Loot

by Nadine Gordimer

  The official car of the Deputy-Director of Land Affairs was often parked in the yard behind the house assigned by the Agency to the Administrator’s Assistant. The driver and security guards sat in Tomasi’s kitchen as habitués unremarked as any of his other friends. They might be called out and dismissed by their charge, the Deputy-Director, to leave the car and find their way home, return in the morning. Somehow though neither he nor she in their new-found rapport had to speak of it, neither would make love with the men talking and laughing in the kitchen.

  She had only once before had a love affair abroad on a tour of duty, brief and in Europe in an hotel where the man arranged a room under a name other than his own (which the receptionist’s eyes made clear was well-known). The man’s wife was away and it was apparently his code of marital honour not to take a woman home in her convenient absence. But here, no doubt, there was the Deputy-Director’s commonsense idea that there was no call for special arrangements—there’s his farm, and the Agency house provided for the woman herself, alone. The guards and driver, the attendant Tomasi: they are there to serve needs, not to question whatever these may be; security has wide implications. Let them gossip and laugh, who knows what it might be about, in the kitchen; no-one’s going to take notice of whatever they might pass on to others at their social level.

  The Administrator and his wife Flora rarely came to his Assistant’s bachelor woman house; it was so much more friendly to have her using as some sort of real temporary home the one Flora kept open to many, a household with food and drink and unquestioning welcome always just beyond the door, the young son plucking the guitar. Yet they must have guessed a new element had entered Roberta Blayne’s tour of duty, even before this became tacitly recognised and generally accepted through certain signs in the conduct of Deputy-Director Gladwell Shadrack Chabruma. If Flora in her all-embracing but fixed impressions of a personality on first acquaintance noticed nothing, it is certain that Alan Henderson, working beside Roberta every day, and dependent on the results of their exchanged observations of the people with whom they had to engage, was aware—and as only a man can be—of a warmed femaleness that emanates from a women who is being made love to, dormant in her before. He said nothing to his wife; put his private observation in the category of Agency matters that should fall into ‘aid talk’ which was, on her own dictate, not her business … But then as months went by and evidently the Deputy-Director gained confidence in the acceptance of his affair (maybe his colleagues in Government hierarchy even thought it might be useful: some woman from the aid Agency of which they had important financial expectations) he began to appear in public alone with Roberta Blayne. Flora, like others, became aware that her bachelor woman of retiring personality, not-so-young, was having an affair with a member of the Government. She was warned by her husband not to broach the subject.—But if Roberta talks to me? I mean it’s out of the blue! Who would have thought he’d … that up-tight fellow … and if he did, one of the young interns in his office or some speakerine from TV, like the others pick, that would be what he’d go for, if at all—

  Roberta didn’t ‘talk’ to her, but as time passed Flora made clear with inoffensive remarks (Of course I don’t suppose you’ll come, you’ll have better things to do this weekend) that she knew of the affair and was pleased about it, for her friend the bachelor woman’s sake. Soon Roberta was able to respond quite naturally, yes, I’m going to the farm with Gladwell if he hasn’t got some special meeting coming up on Saturday. It was mutually understood with the Hendersons that much as they would have liked it, and surely Roberta too, he was not invited with her to intimate dinners at the Henderson house—too much of a defiant sign to others present that this was a particular relationship. When he came as of right to official parties there, both she and the hosts treated him on the same level of impersonal friendliness they did any other guest. There’s a protocol for every situation.

  At the President’s celebration at State House on the anniversary of Independence Day she must have glanced over, without noticing, Flora tête-à-tête with someone in the crowd, a woman. Flora came up with the half-comic tolerant expression of having made an escape:—Good soul, I’m sure, but what can you talk about with her—when you get onto the standby, what are her interests, she tells you about her favourite TV soapie. Homebody of the new kind, the city peasant—you know the poor dears—Flora stopped herself; then the aside—That’s Gladwell’s wife. Must have married her very young and apart from producing a brood … she’s sure no asset in furthering his career now.—

  She looked across the room at the woman, as an intrusion on privacy; observing herself, rather, as the lover of the woman’s husband, squeamish; old conventions wagging a finger at her. It was the only time they met—or rather didn’t meet. He sometimes mentioned, in contexts where it was natural and inevitable, his wife: a car accident in which they’d both been slightly injured, subject come up when on one of the weekend trips to the farm the driver-bodyguard almost landed his passengers in a culvert (this time certainly did have a hangover).

  There must have been some sort of accommodation with his wife; anyone, like Roberta Blayne, who has been once coupled knows there are many acknowledged sidetracks on the secret map of a marriage. Sometimes they met in a restaurant where he might be seen, by others in parliamentary suits, dining with a woman from the Agency personnel. His woman, no doubt. Many had theirs, if not in their company on that occasion. It was that sort of restaurant.

