Life Times Stories - By Nadine Gordimer Page 0,83

agonising slowness. When the laughter had died down she got up and not looking at Johnny – for she knew how he looked, she knew that unembarrassed gaze – she said something appropriate and even funny, and with great skill went easily, comfortably sloppily, out of the dining room. She felt Johnny following behind her, as usual, but she did not fall back to have him keep up with her, and, as usual after breakfast, she heard him turn off, whistling, from the passage into the bar, where there was the aftermath of Saturday night to clear up.

She got to the office. At last she got to the office and sat down in her chair at the roll-top desk. The terrible blush of blood did not abate; it was as if something had burst inside her and was seeping up in a stain through all the layers of muscle and flesh and skin. She felt again, as she had before, a horrible awareness of her big breasts, her clumsy legs. She clenched her hand over the sharp point of a spike that held invoices and felt it press pain into her palm. Tears were burning hot on her face and her hands, the rolling lava of shame from that same source as the blush. And at last, Arthur! she called in a clenched, whimpering whisper, Arthur! grinding his name between her teeth, and she turned desperately to the water, to the middle of the river where the lilies were. She tried with all her being to conjure up once again out of the water something; the ghost of comfort, of support. But that boat, silent and unbidden, that she had so often seen before, would not come again.

The Bridegroom

He came into his road camp that afternoon for the last time. It was neater than any house would ever be; the sand raked smooth in the clearing, the water drums under the tarpaulin, the flaps of his tent closed against the heat. Thirty yards away a black woman knelt, pounding mealies, and two or three children, grey with Kalahari dust, played with a skinny dog. Their shrillness was no more than a bird’s piping in the great spaces in which the camp was lost.

Inside his tent, something of the chill of the night before always remained, stale but cool, like the air of a church. There was his iron bed, with its clean pillowcase and big kaross. There was his table, his folding chair with the red canvas seat, and the chest in which his clothes were put away. Standing on the chest was the alarm clock that woke him at five every morning and the photograph of the seventeen-year-old girl from Francistown whom he was going to marry. They had been there a long time, the girl and the alarm clock; in the morning when he opened his eyes, in the afternoon when he came off the job. But now this was the last time. He was leaving for Francistown in the Roads Department ten-tonner, in the morning; when he came back, the next week, he would be married and he would have with him the girl, and the caravan which the department provided for married men. He had his eye on her as he sat down on the bed and took off his boots; the smiling girl was like one of those faces cut out of a magazine. He began to shed his working overalls, a rind of khaki stiff with dust that held his shape as he discarded it, and he called, easily and softly, ‘Ou Piet, ek wag.’ But the bony black man with his eyebrows raised like a clown’s, in effort, and his bare feet shuffling under the weight, was already at the tent with a tin bath in which hot water made a twanging tune as it slopped from side to side.

When he had washed and put on a clean khaki shirt and a pair of worn grey trousers, and streaked back his hair with sweet-smelling pomade, he stepped out of his tent just as the lid of the horizon closed on the bloody eye of the sun. It was winter and the sun set shortly after five; the grey sand turned a fading pink, the low thorn scrub gave out spreading stains of lilac shadow that presently all ran together; then the surface of the desert showed pocked and pored, for a minute or two, like the surface of the moon through a telescope,