“And that’s a purely scientific collection of subjects, medicine. Imagine how much more difficult where nothing is certain, everything’s a matter of opinion, judgment—” My voice lost itself in the prospect of the rich ambiguity of language and the vast choices of literature.
“Look, if you’re a native,” Joel was saying, “you have to be exceptional to do ordinary things. You have to be one of four in ten who go to school at all, in the first place. You have to be able to concentrate on an empty stomach because you haven’t had any breakfast, you have to resist the temptation to nip off and do a bit of caddying for pocket money you never get given to you, you have to persuade your parents, who can’t afford to keep you, to go on keeping you after you’re twelve or thirteen and could be a houseboy or a nanny and keep yourself. And that’s only the beginning. That’s what you’ve got to do to get to the point at which white kids only start off making an effort. Just to get through an ordinary schooling you’ve got to be a very exceptional kid. And from then on you’ve just got to be more and more exceptional, although in your school life you’ve used up enough determination and effort to put a white boy right through to qualification in a profession. That’s how it is.” He sat back, looking at us.
“Okay-okay,” said Rupert, staring at his coffee. He had listened with the subdued attention that comes over a shady character in the presence of a person of authority.
Joel began to eat. “Butter, please — Helen and I, here, we never had a chance to hear any music when we were small. You don’t, in a little mining place like Atherton. Or you might, if your parents knew about it. But my folks were poor, and in any case they haven’t had any education at all — neither of them can even write English. And Helen’s — well, they like a bit of musical comedy, but that’s all. So now when Helen and I go to a concert we like everything, good, bad, indifferent. We like the noise. The suits the orchestra wear. … You see?” He laughed.
I knew it wasn’t true of Joel, but it pleased me not to have to bear my ignorance on my own. “We do not! I don’t even have to be stopped from clapping between movements any more!”
“You should hold her hand,” said Rupert. “That’s the way to teach her.”
“I should do just that,” said Joel, seriously.
We ate in silence for a few moments, lapsing into that abstracted service to necessity that breaks up the surface of attention. We burrowed away off into our separate thoughts.
I shook my head without knowing.
“What?” said Joel, apologetic, as if he thought I had spoken and he had not listened.
“Nothing—” Suddenly I was embarrassed to speak. “She said something about the expense of the paper—” The little fact, so bald and paltry, a matter of sixpence or a shilling, was silencing in a different way. It seemed to grow in the dignity, the reality, the harshness of a need, something felt instead of thought, experienced instead of spoken.
“Of course,” said Joel. “Nothing’s happened. Just talk. You’re right.”
Chapter 14
My parents had gone to a braaivleis on a West Rand a West Rand mine, fifteen miles the other side of Johannesburg. My excuse was work. “That’s all very well,” said my mother, fastening her pearls. “But you don’t get out and meet people.”
“Isn’t she meeting people all the time at the University?” My father patronized her a little, smiling at me.
My mother settled the pearls on her neck. She looked herself over in the mirror, shook out her gloves, looked again, herself and her mirror self challenging each other for correctness. “I mean her own kind of people.”
They would be standing under the trees, the corseted women, the thin, gracious women who always dressed as if for a garden party, the satellite young daughters in pastel frocks. Where the drinks were, the men would be, faces red from golf and bowls, voices loud, laughing and expansive in departmental allusions as cosy as family jokes; the older men spry or corpulent with position, the up-and-coming younger men showing here a hinted thickness of neck, there a knee peaking up bony that assured that when the first lot died off, the second would be ready to replace them identically. As the darkness tangled with the trees, and the boys “borrowed” from the office or Compound brought the braziers to the right stage of glow, the daughters and the young sons would stand well away to avoid splashing their light frocks and blue suits and patent-leather shoes while they roasted lamb chops stuck on long forks. The smell of hair oil and lavender water would come out in the heat, mixed with the smoke and acridity of burning fat. They would giggle and lick their fingers, eating with the small bites of mice. And run over the lawns back to the house to wash their hands and come back, waving handkerchiefs freshly charged with lavender water. I had been there many times. I knew what it was like; a small child in white party shoes that made my feet big and noisy, tearing in and out among the grownups, wild with the excitement of the fire and the smoky dark; and then grown-up myself, standing first on one foot, then the other, drawing patterns with my toe on the ground, feebly part of the feebleness of it all, the mawkish attempts of the boys to entertain, the inane response of the girls: the roasting of meat to be torn apart by hands and teeth made as feeble as a garden party. That was what these people did to everything in life; enfeebled it. Weddings were the appearance of dear little girls dressed up to strew rose petals, rather than matings; death was the speculation about who would step up to the dead man’s position; dignity was the chain of baubles the mayor wore round his neck.
“Anna’ll stay in the yard. I’ve told her. She’ll take Wednesday off instead. But if you go out at all lock up the front in any case. A drunk boy came over from the stores last week right up to Mrs. Ockert’s dining-room window; she got the fright of her life. — It’s terrible, you’re no safer on the Mine than in the town, anymore—” my mother complained to my father.
“I’ve told you, you should let me get out my Browning.”
“No, no, there are too many accidents with those things. Only the other day, I saw in the paper — little boy of five lost his arm.”
“Yes, but where there are no small children.”
“I wish they’d do away with those stores. — All the flies come from there, too. … — George, you’ve got hair on your collar, wait a minute — Don’t forget, Helen?”
With one of those curious looks that mothers give their children — the same look, whether they are babies or grown men and women — half-abstracted, mind on the outing, half-smitten with the pang that is all that is left of remembrance of a time when the child was in the body and an accompaniment of all ventures, sleeping and waking — they were gone. I wished I could have gone with them; wished I could have wanted to go. My other life, my life at the University, turned me loose at week ends. And I wandered about, wondering what I had been sent back for, for everything that I picked up seemed a relic, sometimes pleasant and loved, but outside the direction of my life, washed up on the bank. The face of our house, of our whole row of houses following every bend and bush of my memory behind the pines, reproached me like the gentle expression of some forgotten person whom you have come back to see but find you have nothing to say to. I opened my mother’s accounts drawer, which as a child had been my safekeeping place, and found at the back some gilt transfers that had been saved for some occasion that had never come, and the little crocheted hat, a thimble cover, that I remembered Mrs. Mitcham giving me when I was about ten. In the front of the drawer was Ludi’s Christmas card of many months back. “Are you married yet, miss?” his beautiful handwriting said on the inside corner.