Life Times Stories - By Nadine Gordimer Page 0,181

would never burgeon irresistibly again, as the girl’s would soon. ‘I’ll tell you something. This’s the best time of your life. The first baby. That’s something you’ll never know again, never.’ She drove off before the girl could see the tears that came to her eyes.

The girl went round back into the yard with her tall stalk, flat-footed in the old takkies.

The black man’s gaze was fixed where she must reappear. He still held the hammer; uselessly. ‘Is it all right?’

‘Of course it’s all right.’

‘What’s she want?’

‘Didn’t want anything. She brought us a present – this.’ Her palm came down over the grin of the child on the tin drum.

He looked at the tin, cautious to see it for what it was.

‘Biscuits. Rusks. The vrou of the agent who let this place to us. Charles and I had to have tea with her the first day we were here.’

‘That’s what she came for?’

‘Yes. That’s all. Don’t you give something – take food when new neighbours move in?’ As she heard herself saying it, she remembered that whatever the custom was among blacks – and God knows, they were the most hospitable if the poorest of people – he hadn’t lived anywhere that could be called ‘at home’ for years, and his ‘neighbours’ had been fellow refugees in camps and military training centres. She gave him her big, culpable smile to apologise for her bourgeois naivety; it still surfaced from time to time, and it was best to admit so, openly. ‘Nothing to get worried about. I don’t mean they’re really neighbours . . .’ She made an arc with her chin and long neck, from side to side, sweeping the isolation of the house and yard within the veld.

The black man implied no suggestion that the white couple did not know their job, no criticism of the choice of place. Hardly! It could not have been better situated. ‘Is she going to keep turning up, hey . . . What’ll she think? I shouldn’t have come into the garden.’

‘No, no, Vusi. She won’t think anything. It was OK she saw you. She just naturally assumes there’ll be a black working away somewhere in the yard.’

‘And Eddie?’

She placed the biscuit tin on the kennel, with its rusty chain to which no dog was attached.

‘OK, two blacks. After all, this is a farming plot, isn’t it? There’s building going on. Where is he?’

‘He went into the house as soon as I came back and told him . . .’

She was levering, with her fingernails, under the lid of the tin. ‘Can you do this? My fingers aren’t strong enough.’

The black man found the hammer in his hand, put it down and grasped the tin, his small brown nose wrinkling with effort. The lid flew off with a twang and went bowling down the yard, the girl laughing after it. It looped back towards the man and he leant gracefully and caught it up, laughing.

‘What is this boere food, anyway?’

‘Try it. They’re good.’

They crunched rusks together in the sun, the black man’s attention turning contemplatively, mind running ahead to what was not yet there, to the shed (big enough for two cars) before which the raw vigour of new bricks, cement and tools was dumped against the stagnation and decay of the yard.

The girl chewed energetically, wanting to free her mouth to speak. ‘We’ll have to get used to the idea people may turn up, for some reason or another. We’ll just have to be prepared. So long as they don’t find us in the house . . . it’ll be all right.’

The black man no longer saw what was constructed in his mind; he saw the rusty chain, he leant again with that same straight-backed, sideways movement with which he had caught the lid, and jingled the links. ‘Maybe we should get a dog, man. To warn.’

‘That’s an idea.’ Then her face bunched unattractively, a yes-but. ‘What do we do with it afterwards?’

He smiled at her indulgently; at things she still didn’t understand, even though she chose to be here, in this place, with Eddie and with him.

The white couple had known two black men would be coming but not exactly when or how. Charles must have believed they would come at night, that would be the likeliest because the safest; the first three nights in the house he dragged the mattress off her bed into the kitchen, and his into the ‘lounge’, on which the front door opened directly, so that