The Queen’s Hotel has clung onto its name, but, like a widow cutting loose in middle age, has in every other respect gaily abandoned its former identity.

I remember it as a respectably gloomy establishment, surviving on its Bar and Lounge, the latter later gentrified into a Ladies Bar (without apostrophe). Round the back was a decidedly un-gentrified Non-European Bar, really only a counter from behind which Nathan Friedman’s wife, Joyce, dispensed boxed sweet wine and half-jacks of brandy. The hotel sported, next to its front door, one little champagne glass, indicating its classification as a one-star establishment by the unexacting standards of the time.

The hospitality of the Queen’s was enjoyed or at any rate employed by the odd commercial traveller whose territory covered this part of the Little Karoo, known as the Ghanta, of which Alfredville is the main centre. Calling it a metropolis would be stretching things, but when I lived here, Alfredville did rather lord it over neighbours like Barrydale and Riversdal. This was the seat of the Ghanta Co-op, where the wine farmers (really just grape farmers) brought their grapes to be processed – the Ghanta Pinotage enjoyed a brief period of fame, after John Platter’s Wine Guide pronounced it a ‘best value wine’ for 1988. The area’s municipal offices, including the all-important Traffic Department that issued tractor licences, were also here, occupying the second most imposing building in the main street, Victoria Street – the most venerable by far being the large white Dutch Reformed church, defended or at least surrounded by cannon from the Boer War, whether Boer cannon pillaged by the British or British cannon pillaged by the Boers I never did know. Alfredville was the site of the annual Mosbolletjiefees, when the region’s wives competed hotly and often crossly for the title of the best mosbolletjie baker. (The dictionary says a mosbolletjie is a sweetish rusk made with unfermented grape juice, but that’s like saying haggis is ground-up intestine boiled inside a stomach –accurate enough, but somehow missing the cultural je ne sais quoi of the thing.)

The Queen’s Hotel, then, used to preside demurely, not to say dourly, over this rather earnest town. If, on a Saturday evening after a victory on the school’s rugby field against Barrydale or Robertson, things got a bit raucous in the Queen’s Bar, by Sunday morning, as the revellers of the previous night took their places in church, by common and unspoken agreement all was forgotten, and each repentant paterfamilias, stoutly buttressed by corseted spouse and bored children, suffered his hangover in solitude, exchanging at most a shamefaced smirk with a fellow-sufferer.

I never saw the inside of the old Queen’s Bar, though my best friend Bennie and I did on one occasion, after writing our matric exams, try to take our dates for the evening, Elrina Potgieter and Gladys Schoonees, to the Ladies Bar for a ‘shandy’. The Ladies Bar was really only the old ‘Lounge’ vamped up to Nathan Friedman’s concept of elegant standards. One half of the room was occupied by a massive bar counter, the top of which was copper-plated; around this edifice perched some over-stuffed bar stools with revolving seats. Behind the bar counter was a multi-hued display of liqueurs and other exotic liquors that, judging by the dust on the bottles, served more as decoration than refreshment. The other half of the room was scattered half-heartedly with uneasy-looking easy chairs uncompanionably assembled around little amoeba-shaped tables on spindly legs.On the walls were virulent oil paintings of nature scenes, of a lushness and verdancy never witnessed in the Ghanta.

I thought at the time that it was all in all rather a larney place for a date. (Bennie and I had put on jackets and ties in deference to the dress code, ascertained in advance, displayed on a gold-coloured perspex sign at the door: Dress: Strictly Smart Casual.) Gladys, indeed, commented, ‘It’s really spiff, hey?’ Elrina, however, who regarded herself as a cut above the rest of us because her mother was the sister of the wife of some disgraced and now defunct prime minister, let it be known after we had sat down on the sticky leatherette easy chairs that she didn’t think it was right to ‘hang around in a place like this’. She had evidently caught sight of Doris Vermaas and Joy Duvenhage on their own at a table, knocking back something viscous and yellow, and guffawing loudly – at, I suspected uncomfortably, the four of us. Doris worked in the Standard Bank, and was assumed to be respectable, but Joy had no known regular occupation and was the subject of heated speculation among the schoolboys, and tight-lipped allusion among the matrons of the town.

