Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

When the papers came he read through them at the odd angle of people who wear bifocal lenses and asked how much money she wanted to draw. She said she thought all of it.

He made the fatherly suggestion: “Don’t you want rather to transfer it wherever you’re going? Where do you go?”

She had thought only of coming here: that was where she had been going. She said, “England.”

His short soft forefinger was a pendulum. “You know if you take your money to England, you don’t get it out again? You have it here in Switzerland, you can write to us from anywhere in the world, we send money to you. It’s better you take now only what you need, and I transfer to England what you are going to need there — where it is? London? — Whatever bank you say.”

“Any bank — I don’t know any.”

She signed some papers. He wrote down the particulars of the sum to be paid into the account of Jean-Louis Kamboya, of Lubumbashi. “Congo Kinshasa, no?” He was proud to know the difference. “With this Congo and that Congo—” He gave her a slip for the teller and shook hands, “I wish you a pleasant stay, dear lady. Unfortunately this is not the best time. You should come in springtime, neh?”

Downstairs white male hands with a gold wedding ring counted out fifteen hundred Swiss francs in notes and clipped them together. She was like Loulou’s girl, now, with a variety of currencies about her.

And now it was done. Her own footsteps died away behind her as she came out through the great doors and she was confronted with figures in raincoats and overcoats hurrying all round her, the sound of children’s inquiring voices in German. Now she had no purpose at all and bewilderedly she met the shops full of suède coats and crocodile-skin luggage (real, not like Loulou’s), the splendid toyshops, shops with rosy salami and horseshoe-shaped sausages, showcases of steel and gold and diamond watches, shops with fur boots. A constant waterfall streamed down the inside of a window filled with bowls of roses, lilies and orchids, magnifying them and somehow setting them out of reach as the lenses of goggles did the wild gardens under water in that other lake that was left behind. In a confectioner’s women bought cakes and ate them at the counter. A blast of heat at the door kept the chill out and while she drank a cup of coffee in the vanilla-scented room where everybody was eating sweet things she watched fingers pointed at this cake or that and felt her legs warmed by the central heating. Out in the street she wandered on past a tiny buried square with a lichened statue deep in hand-shaped leaves cast like old chamois gloves. She had never seen a chestnut tree before but she recognized the conkers children played games with in the English storybooks of her childhood. It began to rain; an old fat woman sold roast chestnuts from a brazier kept aglow under an umbrella. In the tram going back up the hill she sat among the housewives going home with their morning’s shopping, already equipped in full dress against the coming of winter — coats, boots, umbrellas, gloves; even the little children with their gumboots and duffles zipped up tubbily. They seemed so placid, matter-of-factly prepared for hazards all foreseen in an environment of their own where all risks were known ones. But of course, it was never really like that: even these damp pink noses (even Herr Weber) could be invaded in their lawful feather-beds by the violence of sudden love or death.

She felt so cold and bloodless that she ordered a glass of red wine in the hotel lounge. It was furnished with rickety antiques and family portraits and ended in a little conservatory where the common plants that grew everywhere at home, in Africa, were warmed by central heating and trained up the glass from pots. A young couple were sitting there, stirring the cream on their coffee and slowly finishing bowls of berries sprinkled with sugar. They murmured to each other in German — something like, “Good …?” “Oh very good”—and went on dreamily licking the spoons. The girl wore trousers and a sweater with a string of pearls, she was tall and narrow-footed and remote. The man, shorter than she, looked not quite at home in rather smart casual clothes and had a worried little double chin already beginning beneath his soft face. The girl yawned and he smiled. It was the stalemate of conversation, the listlessness of a newly married couple who have never previously been lovers. “Very good,” he said again, putting his bowl on the tray.

The wine rose to her head in a singing sensation and she thought of them sitting on politely round a coffee table for ever, he slipping down into fatness and greyness, she never released from her remoteness, while their children grew, waiting to take their places there. She became aware of an ornamental clock ticking away the silence in the room between herself and the couple.

