Nadine Gordimer - None to Accompany Me

His sexuality in late middle-age was no doubt satisfied elsewhere; although it was clear, from the sense even of her reserved persona behind her office desk, that her whiteness would not be taboo for him, or his blackness for her, sex had no part in their perception of each other except that it recognized that each came from a base of sexual and familial relations to a meeting that had nothing to do with any of these. Vera had never before felt — it was more than drawn to — involved in the being of a man to whom she knew no sexual pull. And it was not that she did not find him physically attractive; from the first time he sat across from her desk, his face wide-modelled and firm as polished basalt, his heavy but graceful back as he walked out of a room, his hands resting calmly palm-down on his thighs as he spoke, brought her reassurance she had not known she no longer found elsewhere with anyone. It was as if, in the commonplace nature of their continuing contact through the Foundation, they belonged together as a single sex, a reconciliation of all each had experienced, he as a man, she as a woman.

Didymus’s left eye flickered open while the other stayed gummed with sleep. In the artificial night when curtains kept out the early morning — she stood, a burglar caught in the act. The eye held her. But this was no intruder: Sibongile off an early plane, the swirl on tarmac coming up in the silence as the taxi that brought her home turned in the empty street.

She released herself. Put down the suitcase. He closed the bleary greeting ashamedly, better pretend to be asleep, drop back into sleep. She drew the suitcase on its wheels across the carpet, fluttered papers and clicked objects against surfaces. Then the waterfall of the shower in the bathroom. The bed dipped to the side as she entered. He knew she wanted him to know she was trying not to wake him: as if she were not there; or had never been away.

He spoke. How was it?

He couldn’t dredge up in his mind where she had been sent, where was it this time, Japan, Libya, not the UN, no. Better not risk how was Qaddafi.

— Ex-tr-a ordinary.—

She lay willing sleep, all she had heard and done alight inside her, could not be extinguished, as he himself had felt when he returned from his missions about which she could not have asked, How was it.

The thick atmosphere of the world of discussion and negotiation came from her hair and skin as smoke clings to the clothing of one who has been in a crowded room. He scented it as a dog sniffs the shoes of its master to trace where he’s been.

She was a stranger and she was as familiar as his own body; that must have been how he was for her, those years when he came and went; if he thought of it at all, he had thought that was how it was; something for women. She slept, suddenly, with a snorting indrawn breath. This body beside him invaded the whole bed, lolled against him. His own felt no stir of desire for it.

He must have slept. Both woke at the sound of the door slamming as Mpho left for school, and Sibongile was out of bed instantly, padding over in her slippery nightgown to the half-disgorged suitcase and packages on the floor. — Look what I found for you. — People are happy bringing the consolation of presents to those left behind.

It was a handsome staff (he saw at first), no, a walking-stick, ebony, carved with a handle in the form of a closed fist over a ring, and chased all down the shaft to a copper ferrule. — Isn’t it great? Look at the work that’s gone into it. I knew you’d love it. I’d looked everywhere in the market but I had so little time — and then there was this damned hawker pestering outside the hotel, one day the moment he held it up I knew, that’s for you. See — all carved in one piece—

She loved it, she sat back on the bed as he received the stick from her and followed its features under her eyes, her feet with magenta-painted toenails waving, her thighs shaping shifting curves of shine on the satin that covered them (he always had been proud of her clothes, her ingenuity in devising the appearance of flamboyant luxury, even to go to bed in, even when they were poor in exile and this had to be contrived out of odds and ends). — And look at the grain, here, these lighter stripes going down the fingers — isn’t that amazing — and feel how solid—

He duly held the object horizontally, raised from the pillows, weighing it on his palms. — Where shall I hang it? Above the desk, or here over the door perhaps.—

She slapped her thighs, sending the satin shivering. — It’s not an ornament! It’s to walk with! Keep your weight down! Don’t think I bring you presents without a double motive, dear— Her voice climbed its scale of laughter. She swung herself off the bed and he could hear her going from room to room, inspecting the traces of her absence, closing cupboard doors in Mpho’s little room, clanging the kitchen bin shut on something he or Mpho had neglected to throw away. The walking-stick rested across his chest. He opened his eyes. She appeared in the bedroom doorway, as she had from a distant country at dawn, but in her dressing-gown, her arms crossed under her breasts. — Aren’t you getting up?—

— What’s the hurry.—

— Oh come on. I’m hungry.—

So she wanted him there in the kitchen to deliver to him a lecture on the results of her trip while they prepared breakfast together. She was trying it out on him — he was a comrade, experienced in such presentations, after all — before she prepared a report. It has been an assignment in Africa — where else could that stick have come from — she’d been sent to negotiate the takeover by that country’s Government of a school for exiles’ children and various other buildings the Movement had had there. The National Executive left it to her diplomacy to see whether these assets, no longer needed, should be handed as a gift to a country that had given asylum, or whether it might be possible to expect some sort of compensation — the Swedes had funded the school and added living quarters for the teachers, so there was some improvement to the property since the host government donated the land. — Dinner with the President, flowers sent to my hotel room and all (I like it better when they send fruit, but only Europeans do that, aih, on our continent people don’t think fruit’s a treat). A lo-ong explanation from him on how we should run things here, my God, if you wrote out all the advice we get it would circle the world — not a word about any compensation deal for the property. The next day there was the great ceremony of the handing-over, President’s guard, military band, more speeches, mine as well, but the best I could do when I got the Minister in his office was to get out of him the promise of an agricultural training project, quite small, they’d arrange for a few students we could send up there, tuition free but living expenses our responsibility. I don’t think I can recommend that as worth taking up? Better that I come back with empty pockets than something we don’t want.—

— And the camp?—

She signalled two slices of bread to be put in the toaster. She went into one of her repertoire of elaborate gestures, throwing hands wide, bringing them together with a slight clap that mocked the attitude of prayer, leaning elbows on the kitchen table with a slumping sigh.

— Did you see Matthew or Tatamkulu?—

— Who … —

— You know.—

— Not there any more.—

— So you did go.—

— I had instructions. Just delivering I didn’t ask what— some documents. — It was said as if this were to be the last word on the subject. But he, not she, had once operated in that camp, it was one of the periods when he disappeared from the exiled homes they occupied in Europe and Africa. His was a right to ask about that camp where spies who infiltrated the Movement were imprisoned, although it was not a subject for general discussion. Recently there had been released by the Movement a public report of things done there; unspeakable things. When the report was about to come out he had thought he’d better tell her what he had never told her: that for a time, a desperate time when the Freedom Fighters and the Movement itself were in great danger by infiltration, he had been an interrogator— yes — a jailer, there. He’d told her the code names of others who were running the place and how two of them had joined him, eventually, in protest against the methods being used to extract information. She knew, all right, about whom he was enquiring when he mentioned those names.