The Golden Notebook Page 14

  June spent most of her time on the verandah of the Booth by house which was a couple of hundred yards to one side of the hotel. It was built on ten-foot-deep foundations away from the ants. Its verandah was deep and cool, white-painted, and had creepers and flowers everywhere. It was extraordinarily bright and pretty, and here June lay on an old cretonne-covered sofa listening to the portable gramophone, hour after hour, inwardly fashioning the man who would be permitted to deliver her from her sleep-walking state. And a few weeks later the image had become strong enough to create the man. Maryrose and I were sitting on the hotel verandah when a lorry stopped on its way down East, and out got a great lout of a youth with massive red legs and sun-heated arms the size of ox-thighs. June came prowling down the gravelled path from her father’s house, kicking at the gravel with her sharp sandals. A pebble scattered to his feet as he walked to the bar. He stopped and gazed at her. Then, looking repeatedly over his shoulder, with a blank, almost hypnotised glance, he entered the bar. June followed. Mr Boothby was serving Jimmy and Paul with gins-and-tonic and talking about England. He took no notice of his daughter, who sat in a corner and posed herself, looking dreamily out past Maryrose and myself into the hot morning dust and glitter. The youth took his beer and sat along the bench about a yard from her. Half an hour later, when he climbed back into his lorry, June was with him. Maryrose and I suddenly and at the same moment burst into fits of helpless laughter and we only stopped ourselves when Paul and Jimmy looked out of the bar to find out what the joke was. A month later June and the boy were officially engaged, and it was only then that everyone became aware that she was a quiet, pleasant and sensible girl. The look of drugged torpor had gone completely from her. It was only then that we realised how irritated Mrs Boothby had been because of her daughter’s state. There was something over-gay, over-relieved in the way she accepted her help in the hotel, became friends with her again, discussed plans for the wedding. It was almost as if she had felt guilty at how irritated she had been. And perhaps this long irritation was the part cause of her later losing her temper and behaving so unjustly.

  Shortly after June had left us on that first night, Mrs Boothby came in. Willi asked her to sit down and join us. Paul hastened to add his invitation. Both spoke in what seemed to the rest of us an exaggeratedly, offensively polite way. Yet the last time she had been with Paul, on the week-end we had all been so tired, he had been simple and without arrogance, talking to her about his father and mother, about “home.” Though of course his England and hers were two different countries.

  The joke among us was that Mrs Boothby had a weakness for Paul. We, none of us, really believed it; if we had we wouldn’t have joked—or I hope very much that we wouldn’t. For at this early stage we liked her very much. But Mrs Boothby was certainly fascinated by Paul. Yet she was also fascinated by Willi. And precisely because of the quality we hated in them both—the rudeness, the arrogance that underlay their cool good manners.

  It was from Willi I learned how many women like to be bullied. It was humiliating and I used to fight against accepting it as true. But I’ve seen it over and over again. If there was a woman the rest of us found difficult, whom we humoured, whom we made allowances for, Willi would say: “You just don’t know anything, what she needs is a damned good hiding.” (The “good hiding” was a Colonial phrase, usually used by the whites thus: “What that kaffir needs is a damned good hiding”—but Willi had appropriated it for general use.) I remember Maryrose’s mother, a dominating neurotic woman who had sapped all the vitality out of the girl, a woman of about fifty, as vigorous and fussy as an old hen. For Maryrose’s sake we were polite, we accepted her when she came bustling after her daughter into the Gainsborough. When she was there Maryrose sank into a state of listless irritation, a nervous exhaustion. She knew she ought to fight her mother, but did not have the moral energy. This woman, whom we were prepared to be bored by, to humour, Willi cured in half a dozen words. She had come into the Gainsborough one evening and found us all sitting around the deserted dining-room talking. She said loudly: “So there you all are as usual. You ought to be in bed.” And she was just about to sit down and join us, when Willi, without raising his voice, but letting those spectacles of his glitter at her, said: “Mrs Fowler.” “Yes, Willi? Is that you again?” “Mrs Fowler, why do you come here chasing after Maryrose and making such a nuisance of yourself?” She gasped, coloured, but remained standing by the chair she had been about to sit down in, staring at him. “Yes,” said Willi, calmly. “You are an old nuisance. You can sit down if you like, but you must keep quiet and not talk nonsense.” Maryrose turned quite white with fright and with pain on behalf of her mother. But Mrs Fowler, after a moment’s silence, gave a short flustered laugh and sat down and kept perfectly quiet. And after that, if she came into the Gainsborough she always behaved with Willi like a well-brought-up small girl in the presence of a bullying father. And it was not only Mrs Fowler and the woman who owned the Gainsborough.

