Nadine Gordimer - None to Accompany Me

He leaned forward from the back seat of the car chattering in a London accent, well-educated but slightly Cockney, telling them of the enormously fat man who had overflowed the armrest in the plane, and how in the middle of the night he’d chatted up the cabin attendant, not the steward who’d said he couldn’t do anything about it but the girl, to find him another place— and bumped up to business class it was, too! With his air of zest and confidence it seemed he was arriving on holiday. He had never been in his father’s home country before; the woman beside him in business class was going all over the show, Kruger Park, Okavango, the Cape — he was certainly looking forward to getting around a bit. The mood prevailed among the three of them while he was shown his room and Ben opened a bottle of champagne before the special dinner Vera had prepared.

After dinner there was the first of the awkward hours that were to follow each night in the next weeks. Vera customarily went to her private place, the enclosed stoep which was her study, in the evening, and Ben read in the living-room. Although the young man had just spent thirteen hours in a plane he was not tired, he would never be tired at night, he wandered about the living-room looking at books and pictures, picking up newspapers and the art journals Ben subscribed to, the Foundation’s pamphlets and offprints of articles about land laws and removals that overflowed from Vera’s study; he walked out into the night and rounded the limits of the garden. Vera at the living-room window saw him standing at the gate before the streetlights webbed in trees, the blur of an all-night neon sunset burning, away over the city, with the stillness of one listening to the turbines of life sounding distantly: a captured animal pacing its new enclosure, seeing and hearing an unknown freedom, out there.

Kruger, the Okavango, the Cape. — Of course we’ll do some travelling together — naturally — but first I have to find you some sort of work. Have to be a responsible grandfather … What would you like to do? I can’t promise to come up with it exactly, but I’m prepared to try.—

— D’you notice how the people we meet think I’m your son — you don’t look much like my grandfather, Ben!—

Vera broke in with a cry. — And me? I suppose I certainly look like a grandmother!—

— Well, do you dye his hair for him? How come it’s still black?—

This kind of light sparring was the initial communication between Vera and the boy, Adam. — It’s always been black, black, never changed. Just as it was when I first saw him. — The boy doesn’t ask where that was, the youth of someone who is a grandmother is something unimaginable. But her remark succeeds in bringing a smile to Ben. — There are white ones if you look closely enough.—

— What’d I like to do? Now what would I like to do? Vera? Ben? People are always telling me what I ought to do, I’m not used to these big decisions. — The three were sitting in the garden; he was at the age when he could sprawl in the sun for hours, perhaps just growing, completing the physical transition to adulthood, his penis secretly stirring under the warmth.

— That’s why I’m asking.—

— But I really don’t know. — Useless to tell them, hitch the road to Kruger, the Okavango, the Cape; even she, who was holding him in a look as if she knew, smiling with a quirk to the side of her mouth, would not let him go. She might have: but she wanted to please her husband. He had been quick to see that his own presence in this house was some sort of gift to his grandfather, she didn’t really want this grandson there. Yet he’d taken a liking to her; their sparring was an admission that she liked him, too, while both were aware he was not welcome. — Maybe I could do something at Vera’s offices, what she tells about the place sounds quite interesting. I’d meet people.—

— That’s out.—

He looked from Ben to Vera. She stirred in don’t-ask-me amusement.

— Ivan specifically didn’t want that.—

— Ben, surely Ivan’s told him.—

— No I swear to you! He told me nothing.—

— Because I got shot in the leg. He thinks anything connected with the Foundation’s likely to put you in danger.—

— What crap! I could be blown up by an IRA bomb in London, couldn’t I?—

— The incidence isn’t quite the same. Vera escaped with her life. Living here is dangerous, even this garden, this house, if people come to rob they shoot or knife as well, if you walk up the wrong street and there’s a demonstration on, you can get tear-gassed or shot; you’ll learn all about this, why it is like that—

— I’m streetwise.—

— No, much more than streetwise — you have to be. You have to accept there are risks you can’t do anything much about. Certain aspects of Vera’s work simply add a few more. Ivan wants to avoid them.—

— Well, anything. Anything. It’s not meant to be a career for life, is it? — He hid in sulks his irritation with his father, with both of them.

— All the same— Ben paused, to reject the too emotional ‘unhappy’. —I don’t want you to be bored.—

He didn’t answer, sat there sucking at the hollow inside his lower lip. He knew they wanted him to get up and go into the house so that they could discuss him. He didn’t move. Vera rose with a leisureliness that challenged him, touching a plant, wiping greenfly off its buds as she left.

— See you later. — Ben followed.

In the bedroom she stood by while he changed into jeans and running shoes. Ben had always liked to run when something was troubling him; a good household remedy. Each has his or her own. Standing in underpants taking the jeans from the generous wall-cupboards the parents of her first husband had fitted, he still had beautiful, strong legs, the ankles and knees perfectly articulated, the thighs — so important if a man is to be a good lover — frontally curved with muscle under smooth black hair. She regarded him as if he were a statue; one of the works of limbs and torsos he used to sculpt.

— He doesn’t really mean it, about working at the Foundation. He’s not disappointed at all, I assure you.—

— Well, it’s the one positive answer he gave me.—

— He wants to show he doesn’t take this whole mock exile seriously, whatever we do. It’s a kind of flirtation with us.—

Adam went to work at Promotional Luggage. Profits were steeply down, with the recession and labour disputes, travel costs rising with the devalued currency, it wasn’t the time to take on unnecessary staff. But Ben knew he couldn’t hope to find anything else for the young man; his A-level achievements didn’t qualify him for something above the rank of junior clerk anywhere else, and where that kind of opening did happen to exist businesses were finding it expedient to Africanize. No one wanted to be seen to employ a white foreigner on some sort of sabbatical, even as a favour to a friend.

Adam was too young to be a salesman — who would give orders for expensive briefcases to a boy with Pre-Raphaelite locks, Ben was amused to think.

— Let him start at the bottom. Messenger and tea-boy. Like any black boy.—

That’s Vera, of course.

— Fax and automatic coffee dispensers now. You know that.—

A place was made for him that hadn’t existed, in design and production, he could learn something there. Ben had an arrangement with his partner, to which Vera was not privy, to pay the salary himself. Apparently Ivan had not provided for Adam to receive any allowance in his banishment; he couldn’t go about penniless and it would have been humiliating for him to have to accept what would have looked like a schoolboy’s pocket-money from Vera and Ben. He spent most of the first month’s salary on compact discs for the player that was in his luggage. Vera’s house was filled with the one intrusion she hadn’t thought of complaining of in anticipation, to Ben. Many desperate voices, accompanied by a heavy beat that she heard without distinction as Michael Jackson, resounded from what had been Ivan’s room.