Nadine Gordimer - A Guest of Honour

She kept still the piece of paper with the particulars of the Swiss account in his handwriting; she carried it around with her in the pocket of the new coat she had bought herself in one of the shops full of lights flashing on and off to nasal music. He had smuggled the money out because he loved her, that she also knew. But this did not please her as proof, because (taking the paper out in tubes, buses, on park benches) it meant at the same time that he accepted they would part, that there was a life for her to live without him. And — cracking the code further — at the time when it was written, that meant he would go back one day to Olivia; not that he would be dead.

She thought of Olivia as an empty perfume bottle in which a scent still faintly remains. She had found one on one of the shelves in the wardrobe of her hotel room: left there by some anonymous English woman, an Olivia. She knew nobody in the city of eight millions. She had nothing in common with anyone; except his wife.

At times she was strongly attracted by the idea of going to see Olivia and his daughters. But the thought that they would receive her, accept her in their supremely civilized tolerance— his tolerance — this filled her with resentment. She wanted to bare her suffering, to live it and thrust it, disgusting, torn live from her under their noses, not to make it “acceptable” to others.

She had bought herself warm clothes and now looked like anyone else, as she went about. After an exchange with the Irish maid in the hotel on the subject of the ages, temperaments, and proclivity to illness of their respective children, she thought of how she would send for her children and perhaps live in London with them. It was not so much a plan as a daydream — walking with them over the piles of fallen leaves in the parks. The Irish maid was the only person she talked to and the conversation began the moment the woman opened the door with her pass key every day and went on, impossible to stem, until a final burst of the Hoover drowned parting remarks. The answers to questions about children were factual but it was Bray she was speaking of when husbands were discussed, and he was alive, waiting for her to come back to whatever part of Africa it was they lived. The maid was satisfied without any precise definition: she referred to Africa as “out there” and looked sympathetic. “I had to leave me job down in the men’s university hostel after twelve years becaz the coloureds was needlin’ each other in the bathroom — I saw the pots of vaseline. I went straight down to the superintendent, I said, all those coloureds the government’s lettin’ in, I’m not used to things like that, I said, my husband wouldn’t let me stay another day — I won’t stand for that, I said, thank you very much.”

Although there was the half — sheet of paper in the coat pocket, there was also what Bray had said the night before they left Gala. She had told him — not in so many words — the only thing she feared about Gala was being sent away, and he said, I know; but I’ll be there. And when she had said, how can we go together, and he knew England was in her mind, he had said, perhaps we can manage. He had said: we’ll decide what to do. (Sitting one afternoon in something called the Ceylon Tea Shop, she suddenly remembered that precisely.) We’ll decide what to do. Perhaps the code of the paper didn’t read that he was going to set her down somewhere, gently, regretfully. It might have meant they were going to Sardinia, where the spear — fishing was so good. No, not really that … but somewhere together outside Gala; they had never had any existence, outside Gala.

In the teashop with the blown — up photographs of tea-estates and the framed quiz How Much Do You Know about Tea? facing her, she came back again to the fact that on that last night they had not made love properly. It was she who had decided, because they were both so tired and had to get up early, that they wouldn’t finish it. He fell asleep inside her body and there was the thought, like a treat, that they would make love in a big bed for the first time the next night, in the capital. So he had never come to her, she had never come to him; it had never been reached, that particular compact of fulfilment. She passed through days now when she was racked by an obsession of regret about this. Of all the deprivation, the loss, the silence, the emptiness, the finality, this became the most urgent, and the cruellest, because urgency itself was a form of mockery thrown back at her from the blank of death: there was nothing for it to be directed at. She told herself that they had made love a hundred times, the compact was made — what did one more time matter? But she hungered for that one last time. It had been given up, for nothing, lost along with the rest, for no reason. She asked herself again and again what difference it would have made. But the answer was fiercely that she wanted it. It was hers. Before death came. It had belonged to her; it was not death that had taken it — what death took was unarguable — it had been forgone. She thought about it so much that she produced in herself the physical manifestations of the unfinished act. The lips of her body swelled and she knew with horror the desire of that night that now would never be satisfied.

She felt afraid of herself.

The smell of stale cigarettes in ashtrays was the smell of Gala after burnings.

Walking round the shivering ponds, down the avenues of leaves sodden as old newspaper under the trees of parks, she saw the nodules of next year’s buds on the stripped branches, the callousness of the earth endlessly renewing itself. Would she, too, seek again — she tried to reduce it to the baldest fact — that coming up of one flesh against another until like a little stone breaking at last the surface of a still pool, sensation in ring after ring flows out from that little stone, that pip fructifying from its hiding place, the plumb centre of her being … she thought: that’s all it is. She grew afraid. It would come back, commonplace desire. Everything else would come round again; be renewed. She sat in the bus and felt the threat of ordinary bodies around her.

There were days when hammering fists of anguish ceased for no more reason than they would begin again. Then she cried. She had begun to do exercises on the floor of the hotel room every morning because she had read in some newspaper that you could get through long periods simply by going through the motions of some routine, and she lay there on the maid’s Hoovered carpet and the tears ran from the outer corners of her eyes. She wept because the sense of Bray had come back to her so strongly, as if he had never been dead on that road and it had never happened. What was she doing in the hotel room? The sense of him was restored to her and she did not have to look for signs of him or question him, because he was gone and there was nothing more to find. And so he died, for her, again. The Irish maid came to clean and the marks of weeping could not be hidden from those hen-sharp eyes beneath the hackle-like fringe; she said that she’d just heard how her children were missing her. The lie became a tenderness towards them and a longing to see them; and the fantasy of walking with them in London changed to an intention. In a few days she would work out what sort of letter to write to Gordon about them. She did not know how or why she expected Gordon to hand the children over to her. She supposed everything might even seem to go on as before, with Gordon satisfied that he had a wife and children somewhere, only just a little more remote than they had always been.

One afternoon she was coming out of the supermarket in the suburban shopping street near the hotel when somebody said her name. It came like a heavy hand on her shoulder. She turned. A tall, very slender girl with a narrow, sallow face curtained in straight black hair was leaning casually on a wheeled shopping basket. It was Emmanuelle. “I thought it was you but it couldn’t be — are you over on holiday?”