None to Accompany Me

by Nadine Gordimer

—I? I knew nothing, I had no idea. I don’t have anything to do with the private lives of the people at the Foundation—

  —Oh yes you do. You had him in your house. You said nothing to me when she went to parties and they were not parties, he was bringing her back to this place to sleep with her! You had him and the other nice friends in your house, you and Ben.—

  The girl began to wail, twisting her feet one upon the other. Everybody looked at her, nobody touched her.

  Vera did not turn to Oupa, who slunk out to fetch a kitchen chair for her, a gesture Sally read with a despising glance as a call upon his employer-friend’s support.

  And did the companionable lunches in her office count for nothing? The years of deprivation on Robben Island, did they not make understandable a weakness for the pleasures of affection and love-making, the temptation of an enticing girl? But a schoolgirl. Sally and Didy’s daughter.

  He placed the chair. —Oupa, you idiot.— The moment the aside came from her she realized it would be taken by Sally as a dismissing insult to her. And to say to him, is this true, would be worse: doubting Sally. She looked at the bowed head of Mpho, the dreadlocks falling either side of her pretty ears dangling ear-rings large as they were. Likely that this girl had made love with others, as well, and Oupa was the one named as culpable, unable to prove he wasn’t. This lovely child—she saw now what should have been evident while the girl lived in her house—had all the instincts of her sex Annick never had had. She wanted to put out a hand and stroke her head, but there was in Sally a forbidding authority against anyone making such a move.

  Vera addressed Didy as if he stood once again in the persona she had not recognized at her door. —How was I to know? Do you think I wouldn’t have done something, I would have spoken to him …—

  Sally wrested the attention away. —But you should have told us your nice young man was married, his wife wasn’t here, he was running around like any man … and look at him, ten years older than a schoolgirl, and no respect for her or her parents. Parties! She lied to us. When a girl-friend came to call for her, it was him! That pig. He sent a girl so we wouldn’t know he was waiting in this place.—

  Vera knew it was pointless to question Oupa but could not ignore that this was expected of her. Their gaze met apart from the others, he was cornered by her, counting upon her. —How did you let it begin.— He understood this signalled You knew I trusted you, there are plenty of other women for you.

  —It was nothing, quite okay, we all went to Kippies together to hear the music, poetry readings, and that. And then one time she said she wanted to see a play, she used to go to plays in London and—I even asked you, you remember … what was a good one … and she said her parents mustn’t know she would go out alone, she was only allowed if there were other girls, she’d tell them she was going to a party. So after that, we saw each other.—

  —And the wife?— Sally rang out. —The wife and children, and now he makes my child, under age—does he know that?— a criminal offence—he gets my child pregnant? He’ll go to jail, does he know that!—

  —Your child is not under age, don’t talk like that Sibo. Sixteen is not under age. She’s an adult by law. And what’s the use of threatening? You want him to divorce his wife? You want Mpho to get married at sixteen, not yet passed her A levels? Is that how we want to see her end up before her life’s begun. Is that what you want? Of course you don’t. Then what’s the use of all this, blaming this one, blaming that.—

  —We should never have brought her from London. She should have been left at school there. You wanted her home; ‘home’ here, to get pregnant at school like every girl from a location.—

  —All right. You also wanted her here. Blaming again, blaming doesn’t help.—

  —That’s how you can count on these people.— Sally spoke of Vera as if Vera were not summoned by her to be present. —Same as it always was, eager to help so’s to be on the right side with us. And making a mess of it. Bringing us harm.—

  —Sibongile, stop it! You’re talking nonsense, you don’t know what you’re saying. It’s my fault, it’s Vera’s fault—what’s the use, what we need is to talk about what we’re going to do, have you forgotten about Mpho, she’s sitting there on the floor, she’s our daughter—

  —I don’t know what we’re going to do about her. I only know she’s got herself into a mess.—

  —What we’re going to do has nothing to do with this young man. We shouldn’t be in this place of his at all. He’s out of it now, the whole matter. What happened between Mpho and him is finished. That’s all he needs to know. Finished and klaar. This child will not be born. Over and done with. Vera will help us—

  How could they all keep the girl grovelling before them on the floor—her mother, her father, Oupa, herself? Vera, shamed, spoke roughly. —Mpho, get up, come on, you’re not alone—

  Usually so quick and graceful, the girl lumbered to her feet, her tear-bloated face had the withdrawn expressionlessness Vera was familiar with in accused brought before court without hope of being found not guilty. Still the wrong thing: making her stand there. Perhaps she was in love with Oupa; but she knew, young and inexperienced in the judgments of the world as she was, that this was no plea.

