Johannesburg from the air is not like a miniature New York, whatever the South African Tourist Corporation may claim; but its compactness and modestly tall buildings do vaguely recall a stunted Manhattan Island surrounded by sandcastles. The sandcastles, of course, are grown-up toys; they are mine-dumps, to be exact, the yellow dross of a full half-century’s frenetic burrowing for gold. For the rest, it is a sprung up, counter-jumping town, as brash, nervous and noisy as its newest millionaire.
One could never return to it without wondering who had gone broke, who had shot himself, which of one’s best friends had been raped or robbed, who was sleeping with whom, and who, incredibly, was not. But it was still my town, and I loved it dearly. And to set the record straight, no one who lived there would dream of calling it Joburg.
As we dipped and circled for our landing at Jan Smuts Airport the man in the next seat, who had been trying all the way from Cape Town to project his personality (and much else besides) in my direction, leant across and said: ‘Can I help you with your seatbelt?’
He had called me ‘young lady’ eight times in three hours. He had small boiled eyes, bristly hair on the backs of his hands, and a snake’s-head belt straining across a bulging stomach. For me (and perhaps, desolately, for himself) he was a natural Doctor Fell.
‘No, thank you,’ I answered. ‘I can manage.’
‘Is anyone meeting you at Joburg?’
Reacting to ‘Joburg’, and also to the more rare annoyance that he did not know who I was, I answered curtly: ‘Yes.’
‘Your family, eh?’
‘Yes, my family. One Jew, one Greek, and one Afrikaner pansy.’
‘Ha! Ha!’ His hand reached out to pat my knee, and changed its mind halfway. (One of my dearest friends swears that she stubs out her cigarettes on such hands. Myself, I have never gone further than flicking hot ash on them.) ‘The young lady has a sense of humour, I can tell.’
The young lady busied herself making up her mouth, while the youngish gentleman watched her sideways. Presently, remembering the word ‘Jew’ in my last answer, he said: ‘Well, they call it Jewburg, don’t they?’
I paused – eyes to mirror, lipstick to mouth: ‘Who?’
‘That’s what Joburg is called,’ he laboured. ‘Jewburg. Because of all the Jews.’
‘What Jews?’
I said it like that, because yet another of my dearest friends claims that all you have to do in these circumstances is to keep on asking silly questions, until the intruder shies away from the charge of molesting female lunatics. But suddenly I thought: To hell with this clod … I ran my own advertising business, with three branches and an annual turnover of four hundred thousand pounds. I wrote a weekly column that had half the adult delinquents in South Africa permanently scared into good behaviour. Ihad large grey eyes, and the legs that God allowed me. I didn’t have to give anyone a gentle brush-off, not at any time, and especially not when there were anti-Semitic overtones hanging in the air.
Thus, before he could answer, I jumped in, with the necessary vehemence. ‘The Jews made Johannesburg!’ I proclaimed loudly. ‘In fact, they made most of South Africa, too! We’re proud of that. My father, the Chief Rabbi–’ suddenly, alarmingly, I couldn’t remember whether rabbis were meant to be celibate or prolific; but I took a chance, ‘–was the first man to build an opera house on the Witwatersrand!’ (That sounded unlikely, and not only for the fact that it would make me approximately sixty-two instead of twenty-six; but it was a moment for plunging on. If I was going to be a Jewess, I’d be a damned good one, like Jael …) ‘Both Caruso and Melba made their débuts there. Don’t you think that’s something to be proud of? If there are a lot of us in Johannesburg, it’s a bloody sight more than dirty old fascists like you deserve! What the hell do you mean, “Jewburg”? Are you trying to insult me?’
If he hadn’t been strapped in, I swear he would have jumped straight out of the window. Admittedly, I had the advantage, as girls who are prepared to scream and wave their arms always have; but still, I could not repress a warm feeling of accomplishment … His mouth made a wet and foolish ‘O’, which God knows was all I wanted it to do: and then he hunched away from me without another word, while the heads that had swung in our direction turned regretfully back again. In silence we glided down and touched the tarmac, making the sort of landing that South African Airways pilots reserve for their nicest passengers.
I was first off the plane (a man called out: ‘Miss Kate Marais, please!’ and I obeyed, but hesitantly, as a shy young lady should). The wonderful Johannesburg air surrounded me with an immediate, insistent relish as I went down the steps. Johannesburg is 6,000 feet above sea level; it is hot and dry during the day, cool and dry at night; like Mexico, it is ideal for eating, drinking, lovemaking, working, or doing nothing in comfort and elegance.
