A Moment On the Edge : 100 Years of Crime Stories By Women

“Well, of course I wouldn’t say I’d been guilty — which anyway, as I keep telling you, I wasn’t. I’d still claim it had been an accident.

But you would be in the soup.”

“I see.” She pondered it long and carefully, still staring, but unseeingly now, at her sad reflection in the glass. “You thought all this out from the very first, didn’t you? In detail, from the very first?”

“Quite a nice little bit of opportunism,” he suggested, proud of it.

“All that about the publicity? The blood deliberately smeared on the poker? Yes, I see. You had to give them something, you had to get yourself accused and charged, you had to be tried and acquitted before it was safe to accuse me. Two purposes to my perjury: first to supply the evidence that would set you free and second to make me vulnerable to blackmail.” She said almost curiously, almost as though she were humbled for him rather than for herself, “Did you never even like me?”

“I didn’t mind you,” he said indifferently. “But as for marrying you — I think I’m a trifle more particular than that.” And he picked up her handbag, helped himself to the thick wad of banknotes there, stuffed them loosely into his wallet, tucked the wallet away. “Just a very, very small beginning, my dear,” he said.

“I won’t even ask how much you’re demanding. You’ll be back again and again and again of course, won’t you? But by way of a start—?”

“Make it ten thousand,” he said. “You can get that much quickly.”

He smiled at her with cruel and ugly triumph. “And I need it quickly — for my honeymoon,” he said.

Clever and quick. Clever not even to have to ask the name, to have summed it all up in one bright intuitive flash. And quick. The poker with its round brass knob lay there on the fender. She snatched it up — and struck.

Trudi burst open the door, darted forward from her listening post, slowed, then came smoothly the rest of the way and knelt beside him. For what seemed a long, long time they both stared down as only a few short months ago Raymond Gray himself had looked down at the dead body of his wife. It was his turn now.

Rosa’s fat white arms retained something, it seemed, of their once splendid muscle; long-ago anatomical training had suggested the most susceptible spot. The heavy ball of the poker had smashed to a cobweb of fractures Raymond’s delicate temple bone.

Trudi moved. With a small sick grimace she shifted Raymond’s head a little way, so that the wound lay crushed against the round brass knob of the fender.

“That rug!” she said, getting up to her feet again. “Always so dangerous! Fancy, a second time, just the same like the poor wife!”

She grinned with brutal complacence into the heavy white face with its look of dead despair. “So lucky that this time I was present, to see that it all was again just a terrible accident.”

Raymond’s jacket had fallen open. She stooped and with fastidious fingers picked out the wad of notes and stuffed them into her apron pocket.

“Just a verry, verrry small beginning,” she quoted and took the poker out of Rosa’s inert hand. “Go back to your flat, Madame.

Collapse upon your bed. I see to everything, then I make telephone to the doctor.” The Trudi shrug. “This time I know the number of him.”

Rosa went back to her own apartment. She did not, however, collapse upon her bed.

“Police?” she said, holding the telephone receiver in a steady hand.

She gave Raymond Gray’s address. “You’d better get over there quick. I’ve just seen from my balcony the au pair girl going for him with a poker. And this time — no question of an accident.”

She listened with a satisfied smile to a sharp voice cracking out orders. The voice returned to her. “Well, I wouldn’t know about that — I can’t see to the floor of the room. The girl disappeared from sight for a bit and when she got up she was stuffing money into her apron pocket. You’ll find it, I daresay, hidden somewhere in her room. An affair going on, you know, even before the poor wife died; and now I suppose he was refusing to marry her.”

Country Lovers NADINE GORDIMER

Nobel Prize winner Nadine Gordimer (b. 1923) was born in the gold mining region of South Africa, the daughter of a jeweler. Receiving her early education at a convent, she graduated from University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Like many writers, she was solitary as a child, out of school from the age of eleven to sixteen because of an apparently imaginary heart ailment, her only companions her mother and her adult friends, with no contact with other children. First published at the age of fifteen, she eventually contributed short stories to such major U.S. markets as The New Yorker, Harper’s, and Mademoiselle. Her first story collection, The Soft Voice of the Serpent and Other Stories, appeared in 1952, her first novel, The Lying Days, in 1955. Her views on racial equality and her celebration of human variety, which eventually led to outspoken opposition to her country’s apartheid policies, she credited to her reading rather than any example from her apolitical parents. She listed as one of her favorite writers J. D. Salinger, another specialist in depicting the societal outsider.

Gordimer wrote critically of the South African regime in both fiction and non-fiction. One of her novels, Burger’s Daughter (1979), was briefly banned in her home country. A Time magazine reviewer of her second novel, A World of Strangers (1958), as quoted in Current Biography (1959 yearbook), wrote that Gordimer “not only tells the truth about her countrymen, but she tells it so well that she has become at once their goad and their best writer.” Surely, her conscientious opposition, along with that of other South African writers and thinkers, was a factor in the eventual end of apartheid.

Generally, Gordimer is not regarded even tangentially as a writer of crime fiction, but “Country Lovers,” a painfully real story that reflects her concern about her country’s policies while confronting some basic truths about racism, certainly qualifies for the category.

The farm children play together when they are small; but once the white children go away to school they soon don’t play together any more, even in the holidays. Although most of the black children get some sort of schooling, they drop every year further behind the grades passed by the white children; the childish vocabulary, the child’s exploration of the adventurous possibilities of dam, koppies, mealie lands and veld — there comes a time when the white children have surpassed these with the vocabulary of boarding-schools and the possibilities of inter-school sports matches and the kind of adventures seen at the cinema. This usefully coincides with the age of twelve or thirteen; so that by the time early adolescence is reached, the black children are making, along with the bodily changes common to all, an easy transition to adult forms of address, beginning to call their old playmates missus and baasie—little master.

The trouble was Paulus Eysendyck did not seem to realize that Thebedi was now simply one of the crowd of farm children down at the kraal, recognizable in his sisters’ old clothes. The first Christmas holidays after he had gone to boarding-school he brought home for Thebedi a painted box he had made in his woodwork class. He had to give it to her secretly because he had nothing for the other children at the kraal. And she gave him, before he went back to school, a bracelet she had made of thin brass wire and the grey-and-white beans of the castor-oil crop his father cultivated. (When they used to play together, she was the one who had taught Paulus how to make clay oxen for their toy spans.) There was a craze, even in the platteland towns like the one where he was at school, for boys to wear elephant-hair and other bracelets beside their watch-straps; his was admired, friends asked him to get similar ones for them. He said the natives made them on his father’s farm and he would try.

When he was fifteen, six feet tall, and tramping round at school dances with the girls from the “sister” school in the same town; when he had learnt how to tease and flirt and fondle quite intimately these girls who were the daughters of prosperous farmers like his father; when he had even met one who, at a wedding he had attended with his parents on a nearby farm, had let him do with her in a locked storeroom what people did when they made