Nadine Gordimer - Loot and Other Stories

— Alan, you speak as if he’s told you all this. But you don’t know him that well …—

— I don’t need to, to know what I’ve said about his needs — I’ve my stored profile (touched at his forehead) of men in high public office in developing countries, where women may be beautiful and desirable but social disadvantages, pressures of all kinds — you know them — have deprived them of education, worldliness, if you like. Even now, there aren’t enough women here on the level of the Minister of Welfare, that great gal, one of the liveliest MPs, never mind the males … And there’s something else — strict confidence! — could relate to Gladwell’s decision. He’s strongly tipped to be made a Minister in the President’s cabinet reshuffle. So — just that you understand motives. See him from right kind of background perspective we use, you and I — all of us in Agency work. A respect for the others’ mores — traditions. Doesn’t imply you — we — have to adopt them, of course.—

What Alan Henderson didn’t tell her was that in the conclusion of discussion of the startling proposition with his wife, Flora had brought up another perspective on the future cabinet minister’s proposal to take Roberta Blayne as number two wife. — She’s not the type to go out to attract a man for herself, is she; this’s a chance with a man who’s somebody, plenty to offer for a woman like her, she’d have a high position, she loves this country, that farm of his, she’d be able to continue her commitment to development with his influence right up top … Not many chances likely to come her way, New York, Geneva … Not so young anymore.—

So her colleague the Administrator tacitly understood the rejection she was having to formulate for her lover. She rehearsed to herself in many different, useless ways, how she would have to tell him she couldn’t believe he, so completely in charge of himself, a man of the present, free, could want to dredge up into his life some remnant from the past — how could he not have seen that it was offensive, surely to him as to her; how disguise the aversion.

What was the protocol for this.

Then there came to her — Buffalo Mine. How he had received her shame: her taking from him the release of orgasm, blurting the dinner-party story, as if the pleasure were not what her blood-line disqualified her to share, illicit, an orgasm stolen from past betrayal of all that makes up human feeling between people. Every Monday on foot to I. Saretsky every Friday back on foot with the case of whisky head hard as a log. Grandfather’s ‘my man’; her man, making love to her. He had shown no shock; no revulsion as she blubbered out the shame. He calmed her matter-of-factly, how was it—‘It was their tradition’. And now she was primly struggling to conceal how she disdained him for expecting her to accept something he chose from his past; an honour; her ugly past was not his. He absolved her from her burden of ancestry — it’s got nothing to do with you: she was indicting him for his. It’s accepted, Flora said. Their tradition.

Her Administrator had shut the door of his office, once again. — How’s it going?—

— I haven’t found a way yet.—

— Look, I can arrange for you to go back ahead of me, reports — some such — I want headquarters to evaluate with you before I’m debriefed, you can prepare for me, answering their questions and so on, expanding … You could leave right away. Wouldn’t that help?—

Of course it would.

The official car arrived. He came to make love with her and it seemed to her the right ending for both of them. He had withdrawn into his old silent self-composure, awaiting her answer without any mention. When they lay together, afterwards, it was the time, coming out of the consolation offered that she still desired and received him. — I am going back to New York the day after tomorrow.—

Out of his silence. — You will resign there.—

— No. I have a new posting somewhere.—

She had not found the right words to explain that love affairs are a cul-de-sac on the marriage map. The shining official car concealed in the yard, the royal coach, had turned into a pumpkin. She was again a member of an aid agency’s changing personnel, walking away barefoot.

You remember; we were coming from a conference in that city and I had just noticed we were near the street, the block where the old friends lived. I was thinking — about to say to you — we should drop in, it’s been such a long time, we’ll be a real surprise, back here again. There were so many people from so many ages; so many periods, approaching us on that London street; in these ancient European cities they are all there in the gait, the shapes of noses and eyes and jowls, the elegant boots and plodding sandals, Shakespeare’s audiences, Waterloo’s veterans, comportment of the bowler-hatted past, slippered advance of the Oriental counter-immigration from the colonial era, heads of punk-purple-and-green striped hair in recall of 60s Flower Children, androgynous young shuffling in drug daze, icons of the present; black faces that could be the indelible after-image left behind, on the return to Africa by our political exiles. All these, recognisable but not known; coming at us, coming at us. And then he was singled out, for me, they shouldered around him on the pavement but he was directed straight towards us. His paper carrier with the name of a speciality shop, his white curls like suds over thick earlobes — just the way he always was, returning from his pilgrimage to buy mangoes or a bottle of wine from the right slope of a small French vineyard. I saw him.

Wasn’t it lovely? Because it was not that everything changes. His image was him: the same.

We did go back to that Kensington flat with him? Didn’t we? Its watercolours of Tuscan landscapes, engravings of early Cape Town, bold impasto oils by South African black painters he used to discover, music cassettes spilled about, the journals and books to be cleared off the sofa so you could sit. Christ! he said, this old unbeliever, where the hell have you been? People don’t write letters any more. We might all have been dead for all we’ve heard of each other. He railed against whatever conservative government it was (maybe still Thatcher). He, who had left the Party after a visit to the old Soviet Union in the Fifties when he was taken round collective pig farms. But I was thinking — perhaps only thinking now — we all have our point of no return in political loyalty, and the stink of pigs is as good as, say, the disillusion of corruption. He was once detained, back home in the old South Africa, he had paid his dues, earned his entitlement to defect, I suppose, however we might have viewed the pretext.

You don’t remember what we talked about? Neither do I. Not really. There he still is, walking out of the weave of people; for us. The apartment: well, as we knew it. But she didn’t appear. No. After so long, can one ask …? Maybe asleep, she often said she was an owl, not a lark, liked to lie late. If she’s gone — died — or divorced? They’ve had their contingent loves, that’s known. And not only the young have sexual freedom, people find new sexual partners at any age at all. We must wait for him to say something.

But no, he didn’t. There are no flowers in the room; she always had majestic vases of blooms and leaves.

So we didn’t need any other evidence.

Not there.

But perhaps she was just too busy to buy any flowers that day and he had forgotten her request and gone his usual route to pursue the fresh halibut or the mangoes or the restricted cultivar of a wine?

Will we ever know the significance of apparent trivial forgetfulness, what’s ignored, in anyone’s life — keys to stages a relationship is passing through. You’ll have to invent them. I can’t help you. Because I couldn’t ask him. Her name didn’t come up at all, did it? That close couple, politically involved, risking themselves, never a policy disagreement between them, a stance in total solidarity, together, over the years. Admirable, d’you remember! One commitment, one mind — he always said: we are convinced, we declare ourselves — it was — enviable. Yes.