“If I slept with you, Paul,” stated Maryrose, “I daresay I’d get fond of you. But you’re the same as he is—my boy-friend from the Cape. You’d never marry me, I wouldn’t be good enough. You have no heart.”
Willi laughed gruffly. Ted said: “That fixes you, Paul.” Paul did not speak. In moving Jimmy a moment before the young man’s body had slipped so that Paul now had to sit supporting his head and shoulders across his knees. Paul cradled Jimmy like a baby; and for the rest of the evening he watched Maryrose with a quiet and rueful smile. And after that he always spoke to her gently, trying to woo her out of her contempt for him. But he did not succeed.
At about midnight, the glare of a lorry’s headlights swallowed the moonlight, and swung off the main road to come to rest in a patch of empty sand by the railway lines. It was a big lorry, loaded with gear; and a small caravan was hitched on behind it. This caravan was George Hounslow’s home when he was superintending work along the roads. George jumped down from the driver’s seat and came over to us, greeted by a full glass of wine held out to him by Ted. He drank it down, standing, saying in between gulps: “Drunken sots, oafs, sodden sods, sitting here swilling.” I remember the smell of the wine, cool and sharp, as Ted tilted another bottle to refill the glass; the wine splashed over and hissed on the dust. The dust smelled heavy and sweet, as if it had rained.
George came to kiss me. “Beautiful Anna, beautiful Anna—but I can’t have you because of this bloody man Willi.” Then he ousted Ted, kissing Maryrose on her averted cheek, and said: “All the beautiful women there are in the world, and we only have two of them here, it makes me want to cry.” The men laughed, and Maryrose smiled at me. I smiled back. Her smile was full of a sudden pain, and so I realised that mine was also. Then she looked uncomfortable, at having betrayed herself, and we quickly looked away from each other, from the exposed moment. I don’t think either of us would have cared to analyse the pain we felt. And now George sat forward, holding a glass brimming with wine, and said: “Sods and comrades, stop lolling about, the moment has come to tell me the news.”
We stirred, became animated, forgot our sleepiness. We listened while Willi gave George information about the political situation in town. George was an extremely serious man. And he had a deep reverence for Willi—for Willi’s brain. He was convinced of his own stupidity. He was convinced, and very likely had been all his life, of his general inadequacy and also of his ugliness.
In fact he was rather good-looking, or at least women always responded to him, even when they were not aware of it. Mrs Lattimore, for instance, the pretty red-head, who often exclaimed how repulsive she thought him, but could never take her eyes off him. He was quite tall, but looked shorter, because of his broad shoulders, which he carried stooped forward. His body narrowed fast from the broad shoulders to his flanks. He had a bull-like set to him, all his movements were stubborn, and abrupt with the subdued controlled irritation of power kept in leash and unwillingly so. It was because of his family life which was difficult. At home he was, and had had to be for many years, patient, self-sacrificing, disciplined. By nature I would say he was none of these things. Perhaps this was the reason for his need to run himself down, for his lack of belief in himself. He was a man who could have been much bigger than his life had given him room to be. He knew this, I think; and because he secretly felt guilty at being frustrated by his family circumstances, his self-denigration was a way of punishing himself. I don’t know…or perhaps he punished himself in this way for his continual unfaithfulness to his wife? One has to be much older than I was then to understand George’s relationship with his wife. He had a fierce loyal compassion for her, the compassion of one victim for another.
He was one of the most lovable people I have ever known. He was certainly the funniest. He was spontaneously irresistibly funny. I’ve seen him keep a room full of people laughing helplessly from the time the bar closed until the sun rose. We lay about on the beds and on the floor laughing so that we couldn’t move. Yet next day, remembering the jokes, they weren’t particularly funny. Yet we were sick laughing—it was partly because of his face, which was handsome, but copy-book handsome, almost dull in its regularity, so that one expected him to talk to rule; but I think mostly because he had a very long narrow upper lip, which gave a look of wooden and almost stupid obstinacy to his face. Then out came the sad, self-punishing, irresistible stream of talk, and he watched us rolling with laughter, yet never laughed with his victims, but watched with positive astonishment, as if he were thinking: Well I can’t be as hopeless as I think I am if I can make all these clever people laugh like this.