  Now it was Mrs Boothby, who was not at all the bully who seeks a bully stronger than herself. Nor was she insensitive about intruding herself. And yet, even after she must have understood with her nerves, if not her intelligence—she was not an intelligent woman—that she was being bullied, she would come back again and again for more. She did not succumb into flustered satisfaction at having been “given a hiding,” like Mrs Fowler, or get coy and girlish like Mrs James at the Gainsborough; she would listen patiently, and argue back, engage herself so to speak with the surface of the talk, ignoring the underlying insolence, and in this way she sometimes even shamed Willi and Paul back into courtesy. But in private I am sure she must sometimes have flushed up, clenching her fists, and muttering: “Yes, I’d like to hit them. Yes, I should have hit him when he said that.”

  That evening Paul almost at once started on one of his favourite games—parodying the Colonial clichés to the point where the Colonial in question must become aware he or she was being made fun of. And Willi joined in.

  “Your cook has, of course, been with you for years—would you like a cigarette?”

  “Thank you, my dear, but I don’t smoke. Yes, he’s a good boy, I must say that for him, he’s always been very loyal.”

  “He’s almost one of the family, I should think?”

  “Yes, I think of him like that. And he’s very fond of us, I’m sure. We’ve always treated him fair.”

  “Perhaps not so much as a friend as a child?” (This was Willi.) “Because they are nothing but great big children.”

  “Yes, that’s true. They’re just children when you really understand them. They like to be treated the way you’d treat a child—firm, but right. Mr Boothby and I believe in treating the blacks fair. It’s only right.”

  “But on the other hand, you mustn’t let them take advantage of you,” said Paul. “Because if you do, they lose all respect.”

  “I’m glad to hear you say that, Paul, because most of you English boys have all kinds of fancy ideas about the kaffirs. But it’s true. They have to know there’s a line they must never step over.” And so on and so on and so on.

  It wasn’t until Paul said—he was sitting in his favourite pose—tankard poised, his blue eyes fixed winningly on hers: “And, of course, there’s centuries of evolution between them and us, they’re nothing but baboons really,” that she blushed and looked away. Baboons was a word already too crude for the Colony, although even five years before it was acceptable, and even in the newspaper leaders. (Just as the word kaffirs would have become, in its turn, too crude in ten years’ time.) Mrs Boothby could not believe that an “educated young man from one of the best colleges in England” would use the word baboons. But when she again looked at Paul, her honest red face prepared for hurt, there he sat, his cherubic smile just as winningly attentive as it had been a month ago when he had been, undeniably, nothing more than a rather homesick boy glad to be mothered a little. She sighed abruptly, and got up, saying politely: “And now if you’ll e
xcuse me I’ll go and get the old man’s supper. Mr Boothby likes a late snack—he never gets time for his dinner, serving in the bar all evening.” She wished us good night, giving Willi, then Paul, a long, rather hurt, earnest inspection. She left us.

  Paul put back his head and laughed and said: “They’re incredible, they’re fantastic, they are simply not true.”

  “Aborigines,” said Willi, laughing. Aborigines was his word for the white people of the Colony.

  Maryrose said quietly: “I don’t see the point of that, Paul. It’s just making fools of people.”

  “Dear Maryrose. Dear beautiful Maryrose,” said Paul, chuckling into his beer.

