Nadine Gordimer - Life Times - Stories 1952-2007

‘Carlitta,’ Stefan said, aside, ‘how long were you in Greenwich Village?’

‘Four years,’ she said shortly, replying from some other part of her mind; her attention and animation were given to the comments with which she amplified her husband’s description of their child’s remarkable knowledge of country lore, his superiority over town-bred children.

Eileen overheard the low, flat reply. Four years! Four years about which Carlitta had said not a word, four years which somehow or other had brought her from the arrogant, beautiful, ‘advanced’ girl with whom Waldeck and Stefan could not fall in love because they and she agreed they were not good enough for her, to the girl who would accept Edgar Hicks a few weeks after a meeting on a train.

Carlitta felt the gaze of the girl from South Africa. A small patch of bright colour appeared on each of Carlitta’s thin cheekbones. Perhaps it was the wine. Perhaps it was the wine, too, that made her voice rise, so that she began to talk of her life on the Ohio farm with a zest and insistence which made the whole table her audience. She told how she never went to town unless she had to; never more than once a month. How country people, like herself, discovered a new rhythm of life, something people who lived in towns had forgotten. How country people slept differently, tasted their food differently, had no nerves. ‘I haven’t a nerve in my body, any more. Absolutely placid,’ she said, her sharp little gestures, her black eyes in the pinched face challenging a denial. ‘Nothing ever happens but a change of season,’ she said arrogantly to people for whom there were stock-market crashes, traffic jams, crowded exhibitions and cocktail parties. ‘Birth and growth among the animals and the plants. Life. Not a cement substitute.’ No one defended the city, but she went on as if someone had. ‘I live as instinctively as one of our own animals. So does my child. I mean, for one thing, we don’t have to worry about clothes.’

Eileen said rather foolishly, as if in reflex, ‘Stefan said I couldn’t wear slacks to a New York restaurant today.’

‘Stefan was always a snob.’ Carlitta’s little head struck like a snake.

Eileen was taken aback; she laughed nervously, looking very young. Carlitta grinned wickedly under the hat whose straw caught the light concentrically, like a gramophone record. Stefan’s wife smiled serenely and politely, as if this were a joke against her husband. She had taken off the jacket of her suit, and beneath it she wore a fine lavender-coloured sweater with a low, round neck. She had been resting her firm neck against her left hand, and now she took the hand away; hers was the kind of wonderful blood-mottled fair skin that dented white with the slightest pressure, filled up pink again the way the sea seeps up instantly through footprints in wet sand. She looked so healthy, so well cared for that she created a moment of repose around herself; everyone paused, resting his gaze upon her.

Then Carlitta’s thin little sun-sallow neck twisted restlessly. ‘I don’t know how you stand it,’ she said. ‘I don’t know how you can live in New York year after year.’

‘We go away,’ Stefan said soothingly. ‘We go to Europe most summers, to Switzerland to my mother, or to Italy. Alice loves Italy.’

‘Italy,’ said Carlitta, suddenly turning over a piece of lobster on her plate as if she suspected that there must be something bad beneath it. ‘Spain.’

‘You remember how you went off to the Pyrenees?’ Waldeck said to her. From his tone it was clear that this was quite a story, if Carlitta cared to tell it.

‘You can’t imagine how time flies on the farm,’ said Carlitta. ‘The years. . just go. Sometimes, in summer, I simply walk out of the house and leave my work and go and lie down in the long grass. Then you can hear nothing, nothing at all.’

‘Maybe the old cow chewing away under the pear tree,’ said Edgar tenderly. Then with a chuckle that brought a change of tone: ‘Carlitta takes a big part in community affairs, too, you know. She doesn’t tell you that she’s on the library committee in town, and last year she was lady president of the Parent-Teacher Association. Ran a bazaar made around three hundred dollars.’ There was a pause. Nobody spoke. ‘I’m an Elk myself,’ he added. ‘That’s why we’re going to Philadelphia Thursday. There’s a convention on over there.’

Carlitta suddenly put down her fork with a gesture that impatiently terminated any current subject of conversation. (Eileen thought: she must always have managed conversation like that, long ago in smoky, noisy student rooms, jerking the talk determinedly the way she wanted it.) Her mind seemed to hark back to the subject of dress. ‘Last year,’ she said, ‘we invited some city friends who were passing through town to a supper party. Now it just so happened that that afternoon I could see a storm banking up. I knew that if the storm came in the night it was goodbye to our hay. So I decided to make a hay-making party out of the supper. When those women came with their high-heeled fancy sandals and their gauzy frocks I put pitchforks into their hands and sent them out into the field to help get that hay in under cover. Of course I’d forgotten that they’d be bound to be rigged out in something ridiculous. You should have seen their faces!’ Carlitta laughed gleefully. ‘Should have seen their shoes!’

The young girl from South Africa felt suddenly angry. Amid the laughter, she said quietly, ‘I think it was an awful thing to do. If I’d been a guest, I should flatly have refused.’

‘Eileen!’ said Waldeck mildly. But Carlitta pointedly excluded from her notice the girl from South Africa, whom Waldeck was apparently dragging around the world and giving a good time. Carlitta was sitting stiffly, her thin hands caught together, and she never took her eyes off Alice Raines’s luxuriantly fleshed neck, as if it were some object of curiosity, quite independent of a human whole.

‘If only they’d seen how idiotic they looked, stumbling about,’ she said fiercely. Her eyes were extraordinarily dark, brimming with brightness. If her expression had not been one of malicious glee, Eileen would have said that there were tears in them.

After lunch, the Brands and the Raineses parted from the Hickses. Carlitta left the restaurant with Waldeck and Stefan on either arm, and that way she walked with them to the taxi stand at the end of the block, turning her small head from one to the other, tiny between them. ‘I just couldn’t keep her away from her two boyfriends today,’ Edgar said indulgently, walking behind with Eileen and Alice. At this point the thin, middle-aged woman between the two men dropped their arms, bowed down, apparently with laughter at some joke, in the extravagant fashion of a young girl, and then caught them to her again.

Edgar and Carlitta got into a taxi, and the others went in Stefan’s car back to his apartment. It was three o’clock in the afternoon, but Stefan brought in a bottle of champagne. The weak sunlight coming in the windows matched the wine. ‘Carlitta,’ said Stefan before he drank. ‘Still “terrific”. Beautiful.’ Eileen Brand, sitting on a yellow sofa, felt vaguely unhappy, as if she had wandered into the wrong room, the wrong year. She even shook her head sadly, so slowly that no one noticed.

‘I told you, same old Carlitta,’ said Waldeck. There was a silence. ‘And that husband,’ Waldeck went on. ‘The life they lead. So unlike Carlitta.’

‘And because of that, so like her,’ said Stefan. ‘She always chose the perverse, the impossible. She obviously adores him. Just like Carlitta.’

Eileen Brand wanted to stand up and beg of the two men, for their own sake — no, to save her, Eileen, from shame (oh, how could she know her reasons!) — see she is changed; see Carlitta is old, faded, exists, as Carlitta, no more!