Life Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  ‘Well, he seems to be happy that way,’ Rita would say with a laugh, embarrassed for the man.

  Sometimes Johnny slept with one of these women guests (there was no bed that withheld its secrets from the old German housekeeper, who, in turn, insisted on relating all she knew to Rita Cunningham). It was tacitly accepted that there was some sort of connection between the rock ’n’ roll performance and the assignation; who would ever notice Johnny at any other time? But in between these infrequent one- or two-night affairs, he took no interest in women, and it seemed clear that marriage was something that never entered his head. Arthur paid him quite well, but he seemed neither to save nor to have any money. He bet (by radio, using the meteorological officer’s broadcasting set) on all the big races in Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg, and he had bought three cars, all equally unsuitable for road conditions up in the territory, and tinkered them to death in Arthur’s workshop.

  When he came back to the hotel with Rita Cunningham after Arthur was drowned, he went on with his work as usual. But after a week, all the great bulk of work, all the decisions that had been Arthur’s, could not be ignored any longer by considerate employees hoping to spare the widow. She said to Johnny at lunch, in her schoolgirlish way, ‘Can you come to the office afterwards? I mean, there’re some things we must fix up—’ When she came into the office he was already there, standing about like a workman, staring at the calendar on the wall.

  ‘Who’s going to see that the store orders don’t overlap, now?’ she said. ‘We’ve got to make that somebody’s job. And somebody’ll have to take over the costing of perishable goods, too, not old Johnson, Arthur always said he didn’t have a clue about it.’

  Johnny scratched his ear and said, ‘D’you want me to do it?’

  They looked at each other for a moment, thinking it over. There was no sign on his face either of eagerness or reluctance.

  ‘Well, if you could, Johnny, I think that’s best . . .’ And after a pause, she turned to something else. ‘Who can we make responsible for the bar – the ordering and everything? D’you think we should try and get a man?’

  He shrugged. ‘If you like. You could advertise in Jo’burg, or p’raps in Rhodesia. You won’t get anybody decent to come up here.’

  ‘I know.’ The distress of responsibility suddenly came upon her.

  ‘You could try,’ he said again.

  ‘We’ll get some old soak, I suppose, who can’t keep a job anywhere else.’

  ‘Sure,’ he said with his sour smile.

  ‘You don’t think,’ she said, ‘I mean just for now – Couldn’t we manage it between us? I mean you could serve, and perhaps the Allgood boy from the garage could come at weekends to give a hand, and then you and I could do the ordering?’

  ‘Sure,’ he said, rocking from his heels to his toes and back again, and looking out of the window, ‘I can do it, if you want to try.’

  She still could not believe that the wheels of these practical needs were carrying her along, and with her, the hotel and the two stores. ‘Oh yes,’ she said, distracted, ‘I think it’ll be OK, just for the time being, until I can . . .’ She did not finish what she was saying because she did not know what it was for which the arrangement was to be a makeshift.

  She took it for granted that she meant to sell the hotel and the two stores. Two of the children were at school in the south, already; the other two would have to follow when they had outgrown the village school, in a year or two. What was the point in her staying on, there, in a remote village, alone, two thousand miles from her children or her relatives?

  She talked, and she believed she acted, for the first six months after Arthur was drowned, as if the sale of the hotel and stores was imminent and inevitable. She even wrote to an agent in Johannesburg and an old lawyer friend in Rhodesia, asking their advice about what sort of price she could expect to get for her property and her businesses – Arthur had left everything to her.

  Johnny had taken over most of Arthur’s work. She, in her turn, had taken over some of Johnny’s. Johnny drove back to Johannesburg to fetch the two younger children home, and the hotel and the stores went on as usual. One evening when she was doing some work in the office after dinner, and giving half her attention to the talk of hotel matters with him, she added the usual proviso – ‘It would do in the meantime.’

  Johnny was hissing a tune through his teeth while he looked up the price of a certain brand of gin in a file of liquor wholesalers’ invoices – he was sure he remembered Arthur had a cheaper way of buying it than he himself knew – and he stopped whistling but went on looking and said, ‘What’ll you do with yourself in Johannesburg, anyway, Rita? You’ll have money and you won’t need a job.’

  She put down her pen and turned round, clutching at the straw of any comment on her position that would help her feel less adrift. ‘Wha’d’you mean?’

  ‘I suppose you’ll buy a house somewhere near your sister and live there looking after the two little kids.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she parried, but faltering, ‘I suppose I’d buy a house . . .’

  ‘Well, what else could you do with yourself?’

  He had made it all absolutely clear to her. It came over her with innocent dismay – she had not visualised it, thought about it, for herself: the house in a Johannesburg suburb, the two children at school in the mornings, the two children in bed after seven each night, her sister saying, you must come down to us just whenever you like.

  She got up slowly and turned, leaning her rump against the ridge of the desk behind her, frowning, unable to speak.

  ‘You’ve got something, here,’ he said.

  ‘But I always wanted to go. The summer – it’s so hot. We always said, one day, when the children—’ All her appeals to herself failed. She said, ‘But a woman – it’s silly – how can I carry on?’

