The Golden Notebook

But later that evening she did succeed in making him ashamed.

George Hounslow, a roads man, lived a hundred miles or so down the line in a small town with his wife, three children, and the four old parents. He was arriving at midnight in his lorry. He proposed to spend the evenings of the week-end with us, attending to his work along the main road in the daytime. We left the dining-room and went off to sit under the bunch of gum-trees near the railway line to wait for George. Under the trees was a rough wooden table and some wooden benches. Mr Boothby sent down a dozen bottles of chilled Cape white wine. We were all mildly tight by then. The hotel was in darkness. Soon the lights in the Boothbys’ house went out. There was a small light from the station building and a small gleam of lights from the bedroom block up the rise several hundreds of yards off. Sitting under the gum-trees with the cold moonlight sifting over us through the branches, and the night wind lifting and laying the dust at our feet, we might have been in the middle of the veld. The hotel had been absorbed into the wild landscape of granite-bouldered kopjes, trees, moonlight. Miles away the main road crossed a rise, a thin gleam of pale light between banks of black trees. The dry oily scent of the gum-trees, the dry irritating smell of dust, the cold smell of wine, added to our intoxication.

Jimmy fell asleep, slumped against Paul, who had his arm around him. I was half-asleep, against Willi’s shoulder. Stanley Lett and Johnnie, the pianist, sat side by side watching the rest of us with an amiable curiosity. They made no secret of the fact, now or at any other time, that we, not they, were on sufferance, and this on the clearly expressed grounds that they were working-class, would remain working-class, but they had no objection to observing at first hand, because of the happy accidents of war, the behaviour of a group of intellectuals. It was Stanley who used the word, and he refused to drop it. Johnnie, the pianist, never talked. He did not use words, ever. He always sat near Stanley, allying himself in silence with him.

Ted had already begun to suffer because of Stanley, the ‘butterfly under a stone’, who refused to see himself as in need of rescue. To console himself he sat by Maryrose and put his arm around her. Maryrose smiled good-humouredly, and remained in the circle of his arm, but as if she detached herself from him and every other man. Very many as it were professionally pretty girls have this gift of allowing themselves to be touched, kissed, held, as if this is a fee they have to pay to Providence for being born beautiful. There is a tolerant smile which goes with a submission to the hands of men, like a yawn or a patient sigh. But there was more to it, in Maryrose’s case.

‘Maryrose,’ said Ted, bluffly, looking down at the gleaming little head at rest on his shoulder, ‘why don’t you love any of us, why don’t you let any of us love you?’

Maryrose merely smiled, and even in this broken light, branch-and-leaf-stippled, her brown eyes showed enormous and shone softly.

‘Maryrose has a broken heart,’ observed Willi above my head.

‘Broken hearts belong to old-fashioned novels,’ said Paul. ‘They don’t go with the time we live in.’

‘On the contrary,’ said Ted. ‘There are more broken hearts than there have ever been, just because of the times we live in. In fact I’m sure any heart we are ever likely to meet is so cracked and jarred and split it’s just a mass of scar tissue.’

Maryrose smiled up at Ted, shyly, but gratefully, and said seriously: ‘Yes, of course that’s true.’

Maryrose had had a brother whom she deeply loved. They were close by temperament, but more important, they had the tenderest of bonds because of their impossible, bullying, embarrassing mother against whom they supported each other. This brother had been killed in North Africa the previous year. It happened that Maryrose was in the Cape at the time doing modelling. She was, of course, much in demand because of how she looked. One of the young men looked like her brother. We had seen a photograph of him—a slight, fair-moustached, aggressive young man. She fell instantly in love with him. She said to us—and I remember the sense of shock we felt, as we always did with her, because of her absolute, but casual honesty: ‘Yes, I know I fell in love with him because he looked like my brother, but what’s wrong with that?’ She was always asking, or stating: ‘What’s wrong with that?’ and we could never think of an answer. But the young man was like her brother only in looks, and while he was happy to have an affair with Maryrose he did not want to marry her.

‘It may be true,’ said Willi, ‘but it’s very silly. Do you know what’s going to happen to you, Maryrose, unless you watch out? You’re going to make a cult of this boy-friend of yours, and the longer you do that the unhappier you’ll be. You’ll keep off all the nice boys you could marry, and eventually you’ll marry someone for the sake of marrying, and you’ll be one of these dissatisfied matrons we see all around us.’