And so she came to England, flying over a grey sea with scum floating like spit, a sea into which the sewers of Europe emptied; over European cities made up of grey blocks like printers’ lugs.

Her parents were living there. But the fact was just an address to which she had written letters and not a place probably within an hour’s journey of the streets she knew now, in London, where people walked off into a thickening of mist as if off the end of the world. She made no attempt to get in touch with her family. She wandered the streets and rode the buses going to see all the things that stood for this city. If there was a lane that said “To Samuel Johnson’s House,” she took it; if there was a brochure, she bought it. She waited on the steepening stairways of tube stations, descending into darkness. She crossed bridges and smelled the musk of churches. She passed the pubs full of beer — coloured light where people stood close-packed, touching. She was among them in trains where they stood close-packed, not touching. She read the messages: in the tube, a girl dropping paper panties from between forefinger and thumb — Give Your Dirty Washing To the Dustman; in the Soho chemists’, Pregnancy Test—24-Hour Service. She went along the titles of second-hand books on a barrow off Old Compton Street; the faces of old men under the yoke of sandwich-boards; the look-out of touts standing like shopwalkers outside strip clubs.

She crossed between the puddles from the fountain and the legs of the people who sat all day with their packs and guitars, marooned on that traffic island that was Piccadilly Circus. A young Jesus in dirty white robes had a ring of frizzy-maned disciples. Girls in Red Indian fringes rested on boys in fur-trappers’ jackets. They streamed past, around, behind her in Shaftesbury Avenue, cowboys with belts as wide as corsets, pale girls with long tangled hair, long bedraggled coats and broken boots like the waifs in illustrations to school-prize editions of Dickens; gipsies, Eastern mendicants, handsome bandits with mustachios, a bullfighter in green velvet pants and bolero, coming full on at her. What did this cold fiesta know of the reality of hot sun on a burning car? Of the load of mauve flowers carried by the trees in the village where chickens tied by the leg were mashed into blood and guts under men’s feet — a moment of sudden displacement came to her like the dazzling dark brightness that follows a blow. She went unrecognized here; she was the figure with the scythe.

Yet this was where Bray came from: there were faces in which she could trace him. An elderly man in a taxi outside a restaurant; even a young actor with sideburns and locks. He might have once been, or become, any of these who were living so differently from the way he did. It was as if she forayed into a past that he had left long ago and a future that he would never inhabit. She wandered the bypasses of his life that he had not taken, meeting the possibility of his presence. It came to her as a kind of wonder, an explanation. Of what? His life? His death? Her experience of living with him? Something of all three. She had started off with the knowledge that she would not live with Gordon again. It was the first positive thing she knew after the moment, on the road, when she had become conscious of thirst; she had said to Vivien, “I will never live with Gordon again.” Now she began to have an inkling of why she knew this. This place where Bray had come from was full of faces that he was not, that he had chosen not to be. He had made his life in accordance with some conscious choice — beliefs, she supposed, that she also supposed she didn’t properly understand. It didn’t have much to do with being what her father would have called a nigger-lover. But it had something to do with life itself. Gordon was always trying to outwit; Bray lived not as an adversary but a participant. She had never lived with anyone like that before. And once you did, you couldn’t live again with a Gordon, who wanted only to “make his pile and get out”—always to the next country just like the last and the next “opportunity” just like the last: to make his pile and get out. Bray’s way had ended on the road as if he hadn’t mattered any more than a bunch of chickens tied by the leg — yes, the explanation given by the people in the capital was nothing to her, meaningless against the fact of his death as she had heard it and seen and felt it in flesh as she picked glass from his cheek. Whoever they were, they had killed him like a chicken, a snake hacked in the road, a bug mashed on a wall, and what they had done was pure faceless horror to her, the madness of waiting in the ditch, the earth under her fingernails. But she was sure he would have known who they were. He would have known why it had happened to him. Old lecherous Dando, trying to feel the beginning of her breast from over her shoulder, was right about that.