Nadine Gordimer - None to Accompany Me

Ben — Ben was negotiating finance for the new enterprise in which he had involved himself. Promotional Luggage. She made staggering, clownish movements of hands and head when, that evening, she heard the name, the term. What did it mean?

The gestures offended. He read scorn or ridicule into them, and she felt exasperation at having to deny these. He had to be coaxed to explain coldly. Suitcases and briefcases designed exclusively for executives, to their requirements and incorporating their logos in materials superior to some embossed stamp. Custom-made. Business has its jargon just as the test-cases of the Foundation have. After a bath to wash away the ancestral instruction from beneath the earth and the sense of lying, herself, buried in One-Twenty-One with reality windswept and forlorn ignored above her head (for if you deny any time, any part of your life, you have no continuity of existence), she dressed and perfumed herself to go with Ben to a business dinner. They agreed it was inexplicable that people in business seem to have no feeling for the privacy of leisure; apparently they are lonely after the occupation of the day and want to fill this vacuum with a continuation of the same company and the same talk over an extended taking of food and drink.

He looked at her in detail, a sculptor’s eye for line and volume, her legs patterned in a filigree of lacey black stockings, her waist marked with a wide belt, her face made up sufficiently to conform with what would be expected of her. For her it was a calculation; for him it put something of the fascinating distance between them that had existed when he first saw her, unapproachable, somebody else’s wife.

— You look lovely.—

— My old glad rags.—

In the car he took up what her banal show of modesty provided the opportunity to say. — Unless I do something about making some money now we’re going to be without resources when we’re really old. (My god, I’m beginning to use their vocabulary.) Hard up. That’s what I’m saying. That’s what Promotional Luggage is about.—

They had never talked about provision for some long survival. A country where there was so much death — why should you need to choose your own solution. — If you can believe we’re going to live so long.—

— It’s easy to think there’s the option of dying before you run out of cash.—

— We’ll always have somewhere, Ben. We’ve always got the house.—

She had taken him in there, into the booty from her relationship with another man; he had given up the idea of becoming a sculptor to provide for her through Promotional Luggage. She put out a hand and squeezed his thigh, a compact, one of the bargains constantly negotiated by marriage.

The restaurant is called the Drommedaris, after the ship that carried the first European to the country; it’s fashionable for cartels that own hotels and restaurants to feel they honour history and claim patriotism with such names. History and patriotism implying settler history and patriotism. They are the clubs whose entry requirements are that the applicant shall be expensively dressed and willing to pay one hundred per cent profit on a bottle of wine. The password comes from the client’s own cabalistic vocabulary — promotion — and is evidenced without being pronounced: up-market. Everyone’s main course is served at the same moment by waiters who, taking the cue from the senior among them like members of an orchestra with one eye on the conductor, simultaneously flourish silver-plated covers from the plates. Revealed are not four-and-twenty blackbirds (she catches Ben’s eye across the table) but attempts at culinary distinction and originality that combine incompatible ingredients in — fortunately — an unidentifiable mixture. Eat. It’s expensive, therefore it’s a privilege, she admonishes herself. It you don’t like it, you’re a prig. Between courses a fake silver egg-cup of watery ice cream is served that coats the palate it is supposed to clear for more eating; a ritual someone in the cartel has picked up in eagerness to claim elegance as well as history, patriotism etc.

The galleon decor is not inappropriate to the conversation, for the men frequently speak of this or that absent colleague being ‘taken on board’ some enterprise. And there are others referred to as small fry; the fingerlings in the sea of business. Women are expected to talk to other women, she knows that, and does not attempt presumptuously to engage the host, on whose right hand she has been placed (the position to be interpreted as recognizing a woman’s husband having been taken on board). He assiduously signals a waiter to fill her wineglass and passes with surface attention friendly remarks suitable to feminine interests (Just like my wife, she’s always removing those chunks of ice they put in the water. Where do you have your holiday house — Plettenberg? — do try some of this, looks exciting doesn’t it oh I agree the Cape is too windy but I’m out in my ski-boat, that’s my passion, Yvonne’s a girl for winter holidays, game parks, you know, all that).

There’s one exception to the contented dinner table purdah in which women chat to one another under the vociferous competitive exchanges of the men. An Afrikaner, dressed, coiffured and made up in the television-star style of an indeterminate age that will never go beyond forty while at the same time adopting every change of fashion, flashing her mascara-spiked eyes from this speaker to that, clinking gold and ivory bracelets and neon-coloured jumbo watch as she laughs in the right places, calls out a tag punch-line now and then that reinforces attention to the male speaker rather than draws it to herself. Some group’s public relations director, a prototype of how, in the choice of a female for the job, the display of possible sexual availability may be exploited to combine with suitably acquired male aggression. Poor thing; she comes clip-clopping into the ladies’ room on high-heeled hooves and behind the door there is the noisy stream of her urine falling, she’s even taught herself to piss boldly as a man. Or perhaps that’s wronging her — she comes out and smiles, My God I was bursting, hey, sorry.

At the table the host stands courteously to see his right-hand partner seated again, they know how to treat a lady. There are cigars and small fruits encased in glassy hardened sugar, as Coca-Cola and buns are distributed at treats in the townships whose workers are being discussed. A recent strike in the cardboard container trade is being compared with that in the tanning industry. Opposite Vera a man keeps pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose and breathing heavily in readiness for an opening to speak. At last: —We told them — called them all together with their shop steward, I don’t talk to those fellows on their own, eh, you only get told afterwards he didn’t have a mandate — we said, look, you can bring your wives (hands chopped edge-on to the table, then lifted) you can bring your children (hands again) you can bring the whole bang shoot, we’ll give you blankets, we’ll supply food, so you won’t have to risk anything coming to work. Most of them said fair enough, you know? I feel sorry for them, we genuinely wanted to help, they can’t afford to lose two days’ pay and they can’t risk being beaten up if they come to work — so it’s a solution. But there was one guy who said no, he has to stay away. Not for political reasons, no, no. So he said. But because he can’t leave his house for two days, in the township. He hasn’t got locks on the doors … So I said … (waiting for the laugh) so I said, all right. Don’t come to work Monday and Tuesday. All right. But then don’t come back on Wednesday.—

Through muffled background music inescapable as a ringing in the ears a cry comes from farther down the table: —Hands in the till! Everywhere you look. I could tell you many more instances … this Government’s become as corrupt as the blacks’ states. If they’re going to lose power, they’re going to make sure they give over a ruined economy. Positively last sale. Everything up for grabs. D’you know what’s happening in the pension funds—