When Paul and I left the kitchen he greeted us as was customary: ’Morning, Nkos. ’Morning, Nkosikaas—that is, Good morning, Chief and Chieftainess.
‘Christ,’ said Paul, with irritation and anger, when we were outside the kitchen. And then, in the whimsical cool tone of his self-preservation: ‘But it’s strange I should mind at all. After all, it has pleased God to call me into the station of life which will so clearly suit my tastes and talents, so why should I care? But all the same…’
We walked up to the big room through the hot sunlight, the dust warm and fragrant under our shoes. His arm was around me again and now I was pleased to have it there for other reasons than that Willi was watching. I remember feeling the intimate pressure of his arm in the small of my back, and thinking that, living in a group as we did, these quick flares of attraction could flare and die in a moment, leaving behind them tenderness, unfulfilled curiosity, a slightly wry and not unpleasant pain of loss; and I thought that perhaps it was above all the tender pain of unfulfilled possibilities that bound us. Under a big jacaranda tree that grew beside the big room, out of sight of Willi, Paul turned me around towards him and smiled down at me, and the sweet pain shot through me again and again. ‘Anna,’ he said, or chanted. ‘Anna, beautiful Anna, absurd Anna, mad Anna, our consolation in this wilderness, Anna of the tolerantly amused black eyes.’ We smiled at each other, with the sun stabbing down at us through the thick green lace of the tree in sharp gold needles. What he said then was a kind of revelation. Because I was permanently confused, dissatisfied, unhappy, tormented by inadequacy, driven by wanting towards every kind of impossible future, the attitude of mind described by ‘tolerantly amused eyes’ was years away from me. I don’t think I really saw people then, except as appendages to my needs. It’s only now, looking back, that I understand, but at the time I lived in a brilliantly lit haze, shifting and flickering according to my changing desires. Of course, that is only a description of being young. But it was Paul who, alone among us, had ‘amused eyes’ and as we went into the big room hand in hand, I was looking at him and wondering if it were possible that such a self-possessed youth could conceivably be as unhappy and tormented as I was; and if it was true that I had, like him, ‘amused eyes’—what on earth could that mean? I fell all of a sudden into an acute irritable depression, as in those days I did very often, and from one second to the next, and I left Paul and went by myself into the bay of a window.
I think that was the most pleasant room I have been in in all my life. The Boothbys had built it because there was no public hall at this station, and they were always having to clear their dining-room for dances or political meetings. But they had built it from good-nature, as a gift to the district, and not for profit.
It was as large as a big hall, but it looked like a living-room, with walls of polished red brick and a floor of dark red cement. The pillars—there were eight great pillars supporting the deep thatched roof—were of unpolished reddish-orange brick. The fireplaces at either end were both large enough to roast an ox. The wood of the rafters was thorn, and had a slightly bitter tang, whose flavour changed according to whether the air was dry or damp. At one end was a grand piano on a small platform, and at the other a radiogram with a stack of records. Each side had a dozen windows, one set showing the piled granite boulders behind the station, and the other miles across country to the blue mountains.
Johnnie was playing the piano at the far end, with Stanley Lett and Ted beside him. He was oblivious of both. His shoulders and feet tapped and shrugged to the jazz, his rather puffy white face blank as he stared away to the mountains. Stanley did not mind that Johnnie was indifferent to him: Johnnie was his meal-ticket, his invitation to parties where Johnnie played, his passport to a good time. He made no secret of why he was with Johnnie—he was the frankest of petty crooks. In return he saw that Johnnie had plenty of ‘organized’ cigarettes, beer and girls, all for nothing. I said he was a crook, but this is nonsense of course. He was a man who had understood from the beginning that there is one law for the rich and one for the poor. This was purely theoretical knowledge for me until I actually lived in a working-class area in London. That was when I understood Stanley Lett. He had the profoundest instinctive contempt for the law; contempt, in short, for the State about which we talked so much. I suppose that was why Ted was intrigued with him? He used to say: ‘But he’s so intelligent!’—the inference being that if the intelligence were used, he could be harnessed to the cause. And I suppose Ted wasn’t so far wrong. There is a type of trade union official like Stanley: tough, controlled, efficient, unscrupulous. I never saw Stanley out of a shrewd control of himself, used as a weapon to get everything he could out of a world he took for granted was organized for the profit of others. He was frightening. He certainly frightened me, with his big hard bulk, hard clear features, and cold analytical grey eyes. And why did he tolerate the fervent and idealistic Ted? Not, I think, for what he could get out of him. He was genuinely touched that Ted, ‘a scholarship boy’, was still concerned about his class. At the same time he thought him mad. He would say: ‘Look, mate, you’ve been lucky, got more brains than most of us. You use your chances and don’t go mucking about. The workers don’t give a muck for anyone but themselves. You know it’s true. I know it’s true.’ ‘But Stan,’ Ted harangued him, his eyes flashing, his black hair in agitated motion all over his head: ‘Stan, if enough of us cared for the others, we could change it all—don’t you see?’ Stanley even read the books Ted gave him, and returned them saying: ‘I’ve got nothing against it. Good luck to you, that’s all I can say.’
On this morning Stanley had stacked the top of the piano with ranks of beer mugs. In a corner was a packing case stacked with bottles. The air around the piano was thick with smoke, lit with stray gleams of reflected sunlight. The three men were isolated from the room in a haze of sun-lanced smoke. Johnnie played, played, played, quite oblivious. Stanley drank and smoked and kept an eye on the girls coming in who might do for himself or Johnnie. And Ted alternately yearned after the political soul of Stanley and the musical soul of Johnnie. As I’ve said, Ted had taught himself music, but he could not play. He would hum snatches from Prokofiev, Mozart, Bach, his face agonized with impotent desire, forcing Johnnie to play. Johnnie played anything by ear, he played the airs as Ted hummed them, while his left hand hovered impatiently just above the keys. The moment the hypnotic pressure of Ted’s concentration relaxed, the left hand broke into syncopation, and then both hands were furious in a rage of jazz, while Ted smiled and nodded and sighed, and tried to catch Stanley’s eye in rueful amusement. But Stanley’s returning smile was for mateyness only, he had no ear at all.
These three stayed at the piano all day.
There were about a dozen people in the hall but it was so large it looked empty. Maryrose and Jimmy were hanging paper garlands from the dark rafters, standing on chairs and assisted by about a dozen aircraftmen who had come down from town by train having heard that Stanley and Johnnie were there. June Boothby was on a window sill, watching out of her private dream. When invited to help with the work,