July's People by Nadine Gordimer Page B

same, wouldn’t it be extraordinary … actually to hear …—
    He was waiting for her to say: would we go back? They had fled the fighting in the streets, the danger for their children, the necessity to defend their lives in the name of ideals they didn’t share in a destroyed white society they didn’t believe in. Go back, at once? How to be received? Things would quieten down—in a new way. That must be counted on. In the Congo, Belgians went back; some of Smith’s Rhodesians stayed on in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe; some Portuguese friends returned to Maputo when Lourenço Marques no longer existed, they were prepared to live in a new way. But she didn’t want to ask the question because the hypothesis presumed, apart from anything else, the presence of the vehicle. She kept her knowledge of the vehicle as a possession to which she was curiously entitled, had no incumbency to reveal. Each one for himself. She felt no meanness in not releasing him instantly from the anxiety they had been held in since early afternoon the day before, and that would return to him but not her the moment the distracting relief of bad news, over the radio, passed. There would come a point at which she would choose to tell him. And she would not have him asking how, why she had come to know what she knew—silently falsifying her taking her clothes off in the middle of the night in the rain as some piece of psychodrama. Already he had given a ‘for god’s sake?’ glance of enquiry when she got up and he noticed her thin white belly and brown pubic hair naked below the cardigan, like some caricature of a titillating photograph in a porn magazine, or—yes, more like—a woman in the Toulouse-Lautrec brothel drawings they had seen together in Europe. Before she reached that point—of telling him (she put on her other pair of jeans, the ones from last night were still wet, buttoned the cardigan over her breasts and was dressed)—July’s voice called at the doorway. Bam’s look was a pair of hands flung apart in the air; her own eyes did not meet it, and perhaps he saw, in that instant, that she had known July was back … caught out, she this time.
    —You say I can come inside?—He used to have the habit of knocking at a door, asking, The master he say I can come in?, and they had tried to train him to drop the ‘master’ for the ubiquitously respectful ‘sir’. He had an armful of wood under a torn fertilizer bag; of course (and he was right) it would not have occurred to them to bring some wood into shelter when the rain began. —You make small fire inside today, s’coming little bit cold.—Royce was coughing himself awake. —Yes, you see—The child’s gaze came to consciousness on him, restfully, confident. He had dropped his city plastic raincoat and was the familiar figure bending about some task, khaki-trousered backside higher than felted black head—he began at once to lay a hearth-fire.
    Bam had not greeted him. Maureen was unbelieving to see on the white man’s face the old, sardonic, controlled challenge of the patron. —And where were you yesterday? What’s the story?—
    July went on doing what he was expert at. The snap of twigs, the shuffle of a single paper fist uncrumpling itself (no cupboard full of old newspapers, here, everything that was worth nothing must be used sparingly), a word or two to keep Royce in bed —Little while, it’s coming nice and warm, you coming nice by the fire.—
    —We were very worried.—Her implication was the flattery, ‘about you’.
    —Where did you go?—Bam giving the man every chance to give a satisfactory account of himself.
    —To the shops.—
    He straightened up and wiped his palms down his trousers.
    The shops! As if he had been sent round the corner for a pint of milk when the household ran short. The shops. The distance to the nearest general store must be forty kilometers. There was a police post there; certainly the Indian store would have a petrol pump.
    Bam