It was clear that it was Joy’s presence that was discomfiting Elrina, but such were the reticences of our youth that nobody mentioned this; we simply trooped out even more gawkishly than we’d entered, to the raucous amusement of Joy and Doris. Instead of the long-anticipated shandies, our over-dressed little party  settled for cream soda floats in the Welcome Café and T Room’s ‘Dining Area’,  a comfortless collection of tables and chairs behind the sweets-and-cool-drink counter and the magazine shelves. There was a smell of rancid oil in the air, and meticulously executed embroideries of proteas and springboks on the wall; also, I remember, one that proclaimed JESUS LIVES HERE, which reminded me of those signs on garden gates featuring crop-eared Dobermanns declaring I AM ON GUARD. Gladys, it soon transpired, was sulking: she maintained a dignified but deafening silence for ten minutes, then, deciding that silence was golden but lacked impact, said abruptly, ‘I can’t see that this café is any better than the Ladies Bar, and it doesn’t even have air conditioning.’ Air conditioning, not being common in Alfredville, was one of the attractions of the Ladies Bar.

Elrina replied with monumental dignity: ‘It would need more than air conditioning to purify the air in that place.’ She pursed her lips genteelly around purify, to embody, as it were, the concept while enunciating it.

‘At least it didn’t smell of vrotfish and chips,’ Gladys said, sounding her ‘vrot’ with all the inelegant force of her ungenteel nature. This set Bennie off giggling, it being one of the more puerile of our schoolboy articles of belief that Joy Duvenhage smelt of fish. Elrina fixed first Bennie then Gladys with her Stare, a basilisk-like glare that she used to devastating effect in netball, where as goal attack she had been known to reduce her opposite number on goal defence to jelly and, occasionally, tears.

‘There is vrotfish, Gladys,’ she declared, ‘and then there are vrot people. I prefer the fish.’

To tote a suitcase in Paris is to court the contempt of the natives. Parisians never go anywhere – why should they? – and despise anyone who does. That’s why they’ve arranged for a flight of stairs at every Metro exit, to break the spirit of anyone hobbled with a suitcase, and to ensure that the unwelcome traveller will arrive out of breath and red of face, in sweaty contrast with the Parisians, who step out of the Metro as unruffled as if fresh from a scented dressing-room.

Lugging his too-heavy case up the steps onto the rain-drenched Boulevard St Germain, Christopher indulged these musings with a vehemence proportionate to his discomfort. The ride from the Gare du Nord to Odéon had been sticky, slow and crowded, his fellow-passengers resentful of his luggage, impervious to his abject, albeit insincere, apologies. Evidently Paris had not, in the years of his absence, undergone a change of heart: she was still a whore with a heart of stone. There were no longer, it was true, evil-tempered ponceuses dwelling in the depths of the Metro to snarl at you while punching a hole in your ticket; but their spirit lingered on discontentedly in the windy vestibules, the impatiently slamming swing doors, in the general inimical implication of the place. It was, he reflected as he stopped to rest his suitcase arm, the same misanthropic spirit that possessed the po-faced bureaucrats in the French consulate in Cape Town, intent less on easing the way of the stranger to la patrie than on impressing upon him how little his presence was desired there. Ultimately, it was the gloating malevolence of the tricoteuses – knit-one, purl-one, slip-one as another head rolled into the basket.

In spite of the rain, he stood looking around him to get his bearings. Thirty years on, and the Boulevard had not changed, not so that he could notice, anyway: the Odéon GC cinemas showing generic American movies with French titles, the eternal cafés, their serving areas retreated now out of the rain, and cars, cars, cars. The plane trees coming into light-green leaf, the news kiosks, the round columns advertising the latest spectacle – it was a film set with action figures.

He stepped into the street. A strong hand grasped his arm and pulled him back from a car coming the wrong way. ‘Faites attention, monsieur,’ said the Samaritan, irritated rather than concerned. Christopher’s first instinct was to tell the man to mind his own business – if I want to get run over, whose life is it anyway? – but brought out a grudging ‘Merci, monsieur’, all the same. The man, without looking round, shrugged and walked away, shaking his head, probably already wondering why he’d bothered to save the life of a gormless foreigner.

‘And bollocks to you too, mate,’ said Christopher aloud. This was not his normal mode of expression – he’d never called anyone mate in his life – but he felt a need proportionate to his humiliation to adopt an assertive persona in the face of this disdainful city. More cautiously now, he crossed the road to the Cour du Commerce connecting the Boulevard with the Rue St André des Arts – that much he remembered. The cobbles of the Cour were slippery; the wheels of the suitcase were too small for the cobbles, and the bag capsized several times. If Paris hadn’t been so damned picturesque, it may have been more negotiable.

The Hotel du Carrefour, too, had not changed in thirty years. Or if it had, Christopher’s memory was not acute enough to register deviations. The building still seemed crazily out of kilter, not a right angle in sight, the stairs listing and veering at some perilous compromise between gravity and inertia. By rights, the whole structure should have collapsed or at least rearranged itself, but as far as he could tell, the angles were all still at odds with one another to exactly the same degree as before. The effect remained disorientating, making one doubt one’s visual and spatial judgement.