  —You mean Mpho should have an abortion.—

  Didymus was used to doing what had to be done. —Yes. And we’re new here, now. It must be without danger to her. You’re the one who’ll be able to make sure of that for us, we know.—

  Sentence passed. The girl went over to the arm of the chair where her mother was sitting and picked up a duffle bag decorated with the iconographic names of pop groups. She ignored her mother and took out a handkerchief, blew her nose.

  FUNK DOGS HIPHOP ROCK ELECTRIC PETALS INSTANT KARMA

  An intense discomfiture filled the room as if the temperature were rising. The girl was disposed of like a body. She was a body, in the solution that had been found; nothing else. The other aspects of the situation that had brought them together had been withdrawn—emotions, motives and responsibilities nobody knew how to deal with. Didymus gathered his wife and daughter; the girl walked out before him without glancing at anyone except—a moment—up at Oupa; Vera saw the movement of the head, from behind, and could not tell whether the look was in compact or defiance; but she saw no responding change in Oupa’s face. Didymus gave a nod to Vera: —We’ll call.— Oupa was imploring her with his eyes and his stranded stance not to leave with the Maqomas. In sudden distress Vera wanted to waylay them —Don’t treat her as if she’s a criminal, put your arms round her, hug her, she’s your daughter— but the girl, walking alone before her parents, was gone down the corridor. Vera slowed to keep to the hesitant pace of Oupa accompanying her, urgent to speak. —I wasn’t the first one she’d been with.—

  —Oh what does that matter. Why tell me. It’s not the point.— Vera was impatient with him for burdening her with the confusion of excuses, if they could be accepted as such, she had thought of already.

  —Not to you. But it would matter to her parents. I didn’t want to make more trouble for Mpho, if I’d told them.—

  They walked a few steps. —So you love her. You think you were in love with her.—

  —I don’t know. How can I be in love, I’ve got a wife.— He closed away from the intrusion.

  —You mean you don’t think you have the right to.— She smiled. —That doesn’t prevent it coming about, you know.—

  —When I say I don’t know … she’s such a kid, the time when I might have a girl-friend like that, I was inside, those young years. But also she’s seen, she knows, so many things I never have—London and Europe and so on … sometimes she even laughs at me, the things I don’t know about. In one way she’s too young, and in another way she’s ahead of me. So I don’t suppose we could ever get it right.—

  As she drove home she realized she had not once, while there in the flat, been aware that this was One-Twenty-One. Otto’s One-Twenty-One. With that unawareness, eve
rything that place had been to her and her lover slipped out of grasp; no retracing of walls and footsteps along a corridor would bring it back, once let go, overlaid, it was disappeared for ever. No part of her was occupied by it.

  That flat was now the scene where she, whose daughter would never have a child, was appointed to arrange to abort the child of someone else’s daughter. The procuress. On the day when the Maqomas were to come and talk to her about arrangements, Didymus, once again, stood alone at the door. —Sally doesn’t want anything to do with this.— He revised what Sibongile had said: Just get rid of it.

