Nadine Gordimer - Life Times - Stories 1952-2007

‘Don’t tell me,’ Johnny agreed, his pipe between his teeth.

In Johannesburg they had all said to one another, ‘It’ll hit her when she gets back.’ But although she had believed the fact of her husband’s death when she was away from the village, in the unreality of the city — once she saw and smelled the village again, once she stepped into the hotel, it all seemed nonsense. Nothing was changed. It was all there, wasn’t it? The wildebeest skins pegged out to tan, the old horns half buried in the sand, the plaster Johnny Walker on the counter in the bar; the river.

Two days later one of the store boys came over to the hotel with some cheques for her to sign, and, standing in the office doorway with his old hat in his hand, said to her in a hoarse low voice, as if he wanted no one, not even the dead, to overhear, ‘He was a good man. Missus, he was a very good man. Oh, missus.’

She cried. While she wrote her name on the cheques and silently handed them back to the elderly black man, it came: strong pity for Arthur, who had been alive, as she was, and was now dead. When she was alone again she sat on at the desk staring at the spikes of invoices and the rubber stamps and the scratched and ink-stained wood, and she wept in pity for the pain of that strong, weathered man, filling his lungs with water with every breath under the weight of the iron bedstead. She wept at the cruel fact of death; perhaps that was not quite what her relatives in Johannesburg had meant when they had said that it would hit her when she got home — but she wept, anyway.

Slowly, in short bursts of confidence that stopped abruptly or tailed off in embarrassment, people began to talk to her about the drowning. This one spared her this detail, another told her it and spared her something else; so it was that she had put together, out of what she had been told, that silent, unreal, orderly picture, scarcely supplemented at all by imagination, since she had very little, that she sometimes saw rise on the river and sink out of sight again.

The facts were simple and horrible. Arthur Cunningham had been doing what he had done dozens of times before; what everyone in the village had done time and again, whenever the river was flooded and the bridge was down. The bridge was either down or under water almost every year, at the height of the rainy season, and when this happened the only way to reach the village was by boat. That December day there was a pack of stuff to get across the river — all the food for the hotel and the store goods, which had come up north by truck. Arthur Cunningham was the sort of man who got things done himself; that was the only way to get them done. He went back and forth with the boys four times, that morning, and they were making some headway. ‘Come on, let’s see if we c’n git things going,’ he kept chivvying at the white assistants who were in charge of unloading the trucks, and were sweating with haste and the nervous exhaustion of working under his eye. ‘I dunno, honestly, I’ve got my boat, I’ve got my team of boys, and what’s happening? I’m waiting for you blokes. Don’t tickle that stuff, there, man! For Christ’s sake, get cracking. Get it on, get it on!’

The Africans took his manner — snarling, smiling, insulting in its assumption (true) that he could do everything his workers did, but in half the time and twice as well — better than the white men. They laughed and grumbled back at him, and groaned under his swearing and his taunts. When the boat was fully loaded for the fifth trip, he noticed the black-japanned double bed, in its component parts, but not assembled, propped against a crate. ‘What about that thing?’ he yelled. ‘Don’t keep leaving that behind for the next lot, you bloody fools. Get it on, get it on. That’s a new bed for the Chief’s new wife, that’s an important order.’ And he roared with laughter. He went up to a pimply little twenty-two-year-old clerk, whose thin hair, tangled with the rims of his glasses, expressed wild timidity. ‘You shouldn’t be too young to know how important a nice comfortable big bed is? You expect the old Chief to wait till tomorrow? How’d’you feel, if you were waiting for that beautiful bed for a beautiful new woman—’ And while the young man peered at him, startled, Arthur Cunningham roared with laughter again.

‘Mr Cunningham, the boat’s full,’ another white assistant called.

‘Never mind, full! Put it on, man. I’m sick of seeing that bed lying here. Put it on!’

‘I don’t know how you’ll get it over, it makes the whole load top-heavy.’

Arthur Cunningham walked up to his clerk. He was a man of middle height, with a chest and a belly, big, hard and resonant, like the body of a drum, and his thick hands and sandy-haired chest, that always showed in the open neck of his shirt, were blotched and wrinkled with resistance to and in tough protection against the sun. His face was red and he had even false teeth in a lipless mouth that was practical-looking rather than mean or unkind.

‘Come on, Harris,’ he said, as if he were taking charge of a child. ‘Come on now, and no damn nonsense. Take hold here.’ And he sent the man, tottering under the weight of the foot of the bed while he himself carried the head, down to the boat.

Rita had married him when she was twenty-three, and he was sixteen or seventeen years older than she was. He had looked almost exactly the same when she married him as he did the last time ever that she saw him, when he stood in the road with his hands on the sides of his belly and watched the car leave for Johannesburg. She was a virgin, she had never been in love, when she married him; he had met her on one of his trips down south, taken a fancy to her, and that was that. He always did whatever he liked and got whatever he wanted. Since she had never been made love to by a young man, she accepted his command of her in bed as the sum of love; his tastes in love-making, like everything else about him, were formed before she knew him, and he was as set in this way as he was in others. She never knew him, of course, because she had nothing of the deep need to possess his thoughts and plumb his feelings that comes of love.

He was as generous as his tongue was rough, which meant that his tongue took the edge off his generosity at least as often as his generosity took the sting out of his tongue. He had hunted and fished and traded all over Africa, and he had great contempt for travellers’ tales. When safari parties stayed at his hotel, he criticised their weapons (What sort of contraption do you call that? I’ve shot round about fifty lion in my lifetime, without any telescopic sights, I can tell you), their camping equipment (I don’t know what all this fuss is about water filters and what-not. I’ve drunk water that was so filthy I’ve had to lean over and draw it into my mouth through a bit of rag, and been none the worse for it), and their general helplessness. But he also found experienced native guides for these people, and lent them the things they had forgotten to buy down south. He was conscious of having made a number of enemies, thinly scattered in that sparsely populated territory, and was also conscious of his good standing, of the fact that everybody knew him, and of his ownership of the hotel, the two stores, and whatever power there was in the village.

His stepmother had been an enemy of his, in that far-off childhood that he had overcome long ago, but he had had no grudge against his young stepbrother, her son, who must have had his troubles, too, adopted into a house full of Cunninghams. Johnny’d been rolling around the world for ten years or so — America, Mexico, Australia — when he turned up in the territory one day, stony-broke and nowhere in particular to go. Arthur wasn’t hard on him, though he chaffed him a bit, of course, and after the boy’d been loafing around the river and hotel for a month, Arthur suggested that he might give a hand in one of the stores. Johnny took the hint in good part — ‘Got to stop being a bum sometime, I suppose,’ he said, and turned out to be a surprisingly good worker. Soon he was helping at the hotel, too — where, of course, he was living, anyway. And soon he was one of the family, doing whatever there was to be done.