Nadine Gordimer: Get A Life

Dust off the loose grass. Getting to the feet still creates disorientation, this wears off here in the garden, where it's usual to stroll slowly unless one is a boy racing to catch a ball. A rose responds to closeness with faint scent. Lilies: slugs, snails, suck the thick, sculptured stems, some years in the pest cycle. In reconciliation – maybe – with the playmate, there is taken up an adult offer of a cent for each snail gathered. To squash them was messy and they were dropped to die in a pail of water. Hot? A snail is not a bird. There's a ceiling at which compassion begins, lowly creatures are below it. That's the innocence that remains unchanged in a garden.

The ring from the house is Berenice's second call of the day. Excitement in her voice, her vocabulary a genre she's speaking from, she's just received confirmation of the big deal, a contract that includes all television, radio, Internet rights as well as newsprint, with clients who've closed their account with a sky-high-profile rival agency and come to her stable. He is aware this exaltation is also relief because her commission on such a deal will be substantial enough to help pay laboratories and doctors.

– And you? – A different voice, the cadence of the unspoken between them. He can tell her there's an email from Emma.

– Oh Emma's great! Read it to me? – no, when I come this afternoon. -

At what is designated his lunchtime, Primrose has left a salad and fresh bread set out, coffee on the electric hot tray, there's a call from his mother, but the preoccupation in that voice is different. She has lost a case, judgment given against her client. She does not bother him with the telling of it. He would only feel he must commiserate. Why should he. The judgment on him, from whom, who knows where, has no recourse; there will be an application for right to appeal, on behalf of the client.

It is Agency style that clients at once address even senior personnel by the first name; the unspoken premise is that the client and the professional who is designing promotion of what the client wants to sell are in partnership rather than the calculated relation of hire and pay. Berenice: this one has a manner of treating the client as an equal in the flair, the style of campaign she is planning, no matter how obvious it is that the client has no such faculties of his or her own. This 'Berenice' somehow conveys assurance that the campaign is an inside job, she's part of the client's company advancing itself. Her smart asides on public taste, and endearing swift movements indicting her own, her small pauses, notation in the brand jingle of advertising-agency-client dialogue, to mark sensitive understanding when the client wavers a doubt… All these that had come to her spontaneously now seemed a professional technique. It could be produced while the one to whom her real responses should be directed was shut away, not only in some physical place, but from any part in the daily, nightly existence of herself and the child. The child: as if the child and the life that he represented were all that there had been in the complex one of a man and a woman? Responses cut and dangling. How could it take an illness to do this? That's all, just an illness. She had not needed, while jesting or expertly elaborating on serious matters appealing to the shrewdness of clients, to think of him when he was off in his wilderness, passionate as he was to be there; she somehow could not, in need now, summon ability to think of him as he was in the room made a confinement in the house of occasional family gatherings. Even his voice on the telephone, what did it convey of where he was, what he was. Even the afternoon visits in that other wilderness between them, his childhood garden, where the tension in him at the pain of her being there and not there for him made her feel she was in control of another's mind, not herself, in another time.

She hears herself convincing sceptical clients with enthusiastic voice, fan-spread hands winking magenta fingernails, bracelets sliding back on rather beautiful forearms, of the intelligence of her plan of action. From the most dourly resistant of them she drew admiration to be read in the relaxation of face muscles although they continued to let their sidekicks do the questioning. In-house, between consultations with clients, there was the usual bantering and exchange of private views on their idiosyncrasies – Agency gossip with colleagues, several of whom were black, now, in the Agency's policy of self-interest showing conformation to Affirmative Action (some clients came from new black-owned companies), young women indistinguishable in their styles of dress and vocational jargon, except for the colour of their skin and elaborate arrangements of their hair. Only a select few of her colleagues knew the details of what had happened to that rather dishy man of hers who was always off in the bush saving the planet. Disaster is private, in its way, as love is. Other people will be pruriently curious (love-matters) or trivialise with their syrup of sympathy (matters of disaster).

Her professional persona, carrying on for her. That had to be. She drank champagne someone brought in to celebrate the triumphant contract, quipped and laughed in shared pride. She went out often to dinner with special friends among the colleagues, usually white, as had been before the Affirmative Action ones had arrived – those seemed to have better things to do with their leisure. At dinner, as always, everyone 'talked shop' and it was quite usual for someone to come without their other-occupied lover or spouse. Mutual friends, Paul's and hers – difficult to explain to them, no offence meant – she became inclined to avoid. They wanted to talk about him, were concerned to know how she really felt, sought her acceptance of their support for that which was not clear – was it because her husband and their dear friend was likely sentenced to death, or was it for the unimaginable state of her isolation from him, parting while he was still alive, somewhere. Should they call him? Could she take books, documentaries and comedies they'd recorded, letters, to him? If she did deliver whatever they remembered to give her, they did not receive any response to let them know that their gifts of friendship and thought for him meant anything. Perhaps he was too weak to respond, though they'd been given to understand he was recuperating while still an Untouchable – radiation coming from his body. Or was it that the state of being taboo to others produced exactly the complementary within the isolated one: ability to communicate stifled.

Most unfortunate it was decided that the grandparents with whom little Nickie got along so happily, perhaps should have no contact with him, though the doctors had been vague about whether secondhand proximity to emanation was any danger; Lyndsay went to Chambers and Adrian mixed with fellow board members. Yet certainly a wise precaution, no matter how remote the shaft of invisible light might be, for the grandmother not to be in the proximity of the child since she was the one who touched what had been against the lit-up body, clothes, sheets, the utensils that came from contact with lips and tongue. Lyndsay and Adrian tactfully left the couple alone in the garden if they happened to be home when Benni visited. But they felt that Paul's wife and themselves must have some private meaning for one another and this should find expression in some gesture beyond telephone exchanges. In association between Adrian and Benni, the danger would seem so remote a risk; Paul was no longer too weak to bath alone, his father did not have to expose himself by helping him. Adrian followed the impulse to call Benni at her Agency, with a suggestion. And so Berenice's secretary transferred a call from the father-in-law asking how Berenice would feel about coming out to dinner with him – would she think it all right, for her? Of course, he didn't say, you'd be going home to the child. Apparently she dismissed this as no risk. Fine, I'd like to.