  —She’s still angry with me?—

  —She has the idea you ought to sack the man.—

  —How could she possibly expect that! Even if I had the power to, which I don’t.—

  —Of course. It’s just that she’s in such a state. I can tell you. It’s not easy. After all, Mpho is our only daughter, we’d given up hope of having a girl and then she came along … Sally brought her up on her own, you know I was away most of the time. And Mpho just shuts herself off, she won’t speak to her mother, she won’t even speak to me, though I don’t reproach her, I’m prepared to forget about the whole business once it’s been dealt with.—

  Didymus looked so different, so—battle-weary, in comparison with the man in great danger who had smiled and said, Vera how mean of you; so isolated, in contrast to the man who lived in the solitude of disguise. She had the instinct to offer some sort of exchange of unexpected situations, as people who feel attachment for one another do; something private out of her own life. —You know Didy, Annie has become a lesbian.—

  He glanced away, clucked his tongue bewilderedly. After a moment, an African exclamation: —Yoh-yoh! What makes you think that?—

  —I didn’t have to think; she’s told me. That woman with her you met at the party, she’s the other half of the couple.—

  —I don’t know what to say—I’m sorry? Does it worry you? D’you mind?—

  —I think I do, but not morally; from my own point of view, you know, because I’m a woman.—

  —I’ve never thought much about it—among our people, about men of that kind, I mean. They’re around. Of course, it’ll be part of our constitution that there’ll be no discrimination against any sex … but that doesn’t cover about your own child becoming—d’you have any idea what made her?—

  —At present just … I suppose we believe we’re responsible for what we think has gone wrong with our children and in their judgment hasn’t gone wrong at all.—

  —Sally and me, with Mpho.—

  —Maybe. The villain of that whole business said something to me about Mpho and him. He supposed they couldn’t ‘ever get it right’ (he meant even if he wasn’t married with kids), they’ve both been displaced, their relative ages don’t tally naturally with their actual experiences, there’s a dislocation that couldn’t be corrected. He missed out her teenage stage, in jail; she has a worldly sophistication beyond her years, because of European exile.—

  —And our generation created both circumstances … well, it could be. Man, I don’t know. But they wouldn’t apply to Annie?—

  —No.—

  He saw that this was the limit of her confidences, for the time being; his old Underground experience in being alert to moods when people reveal themselves remained sensitive to the dropping and raising of barriers.

  They discussed, as if the itinerary for a journey or the agenda for a meeting, the doctor Vera had managed to persuade —playing on his left-wing sympathies and lack of open activity in liberation politics—to salve his conscience, do his bit by removing an embryo from the daughter of an eminent couple who had suffered for the cause much disruption in their lives. A date and place were set.

  Vera walked with Didymus, once again, to his car, this time there openly outside the gate. She hesitated at the window after he was seated. —Ben refuses to believe it—about Annie. He pretends not to know.—

  Chapter 14

  The radio alarm clock Mpho had not been able to resist, duty-free, as she left London airport, woke her with its Japanese version of Greensleeves at the hour she had set. She lay with her fists at her mouth, feeling on them the soft double stream of breath from her nostrils. To awake in the very early morning when everyone else is unconscious is to be alone in the world.

  She got up and went to the window, carefully pulled the curtain. All was blurred with mist and, set back on a hill, only the glass façade of a towering building glistened out of it, mirror to the still hidden sun. She took off the Mickey Mouse T-shirt she slept in, her breasts dragged up and bouncing back; threw the shirt on the bed and then picked it up again, rolled it and put it in her duffle bag. Naked, she packed some other clothes and a goggle-eyed toy cat. She went to the window to see one more time the radiant face witnessing her. As she pulled in her stomach muscles to zip up her jeans a sense of fear and wonder and disbelief at what was there, inside, held her dead still. A lump of panic was suppressed with a swallow of saliva. She put herself together as she always was: frilled elasticized band circling her dreadlocks like an open blue rose on the crown of her head, another T-shirt with some other legend or logo on it, bright socks rolled round the ankles, black sneakers, the crook’d wires of one of her collection of earrings hooked through the soft brown tips of her ear-lobes. Mpho. That’s Mpho. The mirror on her dressing-table caught her as the sun did the face of the building; there she is, nothing’s changed. In her trembling sullen unhappiness, something overturned: she felt gaily released for a moment; nothing had ever happened, she had just got off the plane from London to meet the admiring glances of this country called home.

