Life Times (23 page)

‘Mr Cunningham, the boat's full,' another white assistant called.

‘Never mind, full! Put it on, man. I'm sick of seeing that bed lying here. Put it on!'

‘I don't know how you'll get it over, it makes the whole load top-heavy.'

Arthur Cunningham walked up to his clerk. He was a man of middle height, with a chest and a belly, big, hard and resonant, like the body of a drum, and his thick hands and sandy-haired chest, that always showed in the open neck of his shirt, were blotched and wrinkled with resistance to and in tough protection against the sun. His face was red and he had even false teeth in a lipless mouth that was practical-looking rather than mean or unkind.

‘Come on, Harris,' he said, as if he were taking charge of a child. ‘Come on now, and no damn nonsense. Take hold here.' And he sent the man, tottering under the weight of the foot of the bed while he himself carried the head, down to the boat.

 

Rita had married him when she was twenty-three, and he was sixteen or seventeen years older than she was. He had looked almost exactly the same when she married him as he did the last time ever that she saw him, when he stood in the road with his hands on the sides of his belly and watched the car leave for Johannesburg. She was a virgin, she had never been in love, when she married him; he had met her on one of his trips down south, taken a fancy to her, and that was that. He always did whatever he liked and got whatever he wanted. Since she had never been made love to by a young man, she accepted his command of her in bed as the sum of love; his tastes in love-making, like everything else about him, were formed before she knew him, and he was as set in this way as he was in others. She never knew him, of course, because she had nothing of the deep need to possess his thoughts and plumb his feelings that comes of love.

He was as generous as his tongue was rough, which meant that his tongue took the edge off his generosity at least as often as his generosity took the sting out of his tongue. He had hunted and fished and traded all over Africa, and he had great contempt for travellers' tales. When safari parties stayed at his hotel, he criticised their weapons (What sort of contraption do you call that? I've shot round about fifty lion in my lifetime, without any telescopic sights, I can tell you), their camping equipment (I don't know what all this fuss is about water filters and what-not. I've drunk water that was so filthy I've had to lean over and draw it into my mouth through a bit of rag, and been none the worse for it), and their general helplessness. But he also found experienced native guides for these people, and lent them the things they had forgotten to buy down south. He was conscious of having made a number of enemies, thinly scattered in that sparsely populated territory, and was also conscious of his good standing, of the fact that everybody knew him, and of his ownership of the hotel, the two stores, and whatever power there was in the village.

His stepmother had been an enemy of his, in that far-off childhood that he had overcome long ago, but he had had no grudge against his young stepbrother, her son, who must have had his troubles, too, adopted into a house full of Cunninghams. Johnny'd been rolling around the world for ten years or so – America, Mexico, Australia – when he turned up in the territory one day, stony-broke and nowhere in particular to go. Arthur wasn't hard on him, though he chaffed him a bit, of course, and after the boy'd been loafing around the river and hotel for a month, Arthur suggested that he might give a hand in one of the stores. Johnny took the hint in good part – ‘Got to stop being a bum sometime, I suppose,' he said, and turned out to be a surprisingly good worker. Soon he was helping at the hotel, too – where, of course, he was living, anyway. And soon he was one of the family, doing whatever there was to be done.

Yet he kept himself to himself. ‘I've got a feeling he'll just walk out, when he feels like it, same as he came,' Rita said to Arthur, with some resentment. She had a strong sense of loyalty and was always watchful of any attempt to take advantage of her husband, who had in such careless abundance so many things that other men wanted.

‘Oh for Pete's sake, Rita, he's a bit of a natural sourpuss, that's all. He lives his life and we live ours. There's nothing wrong with the way he works, and nothing else about old Johnny interests me.'

The thing was, in a community the size of the village, and in the close life of the little hotel, that life of Johnny Cunningham's was lived, if in inner isolation, outwardly under their noses. He ate at table with them, usually speaking only when he was spoken to. When, along with the Cunningham couple, he got drawn into a party of hotel guests, he sat drinking with great ease but seldom bothered to contribute anything to the talk, and would leave the company with an abrupt, sardonic-sounding ‘Excuse me' whenever he pleased.

