Life Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  But usually people didn’t mind their offhand reception. By the time they arrived at the river village they had travelled two days from the last village over desert and dried-out salt pans; they had slept out under the crushing silence of a night sky that ignored them and held no human sound other than their own small rustlings. They were inclined to emerge from their jeeps feeling unreal. The sight of Mrs Cunningham, in her flowered print dress, with a brooch on her big bosom, and her big, bright-skinned face looking clerically dazed beneath her thick permanent, was the known world, to them; Friday’s footprint in the sand. And when she appeared in the bar, in the evening, they found out that she was quite nice, after all. She wore a ribbon in her large head of light curly hair, then, and like many fat women, she looked suddenly not young, but babyish. She did not drink – occasionally she would giggle experimentally over a glass of sweet sherry – and would sit reading a week-old Johannesburg paper that someone had brought up with him in his car.

  A man served the drinks with light, spry movements that made everything he did seem like sleight of hand.

  ‘Is that really Mrs Cunningham’s husband?’ newcomers would ask, when they had struck up acquaintance with the three permanent guests – the veterinary officer, the meteorological officer and the postmaster. The man behind the bar, who talked out of the curl of his upper lip, was small and slender and looked years younger than she did, although of course he was not – he was thirty-nine and only a year her junior. Outdoors, and in the daylight, his slenderness was the leanness of cured meat, his boy film-star face, with the satyr-shaped head of upstanding curly hair, the black, frown-framed eyes and forward-jutting mouth, was a monkey face, lined, watchful, always old.

  Looking at him in the light of the bar, one of the permanent guests would explain, behind his glass, ‘Her second husband, of course. Arthur Cunningham’s dead. But this one’s some sort of relative of her first husband, he’s a Cunningham, too.’

  Rita Cunningham did not always see nothing when she turned to look at the water. Sometimes (what times? she struggled to get herself to name – oh, times; when she had slept badly, or when – things – were not right) she saw the boat coming across the flooded river. She looked at the wide, shimmering, sluggish water where the water lilies floated shining in the sun and she began to see, always at the same point, approaching the middle of the river from the other bank, the boat moving slowly under its heavy load. It was their biggest boat; it was carrying eight sewing machines and a black-japanned iron double bedstead as well as the usual stores, and Arthur and three store boys were sitting on top of the cargo. As the boat reached the middle of the river, it turned over, men and cargo toppled, and the iron bed came down heavily on top of their flailing arms, their arms stuck through the bars as the bed sank, taking them down beneath it. That was all. There was a dazzle of sun on the water, where they had been; the water lilies were thickest there.

  She had not been there when it happened. She had been in Johannesburg on that yearly holiday that they all looked forward to so much. She had been sitting in the best seats on the stand at the Wanderers’ Ground, the third day running, watching the international cricket test between South Africa and the visiting New Zealand team. Three of her children were with her – the little boy had the autographs of all the men in both teams; and Johnny was there. Johnny Cunningham, her husband’s stepbrother, who had worked with them at the hotel and the stores for the last few years, and who, as he did every year since he had begun to work for them, had driven her down to Johannesburg, so that she could have a longer holiday than the time her husband, Arthur, could spare away from his work. The arrangement was always that Arthur came down to Johannesburg after his wife had been there for two weeks, and then Johnny Cunningham drove himself back to the hotel alone, to take care of things there.