In parenthesis I must say that this is exactly what happened to Maryrose. For another few years she continued to be delectably pretty, allowed herself to be courted while she maintained her sweet smile that was like a yawn, sat patiently inside the circle of this man’s arm or that; and finally and very suddenly married a middle-aged man who already had three children. She did not love him. Her heart had gone dead when her brother was crushed into pulp by a tank.

‘So what do you think I should do?’ she enquired, with her terrible amiability, across a patch of moonlight, to Willi.

‘You should go to bed with one of us. As soon as possible. There’s no better cure for an infatuation than that,’ said Willi, in the brutally good-humoured voice he used when speaking out of his role as sophisticated Berliner. Ted grimaced, and removed his arm, making it clear that he was not prepared to ally himself with such cynicism, and that if he went to bed with Maryrose it would be out of the purest romanticism. Well, of course it would have been.

‘Anyway,’ observed Maryrose, ‘I don’t see the point. I keep thinking about my brother.’

‘I’ve never known anyone be so completely frank about incest,’ said Paul. He meant it as a kind of joke, but Maryrose replied, quite seriously, ‘Yes, I know it was incest. But the funny thing is, I never thought of it as incest at the time. You see, my brother and I loved each other.’

We were shocked again. I felt Willi’s shoulder stiffen, and I remember thinking that only a few moments before he had been the decadent European; but the idea that Maryrose had slept with her brother plunged him back into his real nature, which was puritanical.

There was a silence, then Maryrose observed: ‘Yes, I can see why you are shocked. But I think about it often these days. We didn’t do any harm, did we? And so I don’t see what was wrong with it.’

Silence again. Then Paul plunged in, gaily: ‘If it doesn’t make any difference to you, why don’t you go to bed with me, Maryrose? How do you know, you might be cured?’

Paul still sat upright, supporting the lolling child-like weight of Jimmy against him. He supported Jimmy tolerantly, just as Maryrose had allowed Ted to put his arm around her. Paul and Maryrose played the same roles in the group, from the opposite sides of the sex barrier.

Maryrose said calmly: ‘If my boy-friend in the Cape couldn’t really make me forget my brother, why should you?’

Paul said: ‘What is the nature of the obstacle that prevents you from marrying this swain of yours?’

Maryrose said: ‘He comes from a good Cape family, and his parents won’t let me marry him, because I’m not good enough.’

Paul allowed himself his deep attractive chuckle. I’m not saying he cultivated this chuckle, but he certainly knew it was one of his attractions. ‘A good family,’ he said derisively. ‘A good family from the Cape. It’s rich, it really is.’

This was not as snobbish as it sounds. Paul’s snobbishness was expressed indirectly, in jokes, or in a play on words. Actually he was indulging his ruling passion, the enjoyment of incongruity. And I’m not in a position to criticize, for I daresay the real reason I stayed in the Colony long after there was any need was because such places allow opportunity for this type of enjoyment. Paul was inviting us all to be amused, as he had when he had discovered Mr and Mrs Boothby, John and Mary Bull in person, running the Mashopi hotel.

But Maryrose said quietly: ‘I suppose it must seem funny to you, since you are used to good families in England, and of course, I can see that’s different from a good family in the Cape. But it comes to the same thing for me, doesn’t it?’

Paul maintained a whimsical expression which concealed the beginnings of discomfort. He even, as if to prove her attack on him was unjust, instinctively moved so that Jimmy’s head fell more comfortably on his shoulder, in an effort to show a capacity for tenderness.

‘If I slept with you, Paul,’ stated Maryrose, ‘I daresay I’d get fond of you. But you’re the same as he is—my boy-friend from the Cape. You’d never marry me, I wouldn’t be good enough. You have no heart.’

Willi laughed gruffly. Ted said: ‘That fixes you, Paul.’ Paul did not speak. In moving Jimmy a moment before the young man’s body had slipped so that Paul now had to sit supporting his head and shoulders across his knees. Paul cradled Jimmy like a baby; and for the rest of the evening he watched Maryrose with a quiet and rueful smile. And after that he always spoke to her gently, trying to woo her out of her contempt for him. But he did not succeed.