Only occasionally – say, once every two years – does the roof fall in; then lightning strikes and burns up rows of houses, hailstones as big as the traditional pigeon’s egg shatter tiles and windows, tornadoes rip through the native locations, killing and mutilating anyone who gets in the way.
But today was not one of those days, and as I crossed the airport apron, I felt that fabulous climate invading my lungs, caressing my skin, pricking my spirit. It was no wonder, I thought, that they all behaved so badly here. What else could happen, when one had this daily and nightly injection of potency?
The three figures I had been expecting to see were waving to me from behind the barrier. I waved back, and kissed my hand to my family, the one I had described to the short-winded Casanova on the plane as consisting of a Jew, a Greek, and an Afrikaner pansy. A few moments later, I was with them.
Perhaps only in Johannesburg would one be met at the airport by three men named, respectively, Joel Sachs, Eumor Eumorphopulos, and Bruno van Thaal.
Joel Sachs was all that his name implied: a young, brown-eyed, Johannesburg Jew, smart, hardworking, uniquely honest, capable. He was the Johannesburg representative of Kate Marais Advertising, and I could not have wished for a better man – nor, incidentally, for a nicer person. The Jews in Johannesburg (and I had not been far wrong when I told the man on the plane that they had built this city) fell roughly into three categories: the old-time magnates, who fifty years ago stole more money before breakfast than latter-day, mundane thieves do in an entire lifetime of crime, but who were now monumentally respectable; the cultural strata, who made of this city an oasis of entertainment; and the youngish, smartish operators who knew a good thing when they smelt it.
Joel Sachs, of course, was one of the last. In the cut-throat world of advertising, his knife had so far proved the sharpest, his own throat the most durable, and his sense of timing the most acute. I was very glad to have him on my side, and I hoped – or let’s say I knew – that the feeling was mutual.
Eumor Eumorphopulos was really my favourite man, if a young woman of twenty-six heavily involved in business must have a favourite. He was a Greek (what else, indeed?), about fifty-five, small, compact, indestructible, wonderfully crafty. I don’t know what had brought him to Johannesburg, with empty pockets, thirty years earlier, but he was certainly an asset to this city, and incidentally to me.
Eumor did a little of everything: he owned finance companies, tea-shops, hotels, landscaping firms, bicycle repair shops, garages, bad racehorses, good asbestos mines. Starting from nothing, he still had nothing – in the sense that if you possess or control a million pounds’ worth of property, owe eight hundred and fifty thousand to your creditors, and play the stock market, the horses and the chemmy tables with the balance, you still have nothing.
Eumor had an impeccable financial sense; I had once watched him leaf through a dozen assorted balance sheets, of companies ranging from marginal gold mines to semi-derelict tyre factories, and pick out the only two which, a year later, proved to be solvent. Naturally, those had been the ones that he himself had bought – and, again naturally, he had made his choice in the interval between the second and third acts of an Old Vic production of Hamlet at the Empire Theatre.
We had never been in business together, though four years earlier, when Kate Marais Advertising had just been incorporated, he had been generously helpful. He was always pretending to be my lover, though privately he lamented an uncertain virility with the recurrent and memorable words: ‘But Kate, dar-r-r-ling, it won’t t-r-r-ravel!’ Little wonder that Eumor was my favourite man.
Bruno van Thaal, my ‘Afrikaner pansy’, certainly had no concern about his virility; he had long disdained to put it to the test. I must confess to an inherent affection for homosexuals; they are amusing, well-groomed, gossipy, and above all no bother to a girl. Bruno was that somewhat rare thing, an Afrikaner of taste and sensibility; he was small, slim, good-looking and fundamentally kind-hearted.
His family and mine had landed on these dubious shores about two hundred years earlier; the Marais descendants took to gold-mining, the van Thaals to farming and land speculation. Now (and a student of heredity would doubtless find it intriguing) the last of the Marais was in advertising, and the last of the van Thaals did almost nothing at all, with perverse and continuous enjoyment.
There was, however, one thing which Bruno van Thaal did, and he did it for me, extremely well. My weekly gossip column, carried by the three Sunday newspapers which was all that God and the Dutch Reformed Church allowed us, needed local contributors; although I lived and worked in Cape Town, I tried to cover also the varied misconduct of Johannesburg, Durban, Bloemfontein, and Pretoria. My ‘locals’ (of whom Bruno was one) had to work undercover; there was really no other way in which they could attend the necessary parties, report accurately on what happened, and still be invited out in the future.
