At the garage where their benefactor left them no one had come to work yet. She put up both hands and stroked Gideon’s cheeks with their little tufts of whorly beard and said coquettishly, “Are you very, very tired,” though she knew he would not answer. They sat on an oil-drum beside the old-fashioned one-armed pumps and waited. When the petrol attendant came, in the baggy skin of old overalls, with a breakfast of dry mealie-meal in a jam tin, Gideon persuaded him to go on his bicycle to wake up the white owner-mechanic. The big black man licked his fingers clean, wrapped the tin carefully in its newspaper, and went off. Presently he returned; the owner said he could take the break-down truck himself and bring the car in. Gideon would go with him. “Go to the hotel and have breakfast,” he said to her, out of hearing of the other.
She looked at him. “Should I?”
He was getting into the truck; he nodded once, vehemently.
Alone in the dining-room of the commercial travellers’ hotel she ate porridge and eggs and bacon and drank cup after cup of grey coffee. She asked, at the reception desk, whether she could pay to have a bath. The receptionist was not on duty yet. The Indian wine-steward-cum-waiter, with his professionally amiable smooth face, said efficiently, “Is madam not resident here? I don’t think it’s allowed if you’re not resident.”
As soon as the car came back she took the thermos flask and ordered coffee to fill it, and sandwiches. “Picnic hamper for the road, madam, certainly I’ll do it for you.” From the oil-drum she watched Gideon biting deeply into the bread, bent with the other man over the open engine. A rumpled-looking fair man arrived at last. He unlocked a plywood booth within the hall of his garage. “Come and sit down in my office.” It had the wet black smell of oily rags, there was an old varnished desk piled with invoices and glossy pamphlets put out by the motor corporations, an office chair with a broken back, a grass chair that she sat in, three calendars showing coy girls with cloud-pink breasts popping from wisps of chiffon or leopard skin. Everything was covered with gritty dust. She wanted to go back to the workshop, but she sat out a decent interval; for the first time in her life she was instinctively following a convention of behaviour, fitting an identity imposed from outside herself. In due course the garage owner came back and said in the encouraging, confused way of doctors and mechanics, “Seems to be a leak of some kind. Battery’s O.K., but the points’re the trouble. Acid or something on them — but we’re trying to file them down and see …”
She got up, released.
“Would’ja like a cup a tea?”
“No thanks — I’ve had breakfast at the hotel. I’ll just go to the car — some things I want.”
“Make yourself at home here.” He reminded her of the hospitality of his office. “You travelling alone with the driver?”
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I have to get to Maseru, you see …”
From the car she called, “Gideon,” in a soft neutral voice that came to her. He walked over obediently. She was bent from the front seat, pretending to search for something on the floor, and she signed to him to lean down toward her. Their faces were suffused as if with physical effort, hers was red and almost coarse, a vein stood out down the side of the bridge of his nose. “For Christ’s sake! How long will it take? Is it bad?” “Can’t say. I don’t know if they know what they’re doing. I suggested a new battery but they haven’t got the right one for this car.” “But can’t they patch it up so that it’ll get us to Maseru, then what’s-his-name, your friend, can get it to a decent garage.” “Everything should be fixed, they’ve done it, but the thing won’t kick over. It’s just dead.”
She was uneasy about knowing her part so well. “I’ve got to sit in that office.” Her eyes had, to him, the bulging look of someone who is held by the throat. He had never seen her almost ugly; he noted it with the cruelty of objectivity and then felt warm to her in a way he had not connected with his feeling for her before — the way he felt when he had a joke with the gossiping crones in their dirty dresses stretched across old breasts, in a location yard, or when Sol was holding forth late at night. It was as if he met her in some part of his life where he could not have expected her to be.
The car took the whole day to repair and, when it became clear that this was going to be so, she went to the hotel and took a room. She was “resident”; she could go down the granolithic corridors to the “Ladies” now, and let the water run resoundingly into the deep enamelled iron bath with its four iron claws. She went between the room at the hotel and the tin workshop of the garage, that heated up under the winter sun as the hours went by. The garage owner came and stood beside her, hands on hips, whenever she came into the workshop; in the hotel room she lay on the cotton bedcover patterned with an Arcadian scene of shepherdesses and sun-dials and looked at the curtains on the window where the same pattern was repeated but had almost faded away; she slept and woke, and her cigarette left another burn beside those that marked the night-table with its emergency candle in a tin holder. She never got a chance to talk to Gideon again, except for the remarks he passed at her, rather than to her, about the car, as he worked with the petrol attendant, helping the garage owner. She prevailed upon the wine steward to give her a plate of cold meat and salad and a knife and fork and recklessly took it, covered by another thick hotel plate, over to the garage. The garage owner smiled at her for being a woman, and soft. “You didn’t have to pay for a meal like that for the boy, mine would’ve given him something.” She saw him eyeing the plates, plates from the hotel dining-room, the plates white people used. At once she asked some question about the car; how much longer could it take, now?
She spent the night in the hotel, alone, eating again opposite the huge black wooden chiffonier that hid the entrance to, but not the noise and smell of, the kitchen; going to bed in the room. Gideon slept in the garage on some sort of a bed provided by the petrol attendant. There were rooms for commercial travellers’ boys in the hotel yard, the garage owner said; she could get one of those — but she lied in shame for the dirty outhouses, “They’re full.”
Everything vanished but these practical details that had constantly to be worked out in the mind; the wangling of decent food, the arrangements for somewhere to sleep, the endless concentration on the coils and nuts and boxes within the gut of the car, and the news of it, the consultations about it. She said “Good morning, Gideon”, standing with the garage owner. She walked away with the man whose pink jowls were creased by his pillows. Gideon looked refreshed. He was shaved and had a clean shirt on. She wondered how and where he had managed this. All the mystery of the simplest mechanics of daily living parted them.
When they were on the road at last again, time had changed and stretched and swollen. No longer had they been a few days together; the other afternoon, the afternoon they had left Johannesburg, was far off. She said to him, “Stop for a minute somewhere.” She was stretched out in the seat beside him gawkily, her head flung back, smoking, the elbow of one arm cupped in the other hand. “What’s wrong?” “Just stop.”
With the engine cut off there was silence for a moment until the passing sounds of the empty road came to them — a chirrup as a bird flitted by, and the crack of a dry stalk in a mealie field. She was frowning intensely, provocatively, blinded by what she wanted to say. She kissed him suddenly with the powerful invitation of a woman who wants to be made love to. While he was uncertain how to respond, as a man is at the wrong time and place, and stroked her arm in some soothing, trifling caress, she sat up and said, “That bloody hotel.”