He was about forty. That is, twelve years older than the oldest of us, Willi. We would never have thought of it, but he couldn’t forget it. He was a man who would always watch each year slide past as if jewels were slipping one by one through his fingers into the sea. This was because of his feeling for women. His other passion was politics. Not the least of his burdens was that he had been brought up by parents who came from slap in the middle of the old socialist tradition in Britain—a nineteenth-century socialism—rationalist, practical, above all, religiously anti-religious. And such an upbringing was not calculated to make him fit in with the people of the Colony. He was an isolated and lonely man, living in a tiny, backward, isolated town. We, this group of people so much younger than he, were the first real friends he had in years. We all loved him. But I don’t believe for a moment he knew it, or would allow himself to know it. His humility was too strong. In particular, his humility in relation to Willi. I remember once, exasperated because of the way he would sit, expressing reverence for Willi with every part of him, while Willi laid down the law about something or other, I said: “For God’s sake George, you’re such a nice man, and I can’t stand seeing you lick the boots of a man like Willi.”
“But if I had Willi’s brain,” he replied and it was typical of him he didn’t enquire how I could make such remarks about a man with whom, after all, I was living—“if I had his brain I’d be the happiest man in the world.” And then his upper lip narrowed in self-mockery: “What do you mean nice? I’m a sod, you know I am. I tell you the things I do and then you say I’m nice.” He was referring to what he told Willi and me, but no one else, about his relations with women.
I’ve thought about that often since. I mean, about the word nice. Perhaps I mean good. Of course they mean nothing, when you start to think about them. A good man, one says; a good woman; a nice man, a nice woman. Only in talk of course, these are not words you’d use in a novel. I’d be careful not to use them.
Yet of that group, I will say simply, without further analysis, that George was a good person, and that Willi was not. That Maryrose and Jimmy and Ted and Johnnie the pianist were good people, and that Paul and Stanley Lett were not. And furthermore, I’d bet that ten people picked at random off the street to meet them, or invited to sit in that party under the eucalyptus trees that night, would instantly agree with this classification—would, if I used the word good, simply like that, know what I meant.
And thinking about this, which I have done so much, I discover that I come around, by a back door, to another of the things that obsess me. I mean, of course, this question of “personality.” Heaven knows we are never allowed to forget that the “personality” doesn’t exist any more. It’s the theme of half the novels written, the theme of the sociologists and all the other -ologists. We’re told so often that human personality has disintegrated into nothing under pressure of all our knowledge that I’ve even been believing it. Yet when I look back to that group under the trees, and re-create them in my memory, suddenly I know it’s nonsense. Suppose I were to meet Maryrose now, all these years later, she’d make some gesture, or turn her eyes in such a way, and there she’d be, Maryrose, and indestructible. Or suppose she “broke down,” or became mad. She would break down into her components, and the gesture, the movement of the eyes would remain, even though some connection had gone. And so all this ta
lk, this anti-humanist bullying, about the evaporation of the personality becomes meaningless for me at that point when I manufacture enough emotional energy inside myself to create in memory some human being I’ve known. I sit down, and remember the smell of the dust and the moonlight, and see Ted handing a glass of wine to George, and George’s over-grateful response to the gesture. Or I see, as in a slow-motion film, Maryrose turn her head, with her terrifyingly patient smile…I’ve written the word film. Yes. The moments I remember all have the absolute assurance of a smile, a look, a gesture, in a painting or a film. Am I saying then that the certainty I’m clinging to belongs to the visual arts, and not to the novel, not to the novel at all, which has been claimed by the disintegration and the collapse? What business has a novelist to cling to the memory of a smile or a look, knowing so well the complexities behind them? Yet if I did not, I’d never be able to set a word down on paper; just as I used to keep myself from going crazy in this cold northern city by deliberately making myself remember the quality of hot sunlight on my skin.
