Life Times by Nadine Gordimer Page A

frightening animal. Then, suddenly, he leaned over and asked in a special, loud, slow voice, ‘What do you do? Are you a teacher?’
    Before the woman could answer, Malcolm Barker’s young sister-in-law, a girl who had been sitting silent, pink and cold as a porcelain figurine, on the window sill behind his back, leaned her hand for balance on his chair and said urgently, near his ear, ‘Has Jessica Malherbe really been in prison?’
    â€˜Yes, in Port Elizabeth. And in Durban, they tell me. And now she’s one of the civil-disobedience people – defiance campaign leaders who’re going to walk into some native location forbidden to Europeans. Next Tuesday. So she’ll land herself in prison again. For Christ’s sake, Joyce, what are you drinking that stuff for? I’ve told you that punch is the cheapest muck possible—’
    But the girl was not listening to him any longer. Balanced delicately on her rather full, long neck, her fragile-looking face with the eyes and the fine, short line of nose of a Marie Laurencin painting was looking across the room with the intensity peculiar to the blank-faced. Hers was an essentially two-dimensional prettiness: flat, dazzlingly pastel-coloured, as if the mask of make-up on the unlined skin were the face; if one had turned her around, one would scarcely have been surprised to discover canvas. All her life she had suffered from this impression she made of not being quite real.
    â€˜She looks so nice,’ she said now, her eyes still fixed on some point near the door. ‘I mean she uses good perfume, and everything. You can’t imagine it.’
    Her brother-in-law made as if to take the tumbler of alcohol out of the girl’s hand, impatiently, the way one might take a pair of scissors from a child, but, without looking at him or at her hands, she changed the glass from one hand to the other, out of his reach. ‘At least the brandy’s in a bottle with a recognisable label,’ he said peevishly. ‘I don’t know why you don’t stick to that.’
    â€˜I wonder if she had to eat the same food as the others,’ said the girl.
    â€˜You’ll feel like death tomorrow morning,’ he said, ‘and Madeline’ll blame me. You are an obstinate little devil.’
    A tall, untidy young man, whose blond head outtopped all others like a tousled palm tree, approached with a slow, drunken smile and, with exaggerated courtesy, asked Joyce to dance. She unhurriedly drank down what was left in her glass, put the glass carefully on the window sill and went off with him, her narrow waist upright and correct in his long arm. Her brother-in-law followed her with his eyes, irritatedly, for a moment, then closed them suddenly, whether in boredom or in weariness one could not tell.
    The young man was saying to the girl as they danced, ‘You haven’t left the side of your husband – or whatever he is – all night. What’s the idea?’
    â€˜My brother-in-law,’ she said. ‘My sister couldn’t come because the child’s got a temperature.’
    He squeezed her waist; it remained quite firm, like the crisp stem of a flower. ‘Do I know your sister?’ he asked. Every now and then his drunkenness came over him in a delightful swoon, so that his eyelids dropped heavily and he pretended that he was narrowing them shrewdly.
    â€˜Maybe. Madeline McCoy – Madeline Barker now. She’s the painter. She’s the one who started that arts-and-crafts school for Africans.’
    â€˜Oh, yes. Yes, I know,’ he said. Suddenly, he swung her away from him with one hand, executed a few loose-limbed steps around her, lost her in a collision with another couple, caught her to him again, and, with an affectionate squeeze, brought her up short against the barrier of people who were packed tight as a rugby scrum around the kitchen table, where the drinks were. He pushed her