Nadine Gordimer - None to Accompany Me

— How old were you when you married him?—

— Your age.—

— God, how awful.—

— Well, it was the war. It’s a hothouse for that sort of thing. Falling in love or rather thinking that’s what it is. People are getting killed so nature advances the mating age to replace the dead with children — something like that. Same sort of thing among young blacks in the violence of the townships now; life’s cheap, sex tricks you into breeding.—

— When you were young sex meant getting married.—

— Generally, yes. Certainly for girls. If you wanted the sex you thought you wanted the marriage.—

They contemplated, a comfortable pause between them.

— I can’t imagine it. We’ve got the sex, now. And we’ve got AIDS … so?—

— Looks like there’s no such thing as sexual freedom. Well, perhaps one generation, at least, had it — Ivan and Annie. Between the end of the necessity to marry and the arrival of the disease.—

— Doesn’t seem to have helped much. Dad got divorced, same as you. When I’m with him, and when I’m with my mother, I wonder why on earth either of them married the other. And what about Annie?—

— How d’you mean? — So Ivan must have related as a disaster Annie’s choice of alliance.

— You know what I mean.—

— That Annie’s a lesbian.—

There was a slight waver of embarrassment on his face before he pursued. — So that’s part of freedom.—

— I suppose so, Adam. Yes.—

— But when d’you think it happened? When she was my age? What about boys?—

— Of course — she’s beautiful. Like Ben; people fall for that kind of beauty. There were boys, men, but they somehow couldn’t strike the right response in her.—

— But another woman could. Why d’you think it was — that she went that way?—

Their attention met and turned aside like the flick of a page, several times. For his part, he was giving her space to reflect, to offer him something he could learn from. She almost said it, shed on this unlikely confidant, Fear of men because her mother was ‘taken away’, the nest of home broken into by a man. But she answered with an assumption of careless self-deprecation. — Sometimes I think I know, but of course it’s nonsense. Maybe the ‘cause’—can you call it that, gays themselves are furious if you suggest it’s an abnormality — maybe it’s physical. Maybe psychological. There are many theories. But Annie would say: choice. Free choice.—

Then he said what Ben had once said, perhaps the question all heterosexual men ask of a woman when considering the rejection of their gender. — Could you sleep with a woman? I don’t mean now (she smiled as he respectfully absolved her of any survival of sexuality, as if it would have been a disgrace), when you were young.—

And she turned Annie’s accusation to advantage. — I’ve loved only men.—

— Some people say to try it … I don’t know. Doing it— or something like it — with my own sex, the idea turns me off. I mean, once you’ve done it with a girl, how can you think of any better way. I love girls.—

— You don’t have to apologize for that!—

— The idea of the war, your getting married to that chap. But you didn’t have any children, did you?—

— No.—

— Before Ivan.—

— Before Ivan, no.—

— Did Dad really not mention that he’s met him?—

— You know how his letters have been preoccupied with you.—

The gentle reproach had him deflected, smiling in a different direction. But he fingered along his jaw a small lump where a shaven hair had burrowed into the skin. — Not just the meeting at the conference. The man took him snorkeling with him, he flew him to the Barrier Reef.—

There was the waiting silence that comes between two people when one is confronting thoughts the other does not know of, but an instinctive inkling, a kind of prickling of the nerves, is being conveyed.

— They seem to have had a great time together. — His curiosity grew; it secluded Vera and him closely.

— I’ve heard the Barrier Reef’s wonderful.—

— Oh he says it was the time of his life. Dad as a pick-up! It’s sure out of character.—

— What do you think of as Ivan’s character?—

— Well he’s not — spontaneous (pleased at finding the right word), like you must have been. He weighs things up. Look how long it took him to make up his mind between my mother and the Hungarian. But maybe it was because of the man knowing you. Not just any stranger in a bar.—

— Maybe. We never know what a son or daughter understands about us; what we think of as ourselves.—

— Well old people are so cagey! … d’you ever tell Ivan what you’ve just said, about the war and sex and everything? — He slowly moved his head in certainty of her joining him in the denial, and she did, the two of them smiling at her compliance.

They returned to the computer. — It’s really bombed out. I’ll see if I can recover the data, try the back-ups.—

She said she’d leave him to it. He sensed that he had gained some advantage over her: she was at once Vera, to him, and his grandmother. He turned. — I’ll take some other girl — you’ll lend me your car for Saturday?—

Consequences.

Father and son.

Vera sees them. They swim towards each other through ruined palaces of coral, flippered feet undulating, ribbons of current and light passing, and, magnified by water: recognize. Ivan’s face is the face of the young woman on the bedroom floor, the wriggling sperm magnified by time out of sight and mind into the man picked up, tagged, in a bar. Without the tag, he might have been taken for one of those coincidental likenesses that share no blood: at one side of the ocean and another two beings happen to have been born with the same conformation of features. Vera, that wilful sexy bitch Vera, had to transform fertilization into parthenogenesis, the proof of her deceit being that she reproduced herself, only herself, in male form, for her new lover. And Ivan is drawn to the man never seen, never talked of, who once was married to a girl who became his mother; such attraction is a kind of recognition. The time of his life, together.

Father and son. No end to consequences. This consequence is that the seventeen-year-old boy has become one of Vera’s confidants. He knows there is something about herself she conceals, making other confessions round about it. He does that kind of thing himself, to protect himself from adults. In recognition — another kind of recognition — of this, she lets him drive without a valid licence, and both of them, as friends, are concealing this from Ben.

She has a need to redefine. Friends. Friends are differing individuals who are the repositories of confidences and confessions. The act of these friendships, in which the various aspects of self cannot be placed all upon one person, is the equivalent of placing the burden of self within the other by which she used to define the sexual act.

Ms Vera Stark, Deputy Director of the Legal Foundation (in the end she has not been able to avoid a title), is among the faces in the newspapers captioned as nominated to serve on the Technical Committee on Constitutional Issues. Vera had heard that her name was being considered, but had not taken the possibility seriously; there were so many commissions and committees sitting, more set up every day either to pass the heat of change from hand to hand or keep an ethos of democracy evolving while the set of the old hegemony theatre was being struck, its now incongruous flats still lumbering people’s lives. Some groups wanted to keep them in the way, hoping that an ivy of acceptability might be able to be painted over them; others wanted to cart the junk off to live by in some enclave of a single skin colour or language, and pranced the streets with guns in mounted commando to make their Nazi neo-Arcadian cause a threat. Some enterprising adapters to a coming order where it might be possible still to make money while losing political control, wanted to lease the ultimate relic of the dead regime’s power, Robben Island, to a resort developer. A former political prisoner whose people the Foundation was representing in a land dispute made to Vera the counterclaim: We spent our lives there. We earned it. The Island is ours.