Life Times Stories - By Nadine Gordimer Page 0,132

It was difficult to know how to treat these people, in this country; to know what they expected. In spite of her embarrassing refusal of the coin, she stood there, completely unassuming, fists thrust down the pockets of her cheap coat against the cold she’d come in from, rather pretty thin legs neatly aligned, knee to knee, ankle to ankle.

‘Would you like a cup of coffee or something?’

He couldn’t very well take her into his study-cum-living room and offer her a drink. She followed him to his kitchen, but at the sight of her pulling out the single chair to drink her cup of coffee at the kitchen table, he said, ‘No – bring it in here—’ and led the way into the big room where, among his books and his papers, his files of scientific correspondence (and the cigar boxes of stamps from the envelopes) his racks of records, his specimens of minerals and rocks, he lived alone.

It was no trouble to her; she saved him the trips to the supermarket and brought him his groceries two or three times a week. All he had to do was to leave a list and the key under the doormat, and she would come up in her lunch hour to collect them, returning to put his supplies in the flat after work. Sometimes he was home and sometimes not. He bought a box of chocolates and left it, with a note, for her to find; and that was acceptable, apparently, as a gratuity.

Her eyes went over everything in the flat although her body tried to conceal its sense of being out of place by remaining as still as possible, holding its contours in the chair offered her as a stranger’s coat is set aside and remains exactly as left until the owner takes it up to go. ‘You collect?’

‘Well, these are specimens – connected with my work.’

‘My brother used to collect. Miniatures. With brandy and whisky and that, in them. From all over. Different countries.’

The second time she watched him grinding coffee for the cup he had offered her she said, ‘You always do that? Always when you make coffee?’

‘But of course. Is it no good, for you? Do I make it too strong?’

‘Oh it’s just I’m not used to it. We buy it ready – you know, it’s in a bottle, you just add a bit to the milk or water.’

He laughed, instructive: ‘That’s not coffee, that’s a synthetic flavouring. In my country we drink only real coffee, fresh, from the beans – you smell how good it is as it’s being ground?’

She was stopped by the caretaker and asked what she wanted in the building? Heavy with the bona fides of groceries clutched to her body, she said she was working at number 718, on the seventh floor. The caretaker did not tell her not to use the whites’ lift; after all, she was not black; her family was very light-skinned.

There was the item ‘grey button for trousers’ on one of his shopping lists. She said as she unpacked the supermarket carrier ‘Give me the pants, so long, then,’ and sat on his sofa that was always gritty with fragments of pipe tobacco, sewing in and out through the four holes of the button with firm, fluent movements of the right hand, gestures supplying the articulacy missing from her talk. She had a little yokel’s, peasant’s (he thought of it) gap between her two front teeth when she smiled that he didn’t much like, but, face ellipsed to three-quarter angle, eyes cast down in concentration with soft lips almost closed, this didn’t matter.

He said, watching her sew, ‘You’re a good girl’; and touched her.

She remade the bed every late afternoon when they left it and she dressed again before she went home. After a week there was a day when late afternoon became evening, and they were still in the bed.

‘Can’t you stay the night?’

‘My mother,’ she said.

‘Phone her. Make an excuse.’ He was a foreigner. He had been in the country five years, but he didn’t understand that people don’t usually have telephones in their houses, where she lived. She got up to dress. He didn’t want that tender body to go out in the night cold and kept hindering her with the interruption of his hands; saying nothing. Before she put on her coat, when the body had already disappeared, he spoke. ‘But you must make some arrangement.’

‘Oh my mother!’ Her face opened to fear and vacancy