Life Times Stories - By Nadine Gordimer Page 0,101

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 certain 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