There are two people in front of her. Lise’s eyes are widely spaced, blue-grey and dull. Her lips are a straight line. She is neither good-looking nor bad-looking. Her nose is short and wider than it will look in the likeness constructed partly by the method of identikit, partly by actual photography, soon to be published in the newspapers of four languages.
Lise looks at the two people in front of her, first a woman and then a man, swaying to one side and the other as she does so, either to discern in the half-faces visible to her someone she might possibly know, or else to relieve, by these movements and looks, some impatience she might feel.
When it comes to her turn she heaves her luggage on to the scale and pushes her ticket to the clerk as quickly as possible. While he examines it she turns to look at a couple who are now waiting behind her. She glances at both faces, then looks back to the clerk, regardless of their returning her stares and their unanimous perception of her bright-coloured clothes.
‘Any hand-luggage?’ says the clerk, peering over the top of the counter.
Lise simpers, placing the tips of her upper teeth over her lower lip, and draws in a little breath.
‘Any hand-luggage?’ The busy young official looks at her as much as to say, ‘What’s the matter with
The clerk, all in one gesture, heaves a sigh, purses his lips, closes his eyes, places his chin in his hands and his elbow on the desk. Lise turns round to address the couple behind her. She says, ‘When you travel as much as I do you have to travel light, and I tell you, I nearly didn’t bring any luggage at all, because you can get everything you want at the other end, so the only reason I brought that suitcase there is that the customs get suspicious if you come in and out without luggage. They think you’re smuggling dope and diamonds under your blouse, so I packed the usual things for a holiday, but it was all quite unnecessary, as you get to understand when you’ve travelled about as you might say with experience in four languages over the years, and you know what you’re doing —’
‘Look, Miss,’ the clerk says, pulling himself straight and stamping her ticket, ‘you’re holding up the people behind you. We’re busy.’
Lise turns away from the bewildered-looking couple to face the clerk as he pushes her ticket and boarding card towards her. ‘Boarding card,’ says the clerk. ‘Your flight will be called in twenty-five minutes’ time. Next please.’
Lise grabs the papers and moves away as if thinking only of the next formality of travel. She puts the ticket in her bag, takes out her passport, slips the boarding card inside it, and makes straight towards the passport boxes. And it is almost as if, satisfied that she has successfully registered the fact of her presence at the airport among the July thousands there, she has fulfilled a small item of a greater purpose. She goes to the emigration official and joins the queue and submits her passport. And now, having received her passport back in her hand, she is pushing through the gate into the departure lounge. She walks to the far end, then turns and walks back. She is neither good-looking nor bad-looking. Her lips are slightly parted. She stops to look at the departures chart, then walks on. The people around her are mostly too occupied with their purchases and their flight-numbers to notice her, but some of those who sit beside their hand-luggage and children on the leather seats waiting for their flights to be called look at her as she walks past, noting without comment the lurid colours of her coat, red and white stripes, hanging loose over her dress, yellow-topped, with its skirt of orange, purple and blue. They look, as she passes, as they look also at those girls whose skirts are specially short, or those men whose tight-fitting shirts are patterned with flowers or are transparent. Lise is conspicuous among them only in the particular mixture of her colours, contrasting with the fact that her hem-line has been for some years an old-fashioned length, reaching just below her knees, as do the mild dresses of many other, but dingy, women travellers who teem in the departure lounge. Lise puts her passport into her hand-bag, and holds her boarding card.
She stops at the bookstall, looks at her watch and starts looking at the paperback stands. A white-haired, tall woman who has been looking through the hardback books piled up on a table, turns from them and, pointing to the paperbacks, says to Lise in English, ‘Is there anything there predominantly pink or green or beige?’
‘Excuse me?’ says Lise politely, in a foreignly accented English, ‘what is that you’re looking for?’
‘Oh,’ the woman says, ‘I thought you were American.’
‘No, but I can speak four languages enough to make myself understood.’
‘I’m from Johannesburg,’ says the woman, ‘and I have this house in Jo’burg and another at Sea Point on the Cape. Then my son, he’s a lawyer, he has a flat in Jo’burg. In all our places we have spare bedrooms, that makes two green, two pink, three beige, and I’m trying to pick up books to match. I don’t see any with just those pastel tints.’
‘You want English books,’ Lise says. ‘I think you find English books on the front of the shop over there.’
‘Well, I looked there and I don’t find my shades. Aren’t these English books here?’
Lise says ‘No. In any case they’re all very bright-coloured.’ She smiles then, and with her lips apart starts to look swiftly through the paperbacks. She picks out one with bright green lettering on a white background with the author’s name printed to look like blue lightning streaks. In the middle of the cover are depicted a brown boy and girl wearing only garlands of sunflowers. Lise pays for it, while the white-haired woman says, ‘Those colours are too bright for me. I don’t see anything.’
Lise is holding the book up against her coat, giggling merrily, and looking up to the woman as if to see if her purchase is admired.
‘You going on holiday?’ the woman says.
‘Yes. My first after three years.
‘You travel much?’
‘No. There is so little money. But I’m going to the South now. I went before, three years ago.
‘Well, I hope you have a good time. A very good time. You look very gay.
The woman has large breasts, she is clothed in a pink summer coat and dress. She smiles and is amiable in this transient intimacy with Lise, and not even sensing in the least that very soon, after a day and a half of hesitancy,
