Nadine Gordimer - Life Times - Stories 1952-2007

‘All they want to know is, do you or don’t you,’ said Johnny. ‘Come on, now.’

‘Well, if it’s a razor, of course I don’t,’ Rita said, appealing to the room.

‘Right! You don’t. “No.” ’ Johnny wrote.

‘Hey — wait a minute, what about the soap? I do buy the soap. I buy the soap for every man in this hotel! Don’t I get any credit for the soap—’

There were cries from the Cape Town table — ‘Yes, that’s not fair, Johnny, if she buys the soap.’

‘She buys the soap for the whole bang shoot of us.’

Johnny put down the paper. ‘Well, who’s she supposed to be a good wife to , anyway!’

All ten questions for the wife were gone through in this manner, with interruptions, suggestions and laughter from the dining room in general. And then Johnny called for quiet while he answered his ten. He was urged to read them out, but he said no, he could tick off his yesses and nos straight off; if he didn’t they’d all be sitting at breakfast until lunchtime. When he had done, he counted up his wife’s score and his own, and turned to another page to see the verdict.

‘Come on, let’s have it,’ called the man from the Cape Town table. ‘The suspense is horrible.’

Johnny was already skimming through the column. ‘You really want to hear it?’ he said. ‘Well, I’m warning you—’

‘Oh, get on with it,’ Rita said, with the possessive, irritated, yet placid air of a wife, scratching a drop of dried egg yolk off the print bosom of her dress.

‘Well, here goes,’ he said, in the tone of someone entering into the fun of the thing. ‘“There is clearly something gravely wrong with your marriage. You should see a doctor or better still, a psychiatrist”’ — he paused for effect, and the laugh — ‘“and seek help, as soon as possible!” ’

The man from Cape Town laughed till the tears ran into the creases at the corners of his eyes. Everyone else laughed and talked at once.

‘If that isn’t the limit!’

‘This psychology stuff!’

‘Have you ever—!’

‘Is there anything they don’t think of in the papers these days!’

‘There it is, my dear,’ said Johnny, folding the paper in mock solemnity, and pulling a funereal, yet careless face.

She laughed with him. She laughed looking down at her shaking body where the great cleft that ran between her breasts showed at the neck of her dress. She laughed and she heard, she alone heard, the catches and trips in her throat like the mad cries of some creature buried alive. The blood of a blush burned her whole body with agonising slowness. When the laughter had died down she got up and not looking at Johnny — for she knew how he looked, she knew that unembarrassed gaze — she said something appropriate and even funny, and with great skill went easily, comfortably sloppily, out of the dining room. She felt Johnny following behind her, as usual, but she did not fall back to have him keep up with her, and, as usual after breakfast, she heard him turn off, whistling, from the passage into the bar, where there was the aftermath of Saturday night to clear up.

She got to the office. At last she got to the office and sat down in her chair at the roll-top desk. The terrible blush of blood did not abate; it was as if something had burst inside her and was seeping up in a stain through all the layers of muscle and flesh and skin. She felt again, as she had before, a horrible awareness of her big breasts, her clumsy legs. She clenched her hand over the sharp point of a spike that held invoices and felt it press pain into her palm. Tears were burning hot on her face and her hands, the rolling lava of shame from that same source as the blush. And at last, Arthur! she called in a clenched, whimpering whisper, Arthur! grinding his name between her teeth, and she turned desperately to the water, to the middle of the river where the lilies were. She tried with all her being to conjure up once again out of the water something ; the ghost of comfort, of support. But that boat, silent and unbidden, that she had so often seen before, would not come again.

He came into his road camp that afternoon for the last time. It was neater than any house would ever be; the sand raked smooth in the clearing, the water drums under the tarpaulin, the flaps of his tent closed against the heat. Thirty yards away a black woman knelt, pounding mealies, and two or three children, grey with Kalahari dust, played with a skinny dog. Their shrillness was no more than a bird’s piping in the great spaces in which the camp was lost.

Inside his tent, something of the chill of the night before always remained, stale but cool, like the air of a church. There was his iron bed, with its clean pillowcase and big kaross. There was his table, his folding chair with the red canvas seat, and the chest in which his clothes were put away. Standing on the chest was the alarm clock that woke him at five every morning and the photograph of the seventeen-year-old girl from Francistown whom he was going to marry. They had been there a long time, the girl and the alarm clock; in the morning when he opened his eyes, in the afternoon when he came off the job. But now this was the last time. He was leaving for Francistown in the Roads Department ten-tonner, in the morning; when he came back, the next week, he would be married and he would have with him the girl, and the caravan which the department provided for married men. He had his eye on her as he sat down on the bed and took off his boots; the smiling girl was like one of those faces cut out of a magazine. He began to shed his working overalls, a rind of khaki stiff with dust that held his shape as he discarded it, and he called, easily and softly, ‘ Ou Piet, ek wag .’ But the bony black man with his eyebrows raised like a clown’s, in effort, and his bare feet shuffling under the weight, was already at the tent with a tin bath in which hot water made a twanging tune as it slopped from side to side.

When he had washed and put on a clean khaki shirt and a pair of worn grey trousers, and streaked back his hair with sweet-smelling pomade, he stepped out of his tent just as the lid of the horizon closed on the bloody eye of the sun. It was winter and the sun set shortly after five; the grey sand turned a fading pink, the low thorn scrub gave out spreading stains of lilac shadow that presently all ran together; then the surface of the desert showed pocked and pored, for a minute or two, like the surface of the moon through a telescope, while the sky remained light over the darkened earth and the clean crystal pebble of the evening star shone. The campfires — his own and the black men’s, over there — changed from near-invisible flickers of liquid colour to brilliant focuses of leaping tongues of light; it was dark. Every evening he sat like this through the short ceremony of the closing of the day, slowly filling his pipe, slowly easing his back round to the fire, yawning off the stiffness of his labour. Suddenly he gave a smothered giggle, to himself, of excitement. Her existence became real to him; he saw the face of the photograph, posed against a caravan door. He got up and began to pace about the camp, alert to promise. He kicked a log farther into the fire, he called an order to Piet, he walked up towards the tent and then changed his mind and strolled away again. In their own encampment at the edge of his, the road gang had taken up the exchange of laughing, talking, yelling and arguing that never failed them when their work was done. Black arms gestured under a thick foam of white soap, there was a gasp and splutter as a head broke the cold force of a bucketful of water, the gleaming bellies of iron cooking-pots were carried here and there in the talkative preparation of food. He did not understand much of what they were saying — he knew just enough Tswana to give them his orders, with help from Piet and one or two others who understood his own tongue, Afrikaans — but the sound of their voices belonged to this time of evening. One of the babies who always cried was keeping up a thin, ignored wail; the naked children were playing the chasing game that made the dog bark. He came back and sat down again at the fire, to finish his pipe.