Nadine Gordimer - A Sport of Nature

He was convinced that he was going to be arrested. Whether this was so or not nobody can say. Many premises are raided; there are not always consequences of the kind he foresaw, building up for her and for those who sheltered them a case against himself. Fear and self-esteem — his conviction of his own threat to others confirmed as it could be only by the assumption of himself being in danger — burned his old resentments as the fuel of elation. He made love more often than ever, and each race to the finish might be the last. His face presented itself as the face that must be looked at as a last look, at any ordinary moment of the day. She opened white-wine bottles and no-one knew the other tipsiness that animated her, now. She confided in no-one; no longer, not she. Sitting a moment on someone’s desk, swinging her legs and chattering; no-one knew that next day she might not be there, one day soon would simply not be there. She and he: gone.

He did not even risk going back for what might be left of ‘his book’. A friend-of-a-friend would go to the cottage and send later whatever papers were there. He — and the little girl, of course — would bum a few clothes (friends who weren’t in danger surely owed them that much) and disappear as they were. The only problem was money. — I can manage, I don’t care. But with you … Maybe you should follow.—

For the first time, there was fear to be seen in her shining, opaque black eyes. — I’ll get money. For both.—

It must have been in June 1963, exact date unknown, she left South Africa. Whether by air under assumed names, or by some Underground route overland, they were gone, she and whoever the man was. His name does not appear in any accounts of resistance during the period, his book seems never to have been published. No-one even gives him the credit for having been the one who, however reluctantly, moved her on.

*

It was to Joe Hillela went so that she wouldn’t be left behind. To his rooms, asking to see him and sitting in the waitingroom among clients. These were blacks as well as whites, sharing the same chairs and journals, The Motorist and Time passed on, perhaps, from the household of one of Joe’s new partners, the English Guardian and local liberal reviews she recognized as from the stacks in Pauline’s livingroom. She didn’t have to pass time with any of these. Joe appeared as soon as her name was taken in to him. Being Joe, there was no demonstration of surprise, pleasure or displeasure. He simply put up a hand and flagged a quiet, coaxing movement. He stood back to let her pass before him through his doorway: Joe, the smell of the shaving cream standing like a tongue’d icecream cone on the bathroom shelf, the buzzing cello voice sustained behind the high babble at family meals. He kissed her gently and held a moment the fingers of the hand she awkwardly took back.

— How have you been? — Even when she and his own daughter were children he had always treated them like grown-up ladies; she was under an old guidance, taking a chair he displaced from where clients customarily faced him across his desk. He drew up another, leaving his professional place empty. Her face was ready to fawn in parrying smiles, culpability, girlish charm at the formula of insincere reproaches that did not come; months and months, not a word, thought you’d forgotten us!

— Oh fine. I’m working in an advertising agency. Oh yes, and they haven’t kicked me out yet, marvel of marvels. I’ve actually been there — what — about six months or so.—

She knew his pace. He didn’t pretend not to be studying her. The last season of good clothes Olga used to supply was lost, along with the cottage, but friends who had offered her ‘something to wear’ had not failed to notice she took the best garments, not the most ordinary, hanging in their modest cupboards. For this visit she had picked a full black skirt that sank round from her small waist as she made herself comfortable, and an Indian shirt of thin red silk slit from a high collar down her brown neck to her wide-set breasts. Thin chains slid in and out of the opening as she gestured.

— There were quite a few jobs before then? Turnover pretty high? — They laughed together, after so long, she and Joe.

— Don’t tell me! You were right about qualifications … you have to be prepared to take anything.—

— Anything?—

— Well, just about.—

After a moment, he spoke. — You didn’t take ‘anything’.—

There was the ‘on my honour’ tone of childhood. — I didn’t—

He confirmed with his slow turn of the head, aside.

— We don’t have the right to ask, anyway. — But he saw she was still so young that she was afraid of references to the family’s rejection of her; the taboo she had broken made responsibility towards her a taboo subject, as well. Her mouth opened a moment, in unease. It seemed to him to contradict the new maturity, clenched hardness, of the way her cheekbones stood out. (She had lost weight after the abortion.) The eyes, without the differentiation between iris and pupil that makes it possible to read eyes’ expression, were drawn miserably half-closed and then opened again, full on him. Her concern and confusion jumped at him like the attention of an affectionate puppy. — Of course, of course you’ve got the right, of course you have! You’ll always have, I promise you!—

He was able to turn the emotion to a gentle, shared joke that gracefully accepted bonds between him and her, belonging to but surviving the past. — Now that’s the correct way with the verb! Future tense! You and Carole used to drive us crazy by using it in the context of something already achieved: ‘I did my homework last night, I promise you’—

— So you see I have learnt something … a little.—

— A lot, Hillela, a lot. You have earned your own living and lived your own life, without help from any of us. — Olga’s handout was not worth his mention.

Joe’s silences were comfortable. At the end of them, there was always some sort of understanding, as if, coming from him as the thread the spider issues from its body and uses to draw a connection from leaf to leaf across space, some private form of communication had been spun.

— So … here I am.—

— And so you should be.—

— I’m going to ask you something. Something big. It’s a lot to ask for. I won’t blame you at all if you won’t — can’t.—

His old gesture: he rested an elbow on the arm of the chair and pressed a finger into the sag of his cheek. — Go on.—

She smiled with calculation, innocent in knowing, showing it to be so. — Not the others, just you.—

— What is said in these professional rooms is naturally confidential. — Dear Joe, teasing her a little while giving another, serious assurance — whatever she was going to ask, he would grant by the default of those whom she could not ask. — Go on, Hillela.—

The small taut fold of skin that formed beneath each eye sank away, drawn back over her cheekbones. It was a feature of her particular image she had had since childhood. She looked at him out of childhood, her darkness, where the natural moisture of her eyes made a shining line along the membrane of each lower lid.

— It’s money.—

Slowly as he watched, her face changed; the molecules of this girl’s being rearranged themselves into the exact aspect they had had when she lay under the sudden bright light, his gaze and Pauline’s, calm in bed beside his son.

Joe judged himself, in the end, no more trustworthy than anyone else. He did tell Pauline. Pauline heard of the escapade — flight, defection, or whatever it was supposed to be — from Olga, of all people. Olga, who herself had long had contingency plans, was the first to hear that her niece had been out of the country for some weeks. The news came to her through the husband of a friend, a client of the advertising agency where, apparently, the girl had had the latest in a series of all kinds of jobs. The husband was told in confidence; the agency’s directors did not want to shake clients’ confidence by allowing any suggestion that their advertising portfolios would be handled by politically suspect people. The girl in question had no position of access to the creative process — she was described (euphemistically) as hardly more than a tea-maker. But the husband remembered his wife talking of her friend Olga’s adoptive daughter of that unusual name; so he was able to supply a piece of gossip for dinner parties. His wife came out with it tactlessly in the presence of Arthur. Olga, from across the table, had to make a quick correction: —We’d never actually adopted —no — she has her father … She already hadn’t lived with us for some years — we’ve been completely out of touch—