Nadine Gordimer - Loot and Other Stories

At six in the morning the driver-bodyguard had already brought the car round to the terrace, ready to go. He showed no sign of his night’s debauch. She was to wonder some time afterwards if he really had been drunk. Or had been given instruction that he was; but then who could measure the unexpressed will, hers as well as her host’s, that was ready for the pretext.

People in official positions, men and women with a public persona know how to accommodate officially unsuitable private circumstances for some sort of decorum within these positions and personae. Even someone with as low a level of official and public persona as Administrator’s Assistant in an international aid agency knows this; along with computer competency and the protocols of tact and diplomacy in relations with the recipient country; another unspoken code. Aid personnel are not permitted to make personal attachments to local individuals on the premise that these might influence aid decisions; if they do indulge in such attachments — and they did — they are trusted to honour the Agency’s objective integrity by following the rules of discretion on both sides — the individual’s in exchange for the Agency’s blind eye. For members of Government of course the circumstance is taken for granted — a man or woman in high office would be expected to have along with a luxury car and security guards, some woman, some man, for relaxation; faces outside the official portraits at home with the family.

The official car of the Deputy-Director of Land Affairs was often parked in the yard behind the house assigned by the Agency to the Administrator’s Assistant. The driver and security guards sat in Tomasi’s kitchen as habitués unremarked as any of his other friends. They might be called out and dismissed by their charge, the Deputy-Director, to leave the car and find their way home, return in the morning. Somehow though neither he nor she in their new-found rapport had to speak of it, neither would make love with the men talking and laughing in the kitchen.

She had only once before had a love affair abroad on a tour of duty, brief and in Europe in an hotel where the man arranged a room under a name other than his own (which the receptionist’s eyes made clear was well-known). The man’s wife was away and it was apparently his code of marital honour not to take a woman home in her convenient absence. But here, no doubt, there was the Deputy-Director’s commonsense idea that there was no call for special arrangements — there’s his farm, and the Agency house provided for the woman herself, alone. The guards and driver, the attendant Tomasi: they are there to serve needs, not to question whatever these may be; security has wide implications. Let them gossip and laugh, who knows what it might be about, in the kitchen; no-one’s going to take notice of whatever they might pass on to others at their social level.

The Administrator and his wife Flora rarely came to his Assistant’s bachelor woman house; it was so much more friendly to have her using as some sort of real temporary home the one Flora kept open to many, a household with food and drink and unquestioning welcome always just beyond the door, the young son plucking the guitar. Yet they must have guessed a new element had entered Roberta Blayne’s tour of duty, even before this became tacitly recognised and generally accepted through certain signs in the conduct of Deputy-Director Gladwell Shadrack Chabruma. If Flora in her all-embracing but fixed impressions of a personality on first acquaintance noticed nothing, it is certain that Alan Henderson, working beside Roberta every day, and dependent on the results of their exchanged observations of the people with whom they had to engage, was aware — and as only a man can be — of a warmed femaleness that emanates from a women who is being made love to, dormant in her before. He said nothing to his wife; put his private observation in the category of Agency matters that should fall into ‘aid talk’ which was, on her own dictate, not her business … But then as months went by and evidently the Deputy-Director gained confidence in the acceptance of his affair (maybe his colleagues in Government hierarchy even thought it might be useful: some woman from the aid Agency of which they had important financial expectations) he began to appear in public alone with Roberta Blayne. Flora, like others, became aware that her bachelor woman of retiring personality, not-so-young, was having an affair with a member of the Government. She was warned by her husband not to broach the subject. — But if Roberta talks to me? I mean it’s out of the blue! Who would have thought he’d … that up-tight fellow … and if he did, one of the young interns in his office or some speakerine from TV, like the others pick, that would be what he’d go for, if at all—

Roberta didn’t ‘talk’ to her, but as time passed Flora made clear with inoffensive remarks (Of course I don’t suppose you’ll come, you’ll have better things to do this weekend) that she knew of the affair and was pleased about it, for her friend the bachelor woman’s sake. Soon Roberta was able to respond quite naturally, yes, I’m going to the farm with Gladwell if he hasn’t got some special meeting coming up on Saturday. It was mutually understood with the Hendersons that much as they would have liked it, and surely Roberta too, he was not invited with her to intimate dinners at the Henderson house — too much of a defiant sign to others present that this was a particular relationship. When he came as of right to official parties there, both she and the hosts treated him on the same level of impersonal friendliness they did any other guest. There’s a protocol for every situation.

At the President’s celebration at State House on the anniversary of Independence Day she must have glanced over, without noticing, Flora tête-à-tête with someone in the crowd, a woman. Flora came up with the half-comic tolerant expression of having made an escape — Good soul, I’m sure, but what can you talk about with her — when you get onto the standby, what are her interests, she tells you about her favourite TV soapie. Homebody of the new kind, the city peasant — you know the poor dears — Flora stopped herself; then the aside — That’s Gladwell’s wife. Must have married her very young and apart from producing a brood … she’s sure no asset in furthering his career now.—

She looked across the room at the woman, as an intrusion on privacy; observing herself, rather, as the lover of the woman’s husband, squeamish; old conventions wagging a finger at her. It was the only time they met — or rather didn’t meet. He sometimes mentioned, in contexts where it was natural and inevitable, his wife: a car accident in which they’d both been slightly injured, subject come up when on one of the weekend trips to the farm the driver-bodyguard almost landed his passengers in a culvert (this time certainly did have a hangover).

There must have been some sort of accommodation with his wife; anyone, like Roberta Blayne, who has been once coupled knows there are many acknowledged sidetracks on the secret map of a marriage. Sometimes they met in a restaurant where he might be seen, by others in parliamentary suits, dining with a woman from the Agency personnel. His woman, no doubt. Many had theirs, if not in their company on that occasion. It was that sort of restaurant.

One day when she entered another restaurant he had chosen there was a young woman seated at the table with him. She hesitated a moment, whether she should approach, he saw her, lifted a palm, she came to it. He gave her name in introduction first. — Roberta Blayne. She is Assistant to Mr Henderson who heads the Agency here, now. — The girl half-rose with the casual acknowledgement of her generation and smiling, held out a hand to the woman standing before her. The hand was long, supple, ringed on fingers and thumb, nails painted fluorescent butterfly-wing blue; an attribute. She was a confidently attractive girl, her beauty arranged in contemporary high style — hair straightened and secured at the crown by a bobbing bunch of glossy curls to be bought in the shops, the liquid flash of slanting eyes, bold lips sculpted in purple-red. — Phila, my younger daughter, she’s just back for a break from her law studies in Nottingham. Your country. — So the two women, his women, talked about England, the girl’s impressions, what was endearing she said she found in ‘the Brits’, what was annoying, what in their ways made her laugh. — You miss England? You’re English, aren’t you?—