A Sport of Nature by Nadine Gordimer Read Free Book Online Page B

puppet. —I want to swim and get a tan same like Hillela.— They all laughed—she flung her arm, wet hand extended, round Hillela and Hillela’s head rested a moment under her cocked one, cradled against her mauvish-black, damp neck.
    Sasha had his mother’s insistence on facing the facts. —You wouldn’t be allowed on the beach. Isn’t that true, Hillela?—
    â€”Well, Jethro’s afraid of the sea anyway, but Emily used to go down early in the morning, when nobody was there.—
    â€”They lucky, like I say. Miss Olga gave them a fridge for their rooms. Emily’s pay is very high, very high. I wish I could be working for Miss Olga!—
    â€”Better than your pay?—
    â€”
Better
than my pay, Sasha? More than ninety pounds a month.—
    â€”My parents wouldn’t take you to a place where you couldn’t even walk on the beach.—
    Bettie wiped the sink with the absent vigour of a task performed through a lifetime. —I’m not thinking about walking, I’m thinking about money, what I must pay my mother for looking after my children, what I must pay for schoolbooks, for uniform, for church—
    â€”We’re not rich people like Olga.—
    Bettie laughed. —Maybe you not rich, I don’t know.—
    â€”You know how hard my mother works to help—black people, I mean. And she doesn’t get paid.—
    â€”Yes, she works hard. I work hard and I’m thinking about money. Money is the thing that helps me. Are you going to lock up, lovey?—
    She took out of the oven a pot containing her man’s supper and a jug with the remains of the dinner coffee and went off across the yard to her room.
    The two young people played the records they liked as loudly as they wished. They sat on the floor in the livingroom under rocking waves of the rhythm to which their pleasurable responses were adjusted by repeated surrender to it, as each generation finds a tidal rhythm for its blood in a different musical mode. Hillela gazed at her feet, transformed by the sun and sea into two slick and lizard-like creatures, thin brown skin sliding satiny over the tendons when she moved her toes. Her attention drew the boy’s.
    â€”What was all that about?— A tip of the head towards the dining-table.
    She took a moment to make sure he was not referring to Bettie. —Someone was here when I came home today.—
    â€”Someone we know?—
    â€”Not you. You weren’t here when she came before. Quite long ago. Before the Chief stayed.—
    â€”But you don’t know who?— After a moment he began again. —Were you there?—
    â€”I was unpacking my things. They were on the verandah.— She bent her head and began stroking over her feet and ankles. —I heard them talking when I went to fetch a banana—
    â€”And?—
    â€”I was thinking about something else.—
    â€”A-ha, some chap you got keen on at Plett, mmh?—
    She mimicked Bettie. —Maybe, I don’t know.—
    He rolled onto his stomach and began playing with her toes to help her remember. —But you understand what they were talking about, now.—
    â€”Well, I remember some things.—
    â€”Such as?— He scratched suddenly down the sole of her foot and her toes curled back over his hand in reflex.
    â€”Oh you know.—
    â€”Me? How could I?—
    â€”You heard what Pauline said, at dinner.—
    â€”Yes. It’s about someone on the run from the police, isn’t it.— He traced down her toes with his forefinger. —Look how clean the sea has made your nails. You’ve got a funny-looking little toe, here.—
    â€”Pauline told me that toe was broken when I was two years old, in Lourenço Marques with my mother.—
    â€”Do you remember?—
    â€”I was too small.—
    â€”Not your mother either? What’s she like?—
    â€”No. —I suppose like Olga and