Nadine Gordimer - Life Times - Stories 1952-2007

She got up slowly and turned, leaning her rump against the ridge of the desk behind her, frowning, unable to speak.

‘You’ve got something, here,’ he said.

‘But I always wanted to go. The summer — it’s so hot. We always said, one day, when the children—’ All her appeals to herself failed. She said, ‘But a woman — it’s silly — how can I carry on?’

He watched her with interest, but would not save her with an interruption. He smoked and held his half-smoked cigarette between thumb and first finger, turned inwards towards his palm. He laughed. ‘You are carrying on,’ he said. He made a pantomime gesture of magnificence, raising his eyebrows, waggling his head slowly and pulling down the corners of his mouth. ‘All going strong. The whole caboodle. What you got to worry about?’

She found herself laughing, the way children laugh when they are teased out of tears.

In the next few weeks, a curious kind of pale happiness came over her. It was the happiness of relief from indecision, the happiness of confidence. She did not have to wonder if she could manage — she had been managing all the time! The confidence brought out something that had been in her all her life, dormant; she was capable, even a good businesswoman. She began to take a firm hand with the children, with the hotel servants, with the assistants at the stores. She even wrote a letter to the liquor wholesaler, demanding, on a certain brand of gin, the same special discount that her late husband had squeezed out of him.

When the lawyer friend from Rhodesia, who was in charge of Arthur’s estate, came up to consult with her, she discussed with him the possibility of offering Johnny — not a partnership, no — but some sort of share, perhaps a fourth share in the hotel and the stores.

‘The only thing is, will he stay?’ she said.

‘Why shouldn’t he stay?’ said the lawyer, indicating the sound opportunity that was going to be offered to the man.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I always used to say to Arthur, I had the feeling he was the sort of man who would walk off, one day, same as he came.’

In view of the steady work he had done — ‘Oh, I must be fair,’ Rita hastened to agree with the lawyer. ‘He has worked terribly hard, he’s been wonderful, since it happened’ — the lawyer saw no cause for concern on this point; in any case the contract, when he drew it up, would be a watertight one and would protect her interests against any such contingency.

The lawyer went home to Rhodesia to draw up the contract that was never needed. In three months, she was married to Johnny. By the time the summer rainy season came round, and he was the one who was bringing the supplies across the river in the boat, this year, he was her husband and Arthur’s initials were painted out and his were painted in, in their place, over the door.

To the meteorological officer, the veterinary officer and the postmaster — those permanent residents of the hotel who had known them both for years — and the people of the village, the marriage seemed quite sensible, really; a matter of convenience — though, of course, also rather funny — there were a number of jokes about it current in the village for a time. To her — well, it was not until after the marriage was an accomplished fact that she began to try to understand what it was, and what had brought it about.

At the end of that first winter after Arthur’s death, Johnny had had an affair with one of the women in a safari party that was on its way home to the south. Rita knew about it, because, as usual, the housekeeper had told her. But on the day the party left (Rita knew which woman it was, a woman not young, but with a well-dieted and massaged slimness) Johnny came into the office after the two jeeps had left and plonked himself down in the old cane chair near the door. Rita turned her head at the creak of the cane, to ask him if he knew whether the cook had decided, for the lunch menu, on a substitute for the chops that had gone off, and his eyes, that had been closed in one of those moments of sleep that fall like a shutter on lively, enervated wakefulness, flew open. He yawned and grinned, and his one eye twitched, as if it winked at her, of itself. ‘Boy, that’s that,’ he said.

It was the first time, in the seven years he had been at the hotel, that he had ever, even obliquely, made any sort of comment on the existence of his private life or the state of his feelings. She blushed, like a wave of illness. He must have seen the red coming up over the skin of her neck and her ears and her face. But, stonily, he didn’t mind her embarrassment or feel any of his own. And so, suddenly, there was intimacy; it existed between them as if it had always been there, taken for granted. They were alone together. They had an existence together apart from the hotel and the stores, and the making of decisions about practical matters. He wouldn’t have commented to her on his affair with a woman while Arthur was alive and she herself was a married woman. But now, well — it was in his careless face — she was simply a grown-up person, like any other, and she knew that babies weren’t found under gooseberry bushes.

After that, whenever he came into the office, they were alone together. She felt him when she sat at her desk with her back to him; her arms tingled into gooseflesh and she seemed to feel a mocking eye (not his, she knew he was not looking at her) on a point exactly in the middle of the back of her neck. She did not know whether she had looked at him or not, before, but now she was aware of the effort of not looking at him, while he ate at table with her, or served in the bar, or simply ran, very lithe, across the sandy road.

And she began — it was an uncomfortable, shameful thing to her, something like the feeling she had had when she was adolescent — to be conscious of her big breasts. She would fold her arms across them when she stood talking to him. She hated them jutting from her underarm nearly to her waist, filling her dress, and, underneath, the hidden nipples that were brown as an old bitch’s teats since the children were born. She wanted to hide her legs, too — so thick and strong, the solid-fleshed, mottled calves with their bristly blonde hairs, and the heavy bone of the ankles marked with bruises where, bare-legged, she constantly bumped them against her desk.

She said to him one morning, after a dance night at the hotel — it simply came out of her mouth — ‘That Mrs Burns seems to have taken a fancy to you.’

He gave a long, curly-mouthed yawn. He was looking into space, absent; and then he came to himself, briskly; and he smiled slowly, right at her. ‘Uh, that. Does she?’

She began to feel terribly nervous. ‘I mean I–I — thought she had her eye on you. The way she was laughing when she danced with you.’ She laughed, jeering a little.

‘She’s a silly cow, all right,’ he said. And as he went out of the bar, where they were checking the empties together, he put his hand experimentally on her neck, and tweaked her earlobe. It was an ambiguous caress; she did not know whether he was amused by her or if — he meant it, as she put it to herself.

He did not sleep with her until they were married; but, of course, they were married soon. He moved into the big bedroom with her, then, but he kept on his old, dingy rondavel outside the main building, for his clothes and his fishing tackle and the odds and ends of motorcar accessories he kept lying about, and he usually took his siesta in there, in the summer. She lay on her bed alone in the afternoon dark behind the curtains that glowed red with the light and heat that beat upon them from outside, and she looked at his empty bed. She would stare at that place where he lay, where he actually slept, there in the room with her, not a foot away, every night. She had for him a hundred small feelings more tender than any she had ever known, and yet included in them was what she had felt at other rare moments in her life: when she had seen a bird, winged by a shot, fall out of flight formation over the river; when she had first seen one of her own children, ugly, and crying at being born. Sometimes, at the beginning, she would go over in her mind the times when he had made love to her; even at her desk, with the big ledgers open in front of her, and the sound of one of the boys rubbing the veranda floor outside, her mind would let fall the figures she was collating and the dreamy recapitulation of a night would move in. He did not make love to her very often, of course — not after the first few weeks. (He would always pinch her, or feel her arm, when he thought of it, though.) Weeks went by and it was only on dance nights, when usually she went to their room long before him, that he would come in, moving lightly, breathing whisky in the dark, and come over to her as if by appointment. Often she heard him sigh as he came in. He always went through the business of love-making in silence; but to her, in whom a thousand piercing cries were deafening without a sound, it was accepted as part of the extraordinary clamour of her own silence.