Nadine Gordimer - Loot and Other Stories

She supposed she was. But something of all the countries where there’d been tours of duty.

— How’re you finding Africa? I’ve only realised since I’ve been living away what it’s really like, here! My homeground, hometown. Weird! Really weird. My father doesn’t like to hear that, he says I’m forgetting who I am. Fat chance — the Brits keep me aware of that. But seriously — or rather not seriously, I’m having a great time. — She caught her father’s hand, flirtatiously reassuring any disapproval in his silence. A silence which otherwise was easy; his remarks to the girl now and then, over the food, no suggestion that the situation of the three present might evoke suspicion and another kind of disapproval: in the daughter.

She wanted to ask — sometime — why he had wanted his daughter to meet her, to reveal her, so to speak, to his family, his real life —that is how she thought of it. While she was not sure of what was hers, she was of his. The right time to ask never came. Perhaps he had not thought of the threesome in the way she had seen it; for him, simply some parental obligation to take his visiting daughter out to lunch.

If she had need to justify — exonerate — her presence at the table it would have to be in acceptance that she was not the first nor would be the last of the Deputy-Director’s affairs. Outside his real life.

What she knew was that she and this man were giving one another what each needed. Love, yes, in one of its many complex forms; one of the simplest. Not-so-young; what might be called the cerebral aspect of her (she knew she was no great intellect but she had a well-exercised intelligence of the workings of the contemporary world) first brought them together; he expected to engage seriously with her, draw from her opinions other than those he was supplied with officially, exchange different perceptions of motives, of what a newcomer saw happening here, his country, and the world she had had experience of quite widely.

In love-making there came an eloquence beyond speech. And this eloquence of pleasure brought her to the danger of confiding — part of the release of orgasm, handing over what can be used against you. In such a moment, the privacy that is like no other — Buffalo Mine. You know, the day I asked, that day. My grandfather owned it and he ran it like a slave plantation. 1920s. He sent a man on foot all the way to that liquor store, still there, you stopped at in town, to fetch a case of whisky for his weekend booze party and the man walked all the way back with a case of whisky bottles on his head. Went on Monday and was back on Friday. Every Monday every Friday. My grandfather made a famous joke of it, my man, what heads they have, thick as a log.—

He said nothing. Suddenly tears of shame, old shame unshed, what heads they have came from her and trickled to his shoulder. He released an arm from their embrace and brushed at the shoulder as if something had alighted there; the fingers discovered their wetness.

— What is the matter.—

— What we did here. In my family. The rest of us. What liars we are, coming to these countries as if we hadn’t ever been, marvelling at the primitive —oh yes it’s a dirty condescending racist word don’t ever use it but the sense of it’s there even in our commendment, our reports, our praise — don’t say it, naïve obtuseness thick-headed —oh the people’s capacity to endure burdens, the usefulness of this capacity, sound basis for development, hard as a log the possession of the power of money over it that’s my man — She could hear her raving whisper.

His voice in the dark a vibration through his breast. — Things like this happened long ago. Nothing to do with you. That’s how they were. That’s how it was with them. Those people. Such things … It was the tradition.—

They made love again and she sensed, from him, she must resist the desire to caress his head, pass her hand over its shape again and again to banish what cannot be changed, a past. Not even by development. She belongs, he belongs, to the present.

In every tour of duty that is going well there is a looming frustration that there will be recall, a new posting, another country, just when more time is needed to see projects fulfilled.

— What d’you think — should I ask for an extension? Would you stay?—

There was no innuendo in Alan Henderson’s question; he was thinking of their effectiveness as a working team. And she answered on the same practical level, using Agency-speak. — If you believe we really could get those five rural projects to the stage of capability they should have if they’re going to become viable under their own steam, when we do go. Worth a try, with New York?—

The Deputy-Director of Land Affairs knew — must have known — it was the business of Government to be ready for a change of the aid development team assigned to the country — that her tour of duty would end in a few months. She did not tell him her Administrator was applying for an extension. To her, this would somehow have taken away the integrity of her response to Alan Henderson; introduced an unacceptable factor in her code: commitment to her purpose in this country. For her to hope for the extension; that would make her the liar, descendant of liars. And as well she did not tell him. The Administrator’s request was refused; he was already lined up for another post, another country. No doubt she was too unimportant for a decision of where she would be ‘deployed’ to be made in advance of her return to headquarters. She and Alan Henderson redoubled their work to leave what they knew as a sustainable achievement behind them, and the hours and days of effort without a sense of time alternated intensely with nights when an official car was hidden in the Administrator’s Assistant’s yard, and the Sundays she was riding horses on the farm of the Deputy-Director of Land Affairs. The California house had come to life within its alien shell as two people talked, ate and drank, made love there. Her shampoo was in the bathroom. There were no reproachful ghosts to be met when they slept in the big bed, a couple’s bed. The wife prefers town. The only troubling matter for Roberta Blayne was a growing attachment to the farm. It was as if no-one had ever owned it before, because attachment, love for a place, is like love for a human being, it brings that place, that person, to heightened life. The love affair would end (the not-so-young know this), Gladwell Shadrack Chabruma would forget her, she would be elsewhere and forget him, they’d exchange Christmas cards until one or the other moved to a new address, but the farm, the rides alone in the sun and wind with the bony dogs running beside her, the children waving, prancing about, showing off, the red earrings of the pepper pods she had seen for the first time; the farm would be one of the experiences knotted into the integument of her life. In development jargon, yes, sustainable.

Oh there were times — times she knew when she would crave for this man, a dread distress of anticipation that this would happen. The reserve that characterised him — up-tight, withdrawn — was indeed: a reserve. A reserve of sensuous energy, tenderness and rousing powers of the body. Beneath the armour of the parliamentary suit there was the passionate assurance, for her, of being desired and — there’s another form of capability — the response of desire that revived in her, turned out to be still available from ten, twenty years back. But this coming parting was something other than the expected parting with pleasure. Leaving a country where she had been before and where, maybe — she shouldn’t indulge herself with the idea — maybe she had made up for the past in some way by her work. Leaving a man; the farm is what she will take away with her from here.