Nadine Gordimer - Jump and Other Stories

— Come. There’s another bed. — He wandered behind her down a passage. She had made up a big bed in a guestroom; he stumbled into it and slept again.

In the morning at breakfast on her terrace she gaily greeted the black man who served them. — Mr Harry is a friend of the master, I asked him to stay the night with us.—

So she, too, had the skills of vigilance, making safe for herself.

Harry went back every night that week. Harry really existed, now, out of the nonexistence of himself. Harry the construction engineer, a successful, highly-paid, professionally well-regarded man of the world, with a passing fancy, a mistress not young but beautiful, a creature lavished by the perfumed unguents of care from the poll of curly tendrils he would lift to expose her forehead, to the painted nails of her pedicured toes. Like him, she had her erratic moments of anguish, caused by conflict with the assertion of reality — her reality — rising within her to spoil an episode outside her life, a state without consequences. These moments found their expression as non sequitur remarks or more often as gestures, the inner scuffle breaking through in some odd physical manifestation. One night she squatted naked on the bed with her arms round her knees, clasping her curled feet tight in either hand. He was disturbed, and suppressed the reason that was sending a sucker from the root of his life: after interrogation in detention he had sat on the floor of his cell holding his feet like that, still rigid with his resistance against pain. A sear of resentment: she —she was only interrogating herself. Yet of course he had feeling for her — hadn’t he just made love to her, and she to him, as she did so generously — he should not let himself dismiss the relative sufferings of people like her as entirely trivial because it was on behalf of nothing larger than themselves.

— A long phone call from Australia… and all I could think about while we were talking was how when we’re alone in here at night he never closes the bathroom door while he pees. I hear him, like a horse letting go in the street. Never closes the door. And sometimes there’s a loud fart as well. He never stops to think that I can hear, that I’m lying here. And that’s all I could think about while he’s talking to me, that’s all.—

He smiled at her almost fondly. — Well, we’re pretty crude, we men… but oh come on, you’re not squeamish — you’re a very physical lady—

— About love-making, yes … you think, because of the things I do, with you. But that’s different, that’s love-making, it’s got nothing to do with what I’m talking about.—

— If sex doesn’t disgust you as a function of the body, then why so fastidious about its other functions? You accept a lover’s body or you don’t.—

— Would you still accept your lover’s body if she had, say, a breast off?—

He lay down beside her with a hand on the dune of her curved smooth back. — How do I know? What woman? When? It would depend on many things, wouldn’t it? I can say now, yes, just to say the right thing, if you want—

— That’s it! That’s what’s good! You don’t say the right thing, like other people.—

— Oh I do, I do. I’m very careful, I have a wary nature, I assure you.—

— Well, I don’t know you. — She let go of her feet and pulled the bow of her body back, under his palm. Restlessly she swiveled round to him pushing the fingers of her two hands up through the poll on her forehead, holding the hair dragged away. — Why do I let that bloody pansy hairdresser do this to me… I look common. Cheap, common.—

He murmured intimately. — I didn’t think so.—

On the bus, yes. — Maybe you wouldn’t have got off if I hadn’t looked like this. Where were you really going, I wonder. — But it was not a question; she was satisfied she wouldn’t get an answer, he wouldn’t come out with the right thing. She was not asking, just as she never questioned that he appeared as out of nowhere, every night, apparently dropped by taxi somewhere out of sight of the house. And he did not ask when the husband would come home; there would be a sign he would read for himself. Stretched out, she quietly took the hand that had been on her back and placed it between her thighs.

There was no sign, but at the end of that week he knew he would not go back again. Enough. It was time. He left as he had followed her, without explanation. Using the same trail for more than a week, he might have made a path for himself by which he could be followed. He moved from where he had been staying, to be taken in at another house. This was the family of a plumber, a friend of the Movement, not quite white, but too ambiguous of pigment for classification, so that the itinerant lodger could pass for a lighter relative. One of the youngsters gave up his bed; the lodger shared the room with three other children. Every day of the trial, new evidence brought by the Prosecutor’s state witnesses involved his name. It claimed him from every newspaper, citing several aliases under which he had been active. But not ‘Harry’.

He was making his way back to the plumber’s house one afternoon when the youngster, on roller skates, zigzagged up the street. The boy staggered to a halt, almost knocking him down, and he struck out playfully at him. But the boy was panting. — My dad says don’t come. I been waiting to tell you and my brother’s there at the other end of the street in case you take that way. Dad send us. They come this morning and went all over the house, only Auntie was there, Ma was also at work already. Looking for you. With dogs and everything. He say don’t worry for your things, he’s going to bring them where you can pick them up — he didn’t tell me nothing, not where, but that you know—

A cold jump of fear under his pectorals. He let it pass, and concentrated on getting out of the area. He took a bus, and another bus. He went into a cinema and sat through some film about three men bringing up a baby. When he came out of the cinema’s eternal dusk, the street was dark. Somewhere to go for the night: he had to have that, to decide where to go tomorrow, which hide on the list in his mind it was possible to use again. Likely that the list was not in his mind alone; nothing on it was left that could be counted on as safe, now.

He got out of the taxi a block away. He pressed the intercom button at the wide teak gates. There was the manservant’s accented voice on the other end.

— It’s Mr Harry.—

— Just push, Mr Harry. — There was a buzz.

Her trees, the swimming-pool; he stood in the large room that was always waiting for a party to fill it. On low tables were the toys such people give each other: metal balls that (as he set them in motion with a flick) click together in illustration of some mathematical or physical principle, god knows what… Click-clack; a metronome of trivial time. She was there, in the doorway, in rumpled white trousers, barefoot, a woman who expected no one or perhaps was about to choose what she would wear for an evening out. — Hul- Io . — Raised eyebrows.

— I had to go away unexpectedly — trouble with the foundations on one of our sites in Natal. I meant to phone—

— But phoning’s awkward. — She recalled, but quite serenely, only half-wishing to score against him.

— I’m not disturbing you…—

— No, no. I’ve just been tidying up… some cupboards … I get very careless—

When alone: so the husband wasn’t back yet. — Could I ask for a drink — I’ve had a heavy day.—

She opened her palms, away from her body: as if he need ask; and, indeed, the servant appeared with the trolley. — I put it outside, madam?—

Quite like coming home; the two of them settled back on the terrace, as before. — I thought it would be so nice to see you.—