Nadine Gordimer - Life Times - Stories 1952-2007

The lake.

He was more than a hundred miles from the capital. With a sense of astonishment at finding himself, he focused his existence, here and now, on the empty road, at a point on the map. He turned down to petrol, a bath, a drink — that much, at least, so assured that he did not have to think of it. But the lake was farther away than the casualness of the sign would indicate. The pass led the car whining and grinding in low gear round silent hillsides of white rock and wild fig trees leaning out into ravines. This way would be impassable in the rains; great stones scraped the oil sump as he disappeared into steep stream-beds, dry, the sand wrung into hanks where torrents had passed. He met no one, saw no hut. When he coughed, alone in the car he fancied this noise of his thrown back from the stony face of hill to hill like the bark of a solitary baboon. The sun went down. He thought: there was only one good moment the whole day; when I drank that beer on the veranda, and the children came up the steps to watch me and hear the music.

An old European image was lodged in his tiredness: the mirage, if the road ever ended, of some sort of southern resort village, coloured umbrellas, a street of white hotels beside water and boats. As the road unravelled from the pass into open bush, there came that moment when, if he had had a companion, they would have stopped talking. Two, three miles; the car rolled in past the ruins of an arcaded building to the barking of dogs, the horizontal streak of water behind the bush, outhouses and water tanks, a raw new house. A young man in bathing trunks with his back to the car stood on the portico steps, pushing a flipper off one foot with the toes of the other. As he hopped for balance he looked round. Blond wet curls licked the small head on the tall body, vividly empty blue eyes were the eyes of some nocturnal animal dragged out in daylight.

‘Can you tell me where there’s a hotel?’

Staring, on one leg: ‘Yes, this’s the hotel.’

Carl Church said, foolishly pleasant, ‘There’s no sign, you see.’

‘Well, place’s being redone.’ He came, propping the flippers against the wall, walking on the outside edges of his feet over the remains of builders’ rubble. ‘Want any help with that?’ But Carl Church had only his typewriter and the one suitcase. They struggled indoors together, the young man carrying flippers, two spearguns and goggles.

‘Get anything?’

‘Never came near the big ones.’ His curls sprang and drops flowed from them. He dropped the goggles, then a wet gritty flipper knocked against Carl Church. ‘Hell, I’m sorry.’ He dumped his tackle on a desk in the passage, looked at Carl Church’s case and portable, put gangling hands upon little hips and took a great breath: ‘Where those boys are when you want one of them — that’s the problem.’

‘Look, I haven’t booked,’ said Church. ‘I suppose you’ve got a room?’

‘What’s today?’ Even his eyelashes were wet. The skin on the narrow cheekbones whitened as if over knuckles.

‘Thursday.’

A great question was solved triumphantly, grimly. ‘If it’d been Saturday, now — the weekends, I mean, not a chance.’

‘I think I met someone on the plane—’

‘Go on—’ The face cocked in attention.

‘She runs a hotel here. .?’

‘Madam in person. D’you see who met her? My stepfather?’ But Carl Church had not seen the airport blonde once they were through customs. ‘That’s Lady Jane all right. Of course she hasn’t turned up here yet. So she’s arrived, eh? Well thanks for the warning. Just a sec, you’ve got to sign,’ and he pulled over a leather register, yelling, ‘Zelide, where’ve you disappeared to—’ as a girl with a bikini cutting into heavy red thighs appeared and said in the cosy, long-suffering voice of an English provincial, ‘You’re making it all wet, Dick — oh give here.’

They murmured in telegraphic intimacy. ‘What about number 16?’

‘I thought a chalet.’

‘Well, I dunno, it’s your job, my girl—’

She gave a parenthetic yell and a barefoot African came from the back somewhere to shoulder the luggage. The young man was dismantling his speargun, damp backside hitched up on the reception desk. The girl moved his paraphernalia patiently aside. ‘W’d you like some tea in your room, sir?’

‘Guess who was on the plane with him. Lady Godiva. So we’d better brace ourselves.’

‘Dickie! Is she really?’

‘In person.’

The girl led Carl Church out over a terrace into a garden where rondavels and cottages were dispersed. It was rapidly getting dark; only the lake shone. She had a shirt knotted under her breasts over the bikini, and when she shook her shaggy brown hair — turning on the light in an ugly little outhouse that smelled of cement — a round, boiled face smiled at him. ‘These chalets are brand new. We might have to move you Saturday, but jist as well enjoy yourself in the meantime.’

‘I’ll be leaving in the morning.’

Her cheeks were so sunburned they looked as if they would bleed when she smiled. ‘Oh what a shame. Aren’t you even going to have a go at spear-fishing?’

‘Well, no; I haven’t brought any equipment or anything.’

He might have been a child who had no bucket and spade; ‘Oh not to worry, Dick’s got all the gear. You come out with us in the morning, after breakfast — OK?’

‘Fine,’ he said, knowing he would be gone.

The sheets of one bed witnessed the love-making of previous occupants; they had not used the other. Carl Church stumbled around in the dark looking for the ablution block — across a yard, but the light switch did not work in the bathroom. He was about to trudge over to the main house to ask for a lamp when he was arrested by the lake, as by the white of an eye in a face hidden by darkness. At least there was a towel. He took it and went down in his pants, feeling his way through shrubs, rough grass, over turned-up earth, touched by warm breaths of scent, startled by squawks from lumps that resolved into fowls, to the lake. It held still a skin of light from the day that had flown upward. He entered it slowly; it seemed to drink him in, ankles, knees, thighs, sex, waist, breast. It was cool as the inside of a mouth. Suddenly hundreds of tiny fish leapt out all round him, bright new tin in the warm, dark, heavy air.

‘. . I enclose a lock of his hair; I had his papers sealed up soon after his decease and will endeavour to transmit them all to you exactly as he left them.’

Carl Church endured the mosquitoes and the night heat only by clinging to the knowledge, through his tattered sleep, that soon it would be morning and he would be gone. But in the morning there was the lake. He got up at five to pee. He saw now how the lake stretched to the horizon from the open arms of the bay. Two bush-woolly islands glided on its surface; it was the colour of pearls. He opened his stale mouth wide and drew in a full breath, half sigh, half gasp. Again he went down to the water and, without bothering whether there was anybody about, took off his pyjama shorts and swam. Cool. Impersonally cool, at this time. The laved mosquito bites stung pleasurably. When he looked down upon the water while in it, it was no longer nacre, but pellucid, a pale and tender green. His feet were gleaming tendrils. A squat spotted fish hung near his legs, mouthing. He didn’t move, either. Then he did what he had done when he was seven or eight years old, he made a cage of his hands and pounced — but the element reduced him to slow motion, everything, fish, legs, glassy solidity, wriggled and flowed away and slowly undulated into place again. The fish returned. On a dead tree behind bird-splattered rocks ellipsed by the water at this end of the beach, a fish-eagle lifted its head between hunched white shoulders and cried out; a long whistling answer came across the lake as another flew in. He swam around the rocks through schools of fingerlings as close as gnats, and hauled himself up within ten feet of the eagles. They carried the remoteness of the upper air with them in the long-sighted gaze of their hooded eyes; nothing could approach its vantage; he did not exist for them, while the gaze took in the expanse of the lake and the smallest indication of life rising to its surface. He came back to the beach and walked with a towel round his middle as far as a baobab tree where a black man with an ivory bangle on either wrist was mending nets, but then he noticed a blue bubble on the verge — it was an infant afloat on some plastic beast, its mother in attendance — and turned away, up to the hotel.