Nadine Gordimer - None to Accompany Me

Oupa doubled as driver of the Foundation’s station-wagon battered by the lawyers’ trips into the backveld to consult with communities under threat of removal. One day when Mrs Stark’s car had been stolen he gave her a lift home, and the theft revived something else. Before he went to the Island, he was awaiting trial on the mainland in a cell with criminals. — Murderers, man! Gangsters. I can tell you, they were brilliant. Nothing to touch them for brains. The things they’d brought off — robberies, bank hold-ups. And they’d play the whole show through for us. Exactly how they did it. Prison means nothing to them, they had the warders bribed and scared of them. Even whites. They had all their stuff waiting for them outside, for when they’d done their time. I tell you, those guys would make top-class lawyers and big businessmen. — He grinned, chin lifted as he drove.

Again Mrs Stark was comfortably silent, if she noted, she made no remark on what he had just innocently confirmed: something of the unacknowledged self that came into being in prison still existed within him, a pride in and defiant community with anyone, everyone, who had the daring to defy the power of white men, to take from them what was not theirs, whether by political rebellion or by the gangster’s gun; silent because this was a self that, by nature of what she was, could not exist among her selves.

— You ever come across any of them again, outside?—

Oupa pressed his elbows to his ribs and brought his shoulders up to his ears. — Those people! Man! Je-ss-uss! I’d be terrified.—

Vera left her promising position in a prosperous legal firm after, when she had failed to conceive for twelve years, her second child was born, Annick.

She has never known whether her first child, Ivan, is the son of her divorced husband or of Bennet Stark, her love of whom was ringed indelibly on a photograph. No one else will ever know that she herself does not. He of the sun-grained, fair-skinned nape is now living in Australia, retired from something to do with shipping, and has nothing around him to bring to the surface that last visit he made to the house they had once shared; and if, in the mood of male camaraderie on a drinking evening there is an exchange of confidences about the unpredictable sexual behaviour of women, he contributes the example of an ex-wife who gave him a better hour than she’d ever done during the brief marriage, he is unlikely to think there could have been any consequences — she was accustomed to see to that. Perhaps he might feel a momentary stab of betrayal, despite her complete betrayal of him, at mentioning her more or less in the context of the one-night stand, but it was all so long ago … As for her present husband, it’s unthinkable that ever there could be betweenthem one of those terrible, embattled stages of marriage when she might thrust her hand down into their life to seize a weapon to wound him mortally.

Ben was almost embarrassedly dismissive of the fact that his daughter had inherited his beauty; part of the quality of that beauty was that he was not aware of it, he was brought to see it only by remarks upon the beauty of the baby girl as the image of her father. Ivan — because he reproduced the face of his mother? — remained Ben’s favoured child.

When the girl was born, with the marvellous markings of her father’s black hair and double fringe of lashes, even the bevel-edged lips, Vera could have been looking in a mirror where her lover from the mountains was preserved as he was as a child. A tremendous gratitude gushed from her along with the expulsion of the afterbirth. For a year she stayed at home taking care of the baby with the tender emotional fervour of one making amends — for what, to whom, was diffused in maternal energy; from which she looked up, only now and then, at the newspaper headlines announcing arrests, trials, bans, finally the outlawing of political movements. Physical fulfilment is a temporary withdrawal from the world, a sealing-off from threat and demand, whether directed to oneself or others. At the time, it seems the other world, all extraneous, is jabber and distraction, a crowded station passed through, train blinds drawn and compartment door locked. The self-absorption was pierced only by the fact of the baby shot dead on its mother’s back at Sharpeville — an infant like her own, like Bennet’s. Her life was all touch: during the day the smooth plumpness of her small daughter damply warm against her hip, the hands of her leggy son, roughened and scratched in tussles at play; the caresses of love-making. There could have been a biological explanation for the strong resurgence of eroticism between Bennet and her. Some theory that after giving birth women experience fresh sexual initiatives and responses. They had been married for twelve years; whatever the reason, the feast of sex begun as a picnic in the mountains again preoccupied her and her lover-husband as it had done. Intelligent people as they were, while they discussed what was happening around them he could be distracted by the bare cup of her armpit showing in a sleeveless dress, and she could be conscious of the curve of his genitals enticing under his jeans.

Bennet Stark carved wood and modelled clay but while recognition for his work in this vocation seemed long in coming had had to make use of a conventional degree he had earned when too young to know what he wanted to do. Bennet Stark was known, behind his back at the Department of English in the university where he worked, as Our Male Lead; as if he were responsible for his looks and the mixture of resentment and admiration these aroused. From the point of view of advancement in an academic community it’s a bad sign to have some advantage that is simply a gift of nature, not earned and not attainable for others by any amount of hard work, lobbying or toadying. He remained in a junior position and the ambitions the lovers had for him as an artist when first they exchanged confidences beside a mountain stream were in abeyance while they concentrated on each other and the extension of themselves in their children. He still modelled in clay occasionally over a weekend — the heads of the children, which were growing, changing, even as the clay hardened the image of one stage or another, and the naked torso of Vera, anonymous female body to anyone other than himself, who supplied the beloved head in his mind. But married to the woman he had captivated and captured and the father of a family, he had given up the idea of becoming a sculptor. Vera, at least, had attained her easier ambition of qualifying in law. Lovingly, he felt no jealousy; hers was a practical goal, not dependent on the imponderable mystery of talent, of which, protected by sensual happiness, he came to accept he perhaps did not have enough.

When Annick began to wriggle out of her arms and Ivan distanced himself from the need of her touch on childish wounds, Vera appeared restlessly displaced. She told Bennet she was going back to work.

They could certainly do with the money.

— I’m not going back to the firm.—

He did not know what to make of a sudden announcement that overturned all assumptions.

— I don’t want to fight their insurance claims when they lose their jewellery and Mercedes. Or dig the dirt in their divorces. — He looked at her tenderly, patiently. — Set up on your own?—

— I don’t know.—

Vera read newspapers and reports, White Papers, was drawn to people who were spread-eagled between their private attachments and those other tentacles, the tug of others’ predicaments, the tangle of frustration and misery; women, as she was a woman, lifted out of the humble ramshackle of their lives and dropped, destitute, in the veld, men, as hers was a man, endorsed out of a town where they might find work, driven off farms where their fathers had given their labour; children unlike hers because there was no childhood for them, begging and sniffing glue for comfort in the street. She did come to know. She went to work at the Foundation, not out of the white guilt people talked about, but out of a need to take up, to balance on her own two feet the time and place to which, by birth, she understood she had no choice but to belong. This need must have been growing unheeded — seed shat by a bird and germinating, sprouting, beside a cultivated tree — climbing the branches of passionate domesticity.