Nadine Gordimer - None to Accompany Me

Empty houses. FOR SALE. Estate agents’ portable signs propped at corners, arrows pointing: ON SHOW. Clues in the paper-chase of flight. On Sunday afternoons the cars clustered at an address are not the sign of a party but another form of diversion, curiosity to see what other people are abandoning— not all who follow the estate agents’ signs are prospective buyers.

It has happened a number of times in the neighbourhood where Vera Stark has continued to live in the house that is one of the only two evidences of an early alliance. The Sharpeville massacre in the Sixties, the black student uprising in the Seventies, now the assassination; although all these dire events did not lay a hand upon the occupants of the white suburbs (only the violent robberies against which they try to protect themselves with walls, alarms, dogs and revolvers do so), these events literally send them packing. In commercial indices in a time of recession, the international movers’ firms report unprecedented growth, their competitive advertising campaigns include jingles on television and radio.

FOR SALE. ON SHOW. Are these suburban museums, exhibiting a way of life that is ended? Is that why the once houseproud occupants are leaving? Or as they flee do they really have to fear for their lives — in the constitution, Bill of Rights, decrees that are going to change life?

Vera and Ben Stark drive past the signs on their way to the airport, not to see someone go, but someone arrive.

Several months before, there was another letter from Ivan in London. One unlike the short notes and postcards which supplemented phone calls and kept awareness of one another’s existence, the slack familial liens, hooked up. After the first page the letter broke off and had been continued under a new date: a letter the writer did not know quite how to write, whose reception he was unsure of. It was addressed to them both, this time. Vera handed it to Ben. A gesture to how much Ivan meant to him.

— I’ll read it out.—

— No don’t — I can wait. — She was opening other mail, tearing up pamphlets, putting aside bills, but as he read he put a hand out to her. In response, she moved to read over his shoulder as he sat.

— Oh my god.—

— Ben wait, let’s get the whole picture.—

But he was drawing breath through pinched nostrils, he held his hand, stayed, at the page.

The boy, the son Adam, had been arrested for drunken driving, suspended sentence, but only after Ivan had made representations to the magistrate, and then the boy had been arrested again, his third offence for speeding, and lost his driver’s licence.

Vera did not find it such a tragedy … she spent every day with people in great anxiety whose youngsters threw stones, couldn’t be got back to school, defied the police in marches and sit-ins, and risked being shot dead. Thinking of what sort of hazards were likely in London streets, she offered — At least it isn’t drugs.—

They read on. Ivan put the blame ‘mostly — I’m aware I’m a weekend father, and sometimes not even that’ on the boy’s mother. To put it bluntly, Adam is too intelligent for her. She can’t meet him on his own ground and so he does what he likes with her — and for himself. She makes scenes. She phones me around the world, always these urgent messages to get in touch with her at once. I think god knows what’s happened to Adam, and then it’s the same tears on the phone, he won’t listen to her, he came home five in the morning, he won’t bring his friends in for a meal, he wears jeans torn over the backside, what must she do. And it’s finally not a matter of what she must do, it’s what I must, I see that more clearly every day, if Adam isn’t to become at best a drop-out and at worst land in jail.

Here the letter had been put aside, like Vera’s bills. Three days later, Ivan began again. I said I must do something. Of course it’s obvious — you’ll be thinking. I should try and get custody for myself. (She has it until he’s eighteen.) There’s the strong evidence that the mother is not a fit guardian — the arrests testify to that, eh, Vera, you’re the lawyer in the family, but of course this kind of case, divorce wrangles, are not quite your thing. And these days the preference of the youngster himself for one parent counts, in the courts; I’m pretty sure he’d want to come to me, though not for the best reasons, I’m afraid. He’s bored with her nagging, with being expected to bring his friends home to chat with her over tea (that’s what she really wants, she has never got over her girlishness, sees herself as one of them, and you know how the young hate that — you never did, never, Vera, a great advantage of the little time you had for us when we were adolescent). He knows I’m away a lot, and he’d be on the loose. And he’s old enough, worldly enough to see that as I live with a woman I’m not married to I couldn’t very well make some big moral stand over his relations with girls — and he seems to have many.

Which brings me to a tremendous worry. The usual. AIDS. He’s had all the information and warnings (they educate even small children as well as adolescents at schools here) and I’ve added mine, told him that as he never goes out without his credit card he must never go out without his condom — but … What I’m getting at I’d better come right out with. If his mother is not fit to look after him at this stage in his life, neither — and it’s hard for me to admit it — am I. I think he needs time to mature, away from both of us, before he goes to university or trains for whatever else it is he wants to do (as yet undecided, of course; that’s part of the trouble). Once he’s in training for a career and living independently — I’ll set him up in a flat or something — I’m sure he and I will get on and become closer. (It’s not that we don’t get on well now, it’s that I know I can’t give him what he doesn’t know he needs.) So I’m going to ask you if he couldn’t come to you, to the house at home, our old place that doesn’t refuse anyone or anything, not that I know of, Ma. I have a feeling his mother will consent, though she’d raise all hell if I wanted to move him in with the Hungarian and me. If Vera and you, Dad, would let him live with you for, say, a year, I think he’d gain a new perspective on his life. If Ben could find him something to do, some work — no offence, Vera, but quite honestly I don’t want him getting out of one kind of mess here and getting into another kind because of becoming involved in politics. Anything you’d offer him wouldn’t be without that risk. One bullet in a leg’s enough. So no good works, please, no brave works. He doesn’t belong in that country, he doesn’t owe it anything. He did fairly well in his A levels and, at my insistence, is taking another at a crammers to be sure he’ll be well qualified to get into a university eventually. This course will be over soon. Ideally, he should go to you then. The handwriting became larger and wide across the page. No immediate hurry. Think about it. Do it for me. I can ask you because I love you, Ben, Vera.

We can talk now.

This is something they can talk about. Now; any time. What concerns Ivan occupies Ben’s attention and energy openly. He remembered Vera’s dismayed silence when — some time ago, he’d been thinking about this solution for the boy even then — there was the divorce and he suggested they might take the boy for a while. Ben rose, turned her to him and with his index fingers lifted her short hair where it lay behind each ear as if it were the long tresses he used to loop back to study her face when it was new to him. He kissed her, one of his long embraces, sensuous as they always became at any contact with her, the letter hidden in one hand of the arms that held her. — It’ll be like having Ivan back again. It’ll be all right.—