  Maryrose was beautiful. She was a tiny slender girl, with waves of honey-coloured hair and great brown eyes. She had appeared on magazine covers in the Cape, had been a dress model for a while. She was entirely without vanity. She smiled patiently and insisted in her slow good-humoured way: “Yes, Paul. After all, I’ve been brought up here. I understand Mrs Boothby. I was like that too until people like you explained I was wrong. You won’t change her by making fun of her. You just hurt her feelings.”

  Paul again gave his deep chuckle, and insisted: “Maryrose, Maryrose, you’re too good to be true too.”

  But later that evening she did succeed in making him ashamed.

  George Hounslow, a roads man, lived a hundred miles or so down the line in a small town with his wife, three children, and the four old parents. He was arriving at midnight in his lorry. He proposed to spend the evenings of the week-end with us, attending to his work along the main road in the daytime. We left the dining-room and went off to sit under the bunch of gum-trees near the railway line to wait for George. Under the trees was a rough wooden table and some wooden benches. Mr Boothby sent down a dozen bottles of chilled Cape white wine. We were all mildly tight by then. The hotel was in darkness. Soon the lights in the Boothbys’ house went out. There was a small light from the station building and a small gleam of lights from the bedroom block up the rise several hundreds of yards off. Sitting under the gum-trees with the cold moonlight sifting over us through the branches, and the night wind lifting and laying the dust at our feet, we might have been in the middle of the veld. The hotel had been absorbed into the wild landscape of granite-bouldered kopjes, trees, moonlight. Miles away the main road crossed a rise, a thin gleam of pale light between banks of black trees. The dry oily scent of the gum-trees, the dry irritating smell of dust, the cold smell of wine, added to our intoxication.

  Jimmy fell asleep, slumped against Paul, who had his arm around him. I was half-asleep, against Willi’s shoulder. Stanley Lett and Johnnie, the pianist, sat side by side watching the rest of us with an amiable curiosity. They made no secret of the fact, now or at any other time, that we, not they, were on sufferance, and this on the clearly expressed grounds that they were working-class, would remain working-class, but they had no objection to observing at first-hand, because of the happy accidents of war, the behaviour of a group of intellectuals. It was Stanley who used the word, and he refused to drop it. Johnnie, the pianist, never talked. He did not use words, ever. He always sat near Stanley, allying himself in silence with him.

  Ted had already begun to suffer because of Stanley, the “butterfly under a stone,” who refused to see himself as in need of rescue. To console himself he sat by Maryrose and put his arm around her. Maryrose smiled good-humouredly, and remained in the circle of his arm, but as if she detached herself from him and every other man. Very many as it were professionally pretty girls have this gift of allowing themselves to be touched, kissed, held, as if this were a fee they have to pay to Providence for being born beautiful. There is a tolerant smile which goes with a submission to the hands of men, like a yawn or a patient sigh. But there was more to it, in Maryrose’s case.

  “Maryrose,” said Ted, bluffly, looking down at the gleaming little head at rest on his shoulder, “why don’t you love any of us, why don’t you let any of us love you?”

  Maryrose merely smiled, and even in this broken light, branch-and-leaf-stippled, her brown eyes showed enormous and shone softly.

  “Maryrose has a broken heart,” observed Willi above my head.

  “Broken hearts belong to old-fashioned novels,” said Paul. “They don’t go with the time we live in.”

  “On the contrary,” said Ted. “There are more broken hearts than there have ever been, just because of the times we live in. In fact I’m sure any heart we are ever likely to meet is so cracked and jarred and split it’s just a mass of scar tissue.”

  Maryrose smiled up at Ted, shyly, but gratefully, and said seriously: “Yes, of course that’s true.”

  Maryrose had had a brother whom she deeply loved. They were close by temperament, but more important, they had the tenderest of bonds because of their impossible, bullying, embarrassing mother against whom they supported each other. This brother had been killed in North Africa the previous year. It happened that Maryrose was in the Cape at the time doing modelling. She was, of course, much in demand because of how she looked. One of the young men looked like her brother. We had seen a photograph of him—a slight, fair-moustached, aggressive young man. She fell instantly in love with him. She said to us—and I remember the sense of shock we felt, as we always did with her, because of her absolute but casual honesty: “Yes, I know I fell in love with him because he looked like my brother, but what’s wrong with that?” She was always asking, or stating: “What’s wrong with that?” and we could never think of an answer. But the young man was like her brother only in looks, and while he was happy to have an affair with Maryrose he did not want to marry her.