  Ever since she was a girl, she had loved cricket. At home, up in the territory, she’d have the radio going in the hotel office while she worked, if there was a cricket commentary on, just as some people might like a little background music. She was happy, that day, high up in the stand in the shade. The grass was green, the figures of the players plaster-white. The sweet, short sound of the ball brought good-natured murmurs, roars of approval, dwindling growls of disappointment following it, from the crowd. There was the atmosphere of ease of people who are well enough off to take a day’s holiday from the office and spend it drinking beer, idly watching a game, and getting a red, warm look, so that they appear more like a bed of easy-growing flowers than a crowd of human faces. Every now and then, a voice over the loudspeaker would announce some request or other – would the owner of car TJ 986339 please report to the ticket office at once; a lady’s fob watch had been lost, and would anyone . . . et cetera; an urgent telegram, I repeat, an urgent telegram awaits Mr So-and-so . . . The voice was addicted to the phrase ‘I repeat,’ and there were mock groans here and there, among the crowd, every time the voice began to speak – she herself had exchanged a little shrug of amusement with someone in the row ahead who had turned in exasperation at the umpteenth ‘I repeat’ that day. And then, at exactly quarter past three in the afternoon, her own name was spoken by the voice. ‘Will Mrs Rita Cunningham, of Olongwe, I repeat, Olongwe, please report to the main entrance immediately. This is an urgent message for Mrs Rita Cunningham. Will Mrs Cunningham please report . . .’

  She turned to Johnny at once, surprised, pulling a face.

  ‘I wouldn’t know,’ he said, giving a short, bored laugh. (He preferred a good fast rugby game any time, but Arthur, wanting to give him a treat, had said to his wife, ‘Get a cricket ticket for Johnny too, take Johnny along one of the days.’)

  She said, smiling and confused, bridling, ‘Somebody’s making a silly ass of me, calling me out like this.’

  ‘Awright,’ he said, slapping down his box of cigarettes and getting up with the quickness of impatience, ‘I’ll go.’

  She hesitated a moment; she had suddenly thought of her fourth child, the naughty one, Margie, who had been left playing at the house of the Johannesburg relatives with whom the Cunninghams were staying. ‘Oh, I’d better go. I suppose it must be Margie; I wonder what she’s gone and done to herself now, the little devil.’

  Johnny sat down again. ‘Please yourself.’ And she got up and made her way up the stand. As soon as she got to the entrance she saw her sister Ruth’s car drawn up right at the gates where no one was allowed to park, and before she had seen her sister and her brother-in-law standing there, turned towards her, a throb of dread beat up once, in her throat.

  ‘What happened? Did she run in the street—’ she cried, rushing up to them. The man and the woman stared at her as if they were afraid of her.

  ‘Not Margie,’ said the man. ‘It’s not Margie. Come into the car.’

  And in the car, outside the cricket ground, still within sound of the plock of the ball and the voice of the crowd rising to it, they told her that a telegram had come saying that Arthur had been drowned that morning, bringing a boatload of goods over the flooded river.

  She did not cry until she got all the way back to the hotel on the bank of the river. She left the children behind, with her sister (the two elder girls went to boarding school in Johannesburg, anyway), and Johnny Cunningham drove her home.

  Once, in the middle of a silence as vast as the waste of sand they were grinding through, she said, ‘Who would ever have dreamt it would happen to him. The things he’d done in his time, and never come to any harm.’

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ Johnny agreed, his pipe between his teeth.

  In Johannesburg they had all said to one another, ‘It’ll hit her when she gets back.’ But although she had believed the fact of her husband’s death when she was away from the village, in the unreality of the city – once she saw and smelled the village again, once she stepped into the hotel, it all seemed nonsense. Nothing was changed. It was all there, wasn’t it? The wildebeest skins pegged out to tan, the old horns half buried in the sand, the pl
aster Johnny Walker on the counter in the bar; the river.

  Two days later one of the store boys came over to the hotel with some cheques for her to sign, and, standing in the office doorway with his old hat in his hand, said to her in a hoarse low voice, as if he wanted no one, not even the dead, to overhear, ‘He was a good man. Missus, he was a very good man. Oh, missus.’

