Nadine Gordimer - None to Accompany Me

— I didn’t go alone. — Head cocked at him.

— Oh. That was sensible. But how is it you didn’t mention Feldman was ill and you were going with someone else? Ben thought you were with someone he trusts, back on that road again.—

— I took along a friend he knows, the man who’s just won the Odendaal case, there couldn’t be anyone safer to be with.—

— But Vera. — He tapped a dance between a knife and fork. — You puzzle me.—

— My darling, how do I puzzle you? — Her face thrust towards him in a smile.

He wasn’t to be turned aside by any ploy of motherly affection. — Why didn’t you let him know it wasn’t Feldman? He thought you were safely with one person, you were with another. When you talked to us about the funeral you didn’t mention Feldman wasn’t there. It’s childish. — He has the right to be critical with her; that’s the kind of edgy relationship both are aware exists between them.

— I don’t know. It’s the usual form of evasion, to say so. Perhaps I’ll find out now you’ve mentioned it.—

Fascinated, he hesitated, sat back in his chair, and then righted himself. He spoke with an intense curiosity. — Do you often lie to him?—

— Is keeping something for yourself lying.—

— I suppose so. Even if you manage to put it that way.—

— And do you?—

— Who to?—

His mother rounded her eyes exaggeratedly, pulled a face: what are the limits of what you will tell me, what can we divine of one another. — Well, the Hungarian.—

He laughed, and then shook his head, down, down, at what had been come upon. — Well yes. As you say, the Hungarian. She wants a child. From me. For instance, there’s that. I tell her no, it’ll spoil what’s between us, I want her to myself. But that’s not what I want. There’s Adam, one hostage enough between me and a woman I couldn’t go on living with.—

— So you don’t envisage going on living with the Hungarian.—

— She’s got a name, Mother! — Eva. No, we get along well but I’m getting old enough to realize what you don’t know at twenty; life isn’t going to end with the catastrophe of hitting the forties, you’re very likely going to have to continue for a long stretch ahead with what — with whom — you take on now. Eva. It’s not like with you and Ben, something for life. I’m not like him — alas, I suppose. He took you away from that first husband of yours, at least that’s what he’s sure he did, I think it’s the basis of his feeling that he belongs to you entirely. You’ve always been and you are all that he has.—

— You can’t belong to someone else. It’s love-making gives the illusion! You may long to, but you can’t. — She stopped, as if the mouthful of wine she swallowed were some potion that would suffuse them both with clarity. — You see, Ben made a great mistake. Choice. — A flick of a glance returned her conspirator to the earlier remark: something not known about at the time. — He gave up everything he needed, in exchange for what he wanted. The sculpture. Even an academic career — all right, it didn’t look brilliant, but he might have been a professor by now, mightn’t he? What d’you think? That wouldn’t have been marginal? He put it all on me. — She was excited to continue by a sense of approaching danger, saying too much; doing exactly that, herself: putting the weight of all this on a son, a grown child. There is a fine limit beyond which a son or daughter may turn away in revulsion. Parents must be defined as such.

— What on you?—

— The whole weight of his life. That love he had. I love him but it’s hard to remember how much I was in love with him. That love affair that started on a holiday in the Drakensberg, it hasn’t moved, for him. It hasn’t been taken up into other things. Children born, friends disappearing in exile, in prison, killings around us, the death of his father in the house, the whole country changing. It hasn’t moved. Not even his confusion over Annie has shifted it, not even your divorce, because both he’s understood only in relation to his own feelings in the Drakensberg, he hasn’t any other criterion. The violence that was always there, pushing people out into the veld, beating them up at police stations, and the gangster violence that’s taking the opportunities of change, now, that’s killed Oupa Sejake — even that he understands now through me , it’s because it’s something that happened to me, it’s the bullet that went through my leg. Love. There’s been so much else, since then. Ivan, I can’t live in the past.—

— I wish I were nearer. For him. Because I always loved you best, as a kid.—

An offering of complicity she did not choose to see, held out to her.

She was examining him lingeringly. — Yes, so far away. You are his favourite. His only child, now. That’s how it turned out.—

Theirs was the last table still occupied but they sat on unnoticing, accepting coffee, more and more coffee, like lovers reluctant to part.

— You don’t need anything, Mother.—

In the clatter of waiters clearing tables he touched her cheek to soften what she might take as judgment.

— On the contrary, I’m finding the answer presents itself before the need. I know only then that it existed.—

They went out into the street roused with wine and confidences, laughing.

‘Do I lie to him often?’

How alike we are, it doesn’t end with the mask that is the face. He knows me because he himself was the first lie. One day I’ll be so old we’ll even talk about that. And he will say, I knew all along, although he couldn’t possibly know except through the code of genes and the language of blood.

Every time Vera leaves Ben out — isn’t that simply a different kind of unfaithfulness? Different from leaving him out by making love with someone else, that’s all. And just as after those times of love-making in One-Twenty-One, she ‘makes it up’ to him. Not by repairing the omission of telling him Rapulana instead of Feldman had accompanied her back along that road where she, too, could have met her death and left him to live without her — the trivial omission, as it could have been presented, of one name for another. When Ivan went off to London she asked Ben to come with her to Cape Town, where there were problems for her to solve at the Foundation’s branch office. Ivan was gone; —We can see something of Annie. — If he was lonely, he must be reminded that he had a daughter.

Annie insisted that they stay with Lou and her. Vera and Ben had never been in this common household. It was everything Annie’s parents’ was not. Vera’s house, that Ben had entered to live among the wartime makeshift provided by her first husband’s parents, donated beds and mismatched chairs, was aesthetically unified — if it could be called that — by coffee-stained newspapers and journals where fish-moth scuttled, grotesque woodcuts and figurines bought at charity sales of African art, photographs of the children who once lived there, poster souvenirs of travel, bureaux lacking handles, box files and old utensils that were meant to be thrown away but might come in useful. From this collage of hazard Annie had taken what had been consciously created within the house, the female torsos Ben had sculpted years ago. They were encountered in a Victorian house balanced on a steep street, one at the archway into the livingroom and the other at the centre of a small patio created by knocking down a wall, Lou explained. Old Cape furniture with the patina of acorns smelled of beeswax. There was a single huge abstract painting that suggested the sea. Flowers filled the fireplaces and plants trailed in the remodelled bathrooms. The kitchen was ranged like a surgery with glass-fronted and steel-topped equipment. Indolent cats slept, hetaerae on a velvet chaise-longue, in the room Ben and Vera were allotted. Whisky in a cut-crystal decanter and ice in an Italian-designed insulated bucket; bedside books, Thomas Bowler views of the nineteenth-century Cape, and a collection of poetry by black women writers. The Bowler, presumably, was a guess at what Ben would appreciate, and the other, for Vera, chosen by Lou on the principle that the lives of blacks were Vera’s particular province and that women ought to be, if they weren’t.