Life Times by Nadine Gordimer Page A

cricket-playing white public-school boy.
    â€˜There’s nothing like Cape Town, is there?’ said the young woman to him, her head charmingly on one side, as if this conviction was something she and he shared.
    â€˜Miss Tetzel’s up here to look us over. She’s from Cape Town,’ Alister explained.
    She turned to Temba with her beauty, her strong provocativeness, full on, as it were. ‘So we’re neighbours?’
    Jake rolled one foot comfortably over the other and a spluttering laugh pursed out the pink inner membrane of his lips.
    â€˜Where did you live?’ she went on, to Temba.
    â€˜Cape Flats,’ he said. Cape Flats is a desolate coloured slum in the bush outside Cape Town.
    â€˜Me, too,’ said the girl, casually.
    Temba said politely, ‘You’re kidding,’ and then looked down uncomfortably at his hands, as if they had been guilty of some clumsy movement. He had not meant to sound so familiar; the words were not the right ones.
    â€˜I’ve been there nearly ten months,’ she said.
    â€˜Well, some people’ve got queer tastes,’ Jake remarked, laughing, to no one in particular, as if she were not there.
    â€˜How’s that?’ Temba was asking her shyly, respectfully.
    She mentioned the name of a social rehabilitation scheme that was in operation in the slum. ‘I’m assistant director of the thing at the moment. It’s connected with the sort of work I do at the university, you see, so they’ve given me fifteen months’ leave from my usual job.’
    Maxie noticed with amusement the way she used the word ‘job’, as if she were a plumber’s mate; he and his educated African friends – journalists and schoolteachers – were careful to talk only of their ‘professions’. ‘Good works,’ he said, smiling quietly.
    She planted her feet comfortably before her, wriggling on the hard chair, and said to Temba with mannish frankness, ‘It’s a ghastly place. How in God’s name did you survive living there? I don’t think I can last out more than another few months, and I’ve always got my flat in Cape Town to escape to on Sundays, and so on.’
    While Temba smiled, turning his protruding eyes aside slowly, Jake looked straight at her and said, ‘Then why do you, lady, why do you?’
    â€˜Oh, I don’t know. Because I don’t see why anyone else – any one of the people who live there – should have to, I suppose.’ She laughed before anyone else could at the feebleness, the philanthropic uselessness of what she was saying. ‘Guilt, what-have-you . . .’
    Maxie shrugged, as if at the mention of some expensive illness, which he had never been able to afford and whose symptoms he could not imagine.
    There was a moment of silence; the two coloured men and the big black man standing back against the wall watched anxiously, as if some sort of signal might be expected, possibly from Jake Alexander, their boss, the man who, like themselves, was not white, yet who owned his own business, and had a car, and money, and strange friends – sometimes even white people, such as these. The three of them were dressed in the ill-matched cast-off clothing that all humble workpeople who are not white wear in Johannesburg, and they had not lost the ability of primitives and children to stare, unembarrassed and unembarrassing.
    Jake winked at Alister; it was one of his mannerisms – a bookie’s wink, a stage comedian’s wink. ‘Well, how’s it going, boy, how’s it going?’ he said. His turn of phrase was bar-room bonhomie; with luck, he could get into a bar, too. With a hat to cover his hair, and his coat collar well up, and only a bit of greasy pink cheek showing, he had slipped into the bars of the shabbier Johannesburg hotels with Alister many times and got away with it. Alister, on the other hand, had got away with the same