The Golden Notebook

“There,” said Paul roughly to Jimmy, handing back his stem. Paul looked embarrassed at his own crossness; Jimmy, silent and rather pale, said nothing. He took the stem and watched the heaving of the minute patch of sand.

  Meanwhile we had been too absorbed to notice that two new pigeons had arrived in the trees opposite. They now began to coo, apparently without any intention of coordination, for the two streams of soft sound continued, sometimes together, sometimes not.

  “They are very pretty,” said Maryrose, protesting, her eyes still shut.

  “Nevertheless, like your butterflies, they are doomed.” And Paul raised his rifle and shot. A bird fell off a branch, this time like a stone. The other bird, startled, looked around, its sharp head turning this way and that, an eye cocked up sky-wards for a possible hawk that had swooped and taken off its comrade, then cocked earth-wards where it apparently failed to identify the bloody object lying in the grass. For after a moment of intense waiting silence, during which the bolt of the rifle snapped, it began again to coo. And immediately Paul raised his gun and shot and it, too, fell straight to the ground. And now none of us looked at Jimmy, who had not glanced up from his observation of his insect. There was already a shallow, beautifully regular pit in the sand, at the bottom of which the invisible insect worked in tiny heaves. Apparently Jimmy had not noticed the shooting of the two pigeons. And Paul did not look at him. He merely waited, whistling very softly, frowning. And in a moment, without looking at us or at Paul, Jimmy began to flush, and then he clambered up, walked across to the trees, and came back with the two corpses.

  “We don’t need a dog after all,” remarked Paul. It was said before Jimmy was half-way back across the grass, yet he heard it. I should imagine that Paul had not intended him to hear, yet did not particularly care that he had. Jimmy sat down again, and we could see the very white thick flesh of his shoulders had begun to flush scarlet from the two short journeys in the sun across the bright grass. Jimmy went back to watching his insect.

  There was again an intense silence. No doves could be heard cooing anywhere. Three bleeding bodies lay tumbled in the sun by a small jutting rock. The grey rough granite was patched and jewelled with lichens, rust and green and purple; and on the grass lay thick glistening drops of scarlet.

  There was a smell of blood.

  “Those birds will go bad,” remarked Willi, who had read steadily during all this.

  “They are better slightly high,” said Paul.

  I could see Paul’s eyes hover towards Jimmy, and see Jimmy struggling with himself again, so I quickly got up and threw the limp wing-dragging corpses into the shade.

  By now there was a prickling tension between us all, and Paul said: “I want a drink.”

  “It’s an hour before the pub opens,” said Maryrose.

  “Well, I can only hope that the requisite number of victims will soon offer themselves, because at the stroke of opening time I shall be off. I shall leave the slaughter to someone else.”

  “None of us can shoot as well as you,” said Maryrose.

  “As you know perfectly well,” said Jimmy, suddenly spiteful.

  He was observing the rivulet of sand. It was now hard to tell which ant-pit was the new one. Jimmy was staring at a largish pit, at the bottom of which was a minute hump—the body of the waiting monster; and a tiny black fragment of twig—the jaws of the monster. “All we need now is some ants,” said Jimmy. “And some pigeons,” said Paul. And, replying to Jimmy’s criticism, he added: “Can I help my natural talents? The Lord gives. The Lord takes. In my case, He has given.”

  “Unfairly,” I said. Paul gave me his charming wry appreciative smile. I smiled back. Without raising his eyes from his book, Willi cleared his throat. It was a comic sound, like bad theatre, and both I and Paul burst out into one of the wild helpless fits of laughing that often took members of the group, singly, in couples, or collectively. We laughed and laughed, and Willi sat reading. But I remember now the hunched enduring set of his shoulders, and the tight painful set of his lips. I did not choose to notice it at the time.

  Suddenly there was a wild shrill silken cleaving of wings and a pigeon settled fast on a branch almost above our heads. It lifted its wings to leave again at the sight of us, folded them, turned round on its branch several times, with its head cocked sideways looking down at us. Its black bright open eyes were like the round eyes of the mating insects on the track. We could see the delicate pink of its claws gripping the twig, and the sheen of sun on its wings. Paul lifted the rifle—it was almost perpendicular—shot, and the bird fell among us. Blood spattered over Jimmy’s forearm. He went pale again, wiped it off, but said nothing.

