She writes every week but he does not write every week in return. That would be too much like reciprocation. Only now and then does he reply, and his letters are brief, saying little except that, by the fact of their having been written, he must still be in the land of the living.
That is the worst of it. That is the trap she has built, a trap he has not yet found a way out of. If he were to cut all ties, if he were not to write at all, she would draw the worst conclusion, the worst possible; and the very thought of the grief that would pierce her at that moment makes him want to block his ears and eyes. As long as she is alive he dare not die. As long as she is alive, therefore, his life is not his own. He may not be reckless with it. Though he does not particularly love himself, he must, for her sake, take care of himself, to the point even of dressing warmly, eating the right food, taking vitamin C. As for suicide, of that there can be no question.
What news he gets about South Africa comes from the BBC and the Manchester Guardian. He reads the Guardian reports with dread. A farmer ties one of his workers to a tree and flogs him to death. Police fire at random into a crowd. A prisoner is found dead in his cell, hanging from a strip of blanket, his face bruised and bloody. Horror upon horror, atrocity upon atrocity, without relief.
He knows his mother’s opinions. She thinks South Africa is misunderstood by the world. Blacks in South Africa are better off than anywhere else in Africa. The strikes and protests are fomented by communist agitators. As for the farm labourers who are paid their wages in the form of mealie-meal and have to dress their children in jute bags against the winter cold, his mother concedes that that is a disgrace. But such things happen only in the Transvaal. It is the Afrikaners of the Transvaal, with their sullen hatreds and their hard hearts, who give the country such a bad name.
His own opinion, which he does not hesitate to communicate to her, is that, instead of making speech after speech at the United Nations, the Russians ought to invade South Africa without delay. They should land paratroops in Pretoria, take Verwoerd and his cronies captive, line them up against a wall, and shoot them.
What the Russians should do next, after shooting Verwoerd, he does not say, not having thought it out. Justice must be done, that is all that matters; the rest is politics, and he is not interested in politics. As far back as he can remember, Afrikaners have trampled on people because, they claim, they were once trampled upon. Well, let the wheel turn, let force be replied to with greater force. He is glad to be out of it.
South Africa is like an albatross around his neck. He wants it removed, he does not care how, so that he can begin to breathe.
He does not have to buy the Manchester Guardian. There are other, easier newspapers: The Times, for instance, or the Daily Telegraph. But the Manchester Guardian can be relied on not to miss anything from South Africa that will make the soul cringe within him. Reading the Manchester Guardian, he can at least be sure he knows the worst.
He has not contacted Astrid for weeks. Now she telephones. Her time in England is up, she is going home to Austria. ‘I guess I won’t see you again,’ she says, ‘so I called to say goodbye.’
She is trying to be matter-of-fact, but he can hear the tearfulness in her voice. Guiltily he proposes a meeting. They have coffee together; she comes back to his room and spends the night (‘our last night,’ she calls it), clinging to him, crying softly. Early the next morning (it is a Sunday) he hears her creep out of bed and tiptoe to the bathroom on the landing to get dressed. When she comes back he pretends to be asleep. He has only to give the slightest signal, he knows, and she will stay. If there are things he would prefer to do first, before paying attention to her, like reading the newspaper, she will sit quietly in a corner and wait. That seems to be how girls are taught to behave in Klagenfurt: to demand nothing, to wait until the man is ready, and then to serve him.
He would like to be nicer to Astrid, so young, so alone in the big city. He would like to dry her tears, make her smile; he would like to prove to her that his heart is not as hard as it seems, that he is capable of responding to her willingness with a willingness of his own, a willingness to cuddle her as she wants to be cuddled and give ear to her stories about her mother and brothers back home. But he must be careful. Too much warmth and she might cancel her ticket, stay in London, move in with him. Two of the defeated sheltering in each other’s arms, consoling each other: the prospect is too humiliating. They might as well get married, he and Astrid, then spend the rest of their lives looking after each other like invalids. So he gives no signal, but lies with his eyelids clenched till he hears the creak of the stairs and the click of the front door.
It is December, and the weather has turned bitter. Snow falls, the snow turns to slush, the slush freezes: on the sidewalks one has to pick one’s way from foothold to foothold like a mountaineer. A blanket of fog enfolds the city, fog thick with coal dust and sulphur. The electricity fails; trains stop running; old people freeze to death in their homes. The worst winter of the century, say the newspapers.
He tramps up Archway Road, slipping and sliding on the ice, holding a scarf over his face, trying not to breathe. His clothes smell of sulphur, there is a foul taste in his mouth, when he coughs he coughs up black phlegm. In South Africa it is summer. If he were there he could be on Strandfontein beach, running over mile after mile of white sand under a great blue sky.
During the night a pipe bursts in his room. The floor is flooded. He wakes up surrounded by a sheet of ice.
It is like the blitz all over again, say the newspapers. They print stories of soup kitchens for the homeless run by women’s auxiliaries, of repair crews toiling through the night. The crisis is bringing out the best in Londoners, they say, who confront adversity with quiet strength and a ready quip.
As for him, he may dress like a Londoner, tramp to work like a Londoner, suffer the cold like a Londoner, but he has no ready quips. Not in a month of Sundays would Londoners take him for the real thing. On the contrary, Londoners recognize him at once as another of those foreigners who for daft reasons of their own choose to live where they don’t belong.
How long will he have to live in England before it is allowed that he has become the real thing, become English? Will getting a British passport be enough, or does an odd-sounding foreign name mean he will be shut out for ever? And ‘becoming English’ — what does that mean anyhow? England is the home of two nations: he will have to choose between them, choose whether to be middle-class English or working-class English. Already he seems to have chosen. He wears the uniform of the middle class, reads a middle-class newspaper, imitates middle-class speech. But mere externals such as those are not going to be enough to get him admission, not by a long chalk. Admission to the middle class — full admission, not a temporary ticket valid for certain times of the day on certain days of the year — was decided, as far as he can tell, years ago, even generations ago, according to rules that will forever be dark to him.
As for the working class, he does not share its recreations, can barely understand its speech, has never felt the slightest motion of welcome from it. The girls at IBM have their own working-class boyfriends, are wrapped up in thoughts of marriage and babies and council houses, respond frostily to overtures. He may be living in England, but it is certainly not by invitation of the English working class.