Of the four people I had working for me in the field, Bruno was certainly the most dependable, the most observant, and the most malicious. But of course, he had the best material to work on.
My column was written for my own pleasure, and for the edification of those people interested in misbehaviour – a wide readership indeed. Personally, I subscribed to the reputed motto of that merry monarch, King Edward VII: ‘I don’t mind what people do, as long as they don’t do it in the streets and frighten the horses.’ In Johannesburg, they were a trifle inclined to frighten the horses.
There was, indeed, a remarkable amount of high-pressure drinking and casual fornication in this city. It was not as intense, of course, as what went on in Kenya, where the upper crust of ‘white settlers’ really behaved very badly indeed, when judged by anything except farmyard standards. Someone should one day write a little piece called A Day in the Life of a Kenya Nobleman; the quota of drinks downed, maidens overthrown, husbands duped, lovers maimed, and bullets hitting the pillow would overload the most elaborate Bureau of Statistics.
But Johannesburg really did very well, in its own quiet way. There was little or no prostitution – the essential yardstick of a moral community; pleasure was public, violence was funny, and love, above all, was amateur.
All of which made it very easy to write a gossip column – especially with the beady blue eyes of Bruno van Thaal to help me.
Those beady blue eyes were now surveying me, with an appraisal all the more intuitive and feminine for being utterly neuter; I knew that Bruno was taking in every last detail, from gabardine suit (slightly crushed from the flight) to maquillage (repaired as good as new). Finally he said: ‘Kate, you look wonderful!’
‘A man tried to pick me up for three whole hours!’ I said, kissing him.
‘My dear, you must have fainted dead away!’
Eumor swept off his Panama hat, and declared, in his unusual Balkanised English: ‘I kill him to the death! Where is he? How tall?’
‘Nine feet.’
‘I surrender.’
Joel Sachs said: ‘Hallo, Kate! Nice to see you again.’
‘How’s our business?’
‘Booming.’
‘Darling,’ said Bruno van Thaal, ‘yesterday’s column was really rather naughty, wasn’t it?’
‘I tried to temper justice with malice.’ Out of sight of the others, I winked at him. It had been mostly his own material.
We moved inside the airport building, where it was cooler, and the noise of planes was deadened. A few people greeted me; one of the Customs men whom I knew smiled as he touched the peak of his cap; a mining man, a friend of my father, raised his hat with the courtesy of a much earlier age. Then the good-looking young steward who had elected to carry my stole and my cosmetic-case off the plane, and to collect the other luggage said: ‘All ready, Miss Marais.’
‘You should come up more often,’ said Bruno, as we moved through the dry sunshine towards the car park. ‘Johannesburg is really very ordinary without you.’
‘Four times a year is all that the traffic will bear … How about the party tonight?’
‘All laid on, darling.’
‘I bring a young girl, no?’ asked Eumor.
‘No.’
‘The daughter of my innkeeper?’
‘No … How are the horses, Eumor?’
‘Not so nice as the daughter of my innkeeper.’
‘There’ll be lots of girls there, Eumor,’ Joel Sachs reassured him. ‘You’ll do all right.’
‘But this one is different.’
‘Two heads?’ I asked.
‘With but a single thought,’ said Bruno.
A couple of minutes later we were in Eumor’s fancy-looking Cadillac, driving towards the mine-dumps and the gleaming white towers of Johannesburg.
We lunched, as usual, at the most civilised restaurant in Johannesburg, Fraternelli’s; this was a four-times-a-year ritual, and the ritual allowed us to be greedy, self-indulgent, and just a little bit high at the finish. We all had caviar an blinis, with Akvavit as a lubricant, to start with; then Bruno and I had truite an bleu, Joel Sachs grappled with a steak obviously culled from the biggest ox in the Transvaal, and Eumor, grumbling all the time, went off into the kitchen with Fraternelli and came back presently with the oddest-looking Italian confection, loosely labelled cannelloni, that I had seen since my last visit.
Pol Roger eased it all down; Armagnac pronounced the blessing; and Fraternelli came up with a rich and rare cheese from the Bel Paese stable, by way of farewell. And lest anyone should think this a specially Lucullan lunch, by Johannesburg standards, I can assure them that it was not.
