The Late Bourgeois World Read Online Free PDF Page B

It’s a comforting thought.
    Some of them would remember, today, that they were right not to take Max seriously, poor devil, when he made that frightful speech at his sister’s wedding. If they were castigated, well, the poorfellow was unbalanced. It was long before the bomb, Lord yes, long before it had come to that – long before we had come to a lot of things. Max and I were still together, Bobo was a little baby a few months old, we still, curiously, had some sort of place in the Van Den Sandt family life. It was after the Defiance Campaign affair, of course, but I suppose since Max’s part in that had been hushed up, the Van Den Sandts didn’t feel that that constituted a valid rift between Max and themselves. Only public injury counts, with them. In one of those twists of an ancient code degenerating far from its source that is characteristic of a civilization brought over the sea and kept in mothballs, the Van Den Sandts interpret honour as something that exists in the eyes of others; you can do each other to death, in private: shame or pain come only from what leaks out. A daughter’s wedding to a suitable candidate was a public occasion (they’d been done out of Max’s by my pregnancy even if Max would not have refused to play) and the bride’s only brother was a traditional participant in the jocular clannish emotionalism of the celebration. Therefore Max lost all other identity; the Van Den Sandts insisted that he must propose the toast to Queenie and her bridegroom. I think they felt confident that the convention of the occasion would carry him along as such things did for them, through everything; that, married,with a wife and baby of his own, the ceremonies and loyalties of his kind would hold sway over him at last, he would ‘rise to it’ irresistibly, like the good fellow any son of theirs
must be
, underneath, after all.
    I was surprised that Max gave in; I had wondered if I’d be able to get him to go to the wedding at all. I thought it must be because of Queenie, of whom he was fond, in an unthinking sort of way – she was so pretty, one of those girls whom one sets aside in one’s mind from any further necessity to account for themselves.
    â€˜What on earth will you find to say?’ I asked, laughing at the idea of him.
    â€˜As if you’re expected to
say
anything,’ he said. ‘To the happy couple!’
    And I waved an imaginary glass and responded, ‘Yay! Hurray!’
    Mrs Van Den Sandt gave me money to buy myself a dress for the wedding; a generous gift, spoilt by her inability to resist the remark: ‘Don’t let Theo know how much your little dress cost – he’ll be furious at my extravagance!’ so that I’d be sure to understand how generous she had been and how modest my expectations of the Van Den Sandts ought to be. What she didn’t know was that the dress cost less than half of what I told her, and I’d used the rest of the money to pay the chemist and dairy. I sat there behind the swag of carnations androses that decorated the bride’s table, eating smoked salmon and drinking champagne, and felt only an empathetic inward trill of shyness – hidden by the smile politely exchanged with the uncle next to me – when Max got up to speak. Max is – was – slight and not very tall, but he had the big wrists and the small bright-blue, far-sighted eyes of his mother’s antecedents; in him, unmistakably, was the Boer identity that she archly claimed for herself. He wore his dark suit and his best, raw silk tie that I had given him. He gave, to the expanse of table cloth directly beneath him rather than anywhere else, the nervous smile that always reminded me of the mouth-movement of an uncertain feline animal, not snarling, unable to express a greeting, yet acknowledging an approach. He did not look at me, nor at anyone. His first few words were lost in the talk that had not