Nadine Gordimer - The Late Bourgeois World

I said I’d think about it; I’d try and come up with a suggestion. If I could think of someone, I’d perhaps even sound out whoever it was, to see. He told me a few more details — ‘Just let me brief you’ (he likes that sort of phrase) — as if the person would ever exist.

And while we talked, the thought was growing inside me, almost like sexual tumescence, and like it — I was nervous — perhaps communicating its tension: there’s my grandmother’s account. She always has had dividends coming in from all over the place. For more than a year, now, in order to make payments (for the Home, and other odd expenses) independent of her unreliable mental state, I have had her power of attorney. I was afraid Luke would somehow divine — not the actual fact, but that there was a possibility ; that there really was something for me to conceal. His hand, his young, clumsy presence (there at my pleasure, I could ask him to leave whenever I wanted) hung over it. And at the same time I had the feeling that he had somehow known all along, all evening, that there was a possibility, some hidden factor, that he would get me to admit to myself. Probably just the black’s sense that whites, who have held the power so long, always retain somewhere, even if they have been disinherited, some forgotten resource — a family trinket coming down from generations of piled-up possessions.

‘Even for say six months, good God, you don’t know how important it would be for us — even just a few months.’ We went on talking as though the non-existent ‘someone’ I should never approach were already found.

I kept saying, ‘Well, I can’t promise anything — maybe as I think about it … there might be a name I can’t think of straight off. But I doubt it …’ and he hovered on the margin of my uncertainties and excuses, snapping them up like a bird swooping on mosquitoes: ‘It’d be marvellous, man. Our hands are tied, tied! The money’s there in London, waiting for us, but for eight months now — eight months! — we haven’t been able to move, our hands are tied!’

‘Well, I’ll look around and let you know.’

‘You’ll let me know?’

I said, yes, we’d be in touch; we always say that when he comes; it means that perhaps in six weeks, three months, he will turn up again, and I’ll tell him that I’m awfully sorry, I couldn’t find anyone.

He said, ‘Tomorrow night?’

But I could say with a laugh at his impatience, ‘It’s tomorrow already — give me a chance. I’ll have to think.’

So he said, affectionately, watchfully, ‘All right, Tuesday or Wednesday, maybe. You see I’ve got to get back, I can’t hang around here too long.’ He kept looking at me with a jaunty, admiring male pride, as if I were displaying some special audacity that charmed him. ‘I’d better let you get some sleep,’ he said, coming over and putting out a hand to pull me up from the sofa. I was chilly and wrapped my arms round myself. ‘What’ll you do now’ — his eyes took in the room again — ‘phone the boyfriend?’ I looked at him and smiled. ‘He’s fast asleep long ago.’ We spoke softly at the door, and when I opened it, signalled goodnight, because of the light still showing behind the glass door of the flat opposite. The soles of his shoes creaked, and I wanted to laugh. He grinned and, with just the right, light regret, put the palm of his hand a moment on my backside, with the gesture with which one says, wait there.

And so he’s gone, my Orpheus in his too-fashionable jacket, back to the crowded company that awaits him somewhere in the town-outside-the-town. In a way it must be a relief to leave behind pale Eurydice and her musty secrets, her life-insured Shades (Graham has made me take out an all-risk policy). At this time of night, all the objects in the room lie around me like papers the wind has blown flat in an empty lot. I stand about; but where can I go, to whom? This is the place I have hollowed out for myself. Only the flowers, that are opening their buds in water and will be dead by Monday, breathe in the room. I put my face in among them, ether-cool snowdrops; but it is a half-theatrical gesture.

I even thought I might go out for a while, go down to one of the Hillbrow clubs where people I know are likely to be on a Saturday night. I do that, sometimes, when Graham has gone home. I put on a coat and some lipstick and go to one of those noisy dark places he’s never seen the inside of. He talks about ‘the white laager’ but this is really it, in a way: all the German and Italian immigrant men, looking for the street-life of Europe, and the young white South Africans and their girls, playing at low life, while outside in the lanes the black prostitutes and male transvestites hang about for those who are serious. In some of these places there are lean young men with guitars, and you hear everyone join in the singing of ‘We Shall Overcome’, just as if it were ‘My Bonny Lies Over the Ocean’. I ought to take Graham there sometime. But that would be an encroachment on my private life.

I have left everything in the room as it was — the onion rings congealed on our plates, Luke’s table napkin thrown on the floor when he turned away from the table, the cheese for the mice to climb up and get at, the monkey lying on the sofa. Tomorrow, for an extra half-crown, Samson will clean it all up and take away the leftovers in an old jam tin. I cream my face as I do every night, as a man carefully cleans and oils his gun after use. I lie in bed, in the dark, and my body follows the routine ritual preparation for sleep: left side with right leg drawn up; belly-down, head to left; left leg drawn up, head to right, weight slowly given to the right side.

Perhaps he’s talking now in the language I don’t understand, full of exclamations and pauses for emphasis, telling them he’s found a white woman who’ll do it. But that’s nonsense, there’s no possible way he can know about my grandmother’s account. It’s not written on my forehead. He’s gone. In three or four months’ time he’ll turn up again, and it’ll be as if the whole thing has been resolved. Africans are instinctively tactful in these matters. He knows that all my talk about trying to think of someone, asking for time, etc., is just a face-saving way — for him and me — of saying no. He knows it. He must know it well. And next time he’ll want something else from me, a fiver again perhaps, or even just a meal, and it won’t be expedient to bring up what he asked for the last time.

The headlights of a car making the steep turn into the street send a great pale moth of light travelling slowly round the room; I turn on my back to follow it. Then there’s darkness again, but some other light, a streetlamp perhaps, casts a wavering panel, spattered and blobbed (the shadow of the branch of a tree?) like the reflection of light in water. But water is heavy and dark, under its own weight, there’s no light down there. I know they must have brought him up when they recovered the suitcase full of papers; but he’ll always be down there, where he chose to go, where he had his last conscious thought. Max was dropped from the late final edition, crowded out by the astronauts. They are still up somewhere above my head. The moon, next time.

I should have kept the front page, with pictures, to send to Bobo. I must remember in the morning. I don’t know what time it is. Often you can tell from the quality of the darkness and silence whether you have woken deep in the night, or towards morning. It can’t be much before morning, I went to bed late and I seem to have come up from a long sleep. Yet it is quite dark and still, layer on layer of sleep suspended in the building between the earth and the open dark … and now, very far off, I heard quite distinctly the shuffle and clash of couplings falling into place between the coaches of a train; the railway yards are about two miles from here and one never knows they’re there.