Nadine Gordimer - Life Times - Stories 1952-2007

She said to her host, ‘I’ll have the same again, Derek. Your punch.’ And even before she had sipped the stuff, she felt a warmth expand and soften inside her, and she said the names over silently to herself — Matt Sha-ba-lala, Martin Math-longo, Ma-hinder Singh. Out of the corner of her eye, as she stood there, she could just see Jessica Malherbe, a short, plump white woman in an elegant black frock, her hair glossy, like a bird’s wing, as she turned her head under the light while she talked.

Then it happened, just when the girl was most ready for it, just when the time had come. The little African named Matt said, ‘This is Miss Joyce McCoy — Eddie Ntwala,’ and stood looking on with a smile while her hand went into the slim hand of a tall, light-skinned African with the tired, appraising, cynical eyes of a man who drinks too much in order to deaden the pain of his intelligence. She could tell from the way little Shabalala presented the man that he must be someone important and admired, a leader of some sort, whose every idiosyncrasy — the broken remains of handsome, smoke-darkened teeth when he smiled, the wrinkled tie hanging askew — bespoke to those who knew him his distinction in a thousand different situations. She smiled as if to say, ‘Of course, Eddie Ntwala himself, I knew it,’ and their hands parted and dropped.

The man did not seem to be looking at her — did not seem to be looking at the crowd or at Shabalala, either. There was a slight smile around his mouth, a public smile that would do for anybody. ‘Dance?’ he said, tapping her lightly on the shoulder. They turned to the floor together.

Eddie Ntwala danced well and unthinkingly, if without much variation. Joyce’s right hand was in his left, his right hand on the concavity of her back, just as if — well, just as if he were anyone else. And it was the first time — the first time in all her twenty-two years. Her head came just to the point of his lapel, and she could smell the faint odour of cigarette smoke in the cloth. When he turned his head and her head was in the path of his breath, there was the familiar smell of wine or brandy breathed down upon her by men at dances. He looked, of course, apart from his eyes — eyes that she had seen in other faces and wondered if she would ever be old enough to understand — exactly like any errand ‘boy’ or house ‘boy’. He had the same close-cut wool on his head, the same smooth brown skin, the same rather nice high cheekbones, the same broad-nostrilled small nose. Only, he had his arm around her and her hand in his and he was leading her through the conventional arabesques of polite dancing. She would not let herself formulate the words in her brain: I am dancing with a black man. But she allowed herself to question, with the careful detachment of scientific inquiry, quietly inside herself: ‘Do I feel anything? What do I feel?’ The man began to hum a snatch of the tune to which they were dancing, the way a person will do when he suddenly hears music out of some forgotten phase of his youth; while the hum reverberated through his chest, she slid her eyes almost painfully to the right, not moving her head, to see his very well-shaped hand — an almost feminine hand compared to the hands of most white men — dark brown against her own white one, the dark thumb and the pale one crossed, the dark fingers and the pale ones folded together. ‘Is this exactly how I always dance?’ she asked herself closely. ‘Do I always hold my back exactly like this, do I relax just this much, hold myself in reserve to just this degree?’

She found she was dancing as she always danced.

I feel nothing , she thought. I feel nothing .

And all at once a relief, a mild elation, took possession of her, so that she could begin to talk to the man with whom she was dancing. In any case, she was not a girl who had much small talk; she knew that at least half the young men who, attracted by her exceptional prettiness, flocked to ask her to dance at parties never asked her again because they could not stand her vast minutes of silence. But now she said in her flat, small voice the few things she could say — remarks about the music and the pleasantness of the rainy night outside. He smiled at her with bored tolerance, plainly not listening to what she said. Then he said, as if to compensate for his inattention, ‘You from England?’

She said, ‘Yes. But I’m not English. I’m South African, but I’ve spent the last five years in England. I’ve only been back in South Africa since December. I used to know Derek when I was a little girl,’ she added, feeling that she was obliged to explain her presence in what she suddenly felt was a group conscious of some distinction or privilege.

‘England,’ he said, smiling down past her rather than at her. ‘Never been so happy anywhere.’

‘London?’ she said.

He nodded. ‘Oh, I agree,’ she said. ‘I feel the same about it.’

‘No, you don’t, McCoy,’ he said very slowly, smiling at her now. ‘No, you don’t.’

She was silenced at what instantly seemed her temerity.

He said, as they danced around again, ‘The way you speak. Really English. Whites in SA can’t speak that way.’

For a moment, one of the old, blank, impassively pretty-faced silences threatened to settle upon her, but the second glass of arak punch broke through it, and, almost animated, she answered lightly, ‘Oh, I find I’m like a parrot. I pick up the accent of the people among whom I live in a matter of hours.’

He threw back his head and laughed, showing the gaps in his teeth. ‘How will you speak tomorrow, McCoy?’ he said, holding her back from him and shaking with laughter, his eyes swimming. ‘Oh, how will you speak tomorrow, I wonder?’

She said, immensely daring, though it came out in her usual small, unassertive feminine voice, a voice gently toned for the utterance of banal pleasantries, ‘Like you.’

‘Let’s have a drink,’ he said, as if he had known her a long time — as if she were someone like Jessica Malherbe. And he took her back to the bar, leading her by the hand; she walked with her hand loosely swinging in his, just as she had done with young men at country-club dances. ‘I promised to have one with Rajati,’ he was saying. ‘Where has he got to?’

‘Is that the one I met?’ said the girl. ‘The one with the high, bald head?’

‘An Indian?’ he said. ‘No, you mean Mahinder. This one’s his cousin, Jessica Malherbe’s husband.’

‘She’s married to an Indian?’ The girl stopped dead in the middle of the dancers. ‘Is she?’ The idea went through her like a thrill. She felt startled as if by a sudden piece of good news about someone who was important to her. Jessica Malherbe — the name, the idea — seemed to have been circling about her life since before she left England. Even there, she had read about her in the papers: the daughter of a humble Afrikaner farmer, who had disowned her in the name of a stern Calvinist God for her anti-nationalism and her radical views; a girl from a back-veld farm — such a farm as Joyce herself could remember seeing from a car window as a child — who had worked in a factory and educated herself and been sent by her trade union to study labour problems all over the world; a girl who negotiated with ministers of state; who, Joyce had learned that evening, had gone to prison for her principles. Jessica Malherbe, who was almost the first person the girl had met when she came in to the party this evening, and who turned out to look like any well-groomed English woman you might see in a London restaurant, wearing a pearl necklace and smelling of expensive perfume. An Indian! It was the final gesture. Magnificent. A world toppled with it — Jessica Malherbe’s father’s world. An Indian!