  She cried. While she wrote her name on the cheques and silently handed them back to the elderly black man, it came: strong pity for Arthur, who had been alive, as she was, and was now dead. When she was alone again she sat on at the desk staring at the spikes of invoices and the rubber stamps and the scratched and ink-stained wood, and she wept in pity for the pain of that strong, weathered man, filling his lungs with water with every breath under the weight of the iron bedstead. She wept at the cruel fact of death; perhaps that was not quite what her relatives in Johannesburg had meant when they had said that it would hit her when she got home – but she wept, anyway.

  Slowly, in short bursts of confidence that stopped abruptly or tailed off in embarrassment, people began to talk to her about the drowning. This one spared her this detail, another told her it and spared her something else; so it was that she had put together, out of what she had been told, that silent, unreal, orderly picture, scarcely supplemented at all by imagination, since she had very little, that she sometimes saw rise on the river and sink out of sight again.

  The facts were simple and horrible. Arthur Cunningham had been doing what he had done dozens of times before; what everyone in the village had done time and again, whenever the river was flooded and the bridge was down. The bridge was either down or under water almost every year, at the height of the rainy season, and when this happened the only way to reach the village was by boat. That December day there was a pack of stuff to get across the river – all the food for the hotel and the store goods, which had come up north by truck. Arthur Cunningham was the sort of man who got things done himself; that was the only way to get them done. He went back and forth with the boys four times, that morning, and they were making some headway. ‘Come on, let’s see if we c’n git things going,’ he kept chivvying at the white assistants who were in charge of unloading the trucks, and were sweating with haste and the nervous exhaustion of working under his eye. ‘I dunno, honestly, I’ve got my boat, I’ve got my team of boys, and what’s happening? I’m waiting for you blokes. Don’t tickle that stuff, there, man! For Christ’s sake, get cracking. Get it on, get it on!’

  The Africans took his manner – snarling, smiling, insulting in its assumption (true) that he could do everything his workers did, but in half the time and twice as well – better than the white men. They laughed and grumbled back at him, and groaned under his swearing and his taunts. When the boat was fully loaded for the fifth trip, he noticed the black-japanned double bed, in its component parts, but not assembled, propped against a crate. ‘What about that thing?’ he yelled. ‘Don’t keep leaving that behind for the next lot, you bloody fools. Get it on, get it on. That’s a new bed for the Chief’s new wife, that’s an important order.’ And he roared with laughter. He went up to a pimply little twenty-two-year-old clerk, whose thin hair, tangled with the rims of his glasses, expressed wild timidity. ‘You shouldn’t be too young to know how important a nice comfortable big bed is? You expect the old Chief to wait till tomorrow? How’d’you feel, if you were waiting for that beautiful bed for a beautiful new woman—’ And while the young man peered at him, startled, Arthur Cunningham roared with laughter again.

  ‘Mr Cunningham, the boat’s full,’ another white assistant called.

  ‘Never mind, full! Put it on, man. I’m sick of seeing that bed lying here. Put it on!’

  ‘I don’t know how you’ll get it over, it makes the whole load top-heavy.’

  Arthur Cunningham walked up to his clerk. He was a man of middle height, with a chest and a belly, big, hard and resonant, like the body of a drum, and his thick hands and sandy-haired chest, that always showed in the open neck of his shirt, were blotched and wrinkled with resistance to and in tough protection against the sun. His face was red and he had even false teeth in a lipless mouth that was practical-looking rather than mean or unkind.

  ‘Come on, Harris,’ he said, as if he were taking charge of a child. ‘Come on now, and no damn nonsense. Take hold here.’ And he sent the man, tottering under the weight of the foot of the bed while he himself carried the head, down to the boat.

  Rita had married him when she was twenty-three, and he was sixteen or seventeen years older than she was. He had looked almost exactly the same when she married him as he did the last time ever that she saw him, when he stood in the road with his hands on the sides of his belly and watched the car leave for Johannesburg. She was a virgin, she had never been in love, when she married him; he had met her on one of his trips down south, taken a fancy to her, and that was that. He always did whatever he liked and got whatever he wanted. Since she had never been made love to by a young man, she accepted his command of her in bed as the sum of love; his tastes in love-making, like everything else about him, were formed before she knew him, and he was as set in this way as he was in others. She never knew him, of course, because she had nothing of the deep need to possess his thoughts and plumb his feelings that comes of love.

