Nadine Gordimer - Life Times - Stories 1952-2007

As the months went by, he made love to her less and less often, and she waited for him. In tremendous shyness and secrecy, she was always waiting for him. And, oddly, when he did come to her again, next day she would feel ashamed. She began to go over and over things that had happened in the past; it was as if the ability to recreate in her mind a night’s love-making had given her a power of imagination she had never had before, and she would examine in recreation, detail by detail, scenes and conversations that were long over. She began always to have the sense of searching for something; searching slowly and carefully. That day at the cricket. A hundred times, she brought up for examination the way she had turned to look at Johnny, when the voice called her name; the way he had laughed, and said, ‘Please yourself.’ The silence between them in the car, driving back to the territory. The dance nights, long before that, when she had sat beside Arthur and watched Johnny dance. The times she had spoken distrustfully of him to Arthur. It began to seem to her that there was something of conspiracy about all these scenes. Guilt came slowly through them, a stain from deep down. She was beset by the impossibility of knowing — and then again she believed without a doubt — and then, once more, she absolved herself — was there always something between her and Johnny? Was it there, waiting, a gleaming eye in the dark, long before Arthur was drowned? All she could do was go over and over every shred of evidence of the past, again and again, reading now yes into it, now no.

She began to think about Arthur’s drowning; she felt, crazily, that she and Johnny knew Arthur was drowning. They sat in the Wanderers’ stand while they knew Arthur was drowning. While there, over there, right in front of the hotel, where she was looking, through the office window (not having to get up from the desk, simply turning her head), the boat with the eight sewing machines and the black-japanned double bed was coming over the water. . The boat was turning over. . The arms of the men (who was it who had taken care not to spare her that detail?) came through the iron bedhead, it took the men down with it — Arthur with his mouth suddenly stopped for ever with water.

She did not say one word to Johnny about all this. She would not have known how to put it into words, even to herself. It had no existence outside the terrifying freedom of her own mind, that she had stumbled down into by mistake, and that dwarfed the real world about her. Yet she changed, outwardly, protectively, to hide what only she knew was there — the shameful joy of loving. It was then that she started to talk about Johnny as ‘he’ and ‘him’, never referring to him by name, and to speak of him in the humorous, half-critical, half-nagging way of the wife who takes her husband for granted, no illusions and no nonsense about it. ‘Have you seen my spouse around?’ she would ask, or ‘Where’s that husband of mine?’

On dance nights, in the winter, he still astonished guests by his sudden emergence from taciturnity into rock’n’ roll. The housekeeper no longer told any tales of his brief ventures into the beds where other men’s women slept, and so, of course, Rita presumed there weren’t any. For herself, she learnt to live with her guilt of loving, like some vague, chronic disorder. It was no good wrestling with it; she had come to understand that — for some reason she didn’t understand — the fact, the plain fact that she had never committed the slightest disloyalty to Arthur all through their marriage, provided no cure of truth. She and Johnny never quarrelled, and if the hotel and the businesses didn’t expand (Arthur was the one for making plans and money) at least they went on just as before. The summer heat, the winter cool, came and went again and again in the reassuring monotony that passes for security.

The torture of imagination died away in her almost entirely. She lost the power to create the past. Only the boat remained, sometimes rising up from her mind on the river through the commonplace of the day in the office, just as once her nights with Johnny had come between her and immediate reality.

One morning in the fourth winter of their marriage, they were sitting at table together in the hotel dining room, eating the leisurely and specially plentiful breakfast of a Sunday. The dining room was small and friendly; you could carry on a conversation from one table to the next. The meteorologist and the postmaster sat together at their table, a small one near the window, distinguished by the special sauce bottles and the bottles of vitamin pills and packet of crispbread that mark the table of the regular from that of the migrant guest in a hotel. The veterinary officer had gone off for a weekend’s shooting. There were two tables of migrants in the room; one had the heads of three gloomy lion-hunters bent together in low discussion over their coffee, the other held a jolly party who had come all the way from Cape Town, and the leaders of which were a couple who had been in the territory and stayed at the hotel twice or three times before. They had received a bundle of newspapers by post from the south the day before, and they were making them do in place of Sunday papers. Johnny was fond of the magazine sections of newspapers; he liked the memoirs of famous sportsmen or ex-spies that were always to be found in them, and he liked to do the crossword. He had borrowed the magazine section of a Johannesburg paper from one of the party, and had done the crossword while he ate his bacon and fried liver and eggs. Now, while he drank a second or third cup of coffee, he found a psychological quiz, and got out his pencil again.

‘He’s like a kid doing his homework,’ said Rita, sitting lazily in her chair, with her heavy legs apart and her shoulders rounded, smoking over her coffee. She spoke over her shoulder, to the people who had loaned the paper, and smiled and jerked her head in the direction of her husband.

‘Isn’t he busy this morning,’ one of the women agreed.

‘Hardly been able to eat a thing, he’s been so hard at it,’ said the man who had been at the hotel before. And, except for the lion-hunters, the whole dining room laughed.

‘Just a minute,’ Johnny said, lifting a finger but not looking up from his quiz. ‘Just a minute — I got a set of questions to answer here. You’re in this too, Rita. You got to answer, too, in this one.’

‘Not me. You know I’ve got no brains. You don’t get me doing one of those things on a Sunday morning.’

‘Doesn’t need brains,’ he said, biting off the end of his sentence like a piece of thread. ‘ “How good a husband are you?” — there you are — ’

‘As if he needs a quiz to tell him that,’ she said, at the Cape Town party, who at once began to laugh at the scepto-comical twist to her face. ‘I’ll answer that one, my boy.’ And again they all laughed.

‘Here’s yours,’ he said, feeling for his coffee cup behind the folded paper. ‘“How good a wife are you?” ’

‘Ah, that’s easy,’ she said, pretending to show off, ‘I’ll answer that one, too.’

‘You go ahead,’ he said, with a look to the others, chin back, mouth pursed down. ‘Here you are. “Do you buy your husband’s toilet accessories, or does he choose his own?” ’

‘Come again?’ she said. ‘What they mean, toilet accessories?’

‘His soap, and his razor and things,’ called a man from the other table. ‘Violet hair-oil to put on his hair!’

Johnny ran a hand through his upstanding curls and shrank down in his seat.

Even the postmaster, who was rather shy, twitched a smile.

‘No, but seriously,’ said Rita, through the laughter, ‘how can I choose a razor for a man? I ask you!’