And so I’ll write again that George was a good man. And that I could not stand seeing him turn into an awkward schoolboy when he listened to Willi…that evening he received the facts about the troubles in the left groups in town with humility, and a nod which said that he would think about them privately, and at length—because of course he was too stupid to make up his mind about anything without hours and hours of thought, even though the rest of us were so clever we didn’t need it.
We, all of us, considered that Willi had been cavalier in his analysis; he had spoken as if he had been in committee, had conveyed nothing of our new disquiet, the new tone of disbelief and mockery.
And Paul, repudiating Willi, now chose to tell George, in his own way, of the truth. He began a dialogue with Ted. I remember watching Ted and wondering if he would respond to the light, whimsical challenge. Ted hesitated, looked uncomfortable, but joined in. And because it was not his character, it was against his deep beliefs, there was an exaggerated wild quality to his talk that jarred us more than listening to Paul.
Paul had begun by describing a committee meeting with “two-men-and-a-half” deciding the whole fate of the African continent “without, of course, any reference to the Africans themselves.” (This was, of course, treachery—to admit, in front of outsiders like Stanley Lett and Johnnie the pianist that we could have any doubts about our beliefs. George looked dubiously at the pair, decided that they must have joined us, because otherwise we’d never be so irresponsible, and gave a smile of pleasure because we had two new recruits.) And now Paul described how the two-men-and-a-half, finding themselves in Mashopi, would go about “guiding Mashopi towards a correct line of action.”
“I would say that the hotel would be a convenient place to start, wouldn’t you, Ted?”
“Near the bar, Paul, all modern conveniences.” (Ted was not much of a drinker, and George frowned at him, bewildered, as he spoke.)
“The trouble is, that it’s not exactly a centre of the developing industrial proletariat. Of course, one could, and in fact we probably should, say the same of the whole country?”
“Very true, Paul. But on the other hand the district is plentifully equipped with backward and half-starving farm labourers.”
“Who only need a guiding hand from the said proletariat if only they existed.”
“Ah, but I have it. There are five poor bloody blacks working on the railway line here, all in rags and misery. Surely they’d do?”
“So all we have to do is to persuade them towards a correct understanding of their class position, and we’ll have the whole district in a revolutionary uproar before we can say Left-wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder.”
George looked at Willi, waiting for him to protest. But that morning Willi had said to me that he intended to devote all his time to study, he had no further time for “all these playboys and girls looking for husbands.” It was so easily that he dismissed the people he had taken seriously enough to work with for years.
George was now deeply uneasy; he had sensed the pith of our belief was no longer in us, and this meant that his loneliness was confirmed. Now he spoke across Paul and Ted to Johnnie the pianist.
“They’re talking a lot of cock, aren’t they mate?”
Johnnie nodded agreement—not to the words, I think he seldom listened to words, he only sensed if people were friendly to him or not.
“What’s your name? I haven’t run across you before, have I?”
“Johnnie.”
“You’re from the Midlands?”
“Manchester.”
“You two are members?”
Johnnie shook his head; George’s jaw slowly dropped, then he passed his hand quickly across his eyes and sat slumped, in silence. Meanwhile Johnnie and Stanley remained side by side, observing. They were drinking beer. Now George, in a sudden desperate attempt to break down the barriers, leaped up and poised a wine bottle. “Not much left, but have some,” he said to Stanley.
“Don’t care for it,” said Stanley, “Beer’s for us.” And he patted his pockets and the front of his tunic, where beer bottles stuck out at all angles. Stanley’s great genius was to unfailingly “organise” supplies of beer for Johnnie and himself. Even when the Colony ran dry, which it did from time to time, Stanley would appear with crates of the stuff, which he had stored away in caches all over the city, and which he sold at a profit while the drought lasted.