  He was as generous as his tongue was rough, which meant that his tongue took the edge off his generosity at least as often as his generosity took the sting out of his tongue. He had hunted and fished and traded all over Africa, and he had great contempt for travellers’ tales. When safari parties stayed at his hotel, he criticised their weapons (What sort of contraption do you call that? I’ve shot round about fifty lion in my lifetime, without any telescopic sights, I can tell you), their camping equipment (I don’t know what all this fuss is about water filters and what-not. I’ve drunk water that was so filthy I’ve had to lean over and draw it into my mouth through a bit of rag, and been none the worse for it), and their general helplessness. But he also found experienced native guides for these people, and lent them the things they had forgotten to buy down south. He was conscious of having made a number of enemies, thinly scattered in that sparsely populated territory, and was also conscious of his good standing, of the fact that everybody knew him, and of his ownership of the hotel, the two stores, and whatever power there was in the village.

  His stepmother had been an enemy of his, in that far-off childhood that he had overcome long ago, but he had had no grudge against his young stepbrother, her son, who must have had his troubles, too, adopted into a house full of Cunninghams. Johnny’d been rolling around the world for ten years or so – America, Mexico, Australia – when he turned up in the territory one day, stony-broke and nowhere in particular to go. Arthur wasn’t hard on him, though he chaffed him a bit, of course, and after the boy’d been loafing around the river and hotel for a month, Arthur suggested that he might give a hand in one of the stores. Johnny took the hint in good part – ‘Got to stop being a bum sometime, I suppose,’ he said, and turned out to be a surprisingly good worker. Soon he was helping at the hotel, too – where, of course, he was living, anyway. And soon he was one of the family, doing whatever there was to be done.

  Yet he kept himself to himself. ‘I’ve got a feeling he’ll just walk out, when he feels like it, same as he came,’ Rita said to Arthur, with some resentment. She had a strong sense of loyalty and was always watchful of any attempt to take advantage of her husband, who had in such careless abundance so many things that other men wanted.

  ‘Oh for Pete’s sake, Rita, he’s a bit of a natural sourpuss, that’s all. He lives his life and we live ours. There’s nothing wrong with the way he works, and nothing else about old Johnny interests me.’

  The thing was, in a community the size of the village, and in the close life of the little hotel, that life of Johnny Cunningham’s was lived, if in inner isolation, outwardly under their noses. He ate at table with them, usually speaking only when he was spoken to. W
hen, along with the Cunningham couple, he got drawn into a party of hotel guests, he sat drinking with great ease but seldom bothered to contribute anything to the talk, and would leave the company with an abrupt, sardonic-sounding ‘Excuse me’ whenever he pleased.

  The only times he came ‘out of his shell’, as Rita used to put it to her husband, were on dance nights. He had arrived in the territory during the jive era, but his real triumphs on the floor came with the advent of rock ’n’ roll. He learnt it from a film, originally – the lounge of the hotel was the local cinema, too, on Thursday nights – and he must have supplemented his self-teaching on the yearly holidays in Johannesburg. Anyway, he was expert, and on dance nights he would take up from her grass chair one of the five or six lumpy girls from the village, at whom he never looked, at any other time, let alone spoke to, and would transform her within the spell of his own rhythm. Sometimes he did this with women among the hotel guests, too; ‘Look at old Johnny, giving it stick,’ Arthur Cunningham would say, grinning, in the scornfully admiring tone of someone praising a performance that he wouldn’t stoop to, himself. There was something about Johnny, his mouth slightly open, the glimpse of saliva gleaming on his teeth, his head thrown back and his eyes narrowed while his body snaked on stooping legs and nimble feet, that couldn’t be ignored.