Nadine Gordimer - No Time Like the Present

She’s to be on the Centre’s team? — but as he begins to ask there’s a scuffle on the line and Gary Elias’s boasting — Dad, I came first in the Junior Marathon, we swam we biked we ran three kilometres — then Jabu called Sindiswa to take her turn.

— Weren’t you supposed to be back? — Of course Sindi’s so absorbed in her adolescent life it doesn’t much matter when it was he went away and when he was due home; it’s the beginning of a healthy independency Jabu didn’t remember — not with Baba. She doesn’t get the mobile back, it’s understood they’ll talk again without these interruptions of claims on him. — Love to you all. — and under contesting voices, for Jabu. — Home soon.—

And back in the present, the lively company, two old men in Fair Isle sweaters are arguing about the failure of some investment pending on the stock exchange (there’s nothing rural about that stock) while Jeremy has turned — his wife Tracy’s remarks affectionately, derisively ‘fantasising’—to talk about restocking what’s left of the old farm with a few cattle. — Stick to your horses. — Everyone helps to clear dishes and wine bottles, including the guest brought by the young woman they call Lyn. As goodnights are being noisily exchanged she waylays her brother. — What’s available? — His eyes swerve left to right as he hunches. — It’ll have to be the mill, everyone’s kids are so grown-up these days, they can’t bed down with mama and papa. Rooms chockablock. — Are there blankets and so on? — Well of course. Always. Beds made up. As far as I know.—

The mill. What mill. The purpose of a mill, the idea of a mill as a room for a night. She embraced all round here and there delayed to hear something shielded by the swung blind of her hair, and animated with private intimacies, she called, Come! The summons was to her car, they were to get in and drive to this mill. Only the headlights a monster’s eyes in the dark away from the lit farmhouse, a path crackling across stubble and then the monster’s sight discovering a shelter, small beside a shining — path? Stream. Must be a continuation of what he thought must be hung over by the curve of trees he’d made out in the dusk on arrival. He has no responsibility for anything; pleasurably tired, fed and wined. She’s in charge. The car’s eyes guide to a door, she shoves, it opens and her fingers find the switch, a room comes to life but there isn’t a moment for impression of what’s there, they are bent into the car to retrieve their bundles, she kills the car’s gaze, they bang its door shut and she enters the room for him, with him. She had expected his surprise, his questioning pause, pleasing to them both.

— It’s really a mill? Watermill?—

The bundles are dumped.

— It was; once. Like everything else around this place. No one knows when it was last working. Tomorrow you’ll see the wheel. Pity it’s not yet summer, too bloody cold to skinny-dip. The stream’s so clean, I love to sleep here, good thing there’s no room at the inn.—

It is just a room. Camping out: there are two beds as you’d have sleeping bags in a tent.

— But electricity, it surely can’t be coming all the way from the inn. — This is word-sparring fun.

— There’s a generator on, we can have a heater right away. Oh and you don’t have to go out in the dark, that little flap door has a loo behind it.—

— You think of everything. But you didn’t tell me this invitation was going to be an adventure in the wilds of England.—

She pulls an electric heater from under the only other piece of furniture beside beds, a table with a faience flower-patterned basin and matching jug, the kind you see in antique shops. At least she fumbles something: the connection of the heater, and he justifies his skilled male presence.

She emptied her hold-all upside down over a bed. So that’s hers.

He opens the tote bag and looks at what there is to take out. Pyjama shorts. He never wears a top. Perhaps he’ll just doss down as he is. She sweeps an arm in a bow to the flap door, he returns the gesture as she scoops some things from her stash and goes through the flap, there’s the sound of teeth-brushing and a brief rustling pause before she comes out in some sort of bunny-rabbit pyjama suit drawn in round each ankle on bare feet, curling up her toes against the cement floor. — Miracle. There are actually a couple of towels in there.—

In a space where he can hardly turn about himself there are indeed stowed as if in a packing case a toilet bowl, a tank and a shower over a drainage hole, hooked-up towels and a jug half-full of water that as he cups a handful to rinse his brushed teeth doesn’t taste like tap water, he fancies it comes from the mill stream. In his occupancy there’s the rush of the toilet after he’s peed; she evidently hadn’t had the need, hardly one to be shy of the natural, or maybe knowing the mill she’s taken the opportunity up at the house. Women are more private about body functions; they were even in the bush under fire.

She’s not in bed. She’s frustratedly turning over the spread contents of her hold-all. — I lose track of time, here. — He’s come out with his shirt loose over the lower part of him, the inadequate shorts, no fly, just pull up — they aren’t encountering each other at a swimming pool.

— Could kick myself — I’d forgotten way out of my mind I’d promised Professor Jacquard I’d postpone his TV interview.—

— You want to SMS him? — If she’s left her mobile where he saw it in the car, his is in his tote bag.

This Lindsay is someone quick to take charge of herself: she’s let herself down rather than Jacquard. So she’s become another persona. Someone other. — No. No, he’ll be furious woken up what is it midnight, oh bloody hell, so he won’t turn up at the studio there’ll be a big fuss my pal the producer won’t have Jacquard’s mobile number so he can’t reach him in the bus to Stonehenge or whichever tour it is Jacquard’s taken.—

Someone other: in this, the time of here. She lobs the mobile at him, passed on, all in one contiguity it’s back in the tote bag — they are laughing at the dismissal of her conscience and, standing, they confirm this compact, her arms around his shoulders, his arms caught below must go down the slope of her back to her waist. The bunny fleece of cloth suggests a bedtime story, Sindiswa used to feel like this a few years ago. But the bodies of a man and a woman are magnets. She meets the length of his and while they are bending a little back and forward together in the laughter of her release, he feels the rising opportunistic penis. She might pull away. She presses closer. The lips this way and that, caressing, then what is always the real discovery, his tongue in that cave that is the mouth, entry permission gained there to the cave of wild pleasure between the legs.

It was simple. She zipped herself out of the bunny in one movement lifting this foot and that to free herself. He steadied her with one hand and began with the other to free himself of the shirt. He shed shorts last; she held gently, a moment, himself declared there, no foreskin shield. Which bed? Of course she decided, it was the other one, apparently allotted to him, she had not entered hers able to invite him. Before making himself welcome inside her he gave attention to, seemed fascinated by the pink nipples of her breasts, licked round them, took them into his mouth pursed over them, traced their aureoles. She murmured, so you like pink ones (some other lover must have remarked them). His tongue was not for talking at this time.

Who was the appallingly exciting lover, he or she, in a generous rivalry. When she innovated that, he found himself innovating this, unimagined. The invasions of passion were a labyrinth where she took in not just what her body was formed to receive, but also the erotic capacity that had ever been secretly inside him. He was, also; someone other.