Nadine Gordimer - Jump and Other Stories

— Quite a trip.—

— So long as he’s back by the time the boys come home for the holidays at the end of next month. They expect to do things together with him. Fishing trips. Things I’m no good at. You’ve got a daughter — lucky. I go along, but just for the ride.—

— Well, I’m sorry—

— Another time. But you’re not going… you’ll stay for dinner. Just something light, out here, such a lovely evening.—

— But haven’t you other plans I’d be disturbing, friends coming? — Harry cannot attend dinner parties, thank you.

— Nothing. Not-a-thing. I’m planning an early night, I’ve been gadding too much. You know how friends imagine, when you’re alone, you can’t be left to yourself for a single evening. I’m sick of them.—

— Then I should push off and leave you in peace.—

— No, just a salad, whatever they’ve got — you’ll share pot luck—

Sick of them. A cure for boredom: hers. The paradox, rather than her company, was his enjoyment. He accepted the role so wide of his range; he opened the bottles of white wine — dry with the fish mousse, a Sauternes with the strawberries — in place of the man of the house.

Her fascination with their encounter rose to the surface in the ease over food and drink. — How many years is it since you met anyone you were not introduced to — can you remember? I certainly can’t. It’s a chain, isn’t it, it’s like Auld Lang Syne all the year, every year, it just goes on and on, a hand on this side taken by a hand on that side… it’s never broken into, always friends of friends, acquaintances of acquaintances, whether they’re from Japan or Taiwan or London, down the road or god knows where.—

— Good friends. They’re necessary. — He was careful.

— But don’t you find that? Particularly for people like you and him — my husband — I mean, the circle of people who have particular business interests, a profession. Round and round… But I suppose it’s natural for us because we have things in common. I thought, that other day — when my car broke down, you know — I never walk around the streets like this, what have all these people to do with me—

It was coming now, of course, the guilt of her class in a wail of self-accusation of uselessness, of not belonging to real life. Hadn’t she shown a hint of it in the bus? But he was wrong and, in his turn, fascinated by the overturning of his kind of conventional assumption.

— They’re unreal to me. I don’t just mean because most of them are black. That’s obvious, that we have nothing in common. I wish them well, they ought to have a better life… conditions … I suppose it’s good that things are changing for them… but I’m not involved, how could I be, we give money for their schools and housing and so on — my husband’s firm does, like everybody else… I suppose you too … I don’t know what your views are—

— I’m no armchair politician.—

— I thought not. But the others — what have I in common with those whites, either… I don’t count in their life, and they don’t count in mine. And the few who might — who’re hidden away in the crowd in those streets (why is this town so ugly and dirty), it’s unlikely I’d recognize them. — She really was quite attractive, unaware of a crumb at the side of her mouth. — Even sitting next to me in a bus.—

They laughed and she made the move to clink glasses.

A black man in white uniform and cotton gloves hung about wearily; her guest was conscious of this witness to everything that went on in whites’ houses, but for once felt that his own whiteness guaranteed anonymity. She told the servant he could leave the table and clear it in the morning. Frog bassoons and fluting crickets filled comfortable silences. — I must go. — He spoke, not moving.

— What about a quick dip first. One for the road. — Although he had dressed, she had eaten dinner in her robe.

He was not eager to get into water again but it was a way of rounding off the evening and he felt there was a need for doing this definitively, for himself. There were too few safe subjects between them — she was more right than she knew — they had too little in common, the acquaintance had come to the end of its possibilities. He went to the change-room again.

The water crept like a cool hand over his genitals; she was already swimming. She doubled up and went under with a porpoise flip, and the light from the terrace streamed off her firm backside and thighs. She kept her distance in the water, they circled one another. Hitching herself out on long arms, she sat on the side of the pool and, again, he was aware of her watching him. He surfaced below where she sat, and suddenly, for a moment only, closed his hand on her wrist before leaving the pool, shaking himself like a dog, scrubbing at his arms and chest with the big towel. — Cold, cold.—

She repeated with a mock shiver — Cold, cold.—

They stood up, in accord to get dressed.

The ring of water in his ears jinglingly mingled with the sound of the frogs. He put his arms round her and in a rush of heat, as if all the blood in his chilled body had retreated to engorge there, pressed his genitals tightly against her. He felt an enormous thrill and a fiercely crashing desire, all the abstinence of a planned nonexistence imploded like the destruction of one of his imaginary twenty-storeys that she feared might fall on her head. She held him as he held her. There was no kiss. She broke away neatly and ran indoors. He dressed, raged against by his roused body, among the chintz drapings in the change-room. When he came out the water in the pool was black, with the reflection of stars thrown there like dying matches. She had turned off the terrace lights and was standing in the dark.

— Good night. I apologize.—

— I hope your car hasn’t been pinched. Should have brought it into the drive.—

— There is no car.—

He was too tired and dispirited to lie. Yet he must summon some slapdash resource of protection. — Friends were coming this way, they dropped me. I said I’d call a taxi to take me back.—

The dark and the cover of chanting frogs hid whatever she might be thinking.

— Stay. — She turned, and he followed her into the house, that he had not before entered.

They began again, the right way, with kisses and caresses. A woman his own age, who knew how to make love, who both responded and initiated, knowing what they wanted; in common. On this territory between them, there was even a kind of unexpected bluntness. Gently pinching his nipples before the second intercourse, she said — You’re not Aids positive, are you.—

He put a hand over the delight of her fingers on him. — A bit late to ask… Not so far as I know. And I’ve no reason to believe otherwise.—

— But you’ve no wife.—

— Yes, but I’m rather a constant character — despite my nomadic profession.—

— How will you explain you didn’t come home. — He laughed. — Who to?—

— The first day you were here… ‘awkward’, you said, for me to phone you.—

— There’s no one. There’s no woman I’m accountable to at present.—

— You understand, it’s none of my business. But we don’t want to make things difficult for either of us.—

The husband. — Of course, I understand, don’t worry. You’re a lovely — preposterous! — woman. — And he began to kiss her as if he were a cannibal tasting flesh.

She was a practical woman, too. Some time in the early hours he stirred with a grunt and found a strange woman standing over him in dawn shadows — oh yes, ‘Sylvie’. So that’s where, waking often in unfamiliar rooms, he was this time. He had learnt to be quick to adjust his sense of place.