Life Times (22 page)

T
he hotel stood a hundred yards up from the bank of the river. On the lintel above the screen door at the entrance, small gilt letters read: J. P. CUNNINGHAM, LICENSED TO SELL MALT, WINE AND SPIRITUOUS LIQUORS; the initials had been painted in over others that had been painted out. Sitting in the office off the veranda, at the old, high, pigeonhole desk stuffed with papers, with the cardboard files stacked round her in record of twenty years, she turned her head now and then to the water. She did not see it, the sheeny, gnat-hazy surface of the tropical river; she rested her eyes a moment. And then she turned back to her invoices and accounts, or wrote out, in her large, strong hand, the lunch and dinner menus: Potage of Green Peas, Crumbed Chop and Sauter Potatoes – the language, to her an actual language, of hotel cooking, that was in fact the garbled remnant influence of the immigrant chef from Europe who had once stuck it out in the primitive kitchen for three months, on his way south to the scope and plush of a Johannesburg restaurant.

She spent most of the day in the office, all year. The only difference was that in winter she was comfortable, it was even cool enough for her to need to wear a cardigan, and in summer she had to sit with her legs spread under her skirt while the steady trickle of sweat crept down the inner sides of her thighs and collected behind her knees. When people came through the squealing screen door on to the hotel veranda, and hung about in the unmistakable way of new arrivals (this only happened in winter, of course; nobody came to that part of Central Africa in the summer, unless they were obliged to) she would sense rather than hear them, and she would make them wait a few minutes. Then she would get up from the desk slowly, grinding back her chair, pulling her dress down with one hand, and appear. She had never learnt the obsequious yet superior manner of a hotelkeeper's wife – the truth was that she was shy, and, being a heavy forty-year-old woman, she expressed this in lame brusqueness. Once the new guests had signed the register, she was quite likely to go back to her bookkeeping without having shown them to their rooms or called a boy to carry their luggage. If they ventured to disturb her again in her office, she would say, astonished, ‘Hasn't someone fixed you up? My husband, or the housekeeper? Oh Lord—' And she would go through the dingy company of the grass chairs in the lounge, and through the ping-pong room that smelled strongly of red floor polish and cockroach repellent, to find help.

But usually people didn't mind their offhand reception. By the time they arrived at the river village they had travelled two days from the last village over desert and dried-out salt pans; they had slept out under the crushing silence of a night sky that ignored them and held no human sound other than their own small rustlings. They were inclined to emerge from their jeeps feeling unreal. The sight of Mrs Cunningham, in her flowered print dress, with a brooch on her big bosom, and her big, bright-skinned face looking clerically dazed beneath her thick permanent, was the known world, to them; Friday's footprint in the sand. And when she appeared in the bar, in the evening, they found out that she was quite nice, after all. She wore a ribbon in her large head of light curly hair, then, and like many fat women, she looked suddenly not young, but babyish. She did not drink – occasionally she would giggle experimentally over a glass of sweet sherry – and would sit reading a week-old Johannesburg paper that someone had brought up with him in his car.

A man served the drinks with light, spry movements that made everything he did seem like sleight of hand.

‘Is that really Mrs Cunningham's
husband
?' newcomers would ask, when they had struck up acquaintance with the three permanent guests – the veterinary officer, the meteorological officer and the postmaster. The man behind the bar, who talked out of the curl of his upper lip, was small and slender and looked years younger than she did, although of course he was not – he was thirty-nine and only a year her junior. Outdoors, and in the daylight, his slenderness was the leanness of cured meat, his boy film-star face, with the satyr-shaped head of upstanding curly hair, the black, frown-framed eyes and forward-jutting mouth, was a monkey face, lined, watchful, always old.

Looking at him in the light of the bar, one of the permanent guests would explain, behind his glass, ‘Her second husband, of course. Arthur Cunningham's dead. But this one's some sort of relative of her first husband, he's a Cunningham, too.'

