Nadine Gordimer - The Late Bourgeois World

As I got out of the door of the Home my own step came back to me after the silence of the corridors, quick, clipped, heel-and-toe on the paving, exhilarating and … slightly cruel. On the walls of the viaduct I have to drive under on my way home I noticed again the arrow-and-spear sign that has been there for a long time, now, the red paint still not entirely faded, and an unfinished message: TORTURE THE END. Perhaps it is one that Sunbun wrote. Whoever it was, was interrupted. There was one of those sunsets beginning — the kind we’ve been having for months. Buildings and telephone poles were punched black against a watercolour sky into which fresh colour kept washing and spreading, higher and higher. We’ve never seen so high before; every day the colours go up and up to a hectic lilac, and from that, at last, comes the night. People carry their drinks outside not so much to look at the light, as to be in it. It’s everywhere, surrounding faces and hair as it does the trees. It comes from a volcanic eruption on the other side of the world, from particles of dust that have risen to the upper atmosphere. Some people think it’s from atomic tests; but it’s said that, in Africa, we are safe from atomic fallout from the Northern Hemisphere because of the doldrums, an area where the elements lie becalmed and can carry no pollution.

Graham was here. He came at six. I was slicing onions for the pork fillets and opened the door with the knife in my wet hand. I’d said this morning I was going out for dinner — but there was nothing to be done about it. My smelly hands were there held stiffly away from me. He had my newspaper that he’d picked up from the doormat, and while I saw from the faintest possible movement at the corners of his long mouth that he understood, he said, ‘So the Americans have brought it off, too. They’ve had a man walking in space — look at this —’ Not able to touch the paper, I twisted my neck to see the front-page pictures of a dim foetal creature attached by a sort of umbilical cord to a dim vehicle. ‘I wish they wouldn’t try to print newspaper pictures in colour. You’d see much better if it were in plain black and white. It looks like something from one of Bobo’s comics.’

He wandered into the living room, opening up the paper while I closed the kitchen door and then disappeared into the bathroom to wash my hands. He was reading aloud the subheadings and bits of the long report: ‘He was several times ordered to return to the spacecraft, but he seemed to be enjoying himself out there … “Quit horsing around” came the terse order … No More Cookies … crumbs from Southern-style corn muffins posed a minor problem …’ I laughed and called out comments while scrubbing my fingernails. The smell didn’t come off. I came back into the living room rubbing lotion into my hands and he was sitting in his usual chair; it was not necessary, or possible, any more, to make an excuse or explanation. Only I could still smell the onion, if my hands moved close to my face.

He said, ‘I walked down. D’you know that it doesn’t take more than twenty-five minutes?’

‘Well, no, I don’t suppose it would. It’s downhill most of the way. But going back! D’you remember one day at Easter when my car wouldn’t start and I walked home from your house?’

‘When was that? But why didn’t I drive you?’

‘You’d lent your car to that fellow from the World Council of Jurists, don’t you remember?’

‘Oh, Patten, yes. Well, I’ll have a drink and start the long trek before it gets too dark.’

‘No, I can run you back. There’s plenty of time for me to dress.’ Now that I couldn’t explain, it was so easy to maintain a lie.

He smiled and said casually, ‘Oh fine,’ and got up to get the whisky bottle out of the cupboard. He supplies the whisky; I can’t afford to. I went to shut the balcony doors because it was getting chilly. The super-sunset was still framed there, a romanticized picture that made the room look drab. He said, ‘It’s magnificent.’

‘I’m getting used to them.’

He went on looking, so that I couldn’t close the doors, and waited for him to have had enough, like a patient attendant at a museum. ‘I’d like a few cows, and lovers floating above Fredagold Heights, though,’ he said. He has a Chagall drawing in his bedroom; curious, the way some women have a Marie Laurençin print in theirs. Why not in the living room? There is some private vision, version of life to which the public one doesn’t correspond. Or into which the public is not allowed. And yet he had never been interested in Chagall until a rich client gave him the drawing. Then he hung it in the bedroom.

‘Suppose it is fallout,’ I said.

‘Well?’ He is sometimes a little patronizing towards me, though not offensively.

‘Then it’s not beautiful, is it.’

‘There’s nothing moral about beauty.’ He smiled; we were having what he calls an ‘undergraduate chat.’

‘Truth is not beauty.’

‘Apparently not.’

I closed the doors but I couldn’t very well pull the curtains; he sat with his drink in his hand, the chair hitched round to face the view.

I hardly notice these sunsets any more, but his attention attracted mine as one’s attention is attracted by someone’s absorption in a piece of music one has heard too often and ceased to hear. I said, gazing because he was gazing, following the colour, ‘If it is fallout there’s something horrible about it looking like that.’

‘How does it look to you?’

I couldn’t see any floating lovers or fiddles or cows, out there. ‘Like the background to a huge Victorian landscape. Something with a quotation underneath with lots of references to the Soul and God’s Glory and the Infinite. Something that ought to have a scrolled gilt frame weighing twenty pounds. It’s what my grandmother would have been taught was beautiful, as a child. You know, that style. What’s it got to do with us. And with bombs.’

‘It’s a bit picture-postcard, but still.’

‘All the dawns and sunsets in all the albums rolled into one. The apotheosis of picture-postcard. Just imagine a colour photograph of that, exhibited in a hundred years’ time. Things are not like that with us at all.’

The dark was coming now, graining the texture of the lilac space. A sharp star came through like a splinter of glass. Usually when I say something that doesn’t particularly engage his mind, but that he thinks sensible, he will say, ‘You have a point there.’ It doesn’t exactly irritate me; it is one of the gauges in which I read what he thinks of me. When people know each other as well as he and I do, this is what is really taking place all the time, no matter what they are talking about. Never mind whether they’re discussing politics, or gossiping about friends or planning a holiday — the important thing is the constant shifting and maintaining of balance, the endless replaying of the roles each has secretly chosen the other to present, and which the other secretly contrives to appear to fulfil by nature. Even though I know I’m a damned intelligent woman — by far the most intelligent female he’s ever had any sort of dealings with — and that a relationship with a woman of my kind implies the acceptance not only of intellectual equality but also coeval commonsense (none of the patronizing affection towards precocious feminine cleverness) — in spite of this, even when I’m holding up my end in discussion a shade better than he is, there’s a sort of backward glance, in me, at my performance before him. And this corresponds to a hidden expectation from him that he will be intrigued by the quality of a female mind — that mind whose quality is accepted rationally as taken for granted. In Europe last year, arguing about paintings and buildings we saw together, in discussions of various kinds at friends’ dinner tables, in his house or my flat, talking politics as we do most of the time — underneath, he coaxes me, and I show off to him, I coax him and he performs for me.