  He watched her with interest, but would not save her with an interruption. He smoked and held his half-smoked cigarette between thumb and first finger, turned inwards towards his palm. He laughed. ‘You are carrying on,’ he said. He made a pantomime gesture of magnificence, raising his eyebrows, waggling his head slowly and pulling down the corners of his mouth. ‘All going strong. The whole caboodle. What you got to worry about?’

  She found herself laughing, the way children laugh when they are teased out of tears.

  In the next few weeks, a curious kind of pale happiness came over her. It was the happiness of relief from indecision, the happiness of confidence. She did not have to wonder if she could manage – she had been managing all the time! The confidence brought out something that had been in her all her life, dormant; she was capable, even a good businesswoman. She began to take a firm hand with the children, with the hotel servants, with the assistants at the stores. She even wrote a letter to the liquor wholesaler, demanding, on a certain brand of gin, the same special discount that her late husband had squeezed out of him.

  When the lawyer friend from Rhodesia, who was in charge of Arthur’s estate, came up to consult with her, she discussed with him the possibility of offering Johnny – not a partnership, no – but some sort of share, perhaps a fourth share in the hotel and the stores.

  ‘The only thing is, will he stay?’ she said.

  ‘Why shouldn’t he stay?’ said the lawyer, indicating the sound opportunity that was going to be offered to the man.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I always used to say to Arthur, I had the feeling he was the sort of man who would walk off, one day, same as he came.’

  In view of the steady work he had done – ‘Oh, I must be fair,’ Rita hastened to agree with the lawyer. ‘He has worked terribly hard, he’s been wonderful, since it happened’ – the lawyer saw no cause for concern on this point; in any case the contract, when he drew it up, would be a watertight one and would protect her interests against any such contingency.

  The lawyer went home to Rhodesia to draw up the contract that was never needed. In three months,
she was married to Johnny. By the time the summer rainy season came round, and he was the one who was bringing the supplies across the river in the boat, this year, he was her husband and Arthur’s initials were painted out and his were painted in, in their place, over the door.

  To the meteorological officer, the veterinary officer and the postmaster – those permanent residents of the hotel who had known them both for years – and the people of the village, the marriage seemed quite sensible, really; a matter of convenience – though, of course, also rather funny – there were a number of jokes about it current in the village for a time. To her – well, it was not until after the marriage was an accomplished fact that she began to try to understand what it was, and what had brought it about.

  At the end of that first winter after Arthur’s death, Johnny had had an affair with one of the women in a safari party that was on its way home to the south. Rita knew about it, because, as usual, the housekeeper had told her. But on the day the party left (Rita knew which woman it was, a woman not young, but with a well-dieted and massaged slimness) Johnny came into the office after the two jeeps had left and plonked himself down in the old cane chair near the door. Rita turned her head at the creak of the cane, to ask him if he knew whether the cook had decided, for the lunch menu, on a substitute for the chops that had gone off, and his eyes, that had been closed in one of those moments of sleep that fall like a shutter on lively, enervated wakefulness, flew open. He yawned and grinned, and his one eye twitched, as if it winked at her, of itself. ‘Boy, that’s that,’ he said.

  It was the first time, in the seven years he had been at the hotel, that he had ever, even obliquely, made any sort of comment on the existence of his private life or the state of his feelings. She blushed, like a wave of illness. He must have seen the red coming up over the skin of her neck and her ears and her face. But, stonily, he didn’t mind her embarrassment or feel any of his own. And so, suddenly, there was intimacy; it existed between them as if it had always been there, taken for granted. They were alone together. They had an existence together apart from the hotel and the stores, and the making of decisions about practical matters. He wouldn’t have commented to her on his affair with a woman while Arthur was alive and she herself was a married woman. But now, well – it was in his careless face – she was simply a grown-up person, like any other, and she knew that babies weren’t found under gooseberry bushes.

  After that, whenever he came into the office, they were alone together. She felt him when she sat at her desk with her back to him; her arms tingled into gooseflesh and she seemed to feel a mocking eye (not his, she knew he was not looking at her) on a point exactly in the middle of the back of her neck. She did not know whether she had looked at him or not, before, but now she was aware of the effort of not looking at him, while he ate at table with her, or served in the bar, or simply ran, very lithe, across the sandy road.

  And she began – it was an uncomfortable, shameful thing to her, something like the feeling she had had when she was adolescent – to be conscious of her big breasts. She would fold her arms across them when she stood talking to him. She hated them jutting from her underarm nearly to her waist, filling her dress, and, underneath, the hidden nipples that were brown as an old bitch’s teats since the children were born. She wanted to hide her legs, too – so thick and strong, the solid-fleshed, mottled calves with their bristly blonde hairs, and the heavy bone of the ankles marked with bruises where, bare-legged, she constantly bumped them against her desk.

  She said to him one morning, after a dance night at the hotel – it simply came out of her mouth – ‘That Mrs Burns seems to have taken a fancy to you.’

  He gave a long, curly-mouthed yawn. He was looking into space, absent; and then he came to himself, briskly; and he smiled slowly, right at her. ‘Uh, that. Does she?’

