Nadine Gordimer - Life Times - Stories 1952-2007

In an alien sophistication they found there was nothing real for them, so they made do with the situations that are traditionally laughable and are unreal for everyone — the strict dragon of a mother, the timid lover, the disdainful young girl. When a couple of stage lovers exited behind the screens that served for wings, someone remarked to his neighbour, very jocular: ‘And what do they do behind there!’ Quite a large portion of the hall heard it and laughed at this joke of their own.

‘Poor Oscar!’ whispered the young girl, behind her hand.

‘Knew it wouldn’t do,’ hissed the striped waistcoat.

From her position at the side of the stage the young girl kept seeing the round, shining, rapt face of an elderly schoolteacher. His head strained up towards the stage, and a wonderful, broad, entire smile never left his face. He was asleep. She watched him anxiously out of the corner of her eye, and saw that every now and then the movement of his neighbour, an unintentional jolt, would wake him up: then the smile would fall, he would taste his mouth with his tongue, and a tremble of weariness troubled his guilt. The smile would open out again: he was asleep.

After the first act, the others, the people from outside who hadn’t been asked, began to come into the hall. As if what had happened between the players and the audience inside had somehow become known, given itself away into the air, so that suddenly the others felt that they might as well be allowed in, too. They pushed past the laconic police-boys at the door, coming in in twos and threes, barefoot, bringing a child by the hand or a small hard bundle of a baby. They sat where they could, stolidly curious, and no one dared question their right of entry, now. The audience pretended not to see them. But they were, by very right of their insolence, more demanding and critical. During the second act, when the speeches were long, they talked and passed remarks amongst themselves; a baby was allowed to wail. The schoolteachers kept their eyes on the stage, laughed obediently, tittered appreciatively, clapped in unison.

There was something else in the hall, now; not only the actors and the audience groping for each other in the blind smile of the dark and the blind dazzle of the lights; there was something that lived, that continued uncaring, on its own. On a seat on the side the players could see someone in a cap who leaned forward, eating an orange. A fat girl hung with her arm round her friend, giggling into her ear. A foot in a pointed shoe waggled in the aisle; the people from outside sat irregular as they pleased; what was all the fuss about anyway? When something amused them, they laughed as long as they liked. The laughter of the schoolteachers died away: they knew that the players were being kept waiting.

But when the curtain jerked down on the last act, the whole hall met in a sweeping excitement of applause that seemed to feed itself and to shoot off fresh bursts as a rocket keeps showering again and again as its sparks die in the sky. Applause came from their hands like a song, each pair of palms taking strength and enthusiasm from the other. The players gasped, could not catch their breath: smiling, just managed to hold their heads above the applause. It filled the hall to the brim, then sank, sank. A young woman in a black velvet headscarf got up from the front row and came slowly up on to the stage, her hands clasped. She smiled faintly at the players, swallowed. Then her voice, the strange, high, minor-keyed voice of an African girl, went out across the hall.

‘Mr Mount and his company, ladies and gentlemen’ — she turned to the players — ‘we have tried to tell you what you have done here, for us tonight’ — she paused and looked at them all, with the pride of acceptance — ‘we’ve tried to show you, just now, with our hands and our voices what we think of this wonderful thing you have brought to us here in Athalville Location.’ Slowly, she swung back to the audience: a deep, growing chant of applause rose. ‘From the bottom of our hearts, we thank you, all of us here who have had the opportunity to see you, and we hope in our hearts you will come to us again many times . This play tonight not only made us see what people can do, even in their spare time after work, if they try ; it’s made us feel that perhaps we could try and occupy our leisure in such a way, and learn, ourselves, and also give other people pleasure — the way everyone in this whole hall tonight’ — her knee bent and arm outstretched, she passed her hand over the lifted heads — ‘everyone here has been made happy .’ A warm murmur was drawn from the audience; then complete silence. The girl took three strides to the centre of the stage. ‘I ask you,’ she cried out, and the players felt her voice like a shock, ‘is this perhaps the answer to our juvenile delinquency here in Athalville? If our young boys and girls’ — her hand pointed at a brown beardless face glazed with attention — ‘had something like this to do in the evenings, would so many of them be at the police station? Would we be afraid to walk out in the street? Would our mothers be crying over their children? — Or would Athalville be a better place, and the mothers and fathers full of pride? Isn’t this what we need?’

The amateurs were forgotten by themselves and each other, abandoned dolls, each was alone. No one exchanged a glance. And out in front stood the girl, her arm a sharp angle, her nostrils lifted. The splash of the footlights on her black cheek caught and made a sparkle out of a single tear.

Like the crash of a crumbling building, the wild shouts of the people fell upon the stage; as the curtain jerked across, the players recollected themselves, went slowly off.

The fat young man chuckled to himself in the back of the car. ‘God, what we didn’t do to that play!’ he laughed.

‘What’d you kiss me again for?’ cried the young woman in surprise. ‘ — I didn’t know what was happening. We never had a kiss there, before — and all of a sudden’ — she turned excitedly to the others — ‘he takes hold of me and kisses me! I didn’t know what was happening!’

‘They liked it,’ snorted the young man. ‘ One thing they understood anyway!’

‘Oh, I don’t know—’ said someone, and seemed about to speak.

But instead there was a falling away into silence.

The girl was plucking sullenly at the feathered hat, resting on her knee. ‘We cheated them; we shouldn’t have done it,’ she said.

‘But what could we do ?’ The young woman turned shrilly, her eyes open and hard, excitedly determined to get an answer: an answer somewhere, from someone.

But there was no answer.

‘We didn’t know what to do,’ said the fat young man uncertainly, forgetting to be funny now, the way he lost himself when he couldn’t remember his lines on the stage.

My wife and I are not real farmers — not even Lerice, really. We bought our place, ten miles out of Johannesburg on one of the main roads, to change something in ourselves, I suppose; you seem to rattle about so much within a marriage like ours. You long to hear nothing but a deep satisfying silence when you sound a marriage. The farm hasn’t managed that for us, of course, but it has done other things, unexpected, illogical. Lerice, who I thought would retire there in Chekhovian sadness for a month or two, and then leave the place to the servants while she tried yet again to get a part she wanted and become the actress she would like to be, has sunk into the business of running the farm with all the serious intensity with which she once imbued the shadows in a playwright’s mind. I should have given it up long ago if it had not been for her. Her hands, once small and plain and well kept — she was not the sort of actress who wears red paint and diamond rings — are hard as a dog’s pads.