Life Times Stories - By Nadine Gordimer Page 0,117

course, but he must know that the risks she took were carefully calculated, very carefully calculated. There was no way of disguising that from someone like him. Then she saw him smiling to himself at the sight of the collection of guests: Jason Madela, Edgar Xixo and Spuds Buthelezi – Spuds Buthelezi, as well. But probably she was wrong, and he would have come out among them without those feelings of reproach or contempt that she read into the idea of his gait, his face. HOPE YOUR PARTY WENT WELL. He may have meant just that.

Frances Taver knew Robert Ceretti was leaving soon, but she wasn’t quite sure when. Every day she thought, I’ll phone and say goodbye. Yet she had already taken leave of him, that afternoon of the lunch. Just telephone and say goodbye. On the Friday morning, when she was sure he would be gone, she rang up the hotel, and there it was, the soft, cautious American voice. The first few moments were awkward; he protested his pleasure at hearing from her, she kept repeating, ‘I thought you’d be gone . . .’ Then she said, ‘I just wanted to say – about that lunch. You mustn’t be taken in—’

He was saying, ‘I’ve been so indebted to you, Frances, really you’ve been great.’

‘—not phonies, no, that’s not what I mean, on the contrary, they’re very real, you understand?’

‘Oh, your big good-looking friend, he’s been marvellous. Saturday night we were out on the town, you know.’ He was proud of the adventure but didn’t want to use the word ‘shebeen’ over the telephone.

She said, ‘You must understand. Because the corruption’s real. Even they’ve become what they are because things are the way they are. Being phony is being corrupted by the situation . . . and that’s real enough. We’re made out of that.’

He thought maybe he was finding it difficult to follow her over the telephone, and seized upon the word: ‘Yes, the “situation” – he was able to slip me into what I gather is one of the livelier places.’

Frances Taver said, ‘I don’t want you to be taken in—’

The urgency of her voice stopped his mouth, was communicated to him even if what she said was not.

‘—by anyone,’ the woman was saying.

He understood, indeed, that something complicated was wrong, but he knew, too, that he wouldn’t be there long enough to find out, that perhaps you needed to live and die there, to find out. All she heard over the telephone was the voice assuring her, ‘Everyone’s been marvellous . . . really marvellous. I just hope I can get back here some day – that is, if they ever let me in again . . .’

A Meeting in Space

Every morning he was sent to the baker and the French children slid out of dark walls like the village cats and walked in his footsteps. He couldn’t understand what they said to each other, but he thought he understood their laughter: he was a stranger. He looked forward to the half-fearful, disdainful feeling their presence at his back gave him, and as he left the house expected at each alley, hole and doorway the start of dread with which he would see them. They didn’t follow him into the baker’s shop. Perhaps the baker wouldn’t have them – they looked poor, and the boy knew, from the piccanins at home, that poor kids steal. He had never been into a bakery at home in South Africa; the baker-boy, a black man who rode a tricycle with a rattling bin on the front, came through the yard holding the loaves out of the way of the barking dogs, and put two white and one brown on the kitchen table. It was the same with fruit and vegetables; at home the old Indian, Vallabhbhai, stopped his greengrocer’s lorry at the back gate, and his piccanin carried into the kitchen whatever you bought.

But here, the family said, part of the fun was doing your own shopping in the little shops that were hidden away by the switchback of narrow streets. They made him repeat over and over again the words for asking for bread, in French, but once in the baker’s shop he never said them, only pointed at the loaf he wanted and held out his hand with money in it. He felt that he was someone else, a dumb man perhaps. After a few days, if he were given change he would point again, this