Nadine Gordimer - Life Times - Stories 1952-2007

Then he saw the fish, deep down, twenty feet maybe, a yellowish nonchalant shape which seemed to pasture in a small forest of short dead reeds. He took a noble breath, dived with all the power and swiftness he could summon from his body, and shot. The miracle happened again. The nonchalant shape became a frenzied spot of light, reflecting the rays of the sun in a series of flashes through the pale blue water as it swivelled in agony round the spear. It was — this moment — the only miracle Church knew; no wonder Africans used to believe that the hunter’s magic worked when the arrow found the prey.

He swam up quickly, his eyes on the fish hooked at the end of the spear, feeling the tension of its weight while he was hauling it and the line between spear and gun straightened. Eight pounds, ten, perhaps. Even Dickie with his silver amulets and bracelets couldn’t do better. He reached the surface, hurriedly lifted the goggles to rid them of water, and dived again: the fish was still continuing its spiralling fight. He saw now that he had not transfixed it; only the point of the spear had penetrated the body. He began carefully to pull the line towards him; the spear was in his hand when, with a slow motion, the fish unhooked itself before his eyes.

In its desperate, thwarted leaps it had unscrewed the point and twirled loose. This had happened once before, in the Mediterranean, and since then Church had taken care to tighten the spearhead from time to time while fishing. Today he had forgotten. Disappointment swelled in him. Breathlessness threatened to burst him like a bubble. He had to surface, abandoning the gun in order to free both arms. The fish disappeared round a boulder with the point of the harpoon protruding from its open belly amid flimsy pinkish ribbons of entrails; the gun was floating at mid distance between the surface and the bed of the lake, anchored to the spear sunk in dead reeds.

Yet the splendour of the afternoon remained. He lay and smoked and drank beer brought by a waiter who roamed the sand, flicking a napkin. Church had forgotten what had gone wrong, to bring him to this destination. He was here ; as he was not often fully present in the places and situations in which he found himself. It was some sort of answer to the emptiness he had felt on the bed. Was this how the first travellers had borne it, each day detached from the last and the next, taking each night that night’s bearing by the stars?

Madam — Lady Jane in person — had sent down a boy to pick up bottle tops and cigarette stubs from the water’s edge. She had high standards. (She had said so in the bar last night. ‘The trouble is, they’ll never be any different, they just don’t know how to look after anything.’) This was the enlightenment the discoverers had brought the black man in the baggage he portered for them on his head. This one was singing to himself as he worked. If the plans that were being made in the capital got the backing of the World Bank and the UN Development Fund and all the rest of it, his life would change. Whatever happened to him, he would lose the standard that had been set by people who maintained it by using him to pick up their dirt. Church thought of the ruin — he’d forgotten to ask what it was. Lady Jane’s prefabricated concrete blocks and terrazzo would fall down more easily.

He had had a shirt washed and although he was sweating under the light bulb when he put it on for dinner, he seemed to have accustomed himself to the heat, now. He was also very sunburned. The lady with the small child sat with a jolly party of Germans in brown sandals — apparently from a Lutheran Mission nearby — and there was a group of men down from the capital on a bachelor binge of skin-diving and drinking who were aware of being the life of the place. They caught out at Zelide, her thick feet pressed into smart shoes, her hair lifted on top of her head, her eyes made up to twice their size. She bore her transformation bravely, smiling.

‘You are coming down to the beach, arnch you?’ She went, concerned, from table to table. Mrs Palmer’s heels announced her with the authority of a Spanish dancer. She had on a strapless blue dress and silver sandals, and carried a little gilt bag like an outsize cigarette box. She joined the missionary party: ‘ Wie geht’s , Father, have you been missing me?’ Dickie didn’t appear. Through the frangipani, the fire on the beach was already sending up scrolls of flame.

Church knew he would be asked to join one group or another and out of a kind of shame of anticipated boredom (last night there had been one of those beer-serious conversations about the possibility of the end of the world: ‘They say the one thing’ll survive an atomic explosion is the ant. The ant’s got something special in its body, y’see’) he went into the empty bar after dinner. The little black barman was almost inaudible, in order to disguise his lack of English. There was an array of fancy bottles set up on the shelves but most of them seemed to belong to Mrs Palmer’s store of objets d’art: ‘Is finish’.’ Church had to content himself with a brandy from South Africa. He asked whether a dusty packet of cigarillos was for sale, and the barman’s hand went from object to object on display before the correct one was identified. Church was smoking and throwing darts as if they were stones, when Dickie came in. Dickie wore a dinner jacket; his lapels were blue satin, his trousers braided, his shirt tucked and frilled; his hands emerged from ruffles and the little finger of the left one rubbed and turned the baroque ring on the finger beside it. He hung in the doorway a moment like a tall, fancy doll; his mother might have put him on a piano.

Church said, ‘My God, you’re grand,’ and Dickie looked down at himself for a second, without interest, as one acknowledges one’s familiar working garb. The little barman seemed flattened by Dickie’s gaze.

‘Join me?’

Dickie gave a boastful, hard-wrung smile. ‘No thanks. I think I’ve had enough already.’ He had the look his mother had had, when Church asked her where her hotel was. ‘I’ve been drinking all afternoon. Ever since a phone call.’

‘Well you don’t look it,’ said Church. But it was the wrong tone to take up.

Dickie played a tattoo on the bar with the ringed hand, staring at it. ‘There was a phone call from Bulawayo, and a certain story was repeated to me. Somebody’s made it their business to spread a story.’

‘That’s upsetting.’

‘It may mean the loss of a future wife, that’s what. My fiancée in Bulawayo. Somebody took the trouble to tell her there’s a certain young lady in the hotel here with me. Somebody had nothing better to do than make trouble. But that young lady is my mother’s secretary-receptionist, see? She works here, she’s employed , just like me. Just like I’m the manager.’

From country to country, bar to bar, Church was used to accepting people’s own versions of their situations, quite independently of the facts. He and Dickie contemplated the vision of Dickie fondling Zelide in the garden as evidence of the correctness of his relations with the secretary-receptionist. ‘Couldn’t you explain?’

‘Usually if I’m, you know, depressed and that, I play my guitar. But I’ve just been strumming. No, I don’t think I’ll have any more tonight, I’m full enough already. The whole afternoon.’

‘Why don’t you go to Bulawayo?’

Dickie picked up the darts and began to throw them, at an angle, from where he sat at the bar; while he spoke he scored three bull’s-eyes. ‘Huh, I think I’ll clear out altogether. Here I earn fifty quid a month, eh? I can earn twenty pounds a night — a night — with a personal appearance. I’ve got a whole bundle of my own compositions and one day, boy! — there’s got to be one that hits the top. One day it’s got to happen. All my stuff is copyright, you see. Nobody’s gonna cut a disc of my stuff without my permission. I see to that. Oh I could play you a dozen numbers I’m working on, they’re mostly sad, you know — the folk type of thing, that’s where the money is now. What’s a lousy fifty quid a month?’