  One day when she entered another restaurant he had chosen there was a young woman seated at the table with him. She hesitated a moment, whether she should approach, he saw her, lifted a palm, she came to it. He gave her name in introduction first.—Roberta Blayne. She is Assistant to Mr Henderson who heads the Agency here, now.—The girl half-rose with the casual acknowledgement of her generation and smiling, held out a hand to the woman standing before her. The hand was long, supple, ringed on fingers and thumb, nails painted fluorescent butterfly-wing blue; an attribute. She was a confidently attractive girl, her beauty arranged in contemporary high style—hair straightened and secured at the crown by a bobbing bunch of glossy curls to be bought in the shops, the liquid flash of slanting eyes, bold lips sculpted in purple-red.—Phila, my younger daughter, she’s just back for a break from her law studies in Nottingham. Your country.—So the two women, his women, talked about England, the girl’s impressions, what was endearing she said she found in ‘the Brits’, what was annoying, what in their ways made her laugh.—You miss England? You’re English, aren’t you?—

  She supposed she was. But something of all the countries where there’d been tours of duty.

  —How’re you finding Africa? I’ve only realised since I’ve been living away what it’s really like, here! My homeground, hometown. Weird! Really weird. My father doesn’t like to hear that, he says I’m forgetting who I am. Fat chance—the Brits keep me aware of that. But seriously—or rather not seriously, I’m having a great time.—She caught her father’s hand, flirtatiously reassuring any disapproval in his silence. A silence which otherwise was easy; his remarks to the girl now and then, over the food, no suggestion that the situation of the three present might evoke suspicion and another kind of disapproval: in the daughter.

  She wanted to ask—sometime—why he had wanted his daughter to meet her, to reveal her, so to speak, to his family, his real life—that is how she thought of it. While she was not sure of what was hers, she was of his. The right time to ask never came. Perhaps he had not thought of the threesome in the way she had seen it; for him, simply some parental obligation to take his visiting daughter out to lunch.

  If she had need to justify—exonerate—her presence at the table it would have to be in acceptance that she was not the first nor would be the last of the Deputy-Director’s affairs. Outside his real life.

  What she knew was that she and this man were giving one another what each needed. Love, yes, in one of its many complex forms; one of the simplest. Not-so-y
oung; what might be called the cerebral aspect of her (she knew she was no great intellect but she had a well-exercised intelligence of the workings of the contemporary world) first brought them together; he expected to engage seriously with her, draw from her opinions other than those he was supplied with officially, exchange different perceptions of motives, of what a newcomer saw happening here, his country, and the world she had had experience of quite widely.

  In love-making there came an eloquence beyond speech. And this eloquence of pleasure brought her to the danger of confiding—part of the release of orgasm, handing over what can be used against you. In such a moment, the privacy that is like no other:—Buffalo Mine. You know, the day I asked, that day. My grandfather owned it and he ran it like a slave plantation. 1920s. He sent a man on foot all the way to that liquor store, still there, you stopped at in town, to fetch a case of whisky for his weekend booze party and the man walked all the way back with a case of whisky bottles on his head. Went on Monday and was back on Friday. Every Monday every Friday. My grandfather made a famous joke of it, my man, what heads they have, thick as a log.—

  He said nothing. Suddenly tears of shame, old shame unshed, what heads they have came from her and trickled to his shoulder. He released an arm from their embrace and brushed at the shoulder as if something had alighted there; the fingers discovered their wetness.

  —What is the matter.—

  —What we did here. In my family. The rest of us. What liars we are, coming to these countries as if we hadn’t ever been, marvelling at the primitive—oh yes it’s a dirty condescending racist word don’t ever use it but the sense of it’s there even in our commendment, our reports, our praise—don’t say it, naïve obtuseness thick-headed—oh the people’s capacity to endure burdens, the usefulness of this capacity, sound basis for development, hard as a log the possession of the power of money over it that’s my man—She could hear her raving whisper.

  His voice in the dark a vibration through his breast. —Things like this happened long ago. Nothing to do with you. That’s how they were. That’s how it was with them. Those people. Such things … It was the tradition.—

  They made love again and she sensed, from him, she must resist the desire to caress his head, pass her hand over its shape again and again to banish what cannot be changed, a past. Not even by development. She belongs, he belongs, to the present.

  In every tour of duty that is going well there is a looming frustration that there will be recall, a new posting, another country, just when more time is needed to see projects fulfilled.

  —What d’you think—should I ask for an extension? Would you stay?—

  There was no innuendo in Alan Henderson’s question; he was thinking of their effectiveness as a working team. And she answered on the same practical level, using Agency-speak.—If you believe we really could get those five rural projects to the stage of capability they should have if they’re going to become viable under their own steam, when we do go. Worth a try, with New York?—

