Life Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  ‘Oh Dickie, I wish you’d eat something. And he’s got to play tonight.’ They watched him lope off lightly down the garden. Her hair and the sun obscured her. ‘They’re both artistic, you see, that’s the trouble. What a performance.’

  ‘Are you sorry you came?’

  ‘Oh no. The weather’s so lovely, I mean, isn’t it?’

  It was becoming a habit to open Livingstone’s Journals at random before falling stunned-asleep. ‘Now that I am on the point of starting another trip into Africa I feel quite exhilarated: when one travels with the specific object in view of ameliorating the condition of the natives every act becomes ennobled.’ The afternoon heat made him think of women, this time, and he gave up his siesta because he believed that daydreams of this kind were not so much adolescent as – worse – a sign of approaching age. He was getting – too far along, for pauses like this; for time out. If he were not preoccupied with doing the next thing, he did not know what to do. His mind turned to death, the graves that his body would not take the trouble to visit. His body turned to women; his body was unchanged. It took him down to the lake, heavy and vigorous, reddened by the sun under the black hairs shining on his belly.

  The sun was high in a splendid afternoon. In half an hour he missed three fish and began to feel challenged. Whenever he dived deeper than fifteen or eighteen feet his ears ached much more than they ever had in the sea. Out of training, of course. And the flippers and goggles lent by the hotel really did not fit properly. The goggles leaked at every dive, and he had to surface quickly, water in his nostrils. He began to let himself float aimlessly, not diving any longer, circling around the enormous boulders with their steep polished flanks like petrified tree trunks. He was aware, as he had been often when skin-diving, of how active his brain became in this world of silence; ideas and images interlocking in his mind while his body was leisurely moving, enjoying at once the burning sun on his exposed shoulders and the cooling water on his shrunken penis – good after too many solitary nights filled with erotic dreams.

  Then he saw the fish, deep down, twenty feet maybe, a yellowish nonchalant shape which seemed to pasture in a small forest of short dead reeds. He took a noble breath, dived with all the power and swiftness he could summon from his body, and shot. The miracle happened again. The nonchalant shape became a frenzied spot of light, reflecting the rays of the sun in a series of flashes through the pale blue water as it swivelled in agony round the spear. It was – this moment – the only miracle Church knew; no wonder Africans used to believe that the hunter’s magic worked when the arrow found the prey.

  He swam up quickly, his eyes on the fish hooked at the end of the spear, feeling the tension of its weight while he was hauling it and the line between spear and gun straightened. Eight pounds, ten, perhaps. Even Dickie with his silver amulets and bracelets couldn’t do better. He reached the surface, hurriedly lifted the goggles to rid them of water, and dived again: the fish was still continuing its spiralling fight. He saw now that he had not transfixed it; only the point of the spear had penetrated the body. He began carefully to pull the line towards him; the spear was in his hand when, with a slow motion, the fish unhooked itself before his eyes.

  In its desperate, thwarted leaps it had unscrewed the point and twirled loose. This had happened once before, in the Mediterranean, and since then Church had taken care to tighten the spearhead from time to time while fishing. Today he had forgotten. Disappointment swelled in him. Breathlessness threatened to burst him like a bubble. He had to surface, abandoning the gun in order to free both arms. The fish disappeared round a boulder with the point of the harpoon protruding from its open belly amid flimsy pinkish ribbons of entrails; the gun was floating at mid distance between the surface and the bed of the lake, anchored to the spear sunk in dead reeds.

  Yet the splendour of the afternoon remained. He lay and smoked and drank beer brought by a waiter who roamed the sand, flicking a napkin. Church had forgotten what had gone wrong, to bring him to this destination. He was here; as he was not often fully present in the places and situations in which he found himself. It was some sort of answer to the emptiness he had felt on the bed. Was this how the first travellers had borne it, each day detached from the last and the next, taking each night that night’s bearing by the stars?