The choir stalls in the foyer, ripped who-knows-when from what church in a frenzy of righteous revolutionary fervour, were at this hour occupied by breakfasting guests, muttering rather than chattering, oppressed by their enforced propinquity. From what Christopher could glean in passing, the breakfast was as plain as ever: the single stub of crusty bread, the postage stamp of butter, the thimble of preserves, the dwarfish pitcher of coffee with its juglet of milk. The serving woman was too young to be the same one as had flung the bread at the guests all those years before, but the flinging action was the same, as was the air of sublime detachment: presumably one of those trade secrets that get passed on from generation to generation. An uninitiated guest was brandishing an empty coffee jug, trying to wring a refill from the serveuse.

The reception desk was still in uncomfortable proximity to the dining area, enabling the owner to keep an eye on the distribution of the matutinal bounty. The owner too, was the same – far older, of course, but showing, in that infuriating French manner, few effects of the passing of the years. Christopher did not think it necessary to mention having stayed here before, but the owner adjusted his eye-glasses – one concession at least to the ravages of time – and peered at Christopher’s passport. ‘Monsieur Turner’ – he pronounced it Turrnirrr – ‘from South Africa; ah, yes, I remember …’, and from the sudden set of his features into something even less welcoming than his habitual scowl, it was clear that he did remember, remembered over a span of thirty years the blocked basin and bidet, the aftermath of an over-enthusiastic indulgence, fresh from the austerities of England, in the vin et crudités à volonté at the Caves Ste Geneviève.

‘I never want to see a grated carrot again,’ Daniel had moaned, as he voided himself of yet another largely undigested helping of crudités and sour wine. Orange and purple, at the best of times an unfortunate combination, had never composed so badly.

‘Don’t blame the carrots,’ Christopher had replied, moralistic even in extremis. ‘They’re not what’s making you puke.’

They had spent the night, or what remained of the night after evacuation of their meal, emptying out basin and bidet with a tooth mug into the toilet in the hallway, but without managing to clear the bowels of the plumbing. They were obliged, thus, to report the blockage to the owner – who, initially apologetic, had, after uncovering the cause of the blockage, been decidedly chilly for the rest of their stay.

‘You will have room 36,’ the owner said, as if pronouncing sentence, producing a heavy brass key suspended from an even heavier brass object, pear-shaped and cumbersome, presumably to prevent theft of the key – though who would steal the key to a garret room in a one-star hotel was anybody’s guess.

‘Ah, yes,’ Christopher said, ‘cinquième étage.’

‘You know it?’

‘It’s where I stayed last time.’

‘Ah,’ the owner said, gravely, as if committing himself with a heavy heart to a course he knew to be unwise. ‘Ah, yes. Of course. Nevertheless. All the same.’

He stood around for a moment, clearly wanting a conversation, but I kept on reading as if he weren’t there. (I seem fated to read James under Cedric’s baleful stare.)

After about five seconds of silence, he said, ‘Thought you said you was gonna work.’

‘Yes, I did. And I am,’ I said, not looking up.

‘You call that working? Just reading, like?’

‘Yes I do. This is my work.’

‘Just reading?’

‘Yes. Reading and writing.’

‘So what yer write about?’

‘About what I’ve read.’

‘Jesus. Why?’

‘Why what?’

‘Why d’yer write about what you’ve read?’

‘So other people can read what I’ve written.’

By now I’d given up even the pretence of reading. Cedric’s not unlike a dog in this respect: the more you ignore him, the more he nudges you for attention.

‘Right. And then they write about what they’ve read what you’ve written?’

‘That is correct.’

He looked at me in disbelief. ‘So when does it stop?’

‘When does what stop?’

‘The readin’ of the writin’ about the readin’ and the writin’ about the readin’ of the writin’ about the reading.’  

‘I suppose it will stop when people stop reading and writing, which, come to think of it, would seem to be sometime soon.’

‘Bleedin’ good thing, ’n all. You know what it reminds me of? Listen, when I was a nipper me old man bought me a pair of white mice, the only thing he ever bought me ’n all, and they were at it all the time, squealin’ and bonking, and it only took them a week and they had twelve little mice and then next thing the little ones started bonkin’ and then they had little mice and so on and on until in the end the whole house was full of bleedin’ bonkin’ mice and we had to drown the lot of ’em in a bucket.’

‘Are you suggesting that all literary scholars should be drowned in a bucket?’

‘If that’s what you call ’em, and if that’s the only way to stop ’em, I reckon yeh, drown the cunts.’

He leant back in the sofa, cracked his knuckles, tensed and untensed his shoulders, which I couldn’t help noticing were formidably developed, and said, ‘I am Pandarus.’

He looked at me as if this should explain everything; but in reality, though the name rang a bell, it told me very little.

