Life Times Stories - By Nadine Gordimer Page 0,4

back seat.

‘Concert, sir? It’s in the Hall, sir. Just follow me.’

Taken over by officialdom, they went through the gates, saluted and stared at, and up the rutted street past the Beer Hall, into the location. Only a beer-brazen face, blinking into the car lights as they passed, laughed and called out something half-heard.

Driving along the narrow, dark streets, they peered white-faced at the windows, wanting to see what it was like. But, curiously, it seemed that although they might want to see the location, the location didn’t want to see them. The rows of low two-roomed houses with their homemade tin and packing-case lean-tos and beans growing up the chicken wire, throbbed only here and there with the faint pulse of a candle; no one was to be seen. Life seemed always to be in the next street, voices singing far off and shouts, but when the car turned the corner – again, there was nobody.

The bicycle wobbled to a stop in front of them. Here was the Hall, here were lights, looking out like sore eyes in the moted air, here were people, more part of the dark than the light, standing about in straggling curiosity. Two girls in flowered headscarves stood with their arms crossed leaning against the wall of the building; some men cupped their hands over an inch of cigarette and drew with the intensity of the stub-smoker.

The amateur company climbed shrilly out of their car. They nearly hadn’t arrived at all! What a story to tell! Their laughter, their common purpose, their solidarity before the multifarious separateness of the audiences they faced, generated once again that excitement that so often seized them. What a story to tell!

Inside the Hall, the audience had been seated long ago. They sat in subdued rows, the women in neat flowered prints, the men collared-and-tied, heads of pens and pencils ranged sticking out over their jacket pockets. They were a specially selected audience of schoolteachers, who, with a sprinkling of social workers, two clerks from the administrative offices, and a young girl who had matriculated, were the educated of the rows and rows of hundreds and hundreds who lived and ate and slept and talked and loved and died in the houses outside. Those others had not been asked, and were not to be admitted because they would not understand.

The ones who had been asked waited as patiently as the children they taught in their turn. When would the concert begin?

In an atmosphere of brick-dust and bright tin shavings behind the stage, the actors and actresses struggled to dress and paint their faces in a newly built small room intended to be used for the cooking of meat at location dances. The bustle and sideburns of a late-Victorian English drawing room went on; a young woman whitened her hair with talcum powder and pinned a great hat like a feathery ship upon it. A fat young man sang, with practised nasal innuendo, the latest dance-tune while he adjusted his pince-nez and covered his cheerful head with a clerical hat.

‘You’re not bothering with make-up?’ A man in a wasp-striped waistcoat came down from the stage.

A girl looked up from her bit of mirror, face of a wax doll.

‘Your ordinary street make-up’ll do – they don’t know the difference,’ he said.

‘But of course I’m making-up,’ said the girl, quite disstressed. She was melting black grease paint in a teaspoon over someone’s cigarette lighter.

‘No need to bother with moustaches and things,’ the man said to the other men. ‘They won’t understand the period anyway. Don’t bother.’

The girl went on putting blobs of liquid grease paint on her eyelashes, holding her breath.

‘I think we should do it properly,’ said the young woman, complaining.

‘All right, all right.’ He slapped her on the bustle. ‘In that case you’d better stick a bit more cotton wool in your bosom – you’re not nearly pouter-pigeon enough.’

‘For God’s sake, can’t you open the door, somebody,’ asked the girl. ‘It’s stifling.’

The door opened upon a concrete yard; puddles glittered, one small light burned over the entrance to a men’s lavatory. The night air was the strong yellow smell of old urine. Men from the street slouched in and out, and a tall slim native, dressed in the universal long-hipped suit that in the true liberalism of petty gangsterdom knows no colour bar or national exclusiveness, leaned back on his long legs, tipped back his hat, and smiled on teeth pretty as a girl’s.

‘I’m going to close it again,’ said the