Nadine Gordimer - Burger's Daughter

How far from the London School of Economics?

Laughter and words capering — Ah that’s right off our route, we’ll never find that, don’t worry — But my colleague, now, he lives in Holland Park, he’s going to get me a room in the house of some friends, êh, it’s cheaper than staying in an hotel…and if there’s a phone-call (Rosa already understands the pause, the inference, old Madame Chabalier has had an ‘infarctus’—heart attack — twice, and there must always be a means of reaching her son) there’s nothing remarkable about someone else in the house having answered the phone, no?—

Yes. And yes again. Yes to everything, as what can’t be done begins to be achieved with the zest of practical solutions following step-by-step, carefully planned, because carelessness costs wounds, no one must be hurt if Bernard Chabalier and Rosa Burger are to remain intact and unreachable.

On the 7th of September Bernard Chabalier assembled the type-written pages and hand-written notes scattered in coded disorder round the room where he had worked and made love, both well — he paused to grant it; a remarkable witness, that room he would not wish to be confronted with again, under changed circumstances, ever — and went back to Paris. It was one week before the re-opening of the lycée where he was, like all French schoolmasters, a professor. That was reasonable enough. It was one week before the re-opening of his children’s schools; that was the reason. He could return one day and walk into his classrooms the next — he had taught what was to be taught many times, but his own children liked him to go along when pencils and exercise-books and new shoes were to be bought in preparation for the school year. He had talked to Rosa about his awareness that he did not know, beyond a certain elementary level, how one would have to behave to be what he called a ‘continuing’ father, equal to needs one would have to divine; for the present he simply did what seemed to please the children most obviously? He did not tell her that the date he and she agreed upon for his departure was a specific instance. That was the sort of thing she had, would have to divine in the kind of life he and she were living and going to live; no need to lift the fact clear of supposition that a ‘professor’ needs a week to assume that identity. Loving the girl, anywhere outside the pure state, the principle that no one must be wounded reversed her position from possible perpetrator to possible victim. If nothing were said, and yet she understood why he was committed to himself to leave on that day, this would be another of the unspoken facts that would graft Rosa Burger and Bernard Chabalier closely upon one another.

He left on a day that denied the date on the airline ticket. Holiday crowds had gone but the ancient stone bones of the village held the marrow of summer. The blue of the sea, triumphant over its pollution, was solid. By contrast the mountains powdered away into delicate haloes of sun-gauze; no memory of snow, it would never come back. From Madame Bagnelli’s car, a smell of geraniums through the windows instead of petrol fumes, and the old men playing their ball-game under the olive trees in the parking ground empty of cars, as Rosa saw him doing there when he grew old. She drove, and perhaps her concentration (still not able to trust her reflexes to keep to the right side of the road instead of the left — which was the rule where she came from) held at bay the desperation that attacked him, so that beside her his hands shook and he breathed with open mouth.

But he was coming to meet her in London in a few weeks. In the meantime he would look for the small apartment for her in Paris in the quartier of the lycée; she would go to London and install herself, waiting for him, in the flat that was available to her always. He would take a week’s leave — he had not had a day’s sick- or study-leave in ten years, he did not care a damn if the term had only just begun — and then they would come back to Paris on the same day, if not the same plane, which is to say, together. It was no parting; it was the beginning of commitment to being exactly that: together. They were no longer one of the affairs of the village. He would telephone her every day; once again, they discussed the best times — she, too, was very good at the connivance of privacies. She did not cry but he was in awe of all she had known in order to learn not to weep; and could not unlearn. It took over again, now; but suddenly she turned from her tight little profile as the angle of a mirror is changed to present full-face and the big calm lips and eyes the colour of the lining of black mussel shells (it had taken him weeks, more than somewhat influenced by the surroundings in which he moved with her and even — at last! — he acknowledged himself as an example of the French preoccupation — the things they ate, to decide the colour). — You are the only man I’ve loved that I’ve made love with. So I feel you can make everything possible for me.—

— What things?—

She took the tongue of ticket stuck out by the meter at the barrier to the airport parking ground, and did not react the moment the gate lifted. He watched her mouth with the passionate attention of the pleasures he found there. That jaw was almost ugly; she attempted as little to disguise the unbeautiful as to promote the beauties of her face. Her lips moved to find shapes for the plenitude struck from her rock — pleasure in herself, the innocent boastful confidence of being, the assurance of giving what will be received, accepted, without question. Before she drove on she tried. — I can’t say. Things I didn’t know about. I find out. Through you.—

— Through me! Oh my darling, I can tell you — sometimes with you I feel I am that child sent out of the room while the adults talk, now grown-up — lived my whole life — out there…

How much his turn of phrase delighted her! They laughed together at him, in Madame Bagnelli’s old car that brought them to a stop; to the destination of the day. Laughter became embraces and in a state of bold intoxication with each other, totally assuring, they parted, for a short while — less than two hours later, from Charles de Gaulle airport where he had just landed, Bernard Chabalier, having found some excuse to get away for a few minutes from whoever it was (Christine with or without children, aged mother) who had met him, telephoned Rosa Burger. He said it this time with blunt wonder: You are the dearest thing in the world to me. She cried in some unrecognized emotion, another aspect of joy; a strange experience.

She left for London ten days later by train because this was the cheapest way. She had earned a little money practising her old healing profession on people to whom she had been recommended, at the yacht harbours; but the folder of traveller’s cheques she had brought to Europe was almost empty. She felt no particular concern. She had telephoned Flora Donaldson in Johannesburg and explained that after spending the summer in France she now wanted to visit London. A normal sort of itinerary for a holiday abroad; Flora, as Rosa knew she could expect of any one of her father’s associates and/or friends, asked no questions that would suggest anything otherwise and expressed no surprise at or reproach for his daughter having gone abroad without telling anyone of the intention, explaining in what possible manner it could have been realized, or saying goodbye to someone who regarded herself, with justification, as the closest of family friends, who had stood outside the prison door with the girl when she was fourteen and suffering her first period cramps. She did not tell Flora with whom she was staying or where, in France. Flora told her from whom to ask the flat key in Holland Park and found a way to indicate that if money were needed, that could be arranged too. Her voice sounded, out of the past, very close, and soprano with excitement as it always became at the prospect of involvement with problems of evasion and intrigue. Rosa found a way to thank her but explain money was not needed. Flora Donaldson suddenly began to ring out as if she could not be heard properly — But how are you? How are you? Really all right? How are you?—