the tough, gritty grass that sometimes scrabbles a hold for itself on worn city pavements; as the girl passed, she saw that the person was one of the white women tramps whom she occasionally saw in the city crossing a street with the peculiar glassy purposefulness of the outcast.

She felt neither pity nor distaste at the sight. It was as if, dating from this day, her involvement in action against social injustice had purged her of sentimentality; she did not have to avert her gaze. She looked quite calmly at the woman’s bare legs, which were tanned, with dirt and exposure, to the colour of leather. She felt only, in a detached way, a prim, angry sympathy for the young pale-brown girl who stood nursing a baby at the gate of the house just beyond, because she had to live next door to what was almost certainly a shebeen.

Then, ahead of her in the next block, she saw three cars parked outside a house and knew that that must be the place. She walked a little faster, but quite evenly, and when she reached it – no. 260, as she had been told – she found that it was a small house of purplish brick, with four steps leading from the pavement to the narrow veranda. A sword fern in a paraffin tin, painted green, stood on each side of the front door, which had been left ajar, as the front door sometimes is in a house where there is a party. She went up the steps firmly, over the dusty imprints of other feet, and, leaning into the doorway a little, knocked on the fancy glass panel of the upper part of the door. She found herself looking straight down a passage that had a worn flowered linoleum on the floor. The head of a small Indian girl – low forehead and great eyes – appeared in a curtained archway halfway down the passage and disappeared again instantly.

Joyce McCoy knocked again. She could hear voices, and, above all the others, the tone of protest in a woman’s voice.

A bald white man with thick glasses crossed the passage with quick, nervous steps and did not, she thought, see her. But he might have, because, prompted perhaps by his entry into the room from which the voices came, the pretty brunette woman with the efficient manner, whom the girl remembered from the party, appeared suddenly with her hand outstretched, and said enthusiastically, ‘Come in, my dear. Come inside. Such a racket in there! You could have been knocking all day.’

The girl saw that the woman wore flimsy sandals and no stockings, and that her toenails were painted like the toes of the languid girls in Vogue. The girl did not know why details such as these intrigued her so much, or seemed so remarkable. She smiled in greeting and followed the woman into the house.

Now she was really there; she heard her own footsteps taking her down the passage of a house in Fordsburg. There was a faintly spicy smell about the passage; on the wall she caught a glimpse of what appeared to be a photograph of an Indian girl in European bridal dress, the picture framed with fretted gold paper, like a cake frill. And then they were in a room where everyone smiled at her quickly but took no notice of her. Jessica Malherbe was there, in a blue linen suit, smoking a cigarette and saying something to the tall, tousle-headed Roy Wilson, who was writing down what she said. The bald man was talking low and earnestly to a slim woman who wore a man’s wrist watch and had the hands of a man. The tiny African, Shabalala, wearing a pair of spectacles with thin tortoiseshell rims, was ticking a pencilled list. Three or four others, black and white, sat talking. The room was as brisk with chatter as a birds’ cage.

Joyce lowered herself gingerly on to a dining-room chair whose legs were loose and swayed a little. And as she tried to conceal herself and sink into the composition of the room, she noticed a group sitting a little apart, near the windows, in the shadow of the heavy curtains, and, from the arresting sight of them, saw the whole room as it was beneath the overlay of people. The group was made up of an old Indian woman, and a slim Indian boy and another Indian child, who were obviously her grandchildren. The woman sat with her feet apart, so that her lap, under the voluminous swath-ings of her sari, was broad, and in one nostril a ruby twinkled. Her hands were little and beringed – a fat woman’s hands. Her forehead was low beneath the coarse black hair and the line of tinsel along the sari, and she looked out through the company of white men and women, Indian men in business suits, Africans in clerkly neatness, as if she were deaf or could not see. Yet when Joyce saw her eyes move, as cold and as lacking in interest as the eyes of a tortoise, and her foot stir, asserting an inert force of life, like the twitch in a muscle of some supine creature on a mudbank, the girl knew it was not deafness or blindness that kept the woman oblivious of the company but simply the knowledge that this house, this room, was her place. She was here before the visitors came; she would not move for them; she would be here when they had gone. And the children clung with their grandmother, knowing that she was the kind who could never be banished to the kitchen or some other backwater.

