Life Times Stories - By Nadine Gordimer Page 0,97

this?’

‘The lounge that was going to be redecorated as a games room,’ she said. She smiled at her son.

The girl came back, walking flat-footed under a tray’s weight up steps that led by way of a half-built terrace to the new bar. As Carl Church went to help her she breathed, ‘What a performance.’

Mrs Palmer drew on her cigarette and contemplated the steps: ‘Imagine the breakages.’

The four of them were together round beer bottles. Church sat helplessly in his borrowed trunks that crawled against his body as they dried, drinking pint after pint and aware of his warmth, the heat of the air, and all their voices rising steadily. He said, ‘I must get going,’ but the waiter had called them to lunch three times; the best way to break up the party was to allow oneself to be forced to table. The three of them ate in their bathing costumes while madam took the head, bracelets colliding on her arms.

He made an effort to get precise instructions about the best and quickest route back to the capital, and was told expertly by her, ‘There’s no plane out until Monday, nine-fifteen, I suppose you know that.’

‘I have no reason whatever to doubt your knowledge of plane schedules,’ he said, and realised from the turn of phrase that he must be slightly drunk, on heat and the water as much as beer.

She knew the game so well that you had only to finger a counter unintentionally for her to take you on. ‘I told you I never let anyone down.’ She blew a smokescreen; appeared through it. ‘Where’ve they put you?’

‘Oh, he’s in one of the chalets, Mrs Palmer,’ the girl said. ‘Till tomorrow, anyway.’

‘Well, there you are, relax,’ she said. ‘If the worst comes to the worst, there’s a room in my cottage.’ Her gaze was out over the lake, a tilting, blind brightness with black dugouts appearing like sunspots, but she said, ‘How’re my jacarandas coming along? Someone was telling me there’s no reason why they shouldn’t do, Dickie. The boys must make a decent trench round each one and let it fill up with water once a week, right up, d’you see?’

‘The effect of travel on a man whose heart is in the right place is that the mind is made more self-reliant; it becomes more confident of its own resources – there is greater presence of mind. The body is soon well-knit; the muscles of the limbs grow hard as a board . . . the countenance is bronzed and there is no dyspepsia.’

Carl Church slept through the afternoon. He woke to the feeling of helplessness he had at lunch. But no chagrin. This sort of hiatus had opened up in the middle of a tour many times – lost days in a blizzard on Gander airport, a week in quarantine at Aden. This time he had the journals instead of a Gideon Bible. ‘Nothing fell from his lips as last words to survivors. We buried him today by a large baobab tree.’ There was no point in going back to the capital if he couldn’t get out of the place till Monday. His mind was closed to the possibility of trying for Moambe, again; that was another small rule for self-preservation: if something goes wrong, write it off. He thought, it’s all right here; the dirty, ugly room had as much relevance to ‘spoiling’ the eagles and the lake as he had had to the eagles when he climbed close. On his way down to the lake again he saw a little group – mother, son, receptionist – standing round the graveside of one of the holes for trees. Dickie was still in his bathing trunks.

Church had the goggles and the flippers and the speargun, and he swam out towards the woolly islands – they were unattainably far – and fish were dim dead leaves in the water below him. The angle of the late afternoon sun left the underwater deserted, filled with motes of vegetable matter and sand caught by oblique rays of light. Milky brilliance surrounded him, his hands went out as if to feel for walls; there was the apprehension, down there, despite the opacity and tepidity, of night and cold. He shot up to the surface and felt the day on his eyelids. Lying on the sand, he heard the eagles cry now behind him on the headland, where trees held boulders in their claws, now over the lake. A pair of