Nadine Gordimer - Life Times - Stories 1952-2007

‘This’s the second morning I’ve sat here cooling my heels.’ Her bracelets shook, dramatising exasperation. ‘The second day running. I only hope to God I’m on this time.’

He said, ‘Where’re you trying to get to?’ But of course he knew before she answered. He waited a moment or two, and then strolled up to the weigh-bay. ‘Still top of the list, I hope?’ — in an undertone.

The airline man, standing beside the black beauty, answered brusquely, ‘There’s just the one lady before you, sir.’

He began to argue.

‘We can’t help it, sir. It’s a compassionate, came through from the town office.’

He went back and sat down.

She said, ‘You’re going on the same plane?’

‘Yes.’ Not looking her way, the bitch, he watched with hope as boarding time approached and there were no new arrivals at the weigh-bay. She arranged and rearranged her complicated hand luggage; rivalry made them aware of one another. Two minutes to boarding time, the airline girl didn’t want him to catch her eye, but he went over to her just the same. She said, cheerfully relieved of responsibility, ‘Doesn’t look as if anyone’s going to get a seat. Everybody’s turned up. We’re just checking.’

He and the blonde lady were left behind. Hostility vanished as the others filed off down the Red Route. They burst into talk at once, grumbling about the airline organisation.

‘Imagine, they’ve been expecting me for days.’ She was defiantly gay.

‘Dragging out here for nothing — I was assured I’d get a seat, no trouble at all.’

‘Well, that’s how people are these days — my God, if I ran my hotel like that. Simply relax, what else can you do? Thank heaven I’ve got a firm booking for tomorrow.’

A seat on tomorrow’s plane, eh; he slid out of the conversation and went to look for the reservations counter. There was no need for strategy, after all; he got a firm booking, too. In the bus back to town, she patted the seat beside her. There were two kinds of fellow travellers, those who asked questions and those who talked about themselves. She took the bit of a long cigarette holder between her teeth and quoted her late husband, told how her daughter, ‘a real little madam’, at boarding school, got on like a house on fire with her new husband, said how life was what you put into it, as she always reminded her son; people asked how could one stand it, up there, miles away from everything, on the lake, but she painted, she was interested in interior decorating, she’d run the place ten years by herself, took some doing for a woman.

‘On the lake?’

‘Gough’s Bay Hotel.’ He saw from the stare of the blue eyes that it was famous — he should have known.

‘Tell me, whereabout are the graves, the graves of Livingstone’s companions?’

The eyes continued to stare at him, a corner of the red mouth drew in proprietorially, carelessly unimpressed. ‘My graves. On my property. Two minutes from the hotel.’

He murmured surprise. ‘I’d somehow imagined they were much further north.’

‘And there’s no risk of bilharzia whatever ,’ she added, apparently dispelling a rumour. ‘You can water-ski, goggle-fish — people have a marvellous time.’

‘Well, I may turn up someday.’

‘My dear, I’ve never let people down in my life. We’d find a bed somewhere.’

He saw her at once, in another backless flowered dress, when he entered the departure lounge next morning. ‘Here we go again’ — distending her nostrils in mock resignation, turning down the red lips. He gave her his small-change smile and took care to lag behind when the passengers went across the runway. He sat in the tail of the plane, and opened the copy of Livingstone’s last journals, bought that morning. ‘Our sympathies are drawn out towards our humble hardy companions by a community of interests, and, it may be, of perils, which make us all friends.’ The book rested on his thighs and he slept through the hour-and-a-half ’s journey. Livingstone had walked it, taking ten months and recording his position by the stars. This could be the lead for his story, he thought: waking up to the recognition of the habits of his mind like the same old face in the shaving mirror.

The capital of this country was hardly distinguishable from the one he had left. The new national bank with air-conditioning and rubber plants changed the perspective of the row of Indian stores. Behind the main street a native market stank of dried fish. He hired a car, borrowed a map from the hotel barman and set out for ‘the interior’ next day, distrusting — from long experience — both car and map. He had meant merely to look up a few places and easy references in the journals, but had begun to read and gone on half the night.

A wife ran away, I asked how many he had; he told me twenty in all: I then thought he had nineteen too many. He answered with the usual reason, ‘But who would cook for strangers if I had but one?’. . It is with sorrow that I have to convey the sad intelligence that your brother died yesterday morning about ten o’clock. . no remedy seemed to have much effect. On the 20th he was seriously ill but took soup several times, and drank claret and water with relish. . A lion roars mightily. The fish-hawk utters his weird voice in the morning, as if he lifted up to a friend at a great distance, in a sort of falsetto key. . The men engaged refuse to go to Matipa’s, they have no honour. . Public punishment to Chirango for stealing beads, fifteen cuts; diminished his load to 40 lbs. . In four hours we came within sight of the lake, and saw plenty of elephants and other game.

How enjoyable it would have been to read the journals six thousand miles away, in autumn, at home, in London. As usual, once off the circuit that linked the capital with the two or three other small towns that existed, there were crossroads without signposts, and place names that turned out to be one general store, an African bar and a hand-operated petrol pump, unattended. He was not fool enough to forget to carry petrol, and he was good at knocking up the bar owners (asleep during the day). As if the opening of the beer refrigerator and the record player were inseparably linked — as a concept of hospitality if not mechanically — African jazz jog-trotted, clacked and drummed forth while he drank on a dirty veranda. Children dusty as chickens gathered. As he drove off the music stopped in mid-record.

By early afternoon he was lost. The map, sure enough, failed to indicate that the fly-speck named as Moambe was New Moambe, a completely different place in an entirely different direction from that of Old Moambe, where Livingstone had had a camp, and had talked with chiefs whose descendants were active in the present-day politics of their country (another lead). Before setting out, Carl Church had decided that all he was prepared to do was take a car, go to Moambe, take no more than two days over it, and write a piece using the journey as a peg for what he did know something about — this country’s attempt to achieve a form of African socialism. That’s what the paper would get, all they would get, except the expense account for the flight, car and beers. (The beers were jotted down as ‘Lunch, Sundries, Gratuities, £3. 10.’ No reason, from Bartram’s perspective, why there shouldn’t be a Livingstone Hilton in His Steps.) But when he found he had missed Moambe and past three in the afternoon was headed in the wrong direction, he turned the car savagely in the road and made for what he hoped would turn out to be the capital. All they would get would be the expense account. He stopped and asked the way of anyone he met, and no one spoke English. People smiled and instructed the foreigner volubly, with many gestures. He had the humiliation of finding himself twice back at the same crossroads where the same old man sat calmly with women who carried dried fish stiff as Chinese preserved ducks. He took another road, any road, and after a mile or two of hesitancy and obstinacy — turn back or go on? — thought he saw a signpost ahead. This time it was not a dead tree. A sagging wooden finger drooped down a turn-off: GOUGH’S BAY LAZITI PASS.