  Madam – Lady Jane in person – had sent down a boy to pick up bottle tops and cigarette stubs from the water’s edge. She had high standards. (She had said so in the bar last night. ‘The trouble is, they’ll never be any different, they just don’t know how to look after anything.’) This was the enlightenment the discoverers had brought the black man in the baggage he portered for them on his head. This one was singing to himself as he worked. If the plans that were being made in the capital got the backing of the World Bank and the UN Development Fund and all the rest of it, his life would change. Whatever happened to him, he would lose the standard that had been set by people who maintained it by using him to pick up their dirt. Church thought of the ruin – he’d forgotten to ask what it was. Lady Jane’s prefabricated concrete blocks and terrazzo would fall down more easily.

  He had had a shirt washed and although he was sweating under the light bulb when he put it on for dinner, he seemed to have accustomed himself to the heat, now. He was also very sunburned. The lady with the small child sat with a jolly party of Germans in brown sandals – apparently from a Lutheran Mission nearby – and there was a group of men down from the capital on a bachelor binge of skin-diving and drinking who were aware of being the life of the place. They caught out at Zelide, her thick feet pressed into smart shoes, her hair lifted on top of her head, her eyes made up to twice their size. She bore her transformation bravely, smiling.

  ‘You are coming down to the beach, arnch you?’ She went, concerned, from table to table. Mrs Palmer’s heels announced her with the authority of a Spanish dancer. She had on a strapless blue dress and silver sandals, and carried a little gilt bag like an outsize cigarette box. She joined the missionary party: ‘Wie geht’s, Father, have you been missing me?’ Dickie didn’t appear. Through the frangipani, the fire on the beach was already sending up scrolls of flame.

  Church knew he would be asked to join one group or another and out of a kind of shame of anticipated boredom (last night there had been one of those beer-serious conversations about the possibility of the end of the world: ‘They say the one thing’ll survive an atomic explosion is the ant. The ant’s got something special in its body, y’see’) he went into the empty bar after dinner. The little black barman was almost inaudible, in order to disguise his lack of English. There was an array of fancy bottles set up on the shelves but most of them seemed to belong to Mrs Palmer’s store of objets d’art: ‘Is finish’.’ Church had to content himself with a brandy from South Africa. He asked whether a dusty packet of cigarillos was for sale, and the barman’s hand went from object to object on display before the correct one was identified. Church was smoking and throwing darts as if they were stones, when Dickie came in. Dickie wore a dinner jacket; his lapels were blue satin, his trousers braided, his shirt tucked and frilled; his hands emerged from ruffles and the little finger of the left one rubbed and turned the baroque ring on the finger beside it. He hung in the doorway a moment like a tall, fancy doll; his mother might have put him on a piano.

  Church said, ‘My God, you’re grand,’ and Dickie looked down at himself for a second, without interest, as one acknowledges one’s familiar working garb. The little barman seemed flattened by Dickie’s gaze.

  ‘Join me?’

  Dickie gave a boastful, hard-wrung smile. ‘No thanks. I think I’ve had enough already.’ He had the look his mother had had, when Church asked her where her hotel was. ‘I’ve been drinking all afternoon. Ever since a phone call.’

  ‘Well you don’t look it,’ said Church. But it was the wrong tone to take up.

  Dickie played a tattoo on the bar with the ringed hand, staring at it. ‘There was a phone call from Bulawayo, and a ce
rtain story was repeated to me. Somebody’s made it their business to spread a story.’

  ‘That’s upsetting.’

  ‘It may mean the loss of a future wife, that’s what. My fiancée in Bulawayo. Somebody took the trouble to tell her there’s a certain young lady in the hotel here with me. Somebody had nothing better to do than make trouble. But that young lady is my mother’s secretary-receptionist, see? She works here, she’s employed, just like me. Just like I’m the manager.’

  From country to country, bar to bar, Church was used to accepting people’s own versions of their situations, quite independently of the facts. He and Dickie contemplated the vision of Dickie fondling Zelide in the garden as evidence of the correctness of his relations with the secretary-receptionist. ‘Couldn’t you explain?’

  ‘Usually if I’m, you know, depressed and that, I play my guitar. But I’ve just been strumming. No, I don’t think I’ll have any more tonight, I’m full enough already. The whole afternoon.’

  ‘Why don’t you go to Bulawayo?’

