No Time Like the Present

by Nadine Gordimer

  It is just a room. Camping out: there are two beds as you’d have sleeping bags in a tent.

  —But electricity, it surely can’t be coming all the way from the inn.— This is word-sparring fun.

  —There’s a generator on, we can have a heater right away. Oh and you don’t have to go out in the dark, that little flap door has a loo behind it.—

  —You think of everything. But you didn’t tell me this invitation was going to be an adventure in the wilds of England.—

  She pulls an electric heater from under the only other piece of furniture beside beds, a table with a faience flower-patterned basin and matching jug, the kind you see in antique shops. At least she fumbles something: the connection of the heater, and he justifies his skilled male presence.

  She emptied her hold-all upside down over a bed. So that’s hers.

  He opens the tote bag and looks at what there is to take out. Pyjama shorts. He never wears a top. Perhaps he’ll just doss down as he is. She sweeps an arm in a bow to the flap door, he returns the gesture as she scoops some things from her stash and goes through the flap, there’s the sound of teeth-brushing and a brief rustling pause before she comes out in some sort of bunny-rabbit pyjama suit drawn in round each ankle on bare feet, curling up her toes against the cement floor. —Miracle. There are actually a couple of towels in there.—

  In a space where he can hardly turn about himself there are indeed stowed as if in a packing case a toilet bowl, a tank and a shower over a drainage hole, hooked-up towels and a jug half-full of water that as he cups a handful to rinse his brushed teeth doesn’t taste like tap water, he fancies it comes from the mill stream. In his occupancy there’s the rush of the toilet after he’s peed; she evidently hadn’t had the need, hardly one to be shy of the natural, or maybe knowing the mill she’s taken the opportunity up at the house. Women are more private about body functions; they were even in the bush under fire.

  She’s not in bed. She’s frustratedly turning over the spread contents of her hold-all. —I lose track of time, here.— He’s come out with his shirt loose over the lower part of him, the inadequate shorts, no fly, just pull up—they aren’t encountering each other at a swimming pool.

  —Could kick myself—I’d forgotten way out of my mind I’d promised Professor Jacquard I’d postpone his TV interview.—

  —You want to SMS him?— If she’s left her mobile where he saw it in the car, his is in his tote bag.

  This Lindsay is someone quick to take charge of herself: she’s let herself down rather than Jacquard. So she’s become another persona. Someone other. —No. No, he’ll be furious woken up what is it midnight, oh bloody hell, so he won’t turn up at the studio there’ll be a big fuss my pal the producer won’t have Jacquard’s mobile number so he can’t reach him in the bus to Stonehenge or whichever tour it is Jacquard’s taken.—

  Someone other: in this, the time of here. She lobs the mobile at him, passed on, all in one contiguity it’s back in the tote bag—they are laughing at the dismissal of her conscience and, standing, they confirm this compact, her arms around his shoulders, his arms caught below must go down the slope of her back to her waist. The bunny fleece of cloth suggests a bedtime story, Sindiswa used to feel like this a few years ago. But the bodies of a man and a woman are magnets. She meets the length of his and while they are bending a little back and forward together in the laughter of her release, he feels the rising opportunistic penis. She might pull away. She presses closer. The lips this way and that, caressing, then what is always the real discovery, his tongue in that cave that is the mouth, entry permission gained there to the cave of wild pleasure between the legs.

  It was simple. She zipped herself out of the bunny in one movement lifting this foot and that to free herself. He steadied her with one hand and began with the other to free himself of the shirt. He shed shorts last; she held gently, a moment, himself declared there, no foreskin shield. Which bed? Of course she decided, it was the other one, apparently allotted to him, she had not entered hers able to invite him. Before making himself welcome inside her he gave attention to, seemed fascinated by the pink nipples of her breasts, licked round them, took them into his mouth pursed over them, traced their aureoles. She murmured, so you like pink ones (some other lover must have remarked them). His tongue was not for talking at this time.

  Who was the appallingly exciting lover, he or she, in a generous rivalry. When she innovated that, he found himself innovating this, unimagined. The invasions of passion were a labyrinth where she took in not just what her body was formed to receive, but also the erotic capacity that had ever been secretly inside him. He was, also; someone other.

  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 bareback 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.

  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.