Fraternelli served us, with much theatrical sleight of hand and finger-snapping; though disappointed that we had not ordered anything in the flambé category, so that he could attract attention to his favourite customers by applying a blowtorch and singeing the chandelier, he still contrived to make a La Scala production of the meal. He was a unique Johannesburg institution, capable, talented and enormously successful; in this city, whether you wanted a directors’ dinner for twenty or a seduction snack for two, food meant Fraternelli, and that was all there was to it.
He was a middle-aged Italian with two crosses to bear: the English language, which gave him every conceivable kind of trouble, and women, who served him even worse. If he could have mastered the one with the doomed facility with which he succumbed to the other, he would have been a happy man indeed.
He always called me ‘Miss Mary’ near enough to Miss Marais, and much nearer than he came to a lot of other words.
We were cheerful, rather noisy, and talkative in a slanderous sort of way. It was a well-lit, beautifully decorated room with a lot of elegant wrought ironwork framing the windows, and it was crammed with people who behaved according to their several public habits – eating stolidly, drinking deep, staring round them, table-hopping, waving, quarrelling, spilling water jugs, falling down when they paid the bill.
People table-hopped a good deal in our direction; it is a habit I can do without, particularly when one is hungry and fond of food; and we were not very forthcoming to such visitors. But it isn’t easy to be dismissive with one’s mouth full.
Women tended to dress well when they went to Fraternelli’s, and I noticed several people I knew who had obviously shot the works on their spring outfits. My dear silly friend Mrs Marchant, wearing a hat that I coveted, waved to me from across the room; another grim-looking woman whose name I couldn’t remember stopped as she neared our table, remarked somewhat coldly: ‘So sorry we can’t come tonight,’ and passed on.
‘I didn’t invite her,’ said Bruno, with relish.
‘Why not?’ I asked.
‘Don’t you remember? Last time she got as high as a kite, and started juggling with the stuffed avocados.’
Fraternelli, who according to his custom had been listening closely, leant over and confided: ‘When wine is in, brain is out.’
‘Well said, Fraternelli,’ I answered, ‘You’re getting positively colloquial.’
He beamed, and hurried away to his dictionary.
‘And anyway,’ said Bruno, pursuing his theme, ‘she’s so ugly.’
‘I am ugly,’ said Eumor, with conviction. ‘This party is for beautiful people only?’
‘It is for my friends,’ I answered. ‘It is also for my many enemies, for the business connections of Kate Marais Advertising, for people I grew up with when I was a pretty little Johannesburg girl, for old chums of my father, and for odds and sods paying a visit to darkest Africa. It is to give me pleasure, and for Bruno to enjoy himself, fiddling the invitations.’
‘Were you a pretty little girl?’ asked Joel.
‘No, hideous. People would gaze at my brother, and say: “What a perfect angel!” and then they’d look at me, and say: “This is going to be the brainy one.” Very mortifying.’
‘You’ve come on since then, dear,’ said Bruno.
‘I was always ugly,’ said Eumor.
We talked about that night’s party, a yearly function for my firm, wildly expensive and great fun. Bruno and Joel Sachs did the invitations between them; I, first at long range and then a good deal closer, laid down the law about the decorations, the food, the entertainment and the service. In a city of parties, some of them excellent, we always tried to give ours a special quality partly for prestige reasons, partly because that is the only kind of party to give. Not for me the dusty canapés and tepid drinks, the crenellated fish-paste sandwiches which only a professional caterer could possibly dream up.
Generally, about three hundred people came, stayed for four hours, and then went on their way, much elevated. Already there had grown up a fissionable tradition, a tendency for our guests to split into smaller and smaller groups as the remainder of the evening progressed. Many was the continent girl, indeed, who had bestowed her all after the Kate Marais spring gallop, and many the maturer lady who had bestowed it all again.
Towards three o’clock that afternoon, Johannesburg being a very hard-working town, the restaurant began to clear. We sat back from our table, enjoying the Armagnac and an easier view of our surroundings. Joel and Bruno were arguing about the exact proportions of a dry martini, a traditional area of disagreement among Americans which was only now setting Johannesburg in an uproar. Eumor was giving me the horrid inside story of why one of his horses had failed to win, over the weekend.
A man whom I had subtly insulted in my column, twenty-four hours earlier, cut me so dead in passing, with such a defiant toss of the head, that I choked, and had to be revived. Fraternelli, now preoccupied with our catering for that evening, brought in (with suitable fanfare) a 16-lb Cape salmon in aspic for me to look at; I complained about the colour of the lemon peel decoration, which clashed with the creature’s eyes, and he retreated again, hand to head, promising much better things in the future.
