7 ‘Love Unending’, a short story based on an episode in Durban.
AN ORDINARY LIFE OF A SEVENTY-PERCENTER
1953 — Interlude: ‘Love Unending’, a short story based on an episode in Durban.
I told you about the time when I was selling RAG Magazines in Durban and came across the beautiful girl sitting in a group in the Edward Hotel. I placed her as a character in the following Don Corbett story. The detail of the story is mainly factualup to the point of my leaving her company that night. The rest is fiction. I have no idea of what happened to her and her Ambassador husband after that night: they might well have continued in Durban for several years.
Here is the story.
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Love Unending.
After listening for a while to the pair of doves cooing love songs to each other in the tree across the road from where we sat on the balcony of Gillian’s apartment, Anne, forever the solicitous soul mate, turned to Don and asked with a detectable quiver in her voice: “Don, why did you never get married?”
I could see that she would have liked to elaborate a bit and tell Don that she thought he would have made a good husband to some lucky woman, but she couldn’t get past the lump in her throat. Don looked her in the eyes, and just perhaps! there was an answering moistness in his own.
“After I met Katita” he said thoughtfully, “it was very difficult to even think about anyone else for a long time. Eventually it was almost too late because I was into my career which did not lend itself to domestic home life. Katita! why, that is fifty years ago now and yet I can still picture her so clearly”.
It was rarely that Don Corbett allowed the softer side of his nature to show, so we were silent for a while, not wanting to intrude as he sat there turning his glass slowly in his left hand, lost in his memories. We had been a young crowd together fifty years ago and had kept in touch through the years. Don was the only one who had not married.
“Just look at those doves now,” Mavis said, “they really are into the mating season!” Heads turned to look at the doves which were chasing each other from branch to branch in the tree, but no one took up the conversation because they realised that this was just an attempt to steer us away from the subject of Don’s lost love. However, Don was quite ready to talk about it.
“I spotted Katita from the doorway to the lounge of the Edward hotel, sitting at a table with three men and another woman. Let me explain, I was a first-year student at the University in Durban and was out that night, cloaked in my undergraduate gown, selling Charity Rag Magazines. I had ‘worked’ a bus down to the Beach Front, and then starting at the harbour end, I had done all the Pubs along the way to the Edward. Men in pubs can be very hospitable, and very insistent! so, by now, emerging from the Edward Bar into the lounge, I was a little unsteady on my feet as I stood in the doorway taking stock of the situation. The sight of Katita quite took my breath away; never had I seen anyone quite so beautiful. Her pitch-black hair framing her almost too-white face, her long arms extending from her off-the-shoulder black dress and ending in those beautiful fingers resting lightly in her lap! I figured I would start at the table near the door where I was and work my way round till I reached her at hers, and meanwhile I started to get quite nervous thinking about what I would say to her. “Good evening. Would you like to buy a Rag magazine?’ just seemed so inappropriate.
“Before I got any further, she was beckoning me! I went across and she smiled and said, ‘Is that the Rag Magazine you’re selling? I’ve been looking out for one all day! Let me have three, please.’ As she went into her bag to take the money out, she said ‘Don’t you want to sit down?’ I sank into the chair next to her, only too glad to get off my wobbly legs, but trembling now at her nearness.
“That was the end of my selling evening. She asked me who I was, introduced herself as Katita, introduced me to her husband who turned out to be the Ambassador from a South American country, introduced me to the others at the table and then offered me a drink. From close up she was even more beautiful than she had seemed from the doorway. Her voice was like cool water shooshing over rocks in a stream, and her Spanish accent only added to the allure. The scent of her! It seemed to be part of her, as disturbing as she was, surrounding her, shielding her presence even from the bar-lounge odours of smoke and beer.
“Her husband was very polite, and kept up the supply of drinks, but directed most of his conversation at the husband of the other couple, who had a foreign European accent and seemed to be involved in some sort of international dealing. The third man was someone at the Embassy. While joining in the general discussion, Katita would sometimes leave the others to it and address herself to me, from which conversations I gathered that she and her husband would shortly be leaving for a more senior post somewhere in Eastern Europe. The thought left me feeling strangely distressed as if this was the end of a passionate love affair!
“By the time the company broke up sometime after eleven, I had missed the last bus and had a two-hour walk up the hill to the Residence, but I didn’t care because I had a lot to walk off, both the effects of too much liquor and too much love! My last impression off Katita was the feel of her soft but firm right hand in mine as we shook hands to say good bye.
“The next day was spent working on a float for the Rag parade. I was with a mixed team of men and women, who joked and drank (from hidden bottles because liquor was not allowed on University premises) and sang the usual round of student songs, but I could hardly join in the fun because the longing just to catch a glimpse of her again, to touch her hand again, left no room for any other feeling. When the singing got to the inevitable ‘The prettiest girl I ever saw, Was sipping cider through a straw’, the longing welled up so intensely that I could hardly bare it. I was literally sick with love and it didn’t seem to matter that she was totally unattainable to me. I must make it clear that there was no suggestion from Katita’s side that she was leading me on or flirting with me. She was an outgoing, friendly soul who was just treating me with the kindness a student selling magazines for charity seemed to deserve. If she knew just how captivating she was, she wasn’t using it for any sinister purposes. It was all from my side and I should have been feeling like a real cad, but I couldn’t even blame myself.
“The Rag was past and the days of study should have begun, but my mind was not on anything but Katita. For weeks afterwards I frequented the Edward lounge in the mad hope that one day I would walk in and there she would be! But it was a vain hope. She had left South Africa not many days after our meeting. I lost heart for study, for Durban, for everything after that and abruptly terminated my University career.
“But something else had resulted from the evening – I had had some part in the discussion with the man at the table who was involved in international business dealings. Hans Stauberman — who was Hungarian in spite of his German-sounding name — and I got on quite well together and he invited me in a very informal way to join him in one of his ventures. I sort of drifted into it and went along with him. It will be quite easy for you to believe me that I went into it for no other reason at that stage than for the hope that our travels on business would one day take us to wherever Katita had gone, and I would see her again!”
Anne, perceptively breathless, asked, “Did you find out where she had gone — did you ever see her again?”
“She kept moving about, but I did see her again, once, three years later. It was only a glimpse of her in London. I was travelling up an escalator and I saw her face in the crowd on the escalator going down. I waved frantically to her and she recognised me — I didn’t think she would remember, but it was obvious that she did because of the smile and the friendly way in which she waved back. In an agony of desire to talk with her again, I pushed through the crowd as I ran up the escalator and immediately stepped onto the other one to follow her. I ran down as fast as I could go, but when I reached the bottom, Katita had disappeared and I had no idea which direction she had taken.”
Don stopped talking and sat meditatively for a few moments.
“That was the last time I saw Katita, and in a while I put her from my mind. I had to, because you can’t go on forever living in love with a dream. I busied myself in my international dealings, and didn’t give myself any room for solid romance any more”. He looked steadily at Anne, with a feint smile playing at the corners of his mouth, and continued: “And so, Anne, that is the whole reason why I never got married.”
Don stopped talking; Anne said “OH!” and was lost for anything further to say; and the rest of us turned our attention to the doves still cooing their love songs to each other in the tree across the street.
