Life Times Stories - By Nadine Gordimer Page 0,99

crowd’s cancelled.’

Going to the bar for cigarettes, he heard mother and son in there. ‘Wait, wait, all that’s worked out. I’mn’a cover the whole thing with big blow-ups of the top groups, the Stones and the Shadows and such-like.’

‘Oh grow up, Dickie my darling, you want it to look like a teenager’s bedroom?’

Church went quietly away, remembering there might be a packet of cigarettes in the car, but bumped into Dickie a few minutes later, in the yard. Dickie had his skin-diving stuff and was obviously on his way to the lake. ‘I get into shit for moving the bar without telling the licensing people over in town, and then she says let’s have the bar counter down on the beach tonight – all in the same breath, that’s nothing to her. At least when my stepfather’s here he knows just how to put the brake on.’

‘Where is he?’

‘I don’t know, something about some property of hers, in town. He’s got to see about it. But he’s always got business all over, for her. I had my own band, you know, we’ve even toured Rhodesia. I’m a solo artist, really. Guitar. I compose my own stuff. I mean, what I play’s original, you see. Night club engagements and such-like.’

‘That’s a tough life compared with this,’ Church said, glancing at the speargun.

‘Oh, this’s all right. If you learn how to do it well, y’know? I’ve trained myself. You’ve got to concentrate. Like with my guitar. I have to go away and be undisturbed, you understand – right away. Sometimes the mood comes, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes I compose all night. I got to be left in peace.’ He was fingering a new thick silver chain on his wrist. ‘Lady Jane, of course. God knows what it cost. She spends a fortune on presents. You sh’d see what my sister gets when she’s home. And what she gave my stepfather – I mean before, when they weren’t married yet. He must have ten pairs of cuff-links, gold, I don’t know what.’ He sat down under the weight of his mother’s generosity.

Zelide appeared among the empty gas containers and beer crates outside the kitchen. ‘Oh, Dickie, you’ve had no lunch. I don’t think he ever tastes a thing he catches.’

Dickie squeezed her thigh and said coldly, ‘S’best time, now. People don’t know it. Between now and about half past three.’

There had always been something more than a family resemblance about that face; at last it fell into place in Church’s mind. Stiff blond curls, skull ominously present in the eye sockets, shiny cheekbones furred with white hairs, blue-red lips, and those eyes that seemed to have no eyelids, to turn away from nothing and take in nothing: the face of the homosexual boy in the Berlin twenties, the perfect, impure master-race face of a George Grosz drawing.

‘Oh Dickie, I wish you’d eat something. And he’s got to play tonight.’ They watched him lope off lightly down the garden. Her hair and the sun obscured her. ‘They’re both artistic, you see, that’s the trouble. What a performance.’

‘Are you sorry you came?’

‘Oh no. The weather’s so lovely, I mean, isn’t it?’

It was becoming a habit to open Livingstone’s Journals at random before falling stunned-asleep. ‘Now that I am on the point of starting another trip into Africa I feel quite exhilarated: when one travels with the specific object in view of ameliorating the condition of the natives every act becomes ennobled.’ The afternoon heat made him think of women, this time, and he gave up his siesta because he believed that daydreams of this kind were not so much adolescent as – worse – a sign of approaching age. He was getting – too far along, for pauses like this; for time out. If he were not preoccupied with doing the next thing, he did not know what to do. His mind turned to death, the graves that his body would not take the trouble to visit. His body turned to women; his body was unchanged. It took him down to the lake, heavy and vigorous, reddened by the sun under the black hairs shining on his belly.

The sun was high in a splendid afternoon. In half an hour he missed three fish and began to feel challenged. Whenever he dived deeper than fifteen or eighteen feet his ears ached much more than they ever had in the sea. Out of training, of course. And the flippers and goggles lent by the hotel really did