Nadine Gordimer - Life Times - Stories 1952-2007

From the assertion of this silent group the girl became aware of the whole room ( their room), of its furnishings: the hideous ‘suite’ upholstered in imitation velvet with a stamped design of triangles and sickles; the yellow varnished table with the pink silk mat and the brass vase of paper roses; the easy chairs with circular apertures in the arms where coloured glass ashtrays were balanced; the crudely coloured photographs; the barbola vase; the green ruched-silk cushions; the standard lamp with more platforms for more coloured glass ashtrays; the gilded plaster dog that stood at the door. An Indian went over and said something to the old woman with the proprietary, apologetic, irritated air of a son who wishes his mother would keep out of the way; as he turned his head, the girl saw something familiar in the angle and recognised him as the man the back of whose neck she had seen when she was trying to identify Jessica Malherbe’s husband at the party. Now he came over to her, a squat, pleasant man, with a great deal of that shiny black Indian hair making his head look too big for his body. He said, ‘My congratulations. My wife, Jessica, tells me you have insisted on identifying yourself with today’s defiance. Well, how do you feel about it?’

She smiled at him with great difficulty; she really did not know why it was so difficult. She said, ‘I’m sorry. We didn’t meet that night. Just your cousin — I believe it is? — Mr Singh.’ He was such a remarkably commonplace-looking Indian, Jessica Malherbe’s husband, but Jessica Malherbe’s husband after all — the man with the roll of fat at the back of his neck.

She said, ‘You don’t resemble Mr Singh in the least,’ feeling that it was herself she offended by the obvious thought behind the comparison, and not this fat, amiable middle-aged man, who needed only to be in his shirtsleeves to look like any well-to-do Indian merchant, or in a grubby white coat, and unshaven, to look like a fruit-and-vegetable hawker. He sat down beside her (she could see the head of the old woman just beyond his ear), and as he began to talk to her in his Cambridge-modulated voice, she began to notice something that she had not noticed before. It was curious, because surely it must have been there all the time; then again it might not have been — it might have been released by some movement of the group of the grandmother, the slender boy and the child, perhaps from their clothes — but quite suddenly she began to be aware of the odour of incense. Sweet and dry and smoky, like the odour of burning leaves — she began to smell it. Then she thought, it must be in the furniture, the curtains; the old woman burns it and it permeates the house and all the gewgaws from Birmingham, and Denver, Colorado, and American-occupied Japan. Then it did not remind her of burning leaves any longer. It was incense, strong and sweet. The smell of death and flowers. She remembered it with such immediacy that it came back literally, absolutely, the way a memory of words or vision never can.

‘Are you all right, Miss McCoy?’ said the kindly Indian, interrupting himself because he saw that she was not listening and that her pretty, pale, impassive face was so white and withdrawn that she looked as if she might faint.

She stood up with a start that was like an inarticulate apology and went quickly from the room. She ran down the passage and opened a door and closed it behind her, but the odour was there, too, stronger than ever, in somebody’s bedroom, where a big double bed had an orange silk cover. She leant with her back against the door, breathing it in and trembling with fear and with the terrible desire to be safe: to be safe from one of the kindly women who would come, any moment now, to see what was wrong; to be safe from the gathering up of her own nerve to face the journey in the car to the location, and the faces of her companions, who were not afraid, and the walk up the location street.

The very conventions of the life which, she felt, had insulated her in softness against the sharp, joyful brush of real life in action came up to save her now. If she was afraid, she was also polite. She had been polite so long that the colourless formula of good manners, which had stifled so much spontaneity in her, could also serve to stifle fear.

It would be so terribly rude simply to run away out of the house, and go home, now.

That was the thought that saved her — the code of a well-brought-up child at a party — and it came to her again and again, slowing down her thudding heart, uncurling her clenched hands. It would be terribly rude to run away now . She knew with distress, somewhere at the back of her mind, that this was the wrong reason for staying, but it worked. Her manners had been with her longer and were stronger than her fear. Slowly the room ceased to sing so loudly about her, the bedspread stopped dancing up and down before her eyes, and she went slowly over to the mirror in the door of the wardrobe and straightened the belt of her dress, not meeting her own eyes. Then she opened the door and went down the passage and back again into the room where the others were gathered, and sat down in the chair she had left. It was only then that she noticed that the others were standing — had risen, ready to go.

‘What about your jacket, my dear. Would you like to leave it?’ the pretty brunette said, noticing her.

Jessica Malherbe was on her way to the door. She smiled at Joyce and said, ‘I’d leave it, if I were you.’

‘Yes, I think so, thank you.’ She heard her own voice as if it were someone else’s.

Outside, there was the mild confusion of deciding who should go with whom and in which car. The girl found herself in the back of the car in which Jessica Malherbe sat beside the driver. The slim, mannish woman got in; little Shabalala got in but was summoned to another car by an urgently waving hand. He got out again, and then came back and jumped in just as they were off. He was the only one who seemed excited. He sat forward, with his hands on his knees. Smiling widely at the girl, he said, ‘Now we really are taking you for a ride, Miss McCoy.’

The cars drove through Fordsburg and skirted the city. Then they went out on one of the main roads that connect the gold-mining towns of the Witwatersrand with each other and with Johannesburg. They passed mine dumps, pale grey and yellow; clusters of neat, ugly houses, provided for white mineworkers; patches of veld, where the rain of the night before glittered thinly in low places; a brickfield; a foundry; a little poultry farm. And then they turned in to a muddy road, along which they followed a native bus that swayed under its load of passengers, exhaust pipe sputtering black smoke, canvas flaps over the windows wildly agitated. The bus thundered ahead through the location gates, but the three cars stopped outside. Jessica Malherbe got out first, and stood, pushing back the cuticles of the nails of her left hand as she talked in a businesslike fashion to Roy Wilson. ‘Of course, don’t give the statement to the papers unless they ask for it. It would be more interesting to see their version first, and come along with our own afterwards. But they may ask—’

‘There’s a press car,’ Shabalala said, hurrying up. ‘There.’

‘Looks like Brand, from the Post .’

‘Can’t be Dick Brand; he’s transferred to Bloemfontein,’ said the tall, mannish woman.

‘Come here, Miss McCoy, you’re the baby,’ said Shabalala, straightening his tie and twitching his shoulders, in case there was going to be a photograph. Obediently, the girl moved to the front.

But the press photographer waved his flashbulb in protest. ‘No, I want you walking.’

‘Well, you better get us before we enter the gates or you’ll find yourself arrested, too,’ said Jessica Malherbe, unconcerned. ‘Look at that,’ she added to the mannish woman, lifting her foot to show the heel of her white shoe, muddy already.