  “It may be true,” said Willi, “but it’s very silly. Do you know what’s going to happen to you, Maryrose, unless you watch out? You’re going to make a cult of this boy-friend of yours, and the longer you do that the unhappier you’ll be. You’ll keep off all the nice boys you could marry, and eventually you’ll marry someone for the sake of marrying, and you’ll be one of these dissatisfied matrons we see all around us.”

  In parenthesis I must say that this is exactly what happened to Maryrose. For another few years she continued to be delectably pretty, allowed herself to be courted while she maintained her sweet smile that was like a yawn, sat patiently inside the circle of this man’s arm or that; and finally and very suddenly married a middle-aged man who already had three children. She did not love him. Her heart had gone dead when her brother was crushed into pulp by a tank.

  “So what do you think I should do?” she enquired, with her terrible amiability, across a patch of moonlight, to Willi.

  “You should go to bed with one of us. As soon as possible. There’s no better cure for an infatuation than that,” said Willi, in the brutally good-humoured voice he used when speaking out of his role as sophisticated Berliner. Ted grimaced, and removed his arm, making it clear that he was not prepared to ally himself with such cynicism, and that if he went to bed with Maryrose it would be out of the purest romanticism. Well, of course it would have been.

  “Anyway,” observed Maryrose, “I don’t see the point. I keep thinking about my brother.”

  “I’ve never known anyone be so completely frank about incest,” said Paul. He meant it as a kind of joke, but Maryrose replied, quite seriously, “Yes, I know it was incest. But the funny thing is, I never thought of it as incest at the time. You see, my brother and I loved each other.”

  We were shocked again. I felt Willi’s shoulder stiffen, and I remember thinking that only a few moments before he had been the decadent European; but the idea that Maryrose had slept with her brother plunged him back into his real nature, which was puritanical.

  There was a silence, then Maryrose observed: “Yes, I can see why you are shocked. But I think about it often these days. We didn’t do any harm, did we? And so I don’t see what was wrong with it.”

  Silence again. Then Paul plunged in, gaily: “If it doesn’t make any difference to you, why don’t you go to bed
with me, Maryrose? How do you know, you might be cured?”

  Paul still sat upright, supporting the lolling child-like weight of Jimmy against him. He supported Jimmy tolerantly, just as Maryrose had allowed Ted to put his arm around her. Paul and Maryrose played the same roles in the group, from the opposite sides of the sex barrier.

  Maryrose said calmly: “If my boy-friend in the Cape couldn’t really make me forget my brother, why should you?”

  Paul said: “What is the nature of the obstacle that prevents you from marrying this swain of yours?”

  Maryrose said: “He comes from a good Cape family, and his parents won’t let me marry him, because I’m not good enough.”

  Paul allowed himself his deep attractive chuckle. I’m not saying he cultivated this chuckle, but he certainly knew it was one of his attractions. “A good family,” he said derisively. “A good family from the Cape. It’s rich, it really is.”

  This was not as snobbish as it sounds. Paul’s snobbishness was expressed indirectly, in jokes, or in a play on words. Actually he was indulging his ruling passion, the enjoyment of incongruity. And I’m not in a position to criticise, for I daresay the real reason I stayed in the Colony long after there was any need was because such places allow opportunity for this type of enjoyment. Paul was inviting us all to be amused, as he had when he had discovered Mr and Mrs Boothby, John and Mary Bull in person, running the Mashopi Hotel.

  But Maryrose said quietly: “I suppose it must seem funny to you, since you are used to good families in England, and of course I can see that’s different from a good family in the Cape. But it comes to the same thing for me, doesn’t it?”

  Paul maintained a whimsical expression which concealed the beginnings of discomfort. He even, as if to prove her attack on him was unjust, instinctively moved so that Jimmy’s head fell more comfortably on his shoulder, in an effort to show a capacity for tenderness.