  “This is getting disgusting,” said Willi.

  “It has been from the start,” said Paul composedly.

  He leaned over, picked the bird off the grass and examined it. It was still alive. It hung limp, but its black eyes watched us steadily. A film rolled up over them, then with a small perceptible shake of determination it pushed death away and struggled for a moment in Paul’s hands. “What shall I do?” Paul said, suddenly shrill; then, instantly recovering himself with a joke: “Do you expect me to kill the thing in cold blood?”

  “Yes,” said Jimmy, facing Paul and challenging him. The clumsy blood was in his cheeks again, mottling and blotching them, but he stared Paul out.

  “Very well,” said Paul, contemptuous, tight-lipped. He held the pigeon tenderly, having no idea how to kill it. And Jimmy waited for Paul to prove himself. Meanwhile the bird sank in a glossy welter of feathers between Paul’s hands, its head sinking on its neck, trembling upright again, sinking sideways, as the pretty eyes filmed over and it struggled again and again to defeat death.

  Then, saving Paul the ordeal, it was suddenly dead, and Paul flung it on to the heap of corpses.

  “You are always so damned lucky about everything,” said Jimmy, in a trembling, angry voice. His full carved mouth, the lips he referred to with pride as “decadent,” visibly shook.

  “Yes, I know,” said Paul. “I know it. The Gods favour me. Because I’ll admit to you, dear Jimmy, that I could not have brought myself to wring this pigeon’s neck.”

  Jimmy turned away, suffering, to his observation of the anteaters’ pits. While his attention had been with Paul, a very tiny ant, as light as a bit of fluff, had fallen over the edge of a pit and was at this moment bent double in the jaws of the monster. This drama of death was on such a small scale that the pit, the ant-eater and the ant could have been accommodated comfortably on a small finger-nail—Maryrose’s pink little finger-nail for instance.

  The tiny ant vanished under a film of white sand, and in a moment the jaws appeared, clean and ready for further use.

  Paul ejected the case from his rifle and inserted a bullet with a sharp snap of the bolt. “We have two more to get before we satisfy Ma Boothby’s minimum needs,” he remarked. But the trees were empty, standing full and silent in the hot sun, all their green boughs light and graceful, very slightly moving. The butterflies were now noticeably fewer; a few dozen only danced on in the sizzling heat. The heat-waves rose like oil off the grass, the sand patches, and were strong and thick over the rocks that protruded from the grass.

  “Nothing,” said Paul. “Nothing happens. What tedium.”

  Time passed. We smoked. We waited. Maryrose lay flat, eyes closed, delectable as honey. Willi read, doggedly improving himself. He was reading Stalin on the Colonial Question.

  “Here’s another ant,” said Jimmy, excited. A larger ant, almost the size of the ant-eater, was hurrying in irregular dashes this way and that between grass-stems. It moved in the irregular apparently spasmodic way that a hunting dog does when scenting. It fell straight over the edge of the pit, and now we were in time to see the brown shining jaws reach up and snap the ant across the middle, almost breaking it in two. A struggle. White drifts of sand down the sides of the pit. Under the sand they fought. Then stillness.

  “There is something about this co
untry,” said Paul, “that will have marked me for life. When you think of the sheltered upbringing nice boys like Jimmy and I have had—our nice homes and public school and Oxford, can we be other than grateful for this education into the realities of nature red in beak and claw?”

  “I’m not grateful,” said Jimmy. “I hate this country.”

  “I adore it. I owe it everything. Never again will I be able to mouth the liberal and high-minded platitudes of my democratic education. I know better now.”

