Nadine Gordimer - My Son's Story

The first time he had to make love to his wife after he had begun to make love to Hannah — it was not so much that too much time had gone by, but that he quickly learned, as a novice deceiver, that to avoid this was the surest way to give himself away — he trembled with sorrow and disgust at himself after he withdrew from her body. The caresses were an easy performance, rehearsed in the habit of marriage, without feeling, dutiful to please Aila, but the uncontrollable animal thrill of his orgasm was horrible. He wanted to get up out of that bed and house and go to Hannah. Shut out everything, himself, blotted against the being of Hannah. And every now and then, in the carefully arranged and guarded life he was managing, when he judged it was time to approach Aila again — to pretend to want poor Aila, oh my god — the act drained him, in shame. Sometimes he felt a final spurt of anger, towards Aila, sperm turned to venom.

For months the most precious aspect of his new life with Hannah was that it was clandestine. Like underground political life, it had nothing to do with the everyday. They owned one another because their times together were shared with no-one. They could not even be in anyone else's thoughts in any way that could reach out and touch them, because no-one knew where they were when they were together. To Sonny, who never before had used the commonplace deceptions — the meetings he was supposed to be attending, the visit to Pretoria she was supposed to be making in the course of her work — these were a kind of magic that made them invisible to the ordinary world he had inhabited all his life. Something he never would have thought possible. When he and she found themselves in the same public company at the same time, it was-to them — part of their wonderful spell of intimacy that there shouldn't be the slightest possibility that anyone else present should know of the secret knowledge of each other only those two, themselves, had. They were so successful that now and then somebody would introduce them: I don't think you've met. this is.

Sonny and Hannah: presented each to the other, as strangers, by a third person. What secret pleasure, to conceal the desire between them that this titillated! Sonny had revealed to him how part of the need in his life had been of a sense of erotic fun. To leave, separately, a gathering where each had given full attention to serious decisions (for the roused state of an ecstatic love affair, in men and women mutually dedicated to a political ideal and battle, heightens their concentration and application in relation to these) and fifteen minutes later be undressing each other: what an exquisite range of changing responses such an afternoon expanded! How much that he never would have known he was capable of experiencing, never ever. That it needed the secret (secret everywhere) presence of this woman, this ample girl — she was younger than she looked — to make possible for him. For months when they talked after love-making it was of the remote places they would like to go together. Islands off this or that continent. Forests in the mountains. Nothing but gulls or owls. Like all lovers, they did not know they were trying to prolong by transformation into words, into the future tense, the physical illusion of personal freedom that fades as the lulled and sated senses come back and will relay the knowledge of time passing with traffic: work, loss, hunger and pain, pacing out there in the street: other people.

But even if the islands and forests were only post-coital reveries, they had Hannah's cottage, Hannah's bed, which was unlike any other bed Sonny had ever known, not only because of what passed between her and him there but because it was not a bed at all — a very big mattress laid directly on the floor. He thought when he first saw it that it meant she was not properly settled in; or perhaps it was some Japanese idea. There were so many tastes, he, coming from his background, did not know about. Futon? she prompted, and laughed. Ah, no, just that she liked to be close to the wood of the floor, the earth beneath it. And how right she was. How unnecessary to have little bedside cabinets with hand-woven lampshades you had to be careful not to knock over in your sleep. Under the softness of the mattress only the law of gravity itself.

If his need of Hannah was terrible — in a magnificent way— then there was no need of anything or anyone else. She knew a lot of poetry — his Shakespeare was a poor stock, compared with hers. She taught him a love-poem he had never heard of, didn't know it was something done to death everyone who had taken a university first-year course in English literature could reel off. It described perfectly those months when Hannah's one room, for them, was 'an everywhere'.

This perfect isolation existed while Sonny and Hannah seemed to themselves to be getting away with the impossible. Its very intensity was granted on the condition that it could not last. Everything outside was ready to rupture it. Circumstance, conscience — there was a rictus of dire fear, to admit it — might take her from him, him from her, any day. But months went by. Their concealment of each other from the world continued to be successful. And now they passed into the second stage of the syndrome that Sonny, never having had the experience before, did not recognize. The fascination in living something totally removed from domestic love with its social dimensions of ordinary shared pleasures among other people gave way to dissatisfaction that they could not do these ordinary things together. For these belonged to Aila, Aila and the children. He could visit friends with Aila, and have her sitting there talking trivialities in the usual corner with the women while he was in a discussion at the other end of the room, a discussion Hannah would have been taking part in, they would have been contributing to together, complementing each other's ideas. He could go to a play (since they had moved to the city he had encouraged his family to take the opportunity to enjoy black theatre) with Aila and his son and daughter but there would not come from them the kind of comment, challenging his own thoughts, he would have had if Hannah had been with him. And there grew in him, in her — he knew it was against all sense and reason— a defiant desire to be seen to belong together. To show each other off. They didn't admit it, but knew it was there, as they knew everything about one another while in their chosen isolation.

Once they were taken by an obstinate, irresistible hankering to see a film together. An ordinary thing like that, which any other couple could do. Instead of spending the afternoon making love, they went across the city to a cinema complex in a suburb where neither knew anyone, a suburb of rich white people who never attended protest meetings or knew, had seen in flesh and blood, anyone who had been a political prisoner. And there, of course — they might have known it. The one encounter they never could have envisaged, something utterly against all probability. They walked out of the dark cinema straight into the afternoon glare and his son. They showed themselves off; to his son.

The instinct was to go to her cottage and hide. Sonny was silent, his eyes concealed from Hannah, as he could do, drawing his thick eyebrows down around their deep darkness. She was afraid. But he did not leave her, he did not say you have destroyed my family. She saw how he had changed; how she had changed him without knowing. They talked of the Italian film and not about the boy. He embraced her passionately before he left her in the early evening and went back to his family; he must already have made up his mind, calmly, how he would deal with his son. He said only: —Don't worry. Not about Will, either.—

And however it was that he managed, it was clear, later, that the boy never said anything — to his mother, to anyone. — He didn't mention it to you?—