Life Times Stories - By Nadine Gordimer Page 0,76

fifty lion in my lifetime, without any telescopic sights, I can tell you), their camping equipment (I don’t know what all this fuss is about water filters and what-not. I’ve drunk water that was so filthy I’ve had to lean over and draw it into my mouth through a bit of rag, and been none the worse for it), and their general helplessness. But he also found experienced native guides for these people, and lent them the things they had forgotten to buy down south. He was conscious of having made a number of enemies, thinly scattered in that sparsely populated territory, and was also conscious of his good standing, of the fact that everybody knew him, and of his ownership of the hotel, the two stores, and whatever power there was in the village.

His stepmother had been an enemy of his, in that far-off childhood that he had overcome long ago, but he had had no grudge against his young stepbrother, her son, who must have had his troubles, too, adopted into a house full of Cunninghams. Johnny’d been rolling around the world for ten years or so – America, Mexico, Australia – when he turned up in the territory one day, stony-broke and nowhere in particular to go. Arthur wasn’t hard on him, though he chaffed him a bit, of course, and after the boy’d been loafing around the river and hotel for a month, Arthur suggested that he might give a hand in one of the stores. Johnny took the hint in good part – ‘Got to stop being a bum sometime, I suppose,’ he said, and turned out to be a surprisingly good worker. Soon he was helping at the hotel, too – where, of course, he was living, anyway. And soon he was one of the family, doing whatever there was to be done.

Yet he kept himself to himself. ‘I’ve got a feeling he’ll just walk out, when he feels like it, same as he came,’ Rita said to Arthur, with some resentment. She had a strong sense of loyalty and was always watchful of any attempt to take advantage of her husband, who had in such careless abundance so many things that other men wanted.

‘Oh for Pete’s sake, Rita, he’s a bit of a natural sourpuss, that’s all. He lives his life and we live ours. There’s nothing wrong with the way he works, and nothing else about old Johnny interests me.’

The thing was, in a community the size of the village, and in the close life of the little hotel, that life of Johnny Cunningham’s was lived, if in inner isolation, outwardly under their noses. He ate at table with them, usually speaking only when he was spoken to. When, along with the Cunningham couple, he got drawn into a party of hotel guests, he sat drinking with great ease but seldom bothered to contribute anything to the talk, and would leave the company with an abrupt, sardonic-sounding ‘Excuse me’ whenever he pleased.

The only times he came ‘out of his shell’, as Rita used to put it to her husband, were on dance nights. He had arrived in the territory during the jive era, but his real triumphs on the floor came with the advent of rock ’n’ roll. He learnt it from a film, originally – the lounge of the hotel was the local cinema, too, on Thursday nights – and he must have supplemented his self-teaching on the yearly holidays in Johannesburg. Anyway, he was expert, and on dance nights he would take up from her grass chair one of the five or six lumpy girls from the village, at whom he never looked, at any other time, let alone spoke to, and would transform her within the spell of his own rhythm. Sometimes he did this with women among the hotel guests, too; ‘Look at old Johnny, giving it stick,’ Arthur Cunningham would say, grinning, in the scornfully admiring tone of someone praising a performance that he wouldn’t stoop to, himself. There was something about Johnny, his mouth slightly open, the glimpse of saliva gleaming on his teeth, his head thrown back and his eyes narrowed while his body snaked on stooping legs and nimble feet, that couldn’t be ignored.

‘Well, he seems to be happy that way,’ Rita would say with a laugh, embarrassed for the man.

Sometimes Johnny slept with one of these women guests (there was no bed that withheld its secrets from the old German housekeeper, who, in