Life Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  ‘I’ve got ideas of my own. But when Madam’s here you can forget it, just forget it. No sooner start something – just get started, that’s all – she chucks it up and wants something different again.’ His gaze wavered once or twice to the wall where the bar had been. Carl Church asked what the fish were. He didn’t answer, and the girl encouraged, ‘Perch. Aren’t they, Dickie? Yes, perch. You’ll have them for your lunch. Lovely eating.’

  ‘Oh what the hell. Let’s go. You ready?’ he said to Church. The girl jumped up and he hooked an arm round her neck, feeling in her rough hair.

  ‘Course he’s ready. The black flippers’ll fit him – the stuff’s in the bar,’ she said humouringly.

  ‘But I haven’t even got a pair of trunks.’

  ‘Who cares? I can tell you I’m just-not-going-to-worry-a-damn. Here Zelide, I nearly lost it this morning.’ He removed a dark stone set in Christmas-cracker baroque from his rock-scratched hand, nervous-boned as his mother’s ankles, and tossed it for the girl to catch.

  ‘Come, I’ve got the trunks,’ she said, and led Carl Church to the bar by way of the reception desk, stopping to wrap the ring in a pink tissue and pop it in the cash box.

  The thought of going to the lake once more was irresistible. His bag was packed; an hour or two wouldn’t make any difference. He had been skin-diving before, in Sardinia, and did not expect the bed of the lake to compare with the Mediterranean, but if the architecture of undersea was missing, the fish one could get at were much bigger than he had ever caught in the Mediterranean. The young man disappeared for minutes and rose again between Carl Church and the girl, his Gothic Christ’s body sucked in below the nave of ribs, his goggles leaving weals like duelling scars on his white cheekbones. Water ran from the tarnished curls over the bright eyeballs without seeming to make him blink. He brought up fish deftly and methodically and the girl swam back to shore with them, happy as a retrieving dog.

  Neither she nor Carl Church caught much themselves. And then Church went off on his own, swimming slowly with the borrowed trunks inflating above the surface like a striped Portuguese man-of-war, and far out, when he was not paying attention but looking back at the skimpy white buildings, the flowering shrubs and even the giant baobab razed by distance and the optical illusion of the heavy waterline, at eye-level, about to black them out, he heard a fish-eagle scream just overhead; looked up, looked down, and there below him saw three fish at different levels, a mobile swaying in the water. This time he managed the gun without thinking; he had speared the biggest.

  The girl was as impartially overjoyed as she was when the young man had a good catch. They went up the beach, laughing, explaining, a water-intoxicated progress. The accidental bump of her thick sandy thigh against his was exactly the tactile sensation of contact with the sandy body of the fish, colliding with him as he carried it. The young man was squatting on the beach, now, his long back arched over his knees. He was haranguing, in an African language, the old fisherman with the ivory bracelets who was still at work on the nets. There were dramatic pauses, accusatory rises of tone, hard jerks of laughter, in the monologue. The old man said nothing. He was an Arabised African from far up the lake somewhere in East Africa, and wore an old towel turban as well as the ivory; every now and then he wrinkled back his lips on tooth-stumps. Three or four long black dugouts had come in during the morning and were beached; black men sat motionless in what small shade they could find. The baby on his blue swan still floated under his mother’s surveillance – she turned a visor of sunglasses and hat. It was twelve o’clock; Carl Church merely felt amused at himself – how different the measure of time when you were absorbed in something you didn’t earn a living by. ‘Those must weigh a pound apiece,’ he said idly, of the ivory manacles shifting on the net-mender’s wrists.

  ‘D’you want one?’ the young man offered. (My graves, the woman had said, on my property.) ‘I’ll get him to sell it to you. Take it for your wife.’

  But Carl Church had no wife at present, and no desire for loot; he preferred everything to stay as it was, in its place, at noon by the lake. Twenty thousand slaves a year had passed this way, up the water. Slavers, missionaries, colonial servants – all had brought something and taken something away. He would have a beer and go, changing nothing, claiming nothing. He plodded to the hotel a little ahead of the couple, who were mumbling over hotel matters and pausing now and then to fondle each other. As his bare soles encountered the smoothness of the terrace steps he heard the sweet, loud, reasonable feminine voice, saw one of the houseboy-waiters racing across in his dirty jacket – and quickly turned away to get to his room unnoticed. But with a perfect instinct for preventing escape, she was at once out upon the dining-room veranda, all crude blues and yellows – hair, eyes, flowered dress, a beringed hand holding the cigarette away exploratively. Immediately, her son passed Church in a swift, damp tremor.

