Nadine Gordimer - The Conservationist

Why not this house? There was not time; she has friends to stay and they would wonder at her lengthy absence. She laughs at the suggestion of the hairdresser. — Do I look as if I spend hours getting myself back-combed and tinted? — He had given himself away and she never left him unaware of such proof, to her, of what he was: the sort of women he was used to had nothing better to do than spend hours in beauty salons. And what was the corollary of that? — he could have trotted it out pat for her. ‘while blacks did all their work’. If such women wanted to make love, their alibi was in character.

Since she was such a free spirit, then: — Why do you have to account to your friends for where you go? —

— I have bonds with my friends that are more important than anything else. -

Of course. She didn’t even allow herself to mention the friends’ names. Some instruction to keep your mouth shut, keep your contacts isolated from one another, if I don’t come back from my mission by twenty-one-O-five hours, alert everyone that I’ve been picked up, destroy documents. all that incompetent cloak-and-dagger romanticism she elevated to a moral code. Didn’t it provide her, within its limits, with an alibi as good as that of any woman who goes to the hairdresser? Very convenient. After all, not telling anyone where you were going so that they couldn’t reveal your whereabouts even under interrogation made it safe as houses for her to come to his flat those times, even if she had to be home before dark or whenever the countdown with her friends was.

— A duplex, isn’t that what the estate agents call them? — Coming downstairs, she looks under her eyelids at her stomach; it is her moment of giving herself away. She watches herself. She flaunts early grey hairs but she fears, too — a slack belly. It is true that she is not flat, when you lie on her you do not feel, anymore, that ass’s jawbone thrust forward down there. When you look down on her, there is no smooth concave pinned on either side by a hipbone, that charming reminder of a nakedness beyond nakedness, a nakedness so complete it goes beyond flesh right to the bone, that some young girls show in a bikini, with cover over only the little padded beak that brings the female body to a point. She did not have a particularly beautiful body even then, five years ago, before she need really have begun to worry about what will happen to it, what happens to them all, around the waist.

— What, no sauna bath? No swimming-pool? —

— Communal. On the roof. You’ll have to be satisfied with the bathrooms, pink with beige john, green with black John. Take your choice. -

— Oh very chic. Which does one use for what? —

If I had your money.

She came to the flat, like the others; it was in the flat, like the others. Only Terry has slept behind the wall of this room (not the wall behind which the kitchen lies, where Alina is talking to somebody); over behind the piano and the wall where a pair of china duck in flight hang up high. On the bed in his school sleeping-bag, Terry — that is certain — had no woman in there, only masturbation and compassion.

The dunes of the desert lie alongside the road between Swakopmund and Walvis Bay. Golden reclining nudes. Torso upon torso, hip sweeping from waist, smooth beyond smoothness, suggesting to the tactile imagining only the comparison, in relation to the hand, of the sensation of the tongue when some substance evanesces on it. The sea is on the other side of the road. There among the rocks pelicans floated at rest like bath toys and those crayfish — lumps under mayonnaise in the sort of place he goes to — were caught by feeling with bare hands under the rock shelf. No fancy gloves and goggles and snorkels that old Kurt and Emmy demand nicely for their princeling visitor. There were old-timers who were friends of Kurt then, too, who knew nature lore and told stories. Could be the same old man. There’s a quality in people like them that makes youngish men seem to have been old, in retrospect. The appellation ‘old so-and-so’ designates something other than age — benignity, perhaps? Some comfortable outgrown quality you don’t see around. Goodness? Emmy and Kurt are good simple people — which means they have been left behind, they don’t change, they are preserved by the desert back there in the past — as good for the boy as they were for himself when he was a boy. Childless women like Emmy are the ones who would have been the best mothers; old chaps like Kurt, who have no son, can do with any boy all those things the father doesn’t have time or the knack for. That little house alone, with its back garden of desert sand raked into a pattern along the paths marked with seashells, and the dog’s kennel Kurt made with the hinged roof so that, like Emmy’s house, the dog’s could be aired every morning. It’s the sort of thing that makes children happy. One would think that for a boy of sixteen, a farm to mess around on would be a paradise; you could keep a horse to ride, if you wanted. If you took an interest.

— You must come out to the farm again, sometime. —

— Oh yes. That was a beautiful place. —

As if he had burned it down or something. Destroyed it by his touch. But it was all part of the sexual game with her, perhaps? He must try to entice her; she must seem to be capitulating. And then she bobs her backside up in his face, so to speak, and is off. - One of these days. —

— Take a picnic lunch. Just for an hour. I’d love to play hookie from the damned office. —

She looks insolently, thrusting her chin and waggling her head, making fun: — I know you would. Perhaps. Next week. -

Once or twice in the flat; that was nothing, really. She was not a woman who had an instinct for what you wanted, at particular moments, when in bed. No doubt she thought she was a remarkably ‘intelligent’ lover. In the flat, just like any other.

— Oh yes… sometimes I wish I had your farm. — She was the one who brought it up again.

He had not mentioned the subject. They had met at an hotel for a drink after he had not seen her for several weeks and did not know whether she would come somewhere — it would have to be his flat, he supposed — or whether they would have one more drink and part for the evening.

— Sometimes for such a small reason — any little thing — this afternoon I was rushing along the street to — I had to get somewhere in a hurry — and I saw a puppy outside one of those little houses with a polished stoep and ferns in a tin — you know. A spindly pup standing with its paws turned in and its silly tail hanging in the air. Then it sat down suddenly and watched everything going by. I wanted to have that puppy and that house and sit and play with it in the afternoons. For a few moments that’s what I wanted. And I understood that by that I meant what it was to be ‘good’. Can you imagine me? —

So you have moments when you want to submit to the ‘system’, keep out of ‘trouble’, be a housewife complacent in her white privilege. Just as you want to go and make love although you are ashamed of having lovers; again a man like him is quick to understand what is being said that can’t be said.

— It presented itself as an awful temptation, honestly just for a flash. I must have been very tired today. —

To understand and to take the opportunity. — You don’t look tired. - She would groan if you told her she was pretty, etc. but at the same time it was what she must hear, not in so many words. Time was measuring as it did when the half-candles were burning; — And if you had my farm? —

She tapped her foot a few moments, her thigh moving in her skirt; smiled, summing herself up in the way she prided. - Same sort of thing, I suppose. —