Надин Гордимер (Nadine Gordimer)AN INTRUDER
Nadine Gordimer
Someone had brought her along; she sat looking out of the rest of the noisy party in the nightclub like a bush-baby between trees. He was one of them, there was no party without him, but under the cross-fire of private jokes, the anecdotes and the drinking he cornered her, from the beginning, with the hush of an even more private gentleness and tenderness: ‘The smoke will brown those ears like gardenia petals.’ She drank anything so long as it was soft. He touched her warm hand on the glass of lemonade; ‘Pass the water,’ he called, and dipping his folded handkerchief in among the ice cubes, wrung it out and drew the damp doth like cool lips across the inside of her wrists. She was not a giggler despite her extreme youth, and she smiled the small slow smile that men brought to her face without her knowing why. When one of the others took her to dance, he said seriously, ‘For God’s sake don’t breathe your damned brandy on her, Carl, she’ll wilt.’ He himself led her to the dark crowded circle in shelter, his arms folded round her and his handsome face pressed back at the chin, so that his eyes looked down on her in reassurance even while the din of bouzouki and drum stomped out5 speech, stomped through bones and flesh in one beat pumped by a single bursting heart.
He was between marriages, then (the second or third had just broken up— nobody really knew which), and this was always a high time, for him. They said, Seago’s back in circulation; it meant that he was discovering his same old world anew, as good as new. But while he was setting off the parties, the weekend dashes here and there, the pub-crawls, he was already saying to her mother as he sat in the garden drinking coffee, ‘Look at the mother and see what you’re getting in the daughter. Lucky man that I am.’
Marie and her mother couldn’t help laughing and at the same time being made to feel a little excited and worldly. His frail little marmoset— as he called her— was an only child, they were mother-and-daughter, the sort of pair with whom a father couldn’t be imagined, even if he hadn’t happened to have been dispensed with before he could cast the reminder of a male embrace between them in the form of a likeness or gesture they didn’t share. Mrs. Clegg had earned a living for them both, doing very pale pastels of the children of the horsey set, and very dark pastels of African women for the tourist shops. She was an artist and therefore must not be too conventional: she knew James Seago had been married before, but he was so attractive— so charming, so considerate of Marie and her and such a contrast to the boys of Marie’s own age who didn’t even bother to open a car door for a woman— there was something touching about this man, whose place was in a dinner-jacket among the smart set, appreciating the delicacy of the girl. ‘You don’t mind if I take her out with my ruffian friends? You’ll let me look after her?’— In the face of this almost wistful candour and understanding, who could find any reality in his ‘reputation’ with women? He came for Marie night after night in his old black Lancia. His ruddy, clear-skinned face and lively eyes blotted out the man her mother heard talked about, the creation of gossip. He was— no, not like a son to her, but an equal. When he said something nice, he was not just being kind to an older woman. And his photograph was often on the social page.