Nadine Gordimer - Life Times - Stories 1952-2007

‘And the other sides? Facing the house?’ The young man looked over to his wife, whose feet were together under her long skirt, cup neatly balanced on her lap, and eyes on cup, inattentive; then he smiled to Mr and Mrs Naas. ‘We don’t want to live in the country and at the same time be disturbed by neighbours’ noise.’

Naas laughed and put a hand on each knee, thrusting his head forward amiably; over the years he had developed gestures that marked each stage in the conclusion of a land deal, as each clause goes to comprise a contract.

‘You won’t hear nothing but the birds.’

On a Thursday afternoon Doctors Milton Caro, pathologist, Grahame Fraser-Smith, maxillo-facial surgeon, Arthur Methus, gynaecologist and Dolf van Gelder, orthopaedic surgeon, had an encounter on Houghton Golf Course. Doctors Caro, Fraser-Smith, Methus and van Gelder are all distinguished specialists in their fields, with degrees from universities abroad as well as at home, and they are not available to the sick at all hours and on all days, like any general practitioner. In fact, since so many of the younger medical specialists have emigrated to take up appointments in safer countries — America, Canada, Australia — patients sometimes have the embarrassment of having recovered spontaneously before arriving for appointments that have to be booked a minimum of three months ahead. Others may have died; in which case, the ruling by the Medical Association that appointments not kept will be charged for, is waived.

The doctors do not consult on Thursday afternoons. The foursome, long-standing members of the Houghton Club, has an almost equally long-standing arrangement to tee off at 2 p.m. (Caro and van Gelder also take long walks together, carrying stout sticks, on Sunday mornings. Van Gelder would like to make jogging a punishable offence, like drunken driving. He sees too many cases of attributable Achilles tendonitis, of chondromalacia patellae caused by repetitive gliding of the patella over the femur, and, of course, of chronic strain of the ligaments, particularly in flat-footed patients.) On this particular afternoon Fraser-Smith and van Gelder were a strong partnership, and Methus was letting Caro down rather badly. It is this phenomenon of an erratic handicap that provides the pleasure mutually generated by the company. The style of their communication is banter; without error, there would be nothing to banter about. This Thursday the supreme opportunity arose because it was not Methus, in his ham-handed phase, who sent a ball way off into a grove of trees, but Fraser-Smith, who on the previous hole had scored an eagle. Van Gelder groaned, Fraser-Smith cursed himself in an amazement that heightened Caro’s and Methus’s mock glee. And then Caro, who had marked where the ball fell into shade, went good-naturedly with Fraser-Smith, who was short-sighted, over to the trees. Fraser-Smith, still cursing amiably, moved into the grove where Caro directed.

‘Which side of the bush? Here? I’ll never find the sodding thing.’ At Guy’s Hospital thirty years before he had picked up the panache of British cuss-words he never allowed himself to forget.

Caro, despite the Mayo Clinic and distinguished participation at international congresses on forensic medicine, called back in the gruff, slow homeliness of a Jewish country storekeeper’s son whose early schooling was in Afrikaans. ‘Ag, man, d’you want me to come and bleddy well hit it for you? It must be just on the left there, man!’

Exactly where the two men were gazing, someone — something that must have been crouching — rose, a shape broken by the shapes of trees; there was an instant when they, it, were aware of one another. And then whoever or whatever it was was gone, in a soft crashing confusion among branches and bushes. Caro shouted — ridiculously, he was the first to admit — ‘Hey! Hey!’

‘Well,’ (they were embellishing their story at the clubhouse) ‘I thought he’d pinched old Grahame’s ball, and I wanted to say thanks very much, because Methus and I, we were playing like a pair of clowns, we needed some monkey-business to help us out. .’

Fraser-Smith was sure the creature had gone up a tree, although when the foursome went to look where he thought it had climbed, there was nothing. Methus said if it hadn’t been for all the newspaper tales they’d been reading, none of them would have got the mad idea it was anything but a man — one of the black out-of-works, the dronkies who have their drinking sessions in there; wasn’t it true they were a problem for the groundsmen, no fence seemed to keep them and their litter out? There were the usual empty beer cans under the tree where Fraser-Smith said he. . ‘Anyway, the papers talked about a monkey, and we all saw — this was something big. . a black, that’s all, and he got a scare. . you know, how you can’t make out a black face in shadow, among leaves.’

Caro spoke aside: ‘A black having a crap, exactly. .’

But van Gelder was certain. No one had seen, in the moment the being had looked at the foursome, and the foursome had looked at it, a face, distinct garments, limbs. Van Gelder had observed the gait, and in gait van Gelder read bones. ‘It was not a monkey. It was not a man. That was a baboon.’

The couple didn’t have much to say for themselves, that day while Naas Klopper was showing them over the Kleynhans place. In his experience this was a bad sign. Clients who took an instant liking to a property always thought they were being shrewd by concealing their keenness to buy under voluble fault-picking calculated to bring down the price. They would pounce on disadvantages in every feature of aspect and construction. This meant the deed of sale was as good as signed. Those who said nothing were the ones who had taken an instant dislike to a property, or — as if they could read his mind, because, hell man, he was an old hand at the game, he never let slip a thing — uncannily understood at once that it was a bad buy. When people trailed around in silence behind him he filled that silence entirely by himself, every step and second of it, slapping with the flat of a hand the pump of whose specifications, volume of water per hour, etcetera, he spared no detail, opening stuck cupboard doors and scratching a white-ridged thumbnail down painted walls to the accompaniment of patter about storage space and spotless condition; and all the time he was wanting just to turn round and herd right out the front door people who were wasting his time.

But this girl didn’t have the averted face of the wives who had made up their minds they wouldn’t let their husbands buy. Naas knows what interests the ladies. They don’t notice if guttering is rotted or electrical wiring is old and unsafe. What they care about is fitted kitchen units and whether the new suite will look right in what will be the lounge. When he pointed out the glassed-in stoep that would make a nice room for sewing and that, or a kiddies’ playroom (but I don’t suppose you’ve got any youngsters? — not yet, ay) she stood looking over it obediently through her big round glasses as if taking instructions. And the lounge, a bit original (two small rooms of the old farmhouse from the twenties knocked into one) with half the ceiling patterned pressed lead and the other ‘modernised’ with pine strips and an ox-wagon wheel adapted as a chandelier — she smiled, showing beautiful teeth, and nodded slowly all round the room, turning on her heel.

Same thing outside, with the husband. He was interested in the outhouses, of course. Nice double shed, could garage two cars — full of junk, naturally, when a place’s been empty, only a boy in charge — Kleynhans’s old boy, and his hundred-and-one hangers-on, wife, children, whatnot. . ‘But we’ll get that all cleaned up for you, no problem.’ Naas shouted for the boy, but the outhouse where he’d been allowed to live was closed, an old padlock on the door. ‘He’s gone off somewhere. Never here whenever I come, that’s how he looks after the place. Well — I wanted to show you the room but I suppose it doesn’t matter, the usual boy’s room. . p’raps you won’t want to have anybody, like Mrs Klopper, you’ll rather do for yourselves? Specially as you from overseas, ay. .’