Life Times Stories - By Nadine Gordimer Page 0,77

turn, insisted on relating all she knew to Rita Cunningham). It was tacitly accepted that there was some sort of connection between the rock ’n’ roll performance and the assignation; who would ever notice Johnny at any other time? But in between these infrequent one- or two-night affairs, he took no interest in women, and it seemed clear that marriage was something that never entered his head. Arthur paid him quite well, but he seemed neither to save nor to have any money. He bet (by radio, using the meteorological officer’s broadcasting set) on all the big races in Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg, and he had bought three cars, all equally unsuitable for road conditions up in the territory, and tinkered them to death in Arthur’s workshop.

When he came back to the hotel with Rita Cunningham after Arthur was drowned, he went on with his work as usual. But after a week, all the great bulk of work, all the decisions that had been Arthur’s, could not be ignored any longer by considerate employees hoping to spare the widow. She said to Johnny at lunch, in her schoolgirlish way, ‘Can you come to the office afterwards? I mean, there’re some things we must fix up—’ When she came into the office he was already there, standing about like a workman, staring at the calendar on the wall.

‘Who’s going to see that the store orders don’t overlap, now?’ she said. ‘We’ve got to make that somebody’s job. And somebody’ll have to take over the costing of perishable goods, too, not old Johnson, Arthur always said he didn’t have a clue about it.’

Johnny scratched his ear and said, ‘D’you want me to do it?’

They looked at each other for a moment, thinking it over. There was no sign on his face either of eagerness or reluctance.

‘Well, if you could, Johnny, I think that’s best . . .’ And after a pause, she turned to something else. ‘Who can we make responsible for the bar – the ordering and everything? D’you think we should try and get a man?’

He shrugged. ‘If you like. You could advertise in Jo’burg, or p’raps in Rhodesia. You won’t get anybody decent to come up here.’

‘I know.’ The distress of responsibility suddenly came upon her.

‘You could try,’ he said again.

‘We’ll get some old soak, I suppose, who can’t keep a job anywhere else.’

‘Sure,’ he said with his sour smile.

‘You don’t think,’ she said, ‘I mean just for now – Couldn’t we manage it between us? I mean you could serve, and perhaps the Allgood boy from the garage could come at weekends to give a hand, and then you and I could do the ordering?’

‘Sure,’ he said, rocking from his heels to his toes and back again, and looking out of the window, ‘I can do it, if you want to try.’

She still could not believe that the wheels of these practical needs were carrying her along, and with her, the hotel and the two stores. ‘Oh yes,’ she said, distracted, ‘I think it’ll be OK, just for the time being, until I can . . .’ She did not finish what she was saying because she did not know what it was for which the arrangement was to be a makeshift.

She took it for granted that she meant to sell the hotel and the two stores. Two of the children were at school in the south, already; the other two would have to follow when they had outgrown the village school, in a year or two. What was the point in her staying on, there, in a remote village, alone, two thousand miles from her children or her relatives?

She talked, and she believed she acted, for the first six months after Arthur was drowned, as if the sale of the hotel and stores was imminent and inevitable. She even wrote to an agent in Johannesburg and an old lawyer friend in Rhodesia, asking their advice about what sort of price she could expect to get for her property and her businesses – Arthur had left everything to her.

Johnny had taken over most of Arthur’s work. She, in her turn, had taken over some of Johnny’s. Johnny drove back to Johannesburg to fetch the two younger children home, and the hotel and the stores went on as usual. One evening when she was doing some work in the office after dinner, and giving half her attention to the talk of hotel matters with him, she added the