Nadine Gordimer - A Sport of Nature

They dried their hair by the fire. He towelled hers vigorously, but her resistance was weak and laughing, the game was running down; the smell of Hillela’s hair was identifiable as the source of the intimations of her he had found, over several years now, in her jacket that hung in the jumble behind a door, or on a cushion on the old sofa, in a jersey left inside-out, as it had been pulled off, sleeves holding the shape of her impatient push up to elbows.

Hunger was also a happiness. He cooked up a rich red-and-yellow mess of tinned tomatoes and mushrooms, tuna fish and cheese, an expert in clandestine boarding-school cuisine. They carried it to the fire and camped on the floor. The cat filched bits of fish with the club of a curved paw and spat out each morsel several times to get rid of the tomato coating. Sasha put her through the window, Hillela let her in again. Sasha suggested he would take another bottle of wine but neither wanted it. The telephone rang; Hillela was sopping up sauce with a piece of bread, he put down his plate, she waved the crust, and he did not know whether it was a signal that he should answer. She cleaned her plate with conscientious gusto, making figures of eight while he counted the rings, nine, ten, eleven, and the last cut off in the middle. Within such content so many things seem possible, even easy. — All you need is enough for a cheap one-way ticket. If you can get that together, then you can work your way round Europe. There must be people we know we could stay with … connections.—

— Billie — she’s got family in London. You know — my step-mother.—

— I want to keep away from youth hostels. I’ve had enough of living in dormitories. They say in France, if you go to the South where so many rich people are, you can get taken on as crew for a yacht. Girls too. There’s someone at school, his brother went all the way to the Bahamas — fantastic. The trouble is, we’ll finish school in the December of next year—

— November.—

— Same thing; it’s winter in Europe. But we could work in ski resorts for a bit.—

Hillela mimed a shiver.

— No, you’ll love it. The way you can dance, I’ll bet you’ll ski well. Good co-ordination.—

— Cold places. — A fearful intake of breath.

— That’s because it’s something you can’t even imagine. The sun is hot, the snow is cold — it’s like eating sorbet and drinking hot black coffee.—

She smiled praisingly. — How do you know.—

He caught her hand, patted himself on the head with it. — I know, I just know.—

— And Carole could join up with us somewhere.—

— Carole?—

He stared at her. She looked back with the face of someone practical, considering ways and means.

— But she’ll still be at school.—

— In the holidays. It’ll be fun. The three of us. Like here.—

Orange and blue liquid pulsed in the coals; measured perhaps a minute. He picked up his book again, and, as the cat would look about fastidiously for a place to lie, slowly settled his head in her lap, where the plate had been. She grabbed a cushion, lifted his head, and put the cushion beneath it. He had been reading, on and off, all day. She looked to see how far along he was by now: more than two hundred pages.

— What about the bathroom.—

Only the pilot light of his conscious attention burned. — There’s all day tomorrow.—

She began to read over his head; when he got to the end of a page before her, her hand went down to hold him back. As she caught up with the sense of the narrative their pace drew even, so that they were reading at the same instant the same passage; ‘I want you to know me. And then to say goodbye. I believe it’s always best to get to know people just before leaving them.’

Sasha closed the book and put it aside without marking his place with the torn bus ticket he used, but the spine of the paperback, bent as far as he had read, lifted the pages apart from the rest at that point. After a while her hand stirred as if about to touch his hair, but did not. She bent over, smiling, but his eyes were closed.

— Sasha?—

— Sasha?—

He waited, once again, to hear her call softly, again.

— Sasha?—

He opened his eyes and suddenly began to yawn, yawned till his eyes watered, full of tears.

They got up. She stood a moment, waiting for him.

— I would never go to Rhodesia.—

She was moving her head very slowly. Feeling him looking at her, a smile turned the edges of her mouth; she might have been being photographed. He approached her very shyly, and kissed her. They wandered through the house, arms about each other’s waist, following the trail of their inhabitation: among the papers on the study desk, a packet of chocolate broken into, from which she took a square, records among the open tins in the kitchen, his telescope that he had been tinkering with (last year’s birthday present for a boy interested in phenomena beyond his orbit) on the dining-table.

He took the telescope into his room and for a long time, until they got too cold, they drew the moon and stars near through the open window, just as their talk drew near ski resorts, the Bahamas, the anonymous freedom of foreign cities.

They were in the deep sleep of midnight when Pauline came quietly into her son’s room and saw that there were two in his bed. She turned on the light. The room was cold and stuffy; warm in the core of it was the smell of a body she had known since she gave birth to him, unmistakable to her as the scent that leads a bitch to her puppy, and it was mingled with the scents of sexuality caressed from the female nectary. The cat was a rolled fur glove in an angle made by Sasha’s bent knees. The two in the bed opened their eyes; they focussed out of sleep and saw Pauline. She was looking at them, at their naked shoulders above the covers, and she called, as if she had come upon intruders in the house— Joe . She turned and walked out.

They did not move. Something grasped Sasha’s innards and was shaking him; he trembled against Hillela. Her body was calm as sun-warmed stone. He spoke. — It’s not Sunday. — Hillela said nothing. Her soft, clean, curly hair lay against his neck, the last sensation he had been conscious of as he fell asleep. Hillela was there. Now that terrified him.

Pauline came back with Joe, she was clutching his upper arm, taking protection. She stopped him in the doorway, against some danger. Sensing attention, the cat began to purr. Pauline’s splendid head rose like an archaic representation of the sun, aureoled with wild filaments, blinding them and holding them in her gaze. — Joe. Joe . — Sasha’s mother was imploring his father to tell the intruders not to be there. The cat stretched, jutted rump and tail and jumped off the bed.

The greatest shock was the confusion. It was days before Sasha (and Hillela, for all he knew) understood why his parents had come home on Saturday night. And Pauline and Joe had to grasp a total displacement of apprehension. They returned because of a crisis they knew how to deal with, in an anxiety not unexpected in the context of their lives. Someone had brought that curse upon peace, a radio, to the camping ground in the Drakensberg. He took the thing, the size of a cigarette pack, along with him when the party of friends went on a climb, and under another kind of waterfall (of static) its cackle told of the arrest of Joe’s partner in the early hours of Saturday morning. Joe and Pauline left Carole with the party and tramped back in the silence of shared preoccupation along the hikers’ trail where, a few hours before, they had noticed the minute beauties of every fern and flower, and the grand surveillance of eagles. What both feared most, on the long drive back, was that their house had been raided while the other two members of the family were left alone there. — Well … they’re not children … they’ll know how to behave sensibly. — Pauline accepted the reassurance, but a mile or two farther on, while she was taking her turn to drive, allowed herself: —How d’you behave with those bastards raking through a house? It’s all very well … but it hasn’t happened to us. I’m not sure what my reactions would be. If I could shut up. And Sasha …—