The Late Bourgeois World Read Free

round Africa who are counted on to bring a healthy blast of contemporaneity into the curriculum. (Bobo has told me about one who played the guitar and taught the boys American anti-bomb and anti-segregation folk songs.)
    The headmaster was at tea in the staffroom, but the young man took me to the headmaster’s study and asked me to sit down while he fetched him. I’ve been in that study a number of times; hostilely clean, hung with crossed-armed athletic groups, the shiny brown plastic flooring covered with a brown carpet in the standard concession to comfort to be found in the rooms of administrators of institutions. There was even a framed cartoon of the headmaster, cut from the school magazine; everyone said what an ‘approachable’, ‘human’ man he was.
    He said how nice it was to see me – just as if one could drop in to the school any old time, insteadof being sternly discouraged to appear outside the prescribed visiting days. And although he must have known I had something serious to say, his quick, peg-on-the-nose voice dealt out a succession of pleasantries that kept us both hanging fire. But no doubt the poor devil dreads parents’ problems, and this is just an unconscious device to stave off their recital. I told him that Bobo’s father had died, and how. He was understanding and sensible, according to the manual of appropriate behaviour for such an occasion, but in his face with its glaze of artificial attentiveness there was certainty of his distance from people like us. He knew the circumstances of Bobo’s background; divorce, political imprisonment, and now this. He knew it all the way, as a broad-minded man and a good Christian, I suppose he follows in the papers the Church’s self-searching over homosexuality or abortion. He and Mrs Jellings, who teaches art at the school, must have been married for at least twenty-five years, and last year their daughter was married from the school with a guard of honour of senior boys.
    He got up and opened the door and stopped a boy who was passing in the corridor. ‘Braithwaite! Send Bruce Van Den Sandt here, will you? D’you know him? He’s in fourth.’ ‘Yes, sir, I know Van Den Sandt, sir. I think he’s on library duty.’ And heskidded off in a way that automatically drew a quick dent between the headmaster’s eyebrows.
    Bruce Van Den Sandt. I hardly ever hear the name spoken. This is the other Bobo, whom I will never know. Yet it always pleases me to hear it; a person in his own right, complete, conjured up in himself. It was Max’s name; Max was dead, but like a word passed on, his name was called aloud in the school corridor.
    The headmaster said, ‘Come in here. I suppose you’ll want to talk to him alone; that’ll be best.’ And he opened a door I’d seen, but never been through before, marked ‘Visitors’ Room’. I’d cowardly lost the moment to say, ‘I’d like to take him out and talk to him while we drive.’ Why am I idiotically timid before such people, while at the same time so critical of their limitations?
    I sat in this shut-up parlour whose purpose I had now gained entry to and waited quite a little while before the door flung open and he filled the doorway – Bobo. He had the glowing ears and wide nostrils of a boy brought from the middle of a game, his hands were alert to the catch, his clothes were twisted, his smile was a grin of breathlessness. The high note of this energy might, like a certain pitch in music, have silently shattered the empty vase and the glass on the engravings of Cape scenes.
    â€˜Ma? Well, nobody told me you were coming!’
    He hugged me and we giggled, as we always do with the glee of being together and clandestine to school and everything else.
    â€˜How’d you get in?’
    I hadn’t thought about what I was going to say to Bobo, and now it was too late. I gripped his hand and