It was about ten when we got down to the food — it was sizzling and succulent the way it never is when someone else serves it up behind doors. He wanted a beer, but I was out of it, and so he carried on with the brandy and I had the lovely wine to myself. A few years ago I should have protested; I’ve developed a secret, spinsterish (or is it bachelor) pleasure in such small selfish greeds. (I in my flat, I suppose, and Graham in his house.) While it went down, warm as the temperature of the room, black-red, matt as fresh milk on the back of my tongue, I thought of how once — long ago, at the beginning — I said to Max, what would one do if somebody you loved died, how did one know how to go on? I always remember what he said: ‘Well, after even only a few hours, you get thirsty, and you want again — you want a drink of water …’
The dinner was so awfully good. It was like a feast. I said to the man with the smooth black face and long eyes, opposite me, ‘I don’t know whether you saw in the paper; my husband is dead.’ After I had spoken my heart suddenly whipped up very fast, as it does when you have got something out at last. And yet I hadn’t thought about mentioning anything to this visitor; the day was over, it had no connection with the visit; the visit had no connection with anything else in my life, such visits are like the hour when you wake up in the night and read and smoke, and then go to sleep — they have no context.
His mouth was full of food. He looked at me dismayed, as if he wanted to spit it out; I felt terribly embarrassed. ‘Christ, I didn’t know. When was that?’
I said, ‘I’ve been divorced for ages, you know. I’ve had Bobo alone with me since he was quite small.’
‘The fellow in Cape Town — he was the one you were married to? I read about it but I —’
‘Yes, I had a telegram early this morning. I hadn’t seen him or heard from him for a year.’
He kept saying, over again, ‘Good God … I didn’t know, you see.’
I went on eating in order to force him to do so, but he sat looking at me: ‘Hell, that’s bad, man.’
‘So what did you do, Liz, what’d you do?’
I could feel him watching me while I ate, spearing a piece of meat, scooping a few soft rings of onion on to it, and putting the fork in my mouth. When I had finished that mouthful, I sat back a bit in my chair and looked at him. ‘There’s nothing to do, Luke. I drove out to the school, that’s all, to tell my son.’
‘What about the funeral?’
‘Oh, that’ll be in Cape Town.’ I wanted to bring the facts of life home to him, so to speak.
‘So you’re not going?’ No doubt he was thinking of an African family funeral, with all feuds and estrangements forgotten, and everyone foregathering from distant and disparate lives.
‘No, I won’t be going.’
‘He was the husband,’ he said.
‘Oh yes,’ I said, ‘I know that. I’ve been thinking, he must have been the one for me. It couldn’t have been much different.’
We size each other up entirely without malice. I don’t pretend to know anything about him, except what I can pick up in his innocent, calculating, good-looking plump face, he interprets me entirely as an outsider — I the outsider — by the exigencies of the life he belongs to.
Slowly he began to eat again, we both went on eating, as if I had persuaded him to it. He said, ‘Wha’d’you think made him do it? Political reasons?’ He knows, of course, that Max turned State witness, that time.
‘If he’d been one of your chaps he wouldn’t have needed to do it himself, ay? Someone else would have stuck a knife in him and thrown him in the harbour.’
He said, ‘Hell, Liz, man, take it easy’ — with a short snort of a laugh. But it’s true; it’s all so much simpler if you’re black, even your guilt’s dealt with for you. African State witnesses appear masked in court, but they can’t count on lasting long.
‘You think he couldn’t get it off his mind?’
I said, ‘Oh I don’t know, Luke, I really don’t know.’
‘But, man, you knew him from way back, you knew what sort of person he was, even if you haven’t seen him lately.’
‘He wasn’t the sort of person he thought he was.’
‘Ah, well.’ He didn’t want to risk speaking ill of the dead. I said, by way of comfort, ‘There are people who kill themselves because they can’t bear not to live for ever’ — I smiled with my lips turned down, in case he thought I was talking about an afterlife in heaven — ‘I mean, they can’t put up with the limitations of the time they’re alive in. Saints and martyrs are the same sort.’ But he just said, ‘The poor chap, ay,’ and I had a glimpse of myself as another white woman who talks too much. I offered him wine again. ‘No, I’ll stick to this,’ he said, so I filled up my own glass; drinks too much, too, I thought. But I was in a calm, steady mood, I never drink when I am in a bad one. We helped ourselves to more food, a to and fro of hands and dishes and no ceremony. He was telling me about Reba’s scheme to build six freehold houses for better-off Africans round the Basutoland capital. ‘If Reba could only get someone to back him, he could really go ahead. He can get cheap bricks and cheap timber —’
‘But what sort of houses will they be!’
‘No, they’re all right. Reba knows what he’s doing. Did you ever know that fellow Basil Katz? Yes, he’s up there now and he’s done some drawings and everything for Reba.’
I wasn’t much interested, and it was easy to sound sympathetic. ‘The building societies won’t play?’
‘No, man, of course not, they won’t do it for a black. It’s a shame. I’m sorry for Reba, he’s dead keen and he knows he can get the cement and the bricks, and the timber — cheap, really cheap. And he’s got the labour — you know, it’s a good thing to show the Basutos you’re providing employment — it’s a good thing.’
‘I don’t suppose he can offer enough security — what’s it?’
‘Collateral. Yes, that’s it. But if he was a white, it’d be a different story —’ Talking business, he assumed, perhaps unconsciously, the manner that he thought appropriate, chair tipped back, body eased casually. ‘On, say, thirty thousand rand, reckoning on a return of ten per cent — well, call it eight — you can expect a profit of close to three thousand, d’you realize that?’
‘But is there anyone there to buy houses like that? Have they got the money — I mean I should have thought it would have to be a sub-economic scheme of some kind.’