Across the wastes of the emptying room, I became aware that I was being stared at.
It was a man, of course; in spite of the aura of oddity which surrounds any woman who lives alone and likes it, I was not an afficionada of any other club. He was sitting across the room from us, alone at an inconspicuous table; I had an impression of slimness, leanness, black hair, careless dress, disdain, poverty, maleness. (Several newspapers pay me substantial sums every week to recognise such things, even at thirty paces.) He was drinking his coffee, and staring, without insistence and with a certain detachment, at our table, and in particular at me.
I wondered why he was lunching at Fraternelli’s, and if he were finding it worth the snob-surcharge on the bill, and if so, for what reason.
I leant across to Eumor, cutting short his sad tale of bribed jockeys, colour-blind race stewards, and trainers sunk in debt, and asked: ‘’Oo dat?’
Eumor’s creased olive face wrinkled ever further, as if plumbing yet inkier depths of woe. He suddenly looked like the oldest Greek in the world, hearing the final results of Thermopylae.
‘Kate, Kate … You’re not listening to me the least little bit.’
‘Yes I am, Eumor, and I think it’s all perfectly terrible. But who’s the shady customer with the black hair?’
‘That’s me, darling.’
‘Eumor …’
Eumor, who (when he was not pretending to be my lover) liked to do a little social pimping on the side, half turned and glanced in the direction I indicated, though with such a hammed-up air of insouciance that he might as well have fired a signal rocket. Then, to my surprise, he waved in acknowledgement, and turned back to me.
‘Stupido! That’s Jonathan Steele.’
‘I’m a country girl,’ I said. ‘Who’s Jonathan Steele?’
‘English,’ said Bruno over his shoulder. He always followed other people’s conversations, no matter how preoccupied he seemed to be. ‘Been here about three months.’
‘Doing what?’
‘Writing a book.’
‘Oh, God …’
Nowadays, everyone wrote books about my poor country, and about Africa in general; ranging from Alan Paton (wonderful) to John Gunther (worthy); from Ruark’s blood-and-guts melodrama to Monsarrat’s ponderous headstone over the colonial civil service. Most of the ones written by visitors were trash, ready-minced for the literary supermarket, like parti-coloured hamburger meat; seldom were they better than slick reportage.
In South Africa especially, we were by now bored to extinction with weekend ‘special correspondents’ who flew in, flew round, and flew out again, confident that they had exhausted the potentialities of this enormously complicated country in seventy-two hours, 2,000 miles of air travel, twenty conversations, three almost traditional love affairs, and one undercover session with devoted Anglican priest, heroic native leader, courageous Jewish advocate – whoever the current journalistic queen-ant might be.
Personally, I took little interest in South African politics, and still less in race relations. My family had played no small part in all these things, since 1750; and it now seemed to me high time for the Marais clan to take a rest, and concentrate on some kind of selfish personality cult, by way of a change.
Nor was I especially enamoured of visiting Englishmen who (if they were not rumpled, know-it-all journalists) were mostly those modern versions of the rooinek – terrible pink-faced City types, who arrived with £500 and a third-hand introduction to Harry Oppenheimer, and expected to assume control of the gold and diamond industries by the following weekend.
True, the English had made an unmatched contribution to my country, far greater than most Afrikaners (even non-Nationalists) would admit; their missionaries were opening up the country, and their soldiers stemming the black tide sweeping down from the north, when many of my ancestors were loafing down in Cape Town, complaining about the heat or slipping off to the slave quarters for a refresher course in sexual callisthenics. But latter-day Englishmen, with their E-string vocal chords and their intact colonial superiority, gave most of us a deep-seated pain which not even a title could assuage.
I woke from my acid daydream to hear Eumor say: ‘But this one is different, Kate. He is serious. He is going to remain a year.’
‘So long?’
‘He has written some earlier books also.’
‘All same Mickey Spillane.’
‘He is paid for by his publishers.’
‘Huh?’
Bruno – and this was exactly the sort of thing he ferreted out – explained. ‘Whoever they are, they’ve advanced enough money for him to live here a year, and write a book about it.’
That attracted my attention; all the publishers I knew were the hardest of hard-headed people, not at all given to this kind of wagering. ‘What sort of book?’
