No, it was not merely that. They were proud of this boy, whoever he might be, because he was one of themselves: they all broke in, in a hesitant enthusiasm that at once generated its own spontaneity.
“Already he’s got a partnership. Mrs. Marks, you know, his mother’s sister — she was sitting next to me and she was telling me. …”
“No, it’s the promise of a partnership when he comes back. Now he’s just working with Dr. Bailey, but even then, it’s very good — he’s only twenty-two. …”—Joel’s sister offered facts that seemed corrective but were actually the wonder which she could not allow herself to express with the simple awe of the old and ignorant, but could not altogether forbear. “He was always a clever boy.” The father brushed aside aggressively. He had a hoarse, coarse voice, as if the words caught on invisible snags.
“No question, no question.” The aunt’s throat trembled with praise. “And didn’t they work hard enough to give it to him? Mrs. Berman built up that business. I remember when the children were little things, she used to be there, running between the shop and the house.”
Mr. Aaron ignored her, particularly when she agreed with him. To Mrs. Aaron’s face there came, quickly, slightly, a smile like the drop of a pause. “Well,” she excused in a low voice, as if covering over some breach of taste with weary sympathy, “it’s nothing, everyone knows Meyer got no brains. It’s all right, what she did, she did. Plenty others the same.”
The aunt whipped the talk back to enthusiasm again. “Anyway, today they’ve got pleasure from their children, thank God.”
Mrs. Aaron smiled. “Really, a wonderful boy,” she said, as if she were in love.
“The fiancée’s a research chemist — I think she’s from Capetown,” Colley was telling Joel.
“I don’t know what. But they’ll go everywhere, they’ll be in Europe, they’ll do what they like. …” Mrs. Aaron, sawing off another slice of bread in answer to some unintelligible sounds from the old relative, was defiant with the freedom of the two young people. Her body woke up to the swiftness it might have had. “Here.” She gestured the bread on the point of her fork. “Anybody else wants?”
“Joel,” said the aunt, with the coy smile of someone venturing a question she pretends not to remember having asked several times before. “I wonder why you didn’t study doctor. You know, I often say—”
“He could have done it. Just the same as Maurice.” Mr. Aaron — he reminded me of some heavy, thick-skinned animal, a rhinoceros or boar, rising reluctantly and powerfully to the prick of words — flew into an aggressive assurance, staring at Joel. “You could have been like Maurice?”
“Of course. I know.” Joel spoke to him with assurance of another kind. “You let me do what I wanted. I’m not sorry.”
“There you are! It just shows you,” said the aunt, not saying what.
“He’ll also go to Europe, to America,” Mrs. Aaron said. “No, no, sit down—” She gestured her daughter, going round to gather the dirty plates herself.
“Was Hilda Marks at the party, Ma?” Colley wiped her child’s mouth with the firm, hard movements of a cat’s tongue.
“No, I told you, only her mother.”
“I hear they’ve got a stand near ours, they’ve started building already.”
“Is that so?”
“You’re going to build a house?” Again I had the feeling that the aunt’s surprise was feigned; she was one of those women who so intensely enjoy the affairs of others that they can savor being told a dozen times and versions, by a dozen different people. I felt quite sure she already knew the answer to her query. “Where?”
Colley’s irritated smile confirmed my suspicion. “But surely you knew? I mean we bought the ground from Dave … and I’m sure he would be the first to run and tell you.”
“My dear, unless you tell me yourself, it’s not for me to say I know.” She turned to Mrs. Aaron, more at ease. “Where’s it, here in the township?”
Mrs. Aaron drew her mouth up and shook her head. “Here? What for? Who lives here now? It’s in a lovely neighborhood, you know there by the dam, open—”
Her daughter supplied the name of the new suburb, an English county name that the estate agent had taken from an overseas magazine.
“But it’s so near the mine dump, there, isn’t it? Mrs. Friedman would have bought there, only she told me the dump’s stuck in middle …”
So they bridled and argued, their voices rose and fell, cutting one across the other, and tea came round, already poured out into the cups in the kitchen and slopping over into the saucers. It reminded me of my mother, for whom this served as a standard for hotels and people; if she got her tea served in her own teapot, then the hotel was a real hotel and not a glorified boardinghouse, the woman whom she was visiting was at least a social equal by personal habit — the most reassuring and revealing gauge. Telepathically, Joel said to me: “Aren’t you going to phone? They might be home by now, and wondering.” I excused myself — nobody heard me — and went to the telephone, which was in the passage, fixed to the wall, as in a public call box. I had not put the light on, and only the wash from the light room where they all sat made watermarks along the nobbly linoleum. I could hear their voices and the click and clatter of the table, while down the telephone, I heard the bell ringing in my mother’s house; heard it as I did from my own room. It stopped. My mother’s voice said challengingly, faint: “Hullo?”
“Mummy—”
“Daddy was getting worried. Where are you?”
“Have you been back long? I’m sorry. Didn’t Anna tell you?”
“Something about you’d gone out with a young man, but it’s half-past nine—” Her voice became muffled, she had turned away from the mouthpiece; then came clear again. “No, that was Daddy. — What? I don’t know. — He says did you take the key.”
“No, it’s under the sword fern on the stoep.”
“All right. The big one or the new one?”
“The old one.”
“I’ve put away something for you. We didn’t feel like having any more to eat.”
“It’s all right, I’m having supper here.”
“Supper? Where?”
“At Joel’s. With the Aarons.”
“With the Aarons?” There was a pause.
“Did you enjoy the braaivleis? How are the Mackenzies?”
“Very nice,” she said, without attention. “How will you get in when you come home—?” It was a voice ignoring a profession of taste that simply could not be understood; not condemned, but quite incomprehensible.
“Leave the key for me where I put it before.”
“All right, then—”
“I won’t be late,” I weakened. But our voices had crossed; she said good-by and hung up.
I stood there a moment. On a small table under the telephone was the outline of a vase of paper flowers, crazily angular with the look of lifeless things, even in the half-dark. I touched one out of curiosity or compassion for the ugliness I could not see, and a smell of dust came away with my hand. The refrigerator shook away at the top of the passage. There was a different smell about the narrow place, like the passage outside the bedrooms of an old country hotel where you have stopped for one night.
I went back into the living room and nodded to Joel under the talk. “Rubbish! Rubbish!” Colley’s husband was shouting. “They couldn’t do without us here, and they know it. Think Malan doesn’t know it?”
“Nothing’s indispensable in South Africa but the Chamber of Mines and native labor.” Joel smiled.