At about midnight, the glare of a lorry’s headlights swallowed the moonlight, and swung off the main road to come to rest in a patch of empty sand by the railway lines. It was a big lorry, loaded with gear; and a small caravan was hitched on behind it. This caravan was George Hounslow’s home when he was superintending work along the roads. George jumped down from the driver’s seat and came over to us, greeted by a full glass of wine held out to him by Ted. He drank it down, standing, saying in between gulps: ‘Drunken sots, oafs, sodden sods, sitting here swilling.’ I remember the smell of the wine, cool and sharp, as Ted tilted another bottle to refill the glass, and the wine splashed over and hissed on the dust. The dust smelled heavy and sweet, as if it had rained.

George came to kiss me. ‘Beautiful Anna, beautiful Anna—but I can’t have you because of this bloody man Willi.’ Then he ousted Ted, kissing Maryrose on her averted cheek, and said: ‘All the beautiful women there are in the world, and we only have two of them here, it makes me want to cry.’ The men laughed, and Maryrose smiled at me. I smiled back. Her smile was full of a sudden pain, and so I realized that mine was also. Then she looked uncomfortable, at having betrayed herself, and we quickly looked away from each other, from the exposed moment. I don’t think either of us would have cared to analyse the pain we felt. And now George sat forward, holding a glass brimming with wine, and said: ‘Sods and comrades, stop lolling about, the moment has come to tell me the news.’

We stirred, became animated, forgot our sleepiness. We listened while Willi gave George information about the political situation in town. George was an extremely serious man. And he had a deep reverence for Willi—for Willi’s brain. He was convinced of his own stupidity. He was convinced, and very likely had been all his life, of his general inadequacy and also of his ugliness.

In fact he was rather good-looking, or at least women always responded to him, even when they were not aware of it. Mrs Lattimore, for instance, the pretty red-head, who often exclaimed how repulsive she thought him, but could never take her eyes off him. He was quite tall, but looked shorter, because of his broad shoulders, which he carried stooped forward. His body narrowed fast from the broad shoulders to his flanks. He had a bull-like set to him, all his movements were stubborn, and abrupt with the subdued controlled irritation of power kept in leash and unwillingly so. It was because of his family life which was difficult. At home he was, and he had had to be for many years, patient, self-sacrificing, disciplined. By nature I would say he was none of these things. Perhaps this was the reason for his need to run himself down, for his lack of belief in himself. He was a man who could have been much bigger than his life had given him room to be. He knew this, I think; and because he secretly felt guilty at being frustrated by his family circumstances, his self-denigration was a way of punishing himself? I don’t know…or perhaps he punished himself in this way for his continual unfaithfulness to his wife? One has to be much older than I was then to understand George’s relationship with his wife. He had a fierce loyal compassion for her, the compassion of one victim for another.

He was one of the most lovable people I have ever known. He was certainly the funniest. He was spontaneously irresistibly funny. I’ve seen him keep a room full of people laughing helplessly from the time the bar closed until the sun rose. We lay about on the beds and on the floor laughing so that we couldn’t move. Yet next day, remembering the jokes, they weren’t particularly funny. Yet we were sick laughing—it was partly because of his face, which was handsome, but copybook handsome, almost dull in its regularity, so that one expected him to talk to rule; but I think mostly because he had a very long narrow upper lip, which gave a look of wooden, and almost stupid, obstinacy to his face. Then out came the sad, self-punishing, irresistible stream of talk, and he watched us rolling with laughter, yet never laughed with his victims, but watched with positive astonishment, as if he were thinking: Well I can’t be as hopeless as I think I am if I can make all these clever people laugh like this.

He was about forty. That is, twelve years older than the oldest of us, Willi. We would never have thought of it, but he couldn’t forget it. He was a man who would always watch each year slide past as if jewels were slipping one by one through his fingers into the sea. This was because of his feeling for women. His other passion was politics. Not the least of his burdens was that he had been brought up by parents who came from slap in the middle of the old socialist tradition in Britain—a nineteenth-century socialism—rationalist, practical, above all, religiously anti-religious. And such an upbringing was not calculated to make him fit in with the people of the Colony. He was an isolated and lonely man, living in a tiny, backward, isolated town. We, this group of people so much younger than he, were the first real friends he had in years. We all loved him. But I don’t believe for a moment he knew it, or would allow himself to know it. His humility was too strong. In particular, his humility in relation to Willi. I remember once, exasperated because of the way he would sit, expressing reverence for Willi with every part of him, while Willi laid down the law about something or other, I said: ‘For God’s sake, George, you’re such a nice man, and I can’t stand seeing you lick the boots of a man like Willi.’

