Nadine Gordimer - Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black

EVA and Michael Tate lived the pattern of the working week, seven days and the next seven days differentiated only by the disruptions of Michael’s alternations of tentative hopes and anxiety about negotiations with the national airline that might bring not a solution for Flight Hadeda’s survival but a bankruptcy as its resolution. ‘That’s no exaggeration.’ He rejected her suggestion that as negotiations were lagging on, this was surely a good sign that the government was at last having doubts. After all their rapping of the private sector over the knuckles for not taking enough responsibility in new ways to develop the infrastructure… Beginning to listen to the private airlines. ‘Government could have just gone ahead and granted licences to the national after that window-dressing democratic first meeting with all of you. Why didn’t it? I think it’s tip-toeing round a compromise.’

He had pulled his upper and lower lips in over his teeth as if to stop what he didn’t want to say.

There were also words she didn’t want to say.

She did something out of her anger and disbelief, that disgusted her. But she did it. She called the squash club on a Tuesday night and asked to speak to Michael Tate. The receptionist told her to hold: for her, an admonition not to breathe. The voice came back, Sorry, Mr Tate is not here tonight. ‘Sorry’ the regret a form of colloquial courtesy personnel are taught.

Eva read in bed and the dog’s indulgence, there with her, was extended. Music accompanied them and she did not look at her watch until the dog jumped off and made for the stairs. Michael was back. And early. Down, Dina, down! They were in the bedroom doorway, the dog with paws leapt to his shoulders. Dina’s come to accept what she scents as part of the aura, now, of the couple and the house, she does not have to recall the atavism of hunting instincts.

Eva does not remark on the hour. And he doesn’t remark that he finds her already gone to bed. Perhaps he isn’t aware of her. She’s never experienced coming home to one man from another, although she once had a woman friend who said she managed it with some sort of novel pleasure.

‘Win or lose?’ Eva asked. The old formula response would be in the same light exchange; a mock excuse if he’d been out of form, mock boast if he’d played well — they knew Tuesdays were for keeping fit rather than sport; avoiding the onset of that male pregnancy, a middle-age belly.

‘I think I’m getting bored with the club. All my contemporaries working out. Most of us past it.’

She tried to keep to the safe formula. ‘So you lost for once!’

He did not answer.

He’d gone to the bathroom; there was the rainfall susurrus — he was taking a shower this time. When he came back she saw him naked; yes, nothing unusual about that, the chest she liked, the stomach with the little fold — no, it’s muscle, no, no, not fat — the penis in its sheath of foreskin. But she saw the naked body as she had seen herself in the bathroom mirror that first night when she and the dog scented him.

He spoke, turned from her, getting into pyjamas. ‘It looks worse every day. There’s a leak that’s come to us. Adams knows one of their officials. They’ve had approved a schedule of the routes they intend to take up. Analysing cost structures if bookings are to be taken only online, cut out the travel agents’ levy on passengers.’

‘But you can do the same.’

‘We can? Travel agents feed us passengers as part of overseas visitors’ round-trip tours. We can’t afford to ditch them.’ He came to the bed.

‘Aren’t you taking Dina?’

Recalled to where he was from wherever he had been, he put his hand on the dog’s head and the two went to the stairs. When he reappeared he got into bed and did not lean for the goodnight kiss. The alternate to his reason for avoidance could be the despairing abstraction: distrait. As Michael turned out their light he spoke aloud but not to her. ‘Hadeda’s down. Scrap.’

For the first time in sixteen years there was no possibility of one comforting the other in embrace. She said in the dark ‘You can’t give up.’ She didn’t know whether this was a statement about Flight Hadeda or a bitter conclusion about where he had been, this and other nights.

They did continue what the new millennium vocabulary terms ‘having sex’ not making love, from time to time, less often than before. This would be when they had had a night out with friends, drinking a lot of wine, or had stood around at her duty academic celebrations when everyone drank successive vodkas, gins or whiskys to disprove the decorum of academia.

So, it was possible for him to desire her then. Hard to understand. She’s always refused to believe the meek sexist acceptance that men’s desire is different from women’s. When they went through the repertoire of caresses real desire was not present in her body; for her, as it must be for him, desire must belong with another woman.

She was looking for the right moment to come out with it. How to say what there was to be said. The ‘Are you having an affair’ of soap operas. ‘You are having an affair’; restating the obvious. ‘You’re making love to some woman, even the dog smells her on you.’ Away with euphemisms. When to speak? At night? Early in the morning, a breakfast subject? Before Patrick came home for the holidays? What happens when such things are said. Would they both go to work after the breakfast, take their son to the movies, act as if the words hadn’t been said, until he was out of the way back at school.

The night before Easter she was taking from the freezer a lamb stew that was to be the last meal together before it was spoken. What she would find the right way to say. When he came home he closed the livingroom door behind him against the entry of the dog and strode over to turn mute the voice of the newscaster on the television.

‘I’m shutting up shop. Just a matter of selling the two jets, no-one’s going to be stupid enough to buy the licence. Fat hope of that. Adams and I have gone through the figures for the past eighteen months and even if the national thing weren’t about to wipe us off it’s there — we’re flying steadily into loss.’

The brightly miming faces were exchanged on the screen while he said what he had to say.

‘But we knew you’d have to rely on our capital for a least two years before you’d get into profit, it’s not the same issue as the national one.’

‘The competition will make the other irrelevant, that’s all. Why wait for that. Sell the planes. Won’t make up the loss. The overdraft.’

‘It’ll be something.’

There were images dwelling on the dead lying somewhere, Afghanistan, Darfur, Iraq.

‘For what. To do what.’

He’s been a man of ideas, in maturity, with connections, friends in enterprises.

‘You’ll look around.’ That’s what he did before, set out to change his life from earthbound real estate to freedom of the sky.

He lifted his spread hands, palm up and let them drop as if they would fall from his wrists while the screen was filled by the giant grin-grimace of a triumphant footballer. ‘How are we going to live in the meantime.’

‘I don’t bring in bread on the corporate scale, oh yes, but there’s a good chance I’ll be appointed head of the Department with the beginning of the new academic year.’

‘It’ll just about pay the fees at Patrick’s millionaire school.’ That school also, had been the father’s ambitious mouldbreaking choice for their son; if it was now a matter of reproach, the reproach was for himself, not a sharp reception of her provision of an interim rescue. Despair ravaged his face like the signs of a terminal illness.

She did not say what she had decided was the right time and the right words to say.