‘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 ‘organize’ 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 realized 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 demoralization 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.’
I remember George’s long puzzled look at Willi. Then how he examined Ted, who had his head back, his chin pointed up towards the boughs, as he inspected the stars glinting through the leaves. Then his worried stare at Jimmy who was still a sodden corpse in Paul’s arms.
Ted said briskly: ‘I’ve had enough. We’ll escort you to your caravan, George, and leave you.’ It was a gesture of reconciliation and friendship, but George said sharply: ‘No.’ Because he reacted like that Paul immediately got up, dislodging Jimmy who collapsed on to the