Nadine Gordimer - The Late Bourgeois World

While I was putting the flowers in water the phone rang again. ‘They’re lovely — I’ve just come in this minute. The first snowdrops I’ve seen this year.’

‘How was he?’

‘Oh, it was all right. He’s a very sensible child, thank God.’

I began to wish he would say come to lunch, but I wouldn’t do anything about it because we make a point of not living in each other’s pocket, and if I were to start it, I’d have to expect him to make the same sort of use of me at some time when it might not be convenient. You can’t have it both ways. He was probably lunching at the house of the young advocate he’d been playing golf with; the wife is a lawyer, too, a nice girl — I enjoy their company and have a sort of open invitation from them, but before people like this, his colleagues, we don’t like to give the impression of ‘going about everywhere together’, we make it tacitly clear that we’re not to be regarded as a ‘couple’. There’s no point in a man like Graham flaunting the fact that he’s got a woman unless — what? I don’t suppose you could say that our affair wasn’t serious; but all the same, it’s not classified, labelled.

Graham told me there was something about Max in the early edition of the evening paper. ‘Do you want me to read it?’

‘No, just tell me.’

But he cleared his throat as he does before he reads something aloud, or begins his plea in court. Unlike most lawyers he has a good voice. ‘It’s not much. There’s no mention of you, only his parents. The case is exhumed, of course … and it says he was a named Communist — I don’t somehow remember …?’

‘Which he wasn’t. He was never named. However.’

‘A diving team managed to bring up the car. There was a suitcase full of documents and papers in the back, all so damaged by water that it will not be possible to determine their nature.’

‘That’s good.’

‘Nothing else. His father’s career in Parliament.’

‘Oh yes. No mention of Bobo at all?’

‘Fortunately not.’

We might have been cool criminals discussing a successful getaway.

I said, ‘It was a most perfect morning. Did you have a good game?’

‘Booker beat the pants off me. That’s the second time this week and I’ve told him it’s once too often.’ He and his golf partner had been opposing counsel in a case Graham had lost.

I said, ‘I don’t understand it. If I were you I should have seen enough of him to last me for a bit.’ He laughed; I am always shocked by the way lawyers can attack each other with every sign of bitter ruthlessness over somebody’s life — and then sit in brotherly bonhomie at the tea break. ‘Nothing’s more frightening than professionalism. Imagine, whether you get ten years or go free can depend on whether or not your counsel can out-talk the other man’s, and there they are boozing together at the golf club. It terrifies me more than the idea of the judge. I like to think that when I go to a lawyer, he’s as tied up in my affairs as I am myself.’

We both laughed; on ground we’d gone over before.

‘But you know that wouldn’t do at all, he’d be giving very bad counsel if he were to be. You’re too emotional.’

I thought of how we’d just talked of Max’s death. Honesty sounds callous; so that one is almost ashamed of it.

‘Booker doesn’t know we’re going to appeal, anyway,’ he teased me drily. ‘I’ll get my own back in court if not on the green. I’m going to do some work this afternoon, that is, if I don’t sleep. I don’t suppose I’ll be able to resist a sleep. That chair you made me buy.’ In Denmark he ordered the beautiful leather furniture they make there, and we threw out the ugly stuff his wife must have thought suitable for a ‘gentleman’s study’. There’s a chair you could sleep the whole night in, even make love in, not that he ever would. Yesterday after the servant had taken the coffee away, although the mood for love-making came as we sat in front of the fire, we went into his bedroom as usual. What nonsense it is to write of the ‘disembodied’ voice on the telephone; all of Graham was there as he talked commonplaces. Last night he was held in my body a long time.

The call box bleeped at his end and I said something again about the flowers, before we hung up. Once alone, I didn’t feel the slightest inclination to go out, after all; I felt, on the contrary, a relief. I brought the water in the vase to the right level. I threw the paper and cellophane in the kitchen bin and put the food I’d bought into the refrigerator. I opened the creaking joints of my plastic and aluminium chair and sat on the balcony in the sun, smoking. Many of the demands one makes on other people are nothing but nervous habit, like reaching for a cigarette. That’s something for me to remember, if I were ever to think of marrying again. I don’t think I’ll marry again. But I catch myself speaking of Max as my ‘first husband’; which sounds as if I expect to have another. Well, at thirty, one can’t be too sure of what one may still do.

At eighteen I was quite sure, of course. I would be married and have a baby. This future had come out to meet me as expected, though perhaps sooner. Max might not have been the man according to specifications, but the situation, deep in my subconscious, matched the pattern I’d been given to go by. The concept of marriage as shelter remained with me, even if it were only to be shelter from parents and their ways. There, whatever the walls were made of, I should live a woman’s life, which was? A life lived among women like my mother, attached to a man like my father. But the trouble is that there are not more men like my father — in the sense that the sort of man my father is doesn’t represent to me, in my world, what it did to my mother in hers. I was brought up to live among women, as middle-class women with their shopping and social and household concerns comfortably do, but I have to live among men. Most of what there was to learn from my family and background has turned out to be hopelessly obsolete, for me.

Graham and I have known each other since the trial. I was already divorced from Max, but there was no one else to do anything, that’s how I met Graham, I was told he was the right man for the case. As it happened he couldn’t take the brief, in the end it was given over to someone else, but he remained interested and afterwards, when Max was in prison, he helped me make various applications on Max’s behalf. Graham didn’t ask me any questions, he was like one of those doctors with whom you feel that he knows everything about you, simply from a professional reading of signs you don’t even know you exhibit. He had a wife once; she was a girl he’d gone about with since they were schoolchildren, and she died of meningitis when she was younger than I am now. There are still traycloths in the house on which she embroidered her initials.

Graham defends many people on political charges and is one of a handful of advocates who ignore the possible consequences of getting a reputation for being willing to take such cases. I’ve got my job analysing stools for tapeworm and urine for bilharzia and blood for cholesterol (at the Institute for Medical Research). And so we keep our hands clean. So far as work is concerned, at least. Neither of us makes money out of cheap labour or performs a service confined to people of a particular colour. For myself, thank God shit and blood are all the same, no matter whom they come from.

In Europe last year, we enjoyed ourselves very much, and lived in the same room, the same bed, in easy intimacy. We each went our own way some of the time, but we’d planned the holiday together and we stayed together for the greater part. I don’t think we once felt irritated with each other. Yet since we’ve been back we’ve lived again just as we used to, sometimes not sleeping together for two weeks, each taking up large tracts of life where the other has no claim. I didn’t need him, sitting in the sun on my balcony.