 

Rita Cunningham did not always see nothing when she turned to look at the water. Sometimes (what times? she struggled to get herself to name – oh, times; when she had slept badly, or when – things – were not right) she saw the boat coming across the flooded river. She looked at the wide, shimmering, sluggish water where the water lilies floated shining in the sun and she began to see, always at the same point, approaching the middle of the river from the other bank, the boat moving slowly under its heavy load. It was their biggest boat; it was carrying eight sewing machines and a black-japanned iron double bedstead as well as the usual stores, and Arthur and three store boys were sitting on top of the cargo. As the boat reached the middle of the river, it turned over, men and cargo toppled, and the iron bed came down heavily on top of their flailing arms, their arms stuck through the bars as the bed sank, taking them down beneath it. That was all. There was a dazzle of sun on the water, where they had been; the water lilies were thickest there.

She had not been there when it happened. She had been in Johannesburg on that yearly holiday that they all looked forward to so much. She had been sitting in the best seats on the stand at the Wanderers' Ground, the third day running, watching the international cricket test between South Africa and the visiting New Zealand team. Three of her children were with her – the little boy had the autographs of all the men in both teams; and Johnny was there. Johnny Cunningham, her husband's stepbrother, who had worked with them at the hotel and the stores for the last few years, and who, as he did every year since he had begun to work for them, had driven her down to Johannesburg, so that she could have a longer holiday than the time her husband, Arthur, could spare away from his work. The arrangement was always that Arthur came down to Johannesburg after his wife had been there for two weeks, and then Johnny Cunningham drove himself back to the hotel alone, to take care of things there.

Ever since she was a girl, she had loved cricket. At home, up in the territory, she'd have the radio going in the hotel office while she worked, if there was a cricket commentary on, just as some people might like a little background music. She was happy, that day, high up in the stand in the shade. The grass was green, the figures of the players plaster-white. The sweet, short sound of the ball brought good-natured murmurs, roars of approval, dwindling growls of disappointment following it, from the crowd. There was the atmosphere of ease of people who are well enough off to take a day's holiday from the office and spend it drinking beer, idly watching a game, and getting a red, warm look, so that they appear more like a bed of easy-growing flowers than a crowd of human faces. Every now and then, a voice over the loudspeaker would announce some request or other – would the owner of car TJ 986339 please report to the ticket office at once; a lady's fob watch had been lost, and would anyone . . . et cetera; an urgent telegram, I repeat, an urgent telegram awaits Mr So-and-so . . . The voice was addicted to the phrase ‘I repeat,' and there were mock groans here and there, among the crowd, every time the voice began to speak – she herself had exchanged a little shrug of amusement with someone in the row ahead who had turned in exasperation at the umpteenth ‘I repeat' that day. And then, at exactly quarter past three in the afternoon, her own name was spoken by the voice. ‘Will Mrs Rita Cunningham, of Olongwe, I repeat, Olongwe, please report to the main entrance immediately. This is an urgent message for Mrs Rita Cunningham. Will Mrs Cunningham please report . . .'

She turned to Johnny at once, surprised, pulling a face.

‘I wouldn't know,' he said, giving a short, bored laugh. (He preferred a good fast rugby game any time, but Arthur, wanting to give him a treat, had said to his wife, ‘Get a cricket ticket for Johnny too, take Johnny along one of the days.')

She said, smiling and confused, bridling, ‘Somebody's making a silly ass of me, calling me out like this.'

‘Awright,' he said, slapping down his box of cigarettes and getting up with the quickness of impatience, ‘I'll go.'

She hesitated a moment; she had suddenly thought of her fourth child, the naughty one, Margie, who had been left playing at the house of the Johannesburg relatives with whom the Cunninghams were staying. ‘Oh, I'd better go. I suppose it must be Margie; I wonder what she's gone and done to herself now, the little devil.'

Johnny sat down again. ‘Please yourself.' And she got up and made her way up the stand. As soon as she got to the entrance she saw her sister Ruth's car drawn up right at the gates where no one was allowed to park, and before she had seen her sister and her brother-in-law standing there, turned towards her, a throb of dread beat up once, in her throat.

‘What happened? Did she run in the street—' she cried, rushing up to them. The man and the woman stared at her as if they were afraid of her.

‘Not Margie,' said the man. ‘It's not Margie. Come into the car.'