The only times he came ‘out of his shell', as Rita used to put it to her husband, were on dance nights. He had arrived in the territory during the jive era, but his real triumphs on the floor came with the advent of rock 'n' roll. He learnt it from a film, originally – the lounge of the hotel was the local cinema, too, on Thursday nights – and he must have supplemented his self-teaching on the yearly holidays in Johannesburg. Anyway, he was expert, and on dance nights he would take up from her grass chair one of the five or six lumpy girls from the village, at whom he never looked, at any other time, let alone spoke to, and would transform her within the spell of his own rhythm. Sometimes he did this with women among the hotel guests, too; ‘Look at old Johnny, giving it stick,' Arthur Cunningham would say, grinning, in the scornfully admiring tone of someone praising a performance that he wouldn't stoop to, himself. There was something about Johnny, his mouth slightly open, the glimpse of saliva gleaming on his teeth, his head thrown back and his eyes narrowed while his body snaked on stooping legs and nimble feet, that couldn't be ignored.

‘Well, he seems to be happy that way,' Rita would say with a laugh, embarrassed for the man.

Sometimes Johnny slept with one of these women guests (there was no bed that withheld its secrets from the old German housekeeper, who, in turn, insisted on relating all she knew to Rita Cunningham). It was tacitly accepted that there was some sort of connection between the rock 'n' roll performance and the assignation; who would ever notice Johnny at any other time? But in between these infrequent one- or two-night affairs, he took no interest in women, and it seemed clear that marriage was something that never entered his head. Arthur paid him quite well, but he seemed neither to save nor to have any money. He bet (by radio, using the meteorological officer's broadcasting set) on all the big races in Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg, and he had bought three cars, all equally unsuitable for road conditions up in the territory, and tinkered them to death in Arthur's workshop.

When he came back to the hotel with Rita Cunningham after Arthur was drowned, he went on with his work as usual. But after a week, all the great bulk of work, all the decisions that had been Arthur's, could not be ignored any longer by considerate employees hoping to spare the widow. She said to Johnny at lunch, in her schoolgirlish way, ‘Can you come to the office afterwards? I mean, there're some things we must fix up—' When she came into the office he was already there, standing about like a workman, staring at the calendar on the wall.

‘Who's going to see that the store orders don't overlap, now?' she said. ‘We've got to make that somebody's job. And somebody'll have to take over the costing of perishable goods, too, not old Johnson, Arthur always said he didn't have a clue about it.'

Johnny scratched his ear and said, ‘D'you want me to do it?'

They looked at each other for a moment, thinking it over. There was no sign on his face either of eagerness or reluctance.

‘Well, if you could, Johnny, I think that's best . . .' And after a pause, she turned to something else. ‘Who can we make responsible for the bar – the ordering and everything? D'you think we should try and get a man?'

He shrugged. ‘If you like. You could advertise in Jo'burg, or p'raps in Rhodesia. You won't get anybody decent to come up here.'

‘I know.' The distress of responsibility suddenly came upon her.

‘You could try,' he said again.

‘We'll get some old soak, I suppose, who can't keep a job anywhere else.'

‘Sure,' he said with his sour smile.

‘You don't think,' she said, ‘I mean just for now – Couldn't we manage it between us? I mean you could serve, and perhaps the Allgood boy from the garage could come at weekends to give a hand, and then you and I could do the ordering?'

‘Sure,' he said, rocking from his heels to his toes and back again, and looking out of the window, ‘I can do it, if you want to try.'

She still could not believe that the wheels of these practical needs were carrying her along, and with her, the hotel and the two stores. ‘Oh yes,' she said, distracted, ‘I think it'll be OK, just for the time being, until I can . . .' She did not finish what she was saying because she did not know what it was for which the arrangement was to be a makeshift.

