Nadine Gordimer - None to Accompany Me

They talked many times, many nights. Ben’s practical propositions of how they tactfully could take care of the boy for Ivan—

— He’s not a boy—

— how they could make arrangements for his needs and anticipate his preferences—

— Arrange our lives.—

Vera’s sense of resentment. Half-defiant, half-ashamed, she had never realized how much her (what was it?) sense of privacy had grown. How could someone like herself whose preoccupations of work were so public, so intertwined with other lives, have at the same time this sense? She did not know, could not decide whether it was protective, necessary (she saw how those who, unlike herself, really were public figures, were surrounded by piranhas of public adulation), or whether it was the early sign of some morbid onset, like the first unnoticed symptom of a loss of physical function. It was linked in an obscure way — she chased it in random dissociation down labyrinths of the subconscious — with the voice that had come up in her several times, the impulse she had had to ask: What am I to do with this love?

Ivan, Ivan. Her double (how Ben loves them both, her in him and him in her); her invader. He had germinated in her body, interloper from an episode into her definitive life. And now he sent his representative, his replacement, for her to ‘make arrangements’ for in that life, over again.

Her daily life. This became the irritable obsessive expression of her emotions; daily life , she challenged and argued with Ben over details that astonished him, housewifely niggles of anticipated disruptions of petty routines she had no more thought worth discussing than she would have needed deliberation about brushing her teeth. Young men always dumped bundles of dirty clothes about; Esther Dhlomo, who came to wash and iron once a week, would have to be engaged to come twice. The kind of simple meals Ben was satisfied to eat and Vera quickly cooked when she came home from the Foundation; a young man would want red meat. And the telephone? He would be on the phone for hours, no one would be able to reach her. It would be necessary to apply well in advance for another line, have a phone installed in the room he occupied.

Ben countered all these problems and was only occasionally impatient. He smiled, offering Vera the bonus, in the life of parents of adults, of what was surely an empty space in that life about to be filled. — He’ll have Ivan’s old room.—

What pleased Ben as a destined occupancy, a heritage binding son to father, Vera recoiled from. With a sudden switch of her emotions in an insight: she had been seeing the son as the father, but Ivan was what Adam was being rescued from.

Ivan’s room; yes, because it had become the room of Annick and her woman lover. A room that imposed no succession upon a male. So there he could be himself, whatever that might turn out to be.

Past the signs.

A powdery Transvaal day at the end of summer drought rested the eye. Pale friable grass flattened at the highwayside, fine dust pastel upon leaves and roofs pressed under the sky night had breathed on and polished. Driving in quiet to the airport together, something more than a truce in their opposing anticipations of arrival came upon Ben and Vera. He put the seal of his hand in her lap; upon not only the contention that set them one against the other in acceptance of Ivan’s proposal — Ivan’s blackmail, for Vera; his right, and proof of love, for Ben. Also upon all that had broken between them over their years, and hairline cracks where the impossibility of knowing another being had impacted, despite confidences, the exchange of the burdens of self Vera put so much value on in entry to and acceptance of the body they had experienced together countless times since initiation in the mountains. She, who had been hostilely apprehensive, was serene; Mrs Stark of the Foundation had trained Vera that once a circumstance has no chance of avoidance it must be accepted without further capacity for conflict and loss of energy. Ben was the one whose eager anticipation of receiving Ivan’s son had become apprehension. Yet there was an atmosphere between them as if they were sharing one diastole and systole in existence that may come briefly between people who have been living together a long time, and disappears, impossible to hold on to or recapture by any intention or will. This bubble of existence was trapped within the car’s isolation — airconditioning, locked doors and closed windows — from the landscape they could see: that landscape was not innocent. There were shootings along the highways and roads every day, attacks like the one that had killed Oupa, shots in the cross-fire between rival political groups, ambushes by gangs representing themselves as revolutionaries. Vera had said to Ben, when final dates for the boy’s arrival were being discussed, that Ivan should be told of the risks his son would be subject to, the ordinary risks of every-day in this country, this time. Ben was ashamed of distrust of her motives. To him it was unthinkable that Vera, who had chosen him so openly, could ever be devious, but he had written soberly to Ivan, a constriction in his fingers at the idea that this might mean the boy would not be sent, after all. Although Ivan must have known that, unlike any risks he admonished his mother not to put his son to by finding him employment in her circles, these risks were not ones that anyone could arrange to avoid, he replied he was sure his parents would take good care of the boy. I only hope there won’t be a last minute objection from his mother because she hears something … But then she never did take much interest in what was going on in the world. Whatever Vera’s motives had been, at this reply she was concerned that Ben (his dark head bent, considering) might not become aware of how determined Ivan was to get rid of the boy. She somehow owed Bennet his illusions — thought of him as Bennet again, when seeking to honour this debt.

As they walked from the parking ground to the airport terminal he laughed jerkily with nerves and remarked it was a pity it was too early for a drink.

— Well, why not? Let’s have one anyway. D’you think the bar’ll be open? Yes! — what d’you feel like? — She laughed with him while they suggested to one another what it was appropriate to drink at eleven in the morning ‘like a couple of alkies’. —Gin and tonic? — No, that’ll make me have to go and pee just as the plane lands. — Sherry, brown sherry, when I was a young girl that was regarded as a suitably mild tipple and I don’t remember it being diuretic.—

No prancing, singing, ululating surge pressing to the barriers for the appearance of these tour groups arriving and travellers returning from sightseeing holidays and business trips instead of exile. No banners; travel agents listlessly holding cards with the names of Japanese, Germans, French and Taiwanese they had come to escort to their hotels. No children conceived in strange lands, tossed home from hands to hands; only small Indian boys dwarfed in men’s miniature suits and little white girls wearing the duplicate of their mothers’ flowered tights, chasing about families patient as cattle, chewing their cud-gum while waiting to greet grandfathers back from Mecca and fathers back from business deals on the other hemisphere. Ben and Vera’s passenger came out among the first to emerge. There he was, guiding a trolley unhurriedly while others urged past him, a tall boy with a bronze ponytail switching as he casually looked around. Ben did not move, taking in this first moment, first sight, in emotion. It was Vera who rose on the balls of her feet to wave and smile. Now the boy steered, careening the trolley, for them. They had seen him only less than a year before, in London, he couldn’t have changed much, the same — it seemed to Vera — outdated Sixties style, the ear-ring, the long hair; apparently the hippies had retreated sufficiently far in history to inspire a revival of the way they looked even if their flowered path had become strewn everywhere with guns, their potsmoking dreams had become Mafia drug cartels, and their sexual freedom had been ended, more horribly than any conventional taboos ever could have decreed, by a fatal disease. Only his jaw had changed. Facing them now, he had the squared angle from the joint beneath the ear of a handsome adult male, it was only with his back turned that, ponytail curling on his shoulders, he could have been mistaken for a girl. When they embraced there was the snag of a night’s beard on his skin.