Nadine Gordimer - None to Accompany Me

Yet there’s purpose in the attempt to break the cycle? On the premise that the resolution is going to be justice? — even if it is renamed empowerment.

Sometimes, after a second drink, when the news gave way to some piece of popular music revamped from the past, Vera, too old to find a partner, danced alone, no one to witness, in the living-room of her house, the rock-’n’-roll and pata-pata her body remembered from wartime parties and the Fifties in the Maqomas’ Chiawelo house. That was the time, she accepted, tolerant of her young self, when all other faculties of judgment were blinded by sex. She would stop: laughing at herself giddily. But the dancing was a rite of passage. An exaltation of solitude would come over her. It was connected with something else: a freedom; an attraction between her and a man that had no desire for the usual consummation. Ben believes their marriage was a failure. Vera sees it as a stage on the way, along with others, many and different. Everyone ends up moving alone towards the self.

After Vera signed the deed of sale of her house she went to spend a week with her daughter Annick in Cape Town. As she was leaving she stood a moment in the doorway and looked at all that had been there over decades, in place still. Buildings, rooms, witness; the inanimate stand outside time.

Lou came to meet her at the airport. Annie had taken the baby to her surgery for routine inoculations; Annie and her lover had adopted an infant. It was female, like themselves, and black, chosen whether as their form of political commitment against that of sitting on commissions and committees or in their concern for one of the abandoned children of adolescent schoolgirls Annie came upon in her round of clinics in the squatter camps and black townships outside the city.

Annie and Lou were in the state of distracted preoccupation of new parents. Lou called to Annie to listen to the infant’s breathing or sniff at its stool in case there was something to be worried about her professional skill would detect; Annie summoned Lou all through the house to witness that she was the first to get the little creature to smile. The room that had been a Victorian nursery and was converted to a lovers’ retreat where Annie and Lou had kept to themselves was restored to a nursery with the door kept ajar so that the baby’s summoning cries could be heard. The baby girl was not beautiful. It had feet and hands too attenuated for its body, wavering about like the legs of an insect trapped on its back. Its sad oil-yellow face crowned with hair like a black sponge bore the aspect of something unloved and unwanted in the womb.

— Here’s your grandchild. — Annie placed the baby in Vera’s arms. She had sensed Vera’s reaction; perhaps because it was her own, that in her case moved her to love and protect. — They’re all a rather pale muddy colour when they’re new. But her mother’s a beautiful Xhosa from the Transkei.—

Annie and Lou had rearranged their working schedules so that one stayed at home to take care of the child on alternate days. All such arrangements were discussed, told to Vera in the conviction of parents that every detail concerning the conduct of life around a child is of the same interest to others as it is to themselves. — We tried turns taking her with us to work, Annie to the hospital and I to the lab, but the one who was without the baby always got so worried about what was happening — we were phoning each other madly all the time! Hopeless! When she’s a few months older we’ll get a good day-care woman in.—

Annie and Vera sat in the sun on the verandah. Tea and scones under the valance of white wooden lacework. Annie with Ben’s beautiful face, the black eyes lowered, the fine nostrils white with concentration, fed the baby from a bottle, but it kept nuzzling towards her breast, pushing up the cushiony flesh above the open neck of her shirt. There were clean cloths handy in case the baby should regurgitate and one of the cats, adjusted to banishment from the lovers’ retreat, lay bubbling a purr, a kettle coming to the boil, in appreciation of having a household where now there was always someone at home. Vera watched Annie listening to the other rhythm, the infant sucking, Annie’s breathing becoming adjusted to it, as if she would fall asleep; it had been easy to fall asleep while giving the breast, yes. The baby might have been Mpho’s if the old gogo in Alex had had her way and it hadn’t ended in a bucket at the abortionist fortunately procured. So often Vera had felt like this, far removed from what was steering her daughter’s life, further and further, unable to check the remove.

Grandmother and daughter and baby; appearing so natural to anyone passing in the street. A squirrel gibbered in one of the old oak trees carefully tended in the garden and Annie looked up — the closed circuit of infant, Annie, Lou, broken by Lou’s absence at work — realizing her mother’s presence, Vera’s presence, having time for it for the first time. — Dad wrote a few weeks ago. I’d written about our acquisition … Perhaps we should give him a call, while you’re here? He seems quite happy with my rich brother. But what about you? Couldn’t that kid Adam at least have stayed until papa comes home? Are you safe in that house alone?—

— I’ve sold the house.—

Annie was instantly, frighteningly indignant: home, the old home, it must be kept intact even if one never sees it again, doesn’t want to. — You’ve what? For God’s sake! When? And what about Ben, when he comes back? Where’ll you live?—

Vera let her lift the baby against her shoulder, patting it in the ritual of aiding digestion, before she spoke.

— Ben won’t come back.—

Annie did not look at her mother. — And when was that decision taken.—

— There’s no decision, but he won’t come back.—

— Don’t tell me you and he are getting divorced at your age.—

— No, not divorced. No. I’ll go and see him and Ivan when I’m overseas.—

She was amazed to see Annie’s face reddening as it did when as a child she was about to lose her temper. The black eyes hostile behind a thick distortion of tears.

— How nice of you. What has he done?—

— Done. Nothing.—

So now she — Vera, the mother — who came home to him fucked out from another man, was abandoning that home, nothing for her father to come back to. Shut out.

— For Christ’s sake, why do you do this?—

Vera was looking with incomprehension at something else before her, the baby back at the breast of a woman who wouldn’t have a man. — Because I cannot live with someone who can’t live without me.—

— That’s right. Answer in riddles.—

— When someone gives you so much power over himself he makes you a tyrant.—

A few tears fell on the baby’s spongy filaments, glistening there, Annie brushed off the contamination fiercely. — Like the penis business. You and the penis, I couldn’t understand that, either, could I.—

Vera wanted to bow her head, walk indoors hangdog, and despised herself for it. Always she had had a masochistic need to be chastised by Annie in expiation of the times when, loving her, she had neglected her by having her out of mind , that most callous form of neglect; while caring for nothing but making love in One-Twenty-One Delville Wood. She resisted the need by coldness. — By now we ought to have accepted there are things about each other neither of us understands.—

Above the head of the baby Annie screwed up the left side of her face as if to focus better, ward off. — And what are you going to do?—

— When the Committee’s finished, I’ll be back at the Foundation of course.—

— You know I don’t mean that. Where’re you intending to live? You’re not going to buy another house, are you? A flat? I can’t see you in one of those buildings where you have to sign in and out every time with some security thug in the foyer.—