  The Deputy-Director of Land Affairs knew—must have known—it was the business of Government to be ready for a change of the aid development team assigned to the country—that her tour of duty would end in a few months. She did not tell him her Administrator was applying for an extension. To her, this would somehow have taken away the integrity of her response to Alan Henderson; introduced an unacceptable factor in her code: commitment to her purpose in this country. For her to hope for the extension; that would make her the liar, descendant of liars. And as well she did not tell him. The Administrator’s request was refused; he was already lined up for another post, another country. No doubt she was too unimportant for a decision of where she would be ‘deployed’ to be made in advance of her return to headquarters. She and Alan Henderson redoubled their work to leave what they knew as a sustainable achievement behind them, and the hours and days of effort without a sense of time alternated intensely with nights when an official car was hidden in the Administrator’s Assistant’s yard, and the Sundays she was riding horses on the farm of the Deputy-Director of Land Affairs. The California house had come to life within its alien shell as two people talked, ate and drank, made love there. Her shampoo was in the bathroom. There were no reproachful ghosts to be met when they slept in the big bed, a couple’s bed. The wife prefers town. The only troubling matter for Roberta Blayne was a growing attachment to the farm. It was as if no-one had ever owned it before, because attachment, love for a place, is like love for a human being, it brings that place, that person, to heightened life. The love affair would end (the not-so-young know this), Gladwell Shadrack Chabruma would forget her, she would be elsewhere and forget him, they’d exchange Christmas cards until one or the other moved to a new address, but the farm, the rides alone in the sun and wind with the bony dogs running beside her, the children waving, prancing about, showing off, the red earrings of the pepper pods she had seen for the first time; the farm would be one of the experiences knotted into the integument of her life. In development jargon, yes, sustainable.

  Oh there were times—times she knew when she would crave for this man, a dread distress of anticipation that this would happen. The reserve that characterised him—up-tight, withdrawn—was indeed: a reserve. A reserve of sensuous energy, tenderness and rousing powers of the body. Beneath the armour of the parliamentary suit there was the passionate assurance, for her, of being desired and—there’s another form of capability—the response of desire that revived in her, turned out to be still available from ten, twenty years back. But this coming parting was something other than the expected parting with pleasure. Leaving a country where she had been before and where, maybe—she shouldn’t indulge herself with the idea—maybe she had made up for the past in some way by her work. Leaving a man; the farm is what she will take away with her from here.

  Three months, two months before the tour of duty ends. Meanwhile, something gratifying happened to the Deputy-Director; the Director of Land Affairs was involved in a corruption scandal, and Gladwell Shadrack Chabruma was appointed in his place. She felt a happy, unpossessive pride, on his behalf, another kind of pleasure; the real share in this recognition of his achievements belonged with his family.

  Success now changed public reading of his taciturnity, brought the conclusion that it signalled integrity—protected high intelligence, ability, efficiency and honesty—he had come clean out of the inquiry that brought the Department into question and caught his superior with, if not a hand in the till, a hand extended to bribes in the granting of land rights to certain individuals and companies, local and international.

  One month before the Administrator of the Agency and his Assistant were due to depart; their replacements had arrived, were temporarily accommodated in an hotel; Roberta Blayne was beginning to pack in bubble-wrap the collection of fragile gifts, the clay pots so likely to return, in transit, to the state of their origin, back to handsful of crumbling earth of the country. He came from a parliamentary sub-committee he had chaired, and was telling her about; through the window she saw the driver and bodyguards going off on foot down the drive calling goodbyes to the yard: so he was going to stay the night with her, they were going to make love. He had poured them each a whisky; he was watching her busied with her pots.

  She thought she read his scepticism, laughed.—They’ll probably be thrown around by the luggage handlers anyway, but I might as well take a chance one or two could survive.—

  —I’m going to marry you.—

  He said it.

  She went on placing a ribbon of sticky tape round the wrapped pot. The tape did not hold and curled back to her fingers.

  That is what he said.

  He sat down on the sofa where they had been side by side the first time he arrived. The Deputy-Director is coming to visit you.

  She abandoned the package and came over to him, her fingers entangled in tape, her face a strange grimace of disbelief, amazement, and a loss of control that came out something like a laug
h.

  He looked at her openly, no need to say it again.

  —I’d never be the cause of a divorce. Never. Gladwell. You may not understand that because, well, I know, I’ve been with you and all along there was your wife. Family. But we both understood. I’d never break up a marriage. Never. It’s been good together. I don’t have to tell you. I don’t know, it wasn’t my business to know what … the … position … arrangement is between you and her. In your life. I suppose I was wrong, but I assumed … how can I say it … we weren’t harming her. Oh I’m not such a hypocrite that I don’t know you’re harming a woman when you sleep with her husband, whether she’s aware of it or not, is aware of it and accepts … We’ve been happy—lucky—anyway I’ve been—lucky.—She turned and began to unwind the tangle of tape from her fingers, began binding her pot for transport; the gesture was there: I’m leaving in a month. I’m recalled. You’re recalled, my lover, home. The gesture was a tender and grateful conveyance.

  —I am not talking about divorce. She is my wife, of course. Roberta, you will also be my wife. You respect her, I know. She will respect you. It is quite usual in our society. Legal. Always been. We don’t have to do what your people do, divorce, remarry, divorce, remarry, and so much trouble and unhappiness, broken homes you’re always hearing about. We don’t have to follow every custom of the West. You know that. It’s what you say in your work. Don’t worry. This country, it’s now yours, you do real work here you can’t do, over there. Good together. I know that, you know that, yes.—