Nadine Gordimer - The Conservationist

— Will you play hookey with me? What about something called Trinity — Trinity Was Here —

— Oh you mean Trinity Is Still My Name —

— I hear it’s a good blood-and-thunder Western –

— I’ve seen it. Not bad. —

— How many cinemas have you been to this week, mmh? —

She lowered her voice to her mother’s pitch. — I don’t think there’s a show in town I haven’t seen. Isn’t that awful. And some are such trash. It’s just a game, to us. We’ll get sick of it in time. I suppose so. — You don’t really feel like it, or you would just walk out. —

— That’s so. —

— There’re other things though, I mean that you really want to do, perhaps…? —

— Sometimes. —

A thin blonde with hunched shoulders attracted her attention and pointed at a huge wristwatch.

She was still so young she did not know how to take leave. She hitched her bag like a navvy. — Well, are we going to see you and Terry at Plettenberg Bay? We’re going down next week — Daddy’ll follow, he’s got a meeting or something. —

— Terry’s off to America to see his mum. —

— But you? —

He put money down beside the cup and the three walked out together. They had to make their way through people entering, jostling; she didn’t introduce her friend, didn’t remember she had had no answer. — Fine. I’ll tell Mummy —

His smiling gesture of correction, protest, uncommitted denial she — already a few yards off, accustomed to the easy uncertainty of her own plans — took laughing, miming the business of not having quite heard or understood. — What? What ? You’ll be around, then — okay — lovely —

The newspaper that was placed folded on his desk each morning usually went straight into the basket. Today he had not already read it in bed in his flat. Iron ore and manganese were steady; copper down a few points. He started near the back, at the financial pages, and worked his way to the front, where there was a report of yet another scandal in the business world — this time a big construction firm in trouble. No one he knew personally seemed directly involved, but he made a note to speak to his broker about some stock he held in a company subsidiary to the firm. He had bought because he’d been tipped off the company was in line for government contracts for the Sishen-Saldanha railway, if that ever came to anything.

He had lunch with someone out from Bethlehem Steel and an old friend, now busy negotiating royalties for Platinum Holdings with the native chiefs in whose Bantustan the mine was, on the one hand, and the General Motors people who wanted the platinum for anti-pollution exhaust devices, on the other. Quite a story.

They had scarcely parted — he was hardly at his desk — when the friend he had left phoned to say that someone with whom they’d both been associated for years had just been found gassed in his car near the Country Club. It was the girl’s father. He was chairman of a bank, an investment trust, and connected with half a dozen other concerns, including perhaps (even those who knew him best would not be familiar with all his interests) the bankrupt construction company.

Thus it is with black men; they did not come into being when it was said, ‘There are no Amatongo.’ They came into being when it was already said, ‘There are Amatongo.’ But we do not know why the man which first came into being said, ‘There are Amatongo.’

… since the white men came and the missionaries, we have heard it said that there is God.

It’s me.

Drawn up, he has been seized, he is going to be confronted, at last, at last. Here it is. This is it. It is true that he did not recognize her because he doesn’t know that he has been expecting anyone — anything. Yet it’s as if he must be eternally waiting, eternally expecting, eter illy dreading. The excitation is suffocating; men have died in the act.

No one’ll even remember where you’re buried.

He is not the sort of person given to morbid reconstruction of how it must be when these people are waiting for the carbon monoxide to take effect. Before you actually pass out or however it comes: do they arrange themselves head in hands, registering despair etc. Just keep eyes fixed on the instrument panel: speedometer, oil gauge, engine heat. Grit in the mouth, face-down.

No one’ll even remember where

Stood up, stood back — or was it a step forward he took, dreadfully — good god, one immigrant girl in a city full of girls, she can hardly make herself understood, she is there somewhere all the time. Or you — it would be typical of you to appear just like that, stirring up trouble , enjoying the sensation: They’ve graciously allowed me back in again, of course they’re following me everywhere –

It’s me: don’t you know me? (Her mother would have corrected the grammar, she takes care not to speak like a colonial.) Don’t you know me? Even Japan isn’t far enough, even getting away to your own four hundred acres, disappearing in the grass (almost could, now in certain places) isn’t far enough.

He gave a name to what was there only when he saw the wide belt that pressed down where that long waist stemmed or ended at the ledge of hip-bone (couldn’t call those hips). More medieval cuirass or Elizabethan stomacher than what one understands by a woman’s belt. The great round medallion dipped in front, slightly convex to follow exactly and flatly the slight curve where there would be a belly if she had one. He admired the belt; oh yes, somebody had just brought it back from Paris, mummy or daddy, everyone in Paris was wearing them. It’s a suggestive piece of rubbishy embellishment behind which her body approaches (across the coffee bar) and is guarded, she perhaps knows this. As she leans over the pun-gence of the coffee, elbows on the ledge (tall, the top of her head would come up to his eyes) the medallion holds her under there like a cupped hand. Don’t you recognize

What a bloody fool, burn to remember how you rose to it, think you’d never seen a woman before. If it’d been all the women ever had, suddenly there in one body, as it seems to be with the first one when you finally get the door open and at last, at last — this little schoolgirl. If it were some sort of seizure or attack for which one goes to the doctor. Or makes up one’s mind to ignore. Except for the excessive smoking, there’s been nothing wrong.

The degrees of hotness, the sweetness, and the bitter consistency of the coffee is something he is precisely aware of; he’s not avuncular, he’s never had any special way of talking to young people because there’s not much to say to them, anyway, but while he chides her easily, nice kid, about her lazy life and she pretends to be complaining to her father’s friend about not having a car, she too is feeling some precise process taking place, as specifically as the progress of some hot sweet liquid tracing a passage of the body of which one is normally not consciously aware. He’s sure of it.

Thank God I have no daughters.

His gullet retains the burning trail. Like a kind of heartburn, but recalled at will. Some of them take poison. A dose of cyanide, it’s quicker. But that’s for spies and brave revolutionaries — ay? Not the tycoon’s way. Cyanide is the stuff that is used in the most effective and cheapest process for extracting gold from the auriferous reef. It is what saved the industry in the early 1900s. It is what makes yellow the waste that is piled up in giant sandcastles and crenellated geometrically-stepped hills where the road first leaves the city. The freeway gives a balcony view of them and of the stumped and straggling eucalyptus plantations between which used to provide timber for these old mines. He drives past so often, approaching from this side on the way out, and that on the way back, that he doesn’t see them any more than he sees people thumbing for lifts.