Bruno sniffed. ‘With Rod and Gun in Darkest Johannesburg,’ he said spitefully. ‘With full-colour illustration of the author wrestling a stockbroker in the lounge of the Canton Hotel.’
Eumor looked mystified. ‘Nonsense. It is a roman.’
‘Again?’
‘A romance. A novel.’
Sipping my brandy, I took another look at Jonathan Steele. This time our eyes met. He seemed to be smiling faintly. He must have been aware that we were talking about him.
‘You want to meet him?’ asked Eumor, the old-time fixer.
‘Yes.’
Close to, he was disappointing, for reasons grounded in a personal foible of mine. Whatever their size or shape, there is no reason why men should not be neat, clean, well-dressed; if we pay them the compliment of taking enormous trouble over our clothes, our make-up and our grooming, they should certainly be prepared to do the same. Rumpled suits, grubby cuffs, wrinkled ties, hair at the nape of the neck, yesterday’s shave – all these are within the spectrum of curable masculine faults.
Jonathan Steele was as clean as a new nail, but he was untidy, dressed in a rather shabby seersucker suit which should have been sent to the cleaners once more, that very afternoon, and then thrown away. His hair was suitable to a writer, his tie something less even than that. There was a further annoyance. Just as all women who wear high heels with slacks or a bathing suit look like whores, so all men in scuffed suede shoes carry with them a fatal air of poverty and neglect. Steele’s shoes were scuffed to the inner lining.
Eumor introduced him all round. He waited until I asked him to sit down. He lit my fresh cigarette with the minimum of delay and fuss. He looked at me with a neutral air, neither as if I were the target for tonight (the majority reaction), nor as if his time for such frivolous contacts was severely limited. He seemed in fact a shabby man with brains and good manners; slightly withdrawn, somewhat proud, inwardly confident, as if he alone had the secret but wasn’t boasting about it. An Irish face, vaguely; pale, lean, potent … In a horribly feminine way, I felt that he was working his way into my good opinion, just by sitting there. I didn’t like that at all.
I asked him what he would drink and, after looking round at all our glasses, he said: ‘Brandy, please,’ with that slight edge to his voice which indicated that brandy would be a treat. Fraternelli took the order, and went behind a screen to execute it. (For some reason, grounded in heaven-knows-what morass of religion, teetotal fanaticism, and misplaced care, women in South Africa were not allowed to see bottles actually uncorked in public; there was thought to be something inflammatory in the gesture though I should have thought the reverse operation was the more suggestive. No matter; the result was that there were no mixed-company bars open to our shy gaze.)
While we were waiting, I asked Jonathan Steele about his book.
‘It’s still in the planning stage,’ he answered, with diffidence. His voice was deeper than I had expected. ‘I’ve only been here three months. I’m still wandering around, and talking to people.’
‘What sort of people?’
He looked at me. ‘You probably wouldn’t know them.’
I didn’t like that either, though I disguised it with a mock sternness when I spoke next.
‘Tell me,’ I commanded, ‘exactly what people you talked to yesterday!’
He answered, with ironic deliberation: ‘I was in Pretoria. There was a Black Sash demonstration. I watched, and talked to some of the women.’
I made the usual face. The Black Sash was an organisation which had grown up during the last few years; its members (all women) followed Cabinet ministers around, or picketed them at their offices, or lined up outside the House of Assembly, standing completely silent and immobile, wearing a black sash to indicate that they were in mourning for our somewhat tattered Constitution.
It was a good tactic, and effective to a limited extent; the police didn’t appreciate it at all, and a number of Cabinet ministers had reacted with a degree of rudeness and crudity which showed that it had got well under their skins.
Steele noticed my expression, and asked: ‘Don’t you believe in the idea?’
‘In a way,’ I answered. ‘But I just don’t want to be a lady in a black sash.’
‘You just want to be a lady?’
Our drinks had arrived, and in the pause that followed his words we all sipped them, as if signalled to do so. Bruno was watching Jonathan Steele and myself, with malicious interest; it was the sort of thing I paid him to do, in other circumstances and with other people; now it was rather disconcerting.
‘I’m a working girl,’ I answered curtly. ‘My family have lived a long time in this country – two hundred years, to be exact. Good or bad, we feel it belongs to us. And good or bad, we can choose whether to get involved in politics, or whether to do something else instead.’
‘But I don’t see,’ he said, again with deceptive diffidence, ‘how you can possibly live in South Africa, and not get involved in politics.’
