Nadine Gordimer - None to Accompany Me

He wandered with a smile of strange sweetness from encounter to encounter, not that he had become simple-minded but because he was reliving the sense of achievement a child has when first it masters how to walk, and the house represented to him territory daily conquered. He did not seem to mind the wheedling patter of Thandeka, who winked and gesticulated behind his back in comment on his infirmity and pride in his progress. How is he today, Ben would enquire of her in the presence of his father; and the hand that he might have touched sank uncertainly out of the way. He bought his father specialist journals and newspapers that should be of interest — he had been a chemical engineer — and left them on the table beside the old man’s chair in lieu of a visit. The woman attendant decided, as part of her responsibility for the old man’s care, what he felt. — Mama, he’s so happy for his granddaughter coming, I tell you, mama! That time she is arrive he’s going to be there, there , mama! So happy! Mama, I’m going to put a nice suit he’ll wear—

Brought forward on her arm with abstract joy expressed on his behalf as smiling nuns set themselves to beam radiance of the holy spirit and politicians display their amorphous love of humankind, he looked uncertain, for a moment, which of the two young women who arrived was his granddaughter. He had not seen her since she was a high-school girl; but the face, the face of his son, there in hers, was surely unmistakable. Vera and Ben had somehow omitted to mention to her that the grandfather was living with them — as often, with them, each thought the other had done something neither had. But Annick kissed him, took the old hand — cold scaly skin like that of a tortoise she’d kept as a pet as a child — placed it in that of the friend with her, using the childhood form of address. — Grandpops, this is Lou, she’s in biology and she’s just come from a month on your old stamping ground, wasn’t it — Zaire — the Congo.—

His voice snagged on the effort to speak, but he turned the pause into a mock appeal to Vera. — Of course this young lady’s in biology, we all are biological — what does that mean she does, though? — He enjoyed his little quip and the polite laughter it brought; Ben only smiled, his black eyes unreadable. The granddaughter cuffed her friend lightly so that the girl shook her drape of hair like a mare stung by a fly; both had long hair, but the straight black tresses Annick had from her father had been frizzed since her parents saw her last. — Grandpops she’s a professor, she’s been doing important research up there, fascinating, we’ll tell you about it.—

— Don’t you believe her, Mr Stark. When we’re at home and I start to talk microbiology to her, her eyes glaze over, all she wants to know about Zaire is what tapes I’ve brought for her, what kind of drums and strings you can still hear there.—

Annick with their two carry-alls followed Vera to Ivan’s room while the friend took her tea over to the old man and settled for a talk about Zaire. The timidity with which the relation with adult children — actuality defies the oxymoron — is taken up when they return from their lives, surrounded Vera. Each time Annick appeared after absence she was the sudden live manifestation of someone fixed in a painting. The static features in the mind were moving, the details of the texture of the skin, the glance — what is she apprehending, at once, about her mother, about us in this house where she was once one of us? Her scent — not perfume but the smell of her that vaguely reaches back to the odour of her hair when she was observed, sleeping, as a child, by one leaning to hear her breathe. Something missing in that beautiful face? Mustn’t be seen to be gazing for it. Not a change in the line of eyebrows; these are never plucked, they are definitive, seal-smooth and glossy, each tapering at the temple’s hollow. Ben’s sperm made her like that, in his image. Not the frizzing, though that hair-style’s a pity; it’s nothing that’s been altered: something that’s gone. But the last opening with which to take up the relationship with daughter or son is to pass some remark about physical appearance.

Perhaps one should tell, not ask.

Offer, not request. Put oneself in their hands, the ex-children. Place there the mystery of the totally unexpected: what am I to do with that love. If a doctor and a professor between them could explain it. Or to place, putting down carefully, a container of secret calm come out of an exaggerated fear of the death of someone not lover, husband, child: what would this young woman who was surely closer than any other woman make of that?

And all the time Vera was talking in the usual flitting, lightly anxious and excited way of someone wanting to make sure guests would be comfortable. The cupboard was cleared for clothes, the old man would share the main bathroom so the second one was all theirs, the daughter’s and her friend’s. — Sorry the room’s crowded. But with full house now, no other bedroom, it’s all I could do, I bought the divan.—

Annick thumped the carry-alls on it. She gave a sigh of pleasure as she recognized some poster of her brother’s era that was still on the wall. — Oh you shouldn’t have bothered. We always sleep in a double bed.—

The androgynous harmony present in Bennet’s male beauty, transformed in this girl’s femininity, her breasts under a loose sweater shrugged together by crossed arms, her pelvis and hips shaped in tight jeans, distracted Vera, she was conscious of something impossible trying to come to her. Instead, a sudden distraction: she realized what was missing in that seductive face. The black punctuation of that beauty, placed exactly as Bennet’s was, below the spread of eyelashes shading the left cheekbone. — What happened to your beauty spot?—

Annie laughed instructively. — The mole. I had it off. No beauty; moles should be removed, they can turn cancerous, Ma.—

The usual party to celebrate a son’s or daughter’s visit. The usual people, Legal Foundation familiars — Ben’s new associates in the luggage business remained business acquaintances he didn’t particularly want to bring home — the old friends, once-banned political activists now turned politicians at negotiating tables, and the addition, among the returned exiles, of those whom definitive indemnity at last allowed to disembark without fear of arrest or to emerge from the subterrain beneath home, half-home. A few diplomats of middle rank, useful conduits to overseas funding, now appeared, a member of one of the UN commissions sent to monitor violence in the country; and there was a presence perhaps no one except young Oupa could place, a man introduced by Vera as Zeph Rapulana. He sat all evening in the same chair, while groups formed and broke up in and out of the garden and living-room; coming and going with drinks and food she was aware of the shine of the planes of his features sinking into the gathering darkness like the natural outline of a landscape, part of a view she could always expect to see from her house. But people came to that dark unknown figure, drawn in some way; she noticed them, Didymus, a consul-general, the UN woman whose professional qualification surely was to be enquiring. Annie and her friend Lou, shoes kicked off and feet on the grass, sat on the steps in rising and falling chatter and laughter with Oupa, Didy and Sally’s daughter Mpho, and Lazar Feldman, the young lawyer from the Foundation.

Ben and Vera cast glances over the gatherings in and outdoors as an airline attendant walks down the aisle of a plane discreetly checking whether seat-belts are fastened. They were with every group and no group, and encountered one another apart from others. He put his hand on her shoulder. The night opened a soaring space above them, dwindling the voices and shapes of the human company they had gathered to a low humming horizon, a thin and distant huddle of life stirring under a vast gaze. Was this all they could muster to set against the trajectory of people thrown off trains that morning; in the house an old man with limbs atrophying; a ship full of nuclear filth prowling round the shores that night with death at a twelve-kiloinetre limit? How far is a twelve-kilometre limit, for death, when this great engulfment of sky cannot be held off? They didn’t speak but drifted together down the steps, past the backs and legs of those sitting there with their daughter, to the garden. The neglected grass licked dew on their ankles; she knelt a moment to bury her hands in it, ants crept up her wrists, crickets filled their ears ringingly, restoring the earth’s scale. They strolled on away from their party. — Lazar seems pretty taken with Annie. I can foresee us being left to entertain the girl-friend from now on.—