From the assertion of this silent group the girl became aware of the whole room (their room), of its furnishings: the hideous ‘suite’ upholstered in imitation velvet with a stamped design of triangles and sickles; the yellow varnished table with the pink silk mat and the brass vase of paper roses; the easy chairs with circular apertures in the arms where coloured glass ashtrays were balanced; the crudely coloured photographs; the barbola vase; the green ruched-silk cushions; the standard lamp with more platforms for more coloured glass ashtrays; the gilded plaster dog that stood at the door. An Indian went over and said something to the old woman with the proprietary, apologetic, irritated air of a son who wishes his mother would keep out of the way; as he turned his head, the girl saw something familiar in the angle and recognised him as the man the back of whose neck she had seen when she was trying to identify Jessica Malherbe’s husband at the party. Now he came over to her, a squat, pleasant man, with a great deal of that shiny black Indian hair making his head look too big for his body. He said, ‘My congratulations. My wife, Jessica, tells me you have insisted on identifying yourself with today’s defiance. Well, how do you feel about it?’

She smiled at him with great difficulty; she really did not know why it was so difficult. She said, ‘I’m sorry. We didn’t meet that night. Just your cousin – I believe it is? – Mr Singh.’ He was such a remarkably commonplace-looking Indian, Jessica Malherbe’s husband, but Jessica Malherbe’s husband after all – the man with the roll of fat at the back of his neck.

She said, ‘You don’t resemble Mr Singh in the least,’ feeling that it was herself she offended by the obvious thought behind the comparison, and not this fat, amiable middle-aged man, who needed only to be in his shirtsleeves to look like any well-to-do Indian merchant, or in a grubby white coat, and unshaven, to look like a fruit-and-vegetable hawker. He sat down beside her (she could see the head of the old woman just beyond his ear), and as he began to talk to her in his Cambridge-modulated voice, she began to notice something that she had not noticed before. It was curious, because surely it must have been there all the time; then again it might not have been – it might have been released by some movement of the group of the grandmother, the slender boy and the child, perhaps from their clothes – but quite suddenly she began to be aware of the odour of incense. Sweet and dry and smoky, like the odour of burning leaves – she began to smell it. Then she thought, it must be in the furniture, the curtains; the old woman burns it and it permeates the house and all the gewgaws from Birmingham, and Denver, Colorado, and American-occupied Japan. Then it did not remind her of burning leaves any longer. It was incense, strong and sweet. The smell of death and flowers. She remembered it with such immediacy that it came back literally, absolutely, the way a memory of words or vision never can.

‘Are you all right, Miss McCoy?’ said the kindly Indian, interrupting himself because he saw that she was not listening and that her pretty, pale, impassive face was so white and withdrawn that she looked as if she might faint.

She stood up with a start that was like an inarticulate apology and went quickly from the room. She ran down the passage and opened a door and closed it behind her, but the odour was there, too, stronger than ever, in somebody’s bedroom, where a big double bed had an orange silk cover. She leant with her back against the door, breathing it in and trembling with fear and with the terrible desire to be safe: to be safe from one of the kindly women who would come, any moment now, to see what was wrong; to be safe from the gathering up of her own nerve to face the journey in the car to the location, and the faces of her companions, who were not afraid, and the walk up the location street.

The very conventions of the life which, she felt, had insulated her in softness against the sharp, joyful brush of real life in action came up to save her now. If she was afraid, she was also polite. She had been polite so long that the colourless formula of good manners, which had stifled so much spontaneity in her, could also serve to stifle fear.

It would be so terribly rude simply to run away out of the house, and go home, now.

That was the thought that saved her – the code of a well-brought-up child at a party – and it came to her again and again, slowing down her thudding heart, uncurling her clenched hands. It would be terribly rude to run away now. She knew with distress, somewhere at the back of her mind, that this was the wrong reason for staying, but it worked. Her manners had been with her longer and were stronger than her fear. Slowly the room ceased to sing so loudly about her, the bedspread stopped dancing up and down before her eyes, and she went slowly over to the mirror in the door of the wardrobe and straightened the belt of her dress, not meeting her own eyes. Then she opened the door and went down the passage and back again into the room where the others were gathered, and sat down in the chair she had left. It was only then that she noticed that the others were standing – had risen, ready to go.

‘What about your jacket, my dear. Would you like to leave it?’ the pretty brunette said, noticing her.

