Nadine Gordimer - The Conservationist

— He never shuts up a minute. Jabber, jabber. I could have died. He’s always like that. Being old, you know. —

— He seemed a nice old man. —

She says, and from the voice he gathers she is smiling, not ill-naturedly — He’s all right. He keeps himself going and that. Lively. —

— You never said a word, I remember. —

— I did say thank you I’m sure. —

— Yes, that’s all right, you said thank you. —

— My, I was glad to see you coming along now. How many times I’ve been soaked these last weeks on the way from work. —

— You recognized the car. —

— I knew it was you. I’ve seen you before. Passing. Often, before that time. —

— Yes, I’m on this road a lot. I could drive it blindfold. —

She’s laughing, giggling — Ooh, don’t do that, I’m scared stiff in cars. Once I grabbed the wheel when I was with someone and I thought we was going to crash — and I can’t even drive. I’m terrible that way; nervous in a car. And specially today, I left home so late for work this morning without even a cup of tea. It’s unfair having to go to work Saturday morning, I wish I could find me a five-day week job. —

— Learn to drive, you won’t be nervous anymore. —

She babbles like a schoolgirl but now answers with the bridling hardness that sort of girl acquires young. — What’s the use without a car. —

It is this tone that makes him glance sideways, at last, and she’s busy in her big shabby white bag stained pinkish with handling, so there’s an opportunity. No no. He would never have known he had seen her before with that old commissionaire. But she couldn’t have invented the tale; how could she have known it. It’s the same little girl. Not little at all, in the sense of the word one means it. She could be twenty-five or late twenties; there’s something about the odours and small sounds that come from the bag — cigarette tobacco from crumpled fags, the strong whiff of cheap cosmetics, a jingling of objects and the fussy clicks of the bracelets colliding on a capable-looking sunburned hand — that suggests perhaps a divorcee looking out for herself.

She catches him, suddenly full into his glance. Really not bad; large brown eyes of the kind that seem to have no whites, all painted up, of course, coated eyelashes and lids, a brown oval face with a mole between upper lip and nose, a high shiny forehead under a rather tortured mop of dull dark hair. A cheap mass-production of the original bare tanned face he likes in a woman.

His attention is back to the road but on the margin of his vision there is her head on one side — Oh man, couldn’t you p’raps just stop a minute by the roadhouse, I really need a snack or something —

God no.

He flicks the indicator to signal the left turn and she’s folded her hands together and looks to the front, immediately satisfied, like a child given a promise of sweets. Turning his head to make sure no bicycle will come up on the left, the glance doesn’t encounter the face but takes in, in passing, a tiny gold cross tipped iop-sided by its position between pushed-up breasts — yes, she’s one of those, dangling them for the boys on Saturday night and down on your knees at the Dutch Reformed Church on Sunday. It really isn’t necessary to get out of the car for her, she won’t expect it: he’s not a fumbler, he produces money as easily as he makes it, and from nowhere has two rand notes in his hand, gesturing them as she opens the door.

— And what for you? —

— No, nothing. —

— You sure? —

— Nothing for me. You go ahead. —

Standing at the window of the roadhouse where the black waiters come to pick up orders they serve to cars she plumps the back of that hair with one hand while she waits, and turns a foot on the heel of one of those clogs, like orthopaedic shoes, the women are wearing these days. He has only just in check a confused impatience ready to rise if she keeps him waiting for her bloody hot dog — why stop, anyway, there must be plenty of buses for these people. He never would have got into this if he had been thinking what he was doing. But she’s been given a packet almost at once, and she’s coming hobbling over the fine grey stones that surface the court of the roadhouse, smiling, though not looking at her benefactor. The smile is for any man who may be watching her progress. He sighs to release the tension of cold impatience it has not proved necessary to summon.

She gets in beside him and arranges herself and slams the door and the car turns to the road and waits to insert itself into the nearest lane of traffic again, here where the mine-dumps and the remains of the old eucalyptus plantations create a sort of industrial rusticity on either side of the road. She has not opened the packet that has brought into the car a whiff of warmth and grease, but leans forward to put it into the open glove shelf and as part of the same movement puts her hand on his thigh as she settles back again. He is waiting for the opportunity to regain the road. The hand is on his leg. His eyes flicker regularly in reaction to the unbroken passing of cars. When he sees his chance and sidles swiftly into the line the woman’s hand is still on him.

— By the old mine-dumps. The trees are nice, there, you can just take that little road down —

He has seen it. No, no. Jacobus can’t be stopped. Shoot him down in his tracks; still he comes on. He has flipped the indicator to signal and she’s still talking — Yes, it’s quite all right, go ahead; even with the rain and that. You can go, you won’t get stuck, it’s all right, all sand, not mud. — As the sound and sensation beneath the car’s wheels change as it leaves the ridge that ends the tarmac and begins to impress the mixture of red earth and yellow sand that is the dirt track, she is making encouraging remarks — Okay. Okay. That’s fine ay, that’s fine. —

The arty blonde who sells stuffed toys from her station-wagon sees it: a black Mercedes with a man and woman turning off the main road just before the freeway and driving down into the old plantation. He saw the elbow crooked from the hip and took, beyond the flashing emblem whose prism is always there the bonnet’s length before his vision, the stare of sunglasses. Oh no. There is no sound but chatter beside him and the soothing swish of tyres over wet sand where they fit smoothly into the worn hollows on either side of a spine of grass. The eucalyptus are not thick — they have suffered many successive fellings to provide timber props underground in the mine and the present growth consists of thin trunks growing out of the sides of the original boles — but there has been so much rain that their tough, clean wintergreen smell comes in very strongly through the window. The track is just a hundred yards or so below the freeway; from that point, the city is not more than ten minutes away, that’s all. The track must date from the old days when these mines were still in production; what is the purpose of it now? It can’t lead anywhere, but it has remained open. From here, not too far in, where he has not exactly come to a halt but paused, foot on the clutch, because where is he going? where does it lead to? — from here you could be in town in ten minutes. A silent place. It might be deep in the country, in a real forest with real mountains enclosing it. A boy could people it with Red Indians or cops and robbers, it looks like a place to run and hide; but four lanes of traffic and a freeway are just over the trees, and behind the yellow mountain a scrapyard, a brickfield, foundries. No no. That’s enough. Once let them near you — the old man had his gold-braided cap in the car window and his hand on the door that time before he could say no — there’s no limit to what they want. With your money, what is there that they dream they could not do and what is there they do not expect of you. Damn it all, no.