  She began to feel terribly nervous. ‘I mean I – I – thought she had her eye on you. The way she was laughing when she danced with you.’ She laughed, jeering a little.

  ‘She’s a silly cow, all right,’ he said. And as he went out of the bar, where they were checking the empties together, he put his hand experimentally on her neck, and tweaked her earlobe. It was an ambiguous caress; she did not know whether he was amused by her or if – he meant it, as she put it to herself.

  He did not sleep with her until they were married; but, of course, they were married soon. He moved into the big bedroom with her, then, but he kept on his old, dingy rondavel outside the main building, for his clothes and his fishing tackle and the odds and ends of motorcar accessories he kept lying about, and he usually took his siesta in there, in the summer. She lay on her bed alone in the afternoon dark behind the curtains that glowed red with the light and heat that beat upon them from outside, and she looked at his empty bed. She would stare at that place where he lay, where he actually slept, there in the room with her, not a foot away, every night. She had for him a hundred small feelings more tender than any she had ever known, and yet included in them was what she had felt at other rare moments in her life: when she had seen a bird, winged by a shot, fall out of flight formation over the river; when she had first seen one of her own children, ugly, and crying at being born. Sometimes, at the beginning, she would go over in her mind the times when he had made love to her; even at her desk, with the big ledgers open in front of her, and the sound of one of the boys rubbing the veranda floor outside, her mind would let fall the figures she was collating and the dreamy recapitulation of a night would move in. He did not make love to her very often, of course – not after the first few weeks. (He would always pinch her, or feel her arm, when he thought of it, though.) Weeks went by and it was only on dance nights, when usually she went to their room long before him, that he would come in, moving lightly, breathing whisky in the dark, and come over to her as if by appointment. Often she heard him sigh as he came in. He always went through the business of love-making in silence; but to her, in whom a thousand piercing cries were deafening without a sound, it was accepted as part of the extraordinary clamour of her own silence.

  As the months went by, he made love to her less and less often, and she waited for him. In tremendous shyness and secrecy, she was always waiting for him. And, oddly, when he did come to her again, next day she would feel ashamed. She began to go over and over things that had happened in the past; it was as if the ability to recreate in her mind a night’s love-making had given her a power of imagination she had never had before, and she would examine in recreation, detail by detail, scenes and conversations that were long over. She began always to have the sense of searching for something; searching slowly and carefully. That day at the cricket. A hundred times, she brought up for examination the way she had turned to look at Johnny, when the voice called her name; the way he had laughed, and said, ‘Please yourself.’ The silence between them in the car, driving back to the territory. The dance nights, long before that, when she had sat beside Arthur and watched Johnny dance. The times she had spoken distrustfully of him to Arthur. It began to seem to her that there was something of conspiracy about all these scenes. Guilt came slowly through them, a stain from deep down. She was beset by the impossibility of knowing – and then again she believed without a doubt – and then, once more, she absolved herself – was there always something between her and Johnny? Was it there, waiting, a gleaming eye in the dark, long before Arthur was drowned? All she could do was go over and over every shred of evidence of the past, again and again, reading now yes into it, now no.

  She began to think about Arthur’s drowning; she felt, crazily, that she and Johnny knew Arthur was drowning. They sat in the Wanderers’ stand while they knew Arthur was drowning. While there, over there, right in front of the hotel, where she was looking, through the office window (not having to get up from the desk, simply turning her head), the boat with the eight sewing machines and the black-japanned double bed was coming over the water . . . The boat was turning over . . . The arms of the men (who was it who had taken c
are not to spare her that detail?) came through the iron bedhead, it took the men down with it – Arthur with his mouth suddenly stopped for ever with water.

  She did not say one word to Johnny about all this. She would not have known how to put it into words, even to herself. It had no existence outside the terrifying freedom of her own mind, that she had stumbled down into by mistake, and that dwarfed the real world about her. Yet she changed, outwardly, protectively, to hide what only she knew was there – the shameful joy of loving. It was then that she started to talk about Johnny as ‘he’ and ‘him’, never referring to him by name, and to speak of him in the humorous, half-critical, half-nagging way of the wife who takes her husband for granted, no illusions and no nonsense about it. ‘Have you seen my spouse around?’ she would ask, or ‘Where’s that husband of mine?’

  On dance nights, in the winter, he still astonished guests by his sudden emergence from taciturnity into rock’n’ roll. The housekeeper no longer told any tales of his brief ventures into the beds where other men’s women slept, and so, of course, Rita presumed there weren’t any. For herself, she learnt to live with her guilt of loving, like some vague, chronic disorder. It was no good wrestling with it; she had come to understand that – for some reason she didn’t understand – the fact, the plain fact that she had never committed the slightest disloyalty to Arthur all through their marriage, provided no cure of truth. She and Johnny never quarrelled, and if the hotel and the businesses didn’t expand (Arthur was the one for making plans and money) at least they went on just as before. The summer heat, the winter cool, came and went again and again in the reassuring monotony that passes for security.

  The torture of imagination died away in her almost entirely. She lost the power to create the past. Only the boat remained, sometimes rising up from her mind on the river through the commonplace of the day in the office, just as once her nights with Johnny had come between her and immediate reality.