Life Times Stories - By Nadine Gordimer Page 0,127

then recognised as desirable by them all.

‘Oh of course, you prefair to dance with Jeelie,’ Mireille, one of the young Belgians, would say to her husband, pretending offence. He and I were quite an act, at the Au Relais, with our cha-cha. Then he would whisper to her in their own language, and she would giggle and punch his arm.

Marco and I were as famous a combination on the squash court as Mireille’s husband and I were on the dance floor. This was the only place, if anyone had had the eyes for it, where our love-making showed. As the weeks went by and the love-making got better and better, our game got better and better. The response Marco taught me to the sound of spilling grain the rain made on the caravan roof held good between us on the squash court. Sometimes the wives and spectators broke into spontaneous applause; I was following Marco’s sweat-oiled excited face, anticipating his muscular reactions in play as in bed. And when he had beaten me (narrowly) or we had beaten the other pair, he would hunch my shoulders together within his arm, laughing, praising me in Italian to the others, staggering about with me, and he would say to me in English, ‘Aren’t you a clever girl, eh?’; only he and I knew that that was what he said to me at other times. I loved that glinting flaw in his smile, now. It was Marco, like all the other things I knew about him: the girl cousin he had been in love with when he used to spend holidays with her family in the Abruzzi mountains; the way he would have planned Tshombe’s road if he’d been in charge – ‘But I like your father, you understand? – it’s good to work with your father, you know?’; the baby cream from Italy he used for the prickly heat round his waist.

The innocence of the grown-ups fascinated me. They engaged in play-play, while I had given it up; I began to feel arrogant among them. It was pleasant. I felt arrogant – or rather tolerantly patronising – towards the faraway Alan, too. I said to Marco, ‘I wonder what he’d do if he knew’ – about me; the caravan with the dotted curtains, the happy watchman, the tips, the breath of the earth rising from the wetted dust. Marco said wisely that Alan would be terribly upset.

‘And if Eleanora knew?’

Marco gave me his open, knowing, assured smile, at the same time putting the palm of his hand to my cheek in tender parenthesis. ‘She wouldn’t be pleased. But in the case of a man—’ For a moment he was Eleanora, quite unconsciously he mimicked the sighing resignation of Eleanora, receiving the news (seated, as usual), aware all the time that men were like that.

Other people who were rumoured or known to have had lovers occupied my mind with a special interest. I chattered on the subject, ‘. . . when this girl’s husband found out, he just walked out of the house without any money or anything and no one could find him for weeks,’ and Marco took it up as one does what goes without saying: ‘Well of course. If I think of Eleanora with someone – I mean – I would become mad.’

I went on with my second-hand story, enjoying the telling of all its twists and complications, and he laughed, following it with the affectionate attention with which he lit everything I said and did, and getting up to find the bottle of Chianti, wipe out a glass and fill it for himself. He always had wine in the caravan. I didn’t drink any but I used to have the metallic taste of it in my mouth from his.

In the car that afternoon he had said maybe there’d be a nice surprise for me, and I remembered this and we lay and wrangled teasingly about it. The usual sort of thing: ‘You’re learning to be a real little nag, my darling, a little nag, eh?’

‘I’m not going to let go until you tell me.’

‘I think I’ll have to give you a little smack on the bottom, eh, just like this, eh?’

The surprise was a plan. He and my father might be going to the Kasai to advise on some difficulties that had cropped up for a construction firm there. It should be quite easy for me to persuade my father that I’d like to accompany him, and then if