Nadine Gordimer - Life Times - Stories 1952-2007

He stood there, fat, greasy, and grinning at the two visitors so lingeringly that his grin looked insolent. Finally he asked, ‘What brings you this end of town, Mr Halford? Sightseeing with the lady?’

The young Englishman gave Jake’s arm a squeeze, where the short sleeve of the rayon shirt ended. ‘Just thought I’d look you up, Jake,’ he said, jolly.

‘Come on in, come on in,’ said Jake on a rising note, shambling ahead of them into the company of the back room. ‘Here, what about a chair for the lady?’ He swept a pile of handbills from the seat of a kitchen chair on to the dusty concrete floor, picked up the chair, and plonked it down again, in the middle of the group of men, who had risen awkwardly, like zoo bears to the hope of a bun, at the visitors’ entrance. ‘You know Maxie Ndube? And Temba?’ Jake said, nodding at two of the men who surrounded him.

Alister Halford murmured with polite warmth his recognition of Maxie, a small, dainty-faced African in neat, businessman’s dress, then said inquiringly and hesitantly to Temba, ‘Have we? When?’

Temba was a coloured man — a mixture of the bloods of black slaves and white masters, blended long ago, in the days when the Cape of Good Hope was a port of refreshment for the Dutch East India Company. He was tall and pale, with a large Adam’s apple, enormous black eyes, and the look of a musician in a jazz band; you could picture a trumpet lifted to the ceiling in those long yellow hands, that curved spine hunched forward to shield a low note. ‘In Durban last year, Mr Halford, you remember?’ he said eagerly. ‘I’m sure we met — or perhaps I only saw you there.’

‘Oh, at the Congress? Of course I remember you!’ Halford apologised. ‘You were in a delegation from the Cape?’

‘Miss—?’ Jake Alexander waved a hand between the young woman, Maxie and Temba.

‘Jennifer. Jennifer Tetzel,’ she said again clearly, thrusting out her hand. There was a confused moment when both men reached for it at once and then hesitated, each giving way to the other. Finally the handshaking was accomplished, and the young woman seated herself confidently on the chair.

Jake continued, offhand, ‘Oh, and of course Billy Boy—’ Alister signalled briefly to a black man with sad, bloodshot eyes, who stood awkwardly, back a few steps, against some rolls of paper — ‘and Klaas and Albert.’ Klaas and Albert had in their mixed blood some strain of the Bushman, which gave them a batrachian yellowness and toughness, like one of those toads that (prehistoric as the Bushman is) are mythically believed to have survived into modern times (hardly more fantastically than the Bushman himself has survived) by spending centuries shut up in an air bubble in a rock. Like Billy Boy, Klaas and Albert had backed away, and, as if abasement against the rolls of paper, the wall or the window were a greeting in itself, the two little coloured men and the big African only stared back at the masculine nods of Alister and the bright smile of the young woman.

‘You up from the Cape for anything special now?’ Alister said to Temba as he made a place for himself on a corner of a table that was littered with photographic blocks, bits of type, poster proofs, a bottle of souring milk, a bow tie, a pair of red braces and a number of empty Coca-Cola bottles.

‘I’ve been living in Durban for a year. Just got the chance of a lift to Jo’burg,’ said the gangling Temba.

Jake had set himself up easily, leaning against the front of the stove and facing Miss Jennifer Tetzel on her chair. He jerked his head towards Temba and said, ‘Real banana boy.’ Young white men brought up in the strong Anglo-Saxon tradition of the province of Natal are often referred to, and refer to themselves, as ‘banana boys’, even though fewer and fewer of them have any connection with the dwindling number of vast banana estates that once made their owners rich. Jake’s broad face, where the bright pink cheeks of a Highland complexion — inherited, along with his name, from his Scottish father — showed oddly through his coarse, coffee-coloured skin, creased up in appreciation of his own joke. And Temba threw back his head and laughed, his Adam’s apple bobbing, at the idea of himself as a cricket-playing white public-school boy.

