Nadine Gordimer - No Time Like the Present

The Sunday lunch lingered until half the afternoon was gone, people drifting from one knot to another as they caught some snatch of conversation that attracted their contribution or took the opportunity to talk to someone they hadn’t had a chance to catch up with in the city. Snatches of banking vocabulary, golf dialect, disagreement over whether Pavarotti was not as great as some other singer in opera just heard, the lowered voices of what must be a pair of doctors, comparing the properties of new drugs, not for laymen to overhear.

Now the family was returning to the farmhouse, the locals off to the village. Making for the mill there was quiet before the spectacle of an early sunset’s rictus on a sky’s spring face — she was right in her guaranteed sun for him. They didn’t talk much, conscious of the presence of each other. At the mill the stream already half in shadow had an eyelid lifted on its colours of the sunset. She stopped, turned on him, at the door, a deep breath held a moment and expelled briskly in consideration. — Do you need to go back. Tonight? Those notes, facts to work on — you said. If you like, don’t mind getting up before the crack of dawn we could go very early in the morning. Be in time. — Of course she’s calculated the traffic, the exact hour the session’s due to begin, no one more easily efficient about the conference programme than she.

A complicit smile at himself. — I didn’t get to the library anyway. I’ll listen big-eared to the others and take a chance on my ad-lib questions, I’m there to learn from my pundit superiors. — Before she can speak he’s adding — I’m serious about that. — After all, she does represent, this woman facing him in changing light, the academic trust by which he is there.

She opens the door with a thump and they are inside, the decision made: leave in the morning! It’s the pact they didn’t know about, they’ve come to each other and they kiss deeply for what is not time as seconds a watch records. There is no consideration from either that they’ll go up to the house, the lunch was too ample to want to eat again. With everyone else. The room is chilly and they undress one another in the game of desire, mock shivers between the distraction of the warmth in mouths. She dives quickly away into what was his allotted bed and he throws the borrowed army jacket over the blankets where her feet peak, before going to her.

Familiar — and utterly unfamiliar — inside her just as new as the first time ever; rediscovery. But the wildness between them was the same, an innate character in each. As if they were entranced not differently as a man and a woman but were a single sensuousness.

So it’s Monday. Monday: they were parted by their showers and getting dressed, he stood hearing the stream, feeling a reluctance, incongruity in emerging to the breakfast company of the extended family who also might have decided to stay overnight and leave early, whatever their reasons. — We’re going by the house? Say (for him, guest to hosts) goodbye.—

She shrugged her nose to a little wrinkle. — Not necessary.—

They left behind what couldn’t even be seen of the family house on a misty morning, driving by headlights as they had found the mill the night of arrival.

She talked of the conference programme for the few days ahead, how she’d tried to suggest that as the working focus was (sweep of a hand off the wheel) science in its present ‘broader contexts’ there ought to have been a night at a theatre, a concert, maybe a sports fan among the professors would have gone for the phenomenon of a night football match — she and he tried to guess who that might be — night clubs were part of the subject of environment, of course, but those were left to the delegates themselves to programme…She looked at her watch, must have made some quick calculation; changed the route back to London (—We certainly are making good time—) to show him an abbey she said was perhaps her favourite building in the world, so far. And his — so far? — Admitting he had not been much of a tourist, so far.

— But don’t worry you’re on the conference circuit, it takes great minds to many countries, places in the world, even space is coming closer.—

— This is my first and I’m only here because the head of department had too much else to do.—

Such confessions are disarming, somehow unserious and must be denied by one who doesn’t know the circumstances. — That can’t be. — She’s laughing and her hand again leaves the wheel, hesitates as if going to rest a moment on his thigh as it did after the shock of avoiding an animal on the road; but it’s back at the wheel.

What was between them had nothing to do with consistency in life. A reality outside reality. Just real in itself.

Back alone, received by the documentation loose in his delegate’s London hotel room, the officer’s army jacket (forgotten to be returned) lying on the bed.

A reality. Perhaps that which sexual love should be.

Or was it a snatch of the alternative, what life might have been if there hadn’t been the Struggle, if he had been produced only by the private whites-only school, its greensward a Mother Country import, and grown up to a money-making profession, the corporates.

Final days of the conference brought some resolutions for dedication to the moral obligations of science, which cannot be solved even by the inconceivable possibilities of the twenty-first-century laboratory research into saving the environment of planet Earth. Only if world governments provide money and means for the capability of the dedicated scientists, would that come about. The ultimate reality, survival.

That he could carry back to Africa with him.

He could take that result of deliberation in his personal baggage.

Lindsay Wilson managed the supervision of the delegates to the end, likeable, informally dignified, amusingly charming with even the most demanding of them. He, with an instinct for deceit he wouldn’t have known he had (the lies you told under interrogation to save comrades and yourself have nothing to do with this), kept the general appreciative manner towards her, like everyone else. Except the Beard, Adrian Bates. He took a seat next to the public relations officer at meals, and he was the one who brought a drink from the bar to her where she was engaged with other delegates at interval when she had succeeded in convincing the Director that they should be indulged with going to hear the Royal Philharmonic under the baton of Zubin Mehta. The Beard of course didn’t live at the hotel. Lindsay Wilson had taken him on to lodge somewhere else, when on their arrival she delivered the other delegate in her care at the hotel entrance. The Beard hadn’t been included in weekend hospitality at the family farmhouse. Yet the familiarity in his attendance on her now would seem a continuation.

Thoughts arising in context that there’d never been place or attention for.

What happened — what there undeniably had been — was — between himself and this woman whose blond veil dropped over his face and his penis — was simply a private ease, not known to those encountering them. A continuation. When they heard each other’s casual voice or the focus of eyes accidentally met. He learnt this from her.

Farewells were hearty among some in the gorilla embrace of coat arms, email and telephone numbers exchanged, many cards handed out like men with something to sell. A number had special requests and went with her one after another to her office to give or note information for follow-up. He had no pretext. As the transport for the airport arrived, she made her usual efficient lift of the shining beacon of her head to summon attention — Professor Reed, I have photostats of those papers you wanted from the library — and went ahead of him into the office. As if remembering, in the haste, her manners, she stepped back for him to pass her, and as if again of itself in haste, the door swung closed behind him. The static of voices and shifting of feet outside was vacuumed into the bus. She signalled dropping her eyelids a moment and firming her lips: the transport wouldn’t leave without him. They went to each other and kissed as in embrace in the mill. Those were their cards exchanged. They left the office separately, she first. From among two other late-coming delegates, one of them Domanski, she beckoned him to mount the panting bus.