Spears was with us most of the time. He and Max were formulating his methodology of African socialism. Max saw it as a series of pamphlets that would become the handbook, anyway, if not the bible, of the African revolution. We must put it down, man. The phrase was at once the purpose Spears lived by and the net of catchwords in which he tried to collect purpose when he was drinking; you could laugh at him when he repeated it drunk, go ahead and laugh at the infirmity of him: but it was like the name of a God, that does not alter in its omnipotence whether used as a curse or a blessing. We must put it down, man. I heard it all the time. It was the beat in his voice spacing the political clichés, grammatical constructions translated from Xhosa and literal translations from Afrikaans, of his strong-flavoured English.
And yet he did not see ‘getting it down’ in quite the literal terms that Max did, that Max could not escape from. Max planned point by point, chapter by chapter (at one time he thought of writing the whole thing in the form of Platonic dialogues); but Spears’ thinking erupted in a lava that, cooled to the process of note-taking, was difficult to break down into its component dissertation and analysis. Max and Spears talked late into the nights and every day Max wrote and recast from notes and memory. That was the time I came home from work and found Max yelling back at screaming Bobo. He had been trying to work all afternoon against the baby’s noisy games and interruptions. Max’s face was a child’s mask of hysterical frustration: I took Bobo and walked in the streets with him, but there was nothing I could do for the face of Max.
For hours he stood planted, arguing in front of Spears, he couldn’t stay put, in a chair. Spears was intense but quite without Max’s tension; he could talk just as well sitting on the kitchen table while I fried sausages, or while Bobo climbed up and used his shoulders as a road for a toy car. He used to call me ‘Honey’ and once or twice, when he was only a little drunk, he cornered me in the kitchen, but I told him I didn’t like the smell of brandy, and he kneaded my hand regretfully and said, ‘Forget it, honey’; I think that most of his drive towards women had washed away in brandy, but the residue was an unspecified casual tenderness to which Bobo and I responded. And Max. Max most of all. There was Max standing urgently over him, protesting, arguing, pressing — it was not just the determination to get it all down that held Max there; he hovered irresistibly towards what could never be got down, what Spears didn’t need to get down because it was his — an identity with millions like him, an abundance chartered by the deprivation of all that Max had had heaped upon himself. Some of the white people I know want the blacks’ innocence; that innocence, even in corruption, of the status of victim; but not Max. And everyone knows those whites who want to be allowed to ‘love’ the blacks out of guilt; and those who want to be allowed to ‘love’ them as an aberration, a distinction. Max wasn’t any of these. He wanted to come close; and in this country the people — with all the huddled warmth of the phrase — are black. Set aside with whites, even his own chosen kind, he was still left out, he experienced the isolation of his childhood become the isolation of his colour.
I don’t know whether Max loved me. He wanted to make love with me, of course. And he wanted to please me — no, he wanted my approval, my admiration for whatever he did. These pass as definitions of love; I can think of others that are neither more nor less acceptable. This business of living for each other, that one hears about; it can just as well be living for the sight of one’s self in the other’s eyes. Something keeps two people together; that’s as far as I’d go. ‘Love’ was the name I was given for it, but I don’t know that it always fits my experience. Someone has given Bobo the name, too; didn’t he say, ‘I’m sorry I didn’t love him?’ What did he mean? Did he mean that he didn’t need his father? Or that he didn’t stop his father from dying?
I wanted to make love to Max, and I wanted to give him the approval he wanted, I wanted to please him. But it wasn’t a matter of watching your husband rising a notch in the salary scale. What I wanted was for him to do the right things so that I could love him. Was that love?
Max was wonderful in bed because there was destruction in him. Passion of a kind; demonic sex. I’ve had it with others, since. With every orgasm I used to come back with the thought: I could die like that. And of course that was exactly what it was, the annihilation, every time, of the silences and sulks, the disorder and frustration of the days. We moved four times in the first three years, each time in response to having reached another impossible situation — living in a one-room flat with a baby; working at home in a two-room flat with a baby; not being able to afford a larger flat on my salary; not being allowed to have Africans visit us in the building — and there was never time or money to make each place more than habitable. Everything had happened to us too soon; before we’d collected enough chairs to sit on the ones we had had begun to fall to bits.
It was Felicity Hare who tacked cotton cloth she had brought from Kenya round the packing cases our stuff was moved in to a converted outhouse in someone’s backyard. We used them as cupboards and tables. We had space there, and she lived with us for a time — a big, red-faced girl just down from Cambridge who wanted to ‘do something’ in Africa. She had been handed on down the continent from territory to territory by introductions from friends of friends and always either in danger of being deported by a British colonial government when she became too friendly with African nationalists, or appealing to a British consulate for protection when African governments wanted her deported for becoming too friendly with members of their Opposition. She wore shorts and would follow you from room to room, talking, whatever you were doing, hitching herself on some ledge or table corner too small to support her, with her enormous, marbled legs doubled up in a great fleshy pedestal. Her conversation was confused and conspiratorial — ‘Actually, the woman in charge of the place wasn’t American at all, she was a Dane, and the girls couldn’t stick her. Couldn’t understand what she was saying d’y’know. That’s another thing I didn’t tell you — they came from about twenty different tribes and could scarcely understand English anyway. But there’d been some fiddle in the State Department — that’s clear — and she wasn’t the one who was supposed to be there, at all. The girls weren’t learning a thing, but old Alongi Senga —’ ‘Who’s that?’ ‘— Senga, Minister of Education, d’y’know, stupid old bastard, Matthew Ochinua says they say all he wants to do is inspect high schools so’s he can pinch the boys’ bottoms. Anyway, he’d had a row with the Field Service people —’ Most of the stories ended with a shrug of the breasts and the big face gazing away, as if she had just discovered them, at her tiny hands with their little shields of bitten-down nail pressed into the plump pad of each finger: ‘So that was that …’ ‘So I was off …’