And in the car, outside the cricket ground, still within sound of the plock of the ball and the voice of the crowd rising to it, they told her that a telegram had come saying that Arthur had been drowned that morning, bringing a boatload of goods over the flooded river.

She did not cry until she got all the way back to the hotel on the bank of the river. She left the children behind, with her sister (the two elder girls went to boarding school in Johannesburg, anyway), and Johnny Cunningham drove her home.

Once, in the middle of a silence as vast as the waste of sand they were grinding through, she said, ‘Who would ever have dreamt it would happen to him. The things he'd done in his time, and never come to any harm.'

‘Don't tell me,' Johnny agreed, his pipe between his teeth.

In Johannesburg they had all said to one another, ‘It'll hit her when she gets back.' But although she had believed the fact of her husband's death when she was away from the village, in the unreality of the city – once she saw and smelled the village again, once she stepped into the hotel, it all seemed nonsense. Nothing was changed. It was all there, wasn't it? The wildebeest skins pegged out to tan, the old horns half buried in the sand, the plaster Johnny Walker on the counter in the bar; the river.

Two days later one of the store boys came over to the hotel with some cheques for her to sign, and, standing in the office doorway with his old hat in his hand, said to her in a hoarse low voice, as if he wanted no one, not even the dead, to overhear, ‘He was a good man. Missus, he was a very good man. Oh, missus.'

She cried. While she wrote her name on the cheques and silently handed them back to the elderly black man, it came: strong pity for Arthur, who had been alive, as she was, and was now dead. When she was alone again she sat on at the desk staring at the spikes of invoices and the rubber stamps and the scratched and ink-stained wood, and she wept in pity for the pain of that strong, weathered man, filling his lungs with water with every breath under the weight of the iron bedstead. She wept at the cruel fact of death; perhaps that was not quite what her relatives in Johannesburg had meant when they had said that it would hit her when she got home – but she wept, anyway.

Slowly, in short bursts of confidence that stopped abruptly or tailed off in embarrassment, people began to talk to her about the drowning. This one spared her this detail, another told her it and spared her something else; so it was that she had put together, out of what she had been told, that silent, unreal, orderly picture, scarcely supplemented at all by imagination, since she had very little, that she sometimes saw rise on the river and sink out of sight again.

The facts were simple and horrible. Arthur Cunningham had been doing what he had done dozens of times before; what everyone in the village had done time and again, whenever the river was flooded and the bridge was down. The bridge was either down or under water almost every year, at the height of the rainy season, and when this happened the only way to reach the village was by boat. That December day there was a pack of stuff to get across the river – all the food for the hotel and the store goods, which had come up north by truck. Arthur Cunningham was the sort of man who got things done himself; that was the only way to get them done. He went back and forth with the boys four times, that morning, and they were making some headway. ‘Come on, let's see if we c'n git things going,' he kept chivvying at the white assistants who were in charge of unloading the trucks, and were sweating with haste and the nervous exhaustion of working under his eye. ‘I dunno, honestly, I've got my boat, I've got my team of boys, and what's happening? I'm waiting for you blokes. Don't tickle that stuff, there, man! For Christ's sake, get cracking. Get it on, get it on!'

The Africans took his manner – snarling, smiling, insulting in its assumption (true) that he could do everything his workers did, but in half the time and twice as well – better than the white men. They laughed and grumbled back at him, and groaned under his swearing and his taunts. When the boat was fully loaded for the fifth trip, he noticed the black-japanned double bed, in its component parts, but not assembled, propped against a crate. ‘What about that thing?' he yelled. ‘Don't keep leaving that behind for the next lot, you bloody fools. Get it on, get it on. That's a new bed for the Chief's new wife, that's an important order.' And he roared with laughter. He went up to a pimply little twenty-two-year-old clerk, whose thin hair, tangled with the rims of his glasses, expressed wild timidity. ‘You shouldn't be too young to know how important a nice comfortable big bed is? You expect the old Chief to wait till tomorrow? How'd'you feel, if you were waiting for that beautiful bed for a beautiful new woman—' And while the young man peered at him, startled, Arthur Cunningham roared with laughter again.