Isa, who was easily bored, and so had a reputation for sharpness, came wheeling a tea wagon from the kitchen. “Edna,” she asked, bending down to pick up a spoon, “exactly what is it you do? I mean, I know you hold meetings and so forth.” She stood up looking at Edna with a rather childish expression of simple inquiry.
“Do,” said Edna, “how do you mean? One can’t answer a question like that offhand. It’s difficult to know where to start. Assuming you know what we want to do—”
“Ah, yes,” Isa interrupted as if she had suddenly remembered the answer for herself, “I thought so. You sell three dozen copies of the Guardian in a native township once a week. Yes, Mike told me, you are pretty good as a newspaperboy, you sell at least three dozen. …” And she proceeded to hand round coffee in an assortment of containers from beer mugs to nursery beakers. I got a tarnished silver-plated one, inscribed DOWELL MACLOUD BETTER BALL FOURSOME ROYAL JOHANNESBURG CLUB 1926, with an unprintable comment scratched by pin underneath.
“She’s intelligent, but she has no grasp whatever of politics, and that infuriates her.”—Edna was stirring her coffee and, with a flicker smile at her American, was now asking her companion if she was aware of what was really happening in China, and in the Indies? Like all Edna’s questions, it was rhetorical.
“Who’s got my dirty mug?” Laurie Humphrey accused Isa.
“What mug?”
“I think I have.” I waved it at him.
“Oh, Laurie.” Isa held it up, twisting her head to read and slopping the coffee over. “It was the pride of my aunt’s mantelpiece.”
“You have no Aunt Macloud.”
“Well it was the pride of somebody’s aunt. We got it in that Claim Street junk shop, near the apfel-strudel place, you know. It was in a job lot that Gerda wanted because of an old straw-covered bottle. Isn’t it nice? Everytime I used it I used to see Dowell on his big day, beaming on the green in plus fours with freckles coming out on top of a shiny bald head. Now it looks like an Oscar designed for Henry Miller.”
I laughed along with the others, but I could see by the face of the young man on the divan that he knew I didn’t know who Henry Miller was. He used it as a small blackmail between us. “Come and share my couch, Titian,” he said, “come on.” I sat on the end, near his feet, and he studied me. He was the kind who says, Don’t tell me — and, appraising you, proceeds to answer his questions for himself. “You’re Scotch, hey. Scotch red.” He indicated my hair. “When something rough touches your neck your skin gets all patchy and annoyed. And you’re prim. Scotch prim.” He smiled at how right he was.
And curiously enough, I felt hypocritically prim. I seemed labeled, sitting there on the edge of the divan with my hands holding the sides of the cushion. “Half Scotch. Mostly on my mother’s side. There’s English and a dash of Welsh to water it down.”
We went on like this all through coffee. It was something like going to a fortuneteller, with the added titillation that this was a young man. The slightly scornful and detached summing-up extended to most other subjects; it is an attitude common to doctors and in particular to those who have specialized in some minutiae of the body — brain cells, or blood cells, or lymph glands — and accept their own and other people’s knowledge in any other sphere with an amused reservation, like the antics of a clockwork toy to which they hold the key. This tinge of patronage sometimes extends even to the performance of life itself, so that there are some rather pathetically brilliant men who feel slightly superior to their own human desires.
But I only noticed the pleasing insolence of this person, and I could easily place that. “You’re a medical student, of course.”
“Of course,” he agreed without interest. John Marcus was busy with the records again, and he stood, tense as if he had made the recording himself, until the voice of the oboe, a voice out of the marshes taking up an ancient tale, lifted and silenced.
And music fell upon the room. It seemed to fall like lava upon these people, making another Pompeii of their attitudes stayed wherever they sat or stood or leaned. For twenty minutes they were returned deeper and deeper into themselves, and all the movement and speech that had blurred them, the exchange that made them shift and overlap in living, died out cold. Each now was contained in his own outline and none had anything to do with the other. Even that English girl, with her husband’s baby somewhere in her body; she sat with her legs slightly spread at the knee and her feet flat on the floor, the attitude of a peasant or a pregnant woman, her eyes light, surface blue, her upper lip lifted a little to listen. With his back to her at the other end of the room, the husband had his arms on his humped knees, staring into the floor: as if the music had caught him looking into some campfire of his own. Backs of heads, and arms, and hands and shoes; all took on the sealed importance of limits; here, with these drooping fingers, with these small crooked toes with their painted nails showing through sandals, these heavy unhuman brown brogues, the person ends. He is shut up in there; she is shut up in there: you see them looking out at their eyes. But not at you, not at the room.
Laurie Humphrey, just across from me, slumped inside a loose gross body that made a rumpled rag of his collar and swallowed the division between his shirt and his trousers. His eyes closed in that big, coarse-textured face, the sagging ears and thick mouth (I could see the patches of dry skin, scaling on the lips) that he wore through his life like a disguise. And Joel’s throat, near Isa. Sitting on the floor with his head hung back over some great book he had pulled down, so that there was his throat, like all that an animal offers of himself to the curious, the muscles spread, the end of the beard line, the beat of his blood widening and closing, widening and closing.
A harmlessness about the sitting Edna; the innocence of the ordinary suitcase from which the dangerous documents have been taken out. Her thighs crossed, a small soft rounded stomach let out under her dress. Isa with a broken look about her limbs, and her face become small. Dug up, dusted of ashes and put in a museum, not Isa the writer preserved, not gusto and wit and intellect, but a creature of sensual conflict, every little sticklike bone twisted in passion, the balked, lovewise curl to the mouth. Only the young man sharing the divan with me winked once, like a sardonic sphinx.
The concerto ended and at once movement and talk obscured them in a flickering gnat-dance zigzagging a tingling blur before the separateness of these, scribbling away the outlines of those. The English girl was shaking out her dress as if the music might have left crumbs. “Herby can get a lift with us,” her husband shouted over to the door. But Isa had suddenly put her arm round the old young man, with the blatant advance a woman can only show toward a man whom everyone can see is quite impossible for her. “No,” she said protectively, “he’s staying here. I’m all alone and you know this is no country for a white woman.”
“How is it you never even get offered a beer here, any more,” Laurie yawned.
“Well you can all come on to my place,” someone offered, but no one took it up.
“—For the simple reason we’re flat. Right out of everything. When Tom brought Ronny and Ben home on Sunday he had to go to the emergency dispensary and wheedle a bottle of invalid wine out of the chap.”