  Jimmy said: “I may know better, but I shall continue to mouth high-minded platitudes. The very moment I get back to England. It can’t be too soon for me. Our education has prepared us above all for the long littleness of life. What else has it prepared us for? Speaking for myself, I can’t wait for the long littleness to begin. When I get back—if I ever do get back that is, I shall…”

  “Hallo,” exclaimed Paul, “here comes another bird. No it doesn’t.” A pigeon cleaved towards us, saw us, and swerved off and away in midair, nearly settled on the other clump of trees, changed its mind and sped into the distance. A group of farm labourers were passing on the track a couple of hundred yards off. We watched them, in silence. They had been talking and laughing until they saw us, but now they, too, were silent, and went past with averted faces, as if in this way they might avert any possible evil that might come from us, the white people.

  Paul said softly: “My God, my God, my God.” Then his tone changed, and he said jauntily: “Looking at it objectively, with as little reference as we can manage to Comrade Willi and his ilk—Comrade Willi, I’m inviting you to consider something objectively.” Willi laid down his book, prepared to show irony. “This country is larger than Spain. It contains one and a half million blacks, if one may mention them at all, and one hundred thousand whites. That, in itself, is a thought which demands two minutes silence. And what do we see? One might imagine—one would have every excuse for imagining, despite what you say, Comrade Willi, that this insignificant handful of sand on the beaches of time—not bad, that image?—unoriginal, but always apt—this million-and-a-little-over-a-half people exist in this pretty piece of God’s earth solely in order to make each other miserable….” Here Willie picked up his book again and applied his attention to it. “Comrade Willi, let your eyes follow the print but let the ears of your soul listen. For the facts are—the facts—that there’s enough food here for everyone!—enough materials for houses for everyone!—enough talent though admittedly so well hidden under bushels at the moment that nothing but the most generous eye could perceive it—enough talent, I say, to create light where now darkness exists.”

  “From which you deduce?” said Willi.

  “I deduce nothing. I am being struck by a new…it’s a blinding light, nothing less…”

  “But what you say is the truth about the whole world, not just this country,” said Maryrose.

  “Magnificent Maryrose! Yes. My eyes are being opened to—Comrade Willi, would you not say that there is some principle at work not yet admitted to your philosophy? Some principle of destruction?”

  Willi said, in exactly the tone we had all expected: “There is no need to look any further than the philosophy of the class struggle,” and as if he’d pressed a button, Jimmy, Paul and I burst out into one of the fits of irrepressible laughter that Willi never joined.

  “I’m delighted to see,” he remarked, grim-mouthed, “that good socialists—at least two of you call yourselves socialists, should find that so very humorous.”

  “I don’t find it humorous,” said Maryrose.

  “You never find anything humorous,” said Paul. “Do you know that you never laugh, Maryrose? Never? Whereas I, whose view of life can only be described as morbid, and increasingly morbid with every passing minute, laugh continuously? How would you account for that?”

  “I have no view of life,” said Maryrose, lying flat, looking like a neat soft little doll in her bright bibbed trousers and shirt. “Anyway,” she added, “you weren’t laughing. I listen to you a lot—” (she said this as if she were not one of us, but an outsider) “—and I’ve noticed that you laugh most when you’re saying something terrible. Well I don’t call that laughing.”

  “When you were with your brother, did you laugh, Maryrose? And when you were with your lucky swain in the Cape?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we were happy,” said Maryrose simply.

  “Good God,” said Paul in awe. “I couldn’t say that. Jimmy, have you ever laughed because you were happy?”

  “I’ve never been happy,” said Jimmy.

  “You, Anna?”

  “Nor me.”

  “Willi?”

  “Certainly,” said Willi, stubborn, defending socialism, the happy philosophy.

  “Maryrose,” said Paul, “you were telling the truth. I don’t believe Willi but I believe you. You are very enviable Maryrose, in spite of everything. Do you know that?”

  “Yes,” said Maryrose. “Yes, I think I’m luckier than any of you. I don’t see anything wrong with being happy. What’s wrong with it?”

  Silence. We looked at each other. Then Paul solemnly bowed towards Maryrose: “As usual,” he said humbly, “we have nothing to say in reply.”