  Dickie picked up the darts and began to throw them, at an angle, from where he sat at the bar; while he spoke he scored three bull’s-eyes. ‘Huh, I think I’ll clear out altogether. Here I earn fifty quid a month, eh? I can earn twenty pounds a night – a night – with a personal appearance. I’ve got a whole bundle of my own compositions and one day, boy! – there’s got to be one that hits the top. One day it’s got to happen. All my stuff is copyright, you see. Nobody’s gonna cut a disc of my stuff without my permission. I see to that. Oh I could play you a dozen numbers I’m working on, they’re mostly sad, you know – the folk type of thing, that’s where the money is now. What’s a lousy fifty quid a month?’

  ‘I meant a quick visit, to put things straight.’

  ‘Ah, somebody’s mucked up my life, all right’ – he caught Church’s eye as if to say, you want to see it again? – and once again planted three darts dead-centre. ‘I’ll play you some of my compositions if you like. Don’t expect too much of my voice, though, because as I say I’ve been drinking all afternoon. I’ve got no intention whatever of playing for them down there. An artist thrown in, fifty quid a month, they can think again.’ He ducked under the doorway and was gone. He returned at once with a guitar and bent over it professionally, making adjustments. Then he braced his long leg against the bar rail, tossed back his skull of blond curls, began a mournful lay – broke off: ‘I’m full of pots, you know, my voice’ – and started again, high and thin, at the back of his nose.

  It was a song about a bride, and riding away, and tears you cannot hide away. Carl Church held his palm round the brandy glass to conceal that it was empty and looked down into it. The barman had not moved from his stance with both hands before him on the bar and the bright light above him beating sweat out of his forehead and nose like an answer exacted under interrogation. When the stanza about death and last breath was reached, Dickie said, ‘It’s a funny thing, me nearly losing my engagement ring this morning, eh? I might have known something’ – paused – and thrummed once, twice. Then he began the song over again.

  Carl Church signalled for the brandy bottle. But suddenly Mrs Palmer was there, a queen to whom no door may be closed. ‘Oh show a bit of spunk! Everyone’s asking for you. I tell him, everyone has to take a few cracks in life, am I right?’

  ‘Well, of course.’

  ‘Come on then, don’t encourage him to feel sorry for himself. My God, if I’d sat down and cried every time.’

  Dickie went on playing and whispering the words to himself.

  ‘Can’t you do something with him?’

  ‘Let’s go and join the others, Dickie,’ Church said; he drank off the second brandy.

  ‘One thing I’ve never done is let people down,’ Mrs Palmer was saying. ‘But these kids’ve got no sense of responsibility. What’d happen without me I don’t know.’

  Dickie spoke. ‘Well you can have it. You can have the fifty pounds a month and the car. The lot.’

  ‘Oh yes, they’d look fine without me, I can tell you. I would have given everything I’ve built up over to him, that was the idea, once he was married. But they know everything at once, you know, you can’t teach them anything.’

  ‘Come on Dickie, what the hell – just for an hour.’

  They jostled him down to the fire-licked faces on the beach. A gramophone was playing and people were dancing barefoot. There were not enough women and men in shorts were drinking and clowning. Dickie was given beer; he made cryptic remarks that nobody listened to. Somebody stopped the gramophone with a screech and Dickie was tugged this way and that in a clamour to have him play the guitar. But the dancers put the record back again. The older men among the bachelors opposed the rhythm of the dancers with a war dance of their own: Hi-zoom-a-zoom-ba, zoom-zoom-zoom. Zelide kept breaking away from her partners to offer a plate of tiny burnt sausages like bird-droppings. HI-ZOOM-A-ZOOM-BA – ZOOM-ZOOM-ZOOM. Light fanned from the fire showed the dancers as figures behind gauze, but where Church was marooned, near the streaming flames, faces were gleaming, gouged with grotesque shadow. Lady Jane had a bottle of gin for the two of them. The heat of the fire seemed to consume the other heat, of the night, so that the spirit going down his gullet snuffed out on the way in a burning evaporation. HI-ZOOM-A-ZOOM-BA. At some point he was dancing with her, and she put a frangipani flower in his ear. Now Dickie, sitting drunk on a box with his long legs at an angle like a beetle’s, wanted to play the guitar but nobody would listen. Church could make out from the shapes Dickie’s mouth made that he was singing the song about the bride and riding away, but the roar of the bachelors drowned it: Hold him down, you Zulu warrior, hold him DOWN, you Zulu chief-chief-ief. Every now and then a slight movement through the lake sent a soft, black glittering glance in reflection of the fire. The lake was not ten feet away but as time went by Church had the impression that it would not be possible for him to walk down, through the barrier of jigging firelight and figures, and let it cover his ankles, his hands. He said to her, topping up the two glasses where they had made a place in the sand, ‘Was there another hotel?’

