Nadine Gordimer - The Conservationist

He dresses very quickly. It’s hardly the prospect of the visit from Meneer De Beer: it’s the shower that’s done it, got rid of that curious awakening down at the reeds and returned him to the ordinary plane of his existence. ‘You’ve got out of bed the wrong side’, the old saying; it is true that one can wake up in the wrong place. The acupuncture of water needles has restored the face with which he will meet the Boer from down the road, and the Metallgesellschaft people, tomorrow morning; meets himself in the mean rectangle of bathroom mirror. He brushes his hair. Sideburns are brindled with grey. Even naked: the face is the kind Metallgesellschaft would recognize.

Alina! He yells out the back door.

Alina!

It’s a nuisance that the very day he needs them — Sunday — is naturally the day they want to gallivant off. In the sitting-room he struggles to push up the rusty wire flyscreens and open some windows. Any visitors he may have from the farms round about will always look more at home in here than he does; he bought the house voets-toets, lock, stock and barrel, nylon pile ‘suite’, rickety three-legged coffee tables, Rhodesian copper firescreen with embossed Flame Lily, wrought-iron plant stand — except for family photographs it is exactly their own sitting-rooms. There is even an upright piano with holes where candle-brackets must have been screwed; occasionally when one of his own friends strays up to the house, a key will be struck, in amusement: sometimes there is a note, sometimes just the small thud of the hammer’s pad. He has offered to give the heirloom away to anyone who will come and take it — an offer that brings a laugh. He keeps a transistor radio on the sideboard that is his bar and the receptacle for farm accounts, and now he switches on to hear the news, forgetting that it is broadcast at a later hour on Sundays. The full panoply of a noisy symphony distends the whole house; it seems, when the entourage troops in through the front door (he has forgotten it hasn’t been used for months, there is a delay while he opens up for them) that truly the house is peopled, throughout the rooms they don’t see, with movement and voices.

They are quite a delegation; the whole family expects to go along if there’s an outing of any kind on a Sunday afternoon. Old De Beer has brought young De Beer, and young De Beer has with him young Mrs De Beer and child. There is also an adolescent girl who looks like young Mrs De Beer, probably a sister. He has seen them all, or a similar combination of the family, looking out from under ceremonious hats, when their car passed on their way home from church on the farm road, this morning. That’s how they knew he’d be at the farm.

They are people who won’t dispose themselves about a room until you tell them to. Come in, come in, sit down… They stand grouped slightly behind old De Beer. Please come inside.

Even when they are settled (looking round at the chair seats before placing their backsides, as if they’re afraid of sitting on something or doing some damage) they remain hidden behind his shirt-tails — they don’t speak. The child is so bashful, she’s a vine wound to her mother’s thick, young, knees-together legs. Hansie De Beer runs the farm, he’s the one Mehring usually deals with, but in his father’s presence he ventures no opinions unless the old man turns his face to him. Old De Beer is a handsome man, his clothes filled drum-tight with his body; there ought to be a watch-chain across it, but there isn’t, he wears on his wrist instead the latest Japanese electronic watch with a dial like something off an instrument panel. The retaining wall of belly and bunch of balls part the thighs majestically. Oh to wear your manhood, fatherhood like that, eh, stud and authority. The coatsleeves are stuffed with flesh that gives the arms the angle to lie monumentally on chair-arms — Mehring is going over these stock points, forgetting his duty to offer beer. The old man’s Kaiser face, Edward VII face, regards him un-yieldingly a moment; the son and the woman don’t respond. Christ, they probably don’t drink on Sundays, the son is afraid to say yes.

The old man’s hoarse slow voice: — Perhaps if you’ve got brandy. I’ll take a brandy. —

Easy now, for Hansie. -Thanks very much, beer. —

— Have you perhaps got a cold drink? — The wife makes a soft, little girl’s request, she wouldn’t be allowed to drink in front of the father-in-law anyway, Sunday or no Sunday.

— Just a drop of water in it. That’s enough. No, that lucerne of yours was not so bad you know, not so bad at all. But why don’t you plant the top veld there — you know, by your boys’ kraal, right up to Delport’s fence — before, you know, when (he looks to his son, who supplies the name) — when Jacobs had this place, it was always lucerne there. It’ll do well, man. There’s not much frost there. With your water you can keep it going right through the winter. —

— Oh I’ve had mealies there. They did exceptionally well. -

— Mealies! Yes man… but now the mealies are all reaped. If you had lucerne, now. You’ll get a good price for lucerne if you’ve got it in winter. — He speaks to the city business man, he even smiles under the sweep of moustache that hides his lip: — That’s the law of supply and demand, hey? —

Mehring gives a hostly laugh, and the son backs it up. The young woman is whispering fiercely all the time in asides to the children, who are occupied sharing out a Coke that, despite the traffic in his kitchen, has been lying in the refrigerator untouched for weeks. -Just a minute, maybe I can find another bottle. -

— No, no, it’s plenty for them. —

The child will sink, she will drown if she lets go of her mother, yet her clinging is flirtatious, she tries to make him look at her so that she may at once hide her head against the mother’s thigh. She’s a beautiful child as their children often are — where do they get them from? — and she’ll grow up — what do they do to them? — the same sort of vacant turnip as the mother. - Sorry, I’ve run out, I’ve been away. - To go into one of those women must be like using the fleshy succulent plants men in the Foreign Legion have to resort to.

— Not so bad. The only thing, the bales didn’t weigh fifty pounds… isn’t that so… — (Now addressing, calling in Hansie when he needs him.)

— No, it’s true, it was a bit less than you… it doesn’t matter… —

They bought lucerne from him — before Japan; Six weeks ago? — before that, or later?

— We lost about ten per cent on it- Hansie is forced by a look to nod confirmation of this.

— It must have dried out. Because it wasn’t the boys who weighed, I know I did it myself. -

It was the week before that business with the police. He hadn’t come out to the farm at all. Perhaps they knew; the old man with his intelligent brown eyes might know. They expected it of a city man like himself to leave things to the boys.

— You can’t trust a kaffir about the scale, I can tell you that. You can teach them as much as you like. It doesn’t matter to them, you see, if it’s so much or so much. To them it seems the same. They’ll know better just by picking it up on their backs. I’ve had some boys who can tell how much you’ll get, just picking the bales up. -

They are all laughing quite admiringly, even old De Beer himself, even young Mrs De Beer, tossing her head piled with Grecian curls behind a nylon scarf, her chin pressed back against her pink neck with exactly her child’s bashful gesture — It’s true, you know, that’s quite true what my father-in-law say —

Putting out a hand to stop the angle of the bottle over his glass in indication that the second tot should rise no farther, old De Beer is in full command, now, not even Mehring will break in on him unless he chooses to make way. — But what I wanted to ask — you can p’raps do me a favour, you know. I’ve got a lot of building material and stuff that I’ve got to pick up. A mass of stuff. And there’s only that small van, except for the milk truck, and I can’t take that, you see, the milk’s got to go into town every morning —