Nadine Gordimer - The Late Bourgeois World

For hours he stood planted, arguing in front of Spears, he couldn’t stay put, in a chair. Spears was intense but quite without Max’s tension; he could talk just as well sitting on the kitchen table while I fried sausages, or while Bobo climbed up and used his shoulders as a road for a toy car. He used to call me ‘Honey’ and once or twice, when he was only a little drunk, he cornered me in the kitchen, but I told him I didn’t like the smell of brandy, and he kneaded my hand regretfully and said, ‘Forget it, honey’; I think that most of his drive towards women had washed away in brandy, but the residue was an unspecified casual tenderness to which Bobo and I responded. And Max. Max most of all. There was Max standing urgently over him, protesting, arguing, pressing — it was not just the determination to get it all down that held Max there; he hovered irresistibly towards what could never be got down, what Spears didn’t need to get down because it was his — an identity with millions like him, an abundance chartered by the deprivation of all that Max had had heaped upon himself. Some of the white people I know want the blacks’ innocence; that innocence, even in corruption, of the status of victim; but not Max. And everyone knows those whites who want to be allowed to ‘love’ the blacks out of guilt; and those who want to be allowed to ‘love’ them as an aberration, a distinction. Max wasn’t any of these. He wanted to come close; and in this country the people — with all the huddled warmth of the phrase — are black. Set aside with whites, even his own chosen kind, he was still left out, he experienced the isolation of his childhood become the isolation of his colour.

I don’t know whether Max loved me. He wanted to make love with me, of course. And he wanted to please me — no, he wanted my approval, my admiration for whatever he did. These pass as definitions of love; I can think of others that are neither more nor less acceptable. This business of living for each other, that one hears about; it can just as well be living for the sight of one’s self in the other’s eyes. Something keeps two people together; that’s as far as I’d go. ‘Love’ was the name I was given for it, but I don’t know that it always fits my experience. Someone has given Bobo the name, too; didn’t he say, ‘I’m sorry I didn’t love him?’ What did he mean? Did he mean that he didn’t need his father? Or that he didn’t stop his father from dying?

I wanted to make love to Max, and I wanted to give him the approval he wanted, I wanted to please him. But it wasn’t a matter of watching your husband rising a notch in the salary scale. What I wanted was for him to do the right things so that I could love him . Was that love?

Max was wonderful in bed because there was destruction in him. Passion of a kind; demonic sex. I’ve had it with others, since. With every orgasm I used to come back with the thought: I could die like that. And of course that was exactly what it was, the annihilation, every time, of the silences and sulks, the disorder and frustration of the days. We moved four times in the first three years, each time in response to having reached another impossible situation — living in a one-room flat with a baby; working at home in a two-room flat with a baby; not being able to afford a larger flat on my salary; not being allowed to have Africans visit us in the building — and there was never time or money to make each place more than habitable. Everything had happened to us too soon; before we’d collected enough chairs to sit on the ones we had had begun to fall to bits.

It was Felicity Hare who tacked cotton cloth she had brought from Kenya round the packing cases our stuff was moved in to a converted outhouse in someone’s backyard. We used them as cupboards and tables. We had space there, and she lived with us for a time — a big, red-faced girl just down from Cambridge who wanted to ‘do something’ in Africa. She had been handed on down the continent from territory to territory by introductions from friends of friends and always either in danger of being deported by a British colonial government when she became too friendly with African nationalists, or appealing to a British consulate for protection when African governments wanted her deported for becoming too friendly with members of their Opposition. She wore shorts and would follow you from room to room, talking, whatever you were doing, hitching herself on some ledge or table corner too small to support her, with her enormous, marbled legs doubled up in a great fleshy pedestal. Her conversation was confused and conspiratorial — ‘Actually, the woman in charge of the place wasn’t American at all, she was a Dane, and the girls couldn’t stick her. Couldn’t understand what she was saying d’y’know. That’s another thing I didn’t tell you — they came from about twenty different tribes and could scarcely understand English anyway. But there’d been some fiddle in the State Department — that’s clear — and she wasn’t the one who was supposed to be there, at all. The girls weren’t learning a thing, but old Alongi Senga —’ ‘Who’s that?’ ‘— Senga, Minister of Education, d’y’know, stupid old bastard, Matthew Ochinua says they say all he wants to do is inspect high schools so’s he can pinch the boys’ bottoms. Anyway, he’d had a row with the Field Service people —’ Most of the stories ended with a shrug of the breasts and the big face gazing away, as if she had just discovered them, at her tiny hands with their little shields of bitten-down nail pressed into the plump pad of each finger: ‘So that was that …’ ‘So I was off …’

She made herself useful doing some typing for Max and spent a lot of time getting people out of what she called ‘messes’ — mostly the aftermath of parties she went to — taking home in her little borrowed car the corpses that piled up, staying the night with girls whose men had gone off with someone else. She patched the lining of Spears’ raincoat and drove him on his complicated errands. There was the night I got up and found her dressed as if for a picnic, carrying a spray gun. ‘Going slogan-painting,’ she said. She went off with a tiny torch to wait to be picked up by whomever it was she was working with. I went back to bed and told Max. ‘A midnight feast for Sunnybunny! O wacko!’ he said. The absurd play on her name was his invention; he and Spears treated her with the comradely mock-flirtatiousness that men show towards unattractive girls. I said, ‘Spears shouldn’t tease her, it’ll set her after him. She worships the two of you.’ ‘Why on earth not? Do Spears no harm, and she needs a man, our Sunbun.’

She was always urging us to go to parties with her, but these were the parties where white liberals and black tarts and toughs went for what each could get out of the other. It surprised me that Max, once or twice, seemed willing to go. The work he and Spears were doing was going badly; Max was finding Spears evasive. Yet it became a sort of craze for the three of them — Max, Spears and Sunbun — to appear at these parties as a weird trio. I dropped out because I couldn’t last till three in the morning without drinking too much, and if I drank too much I couldn’t work next day; if Max and Spears couldn’t get on with their work, then, at least the parties provided a reason.

Often when I came home from the laboratory Max would be sitting waiting; punishing Spears with his waiting as a child believes he is punishing the grown-up who is not even aware of being the object of resentment. When Bobo’s voice rose in the kitchen, or shrieked in the bath, Max gave me one of his seizing looks. The calm of white coats and routine work, life apprehended as a neat smear under a microscope, came from me like the bar on the breath of a drunkard.