  ‘There’s been talk, but no one else’s ever had the initiative, when it comes to the push.’

  ‘But whose was that rather nice building, in the bush?’

  ‘Not my idea of a hotel. My husband built it in forty-nine. Started it in forty-nine, finished it fifty-two or -three. Dickie was still a kiddie.’

  ‘But what happened? It looks as if it’s been deliberately pulled down.’

  CHIEF-UH-IEF-UH-IEF-IEF-IEF. The chorus was a chanting grunt.

  ‘It was what?’

  She was saying, ‘. . . died, I couldn’t even give it away. I always told him, it’s no good putting up a bloody palace of a place, you haven’t got the class of person who appreciates it. Too big, far too big. No atmosphere, whatever you tried to do with it. People like to feel cosy and free and easy.’

  He said, ‘I liked that colonnaded veranda, it must have been rather beautiful,’ but she was yanked away to dance with one of the bachelors.

  Zelide wandered about anxiously: ‘You quite happy?’

  He took her to dance; she was putting a good face on it. He said, ‘Don’t worry about them, they’re tough. Look at those eyes.’

  ‘If there was somewhere to go,’ she said. ‘It’s not like a town, not like at home, you know – you can just disappear. Oh there she is, for God’s sake—’

  He said to Mrs Palmer, ‘That veranda, before you bulldozed it—’ but she took no notice and attacked him at once: ‘Where’s Dickie? I don’t see Dickie.’

  ‘I don’t know where the hell Dickie is.’

  Clinging to his arm she dragged him through the drinkers, the dancers, the bachelors, round the shadowy human lumps beyond the light that started away from each other, making him give a snuffling laugh because they were like the chickens that first day. She raced him stumbling up the dark terraces to Dickie’s cottage, but it was overpoweringly empt
y with the young man’s smell of musky leather and wet wool. She was alarmed as an animal who finds the lair deserted. ‘I tell you, he’ll do something to himself.’ Ten yards from the bungalows and the main house, the bush was the black end of the world; they walked out into it and stood helplessly. A torch was a pale, blunt, broken stump of light. ‘He’ll do away with himself,’ she panted.

  Church was afraid her breathing would turn to hysterics; ‘Come on, now, come on,’ he coaxed her back to the lights burning in the empty hotel. She went, but steered towards quarters he had not noticed or visited. There were lamps in pink shades. Photographs of her in the kind of dress she was wearing that night, smiling over the head of an infant Dickie. A flowered sofa they sat down on, and a little table with filigree boxes and a lighter shaped like Aladdin’s lamp and gilt-covered matchbooks with Dorothy stamped across the corner.

  ‘Take some,’ she said, and began putting them in his pockets, both outer pockets of his jacket and the inner breast pocket. ‘Take some, I’ve got hundreds.’ She dropped her head against him and let the blonde curls muffle her face: ‘Like his father did,’ she said. ‘I know it. I tell you I know it.’

  ‘He’s passed out somewhere, that’s all.’ She smelled of Chanel No. 5, the only perfume he could identify, because he had bought it on the black market for various girls in Cairo during the war. Where she leant on him her breasts were warmer than the rest of her.

  ‘I tell you I know he’ll do something to himself sooner or later. It runs in families, I know it.’

  ‘Don’t worry. It’s all right.’ He thought: an act of charity. It was terribly dark outside; the whole night was cupped round the small flickering of flames and figures, figures like flames, reaching upwards in flame, snatched by the dark, on the beach. He knew the lake was there; neither heard nor seen, quite black. The lake. The lake. He felt, inevitably, something resembling desire, but it was more like a desire for the cool mouth of waters that would close over ankles, knees, thighs, sex. He was drunk and not very capable, and felt he would never get there, to the lake. The lake became an unslakable thirst, the night-thirst, the early-morning thirst that cannot stir a hand for the surcease of water.