‘There’s nothing like Cape Town, is there?’ said the young woman to him, her head charmingly on one side, as if this conviction was something she and he shared.

‘Miss Tetzel’s up here to look us over. She’s from Cape Town,’ Alister explained.

She turned to Temba with her beauty, her strong provocativeness, full on, as it were. ‘So we’re neighbours?’

Jake rolled one foot comfortably over the other and a spluttering laugh pursed out the pink inner membrane of his lips.

‘Where did you live?’ she went on, to Temba.

‘Cape Flats,’ he said. Cape Flats is a desolate coloured slum in the bush outside Cape Town.

‘Me, too,’ said the girl, casually.

Temba said politely, ‘You’re kidding,’ and then looked down uncomfortably at his hands, as if they had been guilty of some clumsy movement. He had not meant to sound so familiar; the words were not the right ones.

‘I’ve been there nearly ten months,’ she said.

‘Well, some people’ve got queer tastes,’ Jake remarked, laughing, to no one in particular, as if she were not there.

‘How’s that?’ Temba was asking her shyly, respectfully.

She mentioned the name of a social rehabilitation scheme that was in operation in the slum. ‘I’m assistant director of the thing at the moment. It’s connected with the sort of work I do at the university, you see, so they’ve given me fifteen months’ leave from my usual job.’

Maxie noticed with amusement the way she used the word ‘job’, as if she were a plumber’s mate; he and his educated African friends — journalists and schoolteachers — were careful to talk only of their ‘professions’. ‘Good works,’ he said, smiling quietly.

She planted her feet comfortably before her, wriggling on the hard chair, and said to Temba with mannish frankness, ‘It’s a ghastly place. How in God’s name did you survive living there? I don’t think I can last out more than another few months, and I’ve always got my flat in Cape Town to escape to on Sundays, and so on.’

While Temba smiled, turning his protruding eyes aside slowly, Jake looked straight at her and said, ‘Then why do you, lady, why do you?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Because I don’t see why anyone else — any one of the people who live there — should have to, I suppose.’ She laughed before anyone else could at the feebleness, the philanthropic uselessness of what she was saying. ‘Guilt, what-have-you. .’

Maxie shrugged, as if at the mention of some expensive illness, which he had never been able to afford and whose symptoms he could not imagine.

There was a moment of silence; the two coloured men and the big black man standing back against the wall watched anxiously, as if some sort of signal might be expected, possibly from Jake Alexander, their boss, the man who, like themselves, was not white, yet who owned his own business, and had a car, and money, and strange friends — sometimes even white people, such as these. The three of them were dressed in the ill-matched cast-off clothing that all humble workpeople who are not white wear in Johannesburg, and they had not lost the ability of primitives and children to stare, unembarrassed and unembarrassing.

Jake winked at Alister; it was one of his mannerisms — a bookie’s wink, a stage comedian’s wink. ‘Well, how’s it going, boy, how’s it going?’ he said. His turn of phrase was bar-room bonhomie; with luck, he could get into a bar, too. With a hat to cover his hair, and his coat collar well up, and only a bit of greasy pink cheek showing, he had slipped into the bars of the shabbier Johannesburg hotels with Alister many times and got away with it. Alister, on the other hand, had got away with the same sort of thing narrowly several times, too, when he had accompanied Jake to a shebeen in a coloured location, where it was illegal for a white man to be, as well as illegal for anyone at all to have a drink; twice Alister had escaped a raid by jumping out of a window. Alister had been in South Africa only eighteen months, as correspondent for a newspaper in England, and because he was only two or three years away from undergraduate escapades, such incidents seemed to give him a kind of nostalgic pleasure; he found them funny. Jake, for his part, had decided long ago (with the great help of the money he had made) that he would take the whole business of the colour bar as humorous. The combination of these two attitudes, stemming from such immeasurably different circumstances, had the effect of making their friendship less self-conscious than is usual between a white man and a coloured one.