Jessica Malherbe was on her way to the door. She smiled at Joyce and said, ‘I’d leave it, if I were you.’

‘Yes, I think so, thank you.’ She heard her own voice as if it were someone else’s.

Outside, there was the mild confusion of deciding who should go with whom and in which car. The girl found herself in the back of the car in which Jessica Malherbe sat beside the driver. The slim, mannish woman got in; little Shabalala got in but was summoned to another car by an urgently waving hand. He got out again, and then came back and jumped in just as they were off. He was the only one who seemed excited. He sat forward, with his hands on his knees. Smiling widely at the girl, he said, ‘Now we really are taking you for a ride, Miss McCoy.’

The cars drove through Fordsburg and skirted the city. Then they went out on one of the main roads that connect the gold-mining towns of the Witwatersrand with each other and with Johannesburg. They passed mine dumps, pale grey and yellow; clusters of neat, ugly houses, provided for white mineworkers; patches of veld, where the rain of the night before glittered thinly in low places; a brickfield; a foundry; a little poultry farm. And then they turned in to a muddy road, along which they followed a native bus that swayed under its load of passengers, exhaust pipe sputtering black smoke, canvas flaps over the windows wildly agitated. The bus thundered ahead through the location gates, but the three cars stopped outside. Jessica Malherbe got out first, and stood, pushing back the cuticles of the nails of her left hand as she talked in a businesslike fashion to Roy Wilson. ‘Of course, don’t give the statement to the papers unless they ask for it. It would be more interesting to see their version first, and come along with our own afterwards. But they may ask—’

‘There’s a press car,’ Shabalala said, hurrying up. ‘There.’

‘Looks like Brand, from the Post.’

‘Can’t be Dick Brand; he’s transferred to Bloemfontein,’ said the tall, mannish woman.

‘Come here, Miss McCoy, you’re the baby,’ said Shabalala, straightening his tie and twitching his shoulders, in case there was going to be a photograph. Obediently, the girl moved to the front.

But the press photographer waved his flashbulb in protest. ‘No, I want you walking.’

‘Well, you better get us before we enter the gates or you’ll find yourself arrested, too,’ said Jessica Malherbe, unconcerned. ‘Look at that,’ she added to the mannish woman, lifting her foot to show the heel of her white shoe, muddy already.

Lagersdorp Location, which they were entering and which Joyce McCoy had never seen before, was much like all such places. A high barbed-wire fence – more a symbol than a means of confinement, since, except for the part near the gates, it had comfortable gaps in many places – enclosed almost a square mile of dreary little dwellings, to which the African population of the nearby town came home to sleep at night. There were mean houses and squalid tin shelters and, near the gates where the administrative offices were, one or two decent cottages, which had been built by the white housing authorities ‘experimentally’ and never duplicated; they were occupied by the favourite African clerks of the white location superintendent. There were very few shops, since every licence granted to a native shop in a location takes business away from the white stores in the town, and there were a great many churches, some built of mud and tin, some neo-Gothic and built of brick, representing a great many sects.

They began to walk, the seven men and women, towards the location gates. Jessica Malherbe and Roy Wilson were a little ahead, and the girl found herself between Shabalala and the bald white man with thick glasses. The flashbulb made its brief sensation, and the two or three picannins who were playing with tin hoops on the roadside looked up, astonished. A fat native woman selling oranges and roast mealies shouted speculatively to a passer-by in ragged trousers.

At the gateway, a fat black policeman sat on a soapbox and gossiped. He raised his hand to his cap as they passed. In Joyce McCoy, the numbness that had followed her nervous crisis began to be replaced by a calm embarrassment; as a child she had often wondered, seeing a circle of Salvation Army people playing a hymn out of tune on a street corner, how it would feel to stand there with them. Now she felt she knew. Little Shabalala ran a finger around the inside of his collar, and the girl thought, with a start of warmth, that he was feeling as she was; she did not know that he was thinking what he had promised himself he would not think about during this walk – that very likely the walk would cost him his job. People did not want to employ Africans who ‘made trouble’. His wife, who was immensely proud of his education and his cleverness, had said nothing when she learnt that he was going – had only gone, with studied consciousness, about her cooking. But, after all, Shabalala, like the girl – though neither he nor she could know it – was also saved by convention. In his case, it was a bold convention – that he was an amusing little man. He said to her as they began to walk up the road, inside the gateway, ‘Feel the bump?’