  ‘Well, God, look at my best girl – mm-MHH . . . madam in person.’ He lifted her off her feet and she landed swirling giddily on the high heels in the best tradition of the Fred Astaire films she and Carl Church had been brought up on. Her laugh seemed to go over her whole body.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘And so, my girl?’

  They rocked together. ‘You been behaving yourself in the big city?’

  ‘Dickie – for Pete’s sake – he’s like a spaniel – ’ calling Carl Church to witness.

  A warm baby-smell beside him (damp crevices and cold cream) was the presence of the girl. ‘Oh Mrs Palmer, we were so worried you’d got lost or something.’

  ‘My dear. My you’re looking well—’ The two vacant, inescapable blue stares took in the bikini, the luxuriously inflamed skin, as if the son’s gaze were directed by the mother’s. Mrs Palmer and the girl kissed but Mrs Palmer’s eyes moved like a lighthouse beam over the wall where the bar was gone, catching Carl Church in his borrowed swimming trunks. ‘Wha’d’you think of my place?’ she asked. ‘How d’you like it here, eh? Not that I know it myself, after two months . . .’ Hands on hips, she looked at the peasant girl and the mildewed outlines as if she were at an exhibition.

  She faced sharply round and her son kissed her on the mouth: ‘We’re dying for a beer, that’s what. We’ve been out since breakfast. Zelide, the boy—’

  ‘Yes, he knows he’s on duty on the veranda today – just a minute, I’ll get it—’

  Mrs Palmer was smiling at the girl wisely. ‘My dear, once you start doing their jobs for them . . .’

  ‘Shadrach!’ The son made a megaphone of his hands, shaking his silver identification bracelet out of the way. The girl stood, eagerly bewildered.

  ‘Oh it’s nothing. Only a minute—’ and bolted.

  ‘Where is the bar, now, Dickie?’ said his mother as a matter of deep, polite interest.

  ‘I must get some clothes on and return your trunks,’ Carl Church was saying.

  ‘Oh, it makes a world of difference. You’ll see. You can move in that bar. Don’t you think so?’ The young man gave the impression that he was confirming a remark of Church’s rather than merely expressing his own opinion. Carl Church, to withdraw, said, ‘Well, I don’t know what it was like before.’

  She claimed him now. ‘It was here, in the open, of course, people loved it. A taverna atmosphere. Dickie’s never been overseas.’

  ‘Really move. And you’ve got those big doors.’

  She drew Church into the complicity of a smile for grown-ups, then remarked, as if for her part the whole matter were calmly accepted, settled, ‘I presume it’s the games room?’

  Her son said to Church, sharing the craziness of women, ‘There never was a games room, it was the lounge, can you see a lot of old birds sitting around in armchairs in a place like this?’

  ‘The lounge that was going to be redecorated as a games room,’ she said. She smiled at her son.

  The girl came back, walking flat-footed under a tray’s weight up steps that led by way of a half-built terrace to the new ba
r. As Carl Church went to help her she breathed, ‘What a performance.’

  Mrs Palmer drew on her cigarette and contemplated the steps: ‘Imagine the breakages.’

  The four of them were together round beer bottles. Church sat helplessly in his borrowed trunks that crawled against his body as they dried, drinking pint after pint and aware of his warmth, the heat of the air, and all their voices rising steadily. He said, ‘I must get going,’ but the waiter had called them to lunch three times; the best way to break up the party was to allow oneself to be forced to table. The three of them ate in their bathing costumes while madam took the head, bracelets colliding on her arms.

  He made an effort to get precise instructions about the best and quickest route back to the capital, and was told expertly by her, ‘There’s no plane out until Monday, nine-fifteen, I suppose you know that.’

  ‘I have no reason whatever to doubt your knowledge of plane schedules,’ he said, and realised from the turn of phrase that he must be slightly drunk, on heat and the water as much as beer.