 

She took it for granted that she meant to sell the hotel and the two stores. Two of the children were at school in the south, already; the other two would have to follow when they had outgrown the village school, in a year or two. What was the point in her staying on, there, in a remote village, alone, two thousand miles from her children or her relatives?

She talked, and she believed she acted, for the first six months after Arthur was drowned, as if the sale of the hotel and stores was imminent and inevitable. She even wrote to an agent in Johannesburg and an old lawyer friend in Rhodesia, asking their advice about what sort of price she could expect to get for her property and her businesses – Arthur had left everything to her.

Johnny had taken over most of Arthur's work. She, in her turn, had taken over some of Johnny's. Johnny drove back to Johannesburg to fetch the two younger children home, and the hotel and the stores went on as usual. One evening when she was doing some work in the office after dinner, and giving half her attention to the talk of hotel matters with him, she added the usual proviso – ‘It would do in the meantime.'

Johnny was hissing a tune through his teeth while he looked up the price of a certain brand of gin in a file of liquor wholesalers' invoices – he was sure he remembered Arthur had a cheaper way of buying it than he himself knew – and he stopped whistling but went on looking and said, ‘What'll you do with yourself in Johannesburg, anyway, Rita? You'll have money and you won't need a job.'

She put down her pen and turned round, clutching at the straw of any comment on her position that would help her feel less adrift. ‘Wha'd'you mean?'

‘I suppose you'll buy a house somewhere near your sister and live there looking after the two little kids.'

‘Oh, I don't know,' she parried, but faltering, ‘I suppose I'd buy a house . . .'

‘Well, what else could you do with yourself?'

He had made it all absolutely clear to her. It came over her with innocent dismay – she had not visualised it, thought about it, for herself: the house in a Johannesburg suburb, the two children at school in the mornings, the two children in bed after seven each night, her sister saying, you must come down to us just whenever you like.

She got up slowly and turned, leaning her rump against the ridge of the desk behind her, frowning, unable to speak.

‘You've got something, here,' he said.

‘But I always wanted to go. The summer – it's so hot. We always said, one day, when the children—' All her appeals to herself failed. She said, ‘But a woman – it's silly – how can I carry on?'

He watched her with interest, but would not save her with an interruption. He smoked and held his half-smoked cigarette between thumb and first finger, turned inwards towards his palm. He laughed. ‘You are carrying on,' he said. He made a pantomime gesture of magnificence, raising his eyebrows, waggling his head slowly and pulling down the corners of his mouth. ‘All going strong. The whole caboodle. What you got to worry about?'

She found herself laughing, the way children laugh when they are teased out of tears.

In the next few weeks, a curious kind of pale happiness came over her. It was the happiness of relief from indecision, the happiness of confidence. She did not have to wonder if she could manage – she had been managing all the time! The confidence brought out something that had been in her all her life, dormant; she was capable, even a good businesswoman. She began to take a firm hand with the children, with the hotel servants, with the assistants at the stores. She even wrote a letter to the liquor wholesaler, demanding, on a certain brand of gin, the same special discount that her late husband had squeezed out of him.

When the lawyer friend from Rhodesia, who was in charge of Arthur's estate, came up to consult with her, she discussed with him the possibility of offering Johnny – not a partnership, no – but some sort of share, perhaps a fourth share in the hotel and the stores.

‘The only thing is, will he stay?' she said.

‘Why shouldn't he stay?' said the lawyer, indicating the sound opportunity that was going to be offered to the man.

‘Oh, I don't know,' she said. ‘I always used to say to Arthur, I had the feeling he was the sort of man who would walk off, one day, same as he came.'

In view of the steady work he had done – ‘Oh, I must be fair,' Rita hastened to agree with the lawyer. ‘He
has
worked terribly hard, he's been wonderful, since it happened' – the lawyer saw no cause for concern on this point; in any case the contract, when he drew it up, would be a watertight one and would protect her interests against any such contingency.