  Maryrose closed her eyes again. A pigeon alighted fast on a tree in the opposite clump. Paul shot and missed. “A failure,” he exclaimed, mock tragic. The bird stayed where it was, surprised, looking about it, watching a leaf dislodged by Paul’s bullet float down to the earth. Paul ejected his empty case, refilled at leisure, aimed, shot. The bird fell. Jimmy obstinately did not move. He did not move. And Paul, before the battle of wills could end in defeat for himself, gained victory by rising and remarking: “I shall be my own retriever.” And he strolled off to fetch the pigeon; and we all saw that Jimmy had to fight with himself to prevent his limbs from jumping him up and over the grass after Paul, who came back with the dead bird yawning, flinging it with the other dead birds.

  “There’s such a smell of blood I shall be sick,” said Maryrose.

  “Patience,” said Paul. “Our quota is nearly reached.”

  “Six will be enough,” said Jimmy. “Because none of us will eat this pie. Mr Boothby can have the lot.”

  “I shall certainly eat of it,” said Paul. “And so will you. Do you really imagine that when that toothsome pie, filled with gravy and brown savoury meat, is set before you, that you will remember the tender songs of these birds so brutally cut short by the crack of doom?”

  “Yes,” said Maryrose.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Willi?” asked Paul, making an issue of it.

  “Probably not,” said Willi, reading.

  “Women are tender,” said Paul. “They will watch us eat, toying the while with Mrs Boothby’s good roast beef, making delicate little mouths of distaste, loving us all the more for our brutality.”

  “Like the Mashona women and the Matabele,” said Jimmy.

  “I like to think of those days,” said Paul, settling down with his rifle at the ready, watching the trees. “So simple. Simple people killing each other for good reasons, land, women, food. Not like us. Not like us at all. As for us—do you know what is going to happen? I will tell you. As a result of the work of fine comrades like Willi, ever-ready to devote themselves to others, or people like me, concerned only with profits, I predict that in fifty years all this fine empty country we see stretching before us filled only with butterflies and grasshoppers will be covered by semi-detached houses filled by well-clothed black workers.”

  “And what is the matter with that?” enquired Willi.

  “It is progress,” said Paul.

  “Yes it is,” said Willi.

  “Why should they be semi-detached houses?” enquired Jimmy, very seriously. He had moments of being serious about the socialist future. “Under a socialist government there’ll be beautiful houses in their own gardens or big flats.”

  “My dear Jimm
y!” said Paul. “What a pity you are so bored by economics. Socialist or capitalist—in either case, all this fine ground, suitable for development, will be developed at a rate possible for seriously undercapitalised countries—are you listening, Comrade Willi?”

  “I am listening.”

  “And because a government faced with the necessity of housing a lot of un-housed people fast, whether socialist or capitalist, will choose the cheapest available houses, the best being the enemy of the better, this fair scene will be one of factories smoking into the fair blue sky, and masses of cheap identical housing. Am I right, Comrade Willi?”

  “You are right.”

  “Well then?”

  “It’s not the point.”

  “It’s my point. That is why I dwell on the simple savagery of the Matabele and the Mashona. The other is simply too hideous to contemplate. It is the reality for our time, socialist or capitalist—well, Comrade Willi?”

  Willi hesitated, then said: “There will be certain outward similarities but…” He was interrupted by Paul and myself, then Jimmy, in a fit of laughter.

  Maryrose said to Willi: “They’re not laughing at what you say, but because you always say what they expect.”

  “I am aware of that,” said Willi.

  “No,” said Paul, “you are wrong Maryrose. I’m also laughing at what he’s saying. Because I’m horribly afraid it’s not true. God forbid, I should be dogmatic about it, but I’m afraid that—as for myself, from time to time I shall fly out from England to inspect my overseas investments and peradventure I shall fly over this area, and I shall look down on smoking factories and housing estates and I shall remember these pleasant, peaceful pastoral days and…” A pigeon landed on the trees opposite. Another and another. Paul shot. A bird fell. He shot, the second fell. The third burst out of a bunch of leaves skywards as if it had been shot from a catapult. Jimmy got up, walked over, brought back two bloodied birds, flung them down with the others and said: “Seven. For God’s sake, isn’t it enough?”

  “Yes,” said Paul, laying aside his rifle. “And now let’s make tracks fast for the pub. We shall just have time to wash the blood off before it opens.”