  She knew the game so well that you had only to finger a counter unintentionally for her to take you on. ‘I told you I never let anyone down.’ She blew a smokescreen; appeared through it. ‘Where’ve they put you?’

  ‘Oh, he’s in one of the chalets, Mrs Palmer,’ the girl said. ‘Till tomorrow, anyway.’

  ‘Well, there you are, relax,’ she said. ‘If the worst comes to the worst, there’s a room in my cottage.’ Her gaze was out over the lake, a tilting, blind brightness with black dugouts appearing like sunspots, but she said, ‘How’re my jacarandas coming along? Someone was telling me there’s no reason why they shouldn’t do, Dickie. The boys must make a decent trench round each one and let it fill up with water once a week, right up, d’you see?’

  ‘The effect of travel on a man whose heart is in the right place is that the mind is made more self-reliant; it becomes more confident of its own resources – there is greater presence of mind. The body is soon well-knit; the muscles of the limbs grow hard as a board . . . the countenance is bronzed and there is no dyspepsia.’

  Carl Church slept through the afternoon. He woke to the feeling of helplessness he had at lunch. But no chagrin. This sort of hiatus had opened up in the middle of a tour many times – lost days in a blizzard on Gander airport, a week in quarantine at Aden. This time he had the journals instead of a Gideon Bible. ‘Nothing fell from his lips as last words to survivors. We buried him today by a large baobab tree.’ There was no point in going back to the capital if he couldn’t get out of the place till Monday. His mind was closed to the possibility of trying for Moambe, again; that was another small rule for self-preservation: if something goes wrong, write it off. He thought, it’s all right here; the dirty, ugly room had as much relevance to ‘spoiling’ the eagles and the lake as he had had to the eagles when he climbed close. On his way down to the lake again he saw a little group – mother, son, receptionist – standing round the graveside of one of the holes for trees. Dickie was still in his bathing trunks.

  Church had the goggles and the flippers and the speargun, and he swam out towards the woolly islands – they were unattainably far – and fish were dim dead leaves in the water below him. The angle of the late afternoon sun left the underwater deserted, filled with motes of vegetable matter and sand caught by oblique rays of light. Milky brilliance surrounded him, his hands went out as if to feel for walls; there was the apprehension, down there, despite the opacity and tepidity, of night and cold. He shot up to the surface and felt the day on his eyelids. Lying on the sand, he heard the eagles cry now behind him on the headland, where trees held boulders in their claws, now over the lake. A pair of piebald kingfishers squabbled, a whirling disk, in midair, and plummeted again and again. Butterflies with the same black and white markings went slowly out over the water. The Arabised fisherman was still working at his nets.

  Some weekend visitors arrived from the hotel, shading their eyes against the sheen of the lake; soon they stood in it like statues broken off at the waist. Voices flew out across the water after the butterflies. As the sun drowned, a dhow climbed out of its dazzle and dipped steadily towards the beach. It picked up the fisherman and his nets, sending a tiny boat ashore. The dhow lay beating slowly, like an exhausted bird. The visitors ran together to watch as they would have for a rescue, a monster – any sign from the lake.

  Carl Church had been lying with his hand slack on the sand as on a warm body; he got up and walked past the people, past the baobab, as far along the beach as it went before turning into an outwork of oozy reeds. He pushed his feet into his shoes and went up inland, through the thorn bushes. As soon as he turned his back on it, the lake did not exist; unlike the sea that spread and sucked in your ears even when your eyes were closed. A total silence. Livingstone could have come upon the lake quite suddenly, and just as easily have missed it. The mosquitoes and gnats rose with the going down of the sun. Swatted on Church’s face, they stuck in sweat. The air over the lake was free, but the heat of day cobwebbed the bush. ‘We then hoped that his youth and unimpaired constitution would carry him through . . . but about six o’clock in the evening his mind began to wander and continued to. His bodily powers continued gradually to sink till the period mentioned when he quietly expired . . . there he rests in sure and certain hope of a glorious Resurrection.’ He thought he might have a look at the graves, the graves of Livingstone’s companions, but the description of how to find them given him that morning by the young man and the girl was that of people who know a place so well they cannot imagine anyone being unable to walk straight to it. A small path, they said, just off the road. He found himself instead among ruined arcades whose whiteness intensified as the landscape darkened. It was an odd ruin: a solid complex of buildings, apparently not in bad repair, had been pulled down. It was the sort of demolition one saw in a fast-growing city, where a larger structure would be begun at once where the not-old one had been. The bush was all around; as far as the Congo, as far as the latitude where the forests began. A conical anthill had risen to the height of the arcades, where a room behind them must have been. A huge moon sheeny as the lake came up and a powdery blue heat held in absolute stillness. Carl Church thought of the graves. It was difficult to breathe; it must have been hell to die here, in this unbearable weight of beauty not shared with the known world, licked in the face by the furred tongue of this heat.