‘Oh, come,’ he said, as I remained silent, ‘you’re a bookish type aren’t you? You’ve heard of Pandarus?’

‘How …?’ I started, but gave up and changed tack. ‘Yes, yes, give me a moment … Shakespeare?’

He nodded glumly, visibly displeased at the suggestion. ‘If you insist.’

‘He’s … that old blunderer in Troilus and Cressida, isn’t he?’ I said. ‘The go-between?’

He nodded again. ‘Yes, in Shakespeare’s version.’

‘So you’re named after a character in a Shakespeare play?’

‘No. I didn’t say I was named after Pandarus. I said I am Pandarus.’

My incredulity, not to say my downright what-the-fuck faculty, kicked in at last.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘I’ve had a couple of glasses of wine, but I’m not pissed enough to play language games. You want me to ask what’s the difference between being named Pandarus and being Pandarus, and I’ll be buggered if going to ask it. So you’re Pandarus, good luck to you.’

He remained unruffled by my little performance. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I am Pandarus. That seems a simple enough proposition, but in fact it’s a philosophical hornet’s nest.’ He announced this with a kind of gusto; he seemed to enjoy his own quandary, if quandary it was.

‘You seem very upbeat,’ I said, ‘for somebody sitting on a hornet’s nest.’

‘Oh, there’s something to be said for sitting on a hornet’s nest. It keeps you on your toes, in a manner of speaking.’

Preamble

Margaret Crowley, handsome, clever and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly fifty-six years in the world with very little to distress or vex her. It was therefore hardly to be foreseen that in her fifty-sixth year she would kill a man with a kitchen knife.

Saturday 10 November 2018

Margaret met Jimmy on the day Benjy almost fell to his death. She was walking, as she did every morning, along the cliff path that ran past her house. Benjy had, ever since their first walk a month ago, been warily interested in the dassies sunning themselves on the rocks, sometimes scurrying off at his approach, more often not deigning to move, having presumably by some evolutionary wisdom arrived at the insight that, given the shortness of their legs as compared to those of a large Doberman, not running was the safer option. On this day, however, a dassie, more nervous than its fellows, took flight when it saw Benjy approach; and Benjy, emboldened by the animal’s scampering retreat, gave chase. The dassie flung itself plumply but with surprising agility down one of the steep cliff faces onto a ledge below and disappeared into a crevice; Benjy, his normal caution overwhelmed by some atavistic hunting instinct, followed the little creature over the top of the cliff, and vanished over its edge. For a moment Margaret stood paralysed, thinking that Benjy had plunged to his death; then, peering over the edge, she saw him about two metres below her, cowering on a ledge barely wide enough for him to stand on, with a hundred metres of rock face and roiling breakers below him.

She called to him, not really thinking he could or would scramble up the sheer face, but not knowing what else to do; she had horrible previsions of the dog panicking, jumping, and falling to his death in the sea below. She had to fight a rising hysteria: she felt as utterly helpless as she’d ever been in her life, and the sight of Benjy trembling on the ledge filled her with terror. Trying to soothe him, she knelt on the edge of the precipice, nonsensically promising him that she would rescue him, that he was to lie down and wait, anything to keep her own panic at bay. But she was near to breaking down when a voice next to her said, ‘What’s the matter, lady? You having a problem?’

She was in such a state of heightened anxiety that she did not pause to assess the probable motives of the stranger: she simply said, ‘Oh heavens, yes, please, please, my dog’s down there, can you help us?’

‘Let me see about that,’ said the stranger, with a languid kind of sangfroid that she would under different circumstances have found irritating. He moved to the edge of the precipice, and kneeled next to her to get a better view.

‘Please,’ she said, ‘don’t … don’t fall.’

‘Nope, I’m not scheming to.’ He looked back at her as he said this, with a sardonic smile that was oddly comforting. He seemed in total control of the situation, which she definitely was not.

‘I reckon,’ he continued, ‘if you pass me that lead, I can climb down and hitch it to the dog’s collar.’

‘But how …? I mean, how can you climb down there?’

‘I’ve done some rock-climbing in my time,’ he said. ‘So you just hang on to the lead, lady, while I go down, just so as to steady me – I won’t put my full weight on it, otherwise we’re all going to be doing doggy paddle with the whales.’

They both got to their feet, she rather shakily, he extravagantly self-possessed. He took one end of the lead she’d given him and gave her back the other end – fortunately it was a very long lead that she’d used in Cape Town in parks that didn’t allow dogs off-lead – and inched his way over the lip of the precipice. Benjy was staring up at him warily: Margaret hoped the dog wouldn’t panic at the approach of the stranger, and jump.

‘His name is Benjy,’ she suggested. ‘Perhaps you can, you know, calm him.’