‘But if I had Willi’s brain,’ he replied and it was typical of him he didn’t enquire how I could make such remarks about a man with whom, after all, I was living—‘if I had his brain I’d be the happiest man in the world.’ And then his upper lip narrowed in self-mockery: ‘What do you mean nice? I’m a sod, you know I am. I tell you the things I do and then you say I’m nice.’ He was referring to what he told Willi and me, but no one else, about his relations with women

I’ve thought about that often since. I mean, about the word nice. Perhaps I mean good. Of course they mean nothing, when you start to think about them. A good man, one says; a good woman; a nice man, a nice woman. Only in talk of course, these are not words you’d use in a novel. I’d be careful not to use them.

Yet of that group, I will say simply, without further analysis, that George was a good person, and that Willi was not. That Maryrose and Jimmy and Ted and Johnnie the pianist were good people, and that Paul and Stanley Lett were not. And furthermore, I’d bet that ten people picked at random off the street to meet them, or invited to sit in that party under the eucalyptus trees that night would instantly agree with this classification—would, if I used the word good, simply like that, know what I meant.

And thinking about this, which I have done so much, I discover that I come around, by a back door, to another of the things that obsess me. I mean, of course, this question of ‘personality’. Heaven knows we are never allowed to forget that the ‘personality’ doesn’t exist any more. It’s the theme of half the novels written, the theme of the sociologists and all the other -ologists. We’re told so often that human personality has disintegrated into nothing under pressure of all our knowledge that I’ve even been believing it. Yet when I look back to that group under the trees, and recreate them in my memory, suddenly I know it’s nonsense. Suppose I were to meet Maryrose now, all these years later, she’d make some gesture, or turn her eyes in such a way, and there she’d be, Maryrose, and indestructible. Or suppose she ‘broke down’, or became mad. She would break down into her components, and the gesture, the movement of the eyes would remain, even though some connection had gone. And so all this talk, this anti-humanist bullying, about the evaporation of the personality becomes meaningless for me at that point when I manufacture enough emotional energy inside myself to create in memory some human being I’ve known. I sit down, and remember the smell of the dust and the moonlight, and see Ted handing a glass of wine to George, and George’s overgrateful response to the gesture. Or I see, as in a slow-motion film, Maryrose turn her head, with her terrifying patient smile…I’ve written the word film. Yes. The moments I remember, all have the absolute assurance of a smile, a look, a gesture, in a painting or a film. Am I saying then that the certainty I’m clinging to belongs to the visual arts, and not to the novel, not to the novel at all, which has been claimed by the disintegration and the collapse? What business has a novelist to cling to the memory of a smile or a look, knowing so well the complexities behind them? Yet if I did not, I’d never be able to set a word down on paper; just as I used to keep myself from going crazy in this cold northern city by deliberately making myself remember the quality of hot sunlight on my skin.

And so I’ll write again that George was a good man. And that I could not stand seeing him turn into an awkward schoolboy when he listened to Willi…that evening he received the facts about the troubles in the left groups in town with humility, and a nod which said that he would think about them privately, and at length—because of course he was too stupid to make up his mind about anything without hours and hours of thought, even though the rest of us were so clever we didn’t need it.

We, all of us, considered that Willi had been cavalier in his analysis; he had spoken as if he had been in committee, had conveyed nothing of our new disquiet, the new tone of disbelief and mockery.

And Paul, repudiating Willi, now chose to tell George, in his own way, of the truth. He began a dialogue with Ted. I remember watching Ted and wondering if he would respond to the light, whimsical challenge. Ted hesitated, looked uncomfortable, but joined in. And because it was not his character, it was against his deep beliefs, there was an exaggerated wild quality to his talk that jarred us more than listening to Paul.

Paul had begun by describing a committee meeting with ‘two-men-and-a-half’ deciding the whole fate of the African continent ‘without, of course, any reference to the Africans themselves’. (This was of course, treachery—to admit, in front of outsiders like Stanley Lett and Johnnie the pianist that we could have any doubts about our beliefs. George looked dubiously at the pair, decided that they must have joined us, because otherwise we’d never be so irresponsible, and gave a smile of pleasure because we had two new recruits.) And now Paul described how the two-men-and-a-half, finding themselves in Mashopi, would go about ‘guiding Mashopi towards a correct line of action’.

‘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?’