  Round the terrace and hotel the ground was pitted by the stakes of high heels; they sounded over the floors where everyone else went barefoot. The shriek and scatter of chickens opened before a constant coming and going of houseboys and the ragged work gang whose activities sent up the regular grunt of axe thudding into stumps and the crunch of spade gritting into earth. The tree-holes had been filled in. Dickie was seen in his bathing trunks but did not appear on the beach. Zelide wore a towelling chemise over her bikini, and when the guests were at lunch, went from table to table bending to talk softly with her rough hair hiding her face. Carl Church saw that the broken skin on her nose and cheeks was repaired with white cream. She said confidentially, ‘I just wanted to tell you there’ll be a sort of beach party tonight, being Saturday. Mrs Palmer likes to have a fire on the beach, and some snacks – you know. Of course, we’ll all eat here first. You’re welcome.’

  He said, ‘How about my room?’

  Her voice sank to a chatty whisper, ‘Oh it’ll be all right, one crowd’s cancelled.’

  Going to the bar for cigarettes, he heard mother and son in there. ‘Wait, wait, all that’s worked out. I’mn’a cover the whole thing with big blow-ups of the top groups, the Stones and the Shadows and such-like.’

  ‘Oh grow up, Dickie my darling, you want it to look like a teenager’s bedroom?’

  Church went quietly away, remembering there might be a packet of cigarettes in the car, but bumped into Dickie a few minutes later, in the yard. Dickie had his skin-diving stuff and was obviously on his way to the lake. ‘I get into shit for movin
g the bar without telling the licensing people over in town, and then she says let’s have the bar counter down on the beach tonight – all in the same breath, that’s nothing to her. At least when my stepfather’s here he knows just how to put the brake on.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘I don’t know, something about some property of hers, in town. He’s got to see about it. But he’s always got business all over, for her. I had my own band, you know, we’ve even toured Rhodesia. I’m a solo artist, really. Guitar. I compose my own stuff. I mean, what I play’s original, you see. Night club engagements and such-like.’

  ‘That’s a tough life compared with this,’ Church said, glancing at the speargun.

  ‘Oh, this’s all right. If you learn how to do it well, y’know? I’ve trained myself. You’ve got to concentrate. Like with my guitar. I have to go away and be undisturbed, you understand – right away. Sometimes the mood comes, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes I compose all night. I got to be left in peace.’ He was fingering a new thick silver chain on his wrist. ‘Lady Jane, of course. God knows what it cost. She spends a fortune on presents. You sh’d see what my sister gets when she’s home. And what she gave my stepfather – I mean before, when they weren’t married yet. He must have ten pairs of cuff-links, gold, I don’t know what.’ He sat down under the weight of his mother’s generosity.

  Zelide appeared among the empty gas containers and beer crates outside the kitchen. ‘Oh, Dickie, you’ve had no lunch. I don’t think he ever tastes a thing he catches.’

  Dickie squeezed her thigh and said coldly, ‘S’best time, now. People don’t know it. Between now and about half past three.’

  There had always been something more than a family resemblance about that face; at last it fell into place in Church’s mind. Stiff blond curls, skull ominously present in the eye sockets, shiny cheekbones furred with white hairs, blue-red lips, and those eyes that seemed to have no eyelids, to turn away from nothing and take in nothing: the face of the homosexual boy in the Berlin twenties, the perfect, impure master-race face of a George Grosz drawing.