‘I beg your pardon?’ she said, polite and conspiratorial.

A group of ragged children, their eyes alight with the tenacious beggarliness associated with the East rather than with Africa, were jumping and running around the white members of the party, which they thought was some committee come to judge a competition for the cleanest house, or a baby show. ‘Penny, missus, penny, penny, baas!’ they whined. Shabalala growled something at them playfully in their own language before he answered, with his delightful grin, wide as a slice of melon. ‘The bump over the colour bar.’

Apart from the children, who dropped away desultorily, like flying fish behind a boat, no one took much notice of the defiers. The African women, carrying on their heads food they had bought in town, or bundles of white people’s washing, scarcely looked at them. African men on bicycles rode past, preoccupied. But when the party came up parallel with the administration offices – built of red brick, and, along with the experimental cottages at the gate and the clinic next door, the only buildings of European standard in the location – a middle-aged white man in a suit worn shiny on the seat and the elbows (his slightly stooping body seemed to carry the shape of his office chair and desk) came out and stopped Jessica Malherbe. Obediently, the whole group stopped; there was an air of quiet obstinacy about them. The man, who was the location superintendent himself, evidently knew Jessica Malherbe, and was awkward with the necessity of making this an official and not a personal encounter. ‘You know that I must tell you it is prohibited for Europeans to enter Lagersdorp Location,’ he said. The girl noticed that he carried his glasses in his left hand, dangling by one earpiece, as if he had been waiting for the arrival of the party and had jumped up from his desk nervously at last.

Jessica Malherbe smiled, and there was in her smile something of the easy, informal amusement with which Afrikaners discount pomposity. ‘Mr Dougal, good afternoon. Yes, of course, we know you have to give us official warning. How far do you think we’ll get?’

The man’s face relaxed. He shrugged and said, ‘They’re waiting for you.’

And suddenly the girl, Joyce McCoy, felt this – the sense of something lying in wait for them. The neat, stereotyped faces of African clerks appeared at the windows of the administrative offices. As the party approached the clinic, the European doctor, in his white coat, looked out; two white nurses and an African nurse came out on to the veranda. And all the patient African women who were sitting about in the sun outside, suckling their babies and gossiping, sat silent while the party walked by – sat silent, and had in their eyes something of the look of the Indian grandmother, waiting at home in Fordsburg.

The party walked on up the street, and on either side, in the little houses, which had homemade verandas flanking the strip of worn, unpaved earth that was the pavement, or whose front doors opened straight out on to a foot or two of fenced garden, where hens ran and pumpkins had been put to ripen, doors were open, and men and women stood, their children gathered in around them, as if they sensed the approach of a storm. Yet the sun was hot on the heads of the party, walking slowly up the street. And they were silent, and the watchers were silent, or spoke to one another only in whispers, each bending his head to another’s ear but keeping his eyes on the group passing up the street. Someone laughed, but it was only a drunk – a wizened little old man – returning from some shebeen. And ahead, at the corner of a crossroad, stood the police car, a black car, with the aerial from its radio-communication equipment a shining lash against all the shabbiness of the street. The rear doors opened and two heavy, smartly dressed policemen got out and slammed the doors behind them. They approached the party slowly, not hurrying themselves. When they drew abreast, one said, as if in reflex, ‘Ah – good afternoon.’ But the other cut in, in an emotionless official voice, ‘You are all under arrest for illegal entry into Lagersdorp Location. If you’ll just give us your names . . .’

Joyce stood waiting her turn, and her heart beat slowly and evenly. She thought again, as she had once before – how long ago was that party? – I feel nothing. It’s all right. I feel nothing.

But as the policeman came to her, and she spelled out her name for him, she looked up and saw the faces of the African onlookers who stood nearest her. Two men, a small boy and a woman, dressed in ill-matched cast-offs of European clothing, which hung upon them without meaning, like coats spread on bushes, were looking at her. When she looked back, they met her gaze. And she felt, suddenly, not nothing but what they were feeling, at the sight of her, a white girl, taken – incomprehensibly, as they themselves were used to being taken – under the force of white men’s wills, which dispensed and withdrew life, which imprisoned and set free, fed or starved, like God himself.