The Late Bourgeois World Read Online Free PDF Page A

burned his father’s clothes.’
    Footsteps rang all about us, we were being jostled.
    â€˜What? All children get up to things. That was nothing.’
    â€˜He did it because he was in trouble at school, and he’d tried to talk about it to his father for days, but his father was too busy. Every time he tried to lead round to what he wanted to say he was told, run away now, your father’s busy.’
    Her painted mouth shaped an incredulous laugh. ‘What are you talking about?’
    â€˜Yes, you don’t remember. But you’ll remember it was the time when your husband was angling to get into the Cabinet. The time when he was Chief Whip, and was so busy?’
    I was excited with hatred of her self-pity, the very smell of her stank in my nostrils. Oh we bathed and perfumed and depilated white ladies, in whose wombs the sanctity of the white race is entombed! What concoction of musk and boiled petals can disguise the dirt done in the name of that sanctity? Max took that dirt upon himself, tarredand feathered himself with it, and she complained of her martyred respectability. I wanted to wound her; could nothing wound her? She turned her back as one does on someone of whom it is useless to expect anything.
    And yet, at the beginning, the Van Den Sandts regarded me as an ally. Not personally, but in my capacity as a ‘normal’ interest for a boy who didn’t have many. If their Max wouldn’t join the country club or pull his weight as a member of the United Party Youth, then at least he’d found himself a ‘little girl’. The ‘little’ was used as indicative of my social standing, not my size; I was a shopkeeper’s daughter from a small town, while Max’s father not only had been a frontbencher in the Smuts government but was also a director of various companies, from cigarette manufacture to plastic packaging. When Max was a student they didn’t take him very seriously, of course, and regarded what they knew of his activities in student politics, along with his pointed non-appearance at dinner parties and his shabby clothes, as youthful Bohemianism. I don’t know whether they ever knew that he was a member of a Communist cell, probably not. To them it was all a game, a fancy dress ball like the ones
they
used to go to in the thirties. Soon he would put away the costume, wear a suit, join one of his father’s companies, invest in the share market and build a nice home for the littlegirl he would marry. They had no idea that he was spending his time with African and Indian students who took him home where he had never been before, to the locations and ghettoes, and introduced him to men who, while they worked as white men’s drivers and cleaners and factory hands, had formulated their own views of their destiny and had their own ideas of setting about to achieve it. For the Van Den Sandts none of this existed; when Mrs Van Den Sandt spoke of ‘we South Africans’ she meant the Afrikaans- and English-speaking white people, and when Theo Van Den Sandt called for ‘a united South Africa, going forward to an era of progress and prosperity for all’ he meant the unity of the same two white groups, and higher wages and bigger cars for them. For the rest – the ten or eleven million ‘natives’ – their labour was directed in various Acts of no interest outside Parliament, and their lives were incidental to their labour, since until the white man came they knew nothing better than a mud hut in the veld. As for the few who had managed to get an education, the one or two outstanding ones who were let into the University alongside her own son – Mrs Van Den Sandt thought it ‘marvellous, how some of them can raise themselves if they make the effort’; but the ‘effort’ was not related in her mind to any room in a location yard where somebody else’s son puzzled through his work by the light of a