“You’re right,” said George. “But we poor bloody Colonials have had our stomachs adjusted to Cape hogwash since we were weaned.” George loved wine. But even this gauge of amity had no softening effect on the couple. “Don’t you think these two ought to have their bottoms smacked?” George enquired, indicating Ted and Paul. (Paul smiled; Ted looked ashamed.)
“Don’t care for all that stuff myself,” said Stanley. At first George thought he was still referring to the wine; but when he realised it was politics that were meant, he glanced sharply at Willi, for guidance. But Willi had sunk his head into his shoulders and was humming to himself. I knew he was suffering from homesickness. Willi had no ear, could not sing, but when he was remembering Berlin, he would tunelessly hum, over and over again, one of the tunes from Brecht’s Threepenny Opera.
Oh the shark has
Wicked teeth dear
And he keeps them
Shining white…
Years later it was a popular song, but I first heard it in Mashopi, from Willi; and I remember the sharp feeling of dislocation it gave me to hear the pop-song in London, after Willi’s sad nostalgic humming of what he told us was “A song we used to sing when I was a child—a man called Brecht, I wonder what happened to him, he was very good once.”
“What’s going on, mates?” George demanded, after a long silence full of discomfort.
“I would say that a certain amount of demoralisation is setting in,” said Paul deliberately.
“Oh no,” said Ted, but checked himself and sat frowning. Then he jumped up and said: “I’m going to bed.”
“We’re all going to bed,” said Paul. “So wait a minute.”
“I want my bed. I’m proper sleepy,” said Johnnie, a longer statement than we had yet heard from him. He got up unsteadily, and poised himself with a hand on Stanley’s shoulder. It appeared that he had been thinking things over and now saw the necessity for some kind of a statement. “It’s like this,” he said to George. “I came down to th’otel because I’m a mate of Stanley’s. He said they’ve got a piano and a bit of a dance Saturday nights. But I don’t go for the politics. You’re George Hounslow. I’ve heard them talk of you. Pleased to meet you.” He held out his hand, and George shook it warmly.
Stanley and Johnnie wandered off into the moonlight towards the bedroom block, and Ted got up and said: “And me too, and I’ll never come back here again.”
“Oh, don’t be so dramatic,” said Paul coldly. The sudden coldness surprised Ted, who gazed around at us all, vaguely, hurt and
embarrassed. But he sat down again.
“What the hell are those two chaps doing with us?” demanded George roughly. It was the roughness of unhappiness. “Nice chaps I’m sure, but what are we doing talking about our problems in front of them?”
Willi still did not respond. The thin mournful humming went on, a couple of inches above my ear: “Oh the shark has, wicked teeth dear…”
Paul said, deliberate and nonchalant to Ted: “I think we’ve incorrectly assessed the class situation of Mashopi. We’ve overlooked the obvious key man. Here he is under our noses all the time—Mrs Boothby’s cook.”
“What the hell do you mean, the cook?” demanded George—much too roughly. He was standing up, aggressive and hurt, and he kept swilling his wine around his glass, so that it sloshed off into the dust. We all thought his belligerence was due, simply, to surprise at our mood. We hadn’t seen him for some weeks. I think we were all measuring the depth of the change in us, because it was the first time we had seen ourselves reflected, so to speak, in our own eyes of so short a time ago. And because we felt guilty we resented George—resented him enough to want to hurt him. I remember very clearly, sitting there, looking at George’s honest angry face, and saying to myself, Good Lord! I think he’s ugly—I think he’s ridiculous, I can’t remember feeling that before. And then understanding why I felt like this. But, of course, it was only afterwards that we really came to understand the real cause of George’s reaction to Paul’s mentioning the cook.
“Obviously the cook,” said Paul deliberately, spurred on by his new desire to provoke and hurt George. “He can read. He can write. He has ideas—Mrs Boothby complains of it. Ergo, he is an intellectual. Of course he’ll have to be shot later when ideas become a hindrance, but he’ll have served his purpose. After all, we’ll be shot with him.”