  Nobody heard, nobody saw her close the front door behind her. In this white part of the suburban city only joggers were about, hamsters working their daily treadmill. She took an empty bus to a city terminal where blacks arrive from the townships to go to work. Street children lay in doorways as drifts of cartons, paper and banana skins lay in gutters. Women were setting out rows of boiled mealies, the venders of watches, sunglasses, vaseline, baseball caps, baby clothes, were unpacking their stock. A shebeen on a packing-case displayed litre bottles of beer and half-jacks of brandy, and before this altar a man still crazed from the drinking of the night danced round her to mbaqanga music coming from the stall-holder’s cassette player. The freshness of the morning brought the smell of urine as dew intensifies the scent of grass. She passed through it all with an untouchable insolent authority beauty creates, going against the stream of workers, agile among the combis cornering, stopping and starting racing-circuit-style, smiling in response to remarks made to her in the language no one who made them would believe she didn’t understand.

  There is dread at the sight of an empty bed.

  Gone.

  Gone, it says.

  Where?

  The contractions of fear; people kill themselves if they have been made to feel ashamed of their lives. From that comes the extreme of fear: what should have been done to avert the sight of the bed, there, empty. What has been done to bring it about. Sibongile knows—he doesn’t have to say it, doesn’t have to conceal—Didymus thinks she has been too harsh and judgmental towards the girl.

  An appallingly reasonable conviction strikes her; of course. —She’s gone to that man.—

  He bunched his mouth. —Unlikely. He’d be scared. I think he’s a weak character. Never mind his record as a comrade. I don’t think he’d take her in, now.—

  Sibongile rummaged again for some clue—no note, of course, if the idea is to punish your parents you certainly don’t leave a note. Didymus followed her into the room, a place mute and accusatory. The odour of Mpho was there, the mingle of perfume and deodorants and skin-warmed clothing, sweaty sneakers, the mint-flavoured gum she liked. She could have run away to people they didn’t know she knew, people picked up at those places young people frequent, Kippies, discos. Now something really terrible could be happening to her, rape, drugs.

  They
stood about in her absence.

  —Why do you think she’s done this?—

  —Scared. She’s scared of what’s going to happen to her. The operation.—

  —For heaven’s sake. It’s hardly an operation. I’ve told her, she’ll be asleep, she won’t feel anything. I even told her I’ve had it, so I know.—

  A change in his face. —Why d’you do that.—

  But Sibongile—Sally—belonged to the generation and the experience that saw emancipation in burdening their half-adult children with the intimate life of their parents. —Why not? So she wouldn’t be scared.—

  —But if you put yourself in the same boat—why should she feel there’s anything wrong with her adventure with the man, why that whole business in the flat, her having to hide her face from us … you get pregnant, you have an abortion, doesn’t matter, it’s nothing to worry about.—

  —Oh you make me mad. Isn’t what’s happened enough without you … d’you think she shouldn’t be allowed to know what our life was like sometimes in exile, how hard up we were, couldn’t even keep the boys with us, how could we have another child those days in East Germany! You always want to protect her from everything, and then look what she brings on herself … As if what I had to go through has anything to do with her playing around with someone else’s man and getting herself pregnant!—

  He spread and then dropped his hands: not prepared to argue. —I’m going to his flat to see if he knows where she is.—

  Sibongile was due to take part in a press conference—it would be that very morning the child chose to run away, God knows where. She was dressed for public exposure. In her distraction and anxiety she had put on as a general does his uniform her tailored skirt and jacket, her accoutrements of small gold ear-rings (nothing showy), her carved wooden bracelets—as royalty is expected to wear garments and jewellery designed and made in their own country, a walking billboard for home products, she always saw to it that she included on her person some example of African craft. It’s understood—and she exacted this from her co-workers—that personal obligations must be subordinate to the cause, always had been in exile and clandestinity and were no less now, round conference and negotiation tables. Public exposure may be an armour within which trembling flesh is hidden. Photo opportunities (that’s what the press asks for) are the victim’s obligation to wear a persona separated by duty from self.