‘It would take too long to explain,’ I answered. ‘But you can.’
At that point, if I had been ten years younger and my mother still alive and present at the table, she would have raised her eyebrows gently yet decisively, and changed the subject to one of her own choosing; later, in her bedroom, she would have said to me: ‘Katherine, I did not bring you up to be rude to your guests, however odd they may be …’ It was true that Jonathan Steele had made me angry; and the process was still continuing.
I watched him now, smiling faintly as he surveyed the four of us over the top of his brandy ballon, and I put into my own mental quotation marks the things he was thinking and saying to himself, like the disgruntled, declamatory, round-the-table list one makes up in one’s head at a dull dinner party.
To Eumor he was saying: ‘You are the classic type of financial juggler.’
To Joel: ‘You are the wrong kind of Jew.’
To Bruno: ‘You are a pansy. I don’t like them.’
To myself: ‘You are beautiful, and unimportant.’
And to all of us: ‘How can you play like children, living on top of this disgusting volcano?’
It was therefore with the utmost surprise that I heard myself saying to Jonathan Steele: ‘If you’re not doing anything else this evening, come to our party.’
Apparently he was the only one who was not surprised; he answered: ‘Thank you – I’d like that very much,’ as if the invitation stemmed from a half-hour’s easy social intercourse. Eumor was staring at me in sardonic inquiry; Bruno frowned petulantly; Joel Sachs went so far as to choke on his Armagnac. But it was Joel, the perceptive Jew, and the only person at the table with a built-in, hereditary preference for peace, who smoothed the moment out.
‘That’s fine, Mr Steele!’ he said. ‘Marlborough Hotel, any time after six o’clock … I’m sure there’ll be a lot of people you know.’
‘Oh yes!’ said Bruno van Thaal, whose personal preference was for strife. ‘We’ve got the Black Sash running the bar.’
‘Then my constitution will be safeguarded,’ said Jonathan Steele, and rose to make his farewells.
I thought that a very adequate retort, and, in the circumstances, defensively brilliant. Watching Steele leave the restaurant, I was not sorry that I had invited him.
But I was in a minority.
‘Now why on earth did you do that?’ asked Bruno peevishly, as soon as Steele was out of earshot. ‘The Marlborough holds three hundred people in agonising discomfort, we’ve got three hundred and fifty coming for certain, and the people I haven’t asked are all in screaming sulks already. And yet you go and invite that agitator!’
‘I heard my mother whispering to me,’ I answered.
‘You and your mother,’ said Bruno, who had been fobbed off with this excuse for eccentricity on many similar occasions. ‘I wish you two would work out your timing beforehand.’
‘He was not in good humour,’ volunteered Eumor, belatedly conscience-stricken over his protégé. ‘But it will be a great book, I swear to you. I have listened to him talk. Brilliant! Fantastique! Fabelhaft!’
‘Nuts!’ said Bruno, who was in a bad mood, and determined to stay there. ‘He’s not a genius – he just needs a haircut. I’ll bet you he never even writes a book.’
‘How much?’ asked Eumor.
‘One million pounds.’
‘Five hundred thousand,’ said Eumor prudently. ‘Cash.’
‘Done.’
‘Besides,’ I said, wishing for no special reason to make up some ground, ‘if he’s writing about South Africa he ought to meets lots of other people, besides those dreary Black Sash matrons.’
‘And communists,’ said Bruno darkly.
‘And natives.’
‘And Father Billingsgate, or whatever his name is.’
‘And the African National Congress.’
‘And us,’ concluded Joel Sachs, on a sensible note.
‘Gentlemen,’ I said rising, ‘Kate Marais Advertising has to do a little work. I’ll see you all in three hours’ time.’
‘If we can get into the hotel,’ said Bruno, ‘past all these hordes of new people.’
I walked back with Joel Sachs to our office on Commissioner Street. It was one of my favourite times of the day, in Johannesburg; the shadows were lengthening, the caverns of the streets were growing cooler, the first edition of the Star was just out and being bought at the street corners, where groups of people who looked as though they didn’t have a cent in the world thumbed through the stock-market prices, the race results from England, the sweepstake draws, the cars-for-sale.
These were the white men, poor and not-so-poor, but most of the other faces in the street were black, of course; we were outnumbered (for that was how an Afrikaner thought of it) nearly five to one in this city, and the main throng was native.
