Nadine Gordimer - A Sport of Nature

— What about it?—

It was not for her to say. She was accustomed to different practices in the different houses where she was taken in as one of the family.

He did not like to linger with Hillela just outside his bedroom door. He went inside and closed it.

On the Highveld in May the sun is still bright — always bright, up there, while the air enters the nose with a whiff of winter’s freezing ether; something to be remembered in tropical parts of Africa, where much of the time it gives great heat but no light, buried in soggy cloud. May was the month when Olga changed her wardrobe. When Hillela used to come back from Rhodesia to spend the holidays with her, she would help Olga carry silky dresses and delicate-coloured sandals to the store-cupboards, and bring back from them garments of suède and angora against which she would pass her cheek. Olga still regarded it as her pleasure and her duty to fit out the girl at the same time as she shopped, each change of season, for new fashions for herself. An arrangement had been made for Hillela to come shopping with her, but she telephoned to postpone their date. — People say there’s some trouble in town. We’ll put it off until things settle down again.—

It was the appointed day for the beginning of the stay-at-home. As young freedom-loving South Africans Carole and Hillela had been kept home from school.

— Olga planned to take you shopping this afternoon? Today?—

Pauline smiled, shook her head, shook her head, over her sister. — Hundreds of people are being arrested, but of course they’re black, and so far as they’re concerned, she only knows her treasure Jethro and her treasure the cook and her treasure the gardener. Meetings are prohibited. You can be detained without trial. The place is swarming with police. And Olga’s shopping trip is postponed.—

Hillela went to the city, anyway — with Carole and Pauline, to see how effective or not the strike was. Joe had told Alpheus not to come to the office but the black servants went about their work and moved as usual along their own backyard network, placing ten-cent bets with the Fah-Fee runner and borrowing a cup of sugar or an onion in the exchange of plenty from white kitchens. The garbage had not been collected but rot doesn’t begin to smell in one day. All the white suburbs were quiet.

So was the city; but it was a different kind of quiet. There was only the static cackling gibberish from radio communication in passing police cars. Without its volume of blacks the city had gone mute. Without its blacks it was a place of buildings. — Like Sunday. — Carole was right; on Sundays the blacks were in their ghettos, that was where they were supposed to be, then, but this was a Monday, and they had not come back. The rhythm of life of this city, that had its black morning spate and black afternoon ebb, was withheld. The half-empty streets waited for a drama that was still to be written. For the present, there was an aspect strange as natural disaster, about which there is never anyone to question: the few blacks in straggling queues at the bus-stations, in the streets, looked the woman and two girls in the eye without a flicker of any acknowledgement. Why they had come to work, whether these white people approved them as the good kind of black or thought them traitors to their cause — that was not whites’ business.

Pauline drove out in the direction of Soweto but could not risk getting too near, with the girls in the car. There were police patrol cars everywhere. From the vantage point where Pauline, Carole and Hillela stopped, the distant cubes of Soweto houses were miles of tombstones in a vast graveyard; yet all the life that was gone from the city was down there; if you had been able to get near enough.

Alpheus and his girl were walking out of the yard gate as Pauline and the girls arrived home. He opened the gate for the car, and Pauline paused as it passed him. — The stay-at-home seems to be fairly successful. We’ve just been into town.—

Alpheus and his girl were dressed to stroll out on a public holiday. He had a way of standing quietly as if waiting to be dismissed. He smiled. — Thank you.—

In the yard, Pauline sat a moment with her hands on the steering-wheel. — What does he thank for? The information? He’s always like that. If every black were like him, nothing would ever change. If Joe hadn’t told him to, he wouldn’t even have supported the strike. Maybe it’s a mistake to have removed him from the condition of his own people. I don’t know, anymore.—

Carole and Hillela also stayed at home when the school held its prayers and celebrations for the Republic. On the day, Pauline and Joe kept open house for friends as depressed and confused as themselves; when Hillela left to go and lunch at Olga’s (a compensation offered for the postponed shopping trip) they were arguing over Mandela’s reasons for calling off the stay-at-home on its second day — as for the national convention, no-one had ever expected for a moment the government would consider that.

— This is the lovely young daughter I didn’t have.—

It was too chilly to swim, but in Olga’s pavilion beside the pool Jethro carried round a whole poached salmon — the stately pink corpse laid out with the cook’s radish roses and swags of golden mayonnaise — and Hillela was allowed a glass of the French champagne served in honour of some guests, in the way of Arthur’s business, from another country. The lady was settled in her chair like a beautifully-marked butterfly — amber hair and the deep blue oval of a sapphire on each earlobe, pale fingers banded with gold and diamonds and tipped with red nails. She made soft noises of approval over Hillela. Jethro paused in his procession to beam on the girl, while everyone except Arthur smiled at them both. — Miss Hilly, you been there to my country again? You staying all the time here in Jo’burg now, you don’t like go there sometime see you daddy?—

Olga charmed, speaking to him in the third person. — Next time Jethro goes home, he’s going to take Miss Hilly with him, isn’t that right? — And Jethro bowed his way round, laughing.

— He thinks of the children in this house as his own.—

— How wonderful. You can’t get anybody loyal like that, not in Europe, not at any price.—

Olga took care not to neglect her young niece in the presence of distinguished company. She turned aside from talk of the villa in Italy, belonging to these guests, which she and Arthur were being pressed to visit, and had a confidential moment with Hillela. — How is Pauline … I worry about Pauline. What is the point of all the things she gets herself involved in. That bus boycott — they had to pay in the end, surely. The Republic — it’s been declared … And she neglects herself. She used to be so striking-looking. If you live here you must abide by the law of the country.—

Olga and Arthur believed you must abide by the law of the country but were once again making contingency plans not to go on living there.

— There’s a delightful place on the market, not far from ours. I think the position’s even better than ours. Why don’t you buy a little pied-à-terre in Italy? It’d be lovely to have you as neighbours now and then—

— The way things are going, it might have to be more than that! — Olga laughed when she said it, and the butterfly lady did not pause to take in the inference: —Though I can understand, if I lived in this beautiful country, with those wonderful vineyard estates at the Cape, and those marvellous beaches, so clean — not like Europe — uncrowded, I wouldn’t see much reason to go anywhere else—

Arthur broke in when he saw an advantage in doing so. — We’ve got a place at the Cape. Nice place right on the best beach in the country. You can come out and spend as long as you like there, any time.—