Nadine Gordimer - The Late Bourgeois World

I opened the telegram and said, ‘He’s dead —’ and as I looked up into Graham Mill’s gaze I saw that he knew who, before I could say. He had met Max, my first husband, a few times, and of course he had heard all about him, he had helped me get to see him when he was in prison. ‘How?’ he said, in his flat professional voice, putting out his hand for the telegram, but I said, ‘Killed himself!’ — and only then let him have it.

It read MAX FOUND DROWNED IN CAR CAPETOWN HARBOUR. It had been sent by the friend with whom probably he had been staying; I have not heard from Max for more than a year, he didn’t even remember Bobo’s birthday last month. ‘Doesn’t say when it was,’ Graham said.

‘Last night, or early this morning, must have been.’ My voice came out cold and angry; I could hear it. It made Graham nervous, he nodded slowly while staring away from me. ‘Otherwise it would have been in the morning paper. I don’t think I looked at the late news —’

The newspaper was on the table among the coffee things. Our cups were half drunk, our cigarettes burned in the saucers; I don’t have to go to work on Saturdays, and, as usual, Graham had come to share my late breakfast. We always divide the newspaper, like any old married couple, and the page containing the stop press column was resting against the honey jar. There was a smear of stickiness on the latest scores in an international golf match: that was all.

Graham, reading over the telegram, said, ‘Why — I wonder.’ This was not an unforeseeable end for Max; Graham was questioning what specific demand had brought it about.

I felt immense irritation break out like cold sweat and answered, ‘Because of me!’

Since I had gone to the door to receive the telegram I had not sat down and stood about like someone stung by insult. Graham patiently bore my angry voice, yet though he must know I spoke in the sense of ‘to spite me’, I saw in his face the astonishing consideration of a self-accusation I had never made, a guilt that, God knows, he knew was not mine. Blast him, he chose deliberately to misunderstand me.

He is good about practical matters and he was the first to think of Bobo — ‘What about the boy? You don’t want him to read about it in tonight’s paper. Shall I drive over to the school and tell him?’ He always refers to Bobo as ‘the boy’; an expression indicative of formal concern for the sacredness of childhood that amuses me. But I said no, I’d go myself. ‘The boy’ is mine, after all. Perhaps unconsciously — let’s be fair to him — Graham tries to move in on responsibility for the child as a means of creating some sort of surety for his relationship with me. It’s not for nothing that he has a lawyer’s mind. If Bobo starts looking upon any man I’m friendly with as a father, it could be awkward if the friendship were to wane.

‘Have some more coffee.’ Graham filled my cup and patted my chair. But I drank it standing. It was as if I had had a quarrel — but with whom? — and were waiting for the right thing to be said — but by whom? ‘I’ll have to go this morning. I’ve got to see my grandmother sometime this afternoon.’ He knows I don’t visit the old lady very regularly; ‘Make it tomorrow.’ ‘No, it’s her birthday today, I can’t.’ He gave a little parenthetic smile. ‘How old is she now?’

‘Somewhere in the eighties.’

I knew exactly how the telegram was worded but I read it over again before crumpling it up and dropping it on the breakfast tray.

While I bathed and dressed, Graham sat in the sun by the open doors of my balcony, reading the paper with the proper attention it is never given at table. As I went about the flat I kept catching sight of him, his long whipcord-covered legs breaking their knife-crease at the knee, his weekend tweed jacket and clean, old silk shirt, the pale creased jaw and deep eyes, behind glasses, of a man who works late into the nights. Graham has a long mouth whose lips, clearly defined in outline by a change in skin-texture like the milled edge of a coin, are a strange, bluish colour. Under the lights in court, in the fancy dress of a barrister, his face is only the heavy-rimmed glasses and this mouth.

When I was ready to go, he got up to leave the flat, too. ‘Will you get away from Grandmama in time for a drink at Schroeders’? They’re leaving for Europe tomorrow.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘What about tonight? Would you like to have dinner somewhere?’

I said, ‘No, I can’t … there’s some damned dinner party. I can’t.’

He’s not a child, he’s forty-six, and he took up his cigarettes and car keys without pique. But as we were leaving the flat I was the one who said, ‘Could you do something for me? Do you think you could go to a florist and get them to send some flowers to the old lady? Shops’ll be closing by the time I get back from the school.’ He nodded without smiling and wrote down the address in his small, beautiful handwriting.

The road to the school leads away from the hilly ridges of Johannesburg and soon strikes out straight through the mealie fields and flat highveld of the plain. It’s early winter; it was one of those absolutely wind-still mornings filled with calm steady sunlight that make the few trees look black against the pale grass. All that was left of the frost overnight was the fresh smell. There was an old pepper tree here and there, where there must once have been a farmhouse; eucalyptus with tattered curls of bark, twiggy acacias, mud-walls of an abandoned hut; an Indian store; a yellowing willow beside a crack in the earth.

It was all exactly as it had been. When I was a child. When Max was a child. It was the morning I had woken up to, gone out into again and again; the very morning. I felt the sun on my eyelids as I drove. How was it possible that it could be still there, just the same, the sun, the pale grass, the bright air, the feeling of it as it was when we had no inkling of what already existed within it. After all that had happened to us, how could this morning, in which nothing had yet happened, still exist? Time is change; we measure its passing by how much things alter. Within this particular latitude of space, which is timeless, one meridian of the sun identical with another, we changed our evil innocence for what was coming to us; if I had gone to live somewhere else in the world I should never have known that this particular morning — phenomenon of geographical position, yearly rainfall, atmospheric pressures — continues, will always continue, to exist.

Max grew up looking out on the veld, here. His parents had their farm — what the estate agents call a country estate — on the edge of the city. His father was a member of parliament and they used to have big Party receptions there. They bred pointers and ducks — for the look of the thing, Max used to say. But he told me that when he was a child he would come back from solitary games in the veld and at a certain point suddenly hear the distant quacking of the ducks like a conversation he couldn’t understand.

All this was my way of thinking about Max’s death, I suppose, because the fact of his death, even the manner of it, was just something that had been told to me. Something to which my contemporary being said quietly: of course. Max had driven a car into the sea and gone down with it; as Max once burned his father’s clothes, and, yes, as Max, three years ago, tried to blow up a post office. This time I wasn’t looking, that’s all. Oh will this child’s game never end, between Max and me? That was what turned me cold with anger when the telegram came; the feeling that he was looking over the shoulder of his death to see … if I were looking?