Nadine Gordimer - A World of Strangers

‘I don’t know why we always have to come to this place,’ she said gaily.

I must have looked surprised, or even hurt, which was what she wanted; she knew I could not suppose her to be ignorant of why two people go back to the place where they first began to be interested in each other.

‘Shall we go somewhere else?’

‘No. But there are other places, I mean. Look at the table, so sticky you can’t touch it. The man must wipe it off.’

I had not made love to her again, but we had had dinner together and gone to the theatre; our affair was running out, or had fallen into one of those lulls from which it might ignite again, mysteriously as a thread of dry grass under a piece of sunlit bottle. With all our old reservations of distrust, each pretended it was assumed that we knew why we had not seen much of each other lately, and that the reasons were satisfactory.

‘You never notice much where you are, though, do you?’ she said indulgently.

After a few sips of her drink, she took off her coat, grumbling about the stuffiness of the place, and sat back in a loose, bloused dress that hung beautifully on her thin body, and just caught, with a change in the sculpture of its folds, on those small, loose breasts of hers. It was green, and made her look very blonde; her hair was kept a silvery colour, now.

‘That’s lovely.’

‘It ought to be,’ she said, impressed by what she had paid for the dress.

‘What’s all this loot? You seem to have been buying up the town.’

‘Oh — things. I’m getting older and I need expensive clothes now.’

‘Why don’t you come to London and show them what a model ought to look like, and get your picture in Vogue and what-not?’ I tried hard to believe in it; we would have a mews flat together, a place of gin-bottles and dressing-gowns, smelling of love.

She smiled, the challenging smile with the corners of her mouth down. ‘I’d be petrified. You’d be the only person I’d know. I can’t even speak French; you’ve always made me feel so ignorant. Sometimes I’ve wanted to hit you when you’ve gone on talking about something I didn’t have the faintest idea about.’

I said, astonished, ‘What, for heaven’s sake?’

She was vague with remembered frustration: ‘Oh, I don’t know, some Greek who was cut up in bits or was turned into a bull or something.’

We had another drink and our talk warmed and became malleable, it was like it was at the beginning, when all our mannerisms of speech were new to each other, and seemed delightful and amusing.

Suddenly she leaned back and gave a deep sigh, content, musing, as if we had been recalling some conversation of the past. She said abruptly, ‘Darling, I’m going to marry Guy Patterson.’

The voice of a woman who had sat down with the back of her chair touching mine, cut across us with the insistent interruption of a radio turned up ‘. . that sort of thing never enters my mind as a rule. But all day last Saturday, I was writing fives for sevens and sevens for fives. . ’

I said, ‘So that’s why he had your stocking.’ And she laughed: ‘Oh no! I mean it wasn’t then, the whole thing blew up in about a week. . ’ She was watching me, pleading for something.

And the woman’s voice gobbled on,’ I said to my boss all morning, I said, I can’t do a thing right, fives for sevens and sevens for fives, all the time, it must mean something. . ’

‘I thought he was married already.’

‘He’s divorced. We’re all divorced. I believe you’re cross.’

I said sourly, ‘Of course I’m cross. I don’t suppose any man likes any woman he’s been at all in love with to get married.’

‘. . Steady Joe was number five and Ascona was seven, honest to God, he took the double. . ’

She was looking at me fondly, with the reluctance with which I have noticed women are seized the moment they have given something up. It was as if we had the licence now to discuss ourselves, to give ourselves away without the fear of giving away some obscure advantage. We had always lacked confidence in each other, and now it didn’t matter any more. ‘You’re like a clam. I told you, I feel you watching me and keeping yourself to yourself.’ She studied me, looking for the answer. ‘Like an enemy,’ she pleaded. And then, ‘You never wanted to marry me, did you?’

‘Fives for sevens and sevens for fives, I mean, could you beat it?’

‘But when I marry it’ll be someone like you, that I know.’ And how do you suppose you’ll reconcile that with a preference for the company of people like Sam and Ella, I sneered at myself? I put the thought away with all the other irreconcilables in myself; for me, the exoticism of women still lay in beauty and self-absorbed femininity, I would choose an houri rather than a companion. No doubt what I had seen in the nasty woodshed of childhood was a serious-minded intellectual woman.

‘You do think Patterson’s charming, don’t you, you do like him?’ She used his surname as if to ensure that she could convince herself that she would get an objective answer; nothing less, in the need for reassurance that beset her, would do.

I said what was expected of me, and she assented, in confirmation, with little alert movements of her head; and when I had done, looked at me, as if perhaps I might say just one thing more, the thing that would make it certain once and for all that she was plumping down on the right side of the balance.

So she had chosen Patterson; in her greed and fear of life, surely and fatefully, her hand had closed on him. Patterson, the hero preserved in whisky. She would have to face no challenge of any kind with him; she got him ready-made, with the triumph of a woman at a bargain sale, his purpose already proven and his windmill tilted at before she had ever known him. Again I remembered the Sunday afternoon in the empty house, when I had suddenly become aware of what she needed, what one might be able to do for her if one loved her. And now, as then, I could not give her her salvation; in the end, I had not that final word.

We began to talk of Patterson and his position in Hamish’s group, and of where he and Cecil would live. ‘Guy insists that we get a white woman to look after Keith, then I can be quite free.’ I could see that this was the ultimate abdication of her relationship with the little boy, she would let him go, slip the bond, loosed now — even in her conscience — because he was delegated to a white woman, as she could never entirely be while he was delegated to a black one. Now there was no need at all for her to be his mother; her eyes, that had drawn their usual immediate brilliance from a few drinks, shone on some imagined future of money, travel, enjoyment, headstrong in the determined turning away of reality. I pitied her, but again, not enough to oppose her with the loss she chose for herself. I said, ‘How does he get on with Keith?’ And she said, ‘Oh he adores him’ and went on to tell me that Patterson had to go to Canada on business in three months’ time, and that they would probably make that the wedding trip. Hamish had been going to go himself, but since he hadn’t been too well lately — but, of course I didn’t know about Hamish’s high blood-pressure, I hadn’t been there for so long. ‘Marion thought it was because of me that you haven’t been coming to The High House,’ she said, with a smile. ‘Because of Guy.’

‘Hamish and Marion are really wonderful people,’ she added, as if in defence of some amorphous threat that had never been uttered, but was sensed, like thunder in the air. But later she returned to me, free of me, no longer afraid of what she would find out about me. ‘Did you really have natives coming to see you in your flat?’ she asked shyly. ‘Guy says that that’s why you had to leave the first flat.’