‘Perhaps she could bleach her hair,’ I said.
‘She won’t listen to anything I say to her.’ She thought for a moment. ‘But perhaps if I talk to Max, and explain it to him, perhaps he’ll talk her into being sensible. He’ll laugh himself sick, but perhaps he’ll help me.’
And, a year ago, I saw a photograph in a South African magazine of Camellia, flower-like in white satin, being married to a stiff-looking, dark-suited, young South African with a proud, embarrassed grin.
On the plane between Lusaka and Salisbury, the misty powder-blue eyes of a large, pink-coloured, middle-aged woman teased my memory. At last, the turn of a heavy red neck on mauve-clad shoulder succeeded in setting those innocent blue eyes in the face of a frisking school-girl.
In my class at school there were a group of girls, committed to idling away the time until they were allowed to leave for the delights of the bioscope and the boys. The despair of the teachers and the envy of the girls, they set the fashion, which was to wear well-pressed gym tunics about half an inch longer than the bottom of one’s black tights, long uncreased black legs, tight girdle, white blouse smooth as ice cream under the school tie, and the white school hat on the back of the head. No one’s black pleats swung with such panache as those of the girls of this group, or gang; and Jane’s, in particular, filled my heart with despair. She was very slim, and it was not a mode for the plump.
Several times a term the house-mother summoned us, and gave us a pep-talk which began invariably: ‘Now, gals, I want you to take a pull on yourselves …’ For twenty minutes or so she would deal with the virtues of discipline and obedience; and then turned her whole person, which was whale-shaped and ponderous, in the direction of the intransigent group who sat, bored but bland, in desks at the back of the prep-room, meeting the stare of her full-blooded eyes and the jut of her dark jowl with calm but eager inquiry. ‘There are gals here who are so stoo-pid that they are wasting their valuable school life in playing the fool. Life will never give them another opportunity. In two years’ time they will leave to be shop assistants and clerks. While they are at school they think they are doing very well, because they mix with gals they will never see again once they leave. The system of education in this country unfortunately being what it is, they have a chance to improve themselves by mixing with their superiors. I want to plead with these gals, now, before it is too late, to change their low-class and cheap behaviour. I want them particularly to take a strong pull on themselves.’
This part of the good woman’s lecture always went over our heads, because class language was no part of our experience. We resented, collectively and individually, all attempts to divide us on these lines, but the resentment was too deep to be vocal. There were teachers we liked, teachers who played the traditional roles of butts and villains; but this woman’s self-satisfied stupidity repelled all myth-making. ‘It was as if a savage spoke.’ We recognized that hers was the voice of the Britain our parents had, in their various ways, escaped from. It was a voice peculiarly refined, holding timbres I did not recognize until I came to Britain and began to learn the game of accent-spotting.
But Jane’s voice, when I heard it on the plane, was indistinguishable from that of the hostess: the anonymous, immediately recognizable voice of the Southern African female, which is light and self-satisfied, poised on an assured femininity which comes of being the keeper of society’s conscience. It is the voice, in short, of Mom.
‘Is that you?’ said she to me, in her indolent voice – and it was really painful to see those pretty eyes unchanged among wads of well-fed flesh. ‘I thought it was you. You’ve been doing well for yourself, I must say.’
‘It looks,’ I said, ‘as if we both have.’
She regarded the solid citizen who was her husband with calm satisfaction. ‘My eldest son,’ she remarked, ‘has just got his degree in law.’
‘Jolly good,’ I said.
‘Do you remember Shirley? She’s done well for herself; she’s married a High Court Judge.’ Shirley was the most determinedly relaxed of the group.
‘And Caroline?’ I asked.
‘Well, poor Caroline, she did well for herself, but her old man works with the Native Department, and so she’s stuck in the middle of a Native Reserve. But she’s always gay, in spite of having nothing but Kaffirs all about.’
‘And Janet?’
‘Janet didn’t do well for herself the first time she got married, but he was killed in the war, and now she’s married to a Civil Servant and her daughter’s at Cape Town University. And have you heard about Connie?’
Connie was the odd-man-out of the group because her natural intelligence was such that she could not help passing examinations well even though she never did any work. This idiosyncrasy was regarded by the others with affectionate tolerance.
‘Connie began to be a doctor because her dad said she must, but she did not really like to work much, so she married a Civil Servant and she’s got a house in Robber’s Roost. It was designed by a real architect.’
‘It seems we are all doing fine,’ I said.
‘Yes, live and let live, that’s what I say. But I think you are forgetting our problems being away from home so long. Do you remember Molly? She was the other swot besides you. Well, she’s got a job on the Star in Johannesburg. She used to be a Kaffir-lover, too, but now she has a balanced point of view. She came up to visit last year, and she gave a lecture on the air about race relations. I listened because I like to keep in touch with the old gang. I think that as we get older we get mature and balanced.’ And with this she gave me a lazy but admonitory smile and rejoined her husband, saying, ‘Goodbye, it was nice seeing you again after all these years. Time is going past, say what you like.’
Salisbury was a wide scatter of light over spaces of dark. To fly over it is to see how fast it is growing – not vertically, save for a few tall buildings in its centre, but outwards, in a dozen sprawling suburbs.
I was reminded of the first time I saw Johannesburg from above by night. A few years ago one could not, even at one’s most optimistic, compare Salisbury with Johannesburg: it was only a small patterning of lit streets in a great hollow of darkness. Now the regular arrangements of street-lighting – all these cities are laid out on the American plan, with streets regularly bisecting each other – confine the veld in sparkling nets of light.
The darkness of the earth at night is never complete in Africa, because even the darkest night sky has a glow of light behind it. And so these cities dissolve after sundown, as if points of strong, firm light were strewn wide over a luminous, dark sea.
To drive from the airport to the house I was staying in on the outskirts of the town took seven minutes. I knew that my sense of space, adjusted to sprawling London, was going to take a shock; but I was more confused than I had thought possible. If you live in a small town, you live in all of it, every street, house, garden is palpable all the time, part of your experience. But a big city is a centre and a series of isolated lit points on the darkness of your ignorance. That is why a big city is so restful to live in; it does not press in on you, demanding to be recognized. You can choose what you know.
But it was night; and the town at night was always to me a different place than the candid day-time town. Now the car swept up along avenues of subdued light, for the moon was