There were women selling lemons and pears and limes and pawpaws; women with babies strapped to their backs; women in brightly-coloured clothes, the élite from the native brothels. The men were office messengers; mine-boys trudging in convoy to the railway station; beggars squirming on the pavement; loafers; pickpockets; shabby black clergymen of the ‘bush Baptist’ variety; young idlers (whom we called skellums) on the lookout for the unlocked car, the coat or suitcase forgotten on a back seat, the handbag hanging open; the American tourists who were fair game for everyone.
From the groups playing dice at the street corners came an occasional pungent drift of dagga smoke, the home-grown version of marijuana which gave a man courage – sometimes too much courage for his own good.
On the sunny side of the street, the colours were gaudy and eye-catching; in the shade, we walked in a cool twilight, part of a restless drifting throng approaching with pleasure the idle hours of the day.
Of course, one never really saw faces, unless they were white; if they were anything less, they were part of the scenery, part of the huge amorphous element known as ‘them’. The thought recalled Jonathan Steele to me, and I decided that I had given him quite enough attention already, that afternoon.
‘Bring me up to date,’ I said to Joel Sachs.
Joel, who was always the quietest person at our lunches (since they spanned a number of different worlds, while he had only one), came swiftly to life.
Kate Marais Advertising was going through one of its spells of unpopularity, he told me. Turnover was up, prestige was high, bigger and bigger accounts were showing a tendency to gravitate in our direction; and since such gravitation always looked, to the loser, like bare-faced stealing, we were both of us branded as thieves, murderers, and worse, at the moment.
I was pleased. I kept Joel up in Johannesburg to conduct the biggest poaching operation he could manage; that was the essence of the advertising business, and if we didn’t deliver first-class copy and service, we in our turn would be poached out of existence. I loved the whole thing, because I had built it up myself in four years, starting with a single room in Cape Town and a loan of £500 from my father; now, with the main office still in Cape Town, but with branches in Johannesburg and Durban, we were at the very top of the heap.
If I was any sort of a snob, it was an achievement snob. It gave me unique pleasure to have got so far, remembering the very early days when setting up the firm had been a driving, heartbreaking scramble for a marginal profit, in an area where, if you were a woman, the marginal profit was you … It had meant very hard work, complete self-discipline, and the cultivation of a sexless, emotionless life in the face of a male world which didn’t believe in such a thing for a single moment.
‘Come and have lunch,’ they used to say, when I was trying to negotiate an intricate contract that would leave me with something to show for it besides bruises. And later: ‘Come and have dinner. Come to bed. Come.’ In a way, it was no wonder that I had made good in advertising. Everyone else was thinking of something quite different.
The gossip column had been an alternative kind of achievement. KMA made money in the business world, and ‘Kate Marais Calling’ kept people hopping, in a fashion vaguely related, vaguely complementary. The column held people at arm’s length, also, the way I liked to have them. A man with whom I was trying to do business was going to think twice about staring at my bosom or crossed legs, or trying the frontal approach in a nightclub, if his wife were certain to read a fragrant little paragraph about it, the following Sunday morning.
Between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-six, I had wanted, progressively, a highly successful business (I ticked the items off in my mind), the odd glamour attached to being a good-looking woman in the business world, and the power (overt or undercover) that went with being able to say in cold print what lesser operators were whispering, hinting at, or ignoring.
I had got all these things, and it hadn’t taken as long as I had feared, nor as my father had forecast.
Joel was saying: ‘There’s a good chance that we’ll get the Anglo-African account as well.’
I laughed, so that a man outside the Carlton Hotel turned and stared. ‘That will make us very unpopular.’
Anglo-African was a big mining house – nearly the biggest. They did not take a great deal of space in any one year (they had no reason to, gold being a commodity which really did sell itself); but it was an excellent account, and they also paid a great deal, at the ‘consultative’ level, for somewhat pedestrian copy.
Joel dodged an early drunk at the next street corner. ‘And I’d like you to call on Sliemeck’s for me.’
‘Why, especially?’
‘It’s a big firm, as you know. They’re thinking of making a change, in our direction. But Sliemeck hasn’t quite made up his mind.’
I laughed again. ‘I’m really getting too old to sell my body for a real-estate account.’
‘Just show it in profile, dear.’
I felt good that afternoon in Johannesburg, walking down Commissioner Street with Joel Sachs. Later, in the air-conditioned office, we did ninety minutes of concentrated, detailed work that made me feel better still. If there was a nicer way of being a woman, I hadn’t discovered it yet, and I didn’t need to.