Nadine Gordimer - No Time Like the Present

They slept almost even as he slowly slipped out of her, their bodies finding a situation each on hipside, facing one another as if the narrow space of the bed was the embrace. Just before first light — must have been, the spring light rises not too late in the northern hemisphere to make up for the long dark winter — he wakened and in the silence caught the sound of the stream. Soon perhaps it reached her, she stirred, her eyes still closed and felt for his presence. Out of sleep they made love again.

She got up first. You can’t say to a stranger, come back to bed, let’s lie a little, the day among others, hasn’t begun. She shook her hands through that flung illumination of hair like a gust of wind. — It’s going to be a beautiful day for you, I’ve arranged it with the sun. — Smiling and bending, knees together in nakedness to gather their discarded clothing, tidying up.

Her neat buttocks and the ride of hips as she went to the shower…a happy gasping, the water must be cold despite the generator.

She came out with the towel secured round her tight under the armpit; nakedness now withdrawn from him. — Boarding school, remember ‘cold showers are good for you’…—Smiling Brrrr…

It’s one among the definitely middle-class experiences she knows they have in common. — Breakfast’s the moveable feast. Everyone just goes to the kitchen and fixes their own, how hungry are you? There used to be a gem that came up from the village her scrambled made with eggs laid by her own hens was fabulous, famous, but that cordon bleu’s on pension now. Only don’t ask for kippers, Tracy or somebody brings them, I can’t stomach the smell—

He wants to go up and give the kiss on the forehead but the mood she’s set makes it unnecessary.

If the sun was shining to order there must have been rain overnight, even after the bracing of the shower the outside world returned to tense him in his meagre shelter of a shirt; but why fuss to go back to his jacket. She, wearing the cap with bobbles that held in brief disguise the waterfall hair, took it for granted they’d take the walk to the house, not the car. They paused as she’s said, for him to see the mill wheel first; the old wheel hanging idle like a vacant glance above the stream it was meant to harness.

— Come let’s go. — She swerved and ran across the stubble for him to catch up with her, so now the chill was another kind of physical exhilaration beside her. In the comfortably scented kitchen — burned toast, coffee — there was only a miauling cat. Someone had already breakfasted and others must still be in bed. She assembled everything, he amusingly contrite that he couldn’t cook. — Don’t suppose you have to. — But it might just as well have been the crisp, playful feminist remark, females usually do the cooking, as a reference to a wife. She talked to the cat (whom she called tomcat) the way she had familiarly addressed the parrot, and the cat took up the conversation as if they long understood one another. The other male at least had the attention of being given tomatoes with instruction to halve for frying. — I have my tiger tabby, I couldn’t live without him and my dog. — As occurred — You have children? — Two. A boy. A girl of fourteen. — It changes nothing. A pubescent girl, a woman like herself. As if he said this aloud to her.

— A boy? Does he look like you? — But it’s not an enquiry it’s a recognition of how he looks, the conference delegate, in her eyes.

He’s not going to ask — does she have a child, by divorce.

What was between them has nothing to do with anything. No relation to others, private and public commitment, loyalties. He takes the board with the precariously wobbling tomatoes to her pan. Now the kiss-touch just a moment on the forehead, the informality appropriately exchanged by delegates at the end of the Canadian’s night-club party.

Jeremy appeared robed in an elegant tartan dressing gown. He shared the breakfast while planning the day for his sister’s guest in sibling argument with her, interrupted by her indignation when he put the cat out in the protest at its part in the conversation. She at once brought the creature in again.

They would go down to the horses if that would interest their friend (Steve? yes, name come to him)…a stomp round the farm maybe, and there’s always the general idea of ending up at the village pub if the sun stays out.—

— It will, it will, I’ve guaranteed it.—

As they left the kitchen, the arrangement to meet in half an hour. — Hang on, Lyn, the man can’t be outdoors early, like that, what’s the matter with you, he comes from Africa. — He disappeared into the passage and came back with an army officer’s jacket. — Not Savile Row, someone in the second oldest profession must have left it here years ago, but it’ll keep off pneumonia.—

She couldn’t have imagined why he laughed, head back in disbelief at himself donning a regular army’s uniform, he, on the run from such, apartheid version, Angola, Namibia. In the striding pace the brother and sister kept round the parameters of the farm warming him up, he got himself free of it, lugged along over his arm. Jeremy in jodhpurs had his saddle with him, she held his horse’s stirrup and he flung his heavy body to mount, the movement was all grace, the man and horse first trotting then balancing in arc-leap over a series of tree-trunk obstacles. She brought the children’s donkey to be introduced, Eeyore — and had a foot race against one of the children bare-back on it, which the reluctant donkey unexpectedly won.

The pub had well-worn benches and warped tables outside, and flower boxes with cigarette stubs among the tulips putting out tongue-tips of bloom, but no one convivial there; inside the people apparently from the village — Jeremy greeted, waylaid with an elbow. — Ron takes care of the horses for me during the week — And the donkey — Yes it’s a come-down for him in retirement, after being riding master at a posh country club. — It’s not me it’s a come-down for, it’s the horses, stabled with that low type. — But the pub also caters for wealthy patrons from their country houses; there were oysters as well as pork and the cook’s ‘famous steak and kidney pie’ chalked on the Sunday lunch board. Tracy recommended pork roast rather than the pie. The barman-pub owner’s patter was a conductor of voices, orders, wine bottles, spluttering beers drawn, in familiarity with Londoners and locals. Alert to a new face — Whyn’t you trying my Margie’s steak and kidney, you won’t get anything to touch it in London or whatever. — And so the stranger changes his order.

The friendliness of these Sunday people makes coming about of any kind of unexpected contact that has happened in context unexceptional. A loop of that shimmery hair falls to be brushed out of the way of her busy mouth as she’s eating beside him as it did softly on his body. Someone of the farmhouse group has the Sunday papers and sections are sailed from hand to hand…there are financial deals, clashes between the Palestinians and Israelis, meetings of the UN Security Council — all distant from this day as what is not reported from South Africa. She ordered a good Chianti to follow the Guinness and her telling some of the others about the subject of the conference was lively interrupted by the delegate she had produced for them. — I’m all primed to bring up the question of tocsins in Guinness and Italian red. — Jeremy happened to lean past him to attract the attention of the showman proprietor. — Not too rustic for you? Enjoying yourself? — Very much, thank you… — Everyone at what once was a farmhouse is accustomed to the variety of passing individuals who must somehow be important to her work.

It wasn’t the Beard. It was him.