Max’s first job was abandoned because they wouldn’t give him three days off to attend a Trades Union conference. Max had been reading politics as a major subject at the university, but there were great gaps in what he felt he ought to know; at the time he was concentrating on trying to give a small group of politically ambitious Africans some of the theoretical background in economics that they wanted. I forget what happened to the next job — oh yes, he got a typist to mimeograph some leaflet during office hours. And so it went on. The jobs came last in any consideration because they were of no importance. He took whatever he could get to do that would help to keep us going. He had no particular qualifications, anyway; he had been studying for an arts degree, which his parents had seen as a harmless alternative to commerce or accountancy, and that he had seen as freedom of mind. The nature of the degree didn’t matter much to them; he’d been expected to join one of his father’s companies on the accomplishment of it, that’s all.
Max was supposed to be going on working for his degree, at night, but at night there was less time than during the day, since the study groups and meetings were all held after working hours, and friends came for sessions of talk that used to last half the night. I went back to work when Bobo was five months old, and we had a nanny, Daphne, a tough, pretty, real Johannesburg nanny who looked after Max, when he was at home, as well as the baby. Once she and I both suspected in the same month that we were pregnant, and, without my bothering Max or her telling her boyfriend, we managed to mend our situation by promptly taking some pills exacted from my doctor with a warning that they wouldn’t work if we were.
I was possessed by the idea that Max must be able to go back to university full-time and finish his course. We wouldn’t live off the Van Den Sandts (we’d had to take help from them now and then — over Bobo’s birth, for example). I wanted to find some work I could do at night, in addition to my daytime job. We examined the possibilities; I couldn’t type. I said at last, ‘A cinema usherette. That’s about all. I wonder what they get paid.’
‘Why not? With a Soutine pageboy’s outfit and a torch.’ I could see that the idea really pleased him. He began to remark to people, as if I had already taken the job, ‘Liz’s going to be working in a cinema. Don’t think you’re seeing things.’ I was working for a private firm of pathologists, then, and instead of becoming an usherette I got the writing up of some research notes to do for one of the doctors. It paid better than working in a cinema would have done, and I was able to do it at home. But Max was often irritated by Dr Farber’s notes spread about in the cramped flat where there was not enough room for his own books and papers, and he seemed to lose interest in the purpose of my extra job. To work as an usherette in a cinema was perhaps the furthest point one could possibly get from any sort of activity that Mrs Van Den Sandt or beautiful Queenie could have imagined themselves engaged in. I deprived Max of an opportunity of reaching an ultimate in his distance from them, and a gratification of his longing to come close to other people in a bond of necessity. I was aware of that longing, but I didn’t always understand when I failed to further its fulfilment.
Although Max had been a member of a Communist cell at the university, he did not take a strictly Marxist line in his attempts to give Africans some background for the evolution of their own political thinking. And when the Communist Party began to function again, as an underground organization, although he was approached to become active under its discipline, he did not do so. He had been very young and unimportant during his brief experience in the Communist cell; maybe that had something to do with it — he didn’t see himself in that limited status, any more. After the Defiance Campaign, in which people of all sorts of political affiliation took part, he joined the new non-racial Liberal Party for a while, and then the Congress of Democrats. But the Africans themselves did not take the Liberal Party seriously; he saw himself set aside in a white group that Africans felt had the well-meaning presumption to speak for them. Even in the Congress of Democrats, a radical white organization (it provided a front for some important Communists) that did not confine itself to polite platform contacts at multi-racial conferences, he was restless. The COD people worked directly with African political movements, but had come into being mainly because, while identifying themselves with the African struggle, they understood as a matter of tactics that no African movement seeking mass support can afford to have white members.
I hadn’t joined the Liberal Party, but I worked in COD, not exactly with Max, but mostly on backroom stuff, printing propaganda for the African National Congress, and so on. You make curiously intense friendships when you work with the fear and excitement of police raids at your back. I believed in what I was doing and in the people I was doing it with. I certainly had enough courage to measure up to what was needed then — before Ninety Days — and I limited my activities only because of Bobo. Other people had children, too, of course, and they put their political work first, but then if Max and I were both to have been arrested there would have been literally no one to look after Bobo but Daphne, since even the thought of him being taken over by the Van Den Sandts or my parents constituted, for me, real abandonment.
I’m mincing words. After all these years, because Max is lying drowned. It’s like putting on a hat for a funeral, the old shabby convention that one must lie about people because they’re dead. The fact is, there was no one responsible for Bobo except myself. Max was unable to be aware of anyone’s needs but his own. My mother once called this inability ‘horrible selfishness’; whereas it was the irreversible training of his background that she had admired so much, and that she saw him as a crazy deviate from. Driven to school and home again by the chauffeur every day, and then shut out of the rooms where the grown-ups were at their meetings and parties, at the Van Den Sandts he was ministered to like a prince in a tower. Even poverty didn’t release him; and we were poor enough. He had the fanatic’s few needs, and expected that they should be answered. He bought a pair of shoes or books or brandy on credit and was arrogantly angry when we were asked to pay; or assumed that I would deal with the shops. Max simply did not know what it was to live with others; he knew all the rest of us as he knew Raskolnikov and Emma Bovary, Dr Copeland and Törless, shut up reading alone in his room on the farm. He would sit for hours analysing a man’s troubles and attitudes with good insight and a compound of curiosity and sympathy, but he would not notice that the man was exhausted; nor would he remember that the man had mentioned that he had to catch a train home at a certain time. He used to take Bobo off down to Fordsburg to be handed about among the adoring young daughters of a multiple Indian household, and then, eager to follow up an acquaintance he’d perhaps made the night before, he’d go on to some yard or house and dump Bobo with a set of faces or a pair of arms — anybody’s — the baby had never seen before. Once Fatima phoned me to say that the mother of a cartage contractor in Noordgesig, the Coloured township, had rung her up to get my number, because Bobo was yelling and she didn’t know what to offer him. Max had left with her son and Fatima’s brother; left Bobo as he used to drop a bicycle or toy for the servants to pick up from the Van Den Sandts’ lawn.