Nadine Gordimer - Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black

I’m not bisexual, he had told her long ago, in the confessionals of their beginning. It has been the only time ever. It was some months but to me it’s the blank you had a day when you were young and had been drunk all night, your friends told you.

Now that she has seen him dead, felt him cold, she finds there’s something she can’t quite remember — what does it matter — whether he divorced before or after that lapse that was like the blankout of alcohol. Must have told her which, but told nothing else, was asked nothing else by her. No more than he would have put any value on hearing details of her love affairs — and her marriage, unlike his, had no traumatic drama to recount, was amicably ended through mutual agreement that each was leaving youth by differing signposts, shouldn’t foolishly have set out on zigzag footsteps.

But now that her man can exist for her survival only through piecing him together in what is available for recall, there is a gap — yes, a blankout. She can make the re-creation for herself whole only if she can recall what is not hers to recall.

Whom to talk to. There’s only one. One who can recall.

IF nobody knows or cares where the Beauty has gone to grow old the one who was the photographer has not disappeared. As if her eye, now, were programmed to react to the small print of the name appearing in accreditation to a series of newsprint photographs, there it is, Hayford Leiden. She had been told this name in the lovers’ confessional, long ago. Over the years the modest byline must have appeared here and there in the local and international newspapers she and her man read, but who notices the minute print below the picture?

She wrote in the dark of her head a letter that never got to paper, addressed care of a photographic agency called Magnum whose name often appeared in attributions in place of that of an individual photographer. Where did he live? If she received his address, what would the unwritten letter convey to him? Would he know that the man of the affair, her man, was dead. Probably not, since their circles had not overlapped in all the years of the marriage. She taught history at a university and knew how the alternative history of private lives goes unnoticed by those concentrated on public events; and a news photographer is one such. So the letter was there, as if waiting to be printed out, so to speak, from a word-processor.

She thought of travelling — friends prescribed it — to move away for a time from the environment of her grief, and perhaps to remove her from their necessity to contemplate it. She, in her turn, could accept invitations to conferences as a substitute way of life as her man once had resorted to. There was one from Canada she passed over, but she overcame her reluctance to leave the rooms, the house where his presence was still recognised by his hairbrush in the bathroom and the grubby chairarms where his hands had rested, and accepted the invitation to a conference in an English university city, which perhaps would seem to be less interesting. She didn’t know whether this was so; and whether she had made the choice because the byline of the photographer whose name she was aware of appeared in newspapers from England that she read. She might visit some friends in England although she had not told any of them she was coming. To pass the time while waiting for the call to board her flight she wandered around the dutyfree shop and passing the wine section saw a red wine she and her man had particularly liked, picked up a bottle. Friends might enjoy it as a reminiscent taste of the home in Africa they had left behind.

Once in the provincial English city, an intention came clear to her: she called various photographic agencies in London and was given his address and telephone number. So the voyage admitted its purpose. She stepped back from herself: in half-disapproval. The letter never was written but the telephone call was made. The first time there was a reprieve; an answering service at which she left no message. The next time a man said yes, Hayford Leiden speaking. She gave her name, so-and so’s wife, in a calm, friendly voice, might have been a caller about to make a sales-pitch. Could she come and see him, briefly. His surprise (or lack of comprehension — what does this woman want) was well disguised; he was no doubt accustomed, in his work, to bizarre encounters. Totally tied up for the coming week, but if she cared to come to London, say, the following Friday… yes, he remembers her man, met him some years ago.

He is dead, she said. Not long ago. Oh, he was sorry to hear… She would like to talk; nothing personal, she assured, just some dates, events, places, his architectural activities in a period of her man’s career when she had not known him. Nothing personal.

The meeting, appointment — whatever — she was still at odds with herself over its presumption, thrusting her life upon a stranger — was for the afternoon. Fiveish, he had suggested. She decided she would stay the night in London at a hotel, inventing some excuse for missing the evening event at the conference.

ON the train she was inwardly shaking her head over herself; what was she about. She had some rhetorical suspicions. Is there prurience somewhere sneaking hidden in the woman making this visit. Oh why wound herself with such an accusation. She had emphasised it over the phone: nothing personal. Intimacies left understood; those had nothing to do with her, nothing to do with her man when he entered her and she took him. Nothing personal. Certainly the photographer accepted that, or he would not have agreed to the meeting.

When the taxi from Waterloo delivered her to the address — she did not think it would have been this, a majestic Victorian house advanced to the present with extensions of a sun-room, an adjoining roof-terraced flat, and as she took the path to the main portico, the glimpse past the house walls of a green sweep of garden and trees. The word ‘Crescent’ on her piece of paper had meant to her a semi-circle of dreary London terrace houses sharing identical façades and joined in a single common unit. This house turned its back on the street and apparently shared nothing but access to a large round park exclusive to itself and its circle of neighbours. Could a photographer afford such a place; he must be famous — but what would she know about the economics of the publicity professions. A tile inset on the entry wall flourished the names:

HAYFORD LEIDEN

CHARLES DEVENMORE

She heard his footsteps coming to her before the door opened.

There had been no photograph of him to go by: thick white hair and thick black eyebrows, bold as in a Japanese print. A man who had aged well smiling on what were still his own teeth. The face was smoothly dull-tanned (acquired under a sun-lamp in a male beauty salon no doubt). But no, the back of the hand that came out to greet hers was darker. He wasn’t tinted by African bloodline, which she would always recognise, but by some other, Oriental. Still handsome as he once must have been beautiful.

The voice was careless and pleasant, as if to convey, I am ready for you, I know who you are, we know who we are, vis-à-vis one another.

As they sat in Corbusier-design chairs regarded by masks from some Eastern culture and West African ones she knew familiarly, there was small talk about what she was doing in England — holiday assumed.

She was at a conference. Her line (his phrase)? Historian. Ah. That seemed to allow this visit an acceptable context for both these strangers, let them off the hook of whatever linked them. Some aspect of her professional inclination. That would do. The dates, places, of an individual life which go to make up what Tolstoy defined as the collective life of the aggregate of human beings. — I met Marc at a conference, used to do some lined-up group photography in those days, as well as what I really wanted — don’t remember what that particular talkshop was all about.—