Life Times by Nadine Gordimer Page B

sort of thing narrowly several times, too, when he had accompanied Jake to a shebeen in a coloured location, where it was illegal for a white man to be, as well as illegal for anyone at all to have a drink; twice Alister had escaped a raid by jumping out of a window. Alister had been in South Africa only eighteen months, as correspondent for a newspaper in England, and because he was only two or three years away from undergraduate escapades, such incidents seemed to give him a kind of nostalgic pleasure; he found them funny. Jake, for his part, had decided long ago (with the great help of the money he had made) that he would take the whole business of the colour bar as humorous. The combination of these two attitudes, stemming from such immeasurably different circumstances, had the effect of making their friendship less self-conscious than is usual between a white man and a coloured one.
    â€˜They tell me it’s going to be a good thing on Saturday night?’ said Alister, in the tone of questioning someone in the know. He was referring to a boxing match between two coloured heavyweights, one of whom was a protégé of Jake’s.
    Jake grinned deprecatingly, like a fond mother. ‘Well, Pikkie’s a good boy,’ he said. ‘I tell you, it’ll be something to see.’ He danced about a little on his clumsy toes, in pantomime of the way a boxer nimbles himself, and collapsed against the stove, his belly shaking with laughter at his breathlessness.
    â€˜Too much smoking, too many brandies, Jake,’ said Alister.
    â€˜With me, it’s too many women, boy.’
    â€˜We were just congratulating Jake,’ said Maxie in his soft, precise voice, the indulgent, tongue-in-cheek tone of the protégé who is superior to his patron, for Maxie was one of Jake’s boys, too – of a different kind. Though Jake had decided that for him being on the wrong side of a colour bar was ludicrous, he was as indulgent to those who took it seriously and politically, the way Maxie did, as he was to any up-and-coming youngster who, say, showed talent in the ring or wanted to go to America and become a singer. They could all make themselves free of Jake’s pocket, and his printing shop, and his room with a radio in the lower end of the town, where the building had fallen below the standard of white people but was far superior to the kind of thing most coloureds and blacks were accustomed to.
    â€˜Congratulations on what?’ the young white woman asked. She had a way of looking up around her, questioningly, from face to face, that came of long familiarity with being the centre of attention at parties.
    â€˜Yes, you can shake my hand, boy,’ said Jake to Alister. ‘I didn’t see it, but these fellows tell me that my divorce went through. It’s in the papers today.’
    â€˜Is that so? But from what I hear, you won’t be a free man long,’ Alister said teasingly.
    Jake giggled, and pressed at one gold-filled tooth with a strong fingernail. ‘You heard about the little parcel I’m expecting from Zululand?’ he asked.
    â€˜Zululand?’ said Alister. ‘I thought your Lila came from Stellenbosch.’
    Maxie and Temba laughed.
    â€˜Lila? What Lila?’ said Jake with exaggerated innocence.
    â€˜You’re behind the times,’ said Maxie to Alister.
    â€˜You know I like them – well, sort of round,’ said Jake. ‘Don’t care for the thin kind, in the long run.’
    â€˜But Lila had red hair!’ Alister goaded him. He remembered the incongruously dyed, artificially straightened hair on a fine coloured girl whose nostrils dilated in the manner of certain fleshy water plants seeking prey.
    Jennifer Tetzel got up and turned the gas off on the stove, behind Jake. ‘That bacon’ll be like charred string,’ she said.
    Jake did not move – merely looked at her lazily. ‘This is not the way to talk with a