Nadine Gordimer - Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black

— You wouldn’t have an old diary with the title of the conference? He must have mentioned it but there’s no note among his papers, and I didn’t pay attention…—

A kindly smile quickly became a dismissive turn-down of the lips, keeping his distance. — My god, no, there were so many I could say bye-bye to and see the world instead.—

She understood he was telling her, if she somehow didn’t know, that he was a news photographer of repute who had himself, far and wide, contributed images to history.

— Marc stayed on a while after the conference. In this country. Can you tell me where he lived? In London. I’d like to see the house, or the street.—

For a moment he was arranging his reply. — I think some small hotel in Kensington.—

He gauged her.

— My flat was in Notting Hill. He moved in. Some months.—

— What was he doing. Work, I mean. With a firm of architects. Or…? He was someone who was always caught up in his projects. — Her hands opened slowly on the space of his death.

— Oh he was recovering from that mess in his life, we had some good times, he got on famously with my crowd then — all gone our particular ways now. USA, Australia, Spain — South Africa. — This last reference apparently reminded him that this one of the crowd, he had just been told, was dead. — Oh good times, there was the project we did together with an artist friend of mine — I think it might even be around still today, second-hand in some museum somewhere — it was a kind of demountable ‘environment’—very ahead of our generation — that’s what we called it, he did the architectural shell, the artist did some sort of objets trouvés interior stuff, I did the photographs, it was supposed to represent the essential mishmash of our style of living at the time. I think some institute in Manchester — imagine, of all places — commissioned it and it was exhibited here in London, too. Hardly made waves, but we were wild about it together.—

— I thought he took a special refresher course at an architectural institute for a few weeks. Oxford.—

— Not that I know of. He was here in London. Maybe it was something… Yes, there was the idea we’d also do a book together, I’d photograph buildings and he’d write the text on their — what’d he call it — architectural relation to the politics of their period. I even had a publisher friend who pretended to be interested… The bits of text, maybe even the designs for the ‘environment’ thing must have lain around in that little flat until I cleared an accumulation of all sorts of stuff when I moved to one of the others I lived in before — here. Finally. He didn’t bring anything like that back with him?—

— Not among the papers I’ve found. It would have been interesting as part of his vision as an architect I’m hoping to put together; there’re all the conventional plans that he designed in his practice. I have those.—

Her host became hostly, or backed away from the rising past he had summoned. — Wouldn’t you like a drink? Or tea, coffee? Whisky? Vodka?—

— Thank you. If you are having one — vodka, please, with tonic.—

An antique butler’s tray table was crowded with liquor bottles and glasses. He left her to fetch ice and tonic water; in the brief absence she could take the chance to look round at what the room held — but they could not be relevant, these Lucian Freud and Bacon nudes, these photographs of the host and another man (Charles Devenmore?) enlaced on a beach, or each individually, one behind his camera in a ruined city, the other on a stage, Shakespearean open-mouthed with rage (the lover evidently an actor) — these could not have been the objects her man had lived this other life among; in that small shared flat, too long ago.

He prepared the drinks and when he had given her hers lifted his own in the social ease therefore supposed between them — a moment in which he might have been going to toast — the past: her man, his man — quickly dismissed so that she might not notice. But she had; the moment lay between them to be examined. He approached it in a generalised way, side-lining what she had said on the telephone. Nothing personal. Only dates, places, professional activities in those months in the shared flat, to bring her man back, piece him together, his life that must continue to exist for her survival.

— It’s always a problem to get people — other people — to understand the kind of commune of gays. What someone from outside can find in it that I don’t think — I know — doesn’t function among the other groups. Something to do with a minority, the healing to be found with us — I don’t mean some solemn holy-male thing…—

She stirred denial, in her chair. — We’ve had — I have many good friends among homosexuals…—

He took an audible gulp of his vodka and laughed, with a gesture to her to do the same. — Oh yes some of my best friends are Jews man’s best friend is his dog.—

What could she say? She was not equipped for this kind of repartee, it was not the encounter or the occasion for it, if he was choosing to make her the butt of insults he’d received in his lifetime. She had told, told him, nothing personal and now he was transgressing the limits of recall she had assured him of.

He was suddenly looking at her in an inescapable way she couldn’t elude, couldn’t interpret, confidential or goading.

— Of course I didn’t want him to go.—

Why did this man who had forgotten her man among many others, couldn’t give her the plain facts that were all she asked of him, want to assert — claim — shared feelings with her: her man who had left her for death, his sometime lover who had left him; their man. Was it amusing him to do so? He went on to recount as an old incident recalled for her benefit — I’d gone off on a trip with someone else, it was to Surinam. As you can see, I’m half-and-half, the name Dutch, the skin Malay, fine old colonial ancestry, isn’t it. I had a notion to find my Malay roots there, the new affair went along with this. He didn’t understand it was an adventure I needed at the time. So when I returned to our flat I found the place empty — he’d gone back to South Africa. I don’t know to what. That crazy woman. God knows.—

— If he wasn’t divorced before you met him he divorced then. — She knew herself being lured into confidences never meant to come about.

He poured himself another vodka, gestured to her glass, over which she placed her palm. — I’ll tell you something. I did come to South Africa once, maybe ten, twelve years ago. On an assignment. I asked whether he was around; so then I heard about you. Just curious, what had become of him. Someone told me where you and he lived. But I didn’t try to look him up, considering…—

There was a hiatus that could not be called silence because while they did not speak there was passing between them a vivid dialogue of the unexpressed.

Then she took up the ready lug of ordinary social intercourse, slotted into place the polite visitor about to leave. — Well, thank you for letting me bother you, I must be off, now.—

— Sure you won’t have another drink?—

She was standing, ready for the lie, also. — My train to catch.—

As she hung her bag over her shoulder some hard shape in it nudged her hip; she had forgotten to give the man the bottle of wine she had brought along at the last minute before closing the door of her conference hotel room — as she knew she wasn’t going to look up the friends she had bought it for, it had seemed to serve as a useful gesture of apology for an intrusion.

He received it with appreciative pleasure. — All the way from South Africa! Charlie and I’ll regale ourselves tonight. — He read out the name on the label, two words run into one, most likely those of a Boer wine farmer after the old war lost to the British, the defeated still spelling in Dutch from which his own language, Afrikaans, derived. — Allesverloren , ‘everything lost’—ah, you see, from my Holland side — grandmother — I can translate…—