Nadine Gordimer - Life Times - Stories 1952-2007

One of the several groups that huddled to talk, like people sheltering beneath a cliff, on divans and hard borrowed chairs in the shadow of the dancers, was dominated by a man in a grey suit, Malcolm Barker. ‘Why not pay the fine and have done with it, then?’ he was saying.

The two people to whom he was talking were silent a moment, so that the haphazard noisiness of the room and the organised wail of the gramophone suddenly burst in irrelevantly upon the conversation. The pretty brunette said, in her quick, officious voice, ‘Well, it wouldn’t be the same for Jessica Malherbe. It’s not quite the same thing, you see. .’ Her stiff, mascaraed lashes flickered an appeal — for confirmation, and for sympathy because of the impossibility of explaining — at a man whose gingerish whiskers and flattened, low-set ears made him look like an angry tomcat.

‘It’s a matter of principle,’ he said to Malcolm Barker.

‘Oh, quite, I see,’ Malcolm conceded. ‘For someone like this Malherbe woman, paying the fine’s one thing; sitting in prison for three weeks is another.’

The brunette rapidly crossed and then uncrossed her legs. ‘It’s not even quite that,’ she said. ‘Not the unpleasantness of being in prison. Not a sort of martyrdom on Jessica’s part. Just the principle .’ At that moment a black hand came out from the crush of dancers bumping round and pulled the woman to her feet; she went off, and as she danced she talked with staccato animation to her African partner, who kept his lids half lowered over his eyes while she followed his gentle shuffle. The ginger-whiskered man got up without a word and went swiftly through the dancers to the ‘bar’, a kitchen table covered with beer and gin bottles, at the other end of the small room.

‘ Satyagraha ,’ said Malcolm Barker, like the infidel pronouncing with satisfaction the holy word that the believers hesitate to defile.

A very large and plain African woman sitting next to him smiled at him hugely and eagerly out of shyness, not having the slightest idea what he had said.

He smiled back at her for a moment, as if to hypnotise the onrush of some frightening animal. Then, suddenly, he leaned over and asked in a special, loud, slow voice, ‘What do you do? Are you a teacher?’

Before the woman could answer, Malcolm Barker’s young sister-in-law, a girl who had been sitting silent, pink and cold as a porcelain figurine, on the window sill behind his back, leaned her hand for balance on his chair and said urgently, near his ear, ‘Has Jessica Malherbe really been in prison?’

‘Yes, in Port Elizabeth. And in Durban, they tell me. And now she’s one of the civil-disobedience people — defiance campaign leaders who’re going to walk into some native location forbidden to Europeans. Next Tuesday. So she’ll land herself in prison again. For Christ’s sake, Joyce, what are you drinking that stuff for? I’ve told you that punch is the cheapest muck possible—’

But the girl was not listening to him any longer. Balanced delicately on her rather full, long neck, her fragile-looking face with the eyes and the fine, short line of nose of a Marie Laurencin painting was looking across the room with the intensity peculiar to the blank-faced. Hers was an essentially two-dimensional prettiness: flat, dazzlingly pastel-coloured, as if the mask of make-up on the unlined skin were the face; if one had turned her around, one would scarcely have been surprised to discover canvas. All her life she had suffered from this impression she made of not being quite real.

‘She looks so nice,’ she said now, her eyes still fixed on some point near the door. ‘I mean she uses good perfume, and everything. You can’t imagine it.’

Her brother-in-law made as if to take the tumbler of alcohol out of the girl’s hand, impatiently, the way one might take a pair of scissors from a child, but, without looking at him or at her hands, she changed the glass from one hand to the other, out of his reach. ‘At least the brandy’s in a bottle with a recognisable label,’ he said peevishly. ‘I don’t know why you don’t stick to that.’

‘I wonder if she had to eat the same food as the others,’ said the girl.

‘You’ll feel like death tomorrow morning,’ he said, ‘and Madeline’ll blame me. You are an obstinate little devil.’

A tall, untidy young man, whose blond head outtopped all others like a tousled palm tree, approached with a slow, drunken smile and, with exaggerated courtesy, asked Joyce to dance. She unhurriedly drank down what was left in her glass, put the glass carefully on the window sill and went off with him, her narrow waist upright and correct in his long arm. Her brother-in-law followed her with his eyes, irritatedly, for a moment, then closed them suddenly, whether in boredom or in weariness one could not tell.

The young man was saying to the girl as they danced, ‘You haven’t left the side of your husband — or whatever he is — all night. What’s the idea?’

‘My brother-in-law,’ she said. ‘My sister couldn’t come because the child’s got a temperature.’

He squeezed her waist; it remained quite firm, like the crisp stem of a flower. ‘Do I know your sister?’ he asked. Every now and then his drunkenness came over him in a delightful swoon, so that his eyelids dropped heavily and he pretended that he was narrowing them shrewdly.

‘Maybe. Madeline McCoy — Madeline Barker now. She’s the painter. She’s the one who started that arts-and-crafts school for Africans.’

‘Oh, yes. Yes, I know,’ he said. Suddenly, he swung her away from him with one hand, executed a few loose-limbed steps around her, lost her in a collision with another couple, caught her to him again, and, with an affectionate squeeze, brought her up short against the barrier of people who were packed tight as a rugby scrum around the kitchen table, where the drinks were. He pushed her through the crowd to the table.

‘What d’you want, Roy, my boy?’ said a little, very black-faced African, gleaming up at them.

‘Barberton’ll do for me.’ The young man pressed a hand on the African’s head, grinning.

‘Ah, that stuff’s no good. Sugar-water. Let me give you a dash of Pineapple. Just like mother makes.’

For a moment, the girl wondered if any of the bottles really did contain Pineapple or Barberton, two infamous brews invented by African natives living in the segregated slums that are called locations. Pineapple, she knew, was made out of the fermented fruit and was supposed to be extraordinarily intoxicating; she had once read a newspaper report of a shebeen raid in which the Barberton still contained a lopped-off human foot — whether for additional flavour or the spice of witchcraft, it was not known.

But she was reassured at once. ‘Don’t worry,’ said a good-looking blonde, made up to look heavily suntanned, who was standing at the bar. ‘No shebeen ever produced anything much more poisonous than this gin-punch thing of Derek’s.’ The host was attending to the needs of his guests at the bar, and she waved at him a glass containing the mixture that the girl had been drinking over at the window.

‘Not gin. It’s arak — lovely,’ said Derek. ‘What’ll you have, Joyce?’

‘Joyce,’ said the gangling young man with whom she had been dancing. ‘Joyce. That’s a nice name for her. Now tell her mine.’

‘Roy Wilson. But you seem to know each other quite adequately without names,’ said Derek. ‘This is Joyce McCoy, Roy — and, Joyce, these are Matt Shabalala, Brenda Shotley, Mahinder Singh, Martin Mathlongo.’

They smiled at the girl: the shiny-faced African, on a level with her shoulder; the blonde woman with the caked powder cracking on her cheeks; the handsome, scholarly-looking Indian with the high, bald dome